YouSaid · the spoken record

Mario Harik

lines on the record: 112
first: 2026-04-14
most recent: 2026-04-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Success for me is someone, including myself. Is being able to achieve what they can achieve with the tools, education, background that they have been given, and to be the best version of themselves. While doing so, also being happy and emotionally fulfilled, because ultimately you can achieve great business success at the expense of your family life as an example. What is that success? Because now you effectively are not emotionally fulfilled, you're not happy. But I think it's not only just for me achieving that personally, but also playing a part in people around me achieving that, whether it's my kids, seeing skids, seeing them become great professionals one day and great human beings and having fulfilled lives and achieving their full potential to people I work with, whether it's my team or colleagues or people I work for, for them to achieve, again, their best potential and doing it while they are emotionally fulfilled as well.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are we achieving the best that we can achieve? For me, that's what was important because then if you're achieving what you can achieve, you are not comparing yourself to your competition. Of course, you have to study your competition to understand what are the levers that they are pushing and what's working for them. Because in some cases, you might not need to reinvent the wheel. In some cases, you might look at it and say, great idea, like let's actually use that idea to make our company a better company. But I always, the bar I use is always, it's not about winning at the expense of somebody else. It's the opposite. It's actually winning because we are doing things right for the long term.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's definitely clean fuel is the way I think about the world. I personally think that humans can create amazing things. And I believe in that. When I work with team members, when I work with people around me, I always believe that they are capable more than what they believe they are capable of. To what I said earlier on, we live short lives. And effectively, if you think about it, you want them to be meaningful. You want them to be impactful. You want to be able to see somebody grow and do amazing things over time. So for me winning is about being smart. It's about being able to understand how you can take a team, a group of people, create a very good plan, but then fight every single day to win because then you're seeing somebody in a team realize their full potential. And for me, I live on that. And when I look back through my career, I always think about winning not in the way that, you know, I want to go just crush the competition or that's not the bar. For me, the bar.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Responsible for 40,000 people. I take this responsibility very seriously. If I work an extra hour and I can actually somehow improve the lives of 40,000 people, I'm going to work this extra hour. And I think that's the reason why when I think about work ethic, it's part of the ingredient of being all in, to be obsessed by every KPI, by every lever, by every team interaction, and to give all yourself for the team and the company you're working for because when you do that, you deliver better outcomes. And the people who are working for you, they deliver amazing things and they'll be proud of themselves. You'd be proud of them. And I think that's rooted in part with having a very strong work ethic. But for me, if I go back to my childhood, it was from seeing my dad build companies and he had a fantastic work ethic and I learned from that.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it started with my parents. My dad has been an entrepreneur and he's also an engineer and was also an amazing business person as well, very wise person. If you meet him, you just spend 15 minutes with him and say, okay, that person is very, very, very wise. And I saw since we were kids the work ethic that he had and being able to deliver to effectively build great things, but also be able to provide for our family as well. And that was rooted in me at a very young age that working hard has to be part of the equation, has to be part of if you want to build big things in life, you cannot do it by not being 100% in, 100% dedicated on what it is that you're doing, which means when you wake up in the morning, you're thinking about it. When you go to bed, you're thinking about it. Now, you couple that with being the leader of an organization.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at today where the latest Google TPUs and where the NVIDIA chipsets are at, we're talking five petaflops that effectively is five million times more powerful from a compute perspective what existed two to three decades ago. So when you think about how large the AI models were at the time, if you have something that has 10 million parameters, you're pushing the envelope. Today you're dealing with two, three, four, five trillion parameters in terms of how these large language models operate. So I think if I roll that forward, the trajectory has been effectively very, very fast or very steep. And if that continues, we will see how that materializes into robotics. But I think in the near term, I think it's more purpose-built robots that are using AI to try to automate a certain task and make effectively the outcomes more efficient accordingly.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We perceive the world Anxiety, whether it's effectively we have emotions that shape our behavior. And I think currently where AI is and where robots are, they're still not there in terms of being able to perceive what human consciousness is to a certain extent. So going back to your question, it's tough for me to tell, is it going to be 10 years before we have effective humanoid robots? Is it going to be two or is it going to be 20? Because the rate of change is very fast, but at the same time the problem to solve is very, very hard as well. Now, if you more broadly, though, if you look at AI, it's truly remarkable what has happened over the last two, three decades. I remember I built my first AI neural network back in the late 90s. At the time, it was running on a Pentium CPU that was from a capacity perspective, was capable of at the peak of one, maybe one gigaflop in terms of compute power.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, as opposed to having a human having to walk through a picking area to pick the products, to ship to a customer when you buy something online, as an example. So a lot of the robotic applications have been very specific in scope to solve a specific problem is what has been effective so far. If you think, however, about humanoid robots, I think humanoid robots are effectively trained to do what humans do, how we move our hands, how we perceive the world through vision, how we perceive the world through hearing. And that's a much tougher task to solve for because you're trying to fit an AI model that typically works great in a digital setting, deals with content, and now you're trying to making it perceived the world the same way a human does. There's another component of it would be for a humanoid robot to be effective, we as humans have emotions, have effectively things that”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tough to tell what the world would look like from a physical robust perspective because the speed at which AI is developing is very, very, very fast. So it's tough to tell if I look today at how effective robots are, there's still a lot of room for things to improve. So today when you think about robotics, robots have predominantly evolved or effective robots that can be used in business to have a very specific application in how they work. So for example, part of our company, we used to be one of the largest warehousing operators in the world. And you think about robots in that space, you could have autonomous robot that looks effectively like a square that is just kind of going on the floor of a warehouse. And then it has a panel that can hold shelves of goods and it brings the right shelf of goods to a human picker sitting stable.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I usually do it with more than one platform because each one of them will have slightly different takeaways than what the takeaways that I had. And I think the variability between them can make you spot things that you didn't see or that you were skimmed over or you thought were not important. But suddenly these two AI platforms tell you, well, this is the point you actually is. It's very important. And the end, you can get more information and more actionable stuff that you can do that you can do with it as well.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the personal level, I use AI predominantly for research or fact check or whenever I have an idea or thought process. I usually my bias is to always go to one of the AI platform. I have all of them on my phone where effectively I would use it as a way to either go deeper in a certain topic or get more information about a certain topic. I also use it whenever I have large documents that I would have read. It's a good way to get a summary in AI's perspective on what it found in them and what are the key takeaways is actually finding out of that data, out of that information”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that particular part of the business. And then you start thinking through what are the different levers you can move. You can say, well, okay, if volume grows based on what I'm seeing in that research where you are seeing the industrial demand pickup in the country, and I know we have these three accounts we are actually onboarding, that means that if we push further the cost efficiency, we might have an issue of that volume is going to grow faster. But you do these type of decisions just let my brain effectively think through all of them and then it kind of builds in. And the end of the process, what I usually find is that I have three or four things that builds clarity that these are the three or four things that we got to focus that I have to focus on to be able to get to a better outcome as an example. I do the same thing in my personal relationship with my kids, with their schooling, with their activities, where you let it's key to go into a very calm state when you do it. So this way you are removing the environmental noise around you as you are doing it as well. But I find that it's a very effective technique.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's all of the above. So, usually, I start by thinking as a company what are the things that we are dealing with? What are the things I'm worried about? What are the things that are effectively could somehow impact our business? Number two, I think about all the material I read the prior day or the prior week and what are some of the key takeaways that I'm seeing in that trend of data. But then something fascinating, Shane, a lot of time when people think they use speech to think. So you effectively are limiting yourself at the speed at which you speak to be able to find or solve the problem. However, you can train your mind to go much faster than that. And the way you do it is effectively you start with an idea and then you just, you almost let it roll forward with, well, okay, let's say we want to grow top line, we want to grow sales, we want to gain market share, we want to close a certain account. We are having a cost efficiency issue.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not a specific place. I think it was more over the years as something I started doing, and I found it helped me solve problems early on. And I think it just became something I do every single morning.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can look at when you play chess, you're always thinking about if I move this piece, what are the next three pieces or next move, next move, next move, and then how deep you go effectively is the more you train your brain to do it, you can actually do that in a more effective way. So then I use that information where now you're synthesizing all of it and you're looking at what you're doing and you're trying to figure out what is that from a three perspective decision, spanning three perspective, what each path, what does it lead to and how you're now using that information to somehow apply it to a problem you're trying to solve or something that you're seeing in your day-to-day life.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a certain set of information that I'm consuming. Look at industrial demand in the country, and you're leading the research reports from 20 different analysts who have spoken to hundreds of people to get to these analyst reports and you start seeing the same theme or trend that is going on in the information, then you actually start thinking about it a bit differently in terms of that becomes a signal as opposed to you heard it once where it might not be as big of an impactful area. And the other thing I do is also I do every morning I spend about 15 minutes to 30 minutes. I usually get myself in a calm place and I think about every decision or every aspect of things I'm going to do for the day and I inform it based on what I read over the weeks prior, whether it's within the company or outside of the company. And I just let my mind race through all the plausible outcomes. So almost like a decision tree. If you play chess.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Read more and learn more. From people I meet, I usually get to ask a lot of questions if they are inside industries, whether it's a CEO you meet at a conference or an investor, you effectively get to pick their brain on what they are seeing, how they are doing things, how they are doing things differently. And you effectively, that helps inform kind of what you're doing. So I think step number one is having a very conscious view of being able to go get information and consume information to get a more holistic view, a more holistic picture of whatever it is a topic that you are looking at. In terms of how you filter signal from noise, I don't know if there's a specific method to do that. I think while you are consuming information, I think you have to be very honest about the information you're consuming. And one of the techniques I use is how many times do I see something appearing?”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From all of our competitors, from what we're hearing about ourselves in the media, from customers kind of research on their companies and what they are hearing. And every weekend effectively I get from the team both for ourselves, for our competitors, for our industry, for side businesses, and for customers hundreds of pages of content that are all highlighted where some of the key points, what they are, with a summary created for each one of them. And usually on the weekend, either Saturday or Sunday, I actually read those couple hundred pages of content. Now, as I read them effectively, I highlight the pieces that I thought were important. In some cases, I could share them with the team and say, hey, when I was reading this, this is what I saw. What do you think of this outcome? What do you think? Whatever new technology or something that we read in there. So I think that's more of a process-based approach to be able to”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both of these are great questions. First, in terms of how you get information, I think it's the conscious choice. Every morning you have a choice to make. That choice can be that today I'm going to go do my job the way I always do it, or you can make a choice that I want to learn new things. I think in terms of within the company, I learn a lot through asking questions. So usually if you're in a meeting with me in our company, I'd be asking 50 questions. And however, before I even ask the questions, I actually would have reviewed Excel spreadsheets of data if I have to to be able to look at the information and what the data is saying. So now your questions are informed by data behind it. But going back to how I consume information, one, we do a lot of research as a company. So we have a small team of analysts that every weekend actually pulls together research reports from the industry.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Permeus for the entire organization as well. But these are some of the different areas where I think about the lion's share of the time gets spent. And of course, you have earnings, you have spending time with shareholders, but all of these are a lower magnitude of time than the other things I just mentioned.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now I can see how it's going to have an impact on ultimately the people who are actually moving the goods and how it's going to impact their lives for the better. So I like to spend a lot of time in the field. I spend a lot of time with my team on initiatives, on programs, on action plans and how they're going to get to a certain output. I do find that a lot of leaders spend time on what's the output. But ultimately, you got to spend time on the inputs. You got to spend time on the action plan that changes the output. These are the things that you can control to change a certain outcome. So I find myself spending a lot of time in data, in action plans that influence a certain outcome. I do love spending a lot of time with customers every quarter. I meet with dozens and dozens of customers. where I get to see, to hear from them what their problems are or whether it's a sales meeting, whether it's a quarterly business review. I think you also get a different perspective ultimately of the people who make a choice between using your company or another company to buy the service and having that voice of the customer.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of then changing the action plan from what it was to what it ought to be to deliver the best amount of value. So in terms of the subjects where I spend my time, this is typically how I do it. In terms of where I spend my time, I think you always look at your team, you have stakeholders within a company. You have your employees. You have your customers. You have your shareholders. And you have to figure out where you organize spending your time to be able to again deliver to the best outcome. On the employee side, I like to spend a lot of time in the field. Even my team tells me if I haven't been out to a terminal for a few weeks, I say, Mario, you're going to get out there because you're getting an hour hair, kind of becoming a micromanager here. But I think it gives you perspective because when you're spending time with the people who are moving the freight, it suddenly, you can then elevate, you can zoom out and say, well, okay, what we're working on over here makes a lot of sense.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leading to the intended results. So let's say a certain area in our plan is working swimmingly well. My contributions won't add a lot of value because I already have somebody or a team of people who are all in, who have a strong action plan, who are executing on it. And now my job is to make sure that I'm giving them what they need. I'm spending enough time with them to keep the guardrails and make sure that we're holding them accountable to deliver to said outcomes. However, if there is an area that is not performing well, that is falling short, that is effectively not delivering to what we as a team believe the best outcome can be, I gravitate towards spending my time there. And then I usually when I spend my time is first I help the team analyze the data behind said area, give them my perspective, make available people on the team who are incredibly bright, who can do the same to give them different perspective.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think from a work perspective, there are levers that you are spending, so there are subjects that you are spending time on and there are ways that you are spending your time. And I'll come back to that in a second. But in terms of to have a successful execution over a long period of time, you need to have a strategy. You need to have levers that you are focused on as an organization to be able to drive better outcomes. As an example for us, these are things like service. investing in capacity, gaining profitable market share, growing pricing, and then improving cost efficiency predominantly in three categories and how we operate our network. When you have clarity of what's important to drive the right business outcomes, then it's much easier for you to organize where you spend your time. But naturally, I gravitate to where I spend my time based on where the action plan is not.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fighting shot there, or whether it's taking my kids fishing and spending time with them actually doing activities that are outdoors. So I think when you are limited on time, what you can focus on is making the quality of that time be the highest possible and also figuring out whether you want to spend your time. So for example, I don't watch TV, I don't play golf, I don't have, for me, I'm either working with my team and the company that I love and being able to drive better outcomes or spending time with my family, with my kids.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I mentioned earlier on that one of the most important things that as a CEO you have is where you spend time, where you spend your personal time, and then where you have your organization spend their time. And I think I once got a very good piece of advice that when you're trying to do a lot of things, naturally you have less time. But you also have to simplify the goals and the targets and the things that you are driving to what is the most important. So when it comes to family, obviously when you're doing a lot of things at work, you have a limited amount of time. But I try to make it the most amount of meaningful time that I can. So with my kids, for example, I don't use my phone. I put it away. I do meaningful activities with them as an engineer last summer we actually built a robotic arm that we programmed and we actually tried to make it solve a RubyCube but didn't work as expected but we kind of give it a five”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think I break it down between business and between the personal life. In terms, I'll start with the personal life. I think having a family and friends, I like to have an enriching Life when it comes to the people you surround yourself with and spending a lot of time with my family, with my kids, seeing my kids grow into beautiful adults and beautiful human beings is a big ambition for me in the scene of just be good people is big. From a work perspective, I think it's doing meaningful work. It's actually building companies, seeing people succeed, it's seeing effectively folks do things they didn't think were possible, be able to provide for their families and have constructives and happy lives as well. And that could be in business, could be different type of companies, could be, but something that truly has an impact, something that meaningfully impact people's lives for the better.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More excited and more confident and more motivated to then set even bigger goals. So I think part of fighting complacency is by thinking big and not thinking small and striving to achieve great things in life. Life's short. It just goes in a snap of a finger. You don't want to live a easy kind of a complacent life. You don't want to set small goals and you want to achieve big things in life. And big things doesn't necessarily have to be in business. It can be that if you're a musician, you want to be the best musician possible and you want to play this piece that you never thought you're even capable of. If you're a business person, you want to create shareholder value. If you're a family person, you want to have a great family, a loving family where you see your kids do amazing things that your friends do amazing things. And I think what Feist complacency is always striving to do something bigger in life and that enables you to always be pushing for that next step, for that next level and be able to drive for that.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think complacency overall comes from feeling comfortable and feeling content. The best way to fight complacency is by setting ultra, ultra big goals. By the way, ultra big goals in business and life and relationships, because ultimately let's say you're setting a goal for your company to grow X amount and you achieve that X amount and you're giving yourself a good path on the back that you achieve that particular set of growth, then you're going to become complacent, you're going to feel that it's okay to actually have. But I believe that life is short. You got to set big, big goals. If you set big goals, that alone is a cure for complacency because you're always striving to achieve something much bigger. And as a team, when you start achieving those goals, winning breeds winning to a certain extent, and then what ends up happening is that the team then gets.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So more than two, what would be the return you're going to get on that particular MA investment that you have done? Is it accretive? Is it going to create shareholder value or detract from shareholder value? Would be the second lever of how you deploy capital? Then you get into the uses of cash in a company where does it make sense to what kind of leverage you want to give to? Does it make sense to pay down debt? Or does it make sense to buy back your shares if you believe where you are today, your profitability at this level and it's going to get to that particular level in a few years? Well, ultimately if you buy back your shares today, you are buying them for cheap and then effectively it's going to create more alpha and more return for shareholders. So ultimately capital allocation I personally think is a very structured should be very objective on ultimately what's going to create the highest return for your shareholders and whatever that answer is is whether you got to deploy your capital.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most amount of returns. And the different forms of capital allocation one is how much capital you deploy into the company. And it's a very simple equation for every project that we have where we are deploying capital, we look at what is the return associated with that capital deploy. For a million bucks, you deployed in a project, are you going to get a million a year? Are you going to get two million a year? You're going to get 3 million a year, 100,000 a year. So that's a very important measure for every initiative where we are deploying capital within the company. Is it going to give you a higher return? When you think M&A and how you deploy capital in M&A, the key is there are multiple levers for that. One is how does a company fit to the overall strategic vision of the company? How can you, does it give you a new set of customers? Does it give you a new product, a new capability? Does it help you build scale as an example? But in M&A, when you acquire that company and you apply your systems and know-how and process and you get one plus one equal.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So high level capital, I mentioned earlier on as a CEO, you have only a few levers of how you can create a lot of value over time. I personally believe number one is who you surround yourself with, who's on the team, how does a team work with you together. Number two is capital allocation, where you have a finite amount of resources as a company. Doesn't matter how big you are as a company. Where do you deploy that capital so that you are getting the highest return back on the capital that you are deploying? And in many, many cases, especially as a public company, that capital is actually shareholders who publicly have given you money to invest for them so they can actually make more money at the end of that. And the third area is where you allocate time, not only your time, but the team's time to be able to create the most amount of alpha. So when I think about capital allocation, it's what's going to generate”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think through my career it was multiple, I mean, obviously, you work for different people, you learn from different people, and different, I had different mentors and different leaders where some gave very critical feedback on the onset and some were much more constructive and believing in you. But I think it was more.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your own perspective and to your own solution to go from point A to point B as opposed to then potentially being much better than you. And that's why when I give feedback, I usually always start by the things that makes them great. What are the things that they are doing that they should keep on doing, that they should amplify, that they should find new ways of actually using those skills, those attributes, to create even better things? And then when it comes to the constructive pieces, I remove the subjective. I tell them, well, okay, objectively, if I look at this, this is what the data said, this is what the situation is, this is kind of how we look at it. And now they are seeing a different perspective of how they can get better without feeling that they are falling short or getting defensive or building up a wall and then not potentially getting to a better place.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expert in a certain area, we just don't get to the optimal solution in a given area. We just shortcutted that quite a bit. So then I started learning more and more with time as opposed to give somebody what I think the solution is. What I need to do is actually teach them a process where they are analyzing the data and they are coming back to me with insights of a dead data that the data is telling them. Similarly, they are designing a solution. And in many, many cases, I look at that solution and say, whoa, that's something I didn't even come close to thinking about. So going back to your question on giving constructive feedback, what I notice is whenever you give somebody only constructive feedback and you're only telling them where they are falling short, you are missing out on them potentially being great. And that feedback is now rooted in molding them into...”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question, Shane, because if I go back earlier in my career, that was a big shortcoming of mine. But the way I led teams was based on, let's say I'm looking at a certain goal, certain solution we wanted to build. I would analyze it and I would come up with a road going back to the engineering design process, I would say, well, okay, this is a goal we want to achieve or a problem we want to solve. Then I would think through the requirements. I would think through the highlights of the solution. And then I would go to my team member and say, well, you know, listen, this is where we are here. This is where we want to get to. I personally believe that's the best way to go from here to here. Naturally, when you do that, you automatically atrophied that person's brain from them being able to find the best, the best outcome. So over time, what I realized is that then if I didn't have the time or I wasn't a subject matter,”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From my perspective, when I give constructive feedback to my team, I never make it subjective. I always ground it on data. I'll tell them, well, okay, look at this situation. We could have gotten to this outcome based on what the data is selling us, but we got over here. We got to figure out how to do it in a better way. Suddenly, that person is thinking, yeah, I felt short in this area, but they're not thinking, they're not becoming defensive because I'm not telling them, hey, I think you dropped the ball on this. I think you're not working hard enough. I think suddenly it's a very subjective set of feedback that causes people to retract from it as opposed to it being, you know, let me tell you objectively where things didn't work well. But then after you have that, so after you believe in that, it's also about creating an environment where it's safe for them to try things and it's safe for them to sometimes fail at them because that's part of life for every five great things you're going to do, you're going to fail at one or two of them. But also creating a safe environment where they can.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High level, I think you have to look at every person in a very customized way based on what makes them great. I always start for every person who works for me. I look for the things that makes them a beautiful professional, what makes their brain beautiful, what makes them actually a great team member. And I believe in them. I believe in their ability to do amazing things. And I think if you look at the human psyche, people want to be appreciated. And when you show someone that you believe in them, that you truly believe in their ability to be great, they have a much, much higher odd to actually be great than if you're only focusing on where they are falling short. Now, once you have that, it doesn't mean that where they're falling short should be, you know, should not be discussed. However, in my”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In business is who you have on the team and how they work with each other. If that is rock solid, if people who work for you are all A players, it's a beautiful thing because they push each other in a beautiful way and ultimately they deliver alpha. Ultimately, they deliver better results. Ultimately, they deliver a better environment for employees where employees are much happier to come to work because part of them being in A player is how they manage their teams. So that's why we think of that talent evaluation process being very important and making sure we have the most amount of A players on the team, especially the higher up you go in the company is very, very important.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you go back home, you're talking to your wife and say, I don't know what I'm going to do. I just heard the most horrible news today. And it's a feeling of angst. It's a feeling of, I'm sure we're going to replace that person. That's an A player. If somebody walks into your office and they say, hey, Mario, don't try to talk me out of it. I'm actually, I find another role in another company and I'm going to move on to a different industry maybe. And your feeling is good news. Actually, we're going to be able to upgrade talent. We're going to be able to, this is going to be great. We'll figure out the transition plan. That's the C flayer. So effectively, it's how you think about the people that are working on your team and who are working for them who are, again, the top performing people that you want to retain. That's an A player and who are the people that if they move on, it's not a big deal actually. You can potentially get to a better outcome as well. And we take that very, very, very seriously. I personally think the biggest lever in creating a lot of alpha.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, want to look at who's not performing on the team, who's somebody on the team, who for whatever reason, whatever circumstances happened, that they are not adding value, they are not being able to contribute to the best outcome for the company overall. But if you think about ranking folks as A, B, or C, typically in A player is somebody that they are again a top performer. They are somebody that you're proud of them, you're proud of their work, you think the world of them. And I learned this actually test from Red as well. If an A player walks into your office and say, Mario, you know what? I don't try to talk me out of it. Maybe my wife is moving to a different state and I took a job with another company. And don't try to talk me out of it. This is done. If the outcome out of that is”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So generally, when you assess talent, you want to be able to assess who are the top performers on your team that you either not only want to make sure you retain them, but you also want to invest in them. You want to grow them. You want to see them do amazing things over time because they have a lot of untapped potential.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“5% that's a decelerating trend so next month that could be three percent the following month could be one percent and that's a problem that we got to solve for as a team and figure out how we can course correct that”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For every operators that owns a PNL, a profit and loss statement, they actually have an FNA resource that is telling them what are the levers, so where are your metrics trending and what all the levers that you can pull to drive the outcomes? And are these levers performing at the level as a business leader that you expect to deliver on the outcome? And that's incredibly important in business because ultimately the scorecard of a operating company is how much are you growing your top line? How much are you growing your profits? How much are you growing your operating margin? And the FB&A team is what instruments all of that and give you forecast. And they also, I mentioned earlier on when we look at KPIs, we look both at first derivative and second derivatives of the KPI. Again, the first derivative tells you your revenue is up 5% on year on year basis. Many companies stop there. What our FP&A team does, then they say, well, okay, the second derivative shows that although you're”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, our FENA team's financial planning and analysis. Effectively, it's the team that looks at all of the financial metrics, financial KPIs of how is your top line trending, effectively, what is your top line doing, what is your cost structure doing, and ultimately what are the profits that you are generating. But then when you double click, they look at first for any period, they are looking what a list to what we call risk and opportunities. So effectively, what are the opportunities based on initiatives that we are driving that can deliver a better financial outcome? And what are the risks that we see in the environment that can take away from the financial outcome? And then for each one of those levers, we assign a probability. So now we can probability adjust what is the projected financial performance of the company for the week, for the month, for the quarter, for the year as we think it through. But then if you go down through the ranks in the FBNA team,”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are we going to launch these terminals? We're going to renovate them and make them look like an XPO terminal effectively. Over what period of time you're going to launch them. Once we launch each one of them, we have a certain assumption. That's how much we expect to improve productivity. There's how much we expect to improve efficiency. This is how much market share we expect to gain. And our FB&A team tracks all of these things. And now you can see the trajectory of how you are delivering on what you expected to deliver. And when you see something deviating, then the team is getting together to say, well, okay, did we have the wrong action plan? Or what should we be doing differently to then get back this initiative or this project back on track to make sure it's delivering to the right outcomes we expect?”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, in business, that's always the case. I mean, when you think about creating a ton of shareholder value, there's always, I mean, we're a large company, we're a multinational company, we have 40,000 people. Every decision you make has big ripple effects into what kind of outcomes you can drive. But this is also part of it would be the financial processes that we have and being able to track any initiative that we are driving. So high level, I mentioned earlier on that in business you have big strategic levers, then you have a certain set of KPI of metrics that ultimately grow your earnings, that ultimately enable you to create shareholder value. And then you have action plans of how you can drive those levers to get to the right place. But this is where also proper financial planning and analysis comes into play. For each one of the projects that you have, including buying a billion dollars of real estate, you have a project plan. You have a project plan that says over what period of time.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are we doing the right thing here? Is that deployment of capital something that's going to create a lot of alpha for shareholders? And the answer was yes, so we effectively you feel much more comfortable making that decision because you see what the roadmap is going to look like to be able to deliver those returns.”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overall, you start off by looking at what are the units of how the financials add up effectively. So what's the overall return you're going to get on that deployed capital? And what I learned from Red is it doesn't matter what the size of the check is. That's the only thing that matters, which is the return you're going to get on the size of the check. But a lot of it is, you know, obviously our board was very much involved in the process, giving feedback and perspective based on the numbers that we were showing. Initially, we started off with a much smarter purchase price and a much smaller set of terminals than we can agree that over time. Brad's feedback in the process, he was our chairman at the time, was fantastic. The team working together and brainstorming and figuring out, again, what would give us the highest amount of return associated with that. So a lot of it is, again, looking at the data, looking at the returns very importantly, but then having a lot of feedback loops on”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recovery over the years to come here in North America. And these terminals will play a big, big roles in enabling us to deliver on that”
2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source