CHAPTER 1

Do You Want to Live?

The relevant question is not simply what shall we do tomorrow, but rather what shall we do today in order to get ready for tomorrow.

—Peter Drucker

Royal Joh. Enschede was founded in 1703 in the Netherlands as a printer of books and manuscripts. A century later, they were the exclusive printer of Dutch Central Banknotes. Eventually, they became a security printer of notes and stamps for several countries around the world, just as early signs of disruption were peering over the horizon. The Euro was introduced in 1999, and e-mail was slowly reducing the need for stamps. Royal Joh. Enschede knew they needed to change, but pride and pedigree had made them complacent. They stuck their head in the sand and suffered a steep and predictable decline in business. To save itself from bankruptcy, the company was sold to an investment firm in 2014. In 2016, they stopped printing banknotes and were forced to lay off a “significant” number of employees.¹

This result was predictable; yet, it caught them by surprise. Their past success had blinded management to the requirements for future success. Current examples, such as Blockbuster, Kodak, and Blackberry, point to the same underlying reason. All these companies were disrupted because they were smart and knew their business, not because they weren’t.² It’s an ironic flaw reinforced by childhood experience: if a particular action is rewarded, we should do it again and again. That works as long as nothing in your external environment changes. The rinse and repeat strategy only changes if you discover a better way to earn the same reward or if the person judging your action changes.

Consider the classic case of disruption put forth by Clayton Christensen in 1997. He described a process whereby a simpler, more affordable product or service takes root at the bottom of a market. While the incumbent focuses on higher margins at the top end of the market, the upstart hones their offering, eventually saturating the low end of the market and moving upstream to displace established competitors. This has become a well-established pattern that intelligent managers at great companies still ignore.

The Case of Big Brown

As a long-time UPS shareholder, I benefit from the company’s success. When UPS announced a new CEO on March 12, 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the United States, I was expectantly optimistic. Carol Tomé seemed like a brilliant choice. She was the first CEO in UPS history who did not grow up in the famously promote-fromwithin company, although she had been a board member for many years while a CFO at Home Depot. Her first earnings call was a breath of fresh air. She talked about her vision, the need for more diversity, and revamping the archaic decision-making processes that had slowed down the company for years. I began to question whether I had retired from UPS too early!

“UPS will be better, not bigger,” she said.

The slogan seemed strategic: UPS would “sweat the assets” and focus on the higher-margin verticals, such as health care and small-to midsized businesses. She almost immediately raised rates as capacity tightened with the pandemic-driven increase in demand for e-commerce deliveries. She slashed capital expenditures and sold off a low-margin trucking business. Wall Street cheered, and UPS stock soared to an all-time high. I joined in the celebration.

But, I also cringed. Beneath the surface of her words lay the seeds of disruption: “Better, not bigger” and “sweat the assets” translate, roughly, to reduced investment and a focus on the highest return areas. On the surface, her language makes sense, but it’s not the path of a Forever Company, which makes decisions beyond its quarterly earnings and the tenure of its current leadership.

The risk of a “better, not bigger” strategy was familiar. This was the classic “Innovator’s Dilemma” outlined by Christensen in 1997. The “dilemma” is whether incumbents focus on existing high-margin segments that are a good match with current capabilities or invest in new capabilities required to capture an emerging, lower-margin part of the market. Christensen’s book features the infamous case study of mini-mills disrupting U.S. Steel in the 1970s. Fifty years later, a similar scenario is playing out in the package delivery business. Table 1.1 shows a side-by-side comparison of strategic moves by U.S. Steel in the 1970s and UPS in 2020 and early 2021.

The convergence of broadband, GPS, ubiquitous smartphones, and artificial intelligence allowed Uber to launch an online ride-hailing service in 2009. Online food delivery companies like UberEATS and DoorDash soon followed. While pizza delivery had been in place for years, this new technology-enabled model allowed businesses to tap into a ready supply of delivery vehicles and drivers on an ad hoc basis. It was revolutionary. Deliveries were made within an hour, but they were also haphazard and low margin. Profitability was an aspiration.

Same-day delivery of fast food was a business that UPS and other incumbents had no interest in. It didn’t fit UPS’s efficient route-based network, and paying gig-workers for delivery would be an uphill battle with the Teamsters Union representing UPS drivers. UPS made the logical choice. They focused on current customers who placed a high value on an efficient global network and were willing to pay more for it.

Fast forward to 2020. E-commerce spikes, outstripping UPS delivery capacity. Retailers increasingly use their stores to fulfill online orders with deliveries that don’t need the celebrated national networks of UPS, FedEx, or the U.S. Post Office. Options proliferate in every locality, from contractors to gig workers, for local pickup with local delivery. Upstarts like Postmates and DoorDash, which already had a solution for local delivery, rushed in to fill the void and expand their market. Subsequently, Uber purchased Postmates for $2.7 billion in July 2020. A few months later, DoorDash went public, valuing the company at $72 billion.

Table 1.1 U.S. Steel and UPS: Similar paths?

Characteristic	U.S. Steel circa 1980’s	UPS Circa 2020/2021
Incumbents move up-market, abandoning the low-end of the market	Focused on higher margin flat rolled steel and ceded the low margin rebar business to the upstart mini-mills led by nucor	Focused on higher margin healthcare, international, and small/mid-size (e.g. SMB) segments, limited low-margin ecommerce shipments, and ignored emergence of low-margin same-day delivery market
Smaller companies with fewer resources and lower quality product enter market at low end	Nucor, chaparral, florida steel corporation, georgetown steel, connors steel, north start steel–rebar was the entry point	Doordash, postmates (bought by uber), instacart, grubhub, point pickup, gopuff–fast food/Grocery was the entry point
Incumbent invests in upgrading current processes to improve efficiency, cuts work-force	Reduced labor hour per ton of steel from 9 hours in 1980 to 3 hours in 1991 and reduced their work-force about 75% during the same period	Invested over $15 billion in their smat logistics network, executed “fastest ground ever” initiative, offered voluntary buyout packages to thousands of non-operating managers.
Sell or close lower margin business units	Closed part or all of 20 obsolete factories in 1983.	Ups sold low margin ups freight division to tforce freight in 2021.
Competitor moves upmarket	Mini-mill nucor begins producing high margin flat rolled steel in 1989.	Doordash began delivering ecommerce purchases For walmart, macy’s, petsmart, CVS and wal-Greens in 2020.
Mainstream customers start adoping the entrants’ offerings in volume	By 1980 nucor owned 90% of the rebar market and about 30% of the market for rods, bars, and angle irons. Nucor overtook U.S. Steel in total steel production in 2014 and never looked back.	?

Meanwhile, as part of its “better, not bigger” strategy, UPS reduced capital expenditures and focused on improving service for high margin albeit slower-growing segments like international and health care while actively shunning some faster-growing but lower-margin e-commerce segments. Delivery capacity was constrained, shipping rates increased, and the rapidly growing same-day local delivery market was ignored.

The disruption was on.

The ostensibly strategic decision to leave the lower-margin business to the startups and the also-rans seemed to be logical, even brilliant. The market value of UPS nearly doubled in the new CEO’s first year. But in this case, the logical thing to do may turn out to be the wrong thing. Recent history is replete with stories of companies abandoning lower-margin products and businesses and aggressive startups happily filling the void. The new entrants continually innovate their business models and processes to stay profitable in a low-margin market. Eventually, these upstarts saturate the low end of the market and move upmarket to displace the incumbents with a better value proposition. The pattern of disruptive innovation popularized by Christensen over 20 years ago has played out in dozens of industries, from entertainment and photography to print media and manufacturing. It is now prevalent in health care, education, financial services, and yes … package delivery. If the pattern is so well known, why does it continue? The answer lies in the motivations and mindsets of the leaders who wrestle with the innovator’s dilemma.

The question “Do you want to live?” is not merely rhetorical. It’s existential: “Am I, as a leader, willing to sacrifice the profitability of the company I lead today to increase its chances for survival in the future?”

If leaders don’t open themselves to the possibility of failure, they have to question their genuine commitment to live. If they are not willing to fight and lose some battles, they are not pressing hard enough. Successful organizations lose to win. In the losing comes the learning that moves the company one lesson closer to victory. Any leader ensconced in a relatively stable industry and who focuses on maximizing profit today at the expense of corporate longevity does not really aspire to live.

This book will make sense only if you want to lead your company to thrive beyond your tenure. Beyond next quarter. Beyond your next bonus. The Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies, such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and Additive Manufacturing, are all accelerators. As they quicken creative destruction, they also create momentum with new opportunities. It’s controlled chaos. To live is to focus on what can be, not what was. And not succumb to the seductive strategies that maximize today at the expense of tomorrow.

Creating Opportunities to Live and Prosper

Life presents opportunities that enable us to create more options for ourselves. The decision to go to college does not guarantee success, but it provides more opportunities to be successful. You may never have to use the karate skills you honed over six years of lessons, but you’ve created the opportunity to do so should the situation arise. An entrepreneur’s job is to create options. That takes guts, grit, and support. Entrepreneurs typically have a strong support system of friends and family that enable them to take high risks to bring their idea to life.³ The Black Swan author Nassim Taleb says, “an option is what makes you antifragile and allows you to benefit from the positive side of uncertainty, without a corresponding serious harm from the negative side.”⁴

Companies are no different. The OV process creates options by helping leaders observe, accept, and act on changes in the environment. Incumbents with existing businesses can nurture the building of new capabilities. Some of these capabilities may create critical advantages that enable future growth. This was the case for Netflix, which began to produce original content as its leadership saw the competitive landscape for streaming become increasingly cluttered. Netflix had already evolved its business model from DVD mail delivery to film streaming. Original content was simply the next phase. As Disney, ViacomCBS, Amazon, and others entered the market, the competition for content has increased exponentially. Netflix’s investment in production has created the option to live.

Fifty-nine-year-old Walmart behaved like a startup during the pandemic. Its leadership understood that last-mile delivery is an extension of their “everyday low prices” value proposition. Walmart went on the offensive. Consider all the simultaneous pilot projects and partnerships that Walmart initiated just in the area of logistics in 2020:

Walmart, of course, has no crystal ball. It’s no different from any other incumbent (ergo, successful) company, except in one significant way. Walmart is creating options that allow for quick pivots based on changes in the external environment. Creating optionality is a crucial capability for companies to thrive in a disruptive world.

Deadly Efficient

If you say “Yes” to the question “Do you want to live?” then you must also do yes. Release your team to create rapid learning opportunities rather than expecting every project to succeed right out of the gate. Encourage a mindset that incorporates a fail-to-succeed philosophy. At most established companies, an expectation of failing was heresy. UPS was no different; it was “the tightest ship in the shipping business,” and leaders regularly delivered successful project outcomes. However, while the no-failure bar makes sense for sustaining innovations—adding a new piece of technology to improve a process by 20 percent—it can be devastating for innovations that touch human behavior. Humans are not as predictable as machines, and outcomes are uncertain. Leaders who asked for funding for an uncertain outcome would be branded as having poor judgment: “Why would I give you money and resources if you don’t feel confident about your pilot?” No executive would dare propose the company spend money on three similar pilots with the same objective, something Walmart and Amazon do brilliantly.

Too often, the efficiency mantra plays like a symphony in the boardroom.

Every company has a finite set of assets. Every leadership team goes through an exercise quarterly or yearly to allocate those scarce assets to meet their strategic and financial objectives. The executives marshal the financial calculations, which they all learned in business school to help them make a decision: net present value, breakeven analysis, and return on assets/invested capital/equity; the list goes on. Macho talk of “failing fast” and the boondoggles to “blue ocean strategy weekends” belies their true intent to focus those limited assets in areas that will create the greatest return for the company. It’s a one-dimensional, simplistic approach to business.

Efficiency works as long as the external environment doesn’t change. You can sharpen the knife, and your cuts will go deeper every day. But it’s meaningless if you are cutting in the wrong place. An obsession with efficiency will hurt the firm if it continues to be efficient at processes that are no longer relevant. No matter how easy Blockbuster made it for customers to locate a video in their stores, it wouldn’t have saved the business.

Some companies, however, decided to live. They made watershed decisions at critical moments that put their collective ass on the line. When Netflix switched from DVD rentals to streaming, customers protested, and its stock plummeted. Instead of retreating, Netflix innovated again and developed original programming. What seems evident in hindsight would never have happened if a leader had not dared to risk the present for the promise of a better future.

When Adobe transitioned its buy-the-software business model to rent-the-software, it upset many investors and left profit on the table. Adobe stuck to its decision, pivoted to the future, and then soared. When Verizon was still just a landline telephone service provider, its executives made bold decisions to move into digital. Instead of following the typical “picking a winner” process and going with it, they let several mutually exclusive networking technologies play it out until it became clear which one was dominant. Verizon’s leaders were humble, willing to live in a cloud of unknowing until they did know. When Shaw Industries (a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway) diversified from its core carpet business into all types of flooring, i.e., from hardwood to turf for sporting facilities, it risked what it knew to create an entirely different future. Pay-Pal started as a cryptography company; only after an iterative process of trial and error (what can only be described as Organizational Velocity), PayPal found its calling as the default online payment system of millions.

The oft-told story of Apple is worth another mention: in 1997, on the verge of failure, Apple brought back its ousted founder, Steve Jobs, to change direction. Instead of following marginal product ideas down the rabbit hole, Apple began focusing on beautifully designed electronics. This led to the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone, which create a consumer frenzy every time a new model is released. In 20 years, Apple went from the gates of disruption to being indelibly integrated into the fabric of everyday lives worldwide.

A less-known example is Wolters Kluwer, a Dutch multinational that began as a publishing house in the 1830s. Publishers have been perennial victims of digital disruption, and in 2003 when Nancy McKinstry became the new Chair and CEO, the company still generated over twothirds of its revenue from print products. Today, digital products make up over 90 percent of revenue, and the stock has soared. According to McKinstry, “It ’s not moving our results in the current year … you have to be able to have patience around investing over the long term. Our best-selling products started being built 12 years ago.”⁵

The Courage to Change

Considering the average tenure of a public company CEO is five years, it takes extraordinary courage to build a Forever Company.⁶ But a change is possible if the will to change is strong enough. And circumstances sometimes compel the change. During the pandemic, companies made changes that otherwise would have taken years to complete. Retailers and grocers began using their physical stores as e-commerce fulfillment centers. Anheuser-Busch went from producing beer to producing hand sanitizer; Ford and GM used their manufacturing capability to create ventilators. Boeing delivered thousands of 3D-printed face shields, and Brooks Brothers made 150,000 masks per day.

These shifts in production and fulfillment were always options for these companies and illustrate my point. Companies can turn quickly in difficult circumstances. Circumstances might affect the decisions, but they don’t make them. The capacity to change needs to be coupled with the will to change. Using the existing manufacturing capability to produce new products for new markets was always an option for Ford, GM, and Boeing. While I’m not advocating that Ford should go into the health care equipment business, I am illuminating they could. The decision to live is just that, a decision, not a circumstance. Companies are never victims of disruption; they are enablers of disruption.

Paradoxically, the question “Do you want to live?” can be coupled with the question, “Are you willing to die … at least a little bit?” Dying is risking. And to live requires risk. Walmart, Netflix, Adobe, Verizon, Shaw, PayPal, Apple, and Wolters Kluwer decided to live. And every other company can make the same decision.

Wrongly Confident

Companies don’t make poor decisions; people do. Most often, the decision to do the same thing over and over again originates from intelligent people who have made so many good decisions that they have lost their ability to be humble. They don’t think to ask, “Has this good decision gone bad?” Executives tend to stick with what has worked. It helps them feel confident. Their worldview is rarely challenged. Ironically, because they are often not reflective enough to ask the hard questions, take risks, and court failure, they come across as confident and visionary. According to Softbank Senior VP Ivo Rook, the danger is that executives can be too smart and “therefore sleepwalk yourself into becoming irrelevant over time.”⁷

The cliché, “always confident, sometimes right,” often applies to corporate leaders who’ve been groomed to exude confidence. This creates a virtuous circle: when a leader projects confidence, people follow them, even if their choices are not optimum. If enough people provide muscle toward a vision, even if it’s lackluster, the company will achieve a modicum of success—enough success for leaders to execute the same playbook.

If a company has been successful with its value proposition, it will see no need to change it. The market loves consistency of performance, but consistency is not reality, and reality finds a way. A hallmark of General Electric was its consistency of earnings. We now know that Neutron Jack (CEO Jack Welch) was tweaking earnings at GE Capital for years to get that consistency until the merry-go-round stopped.⁸

Becoming a Forever Company requires that you keep your current business healthy while also creating new revenue and profit streams. The impetus for these new businesses typically has to come from within organizations. As one COO put it: “It’s not about sharpening the knife, it’s about creating a new knife. And the consultants with McKinsey & Company are not going to recommend that you create a new knife. They won’t do it.”

Consultants who want their clients to rehire them won’t recommend switching knives. More importantly, there’s no way an external force, like a consultant, can create lasting change within an organization. Instead of merely sharpening the existing one, the decision to create a new knife must originate internally; such decisions must be made for the right reasons. Like sobriety or weight loss, fundamental lifestyle changes can only be sustained if they are internally motivated; people want to do it for themselves and their reasons. The same is true for organizations. Organizations often stimulate change with flavor-of-the-month programs and innovation rhetoric that are not backed up by proportional changes in resource allocation and incentive systems. Change is hard and superficial motivations won’t bridge the hard times that ensue. Mindsets must change before actions have a chance of succeeding.

A Forever Mindset: A Present Purpose

Walmart, and companies like it, are forever companies. Their leadership “thinks different,” making their behavior unpredictable, unlike the companies who plan to do tomorrow precisely what they did today. Formulaic behavior is typical of aging leadership. Instead of playing the long game, they look to improve their financial wellbeing in the short run. The closer they are to retirement, the less likely they are to take risks for the long term. They think: why sacrifice near-term profit and put retirement funds at risk for a future payoff another leader will get credit for?⁹

On the other hand, age is irrelevant for senior teams who view themselves as stewards of a Forever Company, where profit is a means, not an end. A Forever Company is a mindset, an attitude that drives decisions that will enable the company to maintain its capacity for independent action into the future. To create that kind of legacy, a leader must engage its people in its larger purpose. They need to feel they are part of the company’s story.

I fight to hold myself back from going on a rant when I hear someone say, “Business isn’t personal.” We’ve heard it enough to assume it’s true. But, it isn’t. Business is highly personal. Think about the last time you had a bad day at work. Did you really forget about it when you left the office? How did your day impact your friends and loved ones? You wouldn’t dare tell someone who has lost their job that it’s not personal. When companies refuse to engage in the future, they put the livelihoods of their employees at risk. And when they engage, their employees gain more than money. They gain a sense of purpose. Money helps you live, but it doesn’t make life fulfilling. Meaningful work does, creating the feeling that you are part of a larger purpose and contributing to what matters in the long term.

A Forever Company creates opportunities for those within the company. Its leadership makes decisions that allow people to engage in a mission and stay employed for the long term. Day-to-day operational decisions are, of course, essential, as are improvements in efficiency or cutbacks, including layoffs. That’s endemic to the work of business leadership. But leaders who have their hand on the plow are also looking for fertile ground elsewhere.

In the digital economy, most companies will not stick with one line of business for 25 or 50 years as they did in the past. If they aspire to become a Forever Company, iterative learning must define them. A Forever Company is in a constant state of cultural and business process reinvention.

Organizational Velocity is the ability to absorb what’s happening in the external environment, learn from it, and act accordingly. It’s a mindset. It’s a “lifestyle.” It’s embedded into the culture and the everyday decision-making process.

In the digital economy, it’s much easier to process information than to act on it. It’s the “acting upon it,” however, that enables companies to learn quickly. And in turn, the acting informs the learning. The Forever Company culture supports failure, allowing young or new leaders to make decisions and fail. The opportunity—and the encouragement— to fail will help develop them into Fourth Industrial Revolution leaders. A company can absorb minor failures, which have a disproportionately positive impact on the decision maker. The knowledge gained from those early decisions, and getting a feeling for the process, will guide the leader when making decisions that are more significant.

People make decisions every day that can make the organization weaker or stronger over time. In my experience, it’s rare that people don’t care about their decision making or that they care only about themselves. More often, leaders don’t realize the damage to their companies when their decisions simply maintain the status quo.

Is UPS a Forever Company? The Story Is Still Being Written

Since its founding, UPS has innovated, adapted, and thrived. UPS would have been a minor historical footnote if its leadership hadn’t effectively responded to its first technological disruption: the telephone. The messenger service was in a freefall.

UPS founder, Jim Casey, took stock of the assets at his disposal and focused on delivering packages from local merchants to homes. He and his partners continually improved delivery by consolidating packages through a hub-and-spoke network and adding new automation, such as conveyor belts. Over the next four decades, UPS expanded across the United States and experimented with delivery via air.

In 1975, UPS expanded services to Toronto and a year later to West Germany. UPS bled cash for many years in the international business, which would become a primary profit driver in the 2000s. In 1988, UPS responded to FedEx’s threat by starting an airline from scratch; it was the fastest major airline startup in FAA history. These two bold moves (going international and starting an airline) established UPS as a Forever Company.

Its last bold move was to expand into the broader freight forwarding and distribution market in 1992, followed by a string of acquisitions in 2000 shortly after going public. Nonetheless, since going public, its decisions have been more measured, cautious. In 2001, UPS acquired Mail Boxes Etc. and Overnite Freight, and health care logistics company Marken in 2016. In 2019, the company launched the UPS Flight Forward drone airline. These were all solid incremental expansions. At the same time, the digital economy had taken root and was expanding exponentially.

You are in real-time on the field and only viewing what’s immediately in front of you. When the company went public, I felt the change but couldn’t fully appreciate the impact: when a “Forever Company” goes public, its metrics change. When UPS expanded internationally, it was still a private company, willing to suffer years of losses in the hopes of long-term gains. The metrics were “progress to profitability.” Owners can withstand the near-term pain for long-term gain. Before it went public, UPS was a partnership owned by managers and managed by owners. We were incented for the longer haul.

While UPS has struggled as a public company, the UPS story is still being written. The new CEO has instituted bold moves that back up the “better, not bigger” and “sweat the assets” rhetoric. Streamlining decision making, spinning off the lower-margin trucking business, raising shipping rates, and slashing capital expenditures by $2 billion were hallmarks of her first full year at the helm. The UPS stock price rose more in Tomé’s first six months as CEO than in the previous 20 years as a public company. Companies need to be successful in the Now before they can aspire to be Forever Companies, and UPS is doing that. However, the pattern of disruption over the last 20+ years indicates trouble ahead if the company’s current trajectory does not change. When quarterly earnings calls begin to be dominated by words like “customer,” “innovation,” and “investment” compared to “results,” “profits,” and “earnings-per-share,” you’ll know UPS is on the way. It starts with a Forever Company mindset that permeates the organization.

In business, as in life, if there is no pain, there is no gain. Do you want to live? There will be some dying before the resurrection. But, to die is to live. It’s the only way to thrive in a world of continuous disruption.

What? Corporate longevity begins with answering a simple, profound question, “Do you want to live?”

So What? Becoming a Forever Company is more often a choice than a circumstance. The “innovator’s dilemma” is a dilemma precisely because choosing to live for the long term is the more difficult path. It requires certain sacrifices now for uncertain gains in the future. Without a core desire to be a Forever Company, change efforts will be more theater than substance.

Now What? Organizational Velocity is a book for leaders that answered “yes” to “Do you want to live?” and are looking for insights that will help them build and sustain a Forever Company. It begins with the leader’s mindset and permeates through the corporate ethos, structure, relationships, hiring practices, business processes, and inventive systems. Explore all these areas in the upcoming chapters.

 

¹  2016. “Printing House Joh. Enschede Stops Printing Banknotes,” Nederlandse Omroep Stichting, no. 15, p. 10. https://nos.nl/l/2145965 (accessed January 12, 2016).

²  C.M. Christensen, M. Raynor, and R. Mcdonald. 2015. “The Big Idea: What is Disruptive Innovation,” Harvard Business Review 93, no. 12; H.C. Lucas, Jr and J.M. Goh. 2009. “Disruptive Technology: How Kodak Missed the Digital Photography Revolution,” The Journal of Strategic Information Systems 18, no. 1.

³  D.G. Blanchflower and A.J Oswald. 1998. “What Makes an Entrepreneur?” Journal of labor Economics 16, no. 1.

⁴  N.N. Taleb. 2012. Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, Vol. 3. Random House Incorporated.

⁵  HBR IdeaCast. 2019. “How One CEO Successfully Led a Digital Transformation,” In Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/12/how-oneceo-successfully-led-a-digital-transformation

⁶  PricewaterhouseCoopers. 2019. “CEO Turnover at Record High; Successors Following Long Serving CEOs Struggling According to PwC’s Strategy&Global Study,” PwC. www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2019/ceo-turnover-record-high.html

⁷  I. Rook. November 26, 2018. “Former Senior Vice President, Sprint.” Interview by Alan Amling.

⁸  J.B. Stewart. 2017. “Did the Jack Welch Model Sow Seeds of G.E.’s Decline?” The New York Times, 2017/06/15/2017, Business, www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/business/ge-jack-welch-immelt.html, NYTimes.com

⁹  C. Adair. April 09, 2020. “Former Vice Chairman, BMO Capital Markets.” Interview by Alan Amling.