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How Leaders Lead with David Novak
#299: David Dorman, Former CEO, AT&T – See around corners
01:11:58
Listen to this leadership podcast with David Dorman, former CEO of AT&T, and discover how to see around corners and lead through disruption.
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- [00:00]
David Novak
Hello, friends, and welcome to another episode of How Leaders Lead with David Novak. Today we have David Dorman on the show. He's the former CEO of AT&T. And in this conversation, David talks about how he sees around corners, not only preparing for industry shifts before they happen, but also becoming the type of leader people trust to guide them through it. So if you find yourself thinking more about the current reality of your business than the future of your business, this episode is for you. Enjoy this conversation, and I'll see you at the debrief.
- [00:37]
David Dorman
You know, we're making some history here, Dave, because this is the first time that I've ever had both a father and a daughter as guests on HAL Leaders Lead.
- [00:47]
Now, how about that proud father?
- [00:52]
Well, your daughter Lindsay founded Wheezy Towels, and your son Andrew as general partner at Noel Ventures, which he also founded. And then your son Tyler, he's like a real estate mogul. How is the way you mentor your kids different from how you mentor CEOs whose boards you sit on?
- [01:12]
Well, honestly, I'm deeply emotionally involved with my children, and I try not to be with CEOs, but each of them, I'll say the similarity is each of them is their own person. You know, CEOs have idiosyncratic behavior that you have to know about. Kids do, too. And each of my kids, you know, what makes them tick is very different.
- [01:36]
Yeah. And you look for leaders who see around corners. Explain what you mean by that.
- [01:40]
Well, I think it's always, to me, a hallmark of a great leader who, yes, they enjoy accomplishment and the success of the day, but they're thinking about where we go from here, what can go wrong, what can go right. And I've often said you learn more sometimes for the bad times that follow good times. Sometimes you hope that never happens. But you ask yourself, well, how did we let this happen? How did we get there? Generally speaking, it's spending too much time counting today's money versus tomorrow's.
- [02:14]
You know, when you look back on your career, when is there a time where you looked around the corner and you saw where things were headed?
- [02:21]
Well, what comes to mind first is that taking over as CEO of AT&T at a moment when wireless services were beginning to really grow dramatically. And historical services that had sort of built AT&T, primarily long distance calling and long distance data services, were beginning to retrench. And it's because there were substitutes. Email, for example, what would you say? Probably in the late 90s, you know, email became a substitute, and now we live with it every day, or most people do, and then you add on text messaging. So the fundamental methods of communication began to change, and AT&T's core businesses were threatened. And I was convinced we had to change and change really quickly or die.
- [03:05]
Yeah, and you made a lot of changes. And, you know, for a leader who doesn't have that ability today to look around the corners, how would you coach him? What should they do?
- [03:17]
Well, I think that you can certainly look at where you are, your environment. One of the things that we used to do with our board, every meeting, and sometimes the board would look at me like, why are you doing this again? We would use a Michael Porter bubble chart. You know, what part of the industry is growing, what part of the industry is shrinking, and are we participating in those. Those pools of growth? And it was pretty obvious after going through it that there was distinct patterns emerging where growth was coming, as I mentioned, to wireless services. If you weren't wireless, you were going to be really threatened. So I think it's both with leaders and even your own board members sometimes are not synced up with. They're looking at the past even more than you are.
- [04:05]
You're now the independent board chair of PayPal, who went from a peak market cap of over $350 billion to roughly 39 billion today. How do you. How do you lead and influence in an environment like that?
- [04:21]
Well, first of all, nobody loves you when that happens. The employees don't love you. You know, the investors sure as hell don't love you. But you ask yourself how it happened, and it was in some ways a perfect storm of having unbelievable growth. During the pandemic, we were already growing, but the pandemic, because people couldn't leave shopping at home, PayPal was a huge beneficiary of that. So we had massive growth during the pandemic period. You know, I think the shame on us is that we didn't recognize that that's a wave it's going to crest. What happens after that? And we had some strategic choices that we didn't pursue because we kind of thought, we can do this organically, we don't have to add to it. And looking back on it, pretty clear that we were just miss calling, you know, when the wave was going to crest and the market punishes, you know, if you've been growing robustly 30, 40% on revenues of 15, 18, 20 billion, they price you way out into the future, which is what the 350 billion represented. And then when you start growing at a more pedestrian, 2, 3 4, 5%, even 10%, they basically re rate you. And that's what happened with PayPal. It was re rated to a much slower grower.
- [05:41]
And how do you assess the opportunity now, Dave?
- [05:44]
Well, payments, you know, I think the world's payment market, total available market is like $29 trillion. And that's, you know, checks and credit cards and all kinds of electronic payments. So it's very robust, but there's a lot of concentration. You know, the very biggest merchants like Walmart and Amazon are growing faster than the market for electronic commerc and growing well. They basically dictate how payment terms are going to be made. So that's a market in itself. And then with consumers, consumers are looking for the best deal and they want to be secure and safe. That's the thing we hear over and over. I think the opportunity still exists to differentiate in the minds of the consumer. We've heard about electronic wallet or digital wallet for a really long time. So it's not a new concept, but making it come alive so that you can, on a transaction by transaction basis say I want to use debit for this, I want to use credit for this and I want to use my Visa card on this transaction, I want to use my MasterCard and have the rewards that follow that accrue to you no matter where you are. So we're today looking at the opportunity to really be a digital bank. That's also not a new concept, but get beyond basic PayPal or basic Venmo to offer an array of digital services.
- [07:08]
So when you think about these concepts that aren't necessarily new concepts, how do you differentiate in that kind of world if you're a PayPal?
- [07:18]
Oh, it's really tough. At the beginning of our company we talked about having a two sided network, meaning we did things for merchants that used our services to collect from customers and we did things for consumers to make their experience, as I said, safe and rewarding. So the power of that two sided network really served us well for the first, I don't know, 20 years of our existence. Well now that's kind of a basic ante. You've gotta be secure, you've gotta be able to do things for merchants. And you know, I know from my time at CVS the merchant fee for credit cards, you know, was a billion and a half dollars a year for CVS. And that's, you know, going back probably 10 years is probably more. Now I think Walmart's is in the billions. So are you gonna try to, as a merchant to minimize the expense that you go to to accept credit cards. And are you going to use that information for the benefit of you and your customer? Because as you know, today credit card companies keep the charge data. It's not owned by the merchant. You know, from your young brands day, you couldn't go track how many guys were using you through credit card usage. Well, that's changing and I think that's going to be a big, big influence on, on merchants.
- [08:32]
You know, you led the search for a new CEO at PayPal. What was the most important characteristic you were looking for? And you've worked in so many different companies, so you gotta go find a new CEO. What was most important to you?
- [08:46]
Well, you know, it's like a batter, if you strike out against a pitcher and you go up against him again, you say, I'm not gonna fall for the sinker this time. I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be more vigilant. Well, we had a CEO that we put in three years ago when Dan Shulman retired. And our objective was to get someone who was a skilled product leader, whose depth was technical, but also in product. And we made a hire and it didn't work out. And we realized that the company was in more significant turmoil than maybe we realized as directors. And so we were basically bringing in a first time CEO for a turnaround situation. And that didn't work the second time around. We said we've got to get someone with serious CEO chops. Been here before, mature. A tech background for sure is important in this business and international is important in this business because half of our profits come from outside the US So that made Enrique Loris, the choice being made a really good choice. After six years as CEO at HP and 35 overall, what advice, Dave, would
- [09:57]
you give others about the process that they should go through to identify a new leader at any level of their company?
- [10:05]
You know, the best situation possible is to groom a leader from within, you know, which you did. And you actually did that over, you know, a couple of successive moves by having a deep bench. PayPal did not have a deep bench. So we were forced to go outside to find the next CEO. And I always, I don't know how to handicap it, but it's significantly riskier to find someone on the outside that's a fit with your culture, fit with your team, fit with your industry and have it all work. There's always some sets of compromises and you're rarely lucky enough to say, gee, this person hits our specific in every possible way. You're Compromising on something. And we clearly try to minimize and mitigate that, but we didn't get it right.
- [10:53]
You know, you've sat on the boards of AT&T, Motorola, CVS, Yum Brands, eBay, PayPal and Dell. Now these are some of the most consequential companies in the last 25 years, one way or the other. What's the most common leadership mistake you see in even in the most successful
- [11:13]
companies, I have to say it's in the development of people. When things are good, it's easy not to have it, or check the box programs and say, okay, we're doing executive development. Where's this person on his program for further development? And I find too many times it's lip service. It's not really in depth. And I remember Jack Welch used to talk about this, you know, incessantly in the heyday of ge. You know, being candid about people and their shortcomings and their strengths and being candid with them instead of leading them on to say, okay, well, gee, you're good enough for now, but you're probably not going to go all the way. People didn't say that. They just kept patting them on the back and doing the job because it's disruptive to make change, especially if someone is performing at level. And I'm not saying you don't have room for people like that, but it's not going to help you develop tomorrow's bench.
- [12:11]
You know, you've led when things have gone swimmingly well and you've led businesses that were in a mess. Tell a story about which one taught you the most about leadership and why.
- [12:26]
When I became CEO of AT&T, it was obvious that the grand strategy of my predecessor was going to have to be unwound. We had had a, you know, a rapid increase in the amount of debt we'd use to acquire other companies, mostly cable assets. You know, from your Comcast days, a big part of Comcast network came from AT&T Broadband. We had to decide to basically give up the strategy or risk the company. And the conclusion was we give up the strategy, which meant we're going to sell off the cable assets we just bought and we're going to double down on communications. Now, unbeknownst to me, I didn't realize that the wireless business we had, which was kind of the future, that's the jewel once you passed on broadband, had been basically mortgaged with an irrevocable requirement to spin it off from AT&T within a few years. Well, that was the growth business. And that sort of, for me, said, okay, if this is true, I don't like it. I have to deal with it. So we need to optimize the value of the remaining business and find a partner who needs business services. And so we set about doing what we needed to do to strengthen the balance sheet, pay down debt as quickly as we could, and then merge with a larger player who was focused on a broader set of offerings and had wireless in their portfolio. That's where Southwestern Bell came in. And Ed Whitaker and I often think, had we not done that, if we had tried to say, we're going to soldier on and fight to the last person, we probably would have blown the company up. And you don't get a lot of credit when people say, well, they saved the company. I know what happened. A lot of people in, you know, in the industry on the inside know what happened. I'd much rather have said, hey, we grew the thing, you know, three times over and tripled the stock price. But that wasn't to be.
- [14:27]
So that's a. That's a great point, Dave, because, you know, you didn't have the story you'd much rather have, and you had to take a different path, and one that was not exactly ideal. You know, how do you, as a leader, get yourself juiced up every day going into an environment like that? How hard was it on you, knowing what had transpired in the past and your inability to do what you really wanted to do?
- [14:53]
Well, there was no time for Woe is me, I can tell you that, but I had a great team. Tom Horton, our cfo, who went on to be CEO of American Airlines and is himself a great director, being on GE and Walmart and Qualcomm's boards. We talked a lot about it. We got the cards dealt to us, and we looked at the cards and said, oh, my, here's what we have to go do. And we set about doing it. And I'd have to say, if I graded us on playing a hand that was really tough to play, I think we did really well. But you do. I said to someone, you have a dream job. And growing up in Telecom, being the CEO of AT&T was a dream job. The problem is, when I got the dream job was not the right time. If I'd been five years earlier and could have determined the outcome differently, I like to think I could have played the cards a little better. But for the hand that I had, I think we played it pretty well.
- [15:55]
I remember you telling me a conversation you had with Warren Buffett, where he talked about comparing the talent of a CEO versus the reality of a crappy business.
- [16:05]
I think you said something to the fact that in the titanic struggle between the world class CEO and the awful business, the awful business will usually win.
- [16:18]
I love that. You know, one of the things I've always admired about you, Dave, and I've seen you do this, you know, not only with me, but with other leaders. You have an uncanny ability to basically, you know, deliver a pretty tough message or a tough challenge and have the other person come out really feeling whole in, in, in the conversation. Can you, can you give me an example when, when you've done that and, and how you think about it?
- [16:48]
You know, having been on the Motorola board at a really interesting time, that, you know, the. Chris Galvin, who was the grandson of the founder, I was not on the board at the time, was asked to leave. I mean, that was very difficult if you can imagine, being a third generation family member. They went outside, hired Ed Zander as CEO and he came in and the Razr, if you remember, the Motorola RAZR was the first flip phone, tiny form factor with red hot product. They ended up selling hundreds of millions of the things and it dominated that single product, dominated the revenue growth of the company. And Ed Zander got a lot of credit for that. And I'm not saying he didn't deserve some, but the product was already on the books when Chris was there. You know, it took off like a rocket. He was getting a lot of adulation. The company stock responded and you know, media does what the media does, saying, oh look, he's made this huge turnaround, it's fantastic. And then things kind of hit a flat spot. There was this device coming out of a company in Cupertino, California, I think called the iPhone, which there's a story I'll tell you about how that came to be separately. But, you know, it began to eat into Motorola sales and the iPhone was a more capable device. The Motorola RAZR was a great phone, but that's really all it did. It didn't have an operating system to do further things. And Ed had a moment, I mean, and this is, I admire him for this, where he basically said, you know, I just had a really dear friend get really sick. And it made me really think about life and I don't want to do this anymore. And this is before things really turned into a bucket of, you know what, he basically resigned. And you know, the board, I'd never seen anything like this. And serious other Board members looked at each other and said, well, now what do we do? We don't really have a CEO to replace him. We kind of looked around the room and I think I said something like, don't look at me, I'm not doing this. And there are various other people in the room. And so we promoted the only guy who was kind of still standing in management, who had not been there that long, was running a relatively smaller part of the business by the name of Greg Brown. And we said, okay, Greg's, we're going to give him a shot. Well, that was, I think, 18 years ago. And since that time, Greg has grown the stock from like 40 bucks a share to 450 bucks a share. They got rid of businesses that were distractions, focused on the historical core public safety radio business. Boring but beautiful, where they have 65% market share. And I think you'd have to count Greg as one of the top 10 CEOs of the last 15, 20 years. And it was, it was from, like, desperation. We don't know what the hell we're going to do, that we got lucky enough to pick the right guy, which, you know, that really wasn't what we expected to happen.
- [20:00]
So what was the tough conversation you had back then, you know, that led to that?
- [20:05]
I don't want to say it quite this way because I wasn't the one delivering this particular message, which was, we're not sure you can do this, but we're going to give you a chance. It was kind of, you know, you're the best we can do right now. And all he did was just blow the, you know, blow the doors off of it.
- [20:24]
Dave, do you recall a tough conversation that you avoided too long that you ended up paying for later?
- [20:32]
I have lots of recollection of wishing I had taken action when I knew something was not going to work out. But it was kind of, as I was saying earlier, it wasn't so bad that the guy was burning the building down, but you just knew that they weren't the right person. And actually I ended up avoiding that conflict by merging the business with someone else so I didn't have to deal with it. And it wasn't that I was totally conflict avoidant. There was a clock ticking, and if I didn't come up with another solution, then I was going to have to take this guy, take this guy out.
- [21:11]
You know, you mentioned the clock ticking. You just Talked about the AT&T, you know, the cards that you were dealt and how you played it. You have a Real pragmatic bone in your body, yet you're a big dreamer. I mean, how do you balance the two of those things?
- [21:29]
Well, you know, I think I'm too conservative. I look back at my track record as an investor over the last 20 years and having, you know, participated in the great growth at Yum Brands and Yum China. You know, I probably sold the stock too early. I have the guy that rides winners, but only so far. And I have to say, in the markets we've had the last 15 years across it, you know, buying and holding has not been a bad strategy for a lot of stuff.
- [21:57]
David Novak
Right.
- [21:58]
David Dorman
And I have to say that my natural conservatism, I don't know if it's being the, the child of two depression babies who didn't have two nickels to rub together and saying, hey, I'm not going to get stuck. But I mean, like right now you read all the same things I'm doing. I mean, the number of new billionaires being created by AI is stunning, staggering. And what people do with newfound wealth is also stunning and staggering on the one hand. But on the other hand, what do people do? They buy a house if they haven't had one, or a bigger house or a second house, or they rent an airplane, or they buy an airplane, you know, but there's, there's a set of conspicuous consumption things that people do when they create wealth. And then you kind of realize there's nothing else to buy. I don't really need anything else. I'm not being made any happier by. And then you're sort of tasked with the challenge of giving it away. And I've found joy in giving money away, enabling other people to be able to find their dreams. So that's something I'm enjoying. And my natural conservatism has somehow allowed me to stumble into enough money to give away.
- [23:13]
Well, you're definitely a good man for sure. And you're also known for being one of the best directors that could be on any board. And I can certainly attest to that fact. When you were a great director on, on Young Brands and you've seen a lot happen on boards, what do you think is the most dangerous thing a board can do to a CEO?
- [23:35]
First of all, boards have to realize they're not running the company. They're the shareholders representative and they've elected a CEO to run the company and they're duty bound to support them. Now, do they hold the CEO accountable? Yes. Should they have frank and candid conversations about the business? Yes. But they're not there to do management work. And I think it's particularly hard for guys like me who've been CEOs to avoid the pitfalls of, you know, sort of asserting yourself in a way that sort of saying you're questioning the judgment of management. I would do it this way, I'd do it that way. You're a colleague in a room, and when the CEO's not there, you're having frank conversations about performance, about direction, about people. And that's really important. But you're not running the company. I've been the non executive chairman now for Motorola, CVS, PayPal. I was chair and CEO at AT&T and Pacific Bell. And being a chairman, I, I analogize. It's like being a grandfather. You really do love the kids and you enjoy being around them and you like going to meetings and having the intellectual stimulation. But when that's over, you go home, right? And the CEO is there running the business. And so you got to stay in your lane. As a chairman, I tried to be the counselor for the CEO to say, hey, if there are things you want to talk about, you just want to bounce ideas off of it. You know, I'm not going to think less of you for sharing. Because some guys like, well, gee, I don't know if I want to admit this to them. You gotta develop a trusting relationship. Now, Larry Merlo And I, the CEO at CVS for the 11 years that I was chairman, Larry was the CEO. He succeeded Tom Ryan, who was chair and CEO, created these two. We basically separated the chair and CEO job. He and I had, I think, a fabulous relationship. You know, he'd call me with, you know, you're not going to believe this. You know, we were, we were communicating freely and candidly and frankly. And occasionally Larry's Italian. He'd get a little out there and get, you know, during the pandemic, for example, you know, our government was not the most efficient thing to deal with with respect to distributing vaccinations for people who are trying their best to give them to as many people as possible. And I remember after a meeting I had to say, larry, I don't blame you. I would be really pissed off as well. But you're not going to make it any better by yelling at the government guys. We got to find another way to get our point across. But that was a really rare instance.
- [26:25]
And you talk about the importance of building trust. To have these conversations, to get the telephone call to admit that you don't know something, that maybe someone might think you should know. Do you have a secret sauce for developing that kind of trust?
- [26:43]
I'd like to think that I have a personality that allows me to get along with most people, especially when I'm focused on it. I'm at my worst when I'm not paying attention. My wife reminds me of that frequently because I'm off on some other planet thinking about AI or whatever it is. But I think when you're focused and your objective is to make sure you hear every word and you're communicating, but there's a trust between you that the person knows I got their back, that's the most important thing that I can tell a CEO is I got your back, I'll be there. And if there are things, you know, let's just say there's some event the company needs to be represented in, and he can't be in two places at once. I'll go trot the chairman out and he can, you know, not going to embarrass you and say a few words. And, you know, after being on the board 16 years, I learned a little something about healthcare. So that was helpful.
- [27:36]
How long does it take you in a new situation to say, I got your back?
- [27:43]
It depends on the relationship. And like I said before, they're all different. I mean, some people are suspicious, and trust is really hard to build. Karen lynch, who succeeded Larry at at cvs, was, you know, I don't think I ever got there with her in two years that I was chairman before, you know, leaving the board. I'd been on a very long time. And I think that was to her detriment that, you know, she wasn't willing to kind of let me in and say, gee, there's some things here I could have done better. You know, where do we go from here? She rather kept it to herself, and I think it ended up affecting her ability to be effective.
- [28:29]
David Novak
Hello, friends. I hope you're loving this conversation. Be sure to stay tuned to the very end of the episode. As always, David and I are going to debrief some of the concepts that he talks about with this week's guest. So stay tuned to the very end, and I will see you soon.
- [28:44]
David Dorman
You know, I want to shift gears for a second and take you back. Dave, what's a story from your. Your childhood that shaped the kind of leader you are today?
- [28:54]
I enjoyed getting recognition for whatever it may be, whether it was doing well on a test, performing an athletic skill of some kind. But I realized I really was a recognition junkie. I needed it. I needed to be reinforced that I'm okay. I was just, you know, goofy little country boy, kind of gawky, but, you know, bright enough to kind of get ahead. And I have to say, that was learning that you're not always gonna get a trophy, you're not gonna get a pat on the head, and you shouldn't expect it, you know, do your job and doing your job, you know, meant something. It wasn't like the soccer kids, you know, like, oh, we're giving a participation trophy. You know, that's not reality.
- [29:45]
So was there something in your childhood that happened that forced that recognition or desire for it or this? Aha.
- [29:55]
Well, your father had a unique job. My dad as well. For the first 12 years of my life, he was gone six weeks at a time and then would get a week off every six weeks. So my exposure to my dad was this. You know, every six weeks, I'd see him and, you know, he tried very hard. We'd go fishing, and we'd throw a ball in the first yard, but then he's gone. And I was left with this kind of a void. And my mother, no matter how hard she worked and she was terrific, you know, couldn't fill that void. So I looked for that, you know, sort of father's influence from others. And as a consequence, when I got to be 17, 18 years old, my dad hadn't been around until I was probably a late teenager. And of course, at that level, I was ready to get out of the house and go do my own thing. And I would say, as I look back on it, I went through undergraduate school at Georgia Tech in three years, graduated with honors, and basically, I can't tell you today why I did that. My friends stayed five years. You know, they had a great time, and I was out of there and working because I wanted to get on with my life.
- [31:10]
You know, you mentioned earlier that the Motorola story, the razor and then Apple iPhone coming in, you know, what's the leadership lesson there for. For how. Let's just say an iconic company like Motorola should. Should handle disruption. What happened?
- [31:30]
I think that it wasn't that Motorola didn't understand that not having a user interface, which the iPhone had, the very first visual user interface, or ui, as they say. And we had this. I mean, even to be able to text on the thing, you had to hit a number key three times to find the letter B or whatever. It was so clunky. The radio, what Motorola knew how to do is make great radios. So the phone function was superb. It was industry leading it work in the basement. We used to laugh. It could work underwater, but it didn't have the user interface which became as you know, we talked earlier with text and then email and now streaming. You know, it was way, way more important. So Motorola did not invest enough in the operating system and chose to partner. Just a quick vignette. I wasn't in this meeting, but I had firsthand players who were there on both sides when Apple met with Ed Zander and his team to look at something they called the ROKR R O K R. So it was a candy bar shaped phone, not a flip phone. And Steve Jobs was in the meeting with his people and they said they had a partnership to put Apple's basically music player, MP3 player, the, what did they call that thing? The ipod. And so you were going to take the ipod's software, put it in a Motorola phone, create this thing called the rokr. You know, Apple would love it, Motorola would love it. After the meeting was over, purportedly Steve Jobs picked up the mock up that Ed Xander had brought in and looked at it and he said, well, if you can put an ipod in, in a phone, why can't you put a phone in an ipod? And they all kind of looked at him and said, well, you probably could well go work on that. Well, that was the seed corn for what has become the greatest selling product of all time, you know, with hundreds of billions of sales and an unbelievable ecosystem. But it was that question, you know, Steve, looking at it differently and asking that question.
- [33:45]
You know, people say today in the world of AI, you know, the really smart companies are going to teach their people how to ask really insightful questions so you can get the best out of AI. What's your thinking on that?
- [33:58]
Well, we were talking a little bit before you came on. I think there's this thing is going. It's almost like throwing a, you know, a squirt of olive oil on a hot skillet. It's going in every direction all at once. And I think that I'm watching some companies very thoughtfully approach it and say we're going to do this in a controlled way. We understand there's a lot of power here. And there are some who are just jumping into the deep end and saying we're going to rip out workday tomorrow and put in an agentic AI HR system or whatever. I actually think, David, that there is a range of things that we're just learning to do. And basically I don't know if you personally use AI.
- [34:43]
I do all the time.
- [34:44]
I Use it every day. And I'm willing to ask myself stuff. I mean, recently we have a mutual friend that, you know, who was being proposed for a golf hall of fame. I said, I need a resume for this person going back to college, emphasis on athletic accomplishments and business accomplishments. Well, I got this incredible Dacia that's kind of child's play. But when I shared it with the person, he goes, well, gee, how did you know this? Well, I didn't. I just. I asked Chatgpt for an answer and he says, well, I don't understand what that is. So I said, well, you can do anything. I said, let's turn this into a poem about your life. How does it do that? You know, within 20 seconds we had a poem and watching people wake up, you know, to what the power of this is today is pretty marvelous. And in business, I just saw what I consider to be a pretty significant tell the earnings announcement of Shopify. They missed their expense budget for the quarter really badly. And their explanation is, we spent too much on A.I. you know, we've lost control. We got all these prompts and people are doing what they want to and there's a lot of experimenting, but we're going to get control of it in the next quarter. I think that's going to be a many times repeated story as people follow this journey to where AI is going to take them and there'll be some huge success stories. Right now it's about infrastructure. People are getting rewarded for building the fundamental building blocks, the data centers. I think the next wave is what you can do with it.
- [36:20]
When you were at Motorola, you worked alongside Carl Icahn, the famous activist. What's something about working with Carl? You'd only learn if you're actually sitting across the table with him.
- [36:36]
Carl's kind of a disagreeable cuss. And to him, investing is sport, right? And I think he really does see it as a blood sport. It's how he gets his jollies, is engaging with people and trying to intimidate them. I think we have a president who's like that to a degree as well, to see if people what their breaking point is and how will they bend. But what I learned about Carl, if you're arguing about something and you're pretty much saying the same thing, if you call timeout and say, well, Carl, what do you want? What do you want? Well, you want the stock to go up? Well, we want the stock to go up. So what we're arguing about is how do we get that done? And I tried to put myself on the same side of the table with Carl to say we're trying to get to the same place. We may disagree on tactics or a person or something, we're trying to get to the same place. So help me help you get where you're going. I don't know. I mean, as I said to someone, it helped that we happened to agree in Motorola and we happened to agree at paper ebay, that separating PayPal from eBay and separating Motorola Mobility from Motorola was a good path forward. So then it became about how quickly can we get there versus arguing about is that the right answer or not? So that's why John Donahoe called me the icon whisperer, which not necessarily a title that I was seeking.
- [38:14]
When we spun off Yum China In 2016, you helped recruit a Chinese board from scratch. What leadership lesson did you take away from that experience?
- [38:24]
Well, we had two things, as you know, we had to appoint a CEO. Mickey Pant was the choice for that. And then we had to get a Chinese investor to buy at least 5% of the company. And Fred Hu and Primavera Capital were standout people. Well, then it came to who has experience in China with a consumer brand and who are they? To my surprise, there were quite a few people at that time. We were able to avail ourselves of skill sets, and it was a real diverse board. So we had, as you know, the special committee was empowered to go get this done. But the problem is, you don't know these folks. They've come from a different walk of life. Maybe they've been in a different country. You only know what's there that the search firm has given you. I think back to AI. AI is making a lot easier to vet people and a lot harder for people to pretend they're something they're not.
- [39:23]
You know, as you mentioned earlier, you're the CCVS chairman for 16 years. 11 years as chair, 11 as chairman, 16 on the board. Right. And what was the biggest challenge you had to work through?
- [39:38]
Tom Ryan. I always call Tom the CEO from central casting. You know, he looks good, he talks good, he knew his business. He started as a pharmacist. He was a guy that could, you know, basically do it all. He made a very successful strategy about acquiring regional drugstore companies, taking CVS, you know, up to, I think it's peak 10,000 stores, buying Caremark. So Tom had had a, you know, 17 year run that was pretty darn good. His number two guy for most of that time was Larry Merlot, who was pretty quiet. Operator, went and got it done. He'd never, when we made Larry CEO, he'd never been on a board. He attended board meetings, obviously at cvs. And he was much more of a quiet, you know, operator, get it done kind of guy. They had very different personalities, right? So Larry had to get used to, you know, not only just the Wall street interactions, but going to represent the company and being on CNBC. And I have to say, in those 11 years, Larry grew remarkably. And I'd like to think, you know, he had somebody he could bounce stuff off of, which was me. So we were, we were, as I said earlier, simpatico. But it was getting Larry to say, you can do this. In fact, this is a hell of a lot easier than doing what you've been doing, which is making the trains run on time. You just got to find another guy like you to do that part of the job that you shouldn't be doing anymore.
- [41:07]
What was the toughest error during that tenure that you had to work through?
- [41:11]
I think when we bought Caremark before Tom had left, you know, it was a very competitive industry and they had some issues. And I think that we probably stayed with the Caremark team that was there a little bit too long. And, you know, we kind of got talked. Talked down a bit of a rabbit trail once we figured it out. And I think this was kind of during the transition with Tom and Larry. You know, we made changes and we went out and found basically the guy who invented the PBM business, a guy named Per Lofberg who had been at Medco. And he did a terrific job. He knew exactly what buttons to push making that critical, really knowledgeable hire who's done it before. And Pear being what I'd consider to be tax return, few words, Swedish guy, no bs. Let's get it done. It was a fabulous hire.
- [42:10]
And you've been on the Dell technologies board since 2016 and. And you've probably had a closer view of Michael Dell as a leader than almost anyone outside the company. What does he do better than any leader you've ever seen.
- [42:25]
This has been a remarkable 10 years, and you probably don't follow this closely, but Dell hit another all time high today. Stock's gone from when they took it private and then took it back out again. I'll get the numbers close, but something like 12 or 13 bucks a share to over 300 a share now. And that, by the way, doesn't count the fact that they owned 82% of VMware, which they spun off and then Avago bought in a massive transaction shortly after the spin for almost $100 billion. So the value creation around Dell in this 10 years has been remarkable. And I'd say that two things. Michael Dell had an intellectual soulmate and Egon Durbin from Silver Lake who sort of laid out if we go private, we sell assets, we use very low cost debt, we pay the debt back with cash flow, we go out and acquire other companies. They bought EMC to get VMware, they work together. And it took Michael being able to trust Egon and Egon to be right for this sort of magic to happen. During that time, Michael has looked for a longer term successor, which has been a struggle. How do you take a founder? I mean, he's 41 years in the business. From being a 20 year old making PCs in his dorm room at UT to a 61 year old guy worth, I don't know, somewhere north of $100 billion, who knows? I watched him. When the supply chain crisis happened and Dell had basically sourced chips and the end assembly of PCs in Shenzhen, China, there was almost like a Dell city that took each of these things, put it together, put it in a box, put it on a boat and shipped it to the US until one day with the pandemic and other issues, it stopped. And there was a lot of, I won't say panic, but there was a lot of concern. What the heck are we going to do? And Michael sat at the end of the table and he listened to everyone talk about this problem and that problem. We haven't figured it out. And he just said, okay, we're not doing this again. We're going to diversify our supply chain. Where can we move, what can we move and how quickly can we move it? And Dell sort of literally midstream, transformed, moved things to Vietnam, Malaysia built its first, which is kind of hard to believe being in Texas, their first factory in Mexico. And within two years they basically had completely de risked their China situation. And it was because he just said, we're going north. And everybody believed that if Michael said we're going north, north must be a good place to go. Let's go north.
- [45:27]
You know, I know this about you, Dave, because I've seen it up close. You're a deeply analytical leader. What's a moment when your instincts were screaming one direction and the data was telling you another?
- [45:39]
There are things that you want to be true and there are things that are true. And earlier we Talked about my AT&T experience, which was, God, I really don't want to give this job up. I love this job. It's, you know, it's what I was sort of trained for, but realizing I'm not going to come out of this, you know, running the company. You know, we're going to do a deal, someone's going to buy us and I'm going to be, you know, I'll go figure out what's next. And I had to make that decision pretty quickly in order to make it happen. In other words, I didn't have two years to think about this because it may have been too late. And we had had a very near miss with Bell south as an acquirer. And as you know, I grew up in Atlanta. For me, that would have been a really desirable outcome from a lot of different perspectives. I could have probably held out a little longer hoping that that transaction would work when in fact Southwestern Bell and Ed Whitaker were ready to go. And I didn't want to be the guy who basically 275,000, you know, AT&T employees and dependents said, that's a knucklehead that, you know, bankrupted our company or drove it into a ditch and, you know, cost us all our futures. That, that was not something I was willing to risk.
- [47:00]
We talked a little bit about AI earlier and you led a dot com company at one point and you lived through the dot com crash. How do you think the dot com revolution compares to what's going on with AI? The AI revolution right now?
- [47:16]
I think Chairman Greenspan called it rational exuberance. Talking about the market as a whole. The dot com bubble was characterized by a lot of the same things that we see today, but the bar has gotten higher. What I'm talking about is taking companies public. Back in 2000, you kind of maybe had a couple of quarters of positive revenue, but the bar was really low. And it was a form of financing sort of, I don't want to say greater fool theory per se. Let's just say you were taking advantage of a public who was willing to invest in speculative public companies, much less private companies. Today this is bigger dimensionally than the dot com bubble because the amount of real investment that is taking place is unprecedented. You know, hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars are being poured in the data centers with the idea build it and they will come. And the telecom part of dot com, we put fiber optic cable in the cities and between cities and the oceans and we deployed all this fiber and it made Lucent and Nortel. Each of those companies grew dramatically and were worth like a half a trillion dollars. Cisco was over half a trillion dollars. They were all part of that infrastructure bubble. Well, I would bring your attention that Nortel went bankrupt over 15 years ago. Now gone. It was sold for scrap and Lucent and Alcatel merged. I don't even know if they're still around. But the two leading infrastructure players of the time, gone. Cisco lived to fight another day because they had some other businesses. And I just noticed sent Chuck Robbins note about this. They are right at a trillion dollars of market cap now. They're maybe 920 billion or something. That's pretty remarkable to sort of have where. But it's been 20 years. I am sure there are going to be winners and they're going to be losers in this current battle. You know, how many LLMs do we need? How many data centers do we need? How many faster, smarter Nvidia GPU chips do we need? I don't know, but I have a feeling we're buying more right now than we're going to need for a while.
- [49:47]
How do you, what separate leaders who survive disruption from leaders who become a victim of it?
- [49:54]
I think sometimes you get so bought into a strategy and you're so trained to put on a positive face and be a exuberant leader and a effective cheerleader that you sometimes maybe get ahead of the situation. So I think you got to balance it. And I think some people, as you suggest, who get too far out there and don't come back, I mean, they're either embarrassed or in a state of shock. And so it's hard for them to sort of repot themselves and come back as a different person. I think the pragmatists are the ones that go, hmm, didn't get that right. What did I miss? Probably got out over my skis a little bit. I maybe have been better to go a little bit slower. I mean, I always remember from, you know, growing up, my mother used to say, measure twice, cut once. And, you know, the tendency for youthful people is. I know this, it's close enough. Cut right here. And I think there's a lot of cut right here going on right now because let's face it, you can throw a dart. I mean, I met a young guy in Palm beach about three months ago who was referred to me by a venture capitalist I have a lot of respect for. And he said, this guy's unbelievable. He's got a couple of master's degrees from Princeton. He's 28 years old. He's working on his Ph.D. in theoretical physics. He's brilliant. He's going to change the world. But I've convinced him that he should pursue his dream to start a company and pursue an AI application company. So, okay, all right, great. What makes him different? We sat down, we talked, and there were so many things I loved about this guy. He's saying, you know, these guys that have done anthropic are making all this money and building companies. I want to build a really durable, important company. I don't want to sell it. I want it to be successful. I said, oh, you want to be Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or Michael Dell? Well, not exactly. I'd say, well, they did. And in their cases, and Michael's 41 years at this, he's kind of the dean of that era, because Gates has gone off to do. I mean, Larry Ellison, I guess, is still sort of working, but. But I asked him to really think through. Everything's going right for you right now. You're raising money at ever increasing rates. You've got customer acceptance. People are. They're not just, you know, eating the dog food. They're ripping the dog food off the shelves and tearing the bags and eating it right in the store. They're just so enthusiastic about this guy's product. Where do you want to be in three years and five years? Who do you want to have around you, and what do you want people to say about you? And it was kind of like he hadn't really thought about any of that. And he was saying, well, don't I have time to do that later? Well, there may not be a later. You should think about it now. And I wasn't trying to, you know, burst his bubble, but I was just trying to say you got to be thoughtful and realistic about you've been given an incredible opportunity.
- [53:00]
Yeah. Questions that everybody should ask themselves, you know, when you're embarking on your career or you're trying to build a company, you know, this has been so much fun, David, and I want to have some more with my lightning round of questions. So are you ready for this?
- [53:11]
You bet.
- [53:12]
The three words that best describe you.
- [53:14]
Persistent, optimistic, and honest.
- [53:17]
If you could be one person for a day besides yourself, who would it be?
- [53:21]
Gee, I hate to say this, but probably Greg Maddox.
- [53:26]
Your biggest pet peeve.
- [53:28]
People who basically try to BS you and are BSing themselves.
- [53:33]
Who would play you in a movie?
- [53:35]
I'd like to say Tom Selleck, but probably not
- [53:40]
your most memorable round of golf from the past year.
- [53:43]
Well, I made six birdies in a round at Cypress Point. I shot 72. So, you know, there was some other mess along with those six birdies. But that was pretty good for me.
- [53:55]
Yeah, it's good for anybody. What's more motivating to you, the fear of failure or thrill of winning?
- [54:01]
I'd have to say at various times both, but I probably would say the thrill of winning is pretty important.
- [54:09]
What's something you've been curious about lately that has absolutely nothing to do with work or anything you're working on?
- [54:15]
I'm fascinated with the application of analytics to sports. You know, watching guys on the sidelines with iPads and they're looking at plays and the linebacker moved this way or a pitcher threw a curveball and, you know, bit. I mean, analytics is taking over sports. And it's just fascinating watching these, you know, giant men talk about blocking technique and they're, you know, the coaches say, here, this is what I want you to look at.
- [54:42]
The one thing you do just for you.
- [54:44]
I read a lot of stuff, you know, almost every day. I'm a consumer of information and I love the fact that it's getting more efficient.
- [54:57]
Besides your family and friends, what's your most prized possession?
- [55:01]
I just say health. If we don't have health, what do we got?
- [55:05]
If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear?
- [55:08]
Probably you would hear Yacht Rock radio on Sirius xm. Cause it sort of dates me into my past.
- [55:17]
What's something about you few people would know?
- [55:20]
I am the baby of two babies who are basically. My mother is a family of nine kids. My dad, 13 kids. They were the last on each side and then me. And I'm the youngest in my family, so I have a grand. My grandfather was born in 1860. Think about that. It seems impossible.
- [55:45]
It does. I am going to have to think about that one. What's one of your daily rituals? Something that you never miss?
- [55:52]
It's pretty boring, but I have to say, starting with that first cup of coffee and reading the Wall Street Journal online.
- [56:01]
All right, we're out of the lightning round. Good job. Now, you and your wife Susan have three kids, Lindsay, Andrew and Tyler. How have you thought about leading at home over the years? Dave and I know they're all out of the household now, but how did you think about that?
- [56:15]
I look back and say probably in things that I regret having not having more time at home. I was building my career. I traveled a lot. And I later realized what remarkable job Susan did with three kids by herself. A lot of the time I'm in Denver. I'm going here. I'm going to Louisville. I'm going over there. And I come home on Friday exhausted, and it was like, here, you take these three kids. But she didn't do that very often. I would say that being present and participating and realizing they just want you and they don't want you kind of half the time, or distracted. And I'm still distracted even today. But I try with my grandchildren to enjoy being with them and create environments where I can be with them because I want them to remember me. I want them to go, oh, yeah, we share a grandfather name, and I want him to remember Ogo. And, you know, where was he when I did stuff? And that. That would be, to me, an accomplishment.
- [57:20]
Absolutely. And, you know, you mentioned earlier that you really early on, you craved recognition. You've had enough success now that you don't need any kind of external validation. So what still drives you?
- [57:36]
I'd have to say making a difference now in people's lives. Being able to do things that can turn someone from despair or lack of hope or, you know, sort of a feeling of hopelessness, let's say, into saying, you know, with the right hand up. A lot of people, you know, it's not a handout, it's a hand up. But people can go on to accomplish really great things. To me, nothing would make me happier to find that person who just needs a break, who just needs a little bit of encouragement and make a difference in their lives.
- [58:11]
All right, last question here. Dave, what's the one piece of advice you'd give to anyone who wants to be a better leader?
- [58:17]
Be introspective. You know, learn from your own mistakes and recognize mistakes when they've made. And have a mentor, someone who is your advocate that you can go to when you got a tough situation, someone you can really trust.
- [58:35]
Well, Dave, as a good friend and as a great board member, you're a guy I could always trust and always count on. And you're a guy who walks the talk on that front. And I want to congratulate you on all the success that you've had and most important importantly, the difference you've made in so many people's lives. So good job, my friend.
- [58:56]
Thank you for having me, David.
- [59:03]
David Novak
Well, David, my phone decided to go to the graveyard last week. So I spent about two hours at the AT&T store last week getting this new cell phone. And I know that Dave's not the CEO of AT&T anymore, but I must say I had an excellent at the AT and T store on Gallatin Avenue in East Nashville. So, Kristin, if you're listening, thank you so much for helping me out. And I'm sure that a lot of what she's learned at her job at AT&T has come from Dave's leadership.
- [59:34]
David Dorman
Well, you know, Dave has taught a lot of people a lot about leadership and is one of the, you know, wisest counselors that I've ever had. He did a great job on. On the yum board. But as. As we just heard, you know, he's influenced a lot of CEOs and helped a lot of companies deal with a lot of tough issues. So there are a lot of leaders that are very thankful for Dave Dorman.
- [59:59]
David Novak
Well, David, as we do in every episode, we're gonna debrief some of the main themes that stood out from this conversation with David. The first one was actually really interesting. He talks about how his dream job was being the CEO of AT&T. So he gets his dream job. He gets into the job only to soon discover that there are certain realities in the business that meant he couldn't really run the strategy that he wanted to. So he has this big, exciting moment where he gets his dream job, and then he couldn't actually do what he wanted to do. If you have a big kind of professional, call it disappointment like that, how do you keep going without letting that affect the way you lead and hold you back?
- [60:41]
David Dorman
Well, I think that the first responsibility of every leader is to define reality. And I think Dave did a great job in this episode, really defining the reality that he faced at AT&T, which basically told him that he was not going to be able to take this company and put it into a massive growth mode, that he was going to have to find another option. But he dealt with that reality and came up with the best possible solution. And that's what I think leaders do. You know, sometimes people hang on to something because they finally got this big job that everybody wanted. You know, it takes a lot of humility to say, hey, I'm going to put the company ahead of myself. I'm going to do what's right for the company, what's right for all the people. And I think Dave has always done that in his career, and that's why I feel like he's respected so well.
- [61:40]
David Novak
It's so interesting to think about expectations versus reality. I heard someone say once that unspoken expectations are resentments in the making. And so there's a lot of work that you have to do, I think, in your own self awareness to deal with that gap between your current reality and what you thought the expectation was. And where I feel like I get stuck in my own life and where a lot of leaders get stuck is that they can't ever bridge that gap. They can't ever get over the fact that it's not what they expected it to be. And to your point, I think that one of the many reasons that David was so successful and is so successful is because he had the humility to bridge that gap and to realize that what he thought wasn't the case. And let's go in a different direction.
- [62:23]
David Dorman
I think it's important to have high expectations. It's important to do everything you can to make sure that you achieve those expectations and that you give it your all. But at times, you know, there are headwinds out there that force you to face the reality and come up with different solutions. And I think that's the best way to manage your expectations, is go after them with 1000% vigor and energy. But if you get new data or new learnings that tell you you got to take another path, then go down that path. And David did that.
- [63:07]
David Novak
The second concept that I want your take on David is this idea of being future minded. It's clear in this conversation that David is a big picture guy and he knows how to see around corners, really in all of the industries that he's worked in. But I think a lot of leaders struggle with this either because they're not wired that way, or maybe they just have too much on their plate to take the time and actually think about what's around the corner. So from your perspective, how do you develop that skill of being able to see the big picture and mine for what's coming next, the day you start
- [63:40]
David Dorman
working or the day you start learning in education, whatever level you're at, curiosity is it. You just gotta be curious. You have to be curious about what's going on around you. If you're going to see around corners, you got to be on top of what's happening in the world. And then do you know pattern recognition? I always talk about the importance of pattern thinking. If you see all these things happening that have some sort of convergence, there's some real meaning there. And if you can pick up those patterns early, you're going to be first in terms of seeing around the corner. So I would really, really encourage everybody just to be curious as hell. Read whatever you could read. You know, learn from whoever you can learn from, watch what's going on and then, and then figure out how you can get ahead of or at least be on Trend and hopefully ahead of it. You know, one of the things when I was in the marketing business that I did every week there was this trade publication. And, you know, many times there. There wasn't a whole lot of great things in it, but I read that cover to cover, you know, and then I always would ask myself, if this is going on in the world in marketing, you know, what should we be thinking about, you know, you know, where should we be headed? And that's just one example. But everybody has publications they can read, books they can read, people they can see that can help them open their eyes to the future.
- [65:28]
David Novak
It's interesting you say that it brings to mind the answer that a lot of folks we have on the show have to the lightning round question where you ask, what's one of your daily rituals, something that you never miss? And I would say probably, I don't know, ballpark, 70% of the folks answered that question with something like, I wake up in the morning, have my coffee, and I read the news, and they have certain publications that they read every single morning. And building that into your routine actually does give you that perspective. I recently started reading these two newsletters every morning from these branding experts that I follow on Substack. And it's totally different industries than what we're in. But I found that starting my day that way helps me look at the work that we're doing with a totally different perspective that's informed by what else is working for other people. And it seems so simple and almost like, silly a little bit. It's like, oh, I wake up in the morning and I have my coffee and I read the newspaper. But it really does work in terms of informing you about what's going on. It gets you out of your own way so that you can kind of stay relevant and current with what's working.
- [66:40]
David Dorman
Yeah, the simple things, the obvious things, sometimes are the best things. And being externally focused is critical. And what you're doing, I think, makes a heck of a lot of sense. So good on you.
- [66:56]
David Novak
Well, the last topic, David, that I know is near and dear to your heart is leadership development. In the episode, David says a bunch of times that the biggest mistake he sees companies make is that they treat leadership development just as lip service, and they don't actually create a structure to develop their top talent. So if someone is listening to the show, David, and they've been wanting to develop their top talent, but they haven't taken that step yet, what is the first thing that they should do? What should be their number One priority.
- [67:25]
David Dorman
Well, I think the number one priority must be to identify the talent. You might be running a small team, a small company, a huge company, but your job as a leader is to understand who you have working for you, who you can influence, and understand how much talent they have. And, you know, so if you find someone that really has a lot of talent, a lot of Runway, then you got to do everything you can to develop them and help them become the best that they. They can be. I came up in PepsiCo and then at Yum Brands, but, you know, one of the things that PepsiCo really started was the. They called their human resource planning process. And then I think we took it to the next level at Yum Brands, where we called it our people planning process. But we. We had a process where we reviewed our talent. You know, every year we identified our very high potential people, and then we made sure that we had action plans to help grow them. And. But we put process and discipline around. You know, one of the things we know great companies do and great leaders do is they put process and discipline around what really matters. So if developing leaders is important to you and is key to your success in the company, make sure you have a process and discipline around it that you can really, you know, put to work to make sure you develop your people.
- [68:56]
David Novak
It's interesting too, coming from David's perspective. You know, he sat on so many boards of some of the greatest companies in the world, and for him to say that that's a mistake that he sees most of these types of companies make is kind of shocking to me. But it's just kind of one of those things. I feel like, David, that kind of falls to the wayside if you don't put process and discipline around it. Because really all it is is time.
- [69:19]
David Dorman
The other thing too, Kula, is that it's not only just time, it's having high standards. So, you know, if you have mediocre talent, you will have a mediocre company. If you have high standards for the people that you have working in your company, and you make sure that the people are very talented and you develop them, you're going to have a great company. And that's just the way it works.
- [69:46]
David Novak
It reminds me, David, of something you talk a lot about, which is building an A team because A players want to play with other A players.
- [69:52]
David Dorman
Yeah. And A teams get a results, and that's the name of the game.
- [69:57]
David Novak
So, David, as we wrap this episode with David Dorman, what are the main things that you want our listeners to Walk away with thinking about, number one,
- [70:07]
David Dorman
you know, go after that dream, dream job, you know, I mean, you know, and then when you get that dream job, make it everything you can possibly be. But at the same time, you know, always be on the lookout for what reality is, because your job is to define reality. And sometimes things don't work out in that dream job that you have, and you have to pivot, but pivot because of the reality that you face and pivot because it's the right thing to do for the company and for the people that you have the privilege of leading. And make sure that you put yourself in the background there. You know, it's not about you, it's about others. And I think that's important. Number two, if you want to see around corners, be curious, develop your ways to be curious and identify the patterns that are going on in this world and then be on trend and hopefully get ahead of trend. And then the third thing is, if you want to develop leaders, identify the leaders you want to develop. Develop a plan for them, but have a process and put discipline around it to. To make sure that developing leaders is something that's really important and everybody on your team knows it, and everybody on your team is expected to develop leaders and people that are better than they
- [71:26]
David Novak
are and perhaps use this podcast as a tool to do so.
- [71:31]
David Dorman
Well, that's an option.
- [71:34]
David Novak
Well, David, that does it for another episode of How Leaders Lead. Thanks so much, and thank you to David Dorman for joining us for the show. Of course. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in to another episode of How Leaders Lead. Come back next Thursday and we will see you soon.