Michael  01:12

Our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download, and you can go to firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. That’s firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. And if you’re looking to advance your career and need to update your resume, you can get a McKinsey and BCG-winning resume template as a free download at http://www.firmsconsulting.com/resumePDF. That’s wwwfirmsconsulting.com/resumePDF. Bill, it’s great to have you back.

 

Bill George  01:56

Thank you very much. Thrilled to be here.

 

Michael  02:00

So I’m going to get straight into it, because you’re always an interesting guy with a nice, unique perspective on things. You’ve updated your book True North, and I wanted to know what’s the reason for now? Why now? Why did you feel it had to happen now?

 

Bill George  02:13

Well, I think it’s time for the emerging leaders in the world to step up, and I’m referring to Gen X, millennials all the way down to Gen Z. I think baby boomers have had our time, and we need new leaders, but we need them to be authentic and to deal with the great challenge we’re facing as a nation, as a world today. I’ve never seen a time when there are so many challenges out there.

 

Michael  02:39

As some of my Gen Z listeners are going to say, but we are stepping up.

 

Bill George  02:45

You are. I think Gen Z is still in the process deciding where it’s going to come out from these things, and we have had a number of Gen Z leaders step up. So great. That’s but I’m also looking at people in business, and one of the things I’m urging the baby boomers do is step aside and open the doors for these fantastic new leaders and give them the opportunities. Don’t stay in place and kind of suppress them, because I think organizations really need their energy, their enthusiasm, their ideas.

 

Michael  03:15

Would you say, is actually very important, and I think it’s a little bit underplayed. We give new, emerging leaders a lot of advice. Your book is one really great example of that, and also the enormous work you’ve done before. You’ve written your book as well. But sometimes we don’t give them the opportunities.

 

Bill George  03:32

Absolutely. And I had those opportunities at 27 I was made general manager for lend industry’s emerging new microwave oven division, and there was no consumer market. We had to build one like 10 million to 200 that may sound like a lot, not very much today, then, but it was a lot then. And anyway, I had that opportunity because somebody’s wanted to give it to me. So I’ve always at Medtronic and everywhere I’ve been looked for opportunities to find outstanding leaders and open the door and see how they could develop and give them the opportunity.

 

Michael  04:09

Now you obviously strike me as a kind of a gung ho guy who, you know, seizes the moment, right? It’s one thing to give opportunities, but how do people go about getting the opportunities. What kind of mindset do they need to be the kind of person who doesn’t wait but tries to seize things, right?

 

Bill George  04:27

Raise your hand. Say, I can do it. Don’t ask for the promotion. Look where you can do right in the role you’re in right now. You can take on so much more. I love leaders every stage of my career, who are willing to do that. And I’ve seen people, my students at Harvard Business Schools, the people I’m mentoring today, see them doing that. They’re not asking, oh, I need more money. I need a promotion, a bigger title. No, it’s that. They say, Hey, give me the opportunity. Let me lead that new thrust, that new marketing initiative, that new project, that radical new technology. You’re trying to get it. And that’s where they have a chance to shine. And frankly, and I push this from board perspective too, Hey guys, let’s, let’s give people more opportunities here, and not make people stand in line. Because I tell you one thing about particularly the millennial generation, they’re not going to stand in line, and that frustrates them, older leaders. I say, why should they? I say, give them the opportunity right now, and that’s we need more entrepreneurs, more people starting businesses too.

 

Michael  05:25

Now, what you say is so true, right? Because a lot of people, not everyone, but they say, Where’s my promotion? Where’s the opportunity. But for example, when I was starting my career management consulting, I never asked for a promotion. I just said, Tell me where there’s a problem and let me go there and leave me alone. I mean, that’s pretty much it, but I think a lot of people, they want the promotion versus saying, Give me the problem or give me the opportunity.

 

Bill George  05:52

Yeah, and you said it well. And let’s start from a client perspective, whether not just consulting, it’s Medtronic, looking at what are our patients needs? It’s anyone in the tech sector saying, not, what’s the great technology I can deliver? But no, what do my clients need? Then devise a solution. So I think everything starts with what my customers or my clients need. Then we work our way back. I remember I had to cancel a major pacemaker program at Medtronic many years ago, because I asked the people running on it, I said, So what’s the benefit to the customer, to the patient? And they said, well, it’s got all this great technology. I said, no, no. So we canceled. Came back with some of our breakthrough ideas for patients. It just took a little tenacity on that score.

 

Michael  06:36

There’s a very interesting story there, because one of my previous clients is now the CEO of a major automotive company. And I was talking to them the other day and asked them, so why are you leaving these, you know, V12, v8 engines and going into electric vehicles? And they said, well, it’s regulation. I’m thinking, look, if you moving towards anything, not because your customers told you to do it, but because you’re trying to meet regulatory standards only. You’re going to backtrack on this soon, because your customers are going to vote with their dollars, and that’s exactly what’s happened.

 

Bill George  07:07

Well, the banking field too. Sometimes we got too caught up in the regulations when I was on the board of Goldman, and we had to get back to what are the customers needs, and how do we satisfy how we help them build their business, to build a great enterprise, overcome props, get the funding they need, make acquisitions, everything that builds dynamic organizations that build this country and the world.

 

Michael  07:31

Yeah, the worst thing you ever want to hear when you’re sitting in any leadership meeting is a company saying, our goal is to grow revenue by 10% that’s not your goal. Your goal is to serve customers. And, you know, profits and revenue growth is a byproduct of doing that.

 

Bill George  07:47

Yeah. And so one other thing I’d like to talk about, I used to teach us when I first went to Switzerland to teach learning through failure. You know, a lot of places, particularly in Europe, where we have incredible talent, people are afraid to fail. The one beautiful thing about Silicon Valley, it’s almost a badge of honor. What did you learn from that experience? Now, how are you going to make it better the next time? And so I think a lot of people are afraid to take those risks. And I think we need people willing to take risks, try new things. They may get butted back, but then they can figure out, hey, I can figure a better way to do that. And, okay, this didn’t work, but that will. And to me, that’s the way we need that kind of dynamic talent. And I think younger people more willing to do that.

 

Michael  08:32

You raised something very interesting, because I’m living in Europe for the next year, and whenever I go to any city, the most important thing I do is I go to the CBD and I look at which companies logos on the tallest buildings. And one of the things that’s fascinating is, in Europe, it’s always old companies that are 100 years old. It’s banks, it’s industrial companies, it’s Siemens. I mean, it talks a lot about the risk taking culture. They have not invested in building these new companies yet.

 

Bill George  09:03

You know, I spent a lot of time in Switzerland, and I talked to one of my Swiss colleagues and said, you know, Switzer was just ranked number one, along with Sweden, number one and number two in innovation. And he came back to me and said, Yes, but we don’t form any new companies. That’s what America does so well we need, because people don’t want to take risks. Hey, we need to help them and give them the funding and give them the Eco structure, the ecological structure around them, so they can take risks and and, you know, get the advice from wise people that can help them.

 

Michael  09:35

You know, have a friend who works at Chicago Booth School of Business. He’s a professor there, and he was doing this fascinating study where, as you said, Sweden and Switzerland rank highly for innovation measured by the number of patents developed, but that’s usually held by established companies, and if you look at what they’re doing with those patents, they’re not doing a lot with them.

 

Bill George  09:56

Yeah, exactly. And you know, it takes that bold riff. Ask. Now look at what Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk have done, the building a whole new field around GOP ones, and it’s amazing. This is, you know, I’m very excited about the weight loss potential and the impact on all forms of these particular cardiovascular on cancer and other things, but they’re finding all kinds of new uses. But they had to have the courage to try something totally new, and then no one ever done that before. No one thought it would work, by the way.

 

Michael  10:25

So how does a leader Well, I think I know the answer, but let’s hear how you see this. How does a leader stand up in a company that is very conservative, very traditional, does not have a culture of risk taking? How do they bring that mindset to the table?

 

Bill George  10:39

Well, I think you have the courage to put their ideas forth and be bold and back them. I always look for leaders like that throughout my career. They’re willing to do it that, you know. So I’ll challenge them. I’ll ask them questions, and they had the Tennessee and the courage and the well developed ideas that they’ll come back and defend their ideas. Said, Okay, we’ll go with you. And I think that’s what it takes. It’s called courage. And to be honest, I’ve seen a lot of leaders, of a lot of managers who world class executives, but they lack courage. I think it takes that courage to be bold, to try new things, and they’re going to be the winners. Looking at the leading companies the world today, are all people that took risks. I thought when Jeff Bezos went from just being a bookseller and not making any money to being a full retailer, wow, this is crazy. Well, look what he’s done. He’s transformed the whole world of retail.

 

Michael  11:33

What you said is very true. I have a lot of clients and colleagues telling me, Michael, how can I be a visionary person? How can I be a deeply insightful thing? And I say, Well, the first thing is you need confidence, because if you say anything new, you’re going to be attacked. And you need the conviction to defend what you’re saying. You need the resilience and the wherewithal to spend a lot of time convincing many people that are going to be pushing back on you. So it’s not enough to have the idea. You need the confidence and you need almost the grit to see through, right?

 

Bill George  12:03

Yeah. Well, let me comment on that. We have too many people in middle management that are pushing back. I was meeting with a CEO a couple days ago, and he talked about how he had to deal with the blockers in his organization. He wants to move forward in a lot of new ideas and these blockers, and so I think it’s time for them to either change or to go away. In other words, we need to clear out a lot of that resistance. And the bigger the organization, the more of that structure comes in, the more of that resistance. And that’s one of the reasons big companies are not interviewing like they have the people. They have the technology, but do they have the infrastructure that labels new ideas to get a shot. So at Medtronic, at any one given time, we owned part interest in two to three dozen venture companies, and we had all kinds of new ventures inside, and I was quite willing to let them fail. So I put them under our vice chairman who would try them. And we had some breakthrough ideas, some it didn’t work, but we had to try it.

 

Michael  13:01

You treated them almost as a real option. You took a stake, and as soon as it looks promising, you either upped your stake, acquired them, and Sony is that the thinking behind it.

 

Bill George  13:10

Exactly, and you know, it wasn’t going to kill the company. We’re not betting the whole company on it, but these are ideas that could transform the company. And when they started to do well, then we put cold, you know, we put all the fuel to them and gave them all the money they needed to expand more rapidly.

 

Michael  13:26

What I like about that is a lot of companies have this mentality, if it was not developed or thought up here, we don’t want anything to do with it. But what you’re saying is, you need a portfolio. You need lots of ideas coming from within your business, but you cannot expect breakthroughs are only going to come from within your business.

 

Bill George  13:43

Well, that’s why, at a Medtronic, and I would say this for any other company, you have to continually bring in new ideas from the outside, buy little companies and see what they can produce in but give them their freedom. Don’t put all your corporate structures around. Give them the opportunity to operate independently of your structure, and see what they can do. And I think that brings lifeblood in, bring people with new ideas, but then you support them. At Medtronic, we had an idea about the Mavericks. Came from our founder, Earl Bakken, that I had to personally as CEO, support the Mavericks. Frankly, in a lot of cases, the system wanted to kill them. They wanted to just out of there and so. And we had an idea about a really low cost pacemaker for the Chinese market. When we went to the market the Chinese doctors wanted it just opened the door to a more sophisticated product. But it did set we did learn so much that helped us a lot, make our products in US and Europe better as well.

 

Michael  14:39

And I can imagine when you were going for this entry level version of the Chinese pacemaker, there were antibodies within your company saying that this is not the Medtronic way we go with the limousine version, right?

 

Bill George  14:50

You got it, and the head of that business wanted to kill me. Everyone know the truth. So how did you convince him? Well, I just decided we kept it as a venture. Were outside his business. And then when it started to mature, then he wanted it back. So okay, that’s clever. We actually had to change the structure. We put our vice chairman in charge of all the creative new things. He’s a medical doctor, a brilliant man named Glenn Nelson. And we put all these creative new things, all the M and A, all the part owned companies, all the ventures and all these new things under him and when they came to market, and then we would transform to the mainstream business.

 

Michael  15:26

So you basically incubated them.

 

Bill George  15:29

Yes, exactly, and you need that incubator. You know, that’s what a lot of small venture companies in Silicon Valley have, is they’re incubated by the venture capitalists.

 

Michael  15:37

Well, I remember once doing some work for a European company, a bank, and they loved the idea of an incubator, and they were using the word all the time. But when you actually looked at what they were doing, they were not building an incubator to protect a baby. They dislike the term. They kept it within the mainstream organization. It never went anywhere because, you know, the antibodies the established businesses killed any new idea that they threaten revenue and cash flow.

 

Bill George  16:03

I learned that in my decade at Honeywell. And you know, that’s why you know. And by the way, I comment on Europe, you said you’re living in Europe. European had brilliant scientists, brilliant engineers. I taught over there for a couple of years, and we just need to give them an opportunity, an organization, structure, something where they can get going, because it’s not going to come out of a Siemens, there’s not going to come out of a giant company, it’s going to come out of allowing them to have a freedom to go produce whole new ideas and creating those structures. So I’d love to see Europe do more of that, because their educational systems and there are so good and their people are so capable.

 

Michael  16:42

Well, I think it could happen, right? One of the things I saw is that in Denmark, they increased the retirement age, I think, to 70, and I noticed European economic growth rates, GDP, growth, is so low they have to do something radical to get growth, and that means being more innovative.

 

Bill George  16:59

Yeah, exactly, by the way it I worked a lot with the Japanese companies. I have highest respect for these companies. But why is the Japanese economy stagnated for 30 years? It’s because there is a fear about new ideas. And so I think this is the whole key to the future of growth for any business and any country, if you can turn that on. And I see this happening all over the United States. I hope will happen all over the world.

 

Michael  17:25

And I think Japan has not exactly but the same challenge as in Europe, where you have these established, gigantic companies doing most of the R&D, producing most of the patents, which they then sit on. It’s not hived off into businesses, you know, run by young, hungry people who have something to prove.

 

Bill George  17:43

No one is very hard to get it through. But I remember when I was working with Sony years ago, decades ago, in Akio Morita. He personally was involved. He was the one that had the idea about the Walkman. That may sound like engineers, but yeah, he had the idea because he was in New York and he saw people putting boombox on his shoulder. He say, hey, we’ll give them some in their pocket, you know. And I look at the creativity of what’s coming out of apple and, you know, continue to produce new ideas. And so, yeah, let’s give them those opportunities. But we have to take some constraints away, and we have to find the vehicles, which a lot of it is funding, frankly, to make sure that we have the venture capital. I love venture capital to fund more startup companies. They won’t all succeed, but some of them will be incredible successes.

 

Michael  18:28

As a funny side, when I started my career, I was going to be an energy researcher. One summer, I got my hands on three books, Akio Morita’s biography, Lee Iacocca’s biography in a book about Jack Welch. And I thought, there is no way I’m going to sit in the lab for the rest of my life. It’s all about creating new ideas and taking it to market and serving customers.

 

Bill George  18:55

Yeah, and you’ve got the right though, you said serving customers, figuring out their needs. We got a little gift on a patent settlement with Siemens, and it was turned out hundreds of millions of dollars. And I told the stock market, you’re not going to see any of this in our profits. What we’re going to do is going to take this money, and we’ve got a team looking at unmet customer, unmet medical needs that statements had. And we created a series of about 10 ventures at Medtronic. Some of those, frankly, were home runs. Some of them didn’t work, and we tried them for eight to 10 years, but it transformed the company and coming with all these new ideas, and I think, you know, in the end, the stock market winced a little bit, but to heck with it, they we didn’t need a short term bump. We needed a long term growth strategy.

 

Michael  19:40

I like that idea and talking about serving customers. You know, one of the things I always do when I meet, especially banking executives, ask them, When is the last time you were in a brunch, and what did you do to serve a customer? And what did you almost will always tell you, Well, the last time. I was in a branch was maybe during orientation, or we had a party one of these days at our main branch in New York. But the reason I bring this up is because I think that what has happened over years is that we get very used to analyzing customer data, but not interacting or observing customers. You have to be almost like an anthropologist, I think you got to watch your customers.

 

Bill George  20:24

So when I joined Medtronic, I had no medical experience at all. I had a lot of 25 years of technology experience, but then the engineers wanted to teach me how our devices work. No, the first thing I did is I went in to see an impact of a Placemaker, and then defibrillators and then spine surgery. I saw over 700 procedures in my time where it actually go and meet the doctor at 630 these are world class doctors put on the Greens go. He invited me to the operating room to stand behind the patient’s head and watch the procedure. Now, I wasn’t selling anyone anything, but I sure was learning what the problems were, and I could bring those back and say, Hey guys, I saw this problem. It’s very different than you think. This is not a circuit problem. This is a human problem that’s taking place in the surgical center. What you need to do to help the doctors with these problems? And they gave me lots of ideas, and it wasn’t just me. It was I said everyone should do that. I want all of you out with the front line. If you’re in the retail business, if you don’t love being in the stores, you’re not going to transform your organization, so you got to get out there. That’s where you find out what’s going on.

 

Michael  21:27

I think the punch you’re not saying, because maybe you’re being a bit modest, is the fact that you are not a medical professional was a big advantage.

 

Bill George  21:34

Well, maybe because I didn’t have a lot of traditional ideas, but I did try to learn from them. I’ll say that.

 

Michael  21:42

Well, the thing is, what I mean by this is you don’t know a question is stupid, so you ask it, and that’s when you learn when you ask these very obvious questions.

 

Bill George  21:50

Yeah, in fact, in our business school, we’re teaching we say it’s really not about the answers, it’s about formulating the right question. And I think that’s true in business, how do you ask the right question? Not just give people the solutions, because maybe the wrong question your problem you’re solving.

 

Michael  22:04

Yeah, but that’s true, right? I mean, that’s the first principle of business. It’s not enough to be a problem solver. You got to solve the right problem, right? Exactly. So we teach people how to solve problems. I mean, Harvard Business School, all these great schools do it, but then we don’t tell people that most of your life is about finding that one problem that’s going to unlock great opportunities with clients and for you in the process of serving them.

 

Bill George  22:27

Yeah. So one of the things we’re have problem or having now, you mentioned people sitting in our offices, looking at data about customers, about their business, about quality. That’s not the way you do it. You’ve got to get out on the front lines with your people. I learned more about quality just walking into our cafeteria of Medtronic and sitting of the group of production workers and asking about quality problems, that’s where I learned what was going on, walking into the labs. And Hey guys, what’s going on? I remember I got the head of one of the businesses very annoyed with me. Why are you talking to those people? Said, because they’ve got all the ideas. What are you doing about it? Where are you? And so I think you’ve got to get out on the front lines. And I think we did a study at Harvard, and we found that executives were spending 72% of their time in their offices and conference rooms, only 5% of their time with employees and 3% of their time with their customers. This is a disaster. I tried to spend 30% of my time with our customers and 30% with employees. Maybe I didn’t quite get there, but that was the goal, and I worked hard at it.

 

Michael  23:25

You know, one of the things I always do is I tell clients the story of Jane Goodall, anthropologist, how she changed the field of, you know, studying primates and simians and so on, by spending time and interacting with them and realizing that they were much more intelligent than people thought they were. And I always tell people that you’ve got to do the same thing with customers. It’s not enough to analyze data reports and so on. You’ve got to spend time with them, and you’ve got to see what their life is like using your products.

 

Bill George  23:55

So now we’re facing a transformation, total transformation, because of artificial intelligence. But here’s the issue is, an awful lot of people are looking at that as efficiency. How can I cut out the frontline workers? Actually, I’m trained as an industrial engineer at Georgia Tech. That’s what we did back in the 60s. And I realized, no, that wasn’t the way to go. Is more into the operations research. But today, I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it. We really need to think of new business models that AI can lead us to, rather than thinking about how we can use it for efficiency. I’m sure it will save a lot of costs. Frankly, I’d rather have it give all the power to the frontline people, so you don’t need all those middle managers. But I think the real issue is, how do we think about new business models. We think about all the great emerging companies of the world have new business models, even Warren Buffett, you know, you know, the iPhone is a whole new business model, if you think about it. And Google is search, all new model. And that’s what we need to think about, YouTube, these things and such creative ideas. So why can’t we do all around the world?

 

Michael  24:59

Well. That’s true. I’m really excited, and I’m also, I’m involved in AI and so on. We have a venture arm that is involved in that. But I’m excited to see the new businesses and the new business models are going to come up. I mean, we’re in the absolute earliest innings of AI. We have no idea where this is going to go, which is why it’s so exciting, right? I always think back to the early days of the internet browser. Yeah, the first New York Times website came up, which was, you know, no offense to New York Times. It wasn’t great. Or the first time Netflix allowed you to watch two movies per week or per month. And if you look at what you can do now with a browser, it shows you how much is going to happen in AI. That should make it exciting. But I think a lot of executives are taking a defense. Are taking a defensive position.

 

Bill George  25:44

Yeah, yeah, they are. That’s why I say be creative. Think about what it can create. This is just, as you say, the starting and what could that lead to. So it may start here, but leads to so many things, but then you’ve got to in an organization, take away those constraints that are keeping you from going there, the fear that you have to be willing to take the risk, you have to fund new business if you can’t do them inside your company. Go acquire startups and see what they can do. But give people, but I’m telling younger people, go focus on that. That’s your future. I was to find a group of high school students the other day, including my grandson, and say, you know, this is what you need to focus on, not just writing code or, you know, figuring out algorithms. You know, figure out how you going to use this stuff.

 

Michael  26:28

It’s applied engineering, right? So, for example, I’m hiring an executive assistant, and they were saying, what are the criteria you have? Michael, must this person understand strategy, corporate finance? No, I don’t want them to do any of those things. They need to be someone who loves playing around with AI, because I can do all the other stuff and show it to them, but I want someone who’s thinking AI first.

 

Bill George  26:49

Yeah, what can you do with this technology? The analogy you did way back to Netflix and others, and look what they’ve done with it.

 

Michael  26:58

Yeah, it’s amazing, but let’s just focus on that, right? Every time there’s change in the world, people approach it in a defensive posture. And then there are a few people who say, hold on a second. This is a grand opportunity to disrupt the incumbents. Right? They have a more mature leadership mindset. Why do so many leaders become fearful of change?

 

Bill George  27:21

Because they’re afraid to take risk. But let me give you a counter example. I’m talking about negative let me give you one. Microsoft, under Steve Ballmer, went from 14 years rejecting every new idea, just to elk and I will say, milk the profits out of Office and Windows, 14 years. The end of 14 years, the stock price was lower than it had been when he started. Satya Nadella comes in. He’s trained his computer engineer, but he brought in two ideas, extremely important. One is, you have to have a growth mindset. We don’t want to, you know, we don’t want to have a fixed mindset. You’re talking about people with a fixed mindset. He said, We have to have a growth mindset. So how are you growing personally, and how are you growing the business? What are you figuring out to do? And he’s brought that and look how creative Microsoft has been since he took over 10 years ago, and the stock is up 10 times now because of the ideas he brought. He opened up all kinds of things and did a terrific job. If you want a great social media site, look at LinkedIn, which is owned by him, but he was willing to do that the other the second thing he says, You have to have empathy. And met Microsoft and one time and said, We want all the smartest, 1% of the people in the world to work here. No, he said, somehow ping is smartest. You have to have EQ. You have to have emotional attention. You have to have empathy, and you have to express that empathy for your fellow employees and for your customer. What are the problems we’ve created for them? How are we going to solve these problems? And I tell you, any CEO in the world, it’s a customer this can pick up a phone and call him, and he’ll get great they’ll get great support, because he’s really focused on empathy with his customers and his employees.

 

Michael  29:00

Yeah, that’s a really good example. And Microsoft is a good example of this, because what a lot of companies do, and what a lot of executives do, is they create something, a product or service, and they do everything they possibly can to migrate it into that cash cow territory, and then they do everything possible to put up a moat around it and milk it for the rest of eternity. I mean, that’s what Microsoft did for 14 years, right?

 

Bill George  29:24

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I thought they’re gonna go the route of IBM, you know, with the mainframe, and stay there too long. But then Satya changed all that. Hey, you saw the opportunity in the cloud. He’s even seen the opportunity in gaming, because he thinks you can learn from gaming about human behavior and take that to a lot of new ideas.

 

Michael  29:43

So we’ll see what you said is true. It’s not about being the smartest person in the room. People always think you need the smartest people in the room to win, and that’s not always true. In fact, it’s never been true. We’ve seen that in sports. It’s not the best team of superstars, it’s the group that plays as a team, right?

 

Bill George  30:00

Yeah. Exactly. I’m a soccer nut. And if you look at the great, look at the Spanish when they won the World Cup, yes, true team games. I mean, like any S is a great team player, yeah. And that is a role model I try to take into businesses. How do you be a great team in soccer, or football Europeans call it, and how do you translate it into your business?

 

Michael  30:20

I’m also a huge soccer nut, and I always, if you have a long enough conversation me, I’m going to be quoting Sir Alex Ferguson point squeaky bum time, and, you know, playing in extra time and so on. Because a lot of the great principles of business leadership come from sports as well.

 

Bill George  30:38

They do. They have businesses and and so we can learn. A lot of people think, Oh, I can’t learn from that. I just want to read books. So and by the way, business schools or I teach, have to change. We’re teaching too much tradition, yeah, too many things, you know, accounting and finance and process controls and manufacturing standards, on and on and on. And I think we really need to do is to think about, how do you not manage these things, but how do you lead in a chaotic world? That’s what I’m concentrating a lot of my energy right now, because we need leaders that know how to lead in this totally changing, chaotic world. Look at the tariffs every day. The tariffs are changing. But how do you lead in this world? And it’s a whole different form of leadership, of how you build a team around you, how you adapt very rapidly, you stay true to your principles. And by the way, we’ve seen organizations like Target, where you serve on the board that’s abandoned its basic advantage adversity and trying to be more traditional, and it’s killing right now, and so you have to have, you have to stay true to your principles and your values. But then you build out a new strategy. You’re flexible, you’re adaptable. And then you change the tactics to adapt to what the needs are today, and you move fast to do that. And that’s the kind of organization we need in this chaotic environment. And you’ll see the ones that do that will be the winners, and the ones that can adapt rapidly will go by the wayside.

 

Michael  32:05

This is a bug bear for mine as well, because, as a management consultant, one of my big criticisms is we teach our people to manage, right? MBA programs teach people to manage. And I always you know this example I used to use with clients. Now ask me, Michael, what’s the difference between a management consultant and someone who’s very innovative? Well, I’ll say, Well, if you put a management consultant to work at Pfizer, you would not have invented Viagra. Yeah, we can manage things, but only when someone is creative to create something.

 

Bill George  32:40

Leadership consultant, not just management consultant, management consultants, willing to take risks and doing new things and build great teams and find the spark. Look at people that have that spark. And I I mentor a lot of young leaders, and I said, Be the person has that spark, be willing to push up against the system. Raise your hand. Say I can take that on. Don’t ask for the promotion, take the opportunity. So I think we can build organizations around people that have that spark and move out, as I said earlier, the blockers, but take, take those risks, and I think that can change everything. And by the way, you see this in the sports model too. Some are great, but we really have to give young people a chance, you know, and you know that they’re the ones that you want to open the door. A 17 year old soccer player could become great tomorrow. So give him a shot. And I think this is true in business.

 

Michael  33:31

To give those think the world’s greatest soccer player for Barcelona is 17 years old this year, isn’t it?

 

Bill George  33:38

That’s exactly who I was thinking about. We watched him in the Euro Cup a year ago. We were in, we were in Europe and Berlin at the time. Pretty amazing. Hey, yeah, why not? You know, but somebody had to open the door for me. That’s I say, just as somebody opened the door for me. And to the leaders on this program, who you opening the door for? Who are you giving that shot? I have an extraordinary 31 year old mentee in Switzerland and just waiting. You know, he’s getting lots of opportunities. He he pulled together. He can do what 10 people do at Goldman Sachs and putting things together, new deals, new opportunities. So give him the opportunity.

 

Michael  34:10

You know, keeping on the soccer theme, since we both know the story, Yamal was scouted when he was six years old.

 

Bill George  34:18

Really, really years old. Where was he?

 

Michael  34:22

He was playing somewhere in Catalonia, in Spain. I thought, yeah, in some really bad area of Spain. Scouted at the age of six, right? And think about Alex Ferguson, right? Yeah. Before he came along, the average age for players in the Premier League was about mid 20s upwards. And he decided to bring in teenagers.

 

Bill George  34:42

Well, in America, I’ve been following Christian Pulisic since he had just turned 17 years old, playing for Dortmund. He came on the scene the best American player in history. Yeah, he had those opportunities. I watched videos of him when he was 10. He was pretty terrific then. So, yeah, you’re right, but I think the same is. Do a business, by the way, I say to CEOs, are you getting out and meeting with your younger leaders? And, you know, really getting to know them and just get letting them give you ideas. And I also believe in reverse mentoring. And I think anyone should have reverse mentors. I mentioned my 31 year old Swiss colleague, friend, mentee, whatever you want to call it. I learned more from him? He ever learns from me?

 

Michael  35:21

Yeah, one of the things that I was trying to point out is that as leaders, we have to know when our skill is managing, because it may not be creating, and if that’s the case, we got to bring in people who can create things.

 

Bill George  35:34

Yeah, well, I think the leader ought to be the creator, the this. He doesn’t have to be the creator. He’s the person that’s sparking the creators, and then have a partner. I’ve had partners that are really good at managing a day to day business, so I let them do it. My successor at Metro, Collins was a world class Executive Managing the business that gave me the freedom to be out there on the front lines, figuring out where the creativity and where the future growth. I think every good leader has to think about, where’s my next growth here? Never be satisfied. What you have to date, what’s the next big breakthrough we can bring? So Medtronic tried to do that time and time again, and still is, by the way.

 

Michael  36:10

Well, it comes back to the example you used earlier. As soon as you develop the mindset that, look, I’m big enough, I need to protect this. You’re not in a growth mindset.

 

Bill George  36:20

Exactly. That’s why I have such admiration of Sasha.

 

Michael  36:23

You have to be thinking about what comes next. Because if you don’t think about it, your competitors are thinking about it.

 

Bill George  36:29

Yeah. And why do we give the opportunity to smaller companies to come up and eat our lunch? So to speak, it’s because we don’t jump in and do it.

 

Michael  36:36

Yes, I have a lot of clients in automotive and so on. And during COVID, I remember asking them, you know, Europe is not the epicenter for EVs I mean, at that point, it was Tesla, right? But do you know what the Chinese are doing? You haven’t been there in three years. It’s been shut down. What are they doing? And then when China opened up after COVID, it shocked the world.

 

Bill George  36:58

Yes, yes, it’s amazing. But I you know what EV I remember, oh, nine years ago, I was visiting with Elon Musk in his plant in Fremont, California, and he had no direct labor employees building Teslas was 100% robots. Now he had technicians. He has programmers. He had service people watching make sure those robots ran to keep it going. But it was really a breakthrough idea. And I think that’s what we need, those breakthrough ideas. And let me take this to a bigger level, though. Let’s do it. We’re focusing on bringing back old line manufacturing. That’s not where the future is. Manufacturing Day Counts for 8.4% of the jobs in America. The futures and things we’re talking about. And how can you transform, I come from healthcare. How can you transform healthcare not to be more efficient, which is horribly inefficient, but how can you use data to meet patient needs better? And how can my son, who’s a surgeon, get so much data and all these scans, 100,000 people that have had the exact same surgery he’s going into to see how it came out longitudinally over 10 years. Everyone looks at instant data. No, I want to see what happens to a patient over 10 years. So that kind of creative thinking and approaches, I think, is going to win the day.

 

Michael  38:13

I like that idea. We’re talking about access to data, right? Because I use an apple smartwatch, and it collects a ton of data on me. Two years ago, I became really ill, really bad. It was bad, bad, bad. The doctors couldn’t figure out what it was. I went to test for about four months. Couldn’t find anything, but I was suffering with back problems and so on. I even lost my vision at one point, and I said, okay, like this is never going to work, right? So I took all the data and I loaded it into some AI system, and it found certain things that the doctors had missed, really, wow. It recommended a very simple routine of exercise, weight training to build up my muscle structure and so on. And I’ve been following that for two years, and that got rid of all of my problems.

 

Bill George  39:01

Amazing. Yeah, my wife is concentrated field for 28 years. How do we bring look at the whole person. Don’t look at me as a body part. Yes, let’s, let’s look at the whole person. Yeah. And you know, what do you do to relieve stress? I’ve been meditating for 45 years. What do you do to eat healthy? Do you get, you know, you exercise every day, and those things are really important now, for me, at this stage in life, one of the things is really important for me to be with younger people every day. That’s where the idea is, I’m just with people my age. We’re just going to be talking about old things and playing about what’s going on in Washington or what’s going on in the world, or things like that, or the weather. No, when you’re young people, they’re the ones pushing limits, and so exciting for me to be with them.

 

Michael  39:45

No, I’m with you, but I take it a little bit more extreme. I like being with babies who are four and five years old. And I’ll tell you why. There’s something about children. They cannot lie. That’s true. If you see a child excited about a product, you know this product is a hit. For that child, yes, and, and it’s very interesting thing, because children don’t lie. If you ask a child, how do I look? They’re not going to hold back. I mean, they don’t know they’re hurting your feelings, but they’ll make a face and so on. But what I’m trying to say is that it’s not only that you get ideas from young people, as you know, and as you’ve noticed, also the energy and enthusiasm they have that so infectious?

 

Bill George  40:21

Well, you know, I had a mentor when I started writing. I’m sadly passed away, Warren Bennett. So I consider the father of leadership, and he had a common concept. It came from biology, called the atony and the acne really is capturing in when you’re in your older years, capturing the childlike qualities the children have where you’re not afraid of taking risks, you’re not afraid of being embarrassed, you can’t lie, you just tell it like it is. And I’ve tried to do that, and I think, you know, I think that’s why it’s so great being with people of all ages.

 

Michael  40:54

When I hit my 40s, I was thinking to myself, why am I not as happy when I was late teens? And I thought, What is the difference? Well, I was at late teen, the whole world was ahead of me. There were so many opportunities that if one path ended, there was at least five ahead of me. So I thought, okay, if I want to be happy in life, maybe I’m going to have a life where there’s a lot of opportunities to do more things in life. And when I started doing that, then my mindset changed, because why am I depressed? If this closes, this is going to open. And it’s interesting. It’s a very small thing that has a big impact on you.

 

Bill George  41:27

Well, I like to teach the concept when one door closes, another one opens. So I made a decision to leave Honeywell, and all of a sudden, the door opened at a much smaller company called Medtronic. Yeah, that time, that Johnny had seven 50 million in sales. Today it’s 32 billion and 1,000,000,001 market cap instead of 100 billion. Yeah. But the potential was there, and I saw that, and I got into it. I had no idea it could grow so fast. Over a 20 year, compounded from my predecessor through my successor, we grew at 20 we do it 18.3% per year in revenues, and that’s only because of new ideas, you know. And if you say, well, that’s some acquisition, okay, it was 15% without acquisition. So we were able to grow because we kept pushing the limits of new ideas. Again, I want to be clear, they didn’t all work, yes, but we did try. We kept trying things, and that’s the only way.

 

Michael  42:21

I don’t know, Medtronic was relatively so much smaller when you took over.

 

Bill George  42:25

Oh, yeah, it was, but much smaller than the sector I was running honey Honeywell. But you know, you could, we found we could move much faster than I could to a very established structure at Honeywell, which is hard to bust through all the layers and blockers. And people were brilliant analysts that can tell you why things wouldn’t work?

 

Michael  42:41

Yeah, that’s one of the things I remember from the book with Jack Welch as well. And one thing I’ve always taken in my career, don’t go where all the superstars are going. You’re going to be a lot of competition for opportunities. You go where everyone is exiting, because you’re going to get the best choicest opportunities. Nobody’s going to pay attention to you. You can make as many mistakes as you want, and it’s true, right? Sometimes we’re in the spotlight. You don’t get the freedom to do what you want.

 

Bill George  43:07

That’s right, and your willingness to try things. So we need to be teaching this in schools, not just teaching process controls and accounting and all the traditional thing we need to teach. I’ll give you a bad example, though, from one of the leading private schools here, I sound a group of five college juniors, rising seniors. Okay, and these, these people are just absolutely brilliant, they say, but our professors don’t allow us to use AI because they can’t figure out what’s AI. And what we really did, I said, Well, really, honestly speaking, this is crazy. This is like telling me, I when I was at Georgia Tech I couldn’t bring a calculator in the room, or telling my son he couldn’t bring a computer in the room. This is crazy. This is this is just a tool. Just look at as a tool. And if the professor can’t tell what your creativity is, young person and what came out of AI, then he’s not doing his job, or she’s not doing her job. So, you know, I think we need to encourage people use all the tools, start and start with the problem. Georgia Tech had a woman that named Wendy Newstead that got a national award because she said, we’re not going to teach all these things, all chemistry and biology and all these things, you know, we’re going to do, we’re going to create teams, and we’re going to give them a really complex problem, they’re going to have a group of people around the table from different disciplines interdisciplinary, and they’re going to figure out how to this is biomedicine, but how to solve the problem. And then they can go and learn the biology and the chemistry and the calculus and the physics and the and the mathematics and the differential equations and all the things they need to do, but then they have to use those things to come up with a solution to the problem. But start with just like you were saying about your customers in consulting.

 

Michael  44:47

You know, this is a very good example here, because people don’t understand the limitations they create when they ignore technology. I was speaking to one of I’m not going to mention the name, but one of the top regulators in Europe. I. Who wanted to ban the use of social media amongst all children until they reach the age of 18 or something, which is fine. I’m not going to get into that debate, but let me ask this person the question. So if you don’t expose young people to this technology, how will Europe ever create something like this?

 

Bill George  45:17

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And how do you take it to the next level? Okay, so I use a lot of social media. I particularly like LinkedIn, as I mentioned, because it gets me in dialog with people all around the world. You want amazing dialogs that people in India and in China and other places just on LinkedIn about ideas. And so I love it for that purpose, and I’m not. I’m not on sites that do a lot of crazies, like we see on Tiktok, not yet, maybe one day, right?

 

Michael  45:49

Bill. Thank you so much. Is there anything you want to add, or is it a place our readers and listeners can get more information about you?

 

Bill George  45:56

Oh, absolutely. Just come to billgeorge.org. Everything I’ve been saying, it’s all on my website and lots of ideas there. Please check it out carefully, billgeorge.org, very simple. Now, yeah, here’s I’d like to say, step up and lead that. We started out with my new book. And you know, I’m not trying to sell books, but I’m saying, be that. Emerging Leader. Be bold, be creative. Don’t let the blockers get in your way. Bust your way through the system, and be that person that stands out. And if you take a couple of hits, a few arrows along the way, that’s okay. You’re going to do that as a leader. But we need more leaders who will step up. Be creative. Try new things, found new companies. Be Creative inside large companies, push the limits, because, boy, if you don’t do it now, you won’t do it when you’re 50 or 60. So take those risks and do it, and you’ll have a great career. I have no idea where it’ll lead. You may not either, but you follow that thread that’ll keep you in but most important of all, stay true to your purpose and values. Don’t be motivated by external Acclimation and adulation. Be motivated by inside you of making a difference in the world and leaving a mark.

 

Michael  47:05

Yeah, there’s maybe one story you want to add to your list of stuff you teach in the business schools. But I always tell clients the story of the mid-engine Corvette. It took them six decades to do this. Wow. And imagine the risk, the resilience, the belief and determination to do that.

 

Bill George  47:25

Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s what we need to do. Medtronic has a product called artion, and it failed its first clinical trial. And I said to the CEO, who I met with every month, I said, Omar, tell me, did this fail because it didn’t help the patient, or did you choose the wrong patients? He said, No, it’s clearly the latter, and we did have statistical endpoints that were wrong. I said, start over. Do it all over, by the way. Now it’s on market, and it’s going to do tremendous amount to help to treat high blood pressure and in a breakthrough way. So this is a product that can really transform society, because so many people have high blood pressure and it’s not treated, so it’s just but he had to push through. And it took him, I think, 12 years, to get approval from the time, yes.

 

Michael  48:12

Yeah. A resilient man, a determined man, right there.

 

Bill George  48:15

Yes, exactly. He had the courage to keep pushing it, because he believed that. And that’s, if you look at the great breakthroughs. That’s what they that’s where they come from.

 

Michael  48:22

Bill, always a pleasure. I enjoyed speaking to you. Great to be with you. Thank you. Have a great evening. Take care. Ciao, bye. Now as we wrap up, today’s podcast is sponsored by StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Using Well-Managed Strategy Studies as a free download. Go to firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. And if you’re looking to advance your career and need to update your resume, you can get a McKinsey and BCG-winning resume template example as a free download at http://www.firmsconsulting.com/resumePDF.