Insights from Guy Chiarello, Chief Administrative Officer of Fiserv: Tom Mendoza Presents

Welcome everyone. Good morning and thank you all for joining us once again for another episode of Tom Mendoza Presents. For those of you who joined us for last fall's outstanding conversations hosted by Tom, it is always such a pleasure and exciting and so insightful to have Tom Mendoza with us in conversation with great industry leaders of our time. Each event in this series is available on our Mendoza College of Business YouTube channel. It is such a privilege for us to listen to and participate in these conversations. Today we are delighted that we will be featuring the conversation with Tom and Guy Chiarello, who Tom will introduce. Tom is well known to so many of you, so I will be brief. He was a former Vice Chairman and President of NetApp, which he helped build into a Fortune 500 company. Today Tom sits on the Board of Directors of UiPath, Veronas, and Vast here at Notre Dame. And at the college which bears his name, we are so grateful for his friendship and support and to have him with us in this series. Thank you, Tom. And thank you, Guy, for joining us today.

Thank you, Martin. So let me do a proper introduction of Guy. So Guy started his career as a technical analyst at Morgan Stanley in 1987. In 10 years he rose up to Managing Director, which is extraordinary in a bank. Six years later he took over the most powerful positions on Wall Street, most influential positions, the CIO, Chief Information Officer at Morgan Stanley, which is where we met. He did a spectacular job of building a team there such that most of those people have gone on to tremendous things all over Wall Street. But at the time, what Guy was very well known for was building an amazing team and then being extraordinarily good at bringing new products to market faster than his competitors. Jamie Dimon didn't miss that. He brought Guy over to Global CIO at JPMorgan Chase in 2007. Guy was there for six years, which time you can imagine, 2007, 2008 was the meltdown. So you can imagine you walked into some amazing things. They were doing major acquisitions. It was an incredibly difficult situation, but legendary performance of making them stronger coming out of it. 2013 made what a lot of people thought was an odd decision, we'll talk about it, and he left what literally was the most significant CIO job in the world and he became the President of a struggling company called First Data. We'll talk a little bit about that, but so he went and took a President's job to turn this company around. Two years later they had the largest IPO in the world for 2015, and four years later they were bought for 22 billion dollars by Fiserv, which Guy is on the executive staff that runs that company today. So if that was his whole story, that would be an unbelievable story. But the biggest story with Guy is he's always given back to people that he's mentored, people he's helped in many, many organizations. He was recognized as Man of the Year from Make-A-Wish. He was recognized for helping out for numerous cancer organizations, Lymphoma and Leukemia Organization Man of the Year. Brian Kelly's organization with Kelly Cares, he's helped run that in New York for a number of huge meetings. And one we'll talk about later called A Chance in Life because it's a special story. Guy, welcome. Thanks for being here.

I thank you very much. So growing up in Trenton, did your parents think my son Guy is going to be a big time tech guy on Wall Street? Is that what they were thinking, Guy?

Let's talk about your parents. What did they do?

That's very interesting since I know how the story ended. It had a big influence. So what brought you to Wall Street? What made you think I want to go that direction with your career?

Those are great lessons by the way. A lot of people worry about stuff that never happens. Right, that's their life, you worry about things that never happen. So I mentioned that you rose up to be a Managing Director in nine years, then to this incredible position of CIO and built great teams. What do you think were the three or four things that you did right that allowed you to have that kind of success at Morgan Stanley and basically later too?

Now I mentioned that you built a great team and you did. I mean, that was, you gave me the honor of coming in every six months for a number of years there and talking about what I thought about the industry. And I mean the quality of that team and the trust they had in each other, there was a longevity, a trust and an execution model that was unbelievable. Everybody admired it. So as someone who's renowned for building great teams, what do you think some of the things you did right about hiring and motivating those people to get it to work as well as it did?

Actually, I just learned some things I'm going to use right away. I thought that was great. So now you go to JPMorgan, 2007. Most dynamic bank in the world at the time for sure. Jamie was doing all kinds of big acquisitions. You are fundamental to making them work. And then the crisis since 2008. What lessons do you learn having to manage in a new company, dynamic company, in a crisis? What are some of the things you came away from that with?

And wouldn't you say the answer though, I'm guessing the learning curve had a part of it, but you took a job with First Data. Digital was still very new as a digital payments and the company was struggling. And you came in to be the President. Tell me about that.

You know, one of the things I was reading the other day, well let's talk about the pandemic first of all. I'm interested in the last year and a half has changed, for the last year has changed how people think of work, think of business. How did that affect Fiserv and you over the last year? What are you doing differently, thinking differently about going forward than you would without this?

I asked Carl Eschenbach the same question and he said it's an excellent, it hasn't, it didn't change something that wouldn't have happened, but it's been an accelerant. That's fluffy charts, right? Carl's a great guy too, he's a great guy, I know you guys are good friends. I'm going to switch gears here and then we're going to have Natalie jump in with some Q&A from the audience. But first of all I want to say the advice you just gave is absolutely phenomenal. I'm going to rewatch this a number of times. So a couple years ago I'm walking in the park with my dog and my phone rings on a Saturday. This guy, he says when you go to Rome where do you stay? I tell him a couple of options that I use. And then he goes, I say why are you going to Rome? He says well I'm going to go see the Pope. You know, there's not too many people could say that. I go give me a break, you're not seeing the Pope. I knew for a fact he was seeing the Pope. And I said why are you seeing the Pope? And Guy is also in the Italian Hall of Fame, he was the Grand Marshal of the Columbus Day Parade. So I mean he's done so much for charities as I mentioned, the Pope wanted to thank. Now fast forward two years and my wife threw me a party after I retired from NetApp and I had like 60 friends from around the world that came. And Guy cannot make it and he's going back and forth. I said no it's okay, no, I'm trying, I'm trying to move this, trying to move that. But he called me so I got one of the best text messages you can imagine in your life. He goes Tom, I feel so bad about this, I want to make it up to you. And I have a meeting with the, this is November 15th, I have a meeting with the Pope on December 9th. I'd like you and Ty to come with me. My son's birthday is the eighth. I go Ty Shakespeare? She goes don't worry about it, we're going. Are you kidding me? I'm like oh yeah, sorry. So anyway I'd like you to talk a little bit about, I know by the way my wife was pregnant with, we now have a daughter Mia. But the Pope, thanks to Guy, blessed the baby in his stomach which I've shown some people a video of. But talk a little bit about how that, you felt meeting the Pope twice and the work he did. And then A Chance in Life, which is a wonderful charity that you brought a lot to and I had the opportunity to experience with myself. So talk a little bit about it from your perspective.

One thing I have to say about you, Guy, and other people that come to mind that are friends of both of ours, what you do which I appreciate so much is you always give without an ask. You always give not because something's coming back to you, of course it's the right thing to do. And that is my best friends, that defines a characteristic of them all actually. I appreciate that so much. That's the kind of people I want around.

All right, Natalie, I know the audience has questions and I just want to say, Guy, thank you so much for sharing all that knowledge, that was awesome. So thank you, let's hear what the audience is like. Thank you.

Absolutely, thanks Tom. And Guy, this has been phenomenal. This is just as you described your trip to Italy to see the Pope as a once-in-a-lifetime experience that you'll never forget. For us, this conversation is a once-in-a-lifetime event that I know everyone on the call, especially our students, will never forget. We've got a number of questions. The first being that you've shared extraordinary leadership and motivation tips and skills with all of us. How do you inculcate those skills enterprise-wide? How do you create a culture where other people are as dedicated to building those skills as you are?

I would add to it that people emulate the behavior that you recognize. So if you want people to be selfless and do an act where it doesn't benefit them but they did it because it's right for the team, it helps the company, you talk about that. If you just hold up somebody's performance and everyone around him knows that that person is doing it in a way that they're not proud of. When we started NetApp, we said, 'What's our goal?' And we had an offsite, it was me, Dan, James, and the founders. We said, 'We want to build a company we're proud of the rest of our lives.' We were voted the number one company to work for in 2009. The first call I got was from Guy. I just landed from Japan and a text, he said, 'Not at all surprised.' If you're doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do, and it goes back to who you hire, who you put as leaders. If you have the right leaders, but if you want to build a culture you're proud of every day of your life, then you should promote to that, you should hire to it, you should promote to it, you should evaluate your leaders on it. Are they doing things that I'm proud of and I want them on my team? Play with champions, right, Guy? And he's always built a great culture. And I think one of the reasons we're such good friends professionally and personally is relying on these things. It really is about your people.

Wonderful. We've talked a lot about how exemplary you are, Guy, as a leader, and Tom, we know that of you as well. And about your successes, but you also mentioned failure, not worrying about failure, knowing it would come occasionally but not worrying about it. Can you talk about a time, and Tom, we'd love to hear about your experience as well, when you felt like you failed and how you moved forward from that and how you moved your team forward from that?

You know, early in my career I was 26 and a gentleman named Frank Keeney, he ended up being the first head of sales at EMC, one of our competitors. And he said to me, we were in a company called Data General, he said to me, 'People tell you you make great decisions all the time.' And I'm like, 'Glad you noticed.' He said, 'Some guy called you from a bar, told you to interview a company in New York. If you get the job, fly to El Paso, Texas, come to work for him.' That actually happened. He was trying to talk to my brother in a bar, that's how I got the job. You want to get in tech, get your brother to go to a bar and help us. So I show up in El Paso, I sell for two years the smaller stuff. And to make money, you got to sell the big stuff. So I walked into my boss, 'I want to sell the big stuff.' He said, 'No, you got to be 40 years old.' So I quit. 'Because you have another job?' 'No, I just don't want this job.' I moved to Phoenix, I found out you could sell copiers, I made twice as much money in six months. I call on a guy, he's a search guy, he's like, 'Why aren't you back in tech?' 'I can't make any money.' 'Yeah, sure you can.' That's how I got to Data General. He goes, 'Now all of those are awful decisions, but what you do right is you make them work. Once you make a decision, you don't look left or right, you go make them work.' And that was a great lesson for me. I tried to be better at decision making, but too many people don't make decisions, that's why they fail. What they do is they kind of make a decision. Lou Holtz spoke at my sales kickoff, the worst one failure that he regrets of his life was the New York Jets. He was there eight games and quit. And he said, 'I said to my wife, I'm going to give it a try.' I don't give anything a try, guys. Cheryl does not give anything a try. If I'm in, I'm in. So the crisis we faced at NetApp when this dot-com bubble burst, I mean our stock was one of the highest flying stocks on the stock exchange, it split four for one two times, four for one two, four and four times, excuse me, but it was 156, it went to six. Our business, 70% was tech or internet. And people around us were saying, 'You're dead. You are dead.' But none of us felt that way. I was thinking that when you were saying this, Guy, because I look around with Dave and James, nobody left the company. They all said, 'What can we do to bring this back?' So having a team that you're inspired by and you are so committed to, and people would say we failed for a period there because our business got disrupted and savaged. But we didn't feel like failures, we felt like we're going to, I don't know how we're going to do it, but we're coming out of this. Then we ended up coming out of it. The last thing I would say is one thing when I'm asked this question that I've thought of before is like when I first got in leadership, I really thought I was good for the first two years. And I met a couple of those guys years later and they told me, 'You were not good.' And looking back, I would have handled things very differently. It all worked out, by the way. External people said you were great because the numbers, but I wasn't. I was too abrupt, I wasn't explaining myself enough, I wasn't listening enough. I just was so sure of myself like every 26-year-old. I would have handled things very, very differently later. But you got to go through these kind of steps to grow. I didn't offend anybody, I didn't do it on purpose, I wasn't mean, I just wasn't that competent yet. So failure is an interesting word. I think I commented before about people fear. My dad was always worrying about what could go wrong and we didn't have any money, so I understand he had two more. But he said to me one day when I was at Notre Dame, 'Why don't you worry about?' I said, 'You know what, 90% of the things you're worried about are never going to happen. Let's wait till the 10% happen and deal with them.' And that's part of the confidence Guy is talking about. So I didn't, you know, Natalie, just, I know we'll get to the next question, but I just looked at my text message from this morning here as Tom was talking because it reminded me of something. And here's certainly what I would say to the student body if you were working for me in business, and this goes back to why I don't worry so much about failure, I kind of worry more about success. Steve Jobs quote, I use it a lot: 'All I ask is that today you do the best work of your entire life.' All I ask is that today you do the best work of your entire life. And I think if you live by that, you tend to not, you work, that's basically a statement of worrying about succeeding rather than worrying about failing. Because if you do your best, then you know fate will take it from there.

That's it. And I think going back to leadership, leadership is getting everybody. You got to earn the right to ask. You got to do so much at the point of attack that when you ask, they don't want to let you down. And once you've done that and you have the right team, no matter what the challenge is, you feel like you can go get it. I mean, so the work goes into, do I have the right people? Is everybody aligned? I used to tell people, if you think there's a better place for you and your family, you should go there, like now at this moment. Don't worry about offending me because all I ask of everybody is I'm not going to wake up every day trying to convince you it's a good idea to be here. You have to bring that. If this is the most important thing in your life professionally every day, we're going to get a long time.

Absolutely. Well, those are fantastic answers and I think that's a great transition to another question we have, which is, you know, you're both so extraordinary in your confidence and it sounds like that's really been part of the key to, as you said, Tom, making a difficult situation work or a difficult decision work. How would you say people can build their confidence to succeed as leaders?

I would say, I'll do it real quick. People, I do a lot of public speaking, people say, 'Are you nervous?' And the answer is no, because I'm prepared. If you're not prepared, you're nervous. You ever go to a meeting and you're not quite prepared for that meeting? You should be nervous, you didn't prepare. So to me, you should constantly work on your skill set. Guy said something critical before, which is when you first started. I was on a panel at Notre Dame on entrepreneurship and it was all VCs and the founders of NetApp and everybody was saying you should get in a startup right out of college. You're getting a startup and then they say, 'What do you think?' And I said, 'Well, I didn't do that and I'm happy I didn't do that. I'm not saying you shouldn't.' I spent seven years learning. I learned that I can sell, I learned about selling, selling to enterprises, I learned about leading. Before I took my first startup job, I had been in business seven years. And I know that if I had taken it right out of college, I wouldn't have been that guy. So to me, Guy did it before he took JAWS for less money. He was always learning and honing that skill. And if you take life like that, I mean, you're getting a paid MBA when you get out of Notre Dame. Your first jobs are a paid MBA and learn. It's not about getting the title or how much to make right away. It's am I learning, am I growing? And second thing I'll just leave on this, find people who will mentor you that are the right mentors for that time. You know, Jay Sheree and I had that talk, mentors can change by where you are in your life. Guy was saying talk to somebody 20 times then they get it. When I give a talk, somebody will come up and say, 'I've heard you say that 10 times today.' It'd be different, it's because the way they are as a receiver. So to me, as long as you're constantly growing and taking on new chances and taking on new responsibility, could be within one company or multiple companies, learn and be around people. And Guy said he left companies every time he flattened out on that. I left if I didn't feel it was a challenge anymore or I didn't believe in the direction of the company, I wanted to go do something different. It was never about money, same as Guy. I never once took a job for money. Money happened because I was in the right place at the right time with the right people.

Absolutely. Well, we've got time for one final question. Let's say you're in a room with an executive that you'd like to make an impression on, either as a mentor or for another reason. You've got 20 minutes with them. How do you make an impression?

Ask me 20 questions. Ask 20 questions. I tell you what, my interviews, 100%. I agree. My interviews with people have very little to do, you know, after you get past the compulsorys, you know, the first few minutes to really get the background, you're in the right direction. I'm really looking for individuals who have intellectual curiosity, who have the confidence, this is back to confidence, someone who's willing to ask questions has a lot of confidence. It also means, to Tom's point, they prepared. They know something about the executive. I don't mean to turn this all into interviews, but whether you're with me in an elevator, or whether you're with me on a plane, or whether you're with me in a meeting, or whether you're with me in an interview, it's really the same thing. I get exhilarated by people who have ideas, who are creative, who are go-getters, not for self-preservation or for really only personal gain, but they're really genuinely trying to immerse themselves into a conversation or a problem and be inquisitive about it and helpful. And that is why I call on people very frequently and say, 'What's your idea? What's your best idea? What do you think about this issue?' So for me, hands down, 100%, took me a split second, inquisitiveness. Because it also shows me all these other traits are kind of underneath it that I look for in my team of teams.

Tom, I've had, first of all, I agree 100% with that. What it made me think about is that early when I was a first-line sales manager, I had guys say to me, 'I made five calls a day, six calls a day, seven calls a day.' And so I went with them and they'd have like 45 minutes with someone where they talked about who they were, what their product was, and then, 'Got to go, got another call.' I said to the guy, 'What do we know about him and his problems or her and her problems?' 'Oh, we'll do that in the next meeting.' That's the complete opposite. And by the way, that's so typical of a lot of poor salesmen, is all they want to do is talk about their product. If I'm going to meet Guy, I should use that 20 minutes to find out what Guy's biggest issues are. First of all, I've done some research and with people under Guy and I believe he said he needs to grow the company, he has three main things. And if I was there, I would say, 'If I understand correctly, these are the three things you're trying to accomplish for your group and as a company, and I have some thoughts on how we can help you in those areas. Would that be a good thing to spend our time on?' I can't say yes. And then I would try and direct it directly to what he, and listen when he came back and said, 'Well, I don't see it that way.' Great, now I'm learning. And when I leave in 20 minutes, Guy knows I've done the research, that I've thought about the problem, whether or not I got exactly the right answer. And this doesn't have to be me going for a job, it's just me connecting and we want to see each other again, you'd like to pursue that conversation more. The worst mistake people can make is try to take that 20 minutes to get a one-punch knockout. I am going to impress this person so much by all my talk. And the last thing I would say is be on time. And if you say you want 20 minutes, don't take 21. Just be on time. Don't use it to stay, make an impression, learn about the person. If you walk out of there knowing five key things you didn't know, your next conversation, that person is going to go at another level.

But I've been, I call that active listening, Guy, right? You're not listening so that when you get done talking you can talk again. You're listening and your reaction, and you'll learn right away what interests them and go and then have that conversation. Then they go, 'This person gets it.' Yeah, really important for the student body, really important for them to know that.

Well, thanks Guy, thanks again Tom. We've certainly learned many more than five things we didn't know before. On behalf of all of us, I know Dean Kremmers is eager to express our gratitude. Martin, over to you.

Yes, thank you Natalie. Well, thank you Guy and thank you Tom. That was terrific. Thank you for all the ways you are giving back today by sharing with us your insightful and inspiring conversation. Guy, we're so honored by your participation in this event today and we're so very grateful for giving everyone watching the opportunity of learning from you. Tom, thank you for bringing Guy to our students in the college, it was a terrific event. I would also like to thank everyone who helped out with this episode of Tom Mendoza Presents, especially Gene, Natalie, Carol, and Beth, the technicians at ND Studios, and our partners at the Alumni Association of Notre Dame. Finally, thank you everyone for watching. We will be back with Tom Mendoza Presents in the fall semester, so please be on the lookout for our announcements about that. Have a great weekend everyone and Go Irish!