YouSaid · the spoken record

Zak Brown

lines on the record
59
first
2025-11-19
most recent
2025-11-19
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. “I think, no, sometimes it's tough love. I think you do it by being transparent, fair, a great communicator, and that is part of communicating is listening. So I believe great leaders know when to lead. They also know when to follow, how to empower people, and then make people understand the importance of their job, the contribution that they're making. And then celebrate and be thankful. But how do you”

    2025-11-19 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Zak Brown: Rebuilding McLaren, Leading Formula 1 and the Power of Winning Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “In the Formula One team, and then that's when you really saw the Formula One team start to blossom and then letting everybody know how important their role is. There's this kind of, you know, the race car. It must just be the people working on the race card. I was like, now if you look at our ecosystem, got to have great fans. That's where you got a great communications department and great marketing department. You then need to have a great commercial department to monetize that great brand and the huge fans. They then need to pass that money off to a great finance department because we live in a cost cap world, so we need to really be ROI and ROO focused. We can't just spend money. We got to spend it wisely. Then you give it to your team. That's where HR comes in and you got to have an unbelievable team that's highly motive.”

    2025-11-19 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Zak Brown: Rebuilding McLaren, Leading Formula 1 and the Power of Winning Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The first thing I learned was I needed to change my leadership team for a variety of reasons. It wasn't they were bad people. We just needed some fresh blood, different teamwork, you know, things were kind of stale, I guess, is how I would describe them. We needed some new energy. And so went about doing that. Then I jumped into the commercial side of our business because that's something I'm very experienced and very comfortable in. And I knew if I could get people believe in in our brand, believe in in the team, bringing some new energy, new partners, which would allow us to make new investments and drivers and wind tunnels, I could kind of reverse this downward trajectory or bad momentum we had. And that's what happened. And so once we got the leaders all rowing in the same direction, they got their departments rowing in the same direction. And then I changed the top three people.”

    2025-11-19 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Zak Brown: Rebuilding McLaren, Leading Formula 1 and the Power of Winning Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “They were all new but one, Laura, our CFO, is someone I promoted. Some were people that I brought in that I'd worked with previously. And then others were headhunted. So it was kind of a combination of. And when I came in, I didn't come in with the intention of, I'm going to change my leadership team. I came in with let me learn.”

    2025-11-19 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Zak Brown: Rebuilding McLaren, Leading Formula 1 and the Power of Winning Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “10 people row in the same direction, finance, HR, team principal of Formula One, a commercial department, our HR department, et cetera. And then once I got those people in place, that became a pretty awesome team.”

    2025-11-19 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Zak Brown: Rebuilding McLaren, Leading Formula 1 and the Power of Winning Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I started with my leadership team because ultimately it's a big organization, okay, not as big as some of the others out there, but it's not a small organization, 1,400 people going racing. And I started with my leadership team. And that wasn't necessarily my intention when I came in. My intention was to figure out why isn't this great racing team working? And at the time, everyone was convinced it was the Hond engine and it was all their fault. And that was the mindset and that was the commentary. Well, you take the Hond engine in, you put the Renault engine in, and you get a little bit better, but you don't get, it was like, okay, well, now what are the excuses? And so that was a great wake-up call for us. I think sometimes you need big wake-up calls. And I changed in new leadership, changed leadership of my leadership team. That was the first thing I did was get.”

    2025-11-19 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Zak Brown: Rebuilding McLaren, Leading Formula 1 and the Power of Winning Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, we were at a record low in sponsorship, in results on track. Our fans weren't happy. And it was a pretty toxic work environment. And as I say, other than that, everything was great. But what we did have was a great brand in a great sport with great history. And clearly we had great people because we have people that have been here for 20, 30, 40 years.”

    2025-11-19 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Zak Brown: Rebuilding McLaren, Leading Formula 1 and the Power of Winning Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “The front, but the way we've been able to unlock the performance of our people through a great culture of transparency, hard work, incremental improvement, real talks, park your feelings at the doors, all those things have just made everyone row in the same direction when you get 1,400 people rowing the same direction can be pretty powerful.”

    2025-11-19 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Zak Brown: Rebuilding McLaren, Leading Formula 1 and the Power of Winning Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “If I had to give, of course, it's not a simple answer and it's never quite as simple as one thing, but it's our people and specifically our culture, what we've been able to do here, you know, if I take a step back where the second most successful Formula One team of all time, second most historic, next to Ferrari, which is good company. And we certainly have won a lot of races and world championships over the years, but we really started to struggle 10, 15 years ago and lost our way for a variety of reasons, but probably the biggest impact being we lost our way as a team, teamwork, and that culture. And so, of course, we've had great investment. We've got great drivers. We have new wind tunnels, all the things that people are the tools that they need to be able to get back to.”

    2025-11-19 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Zak Brown: Rebuilding McLaren, Leading Formula 1 and the Power of Winning Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source