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Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation.
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They said yes.
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And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two year contracts, they said, what the are you talking about, you insane Hollywood?
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So to recap, we're cutting the price.
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Of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 upfront.
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Payment equivalent to $15 per month New customers on first three month plan only.
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Taxes and fees extra speed slower above 40 gigabytes ET details 1 January gym chaos is real, but your fitness goals don't have to suffer for it. Skip the crowded gyms and embrace a better way to get fit in 2025. Bring an uninterrupted low impact full body workout into the comfort of your home with the Hydro Rower. Designed by rowers and led by Olympians, hydrow offers the largest library of immersive rowing workouts filmed in stunning outdoor locations. Kick off the new year with a full body workout all from the comfort of your home with Hydro. Head over to hydrow.com and code TED to save up to $475 off your Hydro Pro rower. That's H Y--R-O-W.com code TED to save up to $475. Hydro.com code TED folks, we're back in the bottom of the six. Lorenzo's on the mound. His slider's been. Wait, is that a cat on the field? That tabby's really moving. He's past second base and Coach Bakerfield's making a grab and oh, he missed in. Incredible. Someone give that cat a contract. But folks, even this incredible cat can't sign up for Lemonade Pet Insurance. But you can cover your pet now@lemonade.com incredible hey, Ted talks daily listeners. I'm Elise Hu. Today we have an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective handpicked by us for you. Could kindness and a little math be all it takes to save a company impact? Investor professor and author James Reese certainly thinks so. In this episode of Fixable, James sits down with Anne and Frances to chat about the importance of deep mutual respect in the workplace and why acting with grace, even in the toughest times, can lead to unprecedented success for teams, people and businesses. You can find more episodes of Fixable with Anne Morris and Frances Frey wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com hi, everyone. Welcome back to Fixable. I'm your host, Dan Morris. And I'm your co host, Frances Fry. Frances, Today we're doing another fantastic master fixer episode. We'll be talking to James Re, a professor of entrepreneurship at Howard University and MIT Sloan. He's also an entrepreneur, an impact investor, an incredibly effective change leader, and he's the author of Red Helicopter, a parable for our times. Lead Change with kindness and a little math. Change with kindness and math. Thank you. Yeah. Your two favorite things. When I saw the title of the book, I knew we needed to have him on the show. He showed up on everyone's radar about a decade ago when he became the improbable turnaround CEO at Ashley Stewart, a company that's primarily serving black moderate income plus size women. I'm just. I've seen his picture. Yeah. He wasn't an obvious fit for the gig when he took it. He was a slim, well paid, Korean American private equity investor who, by the way, had never been a CEO before. And he pulled off this spectacular turnaround in part by building a culture of kindness at the company and. And pursuing a strategy based on deep respect for his customers. And what I love about it is you don't have to be the customer to have deep respect for the customer. I think we're all gonna learn a lot. Yeah. It's such a cool story. And today we wanna talk with James about how he did it, the lesson he's taking from this experience and his current mission to bring more kindness and more humanity to the rest of the business sector. Let's go, James Re. Welcome to Fixable.
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Thank you. Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this.
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So have we. I don't think we've ever liked someone so much before we've actually met them.
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Oh, no.
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So thank you for that human experience.
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The expectations are very high.
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Nowhere to go but down. James, don't fuck this up.
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I won't. No, I'm sweating bullets.
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In the intro, which you didn't hear, we described your mission as bringing more kindness and humanity to business. Is that how you think about it?
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I think I'm trying to bring more kindness and humanity to life. And work is such an important part of having fulfillment as a human being, so why not at work too? And so many of the things that we live in, systems we live in, they're so arbitrary. Right. So I'm just asking people, what do you think if there was a way to live more like the way that you want to live in your workplace, too. And it was, quote, productive and, quote, efficient and, quote, profitable. Like, what do you think? Would you try? And so that's sort of the nature of the book, but it's mostly focused on a life.
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Mm. We write books also and think a lot about words. It seems like there are kind of a lot of words that we could use to describe what you're getting at. I'm curious about how you settled on the word kindness as a focus.
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Yeah. It was not planned 10 years ago, and I mentioned in the book that it came out of my gut soul place. I don't know where it came from, but it was in a time of chaos and the most bleak moment. And I hadn't used that word since I don't even remember when. And I said it. I said kindness in math. And I think that in retrospect, I came up with those two words because those were words that they're almost. They're incontrovertible, they are highly intuitive, and they're much more part of the natural order, like physics, music. And then in Korean, there's another word called chung, which is a feeling of connectedness that can be good or bad. And in the TED talk, I talked goodwill. That's the closest English word for it. But the way I would describe it is the movie scene. For those of you who love It's a Wonderful Life, it's the end of that movie that Mary was able to show George. Look at all of this goodwill or chung you've created in your life. And I think it's a concept that's going to be increasingly important over the next 10 to 50 years as we hyper rationalize and we're just in a 01 type game. And I think chung and kindness, these are twos.
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Yeah, you sometimes use the word freedom too, is the goal here. Where does freedom fit into your story?
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I think freedom is not what we are portraying it to be in media, that it's this hyper solo activity where you can do anything you want. I think freedom, properly defined, really comes hand in hand with mutualism and accountability in a circuitous way. I think freedom is really an understanding of your basic concept of self agency.
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Yeah.
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You know that it's internal motivation, it's intrinsic motivation, that you really are on a path where you understand who you are, who you want to be, who makes that path better for you, easier for you, and that you sort of like come up with your own life, money, joy equation, and you do your best to do that. That, to me, is freedom.
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A
Yeah, it feels like a very powerful theme in your story. So we would love to get into what you did at Ashley Stewart to change this company's destiny in really record time just to set the scene here. Can you give us a sense of the before and after?
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Yeah, I was 40s, early 40s private equity, Boston guy. And there was a company called Ashley Stewart. It's on the surface diametrically opposite of me. And you know, and the company had sort of been bereft of funds for 20 something years. Right. Had a lot of operating losses. There was a lot of like weird stuff going on in the company, couldn't attract the best talent. Money getting siphoned away, heading to its second bankruptcy in three years, no goodwill, six weeks from liquidation. That's the status. I had no wi fi, there was no connections on Wall Street. It was going, and it was going to die a quiet death because they also didn't have a lot of clout with the media. There weren't going to be any like uproar about save the company. And that's the before. Right. And it didn't sit well with me. And so metaphorically you can imagine they were servicing and employing plus size black women, moderate income. So when you gather them in an entity, it's, you can imagine how the systems treated the entity.
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Right.
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And I was a sort of like reflective law school, public defender, private equity guy who used to teach high school, who cared very deeply about people looking at these women and, and seeing my mother. And so I went for six months. It was supposed to be six months. It ended up being seven years. Then the after is that company went from being worth its inventory, which was like 10, 12 million bucks, to a solid nine figure valuation. Realized cash. Company never made money. We made more money in our first year than I paid for the assets. I mean it was shocking. But I think as you all, you both are experts at this, for the people in the car doing it with me, there was no shock. That's the before and after. And I think these, most people didn't know what we had done for a long time because we didn't really want to talk about it. Like we were really happy like just being and enjoying each other's company. But now it's coming out because people are like, oh, the world is starting to hit what I was. Loneliness and you know, different convergence of alliances of people and sort of combining eastern and western philosophies and like, I think that's why there's interest now in the story.
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Yeah, I see it as a very positive indicator that the world is very interested in what happened here. So in the beginning, you started out going more slowly than your private equity colleagues would have advised you to go. What did you learn from the choices you made in those early weeks and months?
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I was creating situations that were cognitive, dissonant for people where I had no office. You know, and I kept explaining, and some people give it lip service, but it was really just operationally made this way that the people on the front lines were much more important than anyone in the home office. And so I spent most of my time actually out in the field. I was hanging jewelry in stores. Yeah. Learning about peplum and, like, shark bites and just talking to the customers and getting to know the women who had been there for so long. And I asked him. I sort of pleaded with them. I was like, just teach me, like, tell me what's wrong. And you have to picture a group of frontline workers in retail, and then you add gender and race. They were nervous at first to really tell me the truth. Even though they trusted me, it took time for them to feel it. Right. And I kept coming back and test it. Yeah. You know, and then I got very personal. I just said, you know, you do remind me of my. My mom. I told the story about the Korean grocery store to them, where my mom acted so differently outside of our house other than when she was in a comfortable place like the Korean grocery store once a year. And I could see it in her whole compartment. And I said, I see the same thing that happens to women when you interact with them. How beautiful.
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You defined it as a safe place and that you were fundamentally in the.
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Business of safety, safety and fellowship. And I was a beneficiary of that safe place, too. They had every right to sort of laugh at me and to, like, not trust me, but they really gave me a chance. But that's the basis of real friendship. And so they. They gifted me that.
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And it's beautiful. You mentioned your TED Talk, which everyone should watch, and in it, you lay out a few pillars of your turnaround strategy, and I'd love to just go through those one by one. You talked about creating this culture of kindness, and in our experience, cultures, it's such a big part of change leadership, and it can be also hard for people to get their heads around. What are the actual levers of culture change. So what did you do to change the culture of this organization that you think was most impactful?
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Well, some of the things we talked about, it was those things, but it was really getting to the heart of it was defining kindness correctly, but not just through PowerPoint. It was through words and ultimately through organizational realignment. Fundamentally, people were taught that to be successful here and in life, they had to learn the definition of how kindness relates to agency. That kindness to me is really an investment in someone else's agency. The ability to sort of be self informed about decisions. Informed, right. But not perfect to try to find help someone find their freedom without asking for a payment. It's not transactional, but it is an investment in them. It's an investment in a system. It is an investment. So it was really sort of getting people to understand kindness. Ultimate investment in agency. So from a physical standpoint, all the trappings of hierarchy were eliminated. No job titles, no, like fancy offices, pecking order on offices. I think I joke in the book. I was driving a beat up, like Nissan Altima and they kept saying, drive a nicer car. I'm like, no, that's like, why would I need that? They were not laptops like people in the meetings. They were very few meetings you would see. There was a Monday morning meeting that I think Bezos, I didn't do this, but remember he has this thing where he set up meetings and no one had computers. He had to write an essay. So it was almost like running a humanities class where people were asked to have done all their work and to be able to speak to it. So people used to laugh and say, we feel like we're at school. And I'm like, you are. I'm learning. And so these are the things people laughed. There was so much self deprecation. There were ridiculous things like spontaneous karaoke where the worst people would sing and people would be like, oh, interesting. Like it was, we filmed ourselves and then put it out into marketing to save money, but also to show people that this was so people felt very safe in that way too. Like self deprecation, laughter, tears were part of the mix. I did not ask people to be humanoids.
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A
And in kind of one example of a mindset shift, you started to think about payroll as an investment, which was not very private equity of you, James.
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No. Well, I think the way that numbers are organized on a spreadsheet is how you categorize them. So sales first is the first thing you see. Cost of goods sold. Got it. Gross margin, you know, and then expenses, marketing, rent, labor. And so I kept saying to people, pull labor out of that spreadsheet. Because this labor, it's you. It's the people sitting next to you.
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It's a beautiful example of math versus accounting. Yeah.
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And so, like, can you solve for net income before labor? And so you solve for that, then you're like, oh. And so people who are less accounting or finance oriented, I would sort of say it this way. I'd say, check this out. When I was growing up, little James wanted to play Little League, But Jennifer, my little sister, she wanted to do ballet. And there was enough money for a new baseball glove or Jennifer's ballet shoes. Jennifer got her ballet shoes. James didn't play baseball. And as a family, we made that decision. And there was a little bit of pouting on my part, but I got over it because that was best for the family. And so when you pull labor out like this, I kept saying to everyone, I was like, why are you treating the landlords or our social media consultants or whatever the same as your colleague? Like, shouldn't we create a system where we maximize like a country would like our inflows. Let's keep as much of the inflows for us. A lot of the things we did, they were so simple.
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But what does that practically mean? Like, if I wanted to leave and I wanted to run my business there because I need to know how much money I'm going to have at the end of the day, and I did have to spend money on labor. So by highlighting that net income before labor, you're essentially saying, let's look at our profit and let's not concern ourselves with the labor cost. It seems symbolic to me, but I'd love to hear you pragmatically. If I adopt that mindset, how would you guide me?
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Yeah. So, number one, you are right. Much of the book and how I wrote it and what happened at Ashley and a lot of the brands I'm a part of, it is a. It's a mindset first. Right. It's like a mental model saying, oh, it's possible to do it a different way. So doing a little bit of that type of manipulation of spreadsheets and pulling things out, it reminds people to just think differently. Right. To say, okay, I'm being primed to think a certain way. I should not be so hasty in this. So the second thing is that I watched and I expected people to want to know how the company actually made money. I'm like, you're opining on things in your, quote, department, but you don't know the impact this has on these four other parts of the general ledger. Do you want to know? And so that was number two. And so that people were Compelled to learn about how to build a business.
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From scratch, about the physics of the organization. On this tactical front, I think the, the third pillar of your strategy that I think was really interesting, you changed the way you worked with your customers and the role they played in the business.
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Yes, it dovetails nicely with Francis statement. It's like with labor. I said, okay, our customers, if they are huge net advocates for us. I think our NPS score, I think McKinsey did the study. I think it went from like 37 to 90 in like two years. It's the highest NPS score. That's so awesome they've ever seen. But I just said, well, why do you look at the customer? Don't we want them effectively, synthetically to be working for us? So it's basically creating leverage. In your, quote, labor account, it's zero expense. It's actually contra expense. Don't treat them like just customers. What happens if they were colleagues? Like, what would you do? And so it's expanding that definition. And then I think the other thing we did well once, so people understood the business, sort of laughed and said, oh, labor is us. I actually had very detailed conversations with them about the meaning of words like, what does compensation mean? And I was honest with them. And I said, I can't, quote, compensate you in hard dollars, narrowly defined. As much as I want to. It's just I can. And by the way, I also understand if at some point you want to leave and go in a better industry, based on the teachings that I'm doing every Friday, I will be the first one to do that. I'm like, that's good. So the compensation on things like this was like, it's cash. It's also like, I focus so much on like the health plan, which was one of the worst. We had a gold standard health plan. We made it a point to afford it. It was really important to them, the flexibility, the leave policies. We changed. We tried to incentivize if you wanted to start a family. I counted babies because the whole get back to the mind, I love that.
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As an indicator of a healthy organization, the number of babies.
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And people laughed. And I was at J.P. morgan's, they laughed and it was like 50. And I just said, well. And then they got very serious about it. They're like, you're right. Because think about, you have to do 20, 30 changes at the same time to solve for that problem. And so it gets back to the compensation. Here's some more practical things. One, people worked like more joyfully. You can imagine we had very little expense in terms of recruiting and retention. People stayed. I taught them, which was a free investment from James's time, that they got better. Like they had better agency, they were more informed. It was an investment in that public good. The workers compensation expenses, insurance went down so much that. And I labeled this, I said, this savings and insurance is not mana from the heavens. This is our collective action asset. And I paid it out in the form of synthetic dividends. Because when I gave raises, I said, it's coming from this pool of money that we earn together.
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Beautiful. That's really nice.
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Right? And so everyone was a quote, equity owner in the company and everyone in that business felt. And then economically were treated in certain ways as an owner. Like they owned their mutual behavior. And this is how they. That reward behavior. Reward it was linked to mutualism. So that was one example. And then I mean, the other example in terms of just the math. In terms of math being kind. After I got more familiar with fashion and things like this. And then you have basics that are slower turning. And then fashion items get higher margin, higher risk. And so after I understood the product flow, I ran the inventory. We created algorithms, like a hedge fund. Like, ultimately we can sell the bra or the basic turtleneck, the basic cami, the basic jean, like the regular cut. Hey, one day it will sell. So it's like a lower risk financial instrument, like a bond, little upside, but you get your money back and you get a quote coupon. And in this case, the coupon is called the gross profit on the bra or gross profit on the jeans. And then I said, wait, that's kind of boring. You can't have a diversified portfolio with just bonds. So we need some equity. And so there would be certain fashion pieces that were fashionable that would go out of style in six weeks. Right. And so I just said, oh, like let's have this. It's higher risk. That means we have to turn with the. Sell it faster. The margin should be higher the dollars for the amount of risk we're taking. And then there were certain fashion items. They were super risky. Like the. That's the equivalent of like buying e liquid real estate in like Argentina. Right. Just like venture. A venture investment that could be zero. And you. And you expect a lot of them to be zero. So this would be like the like leather pencil skirt that you're buying.
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Like, it could go viral. Yeah, it could be a meme stock.
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Or it could be really ugly and no one buys it. Right. And so the whole inventory flow, I set it up as if it were a set of financial instruments instead of it being fashion.
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Oh, so good.
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And then I explained it, though. Here's the fun part. You have to picture the buyers and the merchants. You know, the first time I said it, I. I was like, well, this is what it's going to be like. And they're looking at me like, oh, geez. But, you know, I think I'm a decent teacher. Like, I think in my nature, I am a teacher. So I find ridiculous ways to teach things. And I just said at the end, do you see what this is? It is kind. I want you to have so much freedom and agency. Go do your job. No one's gonna be mad at you. You. You can't blow up the company if you buy the ugly prom dress that no one buys. Mathematically, you cannot blow up this company.
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It's such a beautiful way to empower people, right?
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And. But then they understood it and they laughed. I think a lot of times leaders or companies, particularly in finance or like esoteric things make people feel small or stupid. I think knowledge is. Should be democratic. And if you can't teach it in a way that people can understand, then you're not a very good leader or you're just arrogant. And I think ultimately it hurts your enterprise. But two of the things I was most proud of when people talked to me about kindness and about math were those two examples was workers comp actuarial leading that to compensation, creating even better behavior. And the second thing was this hedge fund inventory. Like turtlenecks.
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A
So cool.
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It mathematically creates an environment that is kind.
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A
It's such a cool example. Well, James, we could talk to you forever. And I know we're running up against time. Fast forward to now. And you want to make these ideas contagious. What's one or two things you hope that people take away from this conversation?
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It's social compact, but I'm writing about and saying, can we be kind? Can we be mathematically honest? And those are table stakes. And I hope that your listeners realize that, like, it's like, unlikely. This company was dead and it was a Korean guy with no experience doing this. Predominantly all black women. Ultimately, a lot of white women came and Asian women came too, and it didn't. Money was like the third or fourth form of capital we had to use.
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That's the lesson. That's the lesson.
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Money amplifies things. And so we started, it was starting off with humanities, civics, science, and then bringing in business know how to amplify those things. And I Think that's what we need.
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A
Beautiful. It's such a privilege to meet you and we're so grateful for your time and energy and example in the world. You're, you're awesome.
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B
I feel the same way. I thank you so much for having me.
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A
Francis, what do you hope listeners take away from this conversation? So I'll A couple of things. One is this was a, you know, how do you lead change through culture? And what we know about culture is that there are the physical artifacts in an organization, there are the shared behaviors in an organization, and then there are the mental models. And the great teaching of culture is that if you want to change behavior, you have to change how people think. That is exactly what James Reid is on the planet to do. He showed you can do it in an organization, you can do it in an organization under tough times with six weeks to go. If you innovate, influence how people think, they will reliably behave differently. And if he went in and commanded people to behave differently, it would never have worked. And this was one of the great Edgar Shine's insight. And so this to me was, I get why it worked. If you want to get people to change their behaviors, don't command them to behave differently. Influence how they think so that they will reliably behave differently. That's the first thing I have. And the second thing I have is that kindness and math, I mean that net income after labor, that is such a beautiful mental model because we have like net income before depreciation, like we have it before all of these, like all of these other things. But to do it from a human centered approach, bringing kindness and math together, I really loved it. And my third thought is kindness isn't lowering the bar. Kindness is actually raising the bar, but giving you the agency to reach it. And I loved that as well. Yeah, it's such a powerful example. You know, we talked about language in this conversation and it's almost as if you can't really find the words, you know, like mindset seems like it doesn't do it justice. Even culture doesn't. It's like the disposition, core basic assumptions we make as human beings. When you shift those, anything is possible, you get what, and it's possible to shift them on a systems level. And I think that's the core assumption of the work we've always done. But it was, I don't know, there was something so humbling about it being brought to life in such a powerful example. And, you know, you get why Edgar Scheind originally talked about the Shared basic assumptions. I think he would have said the shared core basic assumptions. Yeah, no, you're right. It's like that word, the word basic. Yeah. It's so important. Really lands with this story. I also think that the piece that I really think about with this example is the power of respect. The respect that he brought to his employees, their potential, his customers. I mean, the. Again, it's a word that doesn't really, really do it justice. But when that becomes part one of the shared basic assumptions that that's what we're all doing here, it's just. It's part of that emotional foundation. And dignity came to mind for me because there's so much dignity in being useful. Like, I bet the employees were wildly more useful to the organization three days after he started than they were for years before because they didn't know how to be useful. And there is so much dignity in being able to contribute. And so I'm so in for all of it, and I can't wait to read more. The next book I read is gonna be the Red Helicopter. Yes. Hear, hear. I think that is everybody's homework. Everybody's homework is to read the Red Helicopter and let's go and bring kindness and math to the world. All right, let's do it. Thanks, everyone, for listening to this conversation. We want to hear from you, too. If you want to figure out a workplace problem together in the collective as part of our shared humanity, send us a message, email us, call us, text us. You can email us@fixableed.com or call or text at 234- FIXABLE. That's 234-349-2253. Fixable is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me, Anne Morris, and me, Frances Fry. Our team includes Izzy Carter, Constanza Gallardo, Banban Chang, Michelle Quint, Corey Hajim, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Hylash. This episode was mixed by Louis at Storyyard. If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and tell a friend to check us out.
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B
Dear Toyota, I need a word with you about your Crown family. Suddenly I love traffic. Rush hour is my happy place. In the comfort of my crown, I feel on top of the world. This is strange, though, right?
- [33:53]
A
The captivating Toyota Crown family. Toyota, let's go places.
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B
Hey, it's Marc Maron from WTF here to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. And I'm sure the reason you're listening to this podcast right now is because you chose it well. Choose Progressive's Name your price tool and you could find insurance options that fit your budget so you can pick the best one for your situation. Who doesn't like choice? Try it@progressive.com and now some legal info. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. My dad works in B2B marketing.
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A
He came by my school for career.
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B
Day and said he was a big roas man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com results to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn the place to be to be.