Chapter 12
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Five Tips for Life
As you can well imagine, going around interviewing people about their careers eventually means the tables get turned on you. Several CEOs would, when there was a pause in the conversation, inevitably turn around and ask, “So what about you, Betty? What do you think?”
The truth is, it’s difficult to sum up in a few short sentences. Some of what I’d heard from the interviews really resonated with me, particularly when Sallie Krawcheck and Susan Lyne described women holding themselves back or not speaking up when men had no problems doing so. Other topics made me feel I needed to work harder to improve myself, such as focusing more on what the other side needs in a negotiation. What I was glad to see was that nobody is perfect and in fact, many of the successful people have failed dramatically in their lives and been fired; some fired more than once. The fact that they were able to talk honestly about their failures only made me appreciate their confidence.
Jamie Dimon, for instance, recalled the day he got fired.
“I went home and I sat my three little girls down,” he said. “They were probably at the time ten, eight, and six. I said, ‘Girls, I’ve got to tell you something. I resigned, but that really means I no longer have my job. I was fired but I want you to know I’m completely okay.’ And my little one said ‘Daddy, do we have to go sleep on the streets?’ I said ‘No, sweetie, we’re here, we’re fine, we’re fortunate everything’s going to be exactly the same except Daddy’s going to be home a bit more.’ And the middle daughter who was always obsessed with college said, ‘Can I still go to college?’ I said, ‘Of course you can still go to college.’ And the oldest one said, ‘So if everything’s okay, can I have your cell phone? You won’t be needing it.’ Then one of the guys that works at the company came over, he was about six-foot-six. He knocked on the door and my little daughter answered, looking up and says ‘Who do you want to see?’ He says, ‘I want to see your Dad. I work for your Dad.’ She said, ‘Not anymore you don’t!’”
Sometimes I was surprised at how frank some of the CEOs were. John Chambers had no problem telling me he goes to the bathroom all day. There was a purpose to this, Chambers told me, and he learned it from a prominent lawyer during his days as a young executive at Wang Laboratories.
“He was getting very old, and he was retiring, and I said to him, ‘Give me the lessons you learned that would be most useful to me.’ He said, ‘Whenever you have a chance to stop at the bathroom, I want you to stop,’ and he laughed. He said, ‘That will become more important as you get older.’
“He deliberately was quiet, because he was letting me think on it, and he said, ‘Do you understand what I just told you?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir. I got it.’ Whenever you finish a meeting, you want to finish that meeting, summarize what you’re going to do and absolutely don’t go to the next meeting still thinking about the prior meeting. Secondly, you need to develop techniques that allow you to reframe what you’re going to get ready for in the next meeting, and you go in the next meeting knowing exactly what you want to accomplish. What are the two or three things you want to accomplish? Get your mind cleared of all distractions. You don’t want any pressure on you. So the bathroom is a vehicle that reminds me of how to do that in my leadership style.”
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Other CEOs were honest almost to an uncomfortable point—the discomfort being mine. Harvey Golub was very uninhibited in telling me that he thought the idea women were paid less than men was ridiculous.
“Any job [at American Express] that opened was public. You could bid on the job. Everybody got evaluated every year. We made sure the evaluations were clear and responsive. We told everybody what the performance of their unit in the company was and why,” he said. “I remember getting a complaint once from a group of women who were saying that they were not being treated as well as comparable groups of men. They were senior professional executives. These weren’t clerical people. They were lawyers and HR groups and so on. And we did a study and we found that actually they were treated better. They spent less time in a job before they got promoted. It took them a shorter period of time to get up to the median compensation in that position.”
“Then why would they feel this way?” I asked.
“Because if somebody doesn’t get promoted, the reason they’re not being [promoted] is something other than themselves. The reason has to be in the stars.”
He went on to note that on average, “but not true for any one individual, women tend to be a little more laid back, a little bit more relationship-oriented, a little less driven, more facilitative than men are.
“Years ago, forty years ago when I was with IBM, there was a question about whether women should become systems engineers because in those days women went to work in some career and then got married and left and raised children in larger numbers than would be true today. And so the question was, given that you’re going to get higher turnover, should you put women in those jobs at all?
“I did an analysis and found the turnover was actually slightly less. It was just for different reasons. So women did leave because they got married and got pregnant in higher numbers than men, who never got pregnant and who never left for that reason. [Men] never left for getting married, but they left for different jobs . . . So the turnover rate for women was actually lower than for men. The causes were different.”
“But there’s a different perception,” I replied.
“Exactly. It was the perception.”
“Does it matter? A woman leaves a job for the family versus the man leaving for another job?”
“They’re both leaving, so it doesn’t matter in that respect,” he said. “But the problem comes when you see phony statistics like the average woman earns less than a man . . . I mean, it is so not true. It’s so not true but you hear that, and then you get equal pay for equal work. You get that kind of stuff and what you end up doing is reducing opportunities . . . it’s been a while now but if you wanted to fire a minority or a woman, you went through a big, long process and everybody knew it. So you’re better off putting a man in the job because you can fire him.”
I could feel the ears of women executives around the country burning by those comments. But it was Harvey’s perception and nobody can disallow someone’s perception from being told, however right or wrong it may be. I went away from the lunch feeling that what Harvey described was spoken in the context of a career that began 50 years ago—much has changed since then.
Or had it? Sheryl Sandberg already stirred the pot with her book Lean In, arguing for exactly what Harvey said was a phony statistic: equal pay for equal work. Anne-Marie Slaughter, the senior policy official in the State Department who wrote the Atlantic article about how women could not have it all, touched off a firestorm. Her online article was one of the most read ever for the publication. Sallie Krawcheck was having her speak at a forum sponsored by 85 Broads. At the very least, people were talking about women in the workplace again and that had to be healthy.
One post on LinkedIn that caught my eye and that we featured on our television program was from a CEO in Belgium named Inge Geerdens. As head of a recruiting company, she articulated much of what I already personally felt in her blog post titled, “I’m Not Balancing Work and Life and I Feel Great.”
“I don’t need a balance,” she wrote. “I’m not looking for a way to balance my private life with my professional life. I’m just trying to have a great life. Ever since I started my first company in 2003, my professional life has been taking up a lot of my time. There have been successes, failures, crises, expansions, new developments, and the challenges of day-to-day management. Sometimes a crisis forced me to skip a family vacation. Often I came home too late from work to tuck my children in. Does that mean my children are neglected? Of course not!”
Leave it to the Europeans to cut through our existential, middle-class American anguish.
What I Learned From My Kids
Susan Lyne said to me that she learns a lot from being a mother.
“I actually think the things you have to think about as a mother make you a better executive,” she said. “There is no question that sensitivity to how something is going to play out with a person is something you learn as a Mom. How am I going to put this in a light that this person gets it? So that this three-year-old or four-year-old or thirteen-year-old gets it. Those are the kinds of issues we all face.”
There are three things that I’ve learned from my kids.
1. The simplest explanation is the best. Most of the time when I ask them to explain something (and yes, this is usually when something wrong happens), they always surprise me with how simple their explanation is. “I don’t eat the cheese you pack for me because it gets warm by the time lunch rolls around.” “I kicked the cabinet door in and broke it because I was carrying a case of water. I’m sorry.” There are no embellishments or big windup. They just explain and move on. I find I don’t have much choice but to accept and move on too.
2. Focus. This was more relevant when they were younger and needed more of my attention. Nowadays, they would rather I leave the room while they play video games or hang out with their friends. As humorist Dave Barry once said, “To an adolescent, there is nothing more embarrassing in the world than a parent.” And no, I’m not any cooler because I’m on “television.” I’m still embarrassing to them, though thankfully not all the time.
But when my kids were four or five, they would always tug at me to play with them. If I kept begging them off, it would get worse. Until finally I said, okay, I will try to devote an hour every weeknight to just play only with them and shut everything else out. We’re going to stick like glue and just play. After an hour, they would be satisfied that I had given them the attention they needed.
I realized that sometimes, all it takes is an hour or so of focus to really get what you need accomplished. So many of us are distracted by the day’s tasks. I have the most annoying habit of talking and e-mailing at the same time, which drives people nuts because I’m not doing both well at all. But once in a while I remember I need to focus and when I do—say, spending an hour on tomorrow’s show research—I always accomplish more than what I could in five hours’ time. To be able to sequester yourself and focus is a powerful tool for productivity.
3. Optimism. Kids have a way of surprising us. I tend to think I’m a pretty optimistic person but sometimes even my kids trump me. When I worry about something, they’re usually there with a few uplifting answers. The deer ate our vegetable patch? Don’t worry, we’ll just get a fence for next time. The power outage thanks to Hurricane Sandy means we have to spend four nights in the dark with no electricity or water? Well, at least we can tell ghost stories. The plane is delayed by two hours? Well now we can go get pizza. Sometimes I try to remember that whenever I find myself doing the thing that parents and lawyers tend to do, which is focus on the worst-case scenario. It usually takes a kid to lighten things up.
With the debate cleared in my head, I went on to think about what were the five most important things I learned from talking to the CEOs. If there were just five tips I could take away from this book and share with you, what would they be?
Below are the biggest:
1. Learn How to Make Fast Decisions . . . and Reverse Them if You Get New Information.
Every single one of the CEOs is in that seat because he or she is a good decision maker. This is probably one of the most important skills any good leader possesses.
Recall that Martin Sorrell, the advertising chief, had inscribed on his shield “Persistence and Speed.” He said speed was related to how he views decision making.
“I have a quote which was ‘A bad decision on Monday is better than a good decision on Friday,’ which was meant to say, ‘Get on with it,’” Martin said. “I suppose that’s my favorite phrase, ‘Get on with it.’ What bedevils big companies is a lack of response, failure to respond, bureaucracies that cogitate over things. The reason that people don’t make decisions is because they’re uncertain about that decision, or they don’t know the answer. And my father used to say ‘Delay is a negative,’ and I think that’s true. So when people don’t make decisions, it’s not because you have to take a long time to make the decision and there’s a lot of information and data and analytics . . . [it’s because] they’re frightened of making decisions . . . if I don’t make a decision, it’s because I don’t know what the answer is or I’m scared of the answer.”
Teresa Taylor put her interview subjects through lunch to see if they could make simple decisions about ordering. Fast decision making, she believes, is what got her into the senior ranks.
“I didn’t even know I was going to be in the telecom field so the whole thing was by circumstance,” she said. “But I would say that I did have a drive and if I had to say what kept getting me the promotions, it was my decision-making capability. I think one of the areas that people falter on is they just can’t make a decision. And especially as you’re leading bigger groups, just make one, and then you can adjust as you go.”
“Why do you think people have a hard time making decisions?” I asked.
“I think it’s because people say . . . well, I just want to see a little bit more. It’s the hesitation, the lack of confidence. And in fact, you never have all the pieces. When you’re making decisions you work with what you have. You go through your instinct and your role. And I used to have a saying that, ‘At least if we were in grenade range, it was good enough’. . . because no one is that perfect and things change and move and happen. So I think what contributed to my success was the ability to make a decision, be very clear and simple in my communication. So my teams knew what our goal was. It was clear. It was simple. And we charged forward and were successful.”
Equally important is knowing when a decision you’ve made, based on new information, is bad and reversing it just as quickly. This is where people tend to get in trouble. Their egos get wrapped up in a decision and reversing it makes the person feel weak and vulnerable. It’s tough to admit when you’re wrong. Clearly you want to have more right than wrong decisions, but a hallmark of good leadership is knowing when something is not working and changing course.
One of the highlights in Warren Buffett’s annual letters to his investors is when he admits he’s made a bad investment decision. Rather than hang onto the stock to prove he’s right, he explains why he has sold off the entire stake. Among the mistakes he’s admitted to making in the last few years include paying too much for oil stocks and buying a shoe company that was later deemed worthless.
2. Have a Good Team Around You.
Every CEO has a close group of people around them, such as their senior management team, friends, or mentors. I noted before that it’s a lonely job but it’s not a job that’s conducted in isolation.
Usually, the people around a CEO have been with him or her for decades. They’re people they trust and grew up professionally with. Sometimes they may depend on certain people too much, such as when one CEO joked that he’s met some fellow chief executives who “can’t go to the bathroom without consulting their lawyer first.”
It’s important as you develop your career that you have a team of people you trust and are looking out for you. They don’t necessarily have to be at your company and most times, they are not. They’re not always senior to you and they may even be outside your own profession. They may not necessarily be more successful than you but they possess certain skills or knowledge you don’t have. Elon Musk mentioned that he actively solicits negative feedback, which is the same thing as saying you want to have people around you who give honest feedback.
Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL, said National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern—someone who many CEOs look up to for leadership—gives him “direct feedback.”
“He called me up two Fridays ago and said, ‘What are you doing, schmuck.’ It was about some brand stuff. That’s a sign of a great mentor—people who you trust will give you very direct feedback on things.”
Having a good team also means having a good set of professionals around you—an accountant you can trust, a lawyer who advises well, a real estate broker who keeps you in the know on the market, and other people who keep you on track. You may not be able to assemble this right away but it’s always a good idea to begin early and start getting recommendations from people. Who do they like to use? Who spends time without charging? Why do they like these people?
Who’s Afraid of Sleep?
People often ask me what I notice when I interview high-powered people. What’s a common trait?
When I really thought about it, one universal theme is: They all don’t sleep that much.
The person who slept the most was Warren Buffett but even he, at the age of 82, was lacking. Buffett wrote in a note:
According to the National Sleep Foundation, the average adult needs between seven to nine hours of sleep. But the foundation also recognizes that every individual is different. Some need just five hours to function well and others need closer to 10.
CEOs seem to sleep between five and six.
Sam Zell snoozes for six hours. Matin Sorrell said, “Five hours in the week. Catch up on weekends.”
“I sleep around five to six hours a night . . . I’d love to sleep more but can’t!” Tim Armstrong wrote.
Women do no better. Sallie Krawcheck wrote, “I sleep about six hours a night/seven on the weekends. On the weekends, I try for longer, but my body won’t let me.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, adults who consistently sleep less than seven hours a night have a higher mortality rate. Is it the lack of sleep that kills you or the stress that accompanies poor sleep?
Average Joes and Janes behave a little better. An article in the New York Times found that a third of adults slept about seven to eight hours, spot on with the recommendation by doctors and researchers.
But maybe we are stretching the truth. How many people really get a decent eight hours during the week? Even if you’re in bed by 10 p.m., you might take an hour to fall asleep or wake up in the middle of the night. The reality is we’re a nation of restless sleepers.
I used to sleep right at 8 p.m. for my 3:45 a.m. wake-up call. Nowadays, I’m lucky if I physically crawl into bed at 9. I kept a sleep diary one week and found that I usually get about five to five-and-a-half hours of sleep a weeknight, which I found very upsetting. I’m told trying to make up for sleep on the weekends is even worse.
My mission is to get more sleep. If there’s one habit I don’t want to pick up from the CEOs, it’s that I need my beauty rest. And so should the rest of us.
Bad advice is free and everywhere. I’m always amazed at how people will make large, life-changing decisions based on advice from people they’ve barely vetted or from people who are not even qualified to give the advice. An accountant I know laments how many times clients ask for financial advice—getting financial planning advice from your accountant is like going to your mortgage broker to give you tips on investing in the housing market. But if you ask, you’ll get the advice. Free.
3. Information Is Key.
This is not about hoarding information.
It’s about being a voracious consumer of information.
This is easy for me to say because I’m in the business of information. We exchange and report on information all the time. Part of my job is to read everything and stay well informed.
Several CEOs I talked to recommended books to read. Jamie Dimon said he’d just finished Colin Powell’s book It Worked For Me. Jim Reynolds was sitting on the beach reading Good to Great and Built to Last by Jim Collins for the “fourth or fifth time.” Harry Wilson suggested Halftime by Bob Buford and Enough. by John Bogle. Sallie Krawcheck referred to Women’s Inhumanity to Women. And so on.
Warren Buffett can sit in his office for hours reading annual reports and financial documents. Mario Gabelli walks around with a briefcase always brimming with research reports he wants to read. Every time he sits down in the studio chair with me he’s got piles of papers around him, ready for referral. I start my day reading three to four newspapers.
The reason why this is important goes back to what Jim Reynolds called bandwidth. How much do you really know? How curious are you about the world around you? Can you sit in a room and relate to everyone—from the housewife from Texas to the mechanic in Detroit to the trader at the New York Stock Exchange. In other words, are you aware of the world around you?
The people who grow to be huge successes do not narrow the world around them but expand their field of vision. They can be great conversationalists because they know a little bit of everything that’s going on. How many times have you been in a group and suddenly they are talking about a news event or subject matter that you know nothing about? You can’t relate anymore. Having knowledge is so important—not only to be a well-rounded person but for relating to people.
One of the easiest ways to forge a connection with a person is to help inform them. E-mail your bosses news they may not know, and even if they know, they will appreciate getting the information. Don’t pester but be helpful. I love it when our team constantly passes along news and tidbits to the group. I learn things I hadn’t paid attention to before. When someone important sends you a link to a news article or a video, watch and read it and respond. People like to know you’ve paid attention. You don’t have to do it to the degree I or others do, but if you just put a little effort into consuming information, making yourself well informed, being curious about the world around you, you’d be surprised at how the world opens up.
4. Have a Sense of Humor.
If I’m asked to give a talk or emcee an event, the first thing I think of is: Who is the audience and what jokes am I going to tell?
Humor is one of the most underrated skills in your career toolbox. One of the first things Sam Zell said made him a successful person is that he can laugh at himself. He doesn’t take himself too seriously. All the CEOs I talked to possessed a great sense of humor, some funnier than others. They all understand an element in developing a relationship is laughing together. I have a very difficult time connecting myself to someone who can’t get a joke. I try to relate to an audience by telling a few opening lines. If I can’t come up with many on my own, I borrow from the Kings of Late Night Comedy.
Humor diffuses the serious tension in the air. When I saw General Colin Powell speak, his 45-minute speech was more than 80 percent filled with humorous stories. They were genuinely funny. At moments I found myself belly laughing. Nobody expected a serious four-star general to deliver punch lines almost as good as a stand-up comic. He had the room captivated for almost an hour.
Women can be just as funny as men, in different ways. The important thing is to see the lighter side of things when you can and know when to show it. Obviously in a serious meeting, it’s inappropriate. But if you’re in a one-on-one lunch with your boss, if a meeting is losing energy, if relations are strained between colleagues, humor can do wonders.
On our show, we try to find some lighter moments to laugh. A silly story may do the trick, or a joke between reporters and myself. We don’t script them in but we can tell when we need to lighten up. Viewers want the serious news but they also need a break. The Wall Street Journal made famous its A-Hed column on the front page where the silliest story of the day is given the same reportage as all of its other news stories. That dose of humor in an otherwise pretty thick and straight newspaper adds wonders to its depth. In explaining this feature once, the Journal said, “That anyone serious enough about life to read the Wall Street Journal should also be wise enough to step back and consider life’s absurdities.”
A few years ago at Bloomberg TV, the newsroom was abuzz in excitement. We were getting ready to relaunch the channel and everybody had been rehearsing for weeks on end and on weekends. Each show was scrutinized carefully by producers, executive producers, and ultimately, by Andy Lack, the CEO of Bloomberg Multimedia (Andy is now Chairman of Bloomberg Multimedia). By the time it got to Andy’s desk, the shows had to look ready for air.
As we were winding down rehearsals, one of the senior producers came up with a brilliant idea. He asked that Jon Erlichman, who’s now our senior West Coast correspondent, Adam Johnson, our Street Smart anchor, and myself, make a spoof video for Andy. We rehearsed it as seriously as we rehearsed anything else, only this time we were rehearsing all the shots we knew Andy would not want.
In the scene, I would walk down the aisle talking into the camera while Jon popped out of nowhere to accompany me down the newsroom and then Adam joined in on my other side. We had to wait for the new glass studio sliding doors to open and the three of us squeezed through together. Then we all sat down at a preschool table and chairs to continue to discuss the day’s stories.
When Andy first saw the opening scenes, he was a little agitated. These were all exactly what he had asked producers and directors not to do. But then as the scene unfolded, he squeezed out a smile and then his trademark huge, cracked laugh when he saw the end result. It was a genius way to break the tension the newsroom felt and, in many ways, helped cement the feeling that the relaunch was ready. If we could laugh at ourselves, then we really weren’t that worried.
5. Always Be Moving.
I put this in again because I can’t stress how important it is.
Perhaps the single biggest difference between those who make it to the very top and those who languish is that the former are always moving. They don’t stop.
When I say moving, I don’t necessarily mean physically, although you do have to actually be doing things.
I’ll give an example but I won’t use this person’s name.
A senior executive I know left his job. The people he knew whispered about him, said he wasn’t ready to leave yet, and that he hadn’t prepared well. It was going to be difficult for him to start another business. I talked to him occasionally and every time I did, he mentioned this or that meeting he was attending, this or that discussion, this or that place he was flying off to. For obvious reasons, he couldn’t disclose details. I got the sense he was spending his days talking to people, meeting, exchanging ideas, just moving around a lot to figure out the next step. It was hard to tell if he was making progress or running around in circles.
A few months later, he landed a big job and he sounded relieved on the phone. You could tell he felt he had something to prove and he proved it. Even at the stage when you’re at the top, when you believe you’ve made it, you’re still hustling. That never stops, so long as you want to stay in the game. As long as you’re moving, you’re going somewhere. Once you stop, you stay.
I’ll give you another example.
Do you know the book Who Moved My Cheese?
The book is now 15 years old and has probably skipped the generation of Millennials today. But its lesson is still as relevant today as it was in the 1990s.
The story is about two groups—the littlepeople, Hem and Haw, and two mice, Sniff and Scurry, who are on the hunt for more cheese through a giant maze. The littlepeople are more talkers than doers—they reflect all that is neurotic about us, how we fear leaving the comforts of familiarity, how a setback will cause us to stop, how we talk ourselves out of what our gut is saying.
The mice are much simpler. They just keep moving and when they hit a wall, they turn around and move somewhere else. They keep moving, not overthinking why a certain path dead-ends or why a certain path leads to a room with no cheese. As you can imagine, by the time the fable is over, the two mice have found all the cheese in the world simply because they kept moving. One of the littlepeople has learned the same lesson, albeit at a slow pace, and it’s left uncertain if the other littlepeople character has learned the path to greatness (and cheese).
I read and reread that book every once in a while to remind myself that one of the biggest ingredients for success is not to overthink and just keep moving.
Always
Be
Moving
. . . and you will get there.
