← Redefiners
Redefiners
AI or Die: A Conversation with Coveo Chairman and CEO Louis Têtu
00:42:02
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a key topic in C-suite and board room discussions these days; one with the potential to redefine or at least impact every aspect of business and society. Leaders around the world and across industries are racing to f...
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- [00:01]
Hoda Tahun
Call them change makers, call them rule breakers. We call them Redefiners.
- [00:06]
Clark Murphy
Join us in conversation with daring leaders who are creating extraordinary impact and driving change from around the globe.
- [00:13]
Hoda Tahun
Each episode gives you a fresh perspective on your leadership and career journey. I'm Hoda Tahun, a leadership advisor at Russell Reynolds.
- [00:21]
Clark Murphy
I'm Clark Murphy, the former Chief Executive officer and a leadership advisor. And this is is Redefiners.
- [00:29]
Hoda Tahun
Hi everyone and welcome back to Redefiners. I'm Hoda Tahun, a leadership advisor at Russell Reynolds Associates and I am here with my phenomenal co host, Simon Kingston.
- [00:39]
Simon Kingston
Hi, equally phenomenal Hoda, Great to be with you.
- [00:42]
Hoda Tahun
Before we get started, just a quick reminder to our listeners that you can find all episodes of Redefiners and the Leadership Lounge on YouTube. And if you're currently watching Redefiners on YouTube, please go ahead and hit that subscribe button below so that you don't miss an episode. And for our audio listeners, don't forget to rate Redefiners wherever you get your podcasts. We absolutely love to get your feedback. Simon Today's conversation focuses on a key topic that we've been covering that is the potential to continue to redefine, at least impact, every aspect of our lives, business and society. AI.
- [01:19]
Simon Kingston
Yes, Hoda, AI. It's a subject that must be on every leader's mind as they try and wrestle with the implementation of the technology, both to gain efficiencies, to enhance the quality of their business, and ultimately to grow revenues. A few leaders, I think it's fair to say, have jumped in with both feet and are making it work for them. But I think a greater number in the work that we've done are still working out what it means for them, testing and in the experimental phase and working out where they can get most bang for the buck.
- [01:52]
Hoda Tahun
And I think we saw a very similar adoption curve with the digital transformation about a decade ago, where some leaders quickly figured out the process and value of digital their businesses, while others were a bit stuck in maybe more traditional workflows and processes. Right. And I'm sure you've seen that with your clients. I certainly have seen quite a bit of that in the hospitality world with cruise and hotel companies that are perhaps figured out how to use the AI and the technology to scan through and scour through customer feedback forms. Or maybe others are still doing it the old fashioned way.
- [02:24]
Simon Kingston
Yeah, and we're seeing it in social impact too, where they're thinking both about the way in which they can achieve even better value for the scarce resources that they've got, but also thinking about the ethical dimensions of this, which loom large for quite a lot of social organizations.
- [02:38]
Hoda Tahun
Yeah, and I think we're going to dive in quite a bit today on the ethical piece. So today's guest can hopefully help us better understand how leaders can harness the power of AI in their business, especially when it comes to creating better experiences for their customers and employees.
- [02:52]
Simon Kingston
That's right, Hoda. Our guest today is a serial entrepreneur. He's led companies both in the digital transformation and now in AI led change. Louis Taitou is the chairman and CEO of Coveo, which is a global provider of artificial intelligence powered business solutions for e commerce, customer service and workplace applications. And before that, he co founded and served as chairman and CEO of Teleo, which delivers cloud software for talent and human capital management and was acquired by Oracle for 1.9 billion in 2012. Louis serves on the board of Alamentation Couchetard Inc. Which owns and operates 16,000 Couchettar and Circle K convenience stores in 26 countries across the world. And he also, as if that wasn't enough, sits on the board of Petal md, a leading cloud applications provider in the medical sector.
- [03:49]
Hoda Tahun
Louis, welcome to Redefiners.
- [03:51]
Louis Taitou
Thank you, Hoda. Thank you, Simon. Great to be with you today.
- [03:54]
Hoda Tahun
So, Louis, when most people think of AI companies, they typically think of the big tech hubs like Silicon Valley or Seattle in the United States. And your previous company, Taleo is based in San Francisco, but Coveyo is based in Quebec, Canada, which is quite a bit away from Silicon Valley. Do you see that as an advantage or a disadvantage being outside the typical tech hubs?
- [04:15]
Louis Taitou
Well, first of all, Taleo was founded also in Canada at a majority of of its 1500 employees in, in Canada. But if you look at whether it's Taleo or Coveyo today, you know, if you think about Coveo specifically, yes, we are a Canadian company, but we do 98% of our revenue outside of Canada. What I think is, is noteworthy here is that a lot of the AI you know, not all of it, but a lot of the A.I. you know, actually was invented in Canada. If you look at the recent Nobel Prize in Physics is Jeff Hinton from the University of Toronto and Yoshua Benjo in at the Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms was actually also nominated three years ago. And so there's a lot of AI talent here in the country. And more importantly is we've been, we've been in the application of AI in the case of Coveo since 2012. That's when we started adopting machine learning in our platforms, in our search platforms and personalization platforms for digital experiences. So this is where we do a lot of our research and development. We have close to 100 people working at Coveo. We are a Canadian public company, but again, we do it for large enterprises across the world. A lot of the brands, you know, Leo technology under the hood.
- [05:44]
Simon Kingston
So we have established that AI is really Canadian. Good.
- [05:50]
Louis Taitou
I did not quite say it exactly like that.
- [05:53]
Simon Kingston
Talking about you though, Louis. You've been a leader, a senior leader in the businesses that you've helped lead for quarter of a century. And on the face of it, you move into those leadership roles very quickly after graduation. Was there a moment that impelled you into that kind of leadership and defined you what we call on this podcast a redefiner moment for you that shaped who you became as a leader?
- [06:18]
Louis Taitou
I think the defining moment for me and might sound a bit like cliche, I was probably raised by a mom and dad who taught me at an early age that happiness is reality minus expectations when while frustration is probably expectations minus reality. And you know, I, I, I don't aspire as a leader as being a, a, a very notorious person or whatever. I really believe in the power of teams. And I know it's might be cliche to say that, but I do have a framework for who I surround myself with. I like grit, I like curiosity, I like rigorous and engagement. I think there are many things that we can do. I could be doing something else, but you know, I'm someone who's, who's been married 34 years and who's been pretty loyal to, to my partners over the years. And I really believe in the stick to it iveness of teams and you know, having a common mission and, and being very resilient. You know, most companies, most people are not resilient and I think we can take advantage of that as, as entrepreneurs be, be, always be the last one standing. So it's probably a combination of those moments and some, some core beliefs that took us to where we are. And then again, you tell me what, what the definition of success is. I'm still trying to find it.
- [07:50]
Simon Kingston
I think there's a wide body of thought that would suggest you're pretty successful. But what, what's intriguing in these conversations that Hoda and, and Clark and I have the privilege of having is how often leaders refer to their families, refer to that foundation years in terms of the values that, that help shape them. So it's interesting that you reach for.
- [08:09]
Louis Taitou
That so naturally I think fundamentally it starts with values. Just like when you build a business, business has a spine. A business has, yes, a mission and a vision, you know, vision and a mission. But fundamentally it is about creating a spinal system that people adhere to. In our case, I believe in three core fundamental values, which is everything in a business is designed to ensure that customers succeed every time. And I think that's the externally facing value without customers. Businesses are about revenues and customers. Everything else is a proxy to achieve that. And I think that's really, really fundamental. Customers must succeed. The second value to serve that is that you only earn trust when you deliver value. And then from an internal perspective, which applies both externally and externally and internally, you just tell, you just hire great people, I've mentioned that before, and you just tell them to do the right thing and help the team. You know, I always tell people, you know, if you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go far, you need a team. And in order to achieve that, you need to be always learning, always listening, you need to elevate others, embrace differences. Because if you bring people in a room that, you know, people talk about diversity these days. It's interesting, it's intriguing to me that you know, we've took diversity down to Excel metrics and all of that. Diversity should be a goal because only in diversity you find innovation. You don't find innovation and creativity and new solutions to problems by putting in the room people who think the same, look the same, act the same. It comes from human collision. So embracing others differences and really then it's about getting people to take ownership, getting things done and engaging and cultivating excellence. And if you just, you know, I've just described what 70% of my job is, the rest is talkative people like you.
- [10:28]
Simon Kingston
And you've given us a whole set of threads which are going to draw out over the course of the next 25 or 30 minutes. But just in terms of locating where you are now, you were right at the front, the forefront of the digital transformation when you co founded Teleo. That gives you an amazing ability to compare how leaders were prepared for that wave of technology driven change with how they are now as they face into AI. And you're obviously part of that with Caveo. But as you think about those two waves of change and transformation, how well prepared do you think leaders are for AI relative to how they were then?
- [11:08]
Louis Taitou
Not well, but more and more, I think, I think AI. First of all, AI is not new. I wasn't the founder, contrary to Taleo, where I was the co founder. I wasn't the founder of coveo, I was the angel investor. And when I was at Taleo, we were public on the NASDAQ back then and so on. So I was still there. And I met Laurent, my partner today, the founder of Coveo in 2008, who was a surge guy who was very strong in search and natural language processing and delivering large scale search experiences and so on. And in 2008 he told me, he said, look at this technology, it's called machine learning. And Netflix uses that and Amazon uses that and Wayfair uses that and they're going to revolutionize the furniture industry and so will Spotify and et cetera. Because, because that was the very defining technology that turned digital experiences from content centric to person centric. This is your Netflix experience, right? You know who's watching Is the first question. And once they know that they assemble content for you, you can search Meryl Streep. You don't need to because they do a better job, right? They knew the entire repertoire and so on. So it was really a revolution in that space. Our thesis in 2012 was that corporate, whether it's corporate America or the corporate world, would wake up within about five years and, and that by 2017, 18, every enterprise would adopt AI to deliver their digital experiences the same way Netflix does it for you. We were wrong. It took Chat GPT. If, if you look at the big picture, Chat GPT wasn't just the launch of generative AI. Of course it was. And, and it was a major event, took the world by storm, but it was way more than that. It literally woke up the world. It was the very defining galvanized moment where people woke up and said, well, wait a second, I can write a poem on my iPhone and, and, and I could get it to, you know, this is different, right? It's, it's a different paradigm. I don't think companies and it, it's, it's very, to this date, it's very intriguing to me if you think, think about the retail industry. They, they essentially witnessed Amazon using machine learning take over the world for 15 years. And honestly, they did nothing aside from a few, few larger retailers, Walmart did, etc, but you know, if you look across the board, the adoption of AI, albeit so logical in an area such as commerce, didn't, didn't hit the imagination. Now it, now it is, obviously, and it's going to revolutionize the world, the world of knowledge. I always say the, the transformation of technology over 30 years was about efficiency gains, using software to do faster, better, more systematic processes. Essentially what was, essentially what software was designed for. We build data models, we program rules on these data models. AI finds the rules. That's the different thing. And, and then suddenly now we're in the world of proficiency gains, not efficiency. So if you have 10,000 employees, what happens when every employee can handle 30% more complexity, 50% more of the time, 90% faster? That's what we're talking about. And so the world's going to be divided between the AI adopters and non AI adopters. And I always say AI or die. It's going to be the greatest competitive divide in business that we will have ever seen.
- [14:53]
Simon Kingston
Why did it take some people so long to spot that potential? And what can we learn from that delay, as it were, in advising leaders on how to respond?
- [15:03]
Louis Taitou
Now, I think in general, there's always a lag in, in technology adoption and look particularly in, in Canada, I would say, but also the fact that it was, it's hard. You know, a company like Covey built. We, we are, we built one single platform. Coveo is one big platform. We didn't do custom code that applies intelligence into digital experiences in commerce and customer service websites or workplace applications, but it's one single platform. But it took us 15 years to build all the indexing, the search, the semantic layer, the relevance layer, and now all the grounding and the generative AI path and so on. And now we're moving beyond that to being able, for instance, to optimize margins in real time and all of that. Back to your question, Simon. I think it's the obscure aspect of, of AI that probably people didn't grasp or most people didn't understand that the very experiences that as consumers we, we go through all day, every day, you know, from again, Netflix to Uber to are powered by AI. There are videos of Jeff Bezos talking about machine learning in 2006. But, you know, as I said earlier, it's very interesting that it took Chad GPT as the catalyst, but I guess now it went the other way. I think, I think it went, it went, you know, way beyond hype and, and I think we're entering in a way, a little bit of a phase of disillusionment as the dust settles. Typically reality stands and, and now you sort of realize that markets are, and, and people are far more educated because some of them tried and failed and experimented and, and so on. And so people are far more now knowledgeable about what it takes to make, make this all work properly and that that's obviously a big opportunity for applied AI companies with like Cavail and Louis.
- [17:17]
Hoda Tahun
On this topic of where the value is going to be created as companies and executive leadership teams and board directors are thinking about the next 10 years, what should they be thinking about and what advice would you give to leaders so that they don't maybe make mistakes that have been made over the last 10 years?
- [17:37]
Louis Taitou
The advice I would give is there are a number of known use cases in the area of digital experiences. You will not be able to compete in areas such as retail commerce, business to business commerce in areas such as customer service. When an advisor at a bank can ask a very complex question such as, you know, what are the, you know, for my client, what are the tax implications of a mortgage on a second home in Northern Wisconsin given the change of regulation by the city of XYZ and blah blah, blah, press return and get that answer. You know, that's, that's gamechanging and, and you cannot underestimate the human augmentation associated with, with that ability. Of course it, it's hard to do and companies like us know how to execute on that. But you, you should not underestimate the ability that this will create. Again, I come back to my previous statement. What happens when suddenly people online can handle 30 more, 30% more complexity, 50% more of the time, 90% faster? That's what we're talking about. It's the age of proficiency, not the age of efficiency again. And, and that's really, really, really profound. And so my, my, my advice is embrace it quickly.
- [19:06]
Hoda Tahun
And as a follow up to this, this part of the conversation, what about responsible AI and ethics? We would love your perspective on this piece. And what should leaders keep in mind around the ethical piece as it comes to AI?
- [19:19]
Louis Taitou
First of all, thou shalt not use third party data. You know, Netflix uses your data, you know, uses what you click on the trailers, you watch what you start watching, what you drop, what you browse and, and et cetera. And they use the sum total of all the other hundred millions users and et cetera. And that's where they find the patterns. Using machine learning to figure out, you know, what's going to, what, what you're going to enjoy next. But if you want to opt out, you opt out. So they're never going to go behind your back and et cetera. And so I think this is ethics and, and, and I think it's designed for people. So, and again, it uses data that you can control and you're you're agreeing to that. You know, people want that experience and so on. And that's a great use of technology. I think in this day and age, what people expect from companies is one very simple thing. Don't waste my time, because time is the most precious thing we all have. If they use technology to help me be more efficient with my time, I think I really appreciate that. If they do that now in a manner that if they try to do it to influence me in other ways or go figure out things that reach my privacy and et cetera, I think personally I'm violently against that.
- [20:46]
Simon Kingston
We'll be right back with Louis Taytu, but first we'll hear from Harpreet Khurana, our chief digital and Data analytics Officer. Harpreet will discuss why it's so important that organizations commit to using AI responsibly.
- [20:59]
Harpreet Khurana
It's clear that artificial intelligence offers amazing opportunities to innovate, yet it can introduce significant risks if left unchecked. That's why it's important for organizations to put proper safeguards for AI development and use. In fact, many will be legally required to do so through regulations like the EU AI Act. Yet our research reveals a concerning gap. Only 27% of leaders feel their organizations provide adequate guidance on ethical use of AI, and just 24% believe they have sufficient protections against AI misuse. So what's the solution, especially in an environment where the underlying technology is moving so quickly? One important first step is to develop and implement responsible AI principles that guide organizations on ethical uses of AI. At Russell Reynolds Associates, we've implemented six core principles grounded in a people first approach. What this means is that we want to ensure human oversight remains front and center in AI development, and we consistently look out for impacts of AI adoption on people. Want to learn more about our responsible AI principles and our people first approach? Check out the full details, including resources that you can use to create your organization's responsible AI initiatives in the show notes or visit russellreynolds.com now back to.
- [22:22]
Simon Kingston
Our conversation with Louis. Louis, let's talk about customer and employee experience. You've already mentioned the first of your values was to be dedicated to customer experience success. You'll know better than we do how fickle customers can be. One bad experience is enough to turn 50% of customers off straight away and onto other brands. The most recent polling that we've seen by Gallup suggests that employee engagement is low in the US and even lower internationally. So thinking about those two things, customer success and engagement and employee engagement, what for you are the great advantages, the great potentials of AI and gen AI and improving those results for companies.
- [23:13]
Louis Taitou
Right? AI has the power, and that's been demonstrated in spade, to essentially create experiences that are extremely individualized, that are prescriptive in nature. And now, thanks to generative AI advisory, what I mean by advisory is. Well, we understand personalization, but actually I, I often talk about individualization because Madison Avenue has been using personalization for more than two decades and, and it really meant Persona. What I mean here is moving from Persona to person. So if you have a million consumers, you should, you should run a million stores is what I'm saying. That's number one. AI has the power to drive prescriptive experiences. So not only catering to your needs, but anticipating, you know, what you might need and, and driving, you know, recommendations and, and et cetera, and, and, and really suggesting alternatives and, and et cetera, maybe just like Uber does and, and etc. And then AI has the power now to create advisory experiences, particularly generative AI. So you know, prior to generative AI, you could go online and say what is A, what is B, what is C? And get fairly profound content or, or knowledge or answers to, to that. Now with generative AI, you can go online and say what is the difference between A, B and C comma and given that my context is xyz, which one would you recommend? Now, if you turn it around on the business side, AI also has the ability not only to individualize experiences that are prescriptive and advisory, but it has the ability to do that in real time so as to maximize business outcomes in real time. So I can, for instance, not only give you what you want and predict what you will want and give you advice and a really rich experience, but I can do it in a way that perhaps you know, will, will maximize my margin for each and every consumer a million times a day. And that's the future of business. The future of business is a business of one is in. And the future of business is the ability to optimize, to maximize margins at every interaction. That's something that is not even humanly possible, which is why it's going to create such a competitive divide between the adopters and the non adopters.
- [25:57]
Hoda Tahun
Do you think that AI is owned by a specific leader in an organization?
- [26:03]
Louis Taitou
Every company needs to build the competence and the muscle. So you need a core competence, a core group of people. In my opinion, in every organization that understands AI, if only to understand where to apply it and how to prioritize and then how to manage Compliance costs, you know, you know, ROI and understand use cases and all of that. But other than that, I think, I think, I think it will permeate everyone, you know, who's responsible for the Internet today within companies? Is there a chief Internet officer?
- [26:38]
Hoda Tahun
Not to my knowledge.
- [26:40]
Louis Taitou
Not to my knowledge.
- [26:41]
Hoda Tahun
Yeah.
- [26:41]
Louis Taitou
If you look on the vendor side right now, every big vendor is trying to own AI, right? You know, my AI is salesforce. My AI is better than Microsoft and is better in my opinion. It's much more a spinal ability, you know, across. If you think about an enterprise, there are applications everywhere, there's data everywhere. And, and you need a spinal ability, in fact, both from a talent and a technology perspective to drive AI across your organization. And you just need people who understand the engineering side of things to understand, just like you have an engineering department that can understand how to apply physics principles and energy and electricity and all the rest. So AI is like electricity. What do you make of it? So that's how I would frame it, Louis.
- [27:34]
Simon Kingston
That's a very powerful account of what's going on. And the implication of most of our questions so far has been asking your view as an executive. But you've sat on multiple boards, you've moved from board into the executive role and back again. What for you makes a great board. How do you go about thinking about its composition and how to define its success?
- [27:57]
Louis Taitou
I love the question. I think boards are effective when, first of all, when they work together. And number two, when, when there's true synergy with, with the executive leadership team. And, and number three, when both teams agree on a common set of facts and the company strategy. When boards try to run the company or get, you know, forensic or, or think that they can show up every month or every quarter and understand as much as management does, that's when you start seeing problems. And I think it's really important for board members to understand that people think. And it goes with the general statement that I'm a firm believer with this as a preface, maybe that says what's dangerous is when you know enough about something to think you're right, but not quite enough to think you could be wrong. And I've seen board members behave that way because they understand 98%. And I didn't say 90. They understand 98% of the business. But you know what? Every business is built in the long tail, in the understanding of the last 2%. Everybody can grasp 98% of a business. If you're at it, the winning businesses understand the last 2%. I. I've I've believed that, you know, all through my career. I've seen that true excellence happens in the long tail. And it's, it's in the intricate moments that you win. It's in, you know, we talked about customer satisfaction. It's not about satisfying 90% of your customers actually in customer service. It's actually easy. People now talk about chatbots for AI and etc. And then the examples we see is, how do I change my password? Well, you know what? That's not where you make your money. Yeah, you make money. You don't. Your cost in customer service is not serving the first 90% of the questions. That's easy. Where you lose customers is in the long tail. It's in the complex situation. You need to be there for the tough circumstances, not for the easy ones that are high volume. 90% of your customer service cost is, is for less than 10% of the customers. The issues, actually, I would argue 95 and 5. You know, it's, it's the 5. But these 5% of customers are the ones giving you the most money. And they're also the ones that, you know, will give you the most, you know, effort, trouble. And, and, and they're the ones that will churn, you know, not the ones that you're, you're trying to answer with a chat bot. How do I change my password? That's, that's easy. And, and that's what, you know, more sophisticated companies understand. So back to the board. I think when board members really understand that, when board members are humble and they understand that, no, they probably don't know as much as management. I work for a board. Their prerogative is to fire me tomorrow. I've always, and you know what? I'm only as good as my last quarter anyway. So I'm not naive, but that's the way, you know, it works. So when you pick board members that are really work together as a team, are constructive and are humble and, and yet super competent, that have the background and, you know, the, the broad perspective and can work with management, that's where magic happens.
- [31:27]
Simon Kingston
And Lou, I mean, are those sorts of effective boards, are they born or are they made? By which I mean, do, do you see a kind of click early on of complimentary board skills and experience?
- [31:38]
Louis Taitou
Honestly, I've churned board members not because they were bad individuals, but because they weren't catalyst for the magic as a CEO. And maybe words are cheap, right? It's easy to say, but I generally feel that way. I don't look For a board that necessarily agrees with me or won't ask challenging questions because I want to be the first one to add ask the challenging questions and I welcome them. But again, it always has to be constructive because we're in this together.
- [32:06]
Hoda Tahun
You've led three companies to either acquisitions or ipo. You were president CEO of Berklan Group which was acquired by Ben in the 90s. You went on to co found Taleo, which was acquired by Oracle. And then you grew Caveo and took it public in in 2021. Very impressive track record. For those listening, what advice or guidance would you give other leaders who are aspiring for similar success?
- [32:33]
Louis Taitou
Business is challenging and if it's not challenging all day, every day, if it were easy, others would do it. But you have to make the difference between unpleasant and difficult. Right? And you just have to, as I said earlier, I believe in the word stick to itiveness or resilience or persistence, but not in a naive way. I really believe in the power of analysis. I coach businesses and I coach entrepreneurs and I find a lot of businesses, a lot of entrepreneurs, they tend to drink their own Kool Aid sometimes without proper analysis. I will say as a matter of background, I grew up as a commercial pilot. I learned the difference between taking risks versus taking chances. Yes, you take risks. You know, my engine, I can get a flame out on a turbine, you know, at 10,000ft or whatever, but I can manage that risk. But we, I don't take chances. You know, we have checklists and we do our analysis of pre flight and, and all of that. It's much easier to spend more time planning than, you know, trying to plan during the execution. And I always think that if you don't know where you're going, there will be a lot of people along the way to tell you. So this is sort of some of the principles, but also the great is the enemy of the good. It's not about being good enough. You just need to be more agile and make mistakes fast. It's okay to fail as long as you fail fast is what we tell our employees and that I tell entrepreneurs as well. So lots of analysis, not analysis paralysis, you know, do it and do deep analysis fast. So the cycle time should be short. It doesn't mean that you're not going to go deep and then, and then act and try, experiment and put the customer at the center, just, just talk, listen to customers. They will tell you a lot.
- [34:42]
Hoda Tahun
Oh, they absolutely will, Louis.
- [34:44]
Simon Kingston
We've reached the bit of the conversation which we call the rapid fire section. So we're going to ask you a series of questions so that our listeners get to know you even better. And your job is simply to answer them as quickly as you possibly can. Are you ready?
- [34:59]
Louis Taitou
I guess I have to be.
- [35:02]
Simon Kingston
Besides mail, phone and calendar, what are the three apps on your smartphone that you can't live without?
- [35:11]
Louis Taitou
Perplexity. Slack. I love Slack. And how about my card game?
- [35:19]
Hoda Tahun
Louis, who is a mentor that had the biggest impact on you?
- [35:23]
Louis Taitou
Oh, I've had, I've had several, all the way back to when we took Bond public and et cetera, to work with executives, you know, from large tech companies. So I won't name a specific person, but I will just say that people who have lived the most intricate moments, to me are the most helpful and the most intriguing, and I value that a lot. And, you know, one common characteristic between all of them is they're all very genuine individuals. That's probably the quality I admire the most.
- [36:00]
Simon Kingston
Do you like to focus on the journey or the destination?
- [36:04]
Louis Taitou
Oh, definitely the journey. I think. I think most people focused on the destination, unfortunately, I find, and the journey is the rewarding part. I've had the opportunity to exit my first public company at age 33. And most entrepreneurs that I know that have exited businesses, you know, talk much more about the journey than they talk about that destination. When you're 33, actually, there are not a lot of people to play with on Wednesday morning, so. But there's so much about keeping you alive. Right. And in, you know, building and being challenged, competing in a good way. Right. You know, why do we comp? Well, because it keeps you alert, it keeps you engaged, it keeps you innovating. Those are all themes that pertain to the journey. Right. You know, what else would we do, right, if we didn't, if we weren't engaged and doing something. And yes, being challenged every day, that's life. So I think that's 100% the journey.
- [37:16]
Hoda Tahun
Louis, what's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?
- [37:19]
Louis Taitou
I really remembered at one point, one of my mentors actually said, he said, you know, the one place in the world where businesses work super well all the time is in Excel. And he went on to say, there are more fiction that have been written in Excel than in Word. I really remember that because business is about adapting every day and changing and innovating and delivering value and so on. If I had my druthers, we wouldn't make annual plans, we would have three year plans and quarterly plans. And I think it's Amazing how things change when you think long term.
- [38:01]
Simon Kingston
What's your favorite way to decompress after a long day at work?
- [38:04]
Louis Taitou
Hiking, skiing, flying and maybe a bit of wine.
- [38:10]
Hoda Tahun
And you mentioned that you are a licensed helicopter pilot. Where is the most interesting or unusual place that you have flown to?
- [38:20]
Louis Taitou
From Montreal to Northern Quebec. If you think about the territory of Quebec, there's only, you know, seven and a half million people from Montreal to Northern Quebec, to north of the Bay of Angela is further than to go from here to Florida. Flew to a place named the Torn Gap Mountains, but all through northern Ontario, north of Algonquin park. And we actually went canoeing in the Arctic three years, three years ago, which was quite interesting as well. So there's some, there's some fairly pretty scene scenery.
- [38:59]
Hoda Tahun
Oh, I'm sure it's beautiful.
- [39:01]
Simon Kingston
And because our listeners are going to be enjoying this episode early in 2025, do you have any New Year's resolutions you're willing to share with us?
- [39:11]
Louis Taitou
Oh my God. My New Year's resolution would be that I don't know that it's achievable but would be to broaden everyone's perspective on the world in general. And I wish we didn't see the polarization and narrowing of perspectives that we're seeing right now. The world's becoming, you know, very polarized. I think technology is, is a culprit. But my wish would be that people look at the world and with a much more multi dimension and broader perspective and I think it would make the world better.
- [39:56]
Simon Kingston
Louis, that was a fantastic tour de raison of a very successful career, but also a very interesting mix of reflections on what your successes consisted in. That defining moment early on was really interesting, rooted in relationship and that stick to it iveness that you referred to both in the teams around you in executive groups, but also in the boards that you've been part of and helped to shape. The grit, the curiosity, the rigor that ran as a thread through a lot of what you said, the focus on customer success, the understanding of that as a value as well as a set of technology enabled capabilities was extraordinarily strong. And the challenge that you posed to people in almost every sector where customers can engage with 30% more complexity, 50% more of the time, 90% faster. That's an incredible thing to absorb on ethics. Thou shalt not use third party data is a rule that I think lots of us could reflect on. Don't waste my time as the focus of customer need and a real understanding of that need as a leader to take risks, but not chances. And last but not least, AI tastes of maple syrup.
- [41:16]
Hoda Tahun
Louis, thank you so much for the wonderful insights and the incredible knowledge that you've shared with us. We've so much enjoyed having you on Redefiners. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [41:27]
Louis Taitou
Well, thank you, Hoda. Thank you, Simon. It's been a very pleasant conversation.
- [41:34]
Hoda Tahun
Thanks for joining us on this episode of Redefiners. For more compelling insights from leaders across industries and around the world, listen to Redefiners wherever you get your podcasts.
- [41:45]
Clark Murphy
And to learn more or to get in contact with us, visit our website@russellreynolds.com, find us on LinkedIn, and follow us on X, formerly known as Twitter raonLeadership.