Former Nike CEO & Stanford AD on the Future of College Sports

The good news, David, is that my experience in golf doesn't resemble my experience in business. I had a caddy about 10 years ago say to me on the 14th hole at San Francisco, he said, 'Hey, John, can I be honest with you?' And I said, 'Sure, Billy, what's up?' He said, 'John, you have a beautiful golf swing, but I have never seen anyone get less out of a golf swing than you do.' And I'm like, 'Billy, you know my game. I'm going to stick to business rather than golf.'

Absolutely. It's been true. And it's been, David, it's been totally, totally fun. I've been to, I mean in the last two weeks I've been to lacrosse games, wrestling matches, men's gymnastics, women's gymnastics, obviously men and women's basketball, men's volleyball, softball, baseball, and so these we got over 900 student athletes in these 36 sports. And each one's a delight to watch because there's nothing like college athletics. It just has a realness to it that makes it fun.

Well, it's funny as you said, you know, if Stanford would have been a country at the Paris Olympics, Stanford would have been the eighth largest country in terms of medal count. That's amazing. And so gymnastics, I'll just take that. Both men's and women's gymnastics where we had medal winners in Paris. We had a gymnastics meet here in our basketball arena against UCLA on Sunday and it was full. It was the largest crowd, as big a crowd as Duke-Stanford basketball was in Stanford-UCLA women's gymnastics. And watching these athletes and the gymnasts, you know, basketball you're on a team right, you make a mistake your teammates cover for you, go back up the court. And the next time you're on the balance beam you make a mistake everyone sees it and it's unforgiving. Or you're on the floor routine. And so I'm just picking that maybe because it's the most recent, but women's gymnastics and the same thing with men's gymnastics has been so fun to watch.

Well, David, I'll pull the camera lens back a little bit. I'll say that not just this role, but all the following roles. I learned so much at Bain. I feel so fortunate to have started my career there because what Bain taught me was the power of asking good questions because you're never the expert on day one. You're not, there's not a single situation you're walking into where you know more than the other people. And so the power of being curious, the power of asking good questions, the power of seeing situations from a 360 point of view, holistic or an integrative point of view, not just a functional point of view. I learned that at Bain and I think that's been, it served me really well. I would say the other thing that I learned at Bain, you know, in business getting the right answer is often only 20% of it. It's how do you get people to understand, align, buy in, work together to execute. And so I feel like so much of leadership is how do we get to the right answers, but how do we get to the right answers in a way that the team that needs to execute and make things happen feel motivated, aligned, and excited to do so? And I feel like Bain really helped me break down problems where you don't get overly focused on only what's the right answer, but also the human dimension is essential.

Well, that's, we used to always say you always got to start outside-in, right? You always got to start, back then it was customers, competitors, costs, capabilities. But it's really natural for any organization to start with where they exist today. Like how did we do last year? Oh, let's see if we can do 10% better next year than we did last year. And if that's your reference point, often you miss the changes that are occurring in a very dynamic market. And I don't care what industry you're in, David, and in college athletics being near the top of the list, there's disruptive change happening in almost every external landscape, every industry landscape, country, company landscape, and country landscape now that I mention it. And so starting with a real sharp outside-in of what's going on. What are the structural forces? What are the situational dynamics? What are the competing firms both historical and new competing firms doing? What are customers or employees saying? That outside-in point of view I think is, that has to be the starting point of all good strategies certainly. And I think it also allows a higher degree of agility because so much of operating today is operating with agility. And if your focus is on the external, you can see things happening and coming so you can adjust versus just sticking to some plan that you created six months ago that may be less relevant today than it was six months ago.

Well, David, it was a funny circumstance and there were really, I'd say, two parts to it. So, you know, in September of what was it, 2023, I retired from Nike. I was 65. I moved back to the Bay Area. My wife had been in the Biden administration. She had been living in DC. She moved back and we said, 'Right, we're ready for the next stage of life.' We had four kids, six grandkids, all local. We both wanted to be really active in the next stage of our careers, but we thought we were done with full-time roles. And one of the things I thought about doing was teaching at Stanford Business School. And I reached out to Tara VanDerveer, said, 'Hey, Tara, let's,' she's always been one of my heroes as a head coach and the winningest coach in college athletic history. Said, 'Tara, let's teach a class together on leadership and lessons from sports.' And I'd draw from my Nike example. She'd draw from her 40-year coaching career. And then last summer, out of the blue, I get a call from Tara. And Tara says, 'Hey, John. You may not be aware, but we've just been doing this athletic director search and we've got some candidates, but as we sit down and look at it, the truth is college athletics is going through a period of intense disruption and it's not clear where it's going to land. So, we don't really know what skills you need the next athletic director to have. And Stanford, to be honest, got caught a little bit on our heels when this disruption happened and we ended up in the ACC and, you know, we've been a little bit on our heels and we really need someone to come in and help us navigate through the next couple of years and get back on our front foot. Would you be willing to do that?' And I said, 'Tara, I'm flattered. Thank you. I've just spent this intensive internal experience the last nine months. I'm not going to do another full-time role. But I'd be happy to help.' And Tara says, 'You know, John, we were going to teach this class at Stanford together about leadership. Didn't you tell me what was your phrase that you really were a disciple of servant leadership? Did I get that right?' I said, 'Yeah, Tara, I've always loved servant leadership.' Tara says, 'Are you telling me you don't want to serve Stanford?' I'm like, 'Oh, Tara, now I know how you recruit. Now I know how you recruited all those NCAA championship teams.' And David, that was the first, the minute I viewed it as, oh, this is service. This is service to a university I love. I love college sports and think they play an essential role in our society. So service to trying to help propagate a better future for college sports. And so that was the first part of just seeing the why I wanted to do it. And then learning outside-in around what's going on in the disruption of college athletics. It just struck me. I've spent most of my careers in disruptive industries, disruptive circumstances, and that's what college athletics is right now. You had a prevailing set of rules that more or less existed for 40 or 50 years, a flash point, in this case, a court ruling and a series of court rulings was this flash of disruption. So, it looks like all the old rules get thrown out the window. You know, we'll eventually have a new set of rules that will make sense and be modern, but in the middle, you have this period of lawlessness. And that's where we are today. We got the new rules, but it's not clear, do they really apply? Are people really following them? And so we're in that sort of uncomfortable middle. We will get to a good place. I was at the summit at the White House on Friday and there's on saving college athletics and everyone knows we need a new set of rules. It's just a matter of what's the path and how long it will take to get to them.

Well, David, it starts with why are we here? I think like any good organization, any good institution, you got to ask the why questions first. And college athletics exists first and foremost to serve student athletes at a formative time in their lives. And frankly, many student athletes historically and still today are going to be the future leaders in our society and in our world beyond their athletic careers. And so the why college athletics exists, you've got to keep that front and center. Now, do college athletes, in particular, college football and basketball players deserve to be paid in today's media and economic environment? The answer to that's probably yes. And so we got to figure out how do we retain focus on the student athlete but also finding a way they can get paid and share in some of the value that they're creating in a modern world. How do we ensure that if a student athlete wants to be mobile that they can transfer? So you got to make transferring a little bit easier than it used to be, but it doesn't have to be every single year. And so I think the balance is keeping clear on we're here to exist for the student athlete and now we've got to adopt some changes that are appropriate but not throw the baby out with the bathwater which is the risk today.

So, the first thing I did, David, because I was new to being an athletic director, is I go on a listening and learning tour. As I said, my number one priority is to do a lot of listening and a lot of learning. And I started with our head coaches. And we have 36 sports. We have 31 head coaches. A few of them coach multiple sports. Our track and field coach does cross country as well, for example. Or our rowing coach does heavyweight and lightweight rowing. But I asked them, 'What do we need to retain? And what do we need to change?' And every single one said, 'Please do not reduce the admission standards because that differentiates us. There are enough outstanding high school athletes that are also outstanding students. And if we lower our admission standards, we're going to be just like everyone else. And so we'd rather target and focus on those that have excellence both academically and athletically and can get into Stanford because then once they're in there's a source of identity and a source of pride and that's what has allowed Stanford to punch above its weight for so many years.' And so that was really reassuring to me, David. I expected to hear a little bit differently. I expected people to say, 'Hey John, by the way we got to lower the admission standards if we're going to compete in today's era.' And I heard the opposite. Let's make sure we continue to double down in our differentiation.

It was. But then the next part of the AND is and we have to retain them. We can't bring them in and then have them all leave. We've got to deliver such a great experience that they say, you know what, instead of going pro, I want to get my degree because that Stanford degree is a lifelong asset. Or instead of transferring to another school because they're going to pay me $50,000 more, I want to stay at Stanford because perhaps I'm getting some payment, but I'm learning life lessons. I'm being part of an institution, building relationships, developing a network that will be a lifelong asset. And that is, you know, one of the areas I think we do a good job, not a great job, and we're working on is how do we make sure that full end-to-end student athlete experience is highly differentiated and done in a way that only Stanford can.

This happened, you know, before I got here, but I think anyone at Stanford would say Stanford was late for just the reasons you highlighted. When the changes went into effect in 2021, 2022, and 2023, Stanford was late paying athletes and as a result, we lost a lot of athletes that transferred to other places because it was a case where they were going to get zero from Stanford or something from somewhere else. And our current president, Richard Saller, who's just been tremendous, he's been in his role now for two years. He's a Stanford alum. He deeply believes in the importance of athletics at Stanford along with the importance of academics and you can have excellence in both. And he went to the faculty senate about probably 18 months ago I'm guessing now and said this is something we need to be able to do. We believe we can fund it in a way it's not taking away from any of the academic departments. We can raise the money separately and we will do it in a way that is consistent with our values and the faculty senate approved it. So we now are able with the house rule of the $20.5 million revenue share which is the primary way universities pay the athletes. We do as everyone else. We pay those athletes. But our coaches know with a recruit or with an existing athlete, if it ever is all about the money, that person's probably not the right fit for Stanford and vice versa. And so it's part of the value proposition or part of the equation we're offering, but it's not the whole thing. And so, you know, I think we were slow out of the gate and hopefully now we're in the game, if you will.

Well, yeah. I think, you know, the background you and I share of having been a public company CEO. And at Yum you wanted to build a great enduring company and you had to deliver financial results. At eBay or ServiceNow or Nike I wanted to build great enduring companies, purpose-driven companies, all three of them were very purpose-driven and by the way you got to deliver strong financial results and that's what you said a minute ago, it's the power of the AND. And within an athletic department, how do we stay true to why we exist? That we're here to serve the student athlete. We're here to help them grow and develop themselves both athletically, but also academically, their character, their experience. And we have the opportunity to generate more revenue than we did in prior eras between sponsorships, between ticket sales. You know, next year they're going to be a patch on all NCAA uniforms. So, okay, we remember when that happened in the NBA. It was a little bit of a head-turner the first year, but then people got used to it. And so, we have to embrace, I would say, sustainable practices that allow us to also generate the revenue that allows us over time to serve and compensate our student athletes.

Absolutely. I mean, and we look at our what we call our peer institutions all the time. Obviously, our peer institutions within the ACC, which is, by the way, a very strong, the ACC has outstanding academic schools pretty much across the board. And so we're, you know, and I could pick any one of them. You know, a Duke, a North Carolina, a Virginia, a Boston College, virtually almost all of them, Notre Dame. Pete, the athletic director at Notre Dame has become a good friend and Stanford and Notre Dame have a long history. You look at a Northwestern, a Vanderbilt, other universities that hold themselves to really high academic standards and are embracing this future world. And so we're looking to learn from really from anyone. And you know, but in that process try to find out what is the right Stanford way of doing this that learns what's, because I keep asking, hey, what does great look like? Tell me what, you probably did this throughout your career, right? Tell me what great looks like. I want to know what the best practice is. And then we can choose what elements of that best practice we want to embrace. And through that process, maybe create a new definition of a best practice, a new definition that's not quite as, you know, that may not be exactly what someone else is doing, but it's what is right for us.

Oh, I can think of, I'll give one example. So, you know, there's talk about the over-the-cap NIL, right? Name, image, and likeness, which in essence is how do you create sponsorship deals for student athletes where it has to be a legitimate business that exchange for a service at a market rate. And so there are a lot of deals being done out there where it's saying to a student athlete, hey, we're the local car dealership. If you do 10 Instagram posts, we'll pay you X. Right? And you're almost creating activities. A Stanford version of a great NIL deal for our student athletes is a summer internship at a technology company, at a venture capital firm, at many of the firms here in Silicon Valley. And so what we're saying to our student athletes is great. You know what? You're training here this summer. We've got a great six-week or eight-week summer internship at this venture capital firm or this technology firm or this startup and by the way they're going to pay you the same way they pay their other summer interns. That, by the way, you don't have to file that as an NIL deal interestingly, but that is a very Stanford way of getting some payment to athletes but in a way they're in exchange for a service that is building their career and building their relationships and building their network for post-playing days. And so, and our athletes love that. It's interesting. We do have a pilot with our women's gymnastics team this, another way of making the same point, around how they can build their personal brands on Instagram and TikTok and some social networks. And one of the student athletes was so great because she said to one of my colleagues, 'You know, I'm not doing this for the money. I want to use this in my application for med school to show I'm taking initiative.' Or another said, 'I want to use this when I interview for jobs to demonstrate that I understand how influencer marketing, social media, and marketing is going.' And so the Stanford students, you know, I think they have maybe a little more focus on their longer-term careers in addition to the desire to make some money, you know, while they're here.

David. You know, it's funny. I'm sitting in my office here in the Stanford athletic department and literally 100 yards away is the Stanford Business School and I graduated from the Stanford business school literally 40 years ago this spring. I was 11 years old at the time. And one of the phrases I heard when I was in the business school was this concept of servant leadership and it just lit me up because the notion of servant leadership is the job of the leader is to serve the purpose of the organization that you're part of, to serve your teammates, to serve your customers, to serve the society and community in which you operate. And it just resonated with me because service was something that I could really connect with and I feel like service is what I've learned over the years is an incredible source not only of inspiration but also of resilience because so much of leading is about having the resilience to work through the inevitable ups and downs. And relatively early in my career, I was looking around for servant leaders that I thought I admired or I wanted to emulate. And you and I were both raised in the era, you know, the Jack Welch era where the CEO is kind of the dominant top-down figure. And for me, head coaches, the light bulb went on. It's like, wait a minute. Phil Jackson was one of my early muses on this. And the job of a head coach, it's not about the coach. The job of the head coach is literally to make their teammates better, make his or her team better. The head coach gets to define who makes the team, gets to define who starts, gets to define what plays they run, gets to define who gets to substitute, who has to come out. But then after doing that, it's all about the players. And so head coaches have always been my muses. In fact, when I was at Nike, I had Phil Jackson, Coach K, Tara VanDerveer, and John Thompson on my wall behind me. And every Zoom I did over the five years there had them over my shoulders because the organization knew I called myself head coach and my muses were over my shoulders. And I've learned such amazing lessons. At some point I'd love to share a couple Coach K stories as well as Tara VanDerveer stories whose office is now next to mine.

Coach K story. First time I met Coach K, I'll tell two that happened right one right after another. I met him. He was one of my heroes. I met him when I was at ServiceNow. He came to do a talk to our top customers and he said, 'You know, I want to meet with you ahead of time so I make sure I'm on target. Can you have lunch ahead of time?' And I said, 'Yes, I'd love that.' He walks into the conference room and he shows me the phone. He says, 'Think about my life.' He said, 'I spend my life recruiting 15, 16, and 17-year-old boys to come to Duke increasingly for one year.' He said, 'I have to understand how they communicate, what music they like.' He said, 'I've had to reinvent myself 10 times in the last 20 years.' Now, Coach K, by the way, at this stage is 72. He said, 'I'm currently texting with the number one high school sophomore in the country.' And he barely uses words. He uses emojis. And he said, 'I didn't even know what an emoji was a couple weeks ago till my granddaughter taught me.' And he just thought it was hilarious. So, this notion of reinvention that here's the winningest male coach in college history. A second example, I said, 'You know, Coach K, and this just gets adaptability. I just love Duke basketball. I love the values of Duke basketball, the fundamentals, your focus on defense and teamwork.' And he kind of rolls his eyes. He says, 'Yeah, Duke basketball culture.' He said, 'You remember when the three-point shot came in?' And I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'Remember it was Rick Pitino and Kentucky who sort of made it famous, the run-and-gun, that team.' He said, 'You know, at first I thought three-point shot was inconsistent with the values of Duke basketball and the culture of Duke basketball. We pass the ball three times before we shoot. We try to work it inside.' So, we didn't adapt the three-point shot and then we started losing. So, I had to figure out how to incorporate the three-point shot into Duke basketball culture and values. He said, 'You remember one-and-done when that came in?' He said that was absolutely antithetical to Duke basketball values and culture. Our athletes graduate, our seniors teach our freshmen. We want people who are going to be here over time. So we did not embrace one-and-done.

Okay.

It's both. That's your answer. So, we had a head coaches meeting this morning. The head coaches know I came in on day one and I said, 'Here's how I think of organization structure my whole career. Most people think an organization structure is a pyramid where the quote unquote leaders on top, everyone else is underneath. I believe in an upside-down triangle. I believe the people at the top of the organization chart are the people for whom you exist. So, in a business, it's your customer. In our case, our student athletes. We exist to serve our student athletes. Then the top of our internal organization chart are our head coaches because they are the ones that recruit our athletes and help them perform. And then everyone else in the athletic department exists to help our coaches, help our student athletes. And I'm at the very bottom as the servant leader.' And so, I treat our coaches as my boss. And they know that. I learn from them. I support them. It turns out that by the way, David, each of them are mini CEOs. And you know, guess what? Being a CEO is a lonely job, especially after some tough losses. Our men's basketball team lost yesterday in the first round of the ACC tournament to Pitt on a tip-in. We were up one and with less than one second to go, Pitt tipped a ball and we lost. Like those, Kyle Smith and that coaching staff, or our women's basketball team lost in overtime last week. And so the coaches were building community of support for one another because it's a lonely job. Now, many of them have won NCAA championships and high highs, but you also have lows. And so, one of the more enjoyable parts of this role thus far has been the engagement with our coaches, building community, sharing experiences. They're some of the most extraordinary servant leaders I've ever seen. But it's also really heartening to see how they reach out and help each other through what is inevitable, the ups and downs of sports.

I think I'm re-enabling it. You know, some of them said that it existed before, but they were sort of missing it. And I, you know, David, I think that's probably a little bit a symptom of COVID. You know, you just got into, we all got into patterns and it was sort of the before when work from home was still the thing. When you got back together, you know, in a company or in an organization, it allowed a more spontaneous interaction, more in-person engagement. And now what we're doing is each coach says, 'By the way, here's, we call them our gold games.' We have so many events going on. Like this weekend, I literally think we have 15 different games going on, many of them at the same time, Saturday and Sunday. But our coaches are saying this is the most important. You know, our women's lacrosse coach, Danielle, fabulous leader, she's undefeated. They're undefeated thus far. They play Notre Dame this weekend. She said, 'Please come out to the Notre Dame game. You don't need to come to the game the next day, but come to the Notre Dame game.' And so, our athletes and our coaches are also showing up for each other, which is really inspiring.

You know, David, I guess that gets to be such a personal thing. I look at it and you sort of say, well, why am I a leader and why do I exist? If a head coach is your muse and you think about, oh, yes, I want to be the head coach and keep the attention on my team. I think a second thing that you and I both know is there's nothing like getting your ass kicked really badly. The ego, you know, you can have a great season where you win, but you can also have some losing seasons and losing streaks and losing games where you're the goat, the bad goat. And those are humbling experiences, but those are also, they remind us that it actually has far less to do about us and far more to do about the preparation, about luck, about circumstance. And so, anyone that feels like the ego is starting to creep in, just remember there's, you know, at some point something's going to happen and you're going to fall flat on your face. Your day is coming and probably quite visibly. And that's okay, too. By the way, those are great learning experiences. They're painful learning experiences, but they're important ones. And then the last thing I just say is ask yourself if you're a young leader, ask yourself who are the leaders you wanted to follow, that inspired you. Odds are that in many cases it's going to be a servant leader, someone that put your interests before theirs, someone that you trusted. And I would just make the observation over time, I think the most talented people, the greatest talent follow authentic leaders and servant leaders more than they follow self-centered leaders. And so it's also just, I heard Colin Powell, I'll never forget, I was lucky to get a chance to interact with him multiple times and he used to say this publicly, I remember him saying it to me, I was at eBay at the time, he said, 'John, it's not about leadership, it's about followership. Your job is to build followership.' So when you think about it that way all of a sudden the focus is not you the leader, that was his way of talking about servant leadership, right? It's not about you. It's about followership and how you enlist, in his case the troops or the people at the State Department to follow. And almost always that's by values-based, principles-based servant leadership.

You know, I'd say two things, David, come to mind. One is my father had a profound impact on me. I didn't think of my father as a role model but I now realize he was in some ways. He was a senior person at Price Waterhouse in Chicago. He spent his entire career there, ended up being one of the top two or three people in the firm. And a couple things I realized in hindsight I learned from my father. He used to take my sister, I have two sisters. One that's two years younger, one that's 12 years younger. The sister that was two years younger and I, he would take us downtown to his office in downtown Chicago on a weekend where he had to do some work and we'd play in the typewriters back in the days there were typewriters and have hot chocolate. This would have been the late '60s and I remember we'd pull into the parking garage under the building and he'd say to the weekend parking attendant, 'Hey Billy, how you doing? How's the family?' We'd ride up the escalator. And the guy would light up. He'd call him Mr. D. There'd be the receptionist, you know, 'Hey Marge, is your husband out of the hospital yet? Why don't you know I've been thinking of him?' And my dad just had this way, he treated, oh, then we'd be walking down the hallway and it would be the governor of Illinois, Governor Ogilvie. He'd say, 'Governor, come meet my children.' And my dad treated the parking lot attendant the same way he treated the governor. He treated everyone the same and I didn't notice it. I wasn't conscious of this as a child but people would light up when they saw him because they saw that he treated everyone with the same kind of attention and kindness and that brought the best out of them. And then I would say the second thing I learned from my dad is he didn't have the word 'I' in his vocabulary. And so we'd go to some dinner or whatever and I'd be the young person that was brought at the table. He'd bring me along to learn and he would immediately launch into, 'Tell me about yourself, what's going on over here.' David, you've got this gift, too. Right? It's always asking curious questions about others and the focus is on the other people, never on him. And I didn't, as I said, it wasn't until many years later that I heard the phrase servant leadership. But in many ways, my dad, I had this beautiful role model of what a servant leader was.

Oh, so many, David. So many. I learned a ton from Meg Whitman. I got to work for Meg for a couple years before becoming CEO and I learned about

Courage. Meg had courage still to this date. Courage about making hard decisions, bold decisions, about owning up to mistakes. I think the lesson that stayed with me the most around eBay was just the role adversity plays in our lives. And eBay, for me, was a very stressful time at the beginning. It was a turnaround. I was getting skewered in the media. I'll never forget it was the first year Glassdoor came out in the New York Times business section. It had lowest rated CEO in Silicon Valley. It had my picture, and that's back when people actually read the newspaper.

It was not. I've run into people in the grocery store and they go into the other aisle because what they read about you is what they think is your reality. But I came to the realization, and I had some friends help me do this and frankly my therapist helped me do this, that often moments of adversity, phases of adversity, are often the phases that in hindsight we look back on with most fondness and pride. And she had me think about what were the things in my career when I look back that I was most proud of in hindsight and what were the things in my personal life that I was most proud of in hindsight. And she said, was that when things were going really well, John? I said no, were those periods of adversity? And I said yeah. She said, so just remember that it's periods of adversity that give you the opportunity to have the most meaningful moments and the moments you in hindsight are most proud of. And it was a powerful shift for me because I hate adversity. I want it to all be going well. I want people to get along. And I was living in this world, fearful of future adversity. And when I was in adversity, I was so anxious to get out of it. And it helped me realize that that's just not a sustainable model. And so what I learned at eBay and I still try to do today is I don't like adversity. I don't want adversity. No one does. But adversity is a fact of life. It's a fact of life in our personal life. You and I have talked about that. It's a fact of life in our professional lives. And so now when adversity avails itself, I just say to myself, all right, I don't like this, but all I can do is put one foot in front of the other and carry myself in a way that I will be proud of in hindsight. I don't know how it's going to turn out. I don't know when it's going to change, but I do know I can make myself proud by carrying myself in the best possible way through this difficult circumstance. And eBay really taught me that.

PayPal was one part consumer product, one part payments, one part technology, and it was a very ill-defined market. So you always had to be doing these constant game-boarding, what we called game-boarding process. A good friend, mutual friend of ours, Dave Dorman, was on this board and he's now chair of the board. And our annual board retreats, I was chair for a number of years, we would do game-boarding and industry game-boarding because you couldn't predict exactly what was going to happen. So you had to think through it. It was the ultimate in having a dynamic approach to strategy and an outside-in view of the market and how the industry chessboard, I guess that's what we used to call it, industry chessboard, formed. And you could never be too confident in your short-term success because we'd have these periods of intense success. We'd get a network effect would happen, but you always had to be conscious that you can be getting disrupted while you were having success.

Well, if I've learned one thing from ServiceNow, there's nothing like a good tailwind. You know the old phrase, when a good manager meets a bad business, a bad business wins every time. When a mediocre manager meets a good business, a good business wins every time. ServiceNow, and Fred Luddy, the founder, deserves credit for this, and my predecessor Frank Slootman, and now my successor Bill McDermott has just done amazing things. But it's a born-in-the-cloud platform that just had unfair advantages by being a modern technology platform. Now, I think we did a good job of not growing too fast. Fred, the founder, really wanted to build an enduring company. And so making sure that customer success and customers getting real results and that we were taking care of our customers, not because we were the hot technology that everyone needed, but because our technology had the power of helping them achieve tangible value. I learned that. And then I had another leadership lesson there, David, that was totally unanticipated. My direct report team, I inherited three or four of them that had been there for the long term, at least in ServiceNow language. I had two or three of them that joined a year or two before I got there and then I hired two or three. And we did this off-site that was going to be a storming and norming off-site to build team. And I said I really want to develop a set of operating principles or our collective operating principles. And I had a facilitator there and we had a break. And the facilitator would come back after the break. The facilitator says, John, the team would like you to leave. I'm like, what? They said, we'd like you to leave. And so I leave the room and I'm out for three hours. I'm like, Jesus, I think there's a coup going on. And I come back in and the team said, we have built a social contract with each other. We want to share it with you. And it was important to us that we didn't do this because of you or for you. This is for us. And the first phrase of their social contract is we commit to work east-west before we go north-south. Which is to say, we're not going to run to you, John, to fix all of our problems. We commit to try to work with each other. We commit to have each other's back. We'll debate freely when we're in the room, support each other when we're out of the room. And there were seven or eight statements in the social contract. They said, we want you to know this is what we're signing up to. And next week at our all-hands to the company we're going to tell the entire company they can hold us accountable for the social contract. And it was so much more powerful than anything that I could have helped create or encourage that they create. It was a true case in a team self-organizing and doing it in a way where it had real grit and meaning for them.

Oh, I learned so many things at Nike, David. I got exposed to one of the greatest brands in the world and how the company thought about brand and advanced the brand and by the way kept the brand contemporary. That's one of the real hidden secrets of Nike. It's still a young brand in its 53rd or 54th, maybe it's 55th year now. I learned a lot about innovation in a company that really puts innovation at front and center. I also learned a lot personally through COVID through leadership and I learned a lot in a very humbling way. I got my butt kicked toward the end, both very publicly and also learning where I lost the locker room a little bit and had to just sort of confront that. We did certain things very well and then toward the end our results weren't what they needed to be and we weren't living up to our promises and frankly it was time for me to move on. And so I learned a lot through that experience both personally and professionally.