Interview with Alex Freeman

You're listening to One Sharp Sword cutting through to what Matters Most with outfluencer Dr. Wayne Purnell. Welcome to One Sharp Sword cutting through to what Matters Most. I'm your host, your guide, and your coach on this journey. I'm Dr. Wayne Purnell and with me today I have Alex Freeman. He is a global finance and operations leader. And his story, I have him here because his story is. Well, as a, as a human, he's unique. His story is unique. He comes from a country that no longer exists. So we'll dive into that and so much more. Alex Freeman. Alex, welcome to One Sharp Sword.

Well, thank you for having me. You know, we had a chat a few weeks ago.

Yeah.

I got to know each other a little better and, you know, you're such a fascinating person, your background's amazing, and I'm just hoping to add a little value to your, you know, very holistic world there indeed come from a country that no longer exists. You know, there's. It was a Tom Hanks movie about that. The USSR, right, and the 15 republics broke up early 90s. I actually came from the Ukraine, a city of Odessa. It's on the news a lot recently, you know, all of the political and economic stuff. But yeah, thank you for having me on. This is very exciting for me.

That's awesome. It's great to have you. And, you know, you didn't just stay there, right. You're from there and you ended up coming to, you came to Texas, you got your MBA at Purdue, and now you're back in Texas. So talk a little bit about that. What, what inspired you? You didn't wake up one day and go, you know what? My life is all about finance. My life is all about helping organizations pull it together. Because, I mean, really, finance is, is a. One of the main central hubs of any organization. But you probably didn't know that when you, when you even were heading off to Purdue for your mba.

Well, so. So a bit of a monologue, kind of a highlight. Highlights of my background indeed. I lived in Odessa until I was 11, moved to the US by way of Italy. We actually had to stay in Italy for a year until family accepted us here in the U.S. you know, we, we lived on government support for a bit, and as soon as we could wean ourselves off of that, we did that. And, you know, I'm super proud of my family. I moved here with my uncle, mother and grandmother, and, you know, they've made my world the best they could possibly have made it. Right. Effectively I ran a business here in Austin, Texas.

So from Italy you went to Austin?

We went to Austin, which was very unusual. Usually when you moved from the former ussr, you went to Philadelphia or New York or San Francisco, Louisiana, Miami, Chicago. We had a very unusual family from family structure perspective. And so, you know, we spend in Italy almost a year where most families were processed within two to three months. So finally the Austin community took us in and we're blessed and grateful and thankful and trying to give back to the community. I teach at high school, I do all kinds of other events for youth and education. So I try to give back as much as possible. But indeed, it took us a year to get over here to Austin, Texas, which again was very unusual.

It is unusual. I don't think I knew you were a teacher in all the pre conversation we had. So I want to dive into that a little bit too. It's interesting because your background, because you're from the Ukraine, you have had opportunities that most other people in your position didn't have. What so. And that includes going back to Russia to work with Citigroup. We'll talk about that in a second. When you were, when you first landed in Austin and you said you were welcomed by the community, what made you feel like you wanted to go into finance or even pursue an mba?

Well, the finance is a very, it's a very interesting question. And a lot of, a lot of the stuff in life is very happenstance. It doesn't happen the way you planned it. So I actually.

It really does, Alex. Right.

It's like you're gonna plan stuff, you're not planning anything. Life just happens to you and you try to course correct the trajectory a little bit. So I had an excellent GMAT score. Right? That's how you get into business school. So I was actually recruited by many business schools and they said, hey, come to our school, you have a great score, you've got an interesting background. Purdue said, hey, come to our school and we'll pay for your education. And I said, well, wow, that's, that's a no brainer. And at the time Purdue was ranked, of course, a very good school, but it was ranked number one two years in a row for regional schools and Wall Street Journal. And that was a big draw for me while at Purdue. You know, the first year you take the basics of the NBA, I had a very, I had a good relationship with a very senior HR leader from Samsung who was also taking the mba. And he said, Alex, what are you going to major in? You know, in the second year, what are you going to focus on? I said, I don't know, marketing or maybe hr, Because Purdue has an excellent, what we call it mushroom program. It's a major of human resources. And I said one of those two things. He said, look, everybody else is doing that and there's an excellent finance parallel here. Finance program at Purdue do that. I said, I don't know, you know, it's like, it's hard and I, I wanna. And he said, no, you have to go do the stuff that you're uncomfortable doing. And this guy was, you know, 15, 20, 20 years older than me though, so he knew. I said, all right, I took a few introductory courses and that's how it all started.

This is fantastic. Right? So you had a mentor and that is like every so often, Alex, I'll stop you just to pull out some of the leadership nuggets along the way. The mentor gave you something that most people don't really get for decades into their, into their own process. And that is really to grow, really to have the success that you want. You absolutely need to step out of your, outside of your own comfort zone. You a hundred percent need to be in that space of, I don't know, I've never done it before, but I probably could figure it out. So, and, and that's awesome because that's, that's you believing in you. And I think that's the leadership piece is you've got to believe in yourself and you've got to believe that no matter what you step into, you'll figure it out. So that was great. You're the, the, the advice you were given to, you know, do something you're not comfortable with. I love that. I love that. I just wanted to call it out.

So of course. And then, you know, once, once you take that advice and you exercise it, you start challenging, challenging yourself.

Yes.

And that, that's the kind of the launching pad then self talk begins and there's something you don't really want to do, but you know it's going to be beneficial. And you take yourself back to that original convers say, look, you did that. You are uncomfortable. Do that again and again and again. And that's, that's the stepping stone, right? That's the ladder.

That's the leadership and success ladder. There are a lot of people that would go, that was uncomfortable. I never want to do that again. And the selft talk is the absolute opposite where it's, oh, this was terrible and I almost didn't make it. And the doubt the shame, the guilt, the fear, all that stuff that is. Basically, none of it's true. It's just old stories that circulate. They become the anchor for you.

You're like.

I've done this before. I've been uncomfortable before. I've. I'm alive. And I think what you didn't say is, and I made a commitment, right? I mean, you. Basically, what you did in going back and saying, okay, I'm going to push myself, is that you committed to that growth and you committed to your future.

Absolutely. And when you speak about the future, you also commit to the future of passing it forward.

Right?

So now when I speak to the team or I. The other day, it was very interesting. A guy in high school reached out to me on LinkedIn and he said, Hey, I found you on LinkedIn, and you're a finance leader, and I wanted to get some advice from you. So you get those types of opportunities, and because you've done the challenging things so many times, you can tell the person exactly what they should expect, right? You're gonna be uncomfortable. You have to have three, four, five things that calm you. You've got to have sort of a preparatory exercise that you do. You drink tea, or you go for a walk, or you listen to special music or whatever else you do, and then, you know, then you're ready, then you can do this. Just like athletes, you know, all athletes have their own prep. Prep stuff, right? And finance and business in general is no different from an athletic competition. You have to prep, you have to be ready, you have to collaborate, and you kind of have to foresee what might happen and then say, if this, then that, if that, then this, and be ready for whatever comes your way.

Nice. So there's. I want to go in so many directions with you on. On this one. The. The saying in athletics and on stage, as you take a stage for either an acting role or a speaking role, is practice so much. Not till you get it right, but practice so much till you cannot fail. And that is huge. And so when you put yourself in that place of discomfort, you go over it and over it and over it, and suddenly it's. Suddenly there's some place you pass where it's like, it's no longer uncomfortable, now it's comfortable. Now you make it yours. And I think that's huge. I want to know about your prepping to calm kind of stuff, your personal prepping to calm stuff, because it's easy. I. I've just worked with enough leaders, and I've worked with Enough aspiring leaders that I watch them get into these loops and you've broken through them. And sometimes the loop is, okay, I'm drinking my green tea. How come I'm not. I'm, I'm not calm yet, you know, and it was like all the stuff is spinning in their head and it's like, I've got.

Right, there's the green tea.

There it is. That's awesome. All right, well, I have my. I have my water in front of me. So, so, so what are your. You said you have like three to five kind of calming rituals and you do, do you do these daily?

I do these when I have something super important to work through, like our conversation. So here, here are a few things, right? Got to go to sleep early. That happens the day before. You have to, you have to go for a walk, you know, 10, 15, 20 minutes. Number two. Number three, get outside. Specifically get outside, get some vitamin D, Go for a walk, get your blood flowing, get the, you know, all the nutrients to your brain. Three is kind of a do and don't do. I don't drink coffee before anything important. I do drink water and I do drink tea that's not highly caffeinated. Right. Number four, I'll do as much research about the topic as physically possible. You know, you said practice until you can practice. No, no more. But it's like, you know, practice until you live the thing.

Yeah, that's. Till you can't get along.

Right to that. You know, as you said, a stage and actors, that's what they do, you know, that's. That's how they act outside of the stage and outside of the scene on their day to day to prepare. So that I would say is, number four, getting information and, you know, number five is to learn as much as possible about the person that you're. You're working with. Right. And if you can't get information on the person, get information on their industry. Can't get information or industry, get information on their geography.

Right.

You have to, you have to know who you're talking to.

That's great. That's great. All right, let's. I've got some notes. And so having done some research, so I just, I wanted to wander through your, your leadership journey because as we talk more and more, you will say things and I'll stop you and tell you how brilliant they are. Because the leadership journey is so uniquely individual and it is so generalizably human. And it's why I do this show. It's like, it's, it's like your journey is your journey, but, wow, you know what? Everybody can relate to the struggle of maybe not coming from a different land and. And, you know, being in that space of waiting for something to happen.

But.

Everybody does feel isolated from time to time. And so. Right. The. The ability to stay driven and stay focused on your future is huge. And good for you for having good GMAT scores. All right, so you. You have had an amazing kind of. Journey with the companies you've worked for and with. And with. You did Citigroup in Russia. You worked for Visa. You worked with Amex. Do you want to talk about any of that?

Yeah, I'll talk through really, all of those very quickly. You know, effectively. Coming out of Purdue, I had an opportunity to work with Citigroup in New York, London, Moscow. Moscow was a very natural selection for me because it's why I went to business school. I wanted to see the world. I wanted to experience large companies, large structures. And if you go to the un, People always ask me, why would you go to. Why would you go international? Well, you go international because you want to do everything, because you have insatiable thirst or hunger for all types of environments and situations. When you go and work in the US Coming out of school, that just.

Tickles me for some reason. You go international because you want to do everything.

So you.

That makes sense. You get.

You're like, here's your role, right? This is what you're supposed to do in the US and if you go and try to do other stuff, there's somebody else already doing that. And they're like, well, this is my patch. Don't. Don't encroach. When you go international, you're like, here's your role. And then you say, well, I want to do this. Oh, no problem. And what about that? Yeah, sure, have that. Have at it. You know, so there's no limitation. So I did finance, pure finance. I did accounting. I worked in operations. And at Citigroup, you go through this management leadership development program. And I went through, you know, sales partnership cycle. I went through credit risk. I actually brought the small and medium business program to Russia. It didn't exist before. I wrote the business plan, of course, with other folks partnering with me. I camped outside of the chief credit officer's office for two weeks until he approved it. And by the way, we came out of the 2008, 2009 cycle with zero losses. Right? And this is on large business, small business. It's something that most other countries can't claim. Right? City group we know what happened back then. I met my wife in Russia. We said, hey, we don't, we're not going to have our kid in minus 30, minus 40 weather. I went back to Austin, I worked with, I went through the network, got on with Dell Financial Services and think of them as GE Capital, right? Dell at the time was busy reacquiring their assets. Server, storage, all types of hardware, and then acting as the bank for their existing clients. So versus using cit, which was our partner at the time, Dell effectively created a bank in Dell Ireland and was the leasing arm of Dell, Dell proper. You know, a couple of years into it they said, hey, we heard that you worked in Russia before. And I said yeah. And, and what? Like what, what about it? And they said well, we want you to go back. And I said, hm, what's happening? They said well, commercial and the consumer business is getting combined. We just released both of the controllers there. You're going to be a controller in Moscow for this 200 million dollar business. And I said, well, I've never been a controller before, you know, well, you have a finance background, you have a finance mba, don't you? And you've, you speak Russian, so have at it. And that was, that was, you know, a great opportunity for me. That was my first sort of ahead of finance role, right?

That's a unique, a unique opportunity where they come to you and they say we're promoting you and sending you off to go create this new position or you know, land in this position that we've just released other people from. And you know, they're telling you what you're, what, what your strengths are, what your background is and you're like, yeah, that's me. Good for you, right? Controller for a 200 million dollar biz.

And you know, a lot of it was, there's a lot of competition with Chinese companies at the time, right? Monitors and laptops and desktops and all of that stuff. So what we started doing is packaging, servers and storage and mixing and matching consumer versus commercial products even, you know, we could sell a 500 consumer notebook into a very large client who didn't need high, high powered equipment at the time. So that allowed, what was your role in that?

Like did you actually do the, the, this is what consumer, the consumers need at this point. And you started to redirect where the focus was.

See this is, this is to my point back about having an opportunity to touch whatever you wanted to touch. There's just not a lot of staff that global companies or you know, us Headquartered companies can allocate to most of their international. So I sat in front of the distributor owners, owners of these large distributor companies, owners of these large partners, owners of M Video and El Dorado. Think of them as Best Buy and you know, fries of, of Russia. And I understood what, I began to understand what they needed, number one. Number two, I had a super mentor again, Boris Sherbakov. He's the guy that effectively brought technology and HP to Russia post the break breakup. And I partnered with him to make a successful, to kind of re invigorate the Russia business for Dell. So it was really two things. It was a learning experience. I get, I get to sit in front of the folks that were running the businesses that we were partnering with. So I learned from them and then I learned from the business, from this really great guy was my commercial side mentor.

Amazing. That's amazing.

From there I went on a pure accounting role. This was at Visa. I was a senior director of controllership for Visa. My sort of three things that I very proud of. Number one, as I rebuilt the team completely, the, the local account is a statutory accounting gap. Effectively everyone that was a part of the team was brought in by me. By the way, the Dell chief accountant actually followed me to Visa, which was pretty cool because you know, you form a relationship and then you maintain that relationship. That's a sign, you know, vanity aside. To me that was like, okay, so this person and I got along, they trust me, they're going to work, they're willing to work with me in the future, so I'm doing something right. So you know, continue and keep doing, doing what you're doing and keep learning, of course as well. So that's number one, rebuilding the team. Number.

Let me pause for a second because this is a, it's, it's huge. The flip side of that is people don't leave organizations, they leave people. Right? That and the fact that you've got people that choose to connect with you and follow you, that says a lot about your leadership style. It says that, you know, I mean, everything about you is really, yes, you understand the business, yes, you understand the finance and the flow. And beneath it all, you understand people. You understand like how to value them and how to acknowledge them. And you know, you, you've created trust, which is huge. And we haven't talked about that. So yeah, to take a, take a.

Side road here in this, there's a, a podcast I think it's called Hard Knocks where this younger guy, he's actually from Austin, goes around and Call it hunts down successful people. He usually looks for, you know, fancy cars or big, big offices. And he says, hey, well, how did you make your money? And what would be your advice to up and coming professionals today? And, you know, what industry are you in? And while. Is that your car? You know, kind of to get the. And so one of the gentlemen that was responding, he said, I. I built teams. I was very successful. And the podcaster said, hey, how do you build teams? And this guy said, you know what, I'm sorry to say, but you either have it or you don't. I don't know if I agree with that or not, but that's what they said. And they said, I have a very good aptitude for identifying not necessarily the right person, but the right person for the right situation, the right person for the particular role. And throughout my two decades, I mean, there's, I think, one person I can think about that left in a kind of unfortunate situation. Most everybody either stayed at the company that I hired them into, were promoted to bigger roles. This is something that, you know, I've been super blessed with, is identifying and even, you know, at worst, hired the controller, the staff accountant, two near short people, Kari and Alex in Ecuador is absolutely excellent. And I've been involved in a lot of other hiring decisions, so it's something that, you know, I. I have, I guess, or I've developed and, you know, it's. It's a big. It's a big superpower for me, if you will.

Yeah, good. I. I don't believe in the. You have it or you don't. I do believe. Yeah, I, I do believe that. That you either have compassion and empathy or you don't. And if you don't, then there's this level of sociopathy that, you know, we would measure success slightly differently, but your ability to connect with people is really a matter of honing. What is it, how is it you're connecting? You know, what are you. What are you doing to show presence? You know, and it's. I think that's a huge thing. And it's a skill, by the way, that's missing a lot. So as a. Again, as an aside and a leadership lesson here, presence is something that has to be practiced, and that's the piece that a lot of people either have or don't. And yet you can capture it and you can hone it and you can build it. So, you know, it's like, don't I. I have on. On the table in front of me. I have two phones, a Ton of notes and a lot of different potential distractions. And the key is the phones are off, the piles of distractions will wait. And what matters is you right here and my notes just off to the side. So it's practiced. And I'm, I'm saying that specifically so that every single leader that's listening to this or watching this can, can do their own self assessment. Right now, are you present or are you trying to do 14 different things while listening to or watching the podcast? Just pay attention to what's your next meeting and what is, what is the next thing you're doing.

So, so it's just a closeout Visa and then I'll get back to, to the presence thing, right?

Yeah. So rebuild the team.

Go rebuild the team. At the time, the Russian government wanted all of the transactions to be processed locally, so we had to teach them the way of transaction processing. Out of that actually came out a process, you know, a local processing company as well as a local card brand, which then became, of course a direct competitor of Visa. And so that's one of the other major, major projects I contributed to. This was on the accounting side because transaction had to happen locally, then it had to happen again on our, on our servers as well to make sure that it was registered accurately. And the third piece, at the time, the headquarters for Visa was in Singapore, and we ended up moving the headquarters from Singapore to Dubai to be closer to all of our European customers. So I interviewed every single person that came through the Dubai office, right? So they said, look, you hired your team, the team looks pretty good. Why don't you interview these other people? You're going to be one of the, you know, endpoints, one of the nodes. And that went pretty well. Pretty well as well. You know, I, you know, the hiring piece for me has been, has been a blessing. It's amazing now real quick on kind of self talk, self training and distractions. And I think everybody does this. You pull up at a long light behind a long line of cars and you immediately grab your phone, right? So I have these little mnemonics or these little things that I do and I say, look, if I don't, if, if you don't grab your phone, you put a dollar aside for every time you don't grab your phone, you put a dollar aside for yourself for something that you like doing. And so when you think about it and you're like, oh, I didn't grab it. That's 1, 2, 3, 20, 100 by the end of the week. And then you don't you feel less guilty about the spend? It's a kind of a small crazy thing that I do, but wanted to, to share that from a distraction perspective.

That's great. You buy your own presence.

Yes.

I was, I was so present. I'm gonna buy myself a video game to be distracted.

No, I bought a present. That's right.

That's great.

So sanctions came about. We said we got to get back to. Outside of, you know, political stuff. Got to get back to, to the US went back to the US for the American Express 1.5 billion dollar commercial side budget. They, they first hired me to be the marketing finance guy. And they said, well, the commercial budget owner, the CFO call it chief of staff has left. The finance leader for that is left. We want you to do that now. I said, okay, well I'm in New York now, so I might as well do what you guys tell me again. Hired the team and actually hired from existing individuals that were there and got the budget across the board again. $1.6 billion with a B. Got to present that in front of Steve Squarey who's the current CFC CEO of American Express. And I was only there for a year and a half because after having the very kind of intense Moscow experience with all the traffic, all of the hustle and bustle of a, you know, 15 million dollar 15 million person city, new York to me was the same thing my wife and I said, you know, New York is just an English speaking Moscow.

Wow.

So I went back to Austin with HID Global hids. Call it the crown technological, crown jewel of Assa Abloy. You may know Assa abloy if you go into Home Depot Yale, a lot of the hardware is sold by Abloy globally. Sweeto finish company, excellently run firm. And HID did all of the technology. So if you have a gym or a large building access card or hotels, it's probably an HID pass. It's almost a monopolist in that space. Biometrics, computer access, you know the, the code that you get on your phone. That's a lot of. That's hid. So I took a sidestep with them. Sales operations. Not finance. My initial Dell, right. Not accounting, Visa, sales operations. I rebuilt the compensation structure for a billion dollar revenue company. 350 salespeople, six business areas. I knew a little bit about sales comp. And again, going back to our original discussion, how was I able to do it? Well, I read three books. I got together with the Alexander Group, which is the preeminent sales compensation company in the world, I would say. And I had regular conversations. There were a couple of folks that I hired into the team that were part of my team, but actually taught me more than I learned from, you know, any, any of the research that I had done and again rebuilt the team in its entirety. Four individuals myself and was pretty successful at hid. Four years into it, I said, I want to get back into finance. And over the last three and a half years, I've been a finance leader here in Austin, Texas for worse than Diebol Nixdorf.

Amazing. That's so great. What were. If you look back over your entire history because you've worked with some serious firms, you've done a lot of hiring. I interviewed a CEO of major, major insurance organization and asked him what the toughest thing was he ever had to do. And he goes, probably letting somebody go. He goes, sometimes it's necessary, but if it ever gets easy, I don't want to, I don't want to be in this job. And I, I really appreciated that because he kept it as. It's a ne. It's a necessity sometimes, but there's also a human element to it. For you, as you think back, what were some of the toughest decisions in your climb in your trajectory?

Personal decisions or like people human decisions?

Well, isn't personal human? So I, I would, I would globalize it. Like, you know what? I had to make this decision for my family that affected my work. You know what, I had to make this decision for work that affected my, my family. Like they're intertwined. And, and I, yeah, I, I don't ever see a decision that affects your trajectory as something that's not human. Right. So.

So I'm gonna try to put all of all of these pieces together. And this is a great question. Seeing and having worked at very large companies, very often, not only me, but the folks that I worked with felt like a number, a cog in a machine, right? And that is one of the biggest things, that was one of the biggest knocks for working at Fortune, whatevers, right? And so I said at HID or at worst or my other roles, I said, I will never make anyone feel that way. Way, right? Because people talk about, you know, personal and professional balance and all of that stuff, but effectively, to me, it goes back to the personal. We're all human beings. We all want to have a life. We all like, you know, it's, it's these, let's go team building these after work happy hours and all this stuff. I guarantee you in 90% of the cases that person actually wants to be home with their family, with their family and they want to be home with their kids and they want to be, I don't know, even reading a book or walking their dog or whatever, you know, hangout and wind down aspect. So when I interview folks, I say, look, my style is to always have capacity in what we do. I you will probably not work a 10 hour day ever or you won't work beyond, beyond 40 hour weeks because this is the way I staff my teams. But your Production is times 2, times 3, times 4 as of another person that's applying for this role. I know because I've seen the resume, I've done the reference check. I understand you as a human being. So you by default are already going to, are giving the organization times two, times three because you're just a superstar. So there will be times that you have to work a little longer and a little harder. But overall, that is why I maintain an 80 capacity. Because when you need to turn it up, we're now at 100%. We're not going from 100 to 120. And so people might say, well, you know, there's some slack there in salary and bonus whatever else. I said, well, it's a lot more valuable to keep that person for many years as opposed to hiring somebody else going through this. Because look, if you have five people, one person leaves because they're overworked and they're overstressed. Those other four people are now automatically overworked and overstressed. Another one leaves three. Now you're doing you now you're at 150% capacity.

Yep.

So don't ever put yourself in that position. So you know when to answer your question most directly. What is, what are some of the learnings? The learnings and all of these things that I've done in the past are my learnings. That's my experience. And it just goes back to the golden rule. Fundamentally, you want to do for others what you can do for yourself. Right. So it's like, I don't want to work 70 hour weeks. I don't want to be forced to go to happy hour every day. It's like, by the way, if you want to do that, that's, that's perfect if you love you, if you want to work. But ultimately I will never, you know, kind of prod a person into a direction that I don't think as a human being I would ever want to go to.

So the, the, the word for that is called alignment. Right. That you have Values. And it's, it's one of the things, when I start with leaders, I'll, I'll get to what are the core values? How do they operate? And did they actually say what their values are? And then are they showing up in them or did they just show up and their values sort of emerge? And for you, that's, that's how it's come, is that you're like, I am. I believe in humans and this is how I, I operate. And it's like, that's right. You have this human value and you are aligned with that. And I, it's, that's great. No wonder you have such great retention. Right. That in itself is a cost saver for major organizations.

It's, it's a marathon, right? Like one of my favorite commercials from say, 15, 20 years ago, there's this guy huffing and puffing and sprinting and he's number one. And then, you know, there's 30 seconds later, they show another guy passing by and they, it's like an investment, I think. Advertisement it was like, it's, it's a marathon, not a sprint. And even if minor success, you get something accomplished today with your team, but they're exhausted. You get a second one, a third one by the fourth one, they're looking for a new job.

Yeah. Burned out. Keep.

Be aligned and keep everything balanced.

That's awesome. That's really great. Alex, what didn't I talk about that you were hoping we'd touch on?

You know, I, I think what. One of the things that we didn't talk about is this is failure in general and just making mistakes. Right? Yeah, yeah.

Failure used to be so, at least for me, so shame laden, right? Oh, I've failed. Oh, I tried this and it didn't work. Like, it goes back, childhood trauma goes back to. I didn't even like to practice piano in front of my parents because it sounded so bad when I practiced. So I'd never practiced. So that kept me terrible at it and what a horrible loop to be in. Right? So failure is about learning, right?

It's about learning. You know, I, I have a 15 year old and he plays basketball. He's been doing it for six years. And I've probably read 20 basketball books. Right. And done a lot of research, watched a lot of videos. And so coming out of practice, said, how'd you do? And he said, I, oh, I, I dribbled so well. I didn't lose a ball a sec a single time. It's like, I, you know, my ball handling Is great. It's like. But I actually, I'm okay with that. I want you to fail more.

Yeah.

Because if you're failing, you're now simulating a defender that is super shifty and is, you know, so it's like if we're not failing, we're not growing effectively. Right. And we have to fail on a daily basis, and we have to, as a society, make failure. Okay, I.

I love this. So I recently did. I had a beautiful conversation with, with.

A.

An executive leader who was also a bit of a philosopher, and.

He.

Gave me this paradigm which was really interesting. We think of failure, like, in terms of academia. So, you know, oh, we've gone out and we failed this many times. If we failed that many times in school, we would be a failure. But if you look at any top athlete, they are failing 75 and 80% of the time. And in academia, you fail 80% of the time, you're failing. And I think that is. Was one of the biggest shifts for me in my thinking about what we as a society do with failures is we think of it in terms of, oh, you struck out 80% of the time. That's, you must suck. And it's like, no, no. Every single time you're learning something about the other person, the context, yourself, you're, you know, your responsiveness, your. And responsiveness, your responsibility, your ability to respond. And so the idea of if you're not failing, you're not learning is really. I used to be allergic to that. I used to feel really like that's a terrible thing. What are we telling people to go out and fail? And, and the answer to that is we're not telling people to go out and fail. We're telling people to go out and do. And it's not failure that you get, it's feedback that you get. And it's only failure if you don't learn from the feedback.

You know, And I, I talked about my career journey, and I could go into every single one of those roles and pinpoint the biggest failure. And then I can also say, this is what I learned from this failure, and this is how I implemented this failure in, in my next role in my life, in my. So, you know, you look at the outside of a human being or a company, it's a label. Right. The inside is really what's matter, what matters. And I'm glad we're having this conversation. I'm glad we having an opportunity to kind of bounce things back and forth between you and I. And, you know, I know you're a very accomplished person. You told me about your background last time, and it's. It's an incredible experience.

I've. I've had quite a journey. I think what's cool is neither of us. And the same is true for our. Our audience. None of us. We're not done yet. Right. There's still so much to do in. And so many lives to affect and so much to experience. So, yeah, kind of cool. Anything else, Alex? We're. We're running to the end of our time together, at least for this podcast. Anything else you want to share at this point?

No, no, I. I don't have anything else, but I'm open book. If you've got other stuff for me, let's talk about it.

Awesome. All right, well, if people want to reach out to you and maybe bounce things off of you, like, hey, you're an expert at hiring people, you know, and you're still in leadership and you're doing all these amazing things, can I bounce something off you? If they wanted to reach you, is LinkedIn an okay place?

LinkedIn's an okay place, and it happens all the time. You know, I talked about the high school student earlier. We didn't talk about teaching. You know, I taught economics in Moscow and I taught entrepreneurship here in Austin at Westlake as part of the STEM program. Education's golden collaboration's great. And, you know, partnering with other people, if they think that they're going to learn from me, I bet you I'm learning from them as well. So, yes, please, please reach down, reach out on LinkedIn, or you have my email any other way. That's. That's great.

That's. That is great. All right, Alexander J. Freeman is where to find him on LinkedIn. And I love the piece. You didn't call it this. It's legacy, right? That you're building legacy by being able to affect the next generation of thinkers. When you teach, you are giving a piece of yourself to someone else. It's one of the reasons I like to do the podcast. You know, it's like if I can spark an idea, just even just one out of each podcast, and you come away going, oh, you know what? I didn't think about that. Or, oh, yeah, like, I'm on the right track.

Great.

That's what it's about. So. So with that, I will say, alex, thank you.

Thanks so much for being here when I appreciate it.

All righty. My guest today, Alexander J. Freeman. Alex, thank you again. This is one sharp sword cutting through to what matters most and I am Dr. Wayne Pernell, Dr. P. Your host, guide and coach on this journey. We will see you again here next time. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for listening to one sharp sword cutting through to what matters Most with outflancer Dr. Wayne Purnell. For more information, please go to onesharpsword.com.