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4 Bob London + Erik Linn: The inspiration for building a (radically) employee-first company

Name: 4 Bob London + Erik Linn: The inspiration for building a (radically) employee-first company
Uploaded: 2021-08-02T13:09:15+00:00
Duration: 1 min 35 s
Channel: Bob London
Description: In this interview segment, host Bob London asks Erik Linn about the professional experiences that shaped his vision for CrossCountry. Linn recounts his…

2 Aug 2021 · 2 min

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1:35

In this interview segment, host Bob London asks Erik Linn about the professional experiences that shaped his vision for CrossCountry. Linn recounts his early career at Arthur Andersen, describing the firm’s intense environment and limited focus on employee cultivation. He then discusses founding Cap Advisory in the late 1990s, which was later acquired by Navigant Consulting, where he observed the pressures of a publicly traded model that prioritizes quarterly earnings and shareholder interests over people. These two experiences—high‑intensity consulting at a Big Five firm and the shareholder‑driven culture of a public company—led Linn to prioritize a "people‑first" approach at CrossCountry, aiming to create a kinder, more caring environment that is difficult to achieve in large, publicly traded firms.

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You were in the consulting world before CrossCountry, and I always like to ask people, did you have any formative professional observations or experiences that led you to develop the company the way you and your team did? Absolutely. Yes.
I worked for what was one of the big, big 5 firms, Arthur Andersen, which is an extraordinary experience for me. I learned a tremendous amount, had great mentors, but the intensity level of the, now the big 4 firms and equivalent firms definitely sticks out. So they're great places to learn, but not necessarily places where they really cultivate and engage their employee base. So definitely had some takeaways from my Big Five experience that there could be a kinder, gentler, more caring environment for employee base. Then I had the good fortune of starting a firm, Cap Advisory, back in the late '90s, which was sold to a publicly traded company and actually had a wonderful experience there at Navigant Consulting. But I got to see some things inside the publicly traded company model that we've built onto. It's hard to be focused on quarterly earnings and focused on shareholders when you're in a people business. And so two of our huge takeaways from both of those experiences were we wanted to have a— build a culture that really took the idea of people first and caring for the employees to a new level, which is just hard to do in a large, you know, 100,000+ person firm or a publicly traded model. So The idea of employee first really resonated through those two experiences.