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Mario Harik

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112
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2026-04-14
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2026-04-14
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  1. “Business is exactly the same way. It's about having a team of people who are working well with each other, who are aligned on the goals, who respect each other, but at the same time, who push each other as well. It's okay to have some friction. It's okay that somebody's telling you, hey, I think in your area you can do X, Y, or Z in a better way. That's all good. But this is the framework of people from a business perspective. In your personal life, I think some of the things around kindness and humility and being collegial, all of that translates as well. If you surround yourself with people who are actually who bring the vibe of the party up, who are loving people, who are affectionate people, that's going to enrich your own life as you think about it.”

    2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Who try to look for what's best in the team. And along with that, come things like kindness and humility and being able to always thrive to learn and effectively always better yourself and better people who are around you. And when you have a combination of these attributes in a person, now every person in different environments could behave or could have a different or could have different outputs as well. But when you put that together and you create alignment on what the mission is, it's truly remarkable what you can deliver. If you look at sports team, sports team that have one star player only, but they don't have a good, strong, cohesive team, they don't deliver a lot of value.”

    2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “If you look at who we hired for as an organization, but how we think about the team, the team as well. Generally, we break it down into three broad categories. And this is the work side, but some of these carry over to the personal side and who you have personal relationships with. But number one at work would be are they good at what they do? Or do they have a high intellect? Do they have a passion for whatever area of expertise that they have developed in? Are they really good at what they do? Number two is, are they serious about work? Are they hard workers? Are they somebody who, and it doesn't mean that you have to work 90-hour weeks, but it means that when you wake up in the morning, do you take the mission of the company, the mission of your role to heart, where you want to actually maximize the outputs of what you do every single day? And the third one is, are you collegial? Are you somebody who gets along with the rest of the team?”

    2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Number two, I would say is actually how you manage people, how you actually who you surround yourself with, and to have a very disciplined approach to look at the people who are around you, that you have a team, because ultimately in business, you don't go at it alone. You have a group of people and you want them to work collegially as a team, as a group of people who support each other, who want to following a certain strategy, a certain framework, want to go achieve great things, want to beat the competition, want to win. And effectively, how you surround yourself with people, how you actually create a team environment that is very constructive, how you get feedback loops so you're always looking at whether it's the plan or the strategy, you're always adjusting, in some cases, in small areas, in some cases in big areas to be able to get to better outcomes.”

    2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Effective way, whether you buy a company at a lower multiple than what your company is trading at, but a company that has a good strategic outcome for what you are trying to build as well. But if I go back to what I learned from him, I mean, I learned a tremendous amount more than a decade. But probably number one, I would say is to always think big. Don't set small goal. Life is short. Set big goals, whether it's how much value you're creating, whether how much profits you're growing, whether a certain project that you think needs three years to get done and how you can get it done in three months, set big goals and do that at work. Do that in your personal life. Because when you set big goals, you achieve great things. If you set small goals, you achieve small things. And that's probably the number one thing I learned. I learned from him.”

    2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “What bread is one of a kind? He's somebody who started eight multi-billion dollar companies from scratch and in different industries. And a lot of it goes back to having a framework, a method, and he actually wrote two books where he outlines that framework in terms of how to build great companies, companies that endure the tests of time. And ultimately, the goal of a company is to create shareholder value. And these companies have created a tremendous amount of shareholder value. So I learned from him now, everything you read in the book is actually part of the framework in terms of how you think about one setting very big goals for business, thinking outside of the box of how you can deliver a large amount of value. And number two is actually, now in our case, in the case of the companies he has built, a lot of it, the early innings was around M&A and M&A integration and how you allocate capital in events.”

    2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “At the world, how they look at being able to deliver value, how they look at being able to treat others with respect. And I think what surprised me the most is that every person is different. And every person in their own way, they are beautiful. Their mind works in a beautiful way. And being able to take their own methods, their own way of thinking, believing in what's best in them is what creates the most amount of outcome. And it's also a pleasure because then you're effectively working with a group of smart people who are finding their own way to be the best version of themselves. And I think not applying one framework or one method to solving a problem is important.”

    2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, first I'll start by introspecting, looking at myself as a person. As I was growing up, I remember I always used to think that perfection is a good thing. So every time I was set to work on a certain project, on a certain task, that the outcome has to be perfect, that the outcome. And you tell yourself in your own mind these things that, you know, like this is not good enough, it can be better than that. Or you're building a piece of software, this piece of software has to be just exactly right. The code has to be simple. It should not have any bugs in it. And I think the human mind typically doesn't operate in perfection. We all have our own idiosyncrasies. We all have our own biases. We all have our own way of doing things. So for me, in terms of managing people, a lot of it goes back to looking at how they view solving a problem, how they look.”

    2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “To deliver on those outcomes over a period of time. So I think that discipline and grounding your decisions in data does help you help make you an effective CEO. Now, that on its own goes at odds with being able to manage people because as an engineer, you're thinking perfection. You're thinking the process has to work just right. But the reality is people don't operate that way. So I think engineering on its own gives you a framework. However, how you can transform or translate that framework and how you manage people and love people and believe in them and believe what's invest in them is the other ingredient to be able to then enable you to deliver good outcomes.”

    2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The CEO, your first goal is to actually figure out what is your overall strategy. How are you going to be able to create a lot of shareholder value? Are you going to be able to create a company that can grow earnings and ultimately deliver a lot of shareholder value? To be able to deliver that, as you define your strategy, you have to have a framework by which you define a strategy. Now once you have your strategy, you have certain elements associated with that where you have certain KPIs that you are monitoring on a daily, weekly, monthly basis of whether you're achieving the levels of the strategy. Then from that, for every KPI in terms of being able to define how you go from one value to another value, you need an action plan. You need a solution for that. So that engineering mindset is a problem solving mindset. And whether it's defining strategy, whether it's executing on levers of your strategy, an engineering mindset is going to enable you.”

    2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Around people skills because when you run a company, you're effectively, you have teams of people and your goal is to make sure that they are the best versions of themselves. And applying engineering principles to that also helps a lot. So then your team becomes very data driven. Your team becomes problem solvers in terms of how being able to go from point A to point B, whatever, again, whether it's a goal, whether it's a problem you want to solve as well. So I think these are some of the early innings in terms of as I grew in my career, engineering gave me that framework to be able to solve problems and achieve goals, couple that with people skills. This is what has enabled me to effectively run a trucking company.”

    2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Well, I think engineering gives you a very good roadmap and a very good framework of solving problems. I have young kids and I always tell them whenever we have something that gets broken or something we want to build, I always tell them, what do engineers do? We say they build things and they fix things. And I think in the world of business, you're dealing every day with either problems or goals you want to accomplish. An engineering mindset gives you a framework of how to solve for these problems if you think of the engineering design process. It's based on one identifying a problem or a goal. Then it's about collecting a lot of data around that particular problem or goal than defining your requirements, then designing and building a solution, and then eventually testing it for what the outcome would look like. And that discipline and rational thinking and data-driven analysis actually helps you in being able to run a company. Now, the other side of that, though,”

    2026-04-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source