CB LIVE! Courage to Leap & Lead with Doug Guthrie: part 1 - Episode 121

You've got courage to leap, courage to lead.

Be brave and be bold. Whoa, let it roar.

Welcome to the Courage to Leap and Lead podcast, where each of our guests share the stories of courage that helped them become powerful leaders. Before we start today's show, please remember to visit courageconsulting.com where you can find all of the episodes and lots of other excellent resources. That's courageconsulting.com. Now, here's your host, Leadership Courage Coach CB Bowman.

Hello everybody! This is CB Bowman Udomeneli. And I am really excited to be here today with you and our special guest, Doug. Doug is a professor, a colleague, a member of MG 100, and etc., etc., etc., etc. So I'm very delighted to have him come on today, and we're going to talk a bit about really serious things, and And of course, you know, we'll have some fun doing it because that's, that's the style here. So welcome. And with that, let's welcome Doug. Doug, how are you today? Thank you for being here.

Thank you so much for having me. It's, it's really a pleasure and an honor, and I'm so happy to be here. And I'm a big fan, and I'm, I'm just overwhelmed with the idea that I'm here talking to you.

Oh, gosh. Okay. You've kissed the Blarney Stone and I love it. Yeah, we're really excited about this program. In fact, Stephen R. Covey is coming on in a couple of weeks. So we're hitting the big time between you and him and others. So first, I want to ask you, that background that you have, where is that?

So I think of that as my second home, or my home away from home, as I was growing into adulthood. That's Shanghai. It's the eastern part of Shanghai that's east of the Huangpu River. And years ago, when I first moved to Shanghai in 1994, nothing was there. There was the Shanghai TV Tower, which is to my right, but Nothing else. And then 20 years ago, when I went back to live in China and work for Apple there and was living over there, it looked like this. And it was just an amazing, magical transformation.

It looks like something out of Star Wars or something. It's amazing with all the various shapes of the buildings and everything that's going on.

It's crazy. I mean, when I was living over there, My family and I were living right in that area, and it was just a dream to me because, you know, 20 years ago there was nothing, and then 3 of the top 10 tallest buildings in the world were all within one block of each other, and it was just stunning.

So, Doug, let's get started. Tell me— tell us about you when you grew up, how you grew up. Tell us into Tell us secrets that you've never told anybody.

I'll do my best. So I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I, you know, I was from a middle-class family. I lived in a suburb of Pittsburgh. And when I think about that life now, it's just so different than what I went on to do in my life. But it was, it was fine. I had an older sister who was a biological sister, and I had 2 younger brothers and sisters, a younger brother and sister who are adopted, and they're both African American. And so it was an interesting upbringing in a very sort of, you know, white American suburb. And that was a fascinating part of my life and my upbringing.

So wait a second, I didn't know this about you, so I have to have a pause there. Tell me, where were they adopted from and what made your family decide to adopt them?

They were adopted from orphanages in Pittsburgh, and, you know, I think my parents wanted to have a larger family, but they decided instead of just having more kids, they would you know, give opportunities to kids that didn't have families. And so we, when I was about 6 and 9, we got— we adopted these 2 different siblings. And yeah, again, it was a very— I mean, this was a suburb of Pittsburgh in the 1970s. And so racial issues were extreme. And so it was, it was a really kind of interesting lesson for a 7 or an 8-year-old to be learning about those kinds of issues. Yeah, it was— it's a very, very important and magical part of my life.

So what made your parents decide to take that sort of quote-unquote risk?

Well, I think, you know, I was raised a Quaker, and I think my dad thinks a lot about, you know, in Quakerism The, the, the saying that we always learned growing up was, live simply so that others may simply live. And so there was this sort of sense of, what are we giving back to the world? What are we doing for the world? And, you know, adopting children is, is just a microcosm of what you would do for the grander plans for the world. But I think it was something that my parents thought a lot about. And, and again, I think my mom wanted a bigger family, but— rather than just having more kids, there was an opportunity to take kids into our family.

But why 2 Black children? Why not 2 white children?

Well, I mean, it's— when I think about that time, and again, I was pretty young to— young in terms of being a part of the parental conversations that were going on, but, you know, when I think my parents thought about I mean, I don't think they had a preference and were pushing in one direction, but it was very striking. I remember in particular with my brother, who is the older of the 2, you know, if you wanted to adopt a healthy white baby, there was a years-long waiting list. And if you wanted to adopt an African American child, you know, We walked into the orphanage and adopted, signed the papers and adopted my brother that day. And so it's just, it was a different kind of process. And, but that process I think also made us realize just what the needs were.

Yeah, exactly. And so then from there?

So I grew up and I went through you know, grade school and high school. And we may get into this later, but I'll just say it because it's linked to my childhood experience. So, I have bipolar 2 disorder, which wasn't diagnosed until much, much, much later in life. But looking back—

So, tell us, wait, tell us what bipolar 2 disorder is.

So, bipolar 2 disorder, it's actually a relatively recent cousin of bipolar 1. So, bipolar disorder, People often have come into contact with that because bipolar is the swings between hypermania and deep depression. And in hypermania, you kind of become consumed with things. And in the case of bipolar 1, it really, you usually know when it, that it's someone has it because they usually suffer a psychotic break. And so usually people get institutionalized and, And so, the swings between hypermania in bipolar 1 and depression are pretty extreme. In the 1990s, a new form of it was identified, which is called bipolar 2. And bipolar 2 has much less, sort of a much lower grade of mania. You still have mania, but it's called hypomania, which means you don't have a psychotic break, but you tend to become obsessed with things. And in my case, um, it manifested in just working obsessively hard. Um, I remember my first depression happened the year I was 8 years old, and I couldn't really understand what was wrong with me. You know, it just felt like the world wasn't right and I couldn't get out of this depression. And, uh, I made up this character called Super Doug. And I would call on Super Doug, and I would be like, "Super Doug, come on, man! Please, please come save me!" And it it became this really obsessive, hardworking, and you know, as I was growing up, everybody loved Super Doug and didn't really like Depressed Doug, including me. And Super Doug kind of saved me for a long time because that that person was my. I used to think of him as my inner superpower, like I could pull myself out of depression and work hard and work harder than anybody else I knew. And then, and so that took me through high school, um, and then through college, and I worked obsessively in college and became a Chinese language and literature major and thought I was— initially when I went to college, I thought I was just going to be a You know, I was in college at the University of Chicago, and what do you do there? You study economics and then go work for McKinsey. But I had this magical relationship that developed with Chinese language, and then I went on to be a language and literature major and studied Chinese language, literature, and history. But I had kind of become obsessed with China because of the Tiananmen Movement in 1989. And I wanted to understand what had happened with China. And so then when I went on to graduate school, I studied Chinese economic reform and became a China scholar and was a professor at New York University for several years and eventually became a professor of business and did a lot in the business school world. I was a dean of a business school for a little while, the George Washington University School of Business. Um, and then I was famously fired from that job, which was very painful. Um, and then I got a call from Apple, and I went to work for Apple and was there in China from 2014 to 2019. And then, uh, had another psychotic break and had to get my get myself and my family back. Luckily, I landed back in academia, and I'm a professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Wow.

You made it sound fairly easy to move through all this. I want to take a step back to when you were first diagnosed. How did you know to go for help, number one? Then what happened when you were diagnosed?

So, just to be clear, my diagnosis came pretty late in life.

Okay.

So, and looking back at my life, it's all understandable. Like, oh, those were swings between depression and hypomania. I got it. Like, and so finally I had the labels and the understanding of what the swings were. But the reason I was diagnosed finally, which just happened 4 years ago, It was because I, as, as I experienced it, and I think this is probably true with bipolar 2 disorder, when you're younger, the swings between hypomania and depression, they kind of go back and forth, but they get more extreme as you get older. And so, as I got older, the, you know, your brain just can't handle the hypomania. Hypomania tends to come with, you A lot, very much reduced sleep. I was, you know, just lived a life where when I would be hypomanic, manic, I would, you know, sleep 3 hours a night for months and months and months on end. And when you're young, you can do that. But when you're older, it was interesting when I was having real problems in China, I went to a doctor and they did a brain scan and he said, you know, I'm really sorry about this, but you have early onset Alzheimer's.

What?

Which was, it was a misdiagnosis, but he showed me my brain scan and an Alzheimer's brain, Alzheimer's patient's brain scan. And my, our brains looked the same because it's just like when you're older, you just can't, you can't do that to your body anymore. And so the swings of hypomania, but then also the depths and troughs of depression got worse and worse. And eventually I had my worst and most dangerous depression, I guess, in 2018. And I realized it was time to get my family home. And so we just left, and I started the process of really seeing serious doctors and psychiatrists about what was going on. And pretty quickly, I was diagnosed with bipolar 2.

What gave you the courage to bring your family home and to seek support?

Well, I, I realized I had to do it because I, you know, I had a, a supportive wife who I loved and who had followed me around the world, and I had 3 little kids. Um, and that period, the trough of depression involved very serious suicidal ideation. And I came very close to not being here. And I— something happened in the universe, and a friend whose father took his own life when he was young just sort of magically showed up in my orbit and saved my life and reminded me that I had 3 little kids that would never get over this. And so It just was a moment, CB, when I realized that I'm not handling this myself, and I have people that are relying on me. And so that was the point when I went to my— the leaders that I was working for at Apple and said, it's time for me to go.

That took a lot of courage to do that. And I'm curious to know, it took courage to go to them. It took courage to get your family back. What gave you the strength to do that? Because that was way before you connected with your friend who said, you know, be mindful of your children.

No, those were about the same time. I mean, he just magically showed up in Shanghai. I mean, his father had taken his life when he was 12 years old. And it was very— it was a very crazy conversation because when he called me to have dinner, he said, Doug, you know, I've been thinking a lot about you, and, um, I don't know why you've been on my mind, but I, I want to see you. And he came to see me, and it's crazy when I think about it now because I sort of— I think I wanted absolution. Like, I wanted him to tell me it would be okay. And so we sat down at dinner and we're talking, and I said to my friend, how long did it take you to, to get over your father taking his life? And he looked at me, and it was a very caring look, but he seemed kind of angry. And he said, Doug, I don't know what you're thinking of. But that was 36 years ago, and not a day has gone by that I haven't thought about it and been hurt by it. You don't get over something like that. And it was like one of those moments where I was like, okay, okay then. And it was that that gave me the courage, is I just really decided I can't, I can't do this to, to my children. Yeah.

And so it was then after that that you went into the leaders at Apple and said, I'm out.

Yeah. I said, I got to get home. And we reorganized. It took a while to sort of pack everything up and tie everything up, but I knew that I had to get home and get to some real treatment. And within a few months after I got home, the bipolar 2 diagnosis came back from my psychiatrist, and I'm still with that psychiatrist today.

Did you feel when you were packing to go to come back home that there was some sort of sense of relief?

That's an interesting question. I don't know if it was relief because, you know, in my experience, the vicissitudes of bipolar, you know, when you're truly hypomanic, you feel like you can conquer the world, like you can. And a lot of great things have happened to me in my life that I never would've imagined accomplishing.

Yeah.

But the depths of depression can get deeper and deeper and get into suicidal ideation. But when you're kind of just in the middle, the thing that hovers around for me is not feelings of relief, it's feelings of failure.

I see.

And so, you know, I sort of felt like, you know, my friend had shaken me up and told me what I had to do. And I guess that was a relief because I kind of got through that moment. But I more remember the feeling of failure than I remember the feeling of relief.

But you had and still have a very successful life. So what could you possibly feel that you experienced failure in?

I mean, I've— thank you for saying that. And I've had success and I feel very thankful for what I've been able to do. But I was supposed to be president.

I mean— United States?

Yeah, my mom believed that I was going to be. So for me, I'm one of those people who was successful, but I feel always always like a dramatic failure because I was supposed to be some, you know, and it wasn't just my mom. Like, I had advisors who, you know, have believed that I was the China scholar of my generation. And, you know, I mean, and it's all very wonderful laudatory things, and I feel so thankful that people have that kind of faith in me. But, you know, I'm just a professor and Best professor at one of the best schools.

Okay, I could take that. So, you know, it's, it's really surprising, and it shouldn't be, that as I said in my book, courage is in the eye of the beholder. And to me, you're a very courageous person. So, you know, I am struggling to hear what you consider to be failure. And when you say, well, I should have been President of the United States, I'm thinking that probably would have been failure. Because being President of these United States, whoa, who wants that job? I agree.

I agree with that.

So—

But I'll give you another example. So like for my mom, there were the grand things, and my, you know, my mom was a very, you know, smart, ambitious young person who grew up, you know, she became a mom in the 1960s, and it just was, you know, she sort of felt like her life was taken from her, I think. Like she believed she was going to be a senator. She believed she was going to be the first female senator of Arizona. And, you know, that didn't happen. And so when I was young, she used to say, I didn't get to do this, but you're gonna do it. You're gonna change the world. And, you know, it's a little embarrassing.

That's pressure. That's a lot of pressure.

I mean, but, and it's a little embarrassing when I think about it now, but like, you know, there was a year that I lived in Taiwan and I was studying Chinese and I was like 20 years old and people would ask me, so Doug, what are you gonna do? And I had learned some Chinese phrases, and I would say, "我要改变世界上," which means I want to change the world. And like that was sort of what I grew up with, like like you know a mom who thought about changing the world, and her son is going to change the world. And so whether or not that meant being president or whatever, I still had this belief like there was going to be an impact. And then you know you get older, and your your ideas of these things get moderated. But When I was— I was the youngest dean of a business school in the country at one point, and I believed I was going to be a university president. And but hypomania got to me, and I was fired from that job in a very public way. And so, you know, even though I landed on my feet, it still feels like dramatic failure.

So, you know, as I take these things apart, Which somebody said to me, I can describe you, CB. I get you. I understand you. And I said, well, what is that? And he said to me, yeah, you see the world as a jigsaw puzzle that you like to put together the pieces. So here I am with the jigsaw puzzle again, because to me, your mom was right. You are changing the world. You're just doing it from a different seat than the president. I mean, teaching people is changing the world. Let's face it. So it depends on the lens you use, right?

Yeah.

And the fact that you were at Apple, holy crap, how many people would love to work at Apple? Geez, you've got to be kidding me. In fact, just now when I was talking to you, the Apple Store just called me. How fortuitous was that?

That's funny.

I mean, what did you do at Apple?

So I was— I mean, again, I want to come back to your jigsaw puzzle pieces because there's a couple of things that, as I try to reconstruct my life, I like to put them back together and sort of see, even when horrible things happen, there are some gifts that come out of it. And one of those was, was the fact that I was very publicly fired and disgraced. And then an individual who was the founding dean of Apple University and was a friend, and he had sort of been watching and reading what was going on in the newspapers, and he called me and said, you know, why don't you come here? And it was a gift. I mean, it really was an amazing opportunity. And at the time, I wasn't so interested in moving to Cupertino, but because of my China background, they said, well, you can come be a part of Apple University, and then you can go be the lead faculty member for Apple University in China. And so I was doing leadership development for Apple executives and managers in China. But then because of my China expertise, I also did a lot of work on just helping the company sort of think about the risks of doing business in China under Xi Jinping. So it was a real gift. I mean, it was amazing.

Yeah, yeah. How many people in the world have that amazing experience? And with what, one of the top 10 companies in the world?

Yeah, it was a gift and it really was.

The words just came into my head, don't cry for me, Argentina.

Okay, okay. But let me put one more piece of the jigsaw puzzle in place because, you know, again, when you try to reconstruct these things and you feel like you failed dramatically and getting fired from the deanship was incredibly painful.

Why?

Well, because I felt like I was on this path and like it was a wonderful path. But the thing about hypomania is you sort of lose control and perspective of things. And, you know, eventually I thought I was the smartest person in the room and everybody should listen to me and get out of my way. And eventually you realize in complex organizations, like, Actually, you don't talk to the president of the university that way. I'm sorry, Doug, but you just don't do that. But the interesting thing is that I— it did make me a better leadership teacher and coach because I often tell the story when I'm teaching executives or coaching executives of getting fired, and I'll often have people in these classes come up to me afterwards like, why did you tell us that? Nobody talks about their failures like that. And I think—

But they should.

But they should, because, because when you, whether it's hypomania and bipolar 2 disorder or just a superego, you know, good leadership is about listening and having the courage to be vulnerable and tell people your story and taking a step back. And so ironically, it made me a better teacher. So just to your point about what it means to have the gift of being allowed to teach people, some of these bad things that happened probably made me a better person.

Not probably. Definitely.

Yeah.

So I always felt that when I taught, the teaching wasn't in the book. The teaching was sharing my experiences.

Yeah.

Which by some have been mild and by others have been horrific. Right. You know, let the reader decide. But the fact that you can talk about it so that other people feel relieved is a gift.

Yeah.

And you were asked by the greater beings to experience what you experienced so that you could share and help other people. You know, there's a reason why some people are saved. There are some reasons that people are not saved. Neither one of us will ever know what those reasons are, but we have to assume that it was for a good reason.

Yeah.

And sharing so that other people learn and don't have to go through the experiences that we've gone through. is a tremendous gift to others.

Now, I agree with you, and I appreciate that. And, you know, it is also, I think, it's a gift to yourself if you— I mean, for me, that I've had the ability to kind of take a step back and say, your life's not over, Doug. It's okay. Like, yes, there have been dramatic failures here, but you know, if you can use these moments to be a better and more thoughtful person, it's going to be better. And then to translate that into the gift of being allowed to teach and talk about these things, I think it's very powerful. Just one— go ahead. Well, I was just going to say one quick thing about that is that, you know, I do have people in my life, you know, I mean, it's sort of commonplace to say we don't talk enough about mental illness and we don't talk enough And I believe that's true. But I have plenty of people in my life who will say, Doug, you shouldn't be talking about these things. Like, because, you know, like, is somebody really going to want a coach or an advisor or, you know, a professor who has bipolar 2 disorder? I'm like, you know, like, actually, the gift is that I get to help. And so it's taken me some time to get there. But I hope I'm there.

You know, you're always going to have the naysayers. I think you noticed on my email signature, I tell people I'm dyslexic. And it took me a long time, first of all, to be diagnosed. It wasn't until I was in college. Second of all, to get it. And then third, to brag about it. And I had a woman who's part of my association come up to me at one of my conferences. And she said, you know, CB, you're so accomplished now, you really don't need to have that on your email. And I said, that's the reason why I'm accomplished.

Hmm.

And I do need to have it on my email. And a couple of months later, somebody I didn't know was connecting with me, and I responded back. And she called me and she said, I am so glad you have that on your email because it's helped me so much. And I said, terrific. It served its purpose and it will continue to be there. So, you know, one person's folly, another person's gold.

Right.

Can I—

I want to just jump in here because, you know, we share this, um, and I just want to mention sort of the folly and gold piece. And, and again, for me not to, you know, but these things were all connected for me in my experience as a kid. Like when I was 8 years old and, you know, going through my depressed first major depression, it was also partly because I couldn't read. And this was the 1970s, and so you weren't— we didn't know what dyslexia was, or— and I fought hard for it and fought through it. But the interesting thing is that I owe dyslexia before becoming a semi-famous China scholar. And the reason is because I, uh, you know, I, I struggled with reading. I was a fine student and I worked really hard, and I got into the University of Chicago, which I thought was just a gift. Uh, I had all of these kids around me who could read a book a day, and I was just like, yeah, I'm trying.

I know the feeling.

And then, um, but I wanted to do something interesting with my life, and I came from this provincial western Pennsylvania suburb, and so I decided to study Chinese. I had a Taiwanese roommate, and he convinced me that Doug, China's your future, I can tell. And so I started studying Chinese. And the interesting thing about dyslexia is, I don't know if this happened. First of all, like, you know, I mean, dyslexia doesn't affect the characters, because if 2 characters are flipped around, the sentence has the same meaning. So it doesn't, it doesn't affect reading in the same way.

But it depends upon what kind of dyslexia you have.

Okay. So, but the other thing for me was one of my strategies for dealing with dyslexia was, uh, to develop what later people, my psychologists, would call an audiographic memory. And so I was very good at memorizing what I heard. And of course, Chinese is a tonal language and a language where you're listening to language tapes all the time. It was the first time, to be— I was ever really good at something. I was just like— Oh my God. Oh my God. I'm going to be in preschool.

I'm getting Chinese now.

So I owe dyslexia for that.

You know, it's funny because once you accept what's happened in your life in terms of disabilities that other people might not have, you can then flip that coin to make it your strength. So I am lousy at numbers. I can't remember, can barely remember my address, things like that. But I'll tell you what, there is no one better than me in terms of strategy because I had to figure out how to get around this damn dyslexia.

Right.

And, you know, being able to take apart the pieces and putting them back together again. Somehow dyslexia has made me incredibly observant. And so I can see things that other people can't see. And that's because we had to figure out how to exist with this brain thing, right? Right.