Founder Stories: Bill George, CEO of Medtronic leading it to become the market-leader it is today

So good morning, everybody. We appreciate you coming. I know we're going to kind of get assembled here. This looks a little bit like most of my high school, college classes where nobody wants to sit in the front and everybody wants to— or church, you know, everybody wants to sit in the back. But so feel free to move forward if you want to. But so thanks for being here. We have, I think, a very fun day, interesting day, and we'll have a wonderful talk by Bill George, who Rick will introduce in just a second. He's a very close friend of Rick's.. We have at the end, at lunch, we're very excited to have Dr. Staszny tell us some, give us some very interesting things that his career has been about for years and years, so that'll be very exciting. But in addition to all the investors and portfolio CEOs and their management, their teams and advisors that we have, kind of on the back there we have as I understand, I've not met many of them, but a lot of the medical students at Dell Medical School. So I know, can you raise your hands? Some of the Dell med— there they are back there, those guys. And then some UT students back here, some undergraduate students, is that correct? Right here on the— so we're excited to have you there. And so we just, we'll run through the— have some portfolio presentations and then we'll have a couple breaks along the way and then have lunch, and then depart after that. So, but thank you for being here. And Rick, you want to start us off here?

Good morning. Thanks very much for joining us. And for our guests from outside, thanks for coming over as well. We're really privileged today to have a very special guest join us, Bill George, who's an extraordinary human being already. But has had just an incredible career in medical device industry, in academia, and I want to take just a few minutes to sort of introduce Bill and some of the stuff that he's done, and we'll give the floor to Bill. We appreciate you very much being here.

Thank you.

Thank you, Evan. So let me just tell you a little bit about Bill's background. He's currently a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School. He's a former chairman and chief executive officer of Medtronic. And he teaches leadership. He's been teaching leadership since 2004 at the Harvard Business School. He's had 4 bestselling books. And we've asked him to talk a little bit about his lessons from those. 7 Lessons in Leading in Crisis, True North, Finding Your True North, and Authentic Leadership. As well as True North Groups. And his newest book, Discover Your True North, was published in August of 2015. Bill is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Medtronic. He joined Medtronic in 1989 as president and chief operating officer and was chief executive officer from 1991 to 2001 and board chair from 1996 to 2002. Earlier in his career, he was a senior executive at Honeywell and Lytton Industries. He also served in the U.S. Department of Defense. Bill currently serves as a director at Goldman Sachs and the Mayo Clinic. He's also recently served on the boards of ExxonMobil, Novartis, Target Corporation, and Minnesota's Destination Medical Center Corporation. He's currently a trustee at the World Economic Forum USA, and he served as the board chair of Allina Health and Abbott Northwestern Hospital and the United Way of Greater Twin Cities and also at Avamed. In 2014, the Franklin Institute awarded him with the Bauer Award for Business Leadership. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2012. He's been named one of the top 25 business leaders for the past 25 years by PBS, Executive of the Year in 2001 by the Academy of Management, and the Director of the Year in 2001 and 2002 by the National Association of Corporate Directors. Bill is also a contributor to CNBC and makes frequent appearances on television and radio. He received his, his Bachelor of Science in Engineering with honors from Georgia Tech, his MBA with high distinction from Harvard University where he was a Baker Scholar, and has honorary PhDs from Georgia Tech, Mayo Medical School, University of St. Thomas, Augsburg College, and Bryan University. And he and Penny, his wife, reside in Minnesota. I happen to be also close friends with his son, Jeff, who's a close friend of PTV. And on a personal note, you know, Bill has been a thought leader in our space, but he's mentored hundreds, hundreds of CEOs in our industry. Always accessible, always gracious with his time, and willing to sort of take a few minutes with young people to sort of talk to you about your future.. And he brings together in sort of his personal leadership style this intersection between values and authentic leadership. And there's nobody in our industry better to talk to us today about the importance of that. And we're really proud, Bill, to have you here in Texas and here in Austin. So welcome to Austin.

Thank you, Bill. Thank you. Thank you, Rick. Thank you very much. Thank you, Rick. And I'm really excited to be here among a group of healthcare people. You know, we're going through yet another round of shall we redo healthcare. We're up, we're going to throw a 52-card pickup at the healthcare system which accounts for 6 of the U.S. economy. But here's the reality. All we're talking about is who gets access to healthcare and who pays for it. We're not talking about health. No one has talked in any of these bills, whether it's Obamacare or the RyanCare or whether the current Graham-Cassidy goes through, no one's talking about how we improve our health. You know, that really is the name of the game if you think about it. And as Americans live longer and frankly have more disparate lifestyles, the cost of healthcare is going to rise inexorably. Until we address the root causes of healthcare. We don't like to talk about some of those, but I think we're going to have to get at that. We're going to see that. But meanwhile, everyone I know, as I get older, even younger, people are dying for solutions for their health. They're dying to, they'll do anything to get ways to live longer, to live a healthier, more fruitful life. And I think it's not the length of the years that counts, it's the quality of your life. And I think the kind of technologies that you either are working on or investing in really hold the key to that. Is can we offer people around the world high quality of life so they live quality of life. Earl Bakken, the founder of Medtronic, had a diagram done to represent his philosophy as a person rising— he called it the rising man, but let's call it the rising person coming off the operating table halfway up like this, finally walking away. He said, you know, our job is not done when we put a pacemaker or defibrillator or stent in someone. Our job is not done until that person is leading a full, active life. And I think that's really the name of the game. How do we allow people to lead the full, active life? They want to run marathons, they should run marathons. Swim in masters swimming contests when they're 70 years old. Play with their grandchildren. Whatever it is. I think it's what all of us want. And how can we use technology to deliver on that? What could be a more important use of technology? Isn't that more important than just yet another social media app? You know, to give people a full active life. And I want to compliment Rick and Matt and the team here at PTV because that's really what you offer, that support innovation technology. Here's the reality of this industry, quite unlike the pharmaceutical industry, nothing against pharmaceutical industry, but all the companies here basically are startups. Medtronic started with 2 people. When I went there, it had 4,000. Today it is 85,000. But it started with 2 people. The important thing is everything came as a startup. In fact, Earl Bakken was bankrupt 11 years after he founded the company and 2 years after he invented the pacemaker because he had no money. He wouldn't declare bankruptcy. He was too proud to do that. So financing is critical for healthcare. You can't get anywhere unless— because most of the people who start companies are not wealthy people. This is not an industry that started by a group of wealthy people. This is started by people that need capital. And it is an entrepreneur's industry. In fact, one of the challenges we have as industry consolidates is can you stay entrepreneurial? That's why I faced the Medtronic. Can you stay not as a big giant company like Pfizer, but can you operate like a series of small to medium companies as you grow? And can you foster the ventures that just have maybe a dozen people working on them next to a large pacemaker defibrillator CRM business. That's really a challenge. But who provides the capital and who provides value beyond that to provide help? You know, I remember when Earl Bakken had his first— he was one of the first people to take venture capital money in 1960. That's what kept him from going bankrupt. It was not very much money, $200,000. But to him, he said, "The advice I got from the venture capitalists that came on my board was far more important than the money I got." And I think that's something that— providing advice to young people trying to get started up because in the medical technology industry I'm familiar with, every company that I've ever seen has— every invention comes out of two people, a medical doctor and a scientist or an engineer, okay. And most of those medical doctors don't really, aren't, don't wind up running companies. They stay in medicine. They stay at a place like Mayo. So, but I think the key is, can you have, when you're investing with someone, do you have trust and integrity? And the phrase doing well by doing good I think applies very, very well here. So you ask, what does all this have to do with authentic leadership? Well, I think that it's all about that. It's all about how do you build trust? I've been a customer of Wells Fargo for the last 40 years. I'm still a customer of Wells Fargo. I've known all 3 CEOs. But how could, I thought, the most trusted bank, the most trusted commercial bank in the country, wind up creating over 3 million false accounts? I mean, how would you feel if they created some for you and all of a sudden you find you're getting fees on these accounts and, or even if they got closed the next day? How could this happen? To a bank that's under the controls? I know from Goldman Sachs we're all under enormous controls. How could this happen? And what is the cost of that trust? I talked a couple times to Slim, Tim Sloan, including last week he called me, the new CEO, just to talk through some issues. I said, Tim, you're going to have to go way over backward to regain the trust. You may get your processes in order, but it's going to take you a decade to regain the trust. And why would else people bank with you? You don't offer lower interest rates, lower mortgage rates, you know. You don't have— there's no magic. Money is fungible. So what do you offer? Trust. And if you breach that trust— now I think the same applies in all forms of business, but certainly in healthcare. Every time someone— a doctor implants a Medtronic product or anyone else's product in a patient, the doctor really doesn't know, does that defibrillator work? Or is it going to short out or is it going to have, you know, a software glitch that's going to cause it to go off at the wrong time? It doesn't know that. It's trust in the person who creates it. So do you have that trust and integrity which are bound closely together? And I think in your field, those of you who are in the financing field, you know, your clients need to know that you're serving their needs, not your own. And I think we've seen enough problems in the financial world to know that an awful lot of funds have breached that trust. We know that. We know that. We've seen it so often. But employees in an organization and your colleagues must believe you're there to serve them and not yourself. That you really are a servant leader and you mean what you say. And I think today with the scrutiny we have that all the external constituencies, the government, the media, the regulators, everyone who has a vested stake in the integrity of the enterprise must trust that if you're the leader, that you're true to what you— you're true to your work and you will do what you say. You're true to your word, not work, sorry. Typo there. So, I think in terms of how else you'll build loyalty and colleagues that want to work with you, okay? So, when we did Discover Your True North, True North came out in 2007. And research done back in 2005. So, 10 years later, 2015, we went back and expanded the base. We interviewed originally 125 people. In this case, we interviewed an additional 47 to say, how is leadership changing? And what is different today? And these are some of the things we found. That frankly, the— and I can ask some of the students back here. I can tell you the idea of a hierarchical bureaucratic organization, if it isn't dead, it's dying fast. People don't want to work in that kind of organization today. They want to have a place that's empowering, that gives them a chance to make a difference. For large organizations, they're going to look a lot more like Google than the old AT&T before the breakup. They're going to be a series of interdependent units. In the old days, we used to hoard information. Today, everything's transparent. Whether you make it transparent or not, it's transparent. The whole world knows. It's all on, all on the internet, all on social media. You can't hide anything. So you might as well go into the assumption that every discussion we have, every conversation we had, may well wind up being public information. Back in the era of Jack Welch, leader of the— manager of the century, it was all about charisma and style. Now I didn't have charisma and I didn't have great style, so I guess I've always resisted that. To me, leadership is being who you are. I don't think we choose, I see a lot of CEOs coming through our programs at Harvard Business School. They are not the most charismatic people and they don't have the greatest style, but they're genuine, they're real, most of them know their business extremely well, they're great operators, but the most important thing is you can trust them. They have integrity and you can trust them. And to me that's a much more important criteria. The idea is you're confident enough, you feel good enough in your own skin to be open. That you don't have to put on a, you don't have to fake it to make it. There's some people writing about that, actually advocating that. I can tell you, particularly for the students in the back of the room, if you fake it to make it, you might get one or two promotions, you'll never make it. I can just tell you, you'll never make it. This woman Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos who tried to fake it out there with the fingerprint test instead of the blood test. It was, she was faking it to make it. Contrast that with Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. And how, you know, she's not a person who would feel particularly comfortable being so open. And she wrote that amazing letter after her husband Dave died, and describing all of her feelings. She wrote it, put it in a book. I think it's Plan B, it's called. But, you know, amazing that she can be that real and talk about such very deeply personal things, and how much that's helped other people. Be real. By having someone as high profile as she is be so real. And the economists told us the whole baby boomer generation is based on self-interest. Personally, I just think this is all wrong. And I think we're seeing today people, younger people that I work with, students, mid-careers, it's all about serving others in a greater cause. I mean, at the end of the day, what do you want for your life? To say that you're the one died with the most coins? Or that you made a difference, that you made a difference in the lives of people you've touched. When they come to your funeral, I went to a friend's funeral the other day, what do you think they're going to say about you? How much money you made? The title you held? No, they're going to say what kind of person you were. In fact, probably be, if you live long enough, probably your grandchildren giving the eulogy. You know, they're going to say what kind of person you were and how you touched their lives and how you helped them. So why not think about that? Okay. Okay, we're fortunate everyone in this room has enough money to get by. It's not about who has the most. It's really all about how can you in your life serve others in a greater cause. And I can't think of a better cause than healthcare to serve. There are lots of great causes, but this is one that, pretty good one. So what's caused these changes? I'd like to cite 4 things. In spite of what we hear coming out of Washington or coming out of Brexit, I can tell you globalization is here to stay. It's like the tide coming in. You're not going to hold back the tide. You're not like a little boy It's not like a little boy with fingers in the dike who can stop the tide. Globalization is here to stay. This is a country, a nation built upon people who came from outside the country to make their fortunes here. It still is. And the open doors, look at the dynamism. Look at how many Indian Americans are leading major corporations today, okay, including the Dean of the Harvard Business School, Nitin Nohria. Think about the impact of the Jewish immigrants '30s and '40s and the '50s and the impact they had on this country. Think about all the— most all of us came here, or if you track our ancestors, they came from outside this country. So, globalization means we're going to be closer together, we're going to tie together, and we're going to find the best of the best, and we're going to compete globally. That's a fact of life. Technology and social media are driving tremendous change. We're just beginning to see the effect of AI and the effect on the workplace. And if you're concerned about jobs, forget about globalization, think about the impact of AI. What that means is we have to upgrade the jobs that humans do well. I'm a great believer in human interaction. Look, you can go online and see courses and maybe if you're studying, uh, microeconomics or you're studying basic math, uh, you can get that online. But I think the benefit of the human interaction, places like this, will never end. This is where I think it's going to be and that's what, what do we as humans bring to that party? Judgment, integration of ideas, not that somebody wrote an algorithm to integrate our decision making, but do we bring human judgment? And that's what you do. Those of you who are investors, that's what you're doing. You're making human judgment. Now, I'm a great believer in diversity and I think diversity is rich. I don't believe in quotas for people. But I think if you want to have a strong organization, you want diverse points of view sitting around the table. And you want those diverse points of view to come from diverse life experiences. The more diverse the life experiences, the more likely you are to make good decisions. I worked in the U.S. Department of Defense during the Vietnam War. And I went there because some of those brilliant people in the country were working there under Robert McNamara. They were really extraordinary. You know what? They didn't have a clue what was going on on the ground in Vietnam. And they all marched off the cliff together with a lot of false assumptions. They didn't really know. No one had really spoken to what's going on. If you want to be successful in business, you got to be on the ground. I was at Medtronic. I saw between 700 and 1,000 procedures coming to places like Baylor and all over the country, the leading academic centers, all around the world, and contrast what it was like in Greece or Turkey with what it was like in Japan or the United States. Why? Because that's where, that's the real world. My son and daughter-in-law are both doctors and they see it every day. That's the real world. It's that last 3 feet. It's no different in retail sales and in retail if you're not in stores. If John Stumpf, who I know is not a bad person, but I can tell you if he'd gotten out in the branch banks at Wells Fargo, he would have found out what was going on. All you have to do is go out and talk to people. Say, what's going on? They'll tell you what's going on. Going into a factory, how's the quality? They'll tell you. This equipment doesn't work. We can't produce good quality products. They'll tell you what's going on. And in any field, if you're not out there knowing what's going on, you know, I say you're not going to make good decisions. And finally, the millennials. The millennials are changing everything. I would say very much for the better. I'm a great believer in millennials. I think that the commitment to serve and make a difference is very passionate among millennials. And I think the acceptance of people of who the real person is. And I'll tell you with the millennials, you can't fake it to make it. They know who's authentic and who's not in the first 60 seconds. Most of us, most of us do, I should say. So, these are some of the ways that leadership is changing. Well, some of you may be asking, why does it matter? Look, I'm an investor. Why does it really matter? Or I want to go work for an investor. Leadership makes a difference to the success and failure of every organization. Including yours, then the root cause of the failures we've seen in the last decade going back to the banking crisis, those banks didn't fail because of subprime mortgages. They failed because of failed leadership. Why did they fail? Because they were focusing on the short term or the long term, or they made the cardinal sin of putting their self-interest ahead of the institution's. And to me, there's no such thing. You, if you have any responsibility for an organization, which all of us do, You have to put the interest of the organization ahead. I would say to people at Medtronic, if you don't buy into the mission and you don't put the interest of this corporation ahead, then you shouldn't work here. Pretty simple. So, I was pretty strong about that. Now, why do leaders fail? I've studied over 200 leaders who have failed. Interestingly enough, not one has failed because they weren't smart enough. My colleague Dan Goleman is the father of emotional intelligence, has the data. He said, Above a level 120 IQ, which everyone in this room has, the differentiating factor in leadership is not IQ but EQ. So what do we mean by that? It— and I see this at Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs hires very, very smart people. And I keep saying, where we get in trouble is people with low EQ. We don't get in trouble with people that aren't smart enough. They have very high intellectual standards. And almost all the people on top have high EQs, but there are people in the middle ranks that don't, and that's a very serious issue for us. Okay, so what do I mean by that? Well, lack of self-awareness. No one's going to stand up here and admit to you that they lack self-awareness, so I will. There have been many times when I lacked self-awareness and didn't really know what kind of impact. I have no idea how you're receiving this talk. How do you— are you responding, or are you just listening, just being polite? Or they're unable to face reality and admit their mistakes. And I think this is key for any leader because if you as a leader, back to my experience in the Department of Defense when Robert McNamara was Secretary, he could never admit a mistake and so people spent untold amount of hours and money trying to cover up those mistakes. And so you the leader won't admit your mistakes, no one who works for you is. And so I used to say to people at Medtronic, you're never going to get fired here. For making a mistake. Okay, we all make mistakes. If you bring it forward, but if you cover it up, you're gonna lose your job because none of us is clairvoyant. We can't know what's going on. So you have to bring out, and we'll get the smartest people in the company, and if we don't have them in the company, we'll bring in people from outside. How else can you know about a quality problem unless somebody brings it forward? How do you know about business practices that are inappropriate that are going on in China or in Wherever, okay. You won't know unless people are willing to bring those things forward. So, you have to create an environment that's true. I think one of the greatest examples on the negative side was what happened at General Motors. Watching, I saw Rick Wagner, the CEO, 3 weeks before they went bankrupt in 2008. I was with him at a seminar at Harvard. And you know what? He was clueless. He was like a deer frozen in headlights. He had no idea. So I asked them what the challenges were. All the challenges they were were external. We have problems with catalytic converters, the government's imposing on us these CAFE standards, the energy requirements that we're not going to be able to meet. And, you know, the problem is price of oil's too high and so we can't sell, you know, our big SUVs where we make all the money. That wasn't the problem. The problem was they'd lost their market share. It had gone from 52% of the world's largest market to 18%. And they never addressed the root causes of why that— they're buying— they're making cars people didn't want to buy. And then Ed Whitacre came in here from AT&T in San Antonio and he got it turned around and he chose Mary Barra to be the next CEO. And I think it was an inspired choice. Mary was just named the most powerful woman in the world, which is very interesting to think about. She was a student of mine before she became CEO when she was head of product development. And she took over and they had the ignition switch situation and she had to go in front of Congress. And boy, did she get beaten up that day. My wife was so mad at Senator Feinstein because she asked her, "Now tell me, Mary, you know, as a woman, how could you let this happen?" I mean, it was like she was carrying the burden for all women because she was the new CEO of General Motors. Of course, she didn't let it happen. She didn't know anything about it. It was all covered up. They sent their quality problems to the law department. Just try to have the law department solve your quality problem. No offense to the lawyers in the room, but that's what they did. So the management never knew about them. No wonder they couldn't fix them. Mary said to the Congress, you know, we have a cultural problem. They kind of made fun of her, but she was right. She spent— think about her life story. She spent 38 years, because she started at 18 years old, okay? She started at 18 years old before she became CEO. She started on the floor. General Motors sent her to engineering school, then eventually sent her to get her MBA, okay. She didn't go to some big name school. I'll tell you, she started on the— her father was a union worker. She understood the relationship between union, which has always been a problem. So there's a person that's providing real leadership, okay. Or they lacked a passion for the company's mission and values. Or people weren't really passionate about the business we're in. I say to people, if you're not passionate about the Medtronic mission, you shouldn't work here. You know, you can go make a lot more money somewhere else. You know, if restoring people to life and health doesn't excite you, don't work here. Okay? Or they lack compassion for the people they serve, the patients they serve. Do you have compassion for the person that's ultimately going to have the products either you're financing or creating? Or do you have empathy for the people you work with, the difficulties we all go through? Or they lack the courage to transform an organization. When you make a transformative decision, that takes real courage. People aren't going to like it. It may not work. Okay? But that's where the great decisions are made. Now, if you think about these qualities—passion, compassion, courage—these aren't matters of the intellect. These are all matters of the heart. I once heard Thich Nhat Hanh, the famous Buddhist monk, say, the longest journey you'll ever take is the 18 inches from your head to your heart. Okay? And for great leaders, particularly the students here, if you want to be a great leader, you have to have the qualities, the brain power if you will, the analytical skills to, and the rational decision-making skills. But if that's all you have and you cut yourself off at the neck, you'll never be a great leader. You have to have the qualities of the heart, of knowing how to inspire people, knowing how to get them excited, knowing how to treat people well, Qualities like passion, like courage, the courage to make the big decision to bet it all and come through and make it, make it go. You know, look at the healthcare business. This is a high-risk business, guys. It's a risk anytime you put a product in someone's body, anytime someone has a disease, anytime my son, who is a cancer surgeon, does a surgery, it's a risk it may not work. So, if you don't like risk, you're in the wrong field. But I'd say, when I was on board Exxon, Exxon's in the risk business too. They're drilling for oil. They may not have any there. Goldman Sachs is in the risk business. Every time they make an investment, it may not work. We're all in the risk business. So you have to have the courage to take those risks and to put yourself on the line. And if it doesn't work, you need to own it. You can't put it off on someone else. But I think these are the qualities, and those qualities of the heart, okay, integrated with the qualities of the brain, are the mark of great leaders. Okay? And so becoming a leader goes way beyond Critical thinking, learning knowledge, developing skills. What is it all about? It's really about, I think, aligning people around a mission and a set of values. If you can do that well, like J&J has done over the decades, to have a credo that aligns people around that. And then it's not about exerting power over people to lead. That's a very old-fashioned notion. Today's world, the great leaders know how to empower people. Not just a few people, but a lot of people. Maybe thousands of people. And today I think you have to serve all your stakeholders. You cannot just serve the stock market. If you just serve the shareholder of the last 5 minutes, in the end you'll not have a successful organization. You have to serve all your stakeholders simultaneously. It's not a question of trade-off. Some people argue this ad nauseam. It's a question of serving all your stakeholders, including those constituencies who have a stake in your company and may be opposed to what you're doing. Like a regulator, okay, like a labor union. And it's about collaborating with other people. Today the world, in a global world, we have to learn how to collaborate across geographic boundaries and to get creative breakthroughs and ideas. Ultimately, the measure is can you sustain superior results. It's not about quarterly earnings, it's about year after year doing what you say you're going to do and having a successful track record. So, unlike a lot of people, I like to look at the track record that someone's delivered over the long term and to see, have they created growth? Have they created real value? Have they created a dynamic organization and can sustain it? And so, in the book you have in front of you, Discover Your True North, we came up with this phrase because some people talked about, some people called it their moral compass. Jim Burke of J&J called it his moral compass. He said, without a moral compass, you're swimming in chaos. Your true north really is your essence. It's who you are as a person. It's your most deeply held beliefs, your values, and the principles you lead by. I suspect everyone in this room, no matter what decade you're in, can write that down if you really think about it. What are your— what do you at your core believe? What are the values you hold most dear? And what are the principles you lead by? Okay, the challenge we have is we get pulled off course because we want to impress people, and so we either capitulate to the pressures we face and go along to get along, and we aren't willing to step up with the courage to make the bold decision, or we get seduced— money, fame, and power. I could get a promotion by playing the game here. I could play, be a political person. I could not make— I just go along and not make that courageous decision. And so we get seduced by the opportunities for money, fame, and power. It happens in all fields. And so the question is, how do you stay on course? And I think it really starts with your life story. Someone I really admire for what he has done, it's in the first chapter of the book, is Howard Schultz. I've known him over the years, but here's a guy that started with nothing. He grew up in the projects, the Bayview housing projects in Brooklyn. And you look at what he's done, he wanted to found something. He said the saddest day of his life was when his father died. Now he and his father had a very bad relationship. He left Brooklyn because they fought all the time. He thought his father was irresponsible. As he said, he lost 30 jobs, 30 rotten jobs. He thought his father was a failure. But when his father died, he realized he wasn't a failure. He never had a shot. So he wanted to create a company. Where everyone would be proud to work there. And he thought giving healthcare was one of the first elements of trust, giving all of our employees healthcare was one of the most critical. The healthcare that goes into Starbucks costs more than the coffee that you drink. But he understood human connections. And so Starbucks, he said, we're not selling coffee, we're offering human connections. He used to talk about it as the third place that people could, in addition to their home and their office. You go to a coffee house, you'll see all these people sitting around. To third place. One of my students said very perceptively, you know, Bill, for some people it's the only place because they don't have a safe home to go and they don't have a job. It's the one place they can go. But he understood this and he left and turned the company over to Jim Donald and he saw it becoming more bureaucratic and he went back in about 2008 and until recently was CEO, but he's still very much there. I don't think he ever really left. He's really created a very dynamic organization, but he's created that human touch by going into the stores, spending time, and empowering people. But it all comes out of his life story that he wanted to make a difference from the life story he grew up with. What's a crucible? A crucible is when you face a difficult time in your life. Things are not going your way. It may come out of the blue. It may have been growing up that you had a difficult time with your parents. You may have lost a sibling. You may have had to face a life-threatening illness like Dan Vassella at Novartis did where He, ah, faced real serious illness problems. So what is that crucible? Or it may come at you out of the blue. Ah, talked to somebody the other day whose wife of 35 years is leaving him. And it came totally out of the blue. And so sometimes things happen that you never expect. You get a diagnosis. Another friend of mine's wife was just diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Totally out of the blue. They were on top of the world one day, bottomless. How do you deal with these crucibles? The question is, how do you deal and what do you learn from this experience? I had a man who wrote me after True North came out in 2007, and his name, Pedro Algorta. He said, Bill, 35 years ago I was in a life-threatening situation. I was flying with my rugby team across the Andes Mountains from Uruguay to Argentina and our plane crashed in the mountains. And we spent 70 days in the mountains with no food and no water. And we had on street clothes, just like we are now. Well, not dressed up, but just street clothes. And this is the story of Alive by Piers Paul Reed. Some of you have heard of it. It's a well-known story. There's a movie of that same name. But he talked about that experience. He came to my classroom and told the whole story. And because he said, I went for 35 years without ever talking about that. He went to Stanford Business School and got his MBA and never mentioned it once. That he'd been in this crash. And he'd spent 70 days in the mountains like that. And he said, you know, there's 3 ways to deal with a crucible. One way is to lead an angry life and say, a blaming life, saying I didn't grow up with the money you had, I grew up in a tough situation, I didn't have the help, why did I get this life, this on me? And always spend your whole life looking back. I think we know that's not a good way to live your life. We can always wish for something different, but we are who we are. He said the second way is to stuff it, to not even talk about it. He said, that's what I did. And so you shut yourself down emotionally, and you aren't really fully alive as a human being because you don't have that head and heart connected. And so he said, that's— he said, I did that. And he said, it wasn't until I read your book that it all came bubbling up, because eventually it will come up. If you think you can stuff it, those stories, those things from the past will come up. And they'll tend to repeat themselves on a regular basis. He said the third way, and I'd like to encourage you to think about it, is to think of your life like a pearl. How's a pearl formed? Pearls form from an oyster shell where the waves are rashing over it and it's very irritating to the shell because there's sand and there's salt water and it's incessant, they just keep coming and coming and coming. Eventually that shell forms a substance called nacre, which is mother of pearl, and inside that a beautiful pearl is formed. So think about that most difficult time in your life when that pearl was formed. That pearl is, is you, that represents who you are today and how you can build your life around that pearl because you went through the difficult times, because you overcame difficulties, not because you had an easy life, because you faced disappointments. Points. You learn from yourself. And often this repeats itself later in life in a challenging leadership experience. So let me just share with you my most challenging, I call my most defining leadership experience. That's making it sound better than it is. But I was at Honeywell and my father thought he was a failure. I'm an only child, older parents. He thought he was a failure. He wanted me to make up for his failures. And so he thought he should have been a leader of a company he never was. Son, I want you to be the leader I never became. So I'd like you to go out and lead a major company. He even named companies for me. You know, IBM, Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble. I worked for all three. Not my companies, but great companies. So I'm at Honeywell. I think I'm en route to the top. In my 30s, I was president of Honeywell Europe, Middle East, and Africa. I loved it. I got called back for a 2-step promotion, worst promotion in my life because you probably can tell by this point I don't really like working at big bureaucratic organizations. That's what we had. I had 9 divisions in 9 different businesses, 3 groups, and nothing but problems. And everyone you touched, people would kind of push the, kick the can, push the problems out. Well, we had to address the problems. So, I got this series of problems. And it took about 3.5 years to get things on track. And then I got another set of 6 divisions and that went a little faster, about 18 months. And then I was handed the aerospace and defense business. Important business, not necessarily my business, but one that I was really passionate about. But we uncovered $550 million of cost overruns, which is real money in those days, and almost sunk the company. And so one day I'm driving home, meanwhile, immodestly, I'm one of 2 leading candidates to become the next CEO. Decision's about 3 years away, but clearly moving me around with this in mind. And so I'm driving, and I have, we came back from Brussels 3 years, 5 years before. I have a good life. My wife has a good job. 2 kids, one in high school, one in junior high. Both of them are doing well. Lots of friends. And I'm driving home on a beautiful fall day, just like today. Sun was shining. I looked at myself in the mirror and I saw a miserable person, me. Now how can you be miserable when seemingly you have everything going for you? You ask anyone on the outside, oh yeah, he's got a lot going for him. How could you be miserable? I was miserable because I was losing it. I was losing sight of my true north. We didn't use the phrase in those days, but I was losing who I really wanted to be. I wanted to be a value-centered leader. You know what? I was playing the corporate game. You know, I was saying just the right thing to the board of directors, just the right thing to the management committee. You know, I was the guy looking for that brass ring, right? That CEO job. And I wasn't being myself. I was even wearing cufflinks, which I don't wear, just to try to impress people, you know. So I was playing the game. Some of you have seen this in big companies, persons, all you want to play that game. And I wasn't very good at it, by the way. And everyone else could see it, but I couldn't see it. I went home and told my wife what I was feeling. She said, Bill, I've been trying to tell you this for a year. You just refuse to listen. See, it's that person who's closest to you that sees you as you really are. And you can't kid them. So I have a men's group I meet with, met with yesterday morning. Every Wednesday morning when I'm in Minneapolis, which isn't all the time, but when I'm there, 7:15 to 8:30. We've been meeting for 41 years every Wednesday. Believe it or not, it's hard to believe, it's true. Then we've been meeting about 15 years. So I went and told them how I was feeling. They said, yeah, we've seen these changes. I said, "Now you turned Medtronic down 3 times for a job. Why'd you turn Medtronic down?" Well, I think you'll hear the ego coming out here. And I said, "You know, I always thought I was going to run a big organization. Medtronic's kind of a mid-sized company." And I started thinking about it. It took me a couple weeks to kind of overcome this ego thing about running a big company. I said, "Why is that so important?" So I called the CEO back and said, "Win Wallin, is the job still open?" And he said, "Well, we're about ready to hire someone from Baxter, but you can get in line if you'd like." So I did and 4 months later, and I remember talking to Earl Bakken, the founder, over in, down in Phoenix. I had to go down to Phoenix to see him where he was. And he didn't even interview me. All he talked about was the mission of Medtronic. And that was, he was so passionate about finding people to lead the company that were passionate about the mission of restoring people to full life and health. By the way, I had no healthcare background. A lot of high-tech experience, no healthcare background. But somehow I got the job. I came in number 2 role as president, chief operating officer. 2 years later I was CEO. But I remember coming in, I felt like I was coming home. Coming home to a place I'd never been before where I could, you know, learn a lot from the people, bring people together around the table and make good decisions and we could really make a difference in the lives of people we serve. And it was a great 13 years for me and it set up everything that's happened since. But the thing that was most important is not the stock price, which did well, not the revenues or the earnings, not the return on investment. What was most important to me is how many people every year did we restore to full life and health. That was our mission. And that number went from 300,000 when I came to about 6 million when I left, and today, 6.5, today that number is around 60 million. And to me, that's the real mark of what you've accomplished. So I look back at that. I've had nothing to do with it now for 15 years, but I'm glad to see it still goes on. So that's my story. So think about your own and what is your story and how does it come out of your life and how does it inspire the kind of person that you want to be. And I think that's what I want to leave you with. I just want to offer you a few thoughts about your development as a leader because I think we're always— I hope I'm still developing. I hope we're always developing as leaders. And I want to touch briefly on these 6 things. So how do you gain self-awareness? It's one of the hardest things. Very few people have written about this. We've learned a lot in the last 10 years. I've talked about your life story and your crucible. There's 2 other things I want to talk about. But let me just say, self-awareness leads to having compassion for yourself. If you cannot have compassion for other people consistently unless you have compassion for yourself and accept yourself for who you are. If you feel like you have to fake it to make it because you don't like yourself, it's not going to work in the end. And then you can realize all your dreams, which we call self-actualization. So I would say in today's 24/7 world, we all need to take time out to reflect and be introspective. Number 1, why? Why is that so important? I think if you're just working off a task list trying to get your top 20 things done every day, you'll never get to the point where you put the important above the immediate. You'll let the immediate take precedence over the important. That's why so many people make bad decisions. I think you need to take 20 minutes. Now I happen to be a meditator. I meditated this morning on the airplane coming down here from Dallas. Or some mindfulness practice or prayer or going for a long walk or a jog or keeping a journal or having a deep intimate discussion with somebody you love. Or just reflecting in a quiet space, but something where you pull back and you say, am I doing the things today that I really want to do? Am I focusing on things that are really important in my life? Because we can all get caught up with the immediacy. I think there's nothing more important than honest feedback. This is not about just getting a formal review. This is about who's going to give you honest feedback. And if we can't get honest feedback— and a lot of people don't like feedback. So how do you get that honest feedback from the people you work with to open up your hidden areas, discover your blind spots? I think 360 feedback is invaluable. I put a policy in at Medtronic. I made a couple promotion mistakes. We're not going to promote anyone until we get 360 feedback on them from their subordinates so we know how the subordinates feel about them because that's very different than how I might have that perception of them as a boss. I was going to promote a very outstanding young man once. And our head of human resources said to me, "Bill, you know, why do you think he has a 40% turnover in his department? No one, no one can stand to work for him. He takes credit for everything everyone else does and he doesn't really care about the people who work for him. And when things go wrong, he's a blamer." Well, okay, I missed it, eh? So you want to invite those difficult conversations. I think one of the hardest things we have to do How do we see ourselves as other people see us? In terms of values, just ask yourself, would you feel comfortable if this transcript, this conversation was published in the New York Times or the local, your local hometown newspaper? And if you don't, maybe you're going the wrong way, because today it may happen, okay? But you have to be true to your values. Your sweet spot's kind of a euphemistic term we used to call motivated capabilities, but It's when your motivations come together with your greatest strengths. And in terms of motivations, you really have two types of motivations. You have your extrinsic motivations, which— how you look in the outside world. Promotion, money, fame, power, as I mentioned. How you seem in the eyes of others. But I think if you're just driven by that— there's nothing wrong with that, but you need to have a balance with your intrinsic motivation. Making a difference in the world. Making a difference in the lives of people, helping other people, raising a family, finding meaning in your work, and being true to your beliefs. And I think if you stay true to those things, you'll find, if you find a job that enables you to do that, but many of us work in jobs that that's not true. We're just over on the left-hand side. The second thing is play to your strengths. We're all going to have weaknesses. And how do you deal with weaknesses? Surround yourself with people that are very different than you are, that have skills you don't have, that are more capable. When I went to Medtronic, I knew nothing about medicine. So I had a vice chairman, Dr. Glenn Nelson, who was a brilliant medical doctor. He wasn't great at running businesses, but he was so wise that I could go to him at any time for advice on medicine or anything else, organization decisions. And so we had a great partnership because we're so different. And can you acknowledge your own weaknesses? Do you believe that vulnerability is power? If you're willing to be vulnerable, you have the power. If you try to pretend to be invulnerable, you're giving the power to other people. So I'd say you're in your sweet spot when you have intrinsic motivations in a job that utilizes your strengths. When I was at Honeywell, I wasn't passionate about the business, to be honest. Okay? It used my strengths, but I wasn't passionate about the business. When I got to Medtronic, I found a company where I was really passionate about the work. And it used my strengths. And so that was my sweet spot. So are you in your sweet spot now? Can you find that sweet spot? Don't go to work just because you think you ought to have this company behind your title or your name. Go to work where you think you can really make a difference because you're passionate about the work and it utilizes your strengths. We all need a support team around us. Who's on your support team? Who's going to be there to support you? You know, when things are going well, you think, I'm fine, I have lots of friends, I have 1,000 friends on Facebook and a lot of people follow me. That's not what's important. What's really important is when you have a crisis in your life, who's there for you? Things don't go your way, like this friend that called me whose wife has pancreatic cancer. Who are you going to call? Who are you going to reach out? Who will be there for you to help you when it really matters in life? And so I say the time to form your support team is now. First of all, you need one person in your life with whom you can tell everything. Could be your spouse, friend, significant other, best friend, mentor, or it could be a therapist, but you got to have someone who you can really open up. I think mentors are wonderful. I've had wonderful mentors like Warren Bennis and many others earlier in my career. Many of them passed away, and so I now have mentors. Nori, the Dean of Harvard Business School, is 18 years younger than I am. David Gergen, who's my age. But who can you talk to, a guide and counsel you? I actually have a couple of mentors that are in their 20s and 30s because they help me understand the lives of people that are a lot younger and the newer generations. And I mentioned my men's group. I also have a couples group that meets every month. We just met last Sunday, we meet, or a week ago Sunday. We meet once a month and talk about real issues. And in my men's group, one of the guys' wife died. Who's there for him when he goes goes through that and you'll find these things. Another one has a life-threatening illness. So you find these things are invaluable. So who's on your support team? Don't think you don't need it because if you become a loner, then you are going to find yourself in trouble. In terms of integration, I would say there's no such thing as work-life balance. There are always going to be imbalances. It's never going to be perfect. So don't think you can get real balance. The question is, can you be the same person at home at work, in your personal life, and in your community. That's living your life with integrity. And integrity means having an integration in your life so you can be that same person in all environments. If you can't, you may want to reexamine that. But if you can live your life like that, I think you're going to find you have a fulfilling life. Even if you feel like sometimes you're working too hard, you got to get things done, that's what life's like, okay. And finally, your leadership purpose. I think the key is, can you find alignment with the company you're working with and the work you're doing? The organization you're with and the work you're doing. That is so critical. And that's why you say to folks at Medtronic, if you don't find, if you don't get turned on, if you're not passionate about the mission, you shouldn't work here. A company like Johnson Johnson, I visited Alex Gorsky in his office. Credo is there, half of the wall. You know, this is critical. What is the What is the purpose of everyone in your organization? And I encourage you, if you're just thinking about where to go to work, if you're still in school, look hard at that, of where do you want to devote your life. Because if you don't have that alignment, how are you going to bring closer alignment? Because if you feel on edge, it'll always feel like chalk running across a backboard. And so until you find that sense of alignment, keep looking. It took me a long time to get to my triangle, guys. I'm not saying I was an early learner. I was in my mid-40s before I got it. Before that happened. Okay? And then, can you be that empowering leader that empowers people all up? See, I think today it's not about having followers. I think it's about empowering other people to be really great leaders of other people. Okay? Everyone who works for you should be a leader. They're not just a gnome. They're not just running spreadsheets. You've got to think about, can you align people around a mission and values? Can you get full collaboration in your team? Can you get commitment to shared goals and engage fully? And can you listen actively and learn from your teammates? And so these are just some of the things. And I think in the end we've got to hold people accountable for results. Organizations that don't do that eventually atrophy and go downhill. Okay? So let me just close by telling— asking you to do a little exercise with me. You're 97 years old. And you're on your deathbed. Now the good news, guys, you'll live to 97. The bad news, you got about 2 hours to live. And all your adult children and your grandchildren are coming in to say goodbye to Grandma or Grandpa. And your favorite granddaughter looks up at you, and I think my granddaughter Dylan, who I was with last night, beautiful little girl, is 10 years old, lives in Dallas, Texas. She calls me Papa Bill. She says, Papa Bill, or you can substitute Grandma or Grandpa, What did you do to make a difference in the world? What are you going to tell her? What are you going to tell her your life was all about? Don't wait till you're 97. Think about that now. Are you doing what you want to do with your life? You only have one life to live. You can't take it with you. I don't care how much money you have or what your religious beliefs are. You can't take it with you. The only thing you leave, you can take with you is what you leave behind. And through your life, are you making a difference in the lives of the people people you touch. I had to learn the hard way when I thought I was going to change the world back in my 20s and within an 18-month period my mother and my fiancée died in quick succession. I never had a chance to say goodbye to either one of them and I realized what's really important is the reaction, interactions we have right here amongst the people we deal with every day. You can meet thousands, tens of thousands of people, but the ones that really matter are the people and the the impact you have on each other and the relationships you form and those lasting relationships. I was with a group of people that I went to business school with a couple weeks ago and we renewed some relationships. Those relationships are the ones that really matter in life. So think about that as you go through life and think about what can you do to make a difference in the world. Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, once said, never doubt the power of a small group of people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. That's why I'm such a believer in smaller organizations, people with passion coming in, doing things to change the world. You can make that difference. People are doing it every day. You can make that difference and make this world a better place. So at the end of the day, I think we'd all like to be able to say, hey, this world is better when we left it than when we came into it. And so to do that, you are really acting like a servant leader who's serving others. So think about the words Albert Schweitzer, who said, "I don't know what your destiny will be, but this much I know: the only ones among you will be truly happy are those who have sought and found how to serve." And there's no better calling than to serve as a leader in healthcare. So thank you very much. We have time for some questions. Thank you all. I made you listen attentively. I made you listen attentively, but thank you for being so polite. But let's have questions. Anything's on the table. Thank you, sir.

I'm just sorry I have to follow you as a speaker.

You're way too kind. I look forward to your speech. Questions? Thank you.

First, thank you, and thanks to the PT family for creating this opportunity to learn from you. What do you do when you are in a high-level position but not a penultimate decision-making position? You believe in the mission, everything stacks up, and your leader is not this leader that you described.

Yeah, yeah. And you try to give him or her some feedback.

And they don't want to hear it.

Do you have tips and tactics for people who are— I have a lot of people in the classroom at Harvard Business School that are in exactly that situation.

Amazing organization for leadership.

Okay. Well, I had a couple bosses I went to and tried to get them to change, but, you know, they just said, why don't you go back and run your business and you leave me alone. So particularly as people get older, it gets harder to change. So maybe you can get to them. I think the most important thing you do is do your job really well and be that empowering, authentic leader that inspires people around you and build people around you. And everyone else in the organization will see what you're doing. They'll see it through the people you work with. They'll see it through your results. Don't let that person penetrate you. I used to let— I had a couple of really bad bosses at Litton Industries and Honeywell. They happened to be the CEO. And with the CEO, there's not much you can do about it. You know, they're not going to move on anytime soon. You just don't let them penetrate you like they used to penetrate me. And they knew how to get my goat. And I felt like they were— I mean, I have a total reaction to being manipulated. I felt like I was being manipulated. So I would say just stay contained in yourself and create a psychological distance. Particularly if you have a leader that likes to beat up on you or manipulate you, just keep a psychological space. Do you see what I mean? And you have to know who you can trust. In terms of sharing everything about yourself, you're not going to go maybe to that person. But there are people you need to be— feel you can be really authentically open with.

Do you see what I mean? Yeah, I think the trigger that brought it up for me is that as an early-stage investor, I work with really small companies. You know, the entrepreneur that's brilliant has the idea, does not always have this evolution. And so, you know, there's that awkward space between the team that started it and the team that needs to take it to—

Well, that's a big challenge in medical technology. You see this at Uber right now. And I spent time with the founder of Uber and yeah, it's a different world. You know, you'd feel very uncomfortable. You'd feel very uncomfortable working there, to be honest. Okay, it's a great— it has a great app, you know. And so a lot of medical technology companies are like that. And so how do you take them from here and build them up? And I think that's where you need to get a team around. You know, actually everyone always asks about Steve Jobs because he was Steve Jobs, quote, "such a jerk." Well, Steve Jobs Act 1 was. I've talked to people that worked for him. And when he came back, he was a very different person because he learned. He knew he still had those jerk-like qualities, but he tried to surround himself with people with very high emotional intelligence. And he did, by the way, Jony Ive and Ron Johnson and Tim Cook and the people. And so I think about that because I think that brilliant scientist, Inventor, entrepreneur, the medical doctor is going to need people around them that can carry it forward. So you try to help them make that change. That's what Howard Schultz says at Starbucks. You need to have people that can make that change. Earl Bakken at Medtronic never thought he was that person, so he would get different people. But some of them can't let go. But you have to help them let go. So thank you. Thank you for sharing. Thank you. Other questions? Don't be shy. Yes, sir. It's nice to imagine that everybody can know their true north.

Uh-huh.

But the fact of the matter is, as we see in the world today, there are a lot of organizations that don't follow this type of behavior. And so sometimes systems or checks and balances need to be in place. What is your thinking about splitting a job of a CEO and chairman of the board? I think you need to have clarity about who's running an organization, all organizations, and I think I've seen cases where it led to a lack of clarity and power struggles at the top. So I think one must have, the board must be led by someone, either the board chair or the lead director, but there has to be a bright line between the board and the management, if you will. And the board. I mean, I've seen that at Goldman, I've seen it at Exxon, I've seen it at Novartis where we had a chairman and CEO, but we always had a very strong lead director. And we, the board, had to play its role but not try to run the company. And if you cross over that line, it leads to real chaos. But if you're unhappy, it's the board's role to either make a change in the leadership or to work with the leader, try to make them successful or to make a change. Change. I mean, to be that blunt, I've been in a position where we had to, you know, change the leader. Yeah. Yeah, and a friend of mine is chairman of that board, Steve Sanger. He's giving it up at the end of the year. Former chairman, CEO of General Mills. He had no idea, he knew nothing about finance, guys, those of you who do. He has no background in finance. He's a marketing guy. And he had to step into that job and terminate John Stumpf and take his compensation. It's the largest biggest clawback ever, $165 million from the top 2 officers. And they did it in 2 stages as more data came out. That was pretty aggressive. So the board had to really assert itself. But he's been careful. I talked to Tim Sloan last week. He has not stepped over that line. He's been, you know what I mean? So there are times you'll be called on. There'll be an activist investor like Ian Cook stepped up in front of Inder Nui when Nelson Peltz was trying to take over PepsiCo and break it apart. And at a certain point in time, And it was such a vicious attack on her that he, the lead director, had to step in. So I think you need that board leadership. I've been fortunate to be on boards with really great lead directors, like Sam Palmisano was for Rex Tillerson at Exxon, to be a good example of that. You must have that, but you need to have somebody that respects those differences. If the chairman— like in the European model, frankly, I'll be very blunt, in the European model, people that have the role of chairman think they're CEO. And so the CEO is more like a COO. So it's, are you kidding? It's really not real. Do you know what I mean? Even though the CEO's the one out giving all the investor relations presentations, person making all the decisions is CEO. That was true at Nestlé, it's true at Novartis, it was true at Roche, and so it's quite common. Other questions?

Yes?

Presentation, but just kind of further to that last question, you see Ray Dalio's book. Yes. You go back to Lincoln and the team of rivals where you have a lot of conflict. Yeah. Perhaps see some of that in the current administration. How do you reconcile, you know, overt conflict in, I think, in companies? They still have their choose wars and we have a lot of [Speaker:AUDIENCE] [INAUDIBLE] [Speaker:DR. MICHAEL STOLER] Good, good question. Actually, I went to Medtronic and it was a consensus organization and people would never say what they really thought, okay. And they'd go out in the hall and say it. They'd say, "Are you going to go along with that?" "Hell no, I'm not going to do that." "Well, you raised your hand and said you were." "Well, that's, you know, we had to do that." But I don't believe in that, okay. I believe everyone has to speak, have their voice heard, whether you're the quietest person in the room or the noisiest person in the room. In fact, I had to develop a policy to make sure that everyone had a chance to be because somebody who was a lot quieter had very good ideas. So I think, but it's not personal. And I think it's really important to separate a disagreement about ideas, about strategies, about an investment, about a problem from a personal attack. And when things get personal, I think it's got to change. That can't exist. So if it gets to be a lot of personal game playing, I'm trying to get ahead of you, or someone said somebody, came in to me, he was president of Europe, and he came in and started complaining about the head of our cardiac rhythm division and how terrible he was, they weren't delivering the products he needed, he couldn't sell anything, and that's why he didn't make his sales goal. I said, "Good, let's call him up and get him in here. Why don't you tell him to his face? Don't tell me, tell him to his face." It's the last time he did it. You know, so I think I am very much a believer in put it on the table and have the direct discussion now, but it's not political. If it becomes political, becomes personal, then I think it's not good. Then I think people tear each other up. Now, as far as Ray Dalio goes, I have to say this. I found it a bit hypocritical to talk about radical transparency in this organization. I've had mentees that work there and they tell me they find it too, that they're taping everything you say, everything is taped, he gets a chance to look at all the tapes, the HR people look at all the tapes. But on the other hand, there's zero transparency of what that organization is doing outside. So, if you're investing with them, you really don't get much transparency. So, I'm a believer in transparency, but, you know, it's got to go both ways. So, good question. Thank you. Other questions? No more? Anyone in the back row? Okay. Well, thank you very much, Matt. Thank you, Matt.

Appreciate it.

Thank you, Rick. Thanks, sir.

Thank you. So, we're going to take— We've asked Bill to sign some books for us. We'll take a little break, bio break, but Bill will be here. Welcome to just jump in line here and get a signed