Bracken Darrell - CEO at VF Corporation

It's going to give you more purpose. It's going to give you more drive.

It's knowledge plus faith plus action equals courage.

That is a long time ago.

It's funny. I'm interested in everything. I don't necessarily think of myself as curious, but I did have this experience. I think it was after we last talked. So if I'm retelling a story I told you before, I apologize in advance. Please edit it right out like you will half of what I say. During the pandemic, I was by myself in my kitchen. I was looking out the back and I have this really deep yard. Back then I lived in California and I was looking back in this brown and kind of dark green yard, which was the winter in California. Believe it or not, there is a winter in California. You actually once in a while don't have any flowers at all. It's terrible. I was looking back in the deep back of that yard and it was all brown and green and then there was this one little pink dot way back in there. I was looking through my kitchen window getting a glass of water and I just thought, 'I wonder what that dot is.' I started to walk across the kitchen and then I stopped myself. I was like, 'This is what curiosity is, right? You wonder what something is that you don't know.' And then I thought, 'Yeah, but that's worthless if you don't actually go find out the answer.' So I made myself, like my mom used to make me go open the encyclopedia or the dictionary if someone said, 'What's this?', I made myself walk to the back of the yard barefooted. I walked to the back and miraculously, and I'm not making this up, it was a red rose, a weird red rose growing in the middle of that dark brown and green yard in the middle of the winter. So it makes a good story but it's true. It made me realize that curiosity, at least wonder alone, is not worth very much. But wonder plus action, that's worth a lot. That's the only kind of curiosity I'd like to be. So I try to really get the answers.

Three words. Color outside the lines. I would say excited about life. I'm going to give you more than three words. Excited about life. That could be it. But I would say three ideas: excited about life, trying to make a difference, love everybody.

I think anytime since you and I have been aware that we were thinking about things, you could always find the negatives and positives around you. I really believe that you should always look at the things that are tough and try to constructively figure out how to make them better, but not spend too much time worrying about why they're bad. Another way: not spend too much time just worrying about the fact that they are bad. Can you make them better? If you can't, move on and focus on things you can make better. That's been my view of life in general and it's never really changed. Today there are so many positives. We're in the best time in the world to be alive from a healthcare standpoint and almost every direction. But there are always storm clouds on the horizon and there's always a sun somewhere behind them. So far the sun wins almost every time. In the end, things get better. While people could be terrified of where we are in the world from a geopolitical standpoint or from an AI standpoint, you could also try to be very positive. Whether you agree with the things that are happening or not, humanity has this strong balancer inside that seems to get us back upright over time. It's never failed us before. It's failed us for periods of time, but it's never failed us for a long period of time. I'm confident that we'll right it. That's a choice, but I am confident. I guess that's why I'm optimistic.

I think it's a really misleading question to ask somebody at my age. I'm 63 years old and what you see is what you get wherever you are. There's almost no difference between me sitting right here with you, me in a boardroom, me at work with my guys or my women, or me at home with my kids. There's just no difference. But it took me a long time to get to the point where I could say that. There were plenty of periods in my life I was trying to figure out who I was at work relative to who I was at home. For those people out there who it's not so easy, I can sympathize. It wasn't probably for me either. But the older you get, the more comfortable you get in your skin. You just don't worry about what people think. By the way, if you're CEO, it's really easy to say you don't worry about what people think, but it's a lot harder when you have a boss and a boss's boss. I absolutely am what you see. I wish I could say I've always been like that. Probably I haven't. I have a selective memory for good things. I completely forget most bad things.

No, I love everything you said. As you were walking through the stages of your life, I could see mine. They mimic yours. They're very consistent with yours. I'm almost the same age.

No, not at all. But I do love... Since we're near the NBA finals, I'm a Warriors fan, a Nuggets fan, and now I'm a Knicks fan.

It's a great story. By the way, I was in New York about two weeks ago and the city was never nicer. People were holding the door. People were smiling. You could see teeth on New Yorkers. It was unbelievable.

Yeah, I was in New York yesterday. I saw the same thing. I was walking through our stores and I called Brent, who runs the commercial team over in Europe, and he was asleep. So I called Jacques, who runs the retail group, and I said, 'Hey Jacques, we got to get these mannequins with Knicks jerseys on. We got to show we're supporting the local team in our stores in New York.' I thought maybe that's a bad idea because the visual merchandisers know more than I do. So I told the people in the store that and then I backed off. I said, 'I'll call Jacques and let him decide.' So I called Jacques and said, 'Hey, what do you think?' He goes, 'Let me take care of it.' This was at 4:00. I got on a plane to fly here. I landed at 6:00 or 7:00. By 7:00, I had pictures on LinkedIn of all the different stores with mannequins wearing really cool Knicks jerseys, Knicks pants, Timberland boots, Vans. It was so cool.

I don't think I'm making a dent, but I think we're making a lot of dents. Maybe even to Steve Jobs' 'dent in the universe' at some point, but we're not there yet. But we're making a lot of dents. The cool thing about turnarounds is they automatically suggest you have more degrees of freedom than you do in a running business that's going well. So maybe I am attracted to turnarounds in the beginning, but I'm not short-term enough to really be attracted to turnarounds on a short-term basis. I only think long term. So I love this business. I loved Logitech. We're making a big difference. I could spout off numbers to you, but I won't. I'll just say I think we're getting our mojo back. That is a super good feeling. Whether you're on North Face, Timberland, or Vans, you've got exciting things to talk about. People there are doing great work around the world in our stores and distribution centers. I'm really excited about it. You brought up something that's a new thought for me. I was thinking about what do you interview for if you're a CEO? Nobody ever asks you what you interview for. They just assume you know how to interview. I don't think I was a particularly good interviewer because I just see the potential in everybody. I'd be like, 'Oh yeah, that person's going to be great.' I fall in love with everybody in the interview. I need other people to interview them to make sure we get the right people. But I realized the one thing I can interview for are two things: drive and speed. By the time I interview them, everybody's got the capabilities. The two things I interview for that every single person listening can have and does have in some measure are drive and speed. My definition of drive is it's almost an unquenchable desire to make a difference. You just can't get enough of it. It almost leaps out of your body when you're early on. When you're in the zone of drive, you are unstoppable, invincible. You meet people and they just ooze that. You meet other people and you know it's in there but it's not coming out. The second thing is speed. They probably correlate. The great thing about speed is that people who just get things done discover when they were wrong faster than people who think about it a lot, put it on the to-do list, carry it forward to the next day, plan for it the week after, and have a meeting about it. I love drive and speed.

I don't have a formula that I come in and apply. I do have a few frameworks that I think about, which I won't bore you with. They're a little too consulting speak. But the one thing I did well, two things I'm kind of stuck on. One is that I think every business after your first product matured and you had to find the second one, you can employ the model of trees, plants, and seeds. Trees are the mature things that aren't going to grow very fast. Maybe they're even going to decline, but they're healthy. You need them to make cash to put into other things. Plants are the fast-growing parts of your business that you want to invest in. They're working. You can always make them better, but you just keep pouring it on. Seeds are experiments. Seeds are really cool because you can have a lot of them if you invest in small ways. You can have one person running them. That's what I usually do. So you can always have trees, plants, and seeds out there. Whether I talk about it like I did at Logitech or I don't, which I am here, that's really one of the ways I think about how to build a real growth engine. The second way I think about is teams. I used to think small teams are better than big teams because I met so many people in Silicon Valley doing more with four people than I was doing with 30, and they do it in three months if we take a year. I decided small teams really are better. Jeff Bezos called it two-pizza teams. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it's not just small. It's math. With a team of two, you have one connection. With a team of three, you have three connections. With a team of five, you have 12 connections. It goes geometric. Because of that, the number of relationships required makes it more and more difficult to have really great trusting open relationships. So you will have teams of different sizes. Try to make them small where you can. But maybe the more important thing is just have pairs. Figure out who the pairs in your life or your job are that really make a big difference to you and build super trusting relationships and spend a lot of time with them. Those are the two things I think about a lot when I think about frameworks for coming in and changing things.

Maybe. But let me develop that concept with a different analogy. Let me work on the concept of why large companies tend to only have trees. Isn't that weird? Why does the Fortune 500 change dramatically over a 25-year period? It's really dramatic. Why isn't IBM one of the top five largest companies in the world like it was 40 years ago? Why isn't GE like it was 50 years ago? Those are fundamental questions that don't seem too easy to answer, except you can say they ended up with only trees. I think one of the problems is that when you have trees, or let's call them planets, the bigger your planet, as you try to develop those small satellites floating around it, there's this thing called gravity. Gravity pulls the resources from the little things or pulls the attention of the people running those little things. They end up becoming part of the big thing. The original idea of being separated and different gets traded in for being part of the big thing, slower and bureaucratic like the big thing. Gravity is a killer. The way I try to solve the gravity problem, it took me a lot of iteration...

to get to that was I would just put people in charge of it that were independent of all the other big things, the trees or in this case the planets. Yeah, get them separated and then let them re-fight like crazy not to let them take too much advantage of the core. You know, that is completely different from way a lot of people would look at it. It's probably strategically flawed, but it's practically right because the problem is you'll never get these things off the ground. You know, it's inevitable if you have the seed report to one of the tree people who run the trees. Either the tree person's going to get distracted by the seed and you're going to get in trouble with the tree or most likely the tree person's going to pull resources from the seed because there's always something that has a better ROI if it's already scaled. So that's how I think about how to manage that. So gravity maybe is one of my words that I really like because I also like physics but it's a good word because it captures a lot of the problems of big companies that have a lot of gravity. Do you know, I don't know how to say because I hate saying this because I can come off pretentious like oh in my book I talked about but that's what's coming.

I know but it's coming.

No, I don't want to. In my last book I talked about no, in my first book I talked about ETFs. If I were to write a book, I could say that they were called experimental task forces, ETFs, which is basically like do you brand? Do you have a subbrand like because it's almost its own culture and has its own different rules. So do seed people also are seeds and plant people together? Do they subbranded separate? How do you go about what's the blend? Is it like 20% seed? Like what's the blend for you? Any idea?

Well, it starts first of all, it starts slow. So I'm almost three years in and I think I have really one or actually two or three legitimate seeds that are top secret in the company. So nobody knows until right now that I'm telling you.

Yeah, no, it's okay. I literally don't talk about them. And I didn't do it at Logitech either for a long time because, you know, they get too hyped up. And what I would do is I'd go on an earnings call and say, 'Hey, I've got this new product I'm working on. It's in my pocket and we're doing it all by audio, you know, and I love to do that because it's true.' But it was fun to talk about, but no, at the end of the day, I guess if I really think about it, the best thing about seeds is not to mix them up too much. You can have a lot of seeds because they don't cost very much. You know, you can literally start a seed with one person and a few thousand dollars. And that's what I did. I would eventually hire entrepreneurs in whether they were successful or not because they learned the concept of ownership and getting things done on their own and finding resources. And so I ended up with as many as 20 seeds when I was at Logitech. As few as about when I really got rolling, as few as three or four. Here we have probably three or four now. I got to promise my board in public I'm not going to go to 20, but maybe we will at some point if we get it rolling. So that's kind of the way it is. And that means there's a lot more Cs than core business in numbers, but you wouldn't notice it if you walked in the company.

Yeah, I don't think there's courage without fear. You know, I think when I think of courage, I think of, we're just a few days off Memorial Day now, and I think about those young men and women who went into World War II or any battle or any dangerous situation by choice and they were scared to death, you know, and they did it anyway because it was worth it. That's courage. Everything short of that is, I guess there are things you can call courage, but boy, they are far away from risking your life for something bigger than you. That's really strong courage. So if you ask me if I have fear, the fears I have are more fundamental now in my life. I don't lie. I lose sleep over them, but I'm always afraid somebody's going to have a health problem, somebody I love, or somebody I know or just anybody. I hate that. I've got friends right now in my life who have health problems. And I don't let it overwhelm me, the fear part, because I do so strongly believe in trying to find practical answers to things. And even things that are unsolved so far, somebody said, I watched a guy the other day talk about things are impossible until they're done and they're possible. Everything around you was impossible at one point. So I don't let the negative part of it get to me. But if there were one thing that I would really fear, it would be that. In terms of work, I don't really fear very much. I'm just so excited about everything. And of course I have things that you go, 'Oh my gosh, this doesn't work, what will happen?' But that's what we're here for. You're here to try to mitigate risk and take advantage of opportunities and create new things. So it's just so much fun. I view my life as much more full of joy than fear. I hope everybody else is too. And the few times when I think about fear, it's usually late at night when I'm sweating in bed for some reason about somebody I'm worried about.

There is one thing I'm playing the same playbook, and I'll be the first to admit it. It's design. You would think that this industry that's called fashion design would be a design industry, but it's really not. It's like every other industry. It's a business industry with a lot of creative talent, a lot of talented people of all types, but I wouldn't call it really a design industry. There is design in it but it's not designing the way I think about it. So what we did at Logitech was we really tried to turn Logitech into a design company where I had the first designer report directly to me. It was Alister Curtis and we literally made design a seat at the table. Then we started building our own things and having a separate designation and then integrating with all the teams and it just took off. We encouraged people to design how we close our books and all this stuff. We didn't get nearly to where my dream state would be, which is you kind of design and redesign everything all the time. But that was really the goal. Same goal here. While this is a design industry, it's not a design thinking industry. And we're certainly not a designing or design thinking company, but we're getting better. We're getting better at trying to think about the user, whether it's an employee or a customer or a supplier or a wholesaler who sells our product, whoever that might be. Really trying to figure out what their needs are, what their opportunities are, what are the things they might want that they can't even express or haven't even surfaced consciously that we might be able to solve for them. That's design. That's the kind of company I really want to build, a pure design company that's oriented that way where every time you interact with that company, even if you just walk in the door, go to the front desk, and you're greeted by somebody with a warm smile who makes you feel a little better about yourself, everything we touch gets better. That's the goal of a great design company inside the company and out.

You mean of the brands or of the company?

I love all of our brands. So this is a very difficult one in some ways, easy in another because I can just pick any of them. I'll just pick one. I think the Vans one is really cool because people tend to think of it as skaters or kind of that counterculture. What Vans is at its heart, it was built on that feeling in your life when you feel different from other people and it maybe peaks when you're in your teens or something for most people where you really feel different, you feel like you're kind of standing alone, maybe even feel a little ostracized, and then you find a way to feel proud of it, feel good about feeling different. That's what skating did for skaters and Vans became the emblem of that. 'Off the wall' became an expression that stood for that. It was literally off the wall when a skateboard went up over a pool wall. But it was really about that idea that you could feel different and be cool. So in a way it's the most powerful positioning there is because you're off the wall because everybody's off the wall. Everybody's different. When Apple launched 'Think Different,' I was thinking there are two brands that I know of that can stand for the uniqueness of one but appeal to everybody. It's Apple when it talked about think different and it's Vans when it talks about off the wall.

Yeah. I think there's a part of everybody that's off the wall if we're honest.

Some people are predominantly off-the-wall, but we love people who are different, who push the envelope, who are unafraid to do things that other people would be afraid of most of the time. We tend to be attracted to that.

That's right. Very good.

I was one of four. I had two older brothers and a younger sister.

That's a good question. Under my definition of off-the-wall, I was more of a conformist when I was young. My next oldest brother, probably my oldest brother was a little more off-the-wall than the rest of us.

When do you think it came? At what point? Where were you?

Yeah. I had one of my early interviews for Return on Courage was with an astronaut, a founding astronaut at Virgin, and she said to me her definition of success is when there's no daylight between the personal you and the professional you. She said, 'It takes the first 40 years to figure out who you are and the next 40 to be that person.' I was writing the book at like 39. I'm like, 'No, no, no. What's going on here?' But it's true. I'm at peace with who I am now. Very much so. Let's say we had a time machine that we got in and I know we don't want to do that, but let's say we went three years into the future. By the way, the Knicks have officially won the NBA championship, but we're three years in the future.

Okay, there you go. What a ride for you, right? So the mannequins have all changed, but from the standpoint of the business, if you gave yourself grace in a thousand days, and I know speed's important, is there where you hope to drive to? Is that an impossible question or do you have your like, 'I want us to be this, I want us to be known for this as a business?'

Well, that honors your 'don't make me the turnaround guy' thing. It's like maybe turn heads over a period of time, right? How long will it take to do that?

Oh, I think we could be more courageous in almost every part of our business. We're improving day by day, brand by brand, in taking more risk both from a product standpoint and from a marketing standpoint. We need to keep being more aggressive and more inventive, more creative, more risk-taking with products. We need to be unafraid to do things on social media and in the public eye that feel risky even though they might just be fun or mischievous. That's the space where we have a lot of room to run, a lot of room to grow. I am absolutely ready to fuel that fire. I love it. We've got 25,000 people who are capable of it. I was in those stores yesterday in New York. You could feel the energy when I said, 'Hey, why don't we do something for the Knicks in here?' Instantly people are ready to go do something. There's a lot of excitement here. We're getting there and we'll get better and better at this.

Okay. I'm going to start with the middle group. If you're just on your way up, into something, the most important thing you could realize is you're not static at all. You wake up every day, look in the mirror, you can be anything you want to be. That sounds Pollyanna, but I mean it. If you're introverted, you can decide, 'I'm going to make myself extroverted.' That sounds crazy. If you're too extroverted, you can change. You can change your personality. You can change things about yourself. It's not easy, but as I heard somebody say on the Huberman podcast one time, 'The most soul-building things you can do are the ones you least want to do.' That is a great way to think about life. Just get at it when you need to work on something. For the CEO group, I don't know if I have any advice for them. They probably have advice for me. I just think this is the most ridiculously fun job in the world. We're all so lucky. We should be thanking everybody that we get to do these jobs. We have so many paid friends. And then the last group was my employees. Look, I love this company and judging by our engagement surveys, an increasing number of our employees are excited to be here. I hope you'll stay with it because it's going to get better and better and better and more exciting. If there are things around you that you see that you don't like, make that bad news travel as fast as possible because good news can float, but bad news needs to fly. I really believe in that and we're getting better at that too.

Wonder curiosity equals wonder plus action. Yeah.

Well, I hurt my shoulder, so I've begun to shoot left-handed now.

What'd you do to it? Throwing up threes?

I love it, man. In what state? Are you coming back to California?

Well, if you have a game down here, I'll huff and puff with you. I'm still playing soccer.

It's always so much fun to talk to you. I love your optimism and courage.