YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Tedlow

lines on the record: 60
first: 2021-11-15
most recent: 2021-11-15
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, thank you very much for having me on, Ted. It's delightful to talk to you in your joy. Thank you so very much indeed.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life is tougher than you think. The life lesson that I've learned. And I wish I knew it sooner, but I'm learning it now, so better late than never, I guess.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly my father's observations about business have stayed with me that it's a tough world. You have to understand that. My mother was something of a polymath, spoke for a languages, and was a very cultured woman, and it was really she who got me interested in opera, and my parents were on the board of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City for a while. So getting me involved and interested in the world of classical music and of opera, that was a gift that stayed with me my whole life.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The smartest thing I ever did was not shorting Tesla, but I've made some mistakes in classes. The most important thing you can do in a class, either at Apple or at Harvard or anywhere else, is to listen. And the biggest mistake was that there are times when I didn't listen as actively and as carefully to students as I should have, and as a result I didn't pay them the respect they deserved, so if I had my life to do over again I can think of a couple of examples of that that stick with me because if I've had any successes I can't remember them, but I believe you me I live through every mistake every day, so I'm sorry about those.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That actually is not hard to answer. One is a man that I mentioned before Alfred D. Chandler Jr., who basically created the modern field of business history. He and I wrote a textbook together, and he was just a wonderful, wonderful man, and the second was Tom Aw. Both of these are Pulitzer Prize winning historians. Tom was, in addition to being a fine historian, he was very good politically, and at the Harvard Business School, that's really important. When you are on tenured, and I went there as an untenured professor, the worm that walks like a man, you don't know what's going on because everything is confidential. People are talking about you, and they're talking about whether you're going to have a career or not. So you need advice, and Tom was a wonderful career manager for me. So Tom Acraw and Al Chandler are the two that I would mention.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I loathe telephone menus, and if I were king of the universe, if I were a charismatic person, I would outlaw them. And the reason for that is when you call hospital or doctor's office or a drugstore or anything, you always get a menu and the menu never has on it what you want. And so that is my number one pet peeve.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boy, that is an interesting question. I would say walking five miles a day so I'm building on what I said before. That sets me up for the day. I get up, I walk five miles a day. I've done something, so if I make a mess of the rest of the day, at least I can say something at this agent stage.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try at the age of 74 to maintain my physical condition, so I walk a lot, I go to the gym a lot, and that's what I would say is my favorite hobby.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working on Ted Turner, and I'm reading about him, and the reason for that is the chief of psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital, who's also a chaired professor at the Harvard Medical Schoolman named Maurizio Fava, wants to co author with me a book about how the emotional issues that are faced by everybody but that are extreme in some cases, and Turner is a very good example of that, can actually help someone if managed correctly be a success. This may turn into a small course at the Harvard Business School and it may turn into a book. So that's what looks like it's what's next for me, Ted.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their own definition of charisma These people are globally known everybody in the world knows who Jeff Bezos is. They've got to broaden their definition of charisma, and my hope is that they stop competing for the Americas Cup and they stop shooting rockets in the air, and they realize that we've got to make planet Earth work or we're all going to be in trouble. And my hope is that that's where they turn their attention. And you and I are going to find out together.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What they're saying Now let's watch what they do. But Satya Nedella, who's the CEO of Microsoft and who is a very interesting individual, has said that we have to be involved in this because if we're not, the future is very much in peril. And I think that, especially with the political system seemingly as dysfunctional as it seems to be, business leaders are going to have to step up and broaden the”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Family friends, end quote, relatives, and somehow managed to create herself and to become the Queen of all media and to become the first female African American billionaire, this didn't happen by accident. It happened because she's charismatic person. And to me these stories are inspiring, and they show that aspirations can be realized. That's a nice thought to have in one's head.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess one certainly I go back to jobs is the story of what it meant to make a presentation to jobs in the old Apple campus they've now moved to something called iSpaceship but what used to be called infinite loop you would make a presentation to him in a room ridiculously misnamed diplomacy and you had to figure out how do I do this and that story is told by a guy named Ken Cosienda who wrote a wonderful book called Creative Selection I love that story because that really shows you how the sausage is made better than any other book I read about apple and I've read a lot of them certainly the biography of Oprah Winfrey how she rose from a childhood which was unspeakably awful I mean this is a woman who between the ages of nine and fifteen was raped repeatedly by”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say that the world wanted to hear, and that's one reason that those flowers wound up in front of those stores when he died on october fifth, twenty eleven.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give you advice, but it takes a certain courage in the immortal words of my father it's very cold out there, and if your courage leads you astray, you'll wind up running people express, which, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't run anymore. But that was the product of a dream. Sometimes dreams don't come true. Really, in a certain sense, you've got to figure out what kind of life do I want to lead, what kind of person do I want to be? Jobs was a special person. He gave the twenty five Stanford University commencement speech. The last time I looked on YouTube it had been viewed by well over thirty five million people. And let me tell you something having spent most of my life in universities, giving a commencement speech that anybody is going to remember for ten seconds, they're all the same. Set your goals high but not beyond your reach. End of speech. He had something to say.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, don't be afraid to ask. Don't be afraid to push. Don't be afraid to dream and dream big dreams. Moreover, be bold because if you're not going to be bold in your industry or in your company, whatever, somebody else is going to be because that's the world we're living in now. And I also think that what Sam Walton said is true. You can learn from anybody. So learn, keep learning, and ask yourself, what are my strengths and weaknesses? What can I build on to make myself more effective as an actor or actress in this world? By the same token, where am I weak? And so where can I find a partner who can shore up the weak part of me and make me more effective? By the way, there's an article in the Harvard Business Review in twenty ten about how to be charismatic. Look at that. There are plenty of people willing to.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By Biden, who is someone I frankly admire as a human being, is not a charismatic figure, and he's paying the price for that now. It's hard for him to sell what he needs to sell. It's hard for him to keep his poll numbers up because he's no Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt is the essence of a charismatic leader, because his was the charisma of hope. I will tell you something that you will remember, which is that in nineteen thirty three, when he gave his first inaugural address, he said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That's a charismatic statement. Adolf Hitler was an example of the charisma of hate. So it's got a lot of sides to it. But what it really does is it encourages you to park your reason and say, I'm going to bet on this person. That's dangerous. And I don't think it's going to go away.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The people who are going to create whatever it is that's coming down the pike are going to be knowledge workers and they're going to have to be really smart. If you look at the people who I've had the pleasure and privilege of working with and just interacting with, these people they're just unbelievably brilliant. Think about the camera in a phone and think about what it means to mass produce a camera in a phone. And so I had the pleasure when I was at Apple of interacting with the hardware and the software people who did that camera. These people are as smart as anybody anywhere. And so I think that for them to follow a leader, a Steve Jobs, you've got to have charisma. I don't see it diminishing. As a matter of fact, if I may, let's switch to politics just for a split second. There's no question that Trump, for a segment of the population, is a charismatic figure.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, let me say that I'm a mere historian. That's all I ever claimed to be. So I am very bad at predicting the future. I'm very good at predicting the past. As I told you, the war of 1812 started in 1912. I'm right again. One of the advantages is you're never wrong. I think that the need for charisma is actually going to increase, not decrease, and here's why.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, marketing products that had not gone through the formality of being created, you have to really believe that you're going to be able to make it. And I guess Elizabeth Holmes made a believer out of herself. She made a believer out of a lot of investors. But there was no way in the world that thing was ever going to work. That was like Bernie Madoff saying fake it till you make it. I mean, you fake it until you can't fake it anymore. That was her problem. But otherwise, there's a constant battle in tech companies, certainly technology companies, between product and schedule. And that's a little bit about you've got to make believers out of people that it's going to be there even if it's late.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, let's talk for a moment about Elizabeth Holmes. She's a perfect illustration of the fact that charisma is dangerous. Fake it till you make it is a saying out here and I guess all over the world now. But she was faking it forever because that product never could have worked. There was a physician at UCSF, University of California, San Francisco who, when told about the Edison machine and the tiny little blood draw that you got from prick of a finger that was going to enable you to do X number of blood tests, said I would be less surprised if these people told me they were time travelers who had come back from the twenty fifth century. So she was faking it, but she would never make it because that device never would have worked. Other companies, Microsoft is famous for vaporware in the early years, I should say, certainly not.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whenever I think about An entrepreneur, whatever it is, who's trying to create a vision, there's always an element of fake it till you make it. Elizabeth Holmes certainly has all kinds of charisma, as we know, but there was no there behind it. Now that's sort of a digital, that was a zero and maybe Steve Jobs has been a one. But in most of that spectrum, you're somewhere in the middle trying to create what will become the one. What happens as a charismatic leader works their way through just having a vision and having followers to either creating the product that does change the world, change a market, capture market share, or doesn't?”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“others aren't. But basically, the charismatic leaders that I live in Silicon Valley that I see around here are people who make believers out of skeptics. That's what they've got to do”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the definition, if you will, going back to our earlier conversation, of charisma is if I go running down the street stark naked saying that I and I alone can save the world, and there are like thousands of people running after me saying, yes, it's true, Richard can save the world, I'm charismatic. If I go running down the street naked and say I alone can save the world and there's nobody running after me, they're going to take a butterfly net and put me in an insane asylum. So one thing that charismatic leaders have to have are followers. And the creation of followers, it's a mutual relationship is very subtle, very difficult, and very segmented. Musk is a good example, and so is jobs. Some people who are charismatic to X number of people are not charismatic to Y. Some people are bitten by the bug.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of these leaders talked about a little bit of Steve Jobs and certainly Elon Musk, there's another side to them that you hear about. You hear about how difficult of a person Jobs was. There are a lot of skeptics of Elon Musk and his audacious aspirations. How do you think about the prospects of a charismatic leader and what they need to do to be successful in the path from having the vision to making it happen?”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, they're courageous, secondly, they have an idea of where they want to go. Thirdly, they're not imprisoned by the past. Robert Noyce, who was Intel Employee Number one, said, and Intel used to have this printed on t shirts, don't be encumbered by history, go out and do something wonderful. And these are people who weren't encumbered by history. They were people who thought not what can't I do, but what might be possible. The whole story of gorilla glass and the bringing of glass to the phone. Wendell Weeks, who was running Corning, which has been making glass since eighteen fifty one, told Steve Jobs he couldn't get it, and Steve Jobs worked with Wendell Weeks long enough so that he wound up with glass on that phone. They walked through walls. They do things other people thought were impossible.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if they're not, you wind up with companies in trouble Andigrove was a very charismatic business leader, but his successors were not, and Luke at Intel today, so are charismatic leaders born or made. I think Steve Jobs was born. I don't think you can study to become Steve Jobs. I would say the same about Elon Musk. But that said, I do not believe that charisma is digital. I don't believe that you either have it or you don't, because I've seen enough people be coached. I don't think there's a major executive in this country today that hasn't had media coaching. And I think that if you have media coaching and you are coached and you are conscious of the need to lead in an inspirational and aspirational way, you can have an element of charisma about you. So I think it can be learned. Understand it's important.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Device. Well, he was wrong. Jobs was able to think different, and because of his success with the iPod and the iTunes store, no investors were upset with his thinking different, and there was a freedom that came from, I think, the moving of the center of gravity of innovation in the country from places like Dayton, Ohio. Think about Dayton, Ohio. It's where national cash register was headquartered when it was an innovative company. It's where the Wright brothers grew up first in flight. The center of gravity of American innovation has moved from the Middle West to California. And these are companies now that are innovating as much as they can as quickly as possible. So innovation is certainly one thing that one aspect. If you are a member of an outgroup, you want to muscle your way to the table. You've got to be Oprah Winfrey because the African Americans who tried this on television”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It requires charismatic leader, in my opinion, in a crisis. I met with Jim Burke, who was the CEO of Johnston Johnson when Tylenol was poisoned in the nineteen eighties, and crisis turned him into a charismatic leader, so crisis can produce that, but also opportunity. When you see the Blackberry, you remember the Blackberry, I'm sure it was called the Crackberry people were so attached to it, and you realized that it's actually kind of ugly, and that Steve Jobs always believed that technology alone is not enough. The marriage of technology in the humanities lead to the results that make our hearts sing, and so he created the iPhone which is beautiful. Steve Balmer, who was the CEO of Microsoft in twenty oh seven, thought it was going to fail because since it didn't have a plastic keyboard, it wouldn't be an effective either.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably not a stretch to say that success and charisma isn't necessarily inextricably linked. So I'm curious, what are the situations of when and why a company effectively requires a charismatic leader”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Managers were being put on the back burner by investors. Well, that's a little bit of an overstatement. Management still matters and it matters immensely, but investors have muscled their way to the table. There's no question about that.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which made possible the raids of the nineteen eighties, and the raids of the nineteen eighties also pushed change because you couldn't manage Robert Mercer, who was the CEO of Goodyear, when he was being raided by Sir James Goldsmith, couldn't manage that company the way Harlow Curtis managed General Motors in nineteen fifty five when raiding General Motors would have been utterly unthinkable. So the market for corporate control is new. And the rearrangement of the stakeholders between either the workers and the managers and the shareholders and the customers became very powerful in the nineteen eighties. My course was called the coming of managerial capitalism in my friends and finances at the Harvard Business School told me I should have called it the going of managerial capitalism.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a collection of essays called Does Technology Drive History. I'm not sure the answer is yes, but the fact is technology was changing very quickly. The computer had an impact on the world that people could only imagine back in the mid-1960s when the IBM three hundred sixty was first introduced. So the computer made possible a whole bunch of innovations which people began to sense and were either going to grab for or not IACA in many ways was a backward looking CEO. I mean he saved a company that there really wasn't any room for anyway but other people began to look at the old way of doing things and realized that you know what this isn't working. Other countries are doing better. Look at Michael Milken for heaven's sake for all his faults. He weaponized a whole new class of investment in junk bonds.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Used the word innovation before and In that transition period, Li Ocococa turned around a car company, but Sam Walton and Mary Kash created new businesses. What is it about the time that's past since post-World War II that had this necessity for innovation and charismatic business leadership that may not have existed previously”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Windows 95 was launched in 1995. So, Ted, if you were to ask me when did the war of 1812 begin, I could tell you, and I wouldn't say it was 1811 or eighteen thirteen. So anyway, it was these two things that happened. And since 1995, you can't walk out your front door without bumping into a charismatic business leader, and that's because lots of new things have been happening. The internet is a revolution. In twenty oh seven, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, which he said today Apple reinvents the phone. That's a big statement. The first phone call was made in eighteen seventy six, but we're going to reinvent it. If you look at what Elon Musk, if you look at the model three unveil, which was in twenty sixteen, he said we're reinventing the car because that's going to save humanity. So they think big, they act big, they talk.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wasn't saying that Sam Walton was. And then it's very interesting, actually, Walton died in'92, and in'94 Amazon was founded. And so the third phase of this book is ninety five to the present, and I chose ninety five on purpose. This wasn't an accident because in August of nineteen ninety five two very important things happened. One was Netscape had its IPO, and that everybody knew that that meant that the internet was real and important. And the second thing that happened that was important was that Microsoft launched Windows 95. And when you're an historian, you love it when they append the date. So you always, it's easy to remember even when you're old like I am and brain cells are dying.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said, I try to imagine everyone that I encounter with a sign that says, Make me feel important and she started this company on a shoestring. Her husband was going to be the prophet and lost part of PNL. He died of a heart attack at breakfast a month before the company was supposed to launch. It launched it was successful. She came to the Harvard Business School, and let me tell you something. This woman had the students in the palm of her hand Sam Walton is another example of a clearly a charismatic leader, and if you look at what these people very different people had in common was they were thinking big, they were acting boldly. Walton, when he died in nineteen ninety two just before he died, he was given the presidential medal of freedom and he said, we want to make it possible for people to have a better life not only in America but all over the world.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The charismatic business leaders, so although no one, my guess is who's listening to this has heard of Harlow Curtis, my guess is a lot of people have heard of Leia Coca. Leiacoca became famous for turning around Chryser which was on the verge of bankruptcy in nineteen seventy nine and actually went bankrupt in twenty oh nine as did General Motors, and he also became famous because of these commercials that he ran. These commercials were very in your face, they were very hard sell, and he ended them with a tagline if you find a better car buy one. And he became the face of Chrysler. He was more important than Walter Chrysler himself. I mean, he became Chrysler. That was new. You see a couple of other executives, Mary K Ash, who founds Mary K, who says that to me PNL isn't profit and loss, it's people in love.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No longer on top are governmental system was in disarray. We had Nixon forced from office in nineteen seventy four, Gerald Ford, who was the only president who was not actually elected. He was appointed vice president and then became president when Nixon was ejected. And as he said, I am a Ford not a Lincoln. Well, that's not a charismatic statement. And then Jimmy Carter was his successor, a very fine man, in my opinion, but not a terribly successful president. And in his Malay's speech, Carter said people have accused me not of leading the nation but of managing the government. That's the very essence. One of the things when you study charisma is you learn what it isn't, and that's what it isn't. This is what Carter, these are his words. I'm not leading the nation. I'm managing the government. And at the same time, you begin to see”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We got from there to here for a couple of reasons. I tried to lay out three phases. The first phase is basically the age of administration, where the CEO is the chief mechanic of the corporation, and his or her job, although in those days was almost always him, his job was to keep the company running and to keep it with half of the US auto market. By the nineteen seventies I choose the year nineteen seventy five almost randomly was after the first oil shock it was the year we lost to Vietnam War. By the nineteen seventies put it this way, the swinging sixties had morphed into the sobering seventies. The United States was no longer hegemonic and Germany had come back, they had products on global markets very successful products. Toyota had come up with a new way of producing automobiles which eventually conquered what the Japanese called the automobile kingdom which was the United States. And so we were”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Man having a job, that has changed. In nineteen fifty five also happens to be the year Steve Jobs was born, and I find that Piquant because it's as unimaginable that jobs would have run the general motors of nineteen fifty five as it is that Harlow Curtis would have run Apple in twenty seven, which is the year the iPhone was introduced. So yeah, there's been a big change. Today, the CEO is off in the face of the corporation. It's Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, it's Elon Musk, it's Oprah Winfrey, you name it. Then that wasn't true. The CEO tended to be quite anonymous.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And imports accounted for only 0.71%. And that's why the CEO, General Motors, in 1955, was chosen as Time magazine's man of the year. His name is one that none of your listeners have heard of. It's Harlow Curtis. Very few people at the time knew who he was, unless you were in the auto industry. These were not people like Curtis, who, it's interesting as nineteen fifty five, being Time magazine's Man of the Year was something today means nothing. That was also when the Fortune five hundred was founded, and GM was the lynch pin of the Detroit Pittsburgh economy around which the United States revolved. I mean, there's been no biography written of him, but because the job he had. The job had a man rather than”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we were good. It turned out that history didn't stop with that. But that was, if you looked at the CEOs at the time, the company of companies in the industry of industries in the nineteen fifties was General Motors. General Motors had over half the automobile market in the United States in nineteen fifty five, and”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The United States was a global hegemon. Right after the war we had exclusive possession of atomic weaponry, we had a gigantic army, a gigantic navy, and moreover, if you look at the signature product of the 20th century, that's the automobile, just as the signature product of the 21st century, I would say, is the computer. And in 1950, 85% of the automobiles manufactured in the whole world were produced in the United States. So we were really not only a military, but an economic hegemon. As a leader, we actually didn't want change. We thought the history stopped with our success. It was a book written after World War II, which I, if I were you, would put on my must miss list called God is my co pilot. That's how people were thinking. We thought that history stopped because we were on top.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You couldn't be more right history is the study of change over time, and there has been a major change in the nature of the American CEO from the post World War II period to what we see today. So let me take you back to World War II for just a second. Everybody in the United States in nineteen forty five knew who Adolf Hitler was. Everybody hated him, but nobody doubted that Hitler was a charismatic man. And so to some degree, Hitler gave charisma a bad name, if you will, and if you look at the American presidents, I mean the president of the United States when I was born was Harry Truman, Dwight Disenhower followed him. These people, I mean, they were almost grandfatherly, and in businesses you didn't see charisma because you need charisma if there's going to be innovation, you need charisma to drive change, and in the 19th century.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They feel that their mission is so important we're saving the world, we're transforming the automobile, we're landing on Mars. I mean, you name it, that they have the right to be cruel to people who are not performing to the specks that they think they deserve. They feel that their goals are so lofty and that they themselves are so vital to the future of the human race. My mother used to talk about people who loved the human race but hated every individual. There's a certain truth there that I don't have to care about you. You're getting in my way and my way is to reinvent something that needs to be reinvented or to land on Mars, which is what Musk talks about, that sort of thing. You hear charismatic people described in a lot of ways, but you rarely see the word nice associated with. And that's one reason why they can be cruel.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's more money than I have. So, Musk has been described in a very good biography of him as a man who managed to sell the world on his capacity to achieve objectives so lofty that from the mouth of anyone else they'd be called fantasies. The charismatic business leader from an historian's way of putting it, this is the person, man or woman, who stands at the edge of history and brings the future to the present, through a mixture of charm and guile and brilliance and sometimes cruelty, he or she remakes the industry and in some cases society you will do things for a charismatic leader that you will not do for somebody who isn't charismatic, and that's about as I'm kind of surrounding the definition. It's like trying to nail Mercury to the wall. It's very hard to do, but this is about as good as I can manage.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, the definition of charisma is very difficult. There have in fact been books written about this Mox Weber, this famous one of the founders of sociology, German, brought it into common parlance. If you look at the dictionary, it defines charisma as compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others. That's a direct quote. Elon Musk, who, I think, or the last time I looked, Ted, was personally worth more than ExxonMobil. I think he had two hundred thirty billion dollars. This is strictly confidential.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World reacted to the death of Steve Jobs. I mean, there were people Ted, you may remember this if you were walking past an Apple store who bought bouquets of flowers and put them in front of Apple stores. This had never happened before, and this was so remarkable being an historian I've read histories of funerals of business executives going all the way back to the early nineteenth century. Believe me, this was unique, and so the question in my mind was why did this happen? And the answer that I came up with was that Steve Jobs was a charismatic individual, and that's how this book took place.”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was fascinating. First of all, I found that unlike the tenured professorate at a university, if you didn't deliver you out, and it was that simple. Secondly, the company during the period that I was there twenty ten to twenty eighteen was exploding, so it was fascinating to be with a company that was growing so fast and trying so much to create the future. And thirdly, I was there on october fifth, twenty eleven, which is a day I will never forget. That's the day Steve Jobs died. The whole world took notice, and that, by the way, was the stimulus for the writing of this book, although I wasn't going to write one while I was at Apple because I had a job and I was busy. But when I retired in twenty eighteen, I thought, you know, I ought to go back to this because there has never been in American history a reaction to the death of a CEO the way the country and indeed the whole”
2021-11-15 · Capital Allocators · Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source