The Leadership Secrets Behind Business Growth, with Jim Whitehurst

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to be here, and it's great to reconnect with you.

Yeah, well, that was an amazing opportunity that came my way, and if we have time, we can ultimately talk about that. But a board member from Red Hat knew of me at Delta, and that's a long story, and said, 'You've got to give this person a chance.' So, first off, I've been screwing around with Linux for years, which is Red Hat's main product, right, just as an avocation. So when I first got a call, it actually came from a recruiter. It was public I was leaving Delta at the time, and he said, 'I'm not sure you've ever heard of this company, and they do this thing called Linux.' And of course, I said, 'Well, of course I know this. I have used it at home. I know all about this.' So, I'm a little more techy than the average big company exec. But most importantly, coming into that situation, I would tell people any situation, one of the reasons I took the role is I had a thesis of what I would do with it. So I didn't come in and say, 'Oh, great, thank you for the job, now let me go figure it out.' I spent time researching and had a sense of what I thought the company was doing well and the areas where we could really do things differently and accelerate growth. And then, once you've got that thesis, it's about building a great team that can go execute that, because there are more things that I'm bad at than I'm good at. But one thing I think I'm good at is being self-aware enough to know what I'm good and bad at. And so then you hire. That's a beautiful thing when you have latitude to hire your own team, is you can hire for your weaknesses and build complementary strengths that, in total, can lead to everyone on the team being flawed, but the team itself not having a lot of flaws. And so I think we built a really, really good team and executed into it. It was just a phenomenal honor and privilege, but also just an experience to be a part of that.

I luckily didn't. We had to make, let's call it, tweaks. That's one of the big decisions that people have to make, and there are different people with different styles around that. So I know there's some people who come in and say, 'I'm going to change out my team because I want the whole team to either be loyal to me or I want the whole team to be who I've chosen, and I can craft it exactly right.' I guess I cut my teeth at senior leadership at Delta when I was kind of battlefield-promoted to COO. And look, we were hurtling towards bankruptcy, so I wasn't spending time to go recruit people. And honestly, nobody in their right mind would have come to an airline in that situation. So you had to take the existing team and work to kind of craft everyone's dreams to craft an excellent team. But we did fill in with a couple of people here and there. And I would say it was more that at Red Hat, we had a lot of components of a strong team. So I tried to take those and then made a couple of changes. I made a change in marketing, a couple of others. But I would say 70 percent of the team was the same, and I redirected them some and worked to build a team out of it. Tried to augment where I think there were weaknesses. But especially coming in as a new leader to an industry that I wasn't a part of, to me, it felt like continuity, both in terms of the culture but also experience. How was I going to know who a great product person was in software? I'd never been in software. It made more sense to take the team and try to get the best out of them, and then observe where the gaps were and then just hire into those. By the way, I'm still a big fan of that. I know I was kind of forced into that or cut my teeth in that at Delta, but I do feel like oftentimes, in a rush to say, 'I want perfect people,' you end up changing people. And let's be honest, I'll say for myself, I'm not that great a hirer, and there's a lot of data that says a lot of hiring decisions are mistakes. I'd almost rather take what I know and work to optimize around that, and especially hire three or four net new people and try to make sure those things work.

Oh, well, the thing you just really don't appreciate is that when there's no one behind the curtain, there is just an enormous amount more focus and attention on you and stress associated with that. So I thought, 'Oh, I've had 80,000 people working for me at Delta. I ran a company through a bankruptcy, drove all the day-to-day, and so therefore, I could be the CEO of Red Hat,' which at the time was a much smaller company. And you get there day one, and you realize, okay, well, everybody, if you walk in with a styrofoam cup—luckily I didn't do that—people, 'Oh, they don't care about the environment.' All of these little things, everything you do, people are watching. I remember this great story. One time, my wife calls me; she rarely calls me at meetings. So I was in a group of people in the conference room. I said, 'Excuse me a second, my wife normally doesn't call me. Let me just step out real quick.' So I stepped out, took the call, came back, thought nothing about it. Five years later, at a sales rewards club meeting, one of the top salespeople, one of the women there, came up to my wife and said, 'I was just about to resign from Red Hat five years ago because I was pregnant and I wasn't sure Red Hat would work. And I was in a meeting with your husband, and you called, and he stepped out to take the call. And I thought, wow, if the CEO believes that it's important enough that family comes first, this is something I want to be a part of.' She's wildly successful at Red Hat, but if I'd hit ignore, she wouldn't be there. So you don't realize those things. And then the flip side, after the Red Hat acquisition, I became president of IBM. So I'm number two in a massive company, and that was much less stressful because there's somebody else behind the curtain. There's somebody else behind you. And when there is no one else there, and the decisions that you make can affect thousands of people's lives, it's just different. I remember at the Red Hat Halloween party—the first version of Red Hat Linux came out on Halloween, so that's like our big holiday. Everybody brings up their kids, and we do trick-or-treating around the offices. And every year, it's a little bit stressful for me because I'm like, 'Look at all these kids running around. Their parents work at Red Hat,' thinking, 'Oh my god, all these people really rely on decisions that I'm making.' And so it is different to be number two versus number one. And the last thing I'll tell you, you read a lot of articles about these CEOs who become completely arrogant and just flame out because of hubris. They do stupid things. And a lot of those folks, I now look back on and think, look, there are two ways that some people deal with stress. One is you let it get to you and you burn out. The other is you lock it away and say, 'Well, I'm going to convince myself I am so right all the time and I'm all-knowing,' that you become that arrogant. I think a lot of people probably weren't that arrogant when they started, but it's a normal human reaction to just the level of stress you're under. It's either let it eat you up or to say, 'I'm going to surf above it.' And so to get the balance right, to stay humble but not be eaten up by that stress, is a really, really tough trick. And when I talk to other CEOs starting out, I tell them that it's like getting that middle model right, where you don't flame out because you just burn out, but you don't let hubris engulf you as a coping mechanism for all the stress. It's tough. You've got to think really hard about that.

Yeah, you do. And that's well, a couple of observations there. One is, you're exactly right, and you have to push really hard on people. Say, 'No, I really want to know. I will see it as a favor to tell me this. This is not going to hurt. I've got to know because if you don't tell me how my...' So you always have to beg for that. Also, then, frankly, I think having a good, stable family life is helpful. So I always laugh and say I have a wife, a daughter, a mother, and a mother-in-law, and none of them is ever going to let my ego get too far. But I do think being grounded with friends and family or something outside of work, and then really, really emphasizing how important feedback is internally with your reports is critical. I used to do, and I made all my executives do this as they made it, we wanted to do it every several years, we all did 360s, me included. So I talked to the board, talked to my reports, and that way, that was anonymous. And so even if people, I think I did a good job of getting people to say, 'I really want feedback,' but then you kind of got it in a well-rounded package. And I think if you don't do that, it's just hard to know. Because when you've heard the 'quit' before, the last time you ever know if your jokes are funny is the day before you're announced as CEO, right? Exactly, exactly.

So, without a doubt, number one—and when people tell me about accomplishments at Red Hat, I always start off saying—we were 1,500 people when I joined, we were 15,000 when we sold to IBM. And just building and creating a culture and a team, and I think we did a really good job focusing on the culture. So we talked about the open organization, and we really, really focused on that. So building and scaling that organization and the careers that get made around that is the thing by far I'm most proud of that we were able to accomplish. So without a doubt, number one is just the people and the careers and scaling a culture. Red Hat, not to get too far in the specifics of the company, is best known for open source software, and that means all the source code is free. So of course, you say, 'Well, how do you make money selling free software? How do you get people to actually pay you for free software?' It's an interesting trick. And so when we sold to IBM, well, it still is the largest software transaction in history. And I am proud of the fact that we took a disruptive model called open source and turned it into what is right now the largest software transaction in history. VMware may, assuming that deal closes, will be bigger. But there's something about getting a traditional IT company to validate open source as a viable business model is something I am extremely proud of as well. And so those would be the biggest two. I mean, it's great we went from being small to being an S&P 500 component, etc., etc. Those were all great things, but it's really scaling the people and the team, and those individuals, and the senior team, and two levels down. I'm still great friends with all those people. And then the mark we made validating open source as a model are the two that come to mind immediately.

Yeah, we used to talk about the first phase of Red Hat was convincing people that open source was a viable alternative to traditional software, and phase two was convincing people that it was the default choice. And certainly for infrastructure software, if you look at any of the major new things happening in AI or ML or big data or DevOps and cloud, all of those things are open source. So it really did go from convincing people it was a viable alternative to literally being the default choice, at least for infrastructure. I'm really proud of that because I do think we played a significant role in making that happen.

Yeah, and that was, to be honest with you, I was kind of do-over, and maybe in some spare time I may do it, because that book was basically a little bit of my articulation of going from Delta, which is always on the list of most admired companies and all that. You can beat up airlines because we've all had our bags lost and flights, but it is considered a well-run airline. And then I go to Red Hat, and I tell you, the first couple of months at Red Hat, I thought, 'This place is chaos. They have no idea what good management practice is. I've been brought in here to clean it up.' And luckily, I didn't know enough about software to start cleaning it up. I was out meeting customers and trying to get my bearings. And I realized over time, the Red Hat model wasn't chaos at all. It was a different way to run an organization that is more optimized for innovation than for driving efficiency. And so the book was like my lesson learned going from Delta, that I thought that's how you run a company—and Delta does run an excellent company—to running Red Hat, which I would argue is an excellently run company as well, but they look night and day. Because at Delta, you do not want someone innovating on the safety procedures before your flight. You want those locked down, and you want people to follow orders. At Red Hat, it is entirely about getting people to take the right smart risks, the right experiments to be able to innovate faster. And so the book was basically saying, wow, there are different ways to run depending on what your objective function is. And by the way, most companies come from that old world, and they're trying to look like they're in the new world now, but they're not changing their ways of working appropriately to that. So you get this almost this impedance mismatch between leaders saying, 'I want my teams to be growthy and take risks,' and then they get these management systems with these performance cadences and measurement systems and incentive compensation systems that are all about driving variance out. And so the one thing I'd still like to do is spend a little more time trying to more fully flesh out—I talked about the difference between Red Hat and Delta—I didn't create a more systemic 'here are the 10 things to go think about if you are trying to make that transition.'

Well, second edition or sequel.

Well, it was, you know, so I was very happy at BCG. I still, some of my best friends are BCG. My wife was way back when my office mate at BCG, so I have deep roots with the firm. And so Delta had approached me many times, so I always said no. And then 9/11 happened, and I was down at Delta out on 9/11. And literally at noon, the CEO at the time, Leo Mullin, called me and said, 'I need you now to be my treasurer.' If that job had just happened to be open, the prior person had left recently. And so I basically said, 'Leo, I know nothing about being a treasurer.' And he basically said, 'That's okay. Nobody in their right mind will lose money now. I just need somebody who can be creative and help.' And so I literally became treasurer of Delta at noon on 9/11. And I think it was a couple of things. One is it felt patriotic at the time. I did have a lot of feeling for the senior team at Delta because I'd worked with them for several years and had a real affinity there. Also, my wife was pregnant at the time with twins, and so she was due in October, and this was September. And so the idea of coming into a place where I knew everyone well and they knew me well, and felt like a company that really, really needed help at the time, but also then not having to travel as much, kind of all came together. So I joined as treasurer. I did that for a couple of years. There was a CEO transition, and the new CEO asked me to run the network, which is kind of where all the planes fly, and then a year later to be COO, which had strategy and operations and network and all that stuff under it. And basically, still can't believe it, I laugh, I say often, I was 35 at the time when he said, 'We want to make you COO.' Now, we knew we were hurtling towards bankruptcy and would probably have to file in a few months, and I was so young and naive, I said, 'Sure.' Like, you know what I know now, it's like, would you ever take that job? But I didn't know, so I did. And it was obviously one of the greatest things that ever happened to me.

Yeah, no, it was a phenomenal opportunity and a chance to go do that. And again, I thought I had a thesis of what we needed to do, which we put together the plan. Again, I come back to the thesis. If I didn't think I had a sense of what we needed to do, I'm not sure, again, I would have done it. But I had a good sense, and we put together the plan and convinced the creditors committee this was the right plan and raised the debtor-in-possession loan and basically executed the plan, and luckily it worked. So, yeah, it was a phenomenal opportunity. It was more fraught with risk than I was probably willing to admit to myself, because it was extraordinary to get an opportunity to do that, and an incredible learning experience for me. Incredible.

I think there's a little bit, well, I think I'm naturally, I'm a little bit of a geek, and so I do love strategy and I like talking about it. And so I think part of that just comes naturally to me, and I probably talk too much. But then, just dumb luck, right? After the bankruptcy, I was asked to go over to a break room at the Atlanta airport for the night shift mechanics, and it was kind of unplanned. And so I got there, and I didn't have anybody who had scripted what I was going to say. It's like right after we filed. And so I got all these mechanics looking at me saying, 'Well, what am I going to say?' Well, I just started going through and saying, 'Well, let me tell you the plan,' which is what we've been telling the creditors committee and the debtor-in-possession lenders and all those other people. And it was complex, right? It was moving widebodies out of domestic to international and reconfiguring and engaging and all this stuff. These mechanics are just sitting there for 30, 45 minutes. And when I finished, they started asking really intelligent questions around, 'Well, does that plane have the galley capacity to do that?' and 'Do the other night have widebody gates?' I was getting all these kind of questions rather than, 'Well, how long before my medical benefits change?' or 'What's this?' And it got around the airline very quickly by the next day that I'd been there doing that. And so then I just started doing that. And what I found is people really, really wanted to know what they were a part of. And it's one thing I've talked about ever since and done at Red Hat. There's a sense among many executives that this need-to-know, like, 'I know the strategy, I'm going to go tell you what to do,' versus making sure everybody knows the...

Strategy so they know what they're a part of and that creates an intrinsic motivator that's huge. From last to first in on-time performance among the major carriers during the bankruptcy, and I'm totally convinced it's not like we had some brilliant change in operations. I'm totally convinced that was because everybody knew the overall strategy of the company. We told people being on time is how you can help us run a quality airline and get us out. And so people went above and beyond. And that's, I call it later on, like you're flipping the ambiguity higher pyramid. Most people say the strategy could be ambiguous as long as you crisply understand your job. I'm flipping it around. You want everybody to crisply understand the strategy, let how they're doing their job be a little bit ambiguous so they have agency and control to kind of shape it a bit to do what they think is best because they're probably no better than you anyway. And so that was a lesson learned that it was so effective I just kind of kept doing it. So whether I was good at it or I learned to do it because of that, there was a little bit of both in there. But I did that at Red Hat. Early on I did a survey when I first got there and most employees said they didn't quite understand our strategy well. By the end of that year people did, and we spent a lot of time on laying it out and communicating it and surveying that question every year. And I think it's just so important for people to be engaged to know kind of what direction we're all rowing and why. The why really matters. You can't emphasize it enough. I mean it really, more than the what and the how, explaining to people like why are we doing this. If they can connect what it means for them to why, it makes it a lot easier for them to accept things even when it's maybe not personally great for them. And you know, Delta was very simple during the bankruptcy. We didn't have time to go hire a consultant and do a big purpose study. He said we're not going to let this fail on our watch. Delta's an iconic company in the south and you know, a lot of people, there's parents work there and want their kids to work there. It's like we're not going to let this thing fail. And that was enough. And obviously later on, kind of built off of that. And at Red Hat, you know, open unlocks the world's potential. This whole idea of open and sharing and how important that is. And it's incredible how strong intrinsic motivators like that are and how much people want to feel a part of something.

Well, I mean look, I call it a choice, might be a little strong. So the way Delta was structured at the time, I was CEO but almost all the major functions reported to me, I guess other than finance. And so when the new CEO came in, I mean I get along with him, I've known him for years, he'd been at another airline, Richard. He basically said, Jim, I can't have one direct reporter, right? I can't, you know, I gotta have the major kind of functions. And so, you know, so there really wasn't a role for me. I mean he was very gracious, like if you want to take any of the roles, pick one by K and N. So that basically my role was going away. And so honestly I felt like I'd been kicked in the gut. It was one of these, I hadn't, I was so deeply involved every day for what, two years through that bankruptcy, I really didn't kind of think about the other side. And then creditors committee went with someone else and there wasn't a role for me. And I mean it would, took, I'll be a little, I kicked it a gut, it's been a while. And so I think the big one for me on exit was three types of roles. One was a very senior executive at another company, but a big company, but not a CEO. The second was, you know, private equity companies calling to do turnarounds. And then trying to find a smaller company CEO role. And I just, doing another turnaround, we had to lay off so many people when I was at Delta and it was painful. I had zero desire to do turnaround things at all. So it was really looking at the other two. And you know, you do kind of get to the point, it's like I've been close to number one for a long time, I want to show that I can go do it. And so Red Hat took a chance on me again. I was an airline person going into technology. But it was a little bit of a bet and I thought I could go do something and Red Hat gave me the opportunity to do it. You know, it was a great situation to go into given what we talked about earlier in terms of just where they were in their evolution and the whole idea of open source and the movement that they were starting. But I would say there, and this is one I guess lesson learned for me, is a lot of people when I first did it said, wow, you had 85,000 people working for you, a huge thing, you could go run big divisions, be next to the line of VCO, these big things. And Red Hat at the time was what, 400 million, 450 million dollars in revenue, 1,500 people, wasn't that big, right? But finding something, as my wife said after I talked to the CEO and I came in, she said I haven't seen your eyes light up like that in a couple of years. And that's why I kind of knew it was right. It's like pick a role you can get passionate about and you're excited about rather than what looks like the right logical next step and then go make it successful. And if you're successful, new doors open. And they did.

Yeah, well, I mean I can answer, I can talk about the board, I can talk about me personally a bit. So I was not expecting it. I get a call from Jenny, who I knew, we'd seen each other before, we'd done things before, and said, hey, if you're in New York such and such a week, let's grab breakfast. And I said great. So we got together and she slides the term sheet across the table. And you know, it's one of those ones where you really have to tease two things out of a situation like that. One is like what's best for you personally and then kind of what's best for the company. Because Red Hat at the time was, still is, very, very successful. Things were going well. When you're a CEO who's kind of taken the company, you know, 10x'd it in terms of revenue, market cap, etc., the board's generally pretty happy with you and kind of lets you run and do your thing. So life was good, right? Everything's going along well here. And the idea of saying, oh, I'm not going to go sell and now work for another company, I have to say personally wasn't that appealing. Nothing against IBM, it was just, but when you looked at where Red Hat was, which is selling open source infrastructure software in a world where public clouds give you the infrastructure, open source infrastructure software for free to run on their public clouds, Red Hat's standalone strategy was starting to feel like it was going to get tougher, bluntly. And we'd always talk to us like we need scale to be the company that can kind of abstract and run across these, but we're still even at that size at the time, 4 billion or whatever it was in revenue, didn't feel like that was very big versus Amazon and Microsoft and these like massive, massive 10, 20x our size companies. And then IBM comes along with a very nice premium for the shareholders and the scale to try to make that strategy work. So it was the right thing to do for shareholders and Red Hat employees, bluntly. It was tough for me, took a while to mentally get there. But I think the board very quickly realized, you know, large premium, knowing what the likely difficulties, not that we couldn't have made it work, but the probability of success of our strategy being part of IBM was much higher than standalone. And so it was the right decision and we kind of relatively quickly got to that, that we need to be part of a bigger company. So the board, the piece, and because the premium was so big, all was relatively easy, frankly. The hard part was with being a lot of the senior team. You know, we've like built this thing and all of a sudden it's going to be a part of something else. And at some point that's what you have to decide. You got to do the right thing, right? You can't, especially as a senior executive, you cannot let your own personal circumstances or preferences keep you from doing the right thing. And so it was the right thing to do. Still, it does, it's, there's a, I'm from South Georgia, there's this saying, says easy does hard. It's easy to say separate them but it takes a while mentally to get your head there. So but as it became very clear it was the right strategic outcome, you finally get yourself there. And I had a great learning opportunity at IBM as well. And so it, so far it's worked out well.

Well, you know, we did a couple things. And this is where I started, we were talking a little bit about the book earlier and how I demonstrated a little bit. Do-over, you know, we started to get a lot more nuanced around how we thought about culture and ways of working. And the reason I say that, and I used to, this is before the activities, you gave a speech at Mobile Congress a few years ago where I basically talked about that. Telcos go to see Google to learn about how they operate. I say please don't do that because if the major telcos had Google's ways of working, I'd never be able to get a phone call completed again. Flip side, if Google had telco ways of working, we'd see no innovation happening there. And so the issue is most companies have some of both. And IBM is that great example of that. You're running the world's financial systems on mainframes and there's a reason that hasn't moved to distributed architectures. These things have to stay up and they have to run in any condition all the time and never fail. And how you run to deliver that, the same way airlines run on multiple nines of reliability, how you do that is in a different set of ways of working than how you innovate. So we start off saying, at least with Red Hat, this is two cultures working together, not coming together. So we didn't try to change the Red Hat culture. We kind of very much said Red Hat needs to stay Red Hat and work with IBM. Now when I transitioned to the President role at IBM, we spent a lot of time trying to say, we're an IBM, I can software group, how do we start to rethink, given, I mean IBM's created mission critical software for a long time, but as we're driving forward into AI, ML, some of these other categories, how do we adopt some more of the other, I'll call it a faster-paced kind of ways of learning, learning kind of lessons from the Red Hat model if you want to call it that. But not say the Red Hat model's right, the IBM was wrong or not, because there are a lot of things, and I don't know, I always hate to even say innovation versus efficiency because it even becomes the kind of innovation. So if you're trying to build a quantum computer, you need a whole set of work on microwave electronics to come together with the right refrigeration stuff two years from now to come together. And so that requires a level of planning. So I start though, if you're trying to drive this future state versus seek a future state, how you build management systems for that are different. And driving a future state could be able to drive variance out, but it could be building a quantum computer requires that kind of level of precise planning where a lot of software is much more about seek future state, how do I experiment, how do I try and work my way there. And so if you think about those as kind of two extremes, IBM had both, Red Hat had one. And so it's how do you take components of IBM and say let's adopt more of this model, not because it's better or worse, it's just more optimized for a certain set of activities. And so I spent a lot of time teasing that out, getting crisper on that, and working with IBM to adopt more and more of that. That was a lot of my role while I was there.

Yeah, so size wasn't, I didn't find it to be a problem, right? You know, she's decided from Delta and Red Hat kind of grown a lot. But I will say, I mean to be blunt, it's really hard to go from being number one to number two. And I don't think I have a big ego need, it's not like I need to be in control. And matter of fact, I try really, really, really hard just to be a participant in meetings, you know, not perceived as like the leader, because I can get the best results that way. And look, I have a great relationship with Arvind and he and I worked really, really well together. But psychologically it's really hard to not say here's what I want to go do, this is what we're going to go drive, right? And so it's, I didn't think it would be hard to step back from being number one to number two. It's hard after you've been doing it for a lot of years. I will say the stress level's a lot lower, back to my point earlier, right? There is someone else behind the curtain that ultimately is the final arbiter. And so I would say I found it less stressful, but it was also just a very different role to work to execute. You know, and I was engaged in strategy, strategy reported to me and all that, but it's just a different role to be number two versus number one.

You know, one of the things I realized, after I had kind of decided to myself that I was going to leave IBM, but I had not left yet, told Arvind or left, but a lot of times intellectually saying what do you want to do next. And what I've found, and maybe this is me, maybe others feel this way, there's only so much intellectualization you can do with that. At some point you have to go live it. And so I finally decided, you know what, I'm going to take a year off and I'm going to experiment with a lot of things and see what I enjoy and see if I want to keep doing one of those more or jump back into being a CEO. So I'm doing several boards, I mentor a couple of younger CEOs and I love doing that and working with them and working to make them successful. I've gotten much more involved in several charities where I've been able to take on bigger roles. Ironically, when you're a sitting CEO on boards, nobody makes you do that much work. You show up at the meetings and spout off a little bit. Now that I'm not a sitting CEO, I'm like chairing committees to all these things, which I think is, which is great. So I'm much more involved with my university and with some climate things. And spending some more time with my wife and travel. And what, I left last July, so I said this July I'm going to step up and reflect back and say is there one of these things I want to do full-time or do I want to do the portfolio or other things. Also, I'm an advisor to Silver Lake, which I love. You know, I think CEOs, I think are probably notoriously bad investors because you have to be an optimist and you're the person out there kind of creating positive. And I think good investors are more skeptics. And so I've loved engaging with the folks there and they're brilliant but think differently. And so it's so wonderful to get to stretch a new set of muscles. And so one thing I've learned is I'm 54 now but I have still so much to learn and interesting people to meet. And it's lovely to have the privilege to be able to take the year and do that.

That's right. You know, I joined BCG out of college and went there with business school, went back, literally noon on 9/11. You know, showed up half the morning as a BCGer and in the afternoon as a Delta person. So never had a break there. And the deal to Red Hat was a relatively short period of time. So it's the first time I've had time off. And I had so many people tell me that if you ever have a chance between jobs to take some time, do it. And I've never realized how nice it is to be able to do that. I've read a dozen books so far this year, actually I think a little more than that if I go back and look. I'm doing photography. You know, honestly just spending more time talking to my kids and my mother and friends that I'd kind of fallen a little bit out of touch with. Those are things that it's hard to get that time back. And so I thought I would be more sitting on the beach, where I find myself very, very busy but engaging with interesting people.

So first off, I think a lot of people try to act a part that they're in versus just being themselves. And if you're a good enough actor to really be able to act a part, go to Hollywood, try to win an Oscar. I found that being able to say I don't know, or I would really like to learn that, or I made this mistake, is disarming for others. It actually builds your credibility with people because they're saying, okay, this person is comfortable enough with themselves to say they don't know as well as I do. I think human beings interpret insincerity in very sinister ways. If insincerity's like I'm trying to act a part because I feel like I need to be this way, people look at that and say, yeah, that doesn't seem authentic to me, they must have an agenda. Versus, hey, maybe they're just nervous or uncomfortable. So be yourself. And related to that, I ended up, went from treasurer to running the network at Delta to recently CLO. You say, well, how did the treasurer get to do that? Well, a lot of this is curiosity. So went to lunch with the person who ran maintenance and grabbed coffee with the person who ran flight ops. And over time I just was so curious with how things worked, I talked to enough people that it almost kind of became, oh yeah, yeah, Jim's kind of around, he kind of knows a lot of this stuff because he's been around all the various areas, where actually I've only been at the company a few years, but I just spent a lot of time being curious and learning more and more and more. And I think that's, and the flip side is it wasn't like people didn't want to have coffee. The guy who ran maintenance was freezing, like what does a treasurer do now? Why? So those were good conversations to have. And I think that curiosity matters a lot. And the final thing I would say is just again back to we talked about it before, is when you have people working for you, really, really thinking hard about, I call it creating the context for them to do their best work versus being so directive, you'll get better people to work for you, they will do better, which means you'll do better. And that's probably the single biggest lesson I learned. I go back to that night where I didn't know what I was gonna say to mechanics at Delta. And so I spouted off to corporate strategy. That was probably the most impactful night in my career. And that kind of changed the way I thought about how to lead and it's made a huge, huge difference.

Oh wow. Well, I could go on a lot. I want to be careful I don't get too far into my own industry. But I would definitely say if you haven't read Flying Blind, that's a book that came out this year about Boeing. I thought that was just a phenomenal book just talking about how a culture can kind of come apart with just a few years of leadership kind of more focused on profits than on what's core about the company. By the way, I should say on that, I think great companies are product-led and that can be a product for what I mean, they're built around what am I delivering and you have to have great sales to go with it and you ultimately have a financial model. But as soon as you get away from that core of what's the product, that's a problem. And I think Flying the Line, which came off the Isher, was a great one. I thought Empire of Pain, again that's a book about the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma. Great book if you haven't had a chance to read it, that would be high on my list. That just kind of, I think they came out late last year but it's a relatively new book. Code Breaker, Walter Isaacson, if you haven't read that, I mean talk about one of the most impactful areas. I would actually say This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, that all came out I want to say it was last year but it's all about cyber and the implications for cyber going forward. Again, if you want to say CRISPR and crypto and cyber and security, probably three megatrends we should all know about. I haven't read a good crypto book, but I would throw those on there. And then I would say if I throw one more out there, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, the Bill Gates book. I'm spending much more of my time philanthropically and professionally around areas around climate. And that's where I've gotten to the point of, you know, I've been fortunate and I have some time to give back and I want my grandkids to be able to breathe. So that would be my quick list of relatively recent books at least out in the last 18 months.

Well, this is great. Thanks so much for having me. It's an honor. I know you've had some great people on so it's an honor that you asked. I appreciate being here and I really enjoyed the conversation.