194 - Unlocking Leadership and Personal Growth Through Embracing Vulnerability with fassforwardfassforward's Rose Fass

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Rose Fass, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the chairman and founder of a consulting firm, Fass Consulting. That's FASS, F-A-S-S, not fast. And, and the website is FASS, FASS forward consulting.com. Welcome to the show.

Yes, thank you, great to be here.

So tell us a little— I, I know that, uh, you have a pretty amazing backstory. I kind of want to have everybody learn a little bit about who you are and your— and how some of the amazing work you've done in the past to understand where you are today. So let's just start off with a, just a, your quick backstory.

Yeah. So early days, I started my career in retail and from there I went on to be in wholesale and then an entrepreneur. And I launched Mary Quant in this country. And Mary Quant was the originator of the miniskirt and pantyhose. She recently passed away. She's an extraordinary woman, ahead of her time, out of London. And we actually launched her cosmetic line in the United States. And it was a very young, very edgy line that was very different from the typical things that went on. So I was a bit of a fashionista, 'cause I had started on the Saks Fifth Avenue training program right out of BU. On my wedding day, oddly enough, this gentleman that I had attended an Ecumenical event with, with people from all different religions, He was a steward of one of the churches that was sponsoring this. It was at the Lambs Club in New York. Turned out to be an officer for Xerox. And he had spoken with the pastor who had arranged this whole event. My husband is Jewish. I came from an Italian Catholic background. And two of us actually met there. And oddly enough, the morning of my wedding in New Canaan, at the Roger Sherman Inn. He sat down with me and I'm in electric rollers and the whole bit. And he says, would you like to consider coming to Xerox? We're bringing in women in management roles on the fast track. And that was the beginning of my learning what I call the long way home. I was a woman in corporate, hired from the outside, which didn't go over very well. Highly male-dominated tech company at the time. We were $1,000 a share. When I joined Xerox. And that's a whole story in itself. And it's in one of my books about the rise and fall of a great company.

Right.

But I came in there, and as a female, being in an executive role or on a management track, it was, it was very interesting to watch what was going on. I remember the first week I was there, all of the good stuff came out of the territories. I had oversight for, and they went to a gentleman, and I ended up with sort of what was left over. And people don't realize that these things are true. They really do happen. And I remember being in a— and I'll tell this quick story because it's a fun one. I was in Uptown, and I was with one other woman who ran Avon. And there was— I was supposed to become an associate to this very successful sales rep. And his name was Michael Blumenkrantz, and brilliant guy, handled the whole legal market. And he said no when HR came over and said, you know, you have taken a suit. No, not doing that. And his Gucci loafers were up on top of the desk and, you know, it was all going on. So there were a bunch of boys in the, in the bullpen, and the guy who ran commissions came over and he was kind of a sleazy guy. And he walks up to DeeDee and I and he says, hey ladies, I hear this is the new girl we got in town. You know, girl, and I was 28. And he said, would you like to see my automatic input device? These were things in Xerox where you put your copies. So everybody's hooting and laughing. And in those days, you got away with that stuff, you know. So DeeDee is infuriated and ready to— and I have this ability to be fairly quick. I got it from my dad, who was a former Marine. You know, World War II Marine and a philosopher and a published poet. Very interesting guy. So I turned to him and I said, well, you know, I might be interested, but I heard you shut down after one copy. And that's exactly the reaction I got from all the guys in the bullpen. And the next thing I knew, Michael swung his shoes off the desk, picked up the phone, pressed the button, got HR on the phone, which happened to be a guy. And he said, "Yeah, Rose Fass is here. I'll take her." And he hung up the phone and we became fast friends. And he taught me a lot in my first job, learning the art and science of sales in a tech world, and became an incredible mentor for me. I have learned since then, to be honest with you, Doug, is that we as women have to be able to bounce in these situations and not necessarily be defensive. If we can work that, I think that's one of the things, the one of the lessons that I learned early on from my dad was just kind of stand your ground. Don't be overly aggressive. Don't be overly defensive and try to keep a parity going. And that is sort of an example of the kinds of ways in which I wanted to diffuse what was a dicey kind of situation. And of course, this guy crawled back to his hole and didn't come back again, which I was very grateful for. So background on me was I spent a good period of time at Xerox, and I owe them my everything, because everything I learned in that company I have been able to apply throughout my career, to include some of the mistakes that the company made along the way. I became their chief transformation officer in 1993. In year 2000, I began to realize that we were not headed in the right direction. We had a big blowup in Forbes and all the business magazines where our senior leadership had literally committed fraud. And the SEC came in and a lot happened. And as a result, they made a deal with Anne Mulcahy that if she paid off their fines, they would be willing to make her the CEO. And she was a wonderful leader, phenomenal people person, great operator, had been in the company as long as I had, and I really admired and respected her. But she had to stabilize the company, and I wanted to transform the company. And she was not by nature as strategic. So we parted ways. I had an opportunity to take an early retirement. I had just turned 50, and I had the opportunity to do that. And I went to Gartner with Bill McDermott. And when I came to Xerox out of a P&L running a region and being very much a results-oriented leader to the corporate, I thought I had checked into the public library. And being the Chief Transformation Officer was the last thing in the world I ever thought I wanted. People would come up to me and say, what does that mean? Because transformation wasn't even a word then. And I would say, if you don't change, you're under arrest. And then I ended up— that became the genesis for what became Fast Forward. Spent a year in Gartner. I met my co-founder. He was 38. I was 51 when we started the company. He was a classically trained engineer, Gavin McMahon. He had done the case study for Netscape for London School of Business and we both kind of started the company. And today I'm 75 and he is 57, and he's one of my co-CEOs, and I've become a chairman and founder. So that's pretty much my backstory from fashion to tech to Gartner, which was a big IT research firm, to starting Fast Forward.

Wow. And when did you start Fast Forward?

In 2001, in the year that Bill and I went to Gartner, oddly enough, their CEO was a guy from Bain, a young man, not very savvy in terms of how he should run the business. He was a smart guy, but he signed a convertible note without a floor for the market cap of the company. And when the boys came running, it was not good. He made a lot of strategic made errors in judgment, acquired companies that really weren't right for the company, spent a lot of money, did not have the leadership skill to run a company, had a massively big theater in sales for the amount of revenue we were bringing in. And that basic long way home at Xerox between Bill and I, we were smart. We knew what to do. And you learn to be an operator there.

Right.

And we were operators. We knew how to do this. And it didn't go. So Bill left, went to Siebel, later to SAP, and I started Fast Forward.

And so what does Fast Forward do today?

Fast Forward does what I was doing at Xerox as the chief transformation officer. We go into companies and we look at whether they have a strategy. Is it being translated effectively through their leadership? And oh, by the way, are people executing on the strategy? Lots of people have a great strategy, just not executing on it. Right. So we are in the McKinsey aftermarket. We go in after McKinsey does their thing. Right. And we kind of—

they tell you what to do, but not how to do it.

No, they don't. We're the how company. We are the how company and we're hands-on. And principally we're 20 large now and we have lots of contractors as well throughout that are cultural fit for us. We are good people doing good work for good people. That's our purpose. And we have 3 principles that we follow, which is be choosy and build a reputation. That's the big first one, because we said if we do business with no names, we're going to be a no name, right? So be choosy, build a reputation, touch a client every day. I always tell my people, you're not here to play office. Corporations uniquely know how to do that better than most. You can spend a whole day playing office in a corporation, never touch a client, never deliver a thing, never bring in a dime's worth of revenue. Everybody's got to have line of sight to the client. And then the third one is don't compromise on the deliverable. You know, just don't compromise on the deliverable. If you're being asked to do something in too short a period of time, the answer is no. If you're being asked to do the wrong thing, the answer is no. And we have to be there with our clients every inch of the way. I also do not hire career consultants. They haven't done real jobs. They haven't had to stand in front of an ops review. Or deal with business going poorly and figuring out how to turn it around, starting up new businesses. There's just a lot that goes into being an operator and you need to know what these people are doing. So Fast Forward became the extension of what started out as the Center for Business Transformation in Xerox, later became the Center for Business Transformation in Gartner, and then became Fast Forward. And I figured that We could spend a lot of time studying the history of a company and trying to catch up, and it doesn't necessarily work for companies who are on a very, very tight timeline. So we go into the messy middle, wherever you are, and we fast forward.

Good for you. So you've been at this for a long time. We're close in age. I'm 73, you're 75. I can remember, I can remember those days back in the '70s and '80s. It was Very different than it is.

Yes, it was. Yes, it was.

And the young people today have no clue. I mean, remember when interest rates were at 21% and 22%?

Yeah, exactly.

Everybody's complaining about a 7% mortgage today. And I said, that was normal back then.

Yeah, that was normal back then. And what was interesting is that shareholder value back then was a one data point and an indicator. It wasn't both the driver and the outcome for publicly traded companies. So many other things. And it has dramatically changed. Behavior in a corporate environment. It's taken the leadership to a whole different level, which unfortunately we're chasing that stock price rather than chasing stakeholder value, which will translate to a better stock price. So I spent a lot of time, quite frankly, Doug, having these leadership conversations with C-level executives to get them off of we're strictly worrying about share and to start thinking about the four considerations of business. Are you relevant? Are you growing? Can you scale? And can you do it profitably?

Right.

But there's 4 of those. And if all you worry about is profitability, those other things will start to go away because you'll get profitability by having rounds of taking people out of the business and cost cutting, rounds of cost cutting. And that's not a great way to get to good profit. So relevance is the number 1 goal. For every company, because that's how startups come and steal your market. You know, they're, they're relevant and you're not. And then you have your Kodak moment. Yeah. Or you're—

or you're—

yeah. Or you're, you know, one of these companies that used to sell videos and make all your money on penalizing customers. Blockbusters.

Right.

And you're not Netflix. Or you're a taxi driver trying to figure out how you can, you know, arrange to drive and pick up people when Uber can come right to the door. There's just so much of this that has changed, and if you're not aware of what's going on, you lose your relevance.

That's right. I mean, and the Kodak story is perfect. They poo-pooed the whole idea of a digital camera. Said, "This will never work." Completely, you know, by 2012 they were gone. Crazy.

It is crazy.

So you've been at this for a long time. What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to be at work?

Yeah, first of all, I think we love what we do. And for me, it's— I always say I'm in my wisdom years. I never understood that when my parents used to talk about it because I was in my ambition years when I was younger. And it was, what's the next big job? What's the next big promotion? What's the next big salary hike? Or can I get this bonus? And today what gets me out of bed in the morning is, can I help someone smooth the path for getting to a better place and feeling like they have a purpose in life beyond just circulating capital?

Yep.

And so I hired actually very recently, actually not so recently, it's been 5 years now. The son of one of my very dear friends who had been a Princeton graduate, Wall Street 20 years. And at his dad's funeral, very dear friends of my husband and I, I said to him, "Are you tired of circulating capital? Would you like to do something meaningful?" Because there was something about him that I saw as being— and he now heads up our coaching practice, which he's pretty much quadrupled in size. And he's been with us for 5 years. And he's one of my co-CEOs with Gavin. So I wanted to have a generation Succession. Yeah, succession plan. So he's 45, Gavin's 57, and we brought in some younger people. That's probably one of the toughest things, Doug, is to recognize where you are and what needs to be done to keep the company going. And for me, this transition from founder and chief cook and bottle washer to stepping back a little and letting these two guys figure it out has been difficult. But it's working. And I'm very grateful for the opportunity to spiritually have a power greater than myself that kind of helps me understand where I am. My husband is 86. I'm 75. He's a young 86. I'm a young 75. But we both recognize that, you know, there's less going forward than there was in the back. And I don't want to bio out. Without having done some of the right things. So this is part of what I'm thinking about now.

Yeah. What you say really resonates with me. I mean, I left the practice of law in 2000, right after my 50th birthday, because I wasn't serving people. And I learned, I've learned in the 20, almost 25 years since then, that what gives us meaning in life is serving others. And it's not about the money. It's about what kind of, what kind of, how can you make other people's lives better?

Yes.

And that's not something you know at 20 years old.

No, you don't.

It takes a while to figure that out. And that's why I'm so blessed with what I do today. And it sounds like you have the same experience.

Well, I loved your story. I mean, your story about learning how to calm angry people down, to figure out what people need. It's very similar in a lot of ways, Doug. In The Chocolate Conversation, my first book, I write about 3 layers to a conversation. Worldviews, standards, and concerns. And whenever you start out with your worldview, you invite someone to debate because they have a different point of view, right? But when you look at what people need, the concern— what's the unmet need? What can I do here to deal with the unmet need? And whenever anybody's really upset and angry, I always say to them, how can I help? What do you need? Tell me what you need. And when they can open up around that then you can have the basis for the beginning of a conversation that allows somebody to be acknowledged.

Well, that's exactly correct. People have a deep need to be validated and heard that never gets fulfilled. And the anger and the conflict and the fighting and the arguing, it all comes down to people feel invisible.

100%, because you will often hear, even on Facebook, I watch this and on LinkedIn and all these places, I see you. When someone says that, you know, that came out of Avatar the movie, but it's a wonderful concept because even in Macbeth, go all the way back to Shakespeare, he's dying and his best friend Horatio says to him, what can I do? He says, let my story be told, that you really know that I was here, that I saw what was happening, that I've been betrayed. And that, you know, that if you go to a senior citizen home, one of the greatest tragedies is the purposelessness. The, the, the— they just feel like they have no purpose anymore, you know. No, man, it's so sad. And just bringing them and allowing them to see a concert or take a look at a lecture or feel like you're interested in their lives and what do they have to say and where's the wisdom that they have to share. I watched it in my mother and dad when they both passed. And I remember seeing my mother's worldly goods in a little teeny pile after everything had been sold or given away to the nieces and nephews and grandchildren. And she was in an assisted living. You buy out of here with what you come in here with. Pretty much.

That's right. So, so, yeah, the, the phrase that I use is listening other people into existence. And so I teach people how to do that. And the secret is to learn how to listen to emotions, not words.

I love it.

When you listen to people's feelings and reflect their feelings and validate them at a deep level, they feel, oh, you really get me. You really understand me. And when you do that, that's when the magic happens.

Yeah. And here's a trial lawyer who's gone from defending criminals to listening to people who have gone through whatever they've gone through in a way that helps them recognize nobody's so bad that they can't turn around and they can't find purpose in life. I love what you did with women prisons and—

Oh, yeah.

Share a little bit about that. That was wonderful.

Thank you. The power of this in the Prison Project, Prison Peace Project that I co-founded—

Love it.

—is we've had over 700 of our students in California prisons released on parole. Only one has reoffended. Only one.

Only one has reentered. How wonderful is that?

We have almost 100% zero recidivism. That is magnificent. That's the power of learning how to listen. We teach them these skills that they've never had before, and now they can function as human beings. And violence and crime no longer appeal to them because they see that there's a better path, a practical path, not some touchy-feely, go hug a tree singing kumbaya. We're as far from that as you can possibly be. But we teach them these practical, counterintuitive skills that allow them to stop prison violence and ultimately get released and do well. And, and the other thing that's really cool is that they're all doing service work. Yeah. Every single one.

Because when you're busy helping others, you're not looking at what other thing you need. That's right. It's, you reach a point where acquisition just increases the greed. That's right.

Yeah. I'm curious, what— you've obviously had a, a really amazing career. What do you think it is that's unique that you've been able to bring to the table that has made you so successful in everything that you've done from being an operator to now being a high-end consultant?

The interesting piece of this is, yes, okay, all the skills, the competencies and stuff that you learn, But when you can integrate that with real vulnerability, I think that I feel vulnerable most of the time, and I'm able to share that without feeling as though I am less than. There you go. I think that humility is less about being less and more about thinking of yourself less. So I kind of— I'm open to being vulnerable. I tell people the truth. I obey pain. I wasn't particularly good at taking someone else's wisdom and learning from it as much as I could have. I obeyed a lot of pain in my life. And by making every mistake you could make in management and leadership and learning from those painfully, right? And then being able to let people know that leadership is messy. Oh yeah. And that you, if you're going to be a good leader, you can't be a perfectionist. You got Winston Churchill. I always look at these leaders. Winston Churchill, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, any number of these historic figures that are out there, and they had very messy lives. They did. But they were willing to take risks and they were willing— I loved Winston Churchill's "Keep buggering along." You know, he said he had this black dog that followed him around, which was depression, and he just pushed through it and kept buggering along. And one could argue that he died with de Gaulle and Roosevelt not paying much attention to him, and how sad that was when he basically was instrumental in saving civilization. Right.

Going back to vulnerability, it was so interesting that you should mention that. I— what changed my— how I moved from being— I was a civil trial lawyer, not a criminal trial lawyer, but very large financially complex cases in federal court here in California. But I took up the martial arts. Got my second degree black belt when I was 40 years old, and my teacher— that's your what? I earned my second degree black belt when I was 40. Then my teacher said, go learn tai chi. This is what changed my life, because in tai chi there are two paradoxes. The first is the softer you are, the stronger you are. God bless. The more vulnerable you are, the more powerful you are. Soft to be strong, vulnerable to be powerful. So when you said What makes you unique is your vulnerability.

That's where your power comes from. Absolutely. That's a hard lesson for people to learn. Yeah, I mean, I don't need to put on airs. I, I don't need to. And when you get older, you realize what, what's the purpose? We're not getting out of here alive, so I may as well do it in the real way.

Exactly. I, you know, I, I just think that so many people— I, I think what it is is that people don't— are afraid people have not emotionally matured enough. Maybe it just takes a lot of years to be— to develop emotional maturity. But, and so they're still fighting a lot of childhood demons and social norms that are— that I think are abusive, that, that cause them not to be authentic and vulnerable. And that leads to nothing but trouble.

I think that's true. Uh, you know, everybody that I meet that's trying to prove something had the critical parent that they're constantly trying to. And then you look at the news today. I mean, you can't watch it without seeing so much vitriol on both sides. Right. And it's like, why? Exactly. I remember, you know, my dad used to say, if you have to shut a conversation down and shout, you can't hold up your side of the argument. Right. And I— and that's a fact. I mean, we used to have civil discourse in my family.— which got us to a better level.

Imagine, imagine what— you're exactly correct, and it comes down to people don't listen anymore. What would it be like if only— if 10% of our— the public really knew how to listen to each other, regardless of political views, but we really knew how to listen to each other and feel heard? It'd be a completely different country.

I agree, it'd be a different world. That's right.

Well, that's my mission. Is to teach, to spread that skill out. Yeah. God bless you. You're right. One more question. I'll let you go. What is one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

I often say this. Most of my external friendships are not necessarily business people. They're people in the arts. I love music. I love art. I love all that kind of stuff. I used to sing blues and a little bit of jazz, and well, I just very much enjoy being in a theater and just watching performances, whether they're ballet or even opera. Theater on Broadway I always enjoyed. I just love all the live entertainment, and I love to look at I used to really be immersed in Salvatore Dalí and the wonderful art that he produced, you know, like Time on the Sand, and just seeing all that kind of stuff. I, I love beauty, and part of one of my hobbies is that probably if I hadn't done what I did, I would have been an interior decorator, because I do love to be— to make very aesthetically pleasing environments.

My wife's that way. I play jazz violin, jazz and blues.

Oh, how wonderful. Yeah. My husband used to play trumpet.

Ah, yeah, no, I've been, I took up fiddle music, Irish fiddle in law school. And then in the, when I left the practice of law and had a little bit more time, I found a great teacher up in Massachusetts and she and I worked together for the last 15 years.

Do you live in Massachusetts?

No, I live in California. I live in Central California.

Oh, that's right. You said you were in Central California.

Just south of Yosemite National Park.

Were you in Massachusetts at some point?

No, I went to Dartmouth, so I was up in New Hampshire.

Okay. That's what brought you there. Yeah.

So I was in, but I met her many, many years, decades, decades later through just through happenstance. And we've got a great friendship and she's a great teacher. So she, so wonderful. We meet every, every other week for an hour or so. Wonderful.

Well, in jazz, as you know, it's spontaneous, right? And I think leadership's a lot like that.

There you go.

I think you need to know when you come in and how to make sure that the bass is still keeping time. Stay with the band.

Exactly right. Well, this has been a great conversation, Rose. Thank you so much.

Thank you, and I appreciate all that you're doing. I want to hear more about you. I think it's very exciting. Thank you.

Take care. Okay. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.