YouSaid · the spoken record

Thomas DeLong

lines on the record

69

first

2019-06-03

most recent

2019-06-03

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

1. “Well, I'm not the new sheriff in town. John is, but what I do know is that your subordinates want conversations about not only their comp, but about themselves, and about their careers, and they want to know that somebody cares deeply about their work. And I said, I know that that may fall on deaf ears. But I said, our expectation is that you have a 30-minute conversation a year with every one of your professionals, and you could have heard a pen drop. Like, you have got to be kidding. I've got to talk to Ted. I got to talk to Steve Galbra. I've got to talk to Andre for 30 minutes. You got to be kidding. Now, we're talking 1991. 1982 And so that was the start. But what we did is that we got actors to come in and role play how to have a conversation.”

   2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Well, the first thing about organizational change in my mind is that you need to kind of start small. And so I went right with the investment bankers and I said, are you pleased with the way your comms fixed? Are you pleased with who gets promoted? And they go, no, we have no data about it. It's all bullshit. And I says, Well, let's create something. What we realize is that nobody was talking about their careers. There is no mentoring going on. And so we wanted to create some kind of structure for people to talk with one another. And we says, why not a performance evaluation? And we'll have them help design it. And then I got up, I think this was one of the things that happened. I got up in a partner's meeting. No notes. And there might have been 500 partners at our annual meeting. And I challenged them and I said,”

   2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “I want our managers to be the kind of managers where other people experience themselves differently when they're with them. And that has been, in my mind, the mantra is what happens inside another person. And so I started having conversations with folks. I couldn't believe the way people were compensated. I couldn't believe the way people were promoted. It was literally an old boy system. And I went right after that and helped create the first performance evaluation in the history of Wall Street. And again, that's another story in and of itself.”

   2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “This is what I've come to believe, and here I am teaching this the so called advanced course on leadership here at the business school, and get a chance to go all over to different companies, et cetera, et cetera. But what I've realized is that leadership, in my mind, is something that's deeply personal. And I don't think I knew it then. But what would happen is I'd have a conversation with somebody. And while I think that their internal dialogue could have been about criticism, I found them kind of leaning on the edge of their seats. And I actually think that folks were having the same kind of experience with me that I had with John, and I realized, and John told me, he says, Tom, I don't want you to learn the business. I could care less. And I'm going to put words in his mouth, but basically he said,”

   2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “So how do you do it? You show up at Morgan Stanley and John Max brought you in so people probably take you a little bit seriously. But, you know, people have this technical expertise. They have their heads down. They're trying to make money. And the stuff you're talking about, as you said, you know, these tough Wall Street guys are going to call that soft stuff. Were there one or two incidents that you remember that either broke that open or allowed you to have an impact?”

   2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “And I remember walking around the track with them and then walking into school with them, I asked myself, am I over my head both to be the kind of father I want to be partner? That's another story.”

   2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Going to this top tier company, firm. And again, being responsible for people, being responsible for the culture, I mean, how does that work? And so, once again, I make this high risk decision, move my family back. And I remember there was one moment at Scarsdale High School. Camille was still back in Utah, and I had the three kids and was moving them, and I dropped off my two girls at Scarsdale High School. One was going to be a junior and one was going to be a freshman. And they left their books in the car and I went back, and here was Sarah Junior, Catherine, the freshman, and they were walking around the track and school had already started. And they were both sobbing. And they said Dad, we know we told you that we'd support you in moving, but they said we don't want to go into the school. And it was like my third day of work.”

   2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Be able to manage to be able to interact, to be able to have honest conversations. And he said, someday you're going to work for me and you're going to help me transform this place to make it a place where people don't want to come just because of their money or because of the status and by then at that time it was Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and the others were far behind. But he says there's something more that we need to create and sometime you're going to do that I took a year off and commuted, and then we moved. We sold a nine acre farm. And again, it's one of these irrational decisions, you might say, Ted, well, because you know this world, you know the Harvard Business School world and the investment banking world. But here I was as this professor in a school of education, which feels a little bit second-rate.”

   2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “There is some way that I experienced myself around feeling like I could do anything. And by the way, I experienced this in the three hours that we talked. And he experienced something like that, I think, with me. And here he was taking over as president. And he says, I've been talking competition. He was then running fixed income and had his own inferior complex about being in fixed income as opposed to equities and investment banking. And he says, I've been so mean-spirited. Now I've got to get all these divisions to work together. And so I was talking about some of the things he might do. And then two weeks later, he calls me when I'm back in Utah. And he said, I need you to fly out here. I want to talk. More about this whole notion of how do you get”

   2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Loud enough that the guy makes a lot of sense. I was practicing and I'm sure he thought that there was a problem with me. And he doesn't introduce himself. He just says, speak up. Could you speak up? This is interesting. So I spoke up. And then he turns to me and introduce himself. And I says, well, what do you do for a living? And he says, well, I'm the president of Morgan Stanley. And I said, this is how much I knew about investment banking. I said to him, well, what's the difference between JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley and Morgan Guarantee? And so here was the president of Morgan Stanley giving me a history lesson about Harold Stanley and these partners breaking away. And then when we land, we talked the whole time. He says, I'm going to call you. And I said, that would be great. And that was it. And what happened is we were just kind of smitten with each other in the sense of something happened inside of me when I was with John.”

    2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “I was on an airplane. I was heading to Johnson Johnson headquarters, so I was flying from Salt Lake City to JFK. And I was going to talk about my research on individual organizational change. And Ralph Larson, who was the chairman then, had pulled together all of the boards of companies owned by J&J. And there were 70 different, and they all had different boards, some highly functioning, some totally dysfunctional. I was going to go back in this big room and talk to them about my research. So I'm practicing the speech I'm going to give. And the guy sitting next to me says, could you speak up? This was in 1990, 1990.”

    2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “I went to organizational behavior, became his teaching assistant for two years, and then said, well, I know some of the theory around how organizations work. I'm going to go in for more study. So I went to a combined PhD program at Purdue where I could study organizational behavior and also family systems and see the interaction intersection with that. So I remember getting in my Camille and I had been married five years and we had a 65 Chevy convertible and we headed from Utah to West Lafayette, Indiana. And then from there, a postdoc at MIT and then back to the academic route.”

    2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “I think after my bachelor's degree in English, I continued to feel like well, I don't know enough to leave here. And I love academic institutions. And I remember as a kid being on my bicycle in Portland, Oregon and riding around looking at the different schools. And I was just enamored with it. And so I felt comfortable being in a university. And then I actually had a professor, a professor named Stephen Covey that has passed on now. We had a conversation. He says, you need to go into organizational behavior. And I took the law exam, entrance exam, and it didn't do well and it broke my heart and felt like a total failure at 23. So I decided to go into this because I was impressed with how he could in some ways capture an audience.”

    2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “And how did you take that as a path I have in my head now? We have Tom de Long, we have Tony Robbins, we have my father, the psychiatrist. There are so many different ways you could take that interest. How did you take the interest into an academic study and then go from there?”

    2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “I was the fourth of six children. And while at the time I thought I had an ideal family And I'm finding myself self editing right now about how far to go into this. But I will just say that I felt like it was my responsibility to figure out all the family members and make everything great. And so I was an observer of systems and of relationships, and I wouldn't have used the word when I was eight or nine about symmetry in relationships or power dynamics. But I think that I kind of made it my goal that if I could somehow help Small systems, whether it was a dyad or other people or larger organizations simply to make their lives and not just meaningful, but make it so that they're getting traction in ways that are self-satisfying for them”

    2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “We would have substantive conversations with folks, and then when they'd get back in the group, it was back to golf and it was back to redecorating the kitchen. And I think, by the way, that's one of the reasons that I longed to come back into an academic setting is the nature of the conversations and that I felt like folks were more willing, students and faculty, to have the kind of conversations that I thought would nurture them and were certainly nurturing for me.”

    2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Has really been about helping people in organizations and individually live more meaningful lives on a lot of different dimensions. And it's interesting also that I find myself a bit defensive in saying that because it feels so soft in the world of finance. It feels so, it's interesting because when I was at Morgan Stanley and I would have what I would call something other than deeply shallow conversations.”

    2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “And how did you end up here? And then here's Ted wanting to record it. But I want to go back to a word or a phrase you said, and that is you're interested in my work. And I think I've been fascinated for as long as I can remember about how each person defines for him or herself what their work is. Capital W small w how do they identify themselves with their work? Is it work? Is it day to day stuff that you fill up your life with it a kind of a higher purpose kind of work? And now again at sixty six I've realized that my work”

    2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Well, it's interesting that you tee it up that way because... At each stop at each chapter along the way I've had this feeling of do I really belong here I've been treated as that I belong. But I ask myself, in fact, I said, you made all these irrational decisions through your life. And now you're in the twilight of your career, as it were.”

    2019-06-03 · Capital Allocators · REPLAY - Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source