This is a show about facing fear, unlocking courage, and taking action.
Courage isn't necessarily a daunting thing.
It's going to give you more purpose. It's going to give you more drive.
It feels like making a courageous decision is going to get you closer to who you aspire to be.
It's knowledge plus faith plus action equals courage.
The two things I interview for that every single person who's listening to this can have are drive and speed. My definition of drive is it's almost an unquenchable desire to make a difference. And the second thing is speed. The great thing about speed is that people who just get things done, they discover when they are wrong faster than people who think about it a lot.
Man. Somehow you wake up and you've reached your 275th episode and you're like, 'Wait a minute. I was just trying to like,'
Stay curious and learn. And you know, every Thursday a new pod would go out and when I go back and look, I'm not blowing smoke here. Like my probably on the podium of episodes was our first episode. I think it was episode four, Bracken. That's how long it's been.
Right here we are. I'm not putting an episode out every day. It's once a week.
And what I remember most about you is that just how curious you are. You know, you've always been, it was almost less about the answers and more about the questions. And I'm curious if you feel that's still the way you lead because I took away that you might have asked me the same amount of questions I asked you the last time you were on the show.
You know it's funny. I don't think of myself as curious, but I did have this experience. I think it was after we last talked. So if I'm retelling a story I told you before, I apologize in advance. Please edit it right out like you will half of what I say. But during the pandemic, I was by myself in my kitchen. I was looking out the back, and I have this really deep yard. Back then I lived in California. I was looking back in this brown and kind of dark green yard, which was winter in California. Believe it or not, there is a winter in California where you don't have any flowers at all. It's terrible. But I was looking back in the deep back of that yard, and it was all brown and green, and then there was this one way back there. I could see this one little pink dot. I was looking through my kitchen window getting a glass of water, and I thought, 'I wonder what that dot is.' I started to walk across the kitchen, and then I stopped myself. I thought, this is what curiosity is, right? You wonder what something is that you don't know. And then I thought, but that's worthless if you don't actually go find out the answer. So I made myself, like my mom used to make me go open the encyclopedia or the dictionary if I said, 'What's this?' I made myself walk to the back of the yard barefooted. I walked to the back, and miraculously, and I'm not making this up, it was a red rose, a weird red rose growing in the middle of that dark brown and green yard in the middle of winter. So it makes a good story, but it's true. And it made me realize that curiosity alone—at least wonder alone—is not worth very much. But wonder plus action, that's worth a lot. That's the only kind of curiosity I'd like to be. Active curiosity is the only kind of curiosity I'd like to be. So I try to really get the answers.
One of the things I love most about our interactions is, you know, I'm not sure where this conversation is going to go, but I'm willing to participate in it. And to me, it's more important that people see Bracken than they see Bracken Darrell. I keep coming back to this idea that I don't know what I'm doing with it yet, but first names only. We get so caught up when you say someone's full name that you see the title but you miss the human. When I think about Bracken, if you were going to explain Bracken to the guest because we're going to get to the work you're doing now, but who are you? How would you describe yourself in three words?
You can do more than three. Have at it.
Color outside the lines. I would say excited about life. I'm going to give you more than three words. Excited about life. That could be it. But I would say three ideas: excited about life, trying to make a difference, love everybody.
Man, so great. More than three words, but that's okay. Three ideas, right? So, no, I'm not a math major. I was an English major, not a math major.
But help people right now be excited about life. And I'm an optimist. I am all about optimism is my number one core value. Maybe that's another reason why I get good energy from you. But a lot of people right now are allowing the gravity of life to win. How do you go about making sure that doesn't happen for you? I think anytime since you and I have been aware that we were thinking about things, you could always find the negatives and positives around you. I really believe that you should always look at the things that are tough and try to constructively figure out how to make them better, but not spend too much time worrying about why they're bad. Not spend too much time just worrying about the fact that they are bad. Can you make them better? If you can't, move on and focus on things you can make better. So that's been my view of life in general, and it's never really changed. Today there are so many positives. We're in the best time in the world to be alive from a healthcare standpoint, from almost every direction. But there are always storm clouds on the horizon, and there's always a sun somewhere behind them. So far the sun wins almost every time. In the end things get better. While I think people could be terrified of where we are in the world from a geopolitical standpoint or from an AI standpoint, you could also try to be very positive about it. Whether you agree with the things that are happening or not, there is a strong balancer inside humanity that seems to get us back up right over time. It's never failed us before. It's failed us for periods of time, but it's never failed us for a long period. So I'm confident that we'll right it. That's a choice, but I am confident. So I guess that's why I'm optimistic.
Uh, do we see like I feel like I've had the luxury somehow someway we exchange numbers and I'll send you a text randomly and I'm like, 'How's your jumper?' or 'How's life?' I'm trying to give good energy. And I feel like I get to see Bracken. I see the personal you, and there's not a lot of daylight between the personal you and the professional you. Do you think there's a difference between those two people? Or are you like this on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday? Are you this person all the time?
You know, I think it's a really misleading question to ask somebody at my age because I'm 63 years old and what you see is what you get wherever you are. There's almost no difference between me sitting right here with you, me in a boardroom, me at work with my guys or women, or me at home with my kids. There's just no difference. But it took me a long time to get to the point where I could say that. I can honestly say there were plenty of periods in my life when I was trying to figure out who I was at work relative to who I was at home. For those people out there who don't find it so easy, I can sympathize. It wasn't probably for me either. But the older you get, the more comfortable you get in your skin. You just don't worry about what people think. By the way, if you're CEO, it's really easy to say you don't worry about what people think, but it's a lot harder when you have a boss and a boss's boss. So I absolutely am what you see. I wish I could say I've always been like that. Probably I haven't. I have a selective memory for good things. I completely forget most bad things.
I have a theory on life, and you are a philosophizer that I feel like I could test this with. I don't get a lot of people that I can. All right, here we go. So I think life is like these four S's, and it's not one of the S's that you think. I think when we're born, life is shoved at you. That's not negative. I grew up in DC. Guess what teams I root for? I'm clearly a loyal Wizards and Commanders fan. It doesn't even say Wizards and Commanders. Life was shoved at you. I see the face. Okay, but I'm loyal. I'm sticking with it. I'm not commenting on that. No. So life is shoved at you. My parents' beliefs at that time, a lot of what they believed, guess what? I believed. It probably wasn't until somewhere in my late teens when I knew I was going to leave that I moved into true survivor mode. Survivor mode was like the duck metaphor. On the surface I have it together, but below I'm a little nervous and freaking out. How do I want to show up and what do I want to be when I grow up? I didn't love this about my last life, and then I'm moving into this new life. For survivor mode for me, that kind of felt through even my first job. I didn't get to pick my boss. I just wanted somebody to pay me and hope that I get in. And then somewhere along that line, some people never leave survivor mode. They never get out of that phase. I got lucky where I saw somebody who actually said 'no' for the first time in a meeting. I thought, 'You could say no? I had no idea you could say no.' And I realized there was another mode, which was success mode. The rules slowed down and you kept a few people close. For me, some people never get to success mode. If you're lucky enough, you get to something more, and it's soul mode. Soul mode is sort of the all of the above. You can have your cake and eat it too, and the cake can be gluten-free, and you can win and make impact. These are my versions of stages. So first, before I say anything else, does this land for you? Does it not land? Is there another S I missed? Did you pass go directly to success or soul mode?
No, I love everything you said. I think as you were walking through the stages of your life, I could see mine. They mimic yours. They are very consistent with yours. I'm almost the same ages.
Are you a Wizards fan, too?
No.
Not at all. But I do love, since we're near the NBA finals, I'm a Warriors fan, a Nuggets fan, and now a Knicks fan. I'm a big Knicks fan. I was never a Knicks fan, but I love them right now. It's a great story. By the way, I was in New York about two weeks ago, and the city was never nicer. People were holding the door. People were smiling. You could see teeth on New Yorkers. It was unbelievable.
Wait till the World Cup comes. Every city will be like that even more because people just get so positive during these big sporting events.
But yeah, I was in New York yesterday. I saw the same thing. I was walking through our stores and I called Brent, who runs a commercial team in Europe, and he was asleep. So I called Jacques, who runs a retail group, and I said, 'Jacques, we've got to get these mannequins with Knicks jerseys on. We've got to show we're supporting the local team in our stores in New York.' I thought, maybe that's a bad idea because the visual merchandisers know more than I do. So I told the people in the store and then I backed off. I called Jacques and said, 'What do you think?' He said, 'Let me take care of it.' This was at 4:00. I got on a plane to fly here. I landed at 7:00. By 7:00, I had pictures on LinkedIn of all the different stores with mannequins wearing Knicks jerseys, Knicks pants, Timberland boots, Vans. It was so cool.
That's a different S. That's speed. But I like it. I like speed. I do love speed. All right, so let's talk. You said the three things that make you you are making an impact. Maybe that's the path to soul. You are in a position to make impact. When we met, you were over at Logitech, and I felt like I had no idea what that story was. What a turnaround story. I don't think you see yourself as a turnaround guy, but that's what it was. It felt like the Silicon Valley story that no one's talking about. The growth there. And now here you are in this new life on this next adventure. How are you making impact there? What are you doing? When do you feel like you're making a dent?
I don't think I'm making a dent, but I think we're making a lot of dents. Maybe even to Steve Jobs, where is a dent in the universe at some point, but we're not there yet. But we're making a lot of dents. The cool thing about turnarounds is they automatically suggest you have more degrees of freedom than in a running business that's going well. Maybe I am attracted to turnarounds in the beginning, but I'm not short-term enough to really be attracted to them on a short-term basis. I only think long term. I love this business just like I loved Logitech. We're making a big difference. I could spout off numbers, but I won't. I'll just say I think we're getting our mojo back. That is a super good feeling. Whether you're on North Face, Timberland, or Vans, you've got exciting things to talk about. People are doing great work around the world. You brought up something that's a new thought for me. I was thinking about what do you interview for if you're a CEO because nobody ever asks you that. They just assume you know how to interview. I don't think I was a particularly good interviewer because I see the potential in everybody. I fall in love with everybody in an interview. I need other people to interview them to make sure we get the right people. But I realized the one thing I can interview for are drive and speed. By the time I interview them, everybody's got the capabilities. The two things I interview for that every single person listening to this can have are drive and speed. Drive is an almost unquenchable desire to make a difference. It leaps out of your body when you're early on. When you're in the zone of drive, you are unstoppable. Speed is great because people who just get things done discover when they are wrong faster than people who think about it a lot. So I love drive and speed. Do you have a version of that for your business? Like 'These are the steps we're going to follow' that you put in play when you've seen enough and it's time to go? Or is it more like when you see something, say something, and that's that we move forward?
I don't have a formula that I come in and apply. I do have a few frameworks that I think about, but I won't bore you with them. They're a little too consulting speak. But the one thing I do well, two things I'm stuck on. One is that I think every business of any age can employ the model of trees, plants, and seeds. Trees are the mature things that are not going to grow very fast, maybe even decline, but they're healthy. You need them to make cash to put in other things. Plants are the fast-growing parts of your business that you want to invest in. They're working. You can always make them better. Seeds are experiments. They are really cool because you can have a lot of them if you invest in small ways. You can have one person running them. So you can always have trees, plants, and seeds out there. That's one of the ways I think about how to build a real growth engine. The second way I think about is teams. I used to think small teams are better than big teams because I met so many people in Silicon Valley doing more with four people than I was doing with 30, and they do it in three months while we take a year. So small teams are better. Jeff Bezos called it two-pizza teams. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it's not just small. It's math. If you have a team of two, you have one connection; a team of three, three connections; a team of five, twelve connections. It goes geometric. The number of relationships required makes it harder to have great trusting relationships. So you will have teams of different sizes. Try to make them small where you can. But maybe the more important thing is to have pairs. Figure out who the pairs in your life or job are that make a big difference and build super trusting relationships. Those are the two things I think about a lot when I think about frameworks for coming in and changing things.
I love the seeds, plants, and trees. You know, I have to be careful because I get cute with my language. I think clear beats clever, but if clever helps you remember it, then fire away. And that's true. One of the things I've talked about is that the 're' sets you free. Like, are we regalvanizing our people? Are we rethinking our tomorrow? Are we repositioning the company? The 're' sets you free. Have we actually picked the right 're' for the business? What do we need to rework? I like your comment about seeds and plants and acknowledging what trees are. But that's where I see most fear inside organizations: they only have trees, holding on to them for dear life, not thinking about seeds. They don't invest in seeds. Their money goes to the trees when it should go to plants or seeds. You said my favorite word, which is 'experiments.' I wish more leaders looked at it like, 'Hey, this is an experiment,' which gives people permission to report back when it's not a wild success. It's still a learning opportunity.
Do you have other words? I call it word stock market. One of my favorite words is 'experiment.' Another is 'willingness.' For a guy that has a company called Courageous, I love the word 'willing' because it's like we're open-minded. We're going to fire through. Do you have words like that that you turn to as your love list?
Maybe. But let me develop that concept in a different analogy. Let me work on the concept of why do large companies tend to only have trees? Isn't that weird? Why does the Fortune 500 change dramatically over a 25-year period? Why isn't IBM one of the top five largest companies in the world like it was 40 years ago? Why isn't GE like it was 50 years ago? Those are fundamental questions that aren't too easy to answer except that you can answer them by saying they ended up with only trees. I think what happens is that when you have trees, or let's change the vernacular and call them planets. The bigger your planet, as you try to develop those small satellites floating around it, there's gravity. Gravity pulls resources from the little things or pulls the attention from the people running those little things. So they end up becoming part of the big thing. The original idea of being separated and different gets traded in for being part of the big thing, slower, and bureaucratic. Gravity is a killer. The way I try to solve the gravity problem, it took me a lot of iteration...
To get to that, I would just put people in charge of it that were independent of all the other big things, the trees or in this case the planets. Get them separated and then let them fight like crazy not to let them take too much advantage of the core. That is completely different from the way a lot of people would look at it. It's probably strategically flawed, but it's practically right because the problem is you'll never get these things off the ground. It's inevitable if you have the seed report to one of the tree people who run the trees. Either the tree person's going to get distracted by the seed and you're going to get in trouble with the tree, or most likely the tree person's going to pull resources from the seed because there's always something that has a better ROI if it's already scaled. So that's how I think about how to manage that. Gravity is one of my words that I really like because I also like physics, but it's a good word because it captures a lot of the problems of big companies that have a lot of gravity. I don't know how to say this because I hate saying it, I can come off pretentious like in my book I talked about, but that's what's coming.
That's cool to say though.
You should say it at least once every podcast.
No, no, no, I don't want to. I'd like...
In my last book I talked about... No, in my first book I talked about ETFs. If I were to write a book, I could say that.
They were called experimental task forces, ETFs, which is basically this: do you brand, do you have a subbrand? Because it's almost its own culture and has its own different rules. So do seed people and plant people together? Are they subbranded separate? How do you go about what's the blend? Is it like 20% seed, 20%? What's the blend for you? Any idea?
Well, it starts slow. I'm almost three years in and I think I have really one or actually two or three legitimate seeds that are top secret in the company. Nobody knows until right now that I'm telling you.
Great. I'm going to have to cut this part out of the podcast.
Yeah, no, it's okay. I literally don't talk about them. I didn't do it at Logitech either for a long time because people get too hyped up. What I would do is go on an earnings call and say, 'Hey, I've got this new product I'm working on. It's in my pocket and we're doing it all by audio.' I love to do that because it's true. It was fun to talk about, but at the end of the day, the best thing about seeds is not to mix them up too much. You can have a lot of seeds because they don't cost very much. You can literally start a seed with one person and a few thousand dollars. That's what I did. I figured out it was really successful to hire entrepreneurs, whether they were successful or not, because they learned the concept of ownership and getting things done on their own and finding resources. So I would just hire them in. I ended up with as many as 20 seeds when I was at Logitech, as few as three or four when I really got rolling. Here we have probably three or four now. I promised my board in public I'm not going to go to 20, but maybe we will at some point if we get it rolling. That means there's a lot more seeds than core business in numbers, but you wouldn't notice it if you walked into the company.
So I don't think I have the power to stain you, and I'm not trying to do that, but I'm very curious. I don't want to lead the witness on this one. You have a big job to do. I'm very curious what your relationship is with fear, or if you have a relationship with fear. Where this is coming from is, a lot of times we get brought in because there's a change that has to happen, and I don't think there's change without courage, and I don't believe there's courage without fear. That's my perspective. I'm curious what your take is on that.
Yeah, I don't think there's courage without fear. When I think of courage, I think of those young men and women who went into World War II or any battle or dangerous situation by choice, and they were scared to death, but they did it anyway because it was worth it. That's courage. Everything short of that is far away from risking your life for something bigger than you. That's really strong courage. So if you ask me if I have fear, the fears I have are more fundamental now in my life. I don't lose sleep over them, but I'm always afraid somebody's going to have a health problem, somebody I love, or just anybody. I hate that. I've got friends right now who have health problems. I don't let the fear overwhelm me because I strongly believe in trying to find practical answers to things. Even things that are unsolved so far, somebody said, I watched a guy talk about things are impossible until they're done, and then they're possible. Everything around you was impossible at one point. So I don't let the negative part of fear get to me. If there were one thing I would really fear in terms of work, I don't really fear very much. I'm just so excited about everything. Of course, I have things where I go, 'Oh my gosh, this doesn't work, what will happen?' But that's what we're here for. We're here to mitigate risk, take advantage of opportunities, and create new things. It's just so much fun. I think my life is much more full of joy than fear. I hope everybody else is too. The few times I think about fear, it's usually late at night when I'm sweating in bed about somebody I'm worried about.
What's one thing you took from the last experiment of Logitech that you're like, 'Oh, I'm bringing that into this. This is now a new process or a new practice I'm bringing in with me here.' And no one is, by the way, nor am I suggesting you're playing the same playbook here that you did there.
There is one thing I'm playing the same playbook, and I'll be the first to admit it: design. You would think that this industry called fashion design would be a design industry, but it's really not. It's like every other industry, a business industry with a lot of creative talent, but I wouldn't call it a design industry. There is design in it, but it's not designing the way I think about it. At Logitech, we tried to turn it into a design company. I hired the first designer to report directly to me, Alistair Curtis. I made design a seat at the table. We started building our own things, having a separate designation, and integrating with all the teams. It took off. We tried to design things that hadn't been designed and encouraged people to design how we close our books. We didn't get nearly to my dream state, which is to design and redesign everything all the time, but that was the goal. Same goal here. While this is a design industry, it's not a design thinking industry, and we're certainly not a design thinking company, but we're getting better at trying to think about the user, whether it's an employee, customer, supplier, or wholesaler. Really trying to figure out their needs, opportunities, and things they might want that they can't even express. That's design. That's the kind of company I want to build, a pure design company oriented that way, where every time you interact with the company, even walking in the door and being greeted with a warm smile, everything we touch gets better. That's the goal of a great design company inside and out.
And again, you've got a whole family of brands now. We can see him behind you on the backdrop there. You're rocking your North Face shirt. Give me one sort of, 'Oh, that completely gets my goat. That you think we're about this when really we're about that?'
You mean of the brands or of the company? What do you...
