Virtuous Leadership Program: a conversation with Hubert Joly, author of "The Heart of Business"

Bonjour.

Absolutely. It's a huge pleasure and a true, true privilege to meet you once again, and on behalf of this group, we are very, very grateful for the generosity of taking your precious time, and we are above all thrilled to be here with you. So, I also would like to deeply thank you, and also your chief of staff, right, Hasty, for her support, her kindness throughout this process that made this session possible. We have agreed that I'm going to kick off this conversation with four or five questions, and then we are going to open for other questions from the members of our group. Okay, so let's go.

And of course, you're referring to David Brooks' book, 'The Second Mountain,' a wonderful book. I don't know that we need to climb the two mountains in sequence, but certainly at the top of that first mountain, I felt it was desolate. It was dry. There was no joy for me. There was no meaning, and probably because, to an extent, I felt I had been driven too much by the quest for power, fame, glory, or money. This is, of course, not something that's fulfilling. So, call this my midlife crisis, maybe. It's not going to happen to everybody, but it happened to me. What was healthy is that I actually took the time to step back, and I was very fortunate. I was invited by a former client of mine to go through the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. There are many ways to step back, but this was an opportunity to go through my life story, identify the moments where there had been joy versus not, and through a lot of spiritual reflection, discern my calling in life, why I was here. Earlier on, in the early 90s, I had the opportunity, invited by a couple of friends who were monks, to write an article about the philosophy and theology of work: why do we work? Is work a punishment because some dude sinned in paradise? Is it something we do so we can do something else, like watch PSG lose to Real Madrid earlier this week? Or is it something that's part of our calling as human beings, part of our way to find fulfillment in our life? In most companies, the vast majority of people see work as a necessary evil. But we have a choice: we can decide why we work and how we can have work be part of our way to do something good in the world. That was incredibly transformative for me. A mistake I've made, one of many in my life, was thinking that to be a good leader, you need to be smart and be the smartest person in the room. One thing I've learned over the years, certainly during the pandemic, is that as leaders, we need to lead with all of our body parts: our head, but also our heart, our soul, our guts, our ears, our eyes, not just our brain.

Yeah, because there was confusing perfection and performance. Of course, in business, we need to perform; there's no doubt. But the problem with perfection is that if we're seeking to be perfect, here's the scoop: I was a human being, so I was not going to be perfect. Therefore, I would not be able to accept myself as I was. Worse, I was not able to accept my team members because they were also human beings, and therefore imperfect. That creates constant dissatisfaction and almost depression. Whereas if we realize that we're not perfect, we're human beings, we can first accept ourselves and love ourselves because to love others, you have to start with loving yourself. Then we can love others and accept them with their imperfection. That's really helpful. Here's a very concrete example: at the beginning of the pandemic, did you have the manual to deal with COVID? Of course not. Nobody did. The only way to deal with COVID was to be able to say, 'I don't know, and we're going to have to figure it out. We're going to have to ask for advice and then try to figure it out.' If this happens, we can leverage our collective strengths and produce much better results because we're not limited by this false idea of perfection. Then we can build genuine human connections because the only way we can connect with each other at a very personal, deep, and meaningful level is if we can open up. If I can talk to you about my crucibles in life, that changes things. The only thing that's real in life is human connections. In business, in life, that is what unleashes human magic, which is what we've seen at Best Buy. Now, how did I recover from that disease? I got help. I couldn't do it myself. A transformative point in my life was working with a coach. In 2009, my head of HR at Carlson Companies walked into my office, Elizabeth Bastoni, and she said, 'Hubert, would you like to work with a coach?' I said, 'Have I done something wrong? Is there a problem? Did somebody complain?' She said, 'No, this is a coach who helps successful leaders get better.' That was Marshall Goldsmith. His wonderful book, 'What Got You Here Won't Get You There,' I highly recommend. He helped me discover not feedback, but feed forward. I always struggled with feedback; it was depressing. You cannot change the past, but with feed forward, I can decide what I want to get better at and ask for help. If I want to become a better delegator or better at unleashing growth, maybe I can ask you, Alexander, if you have any advice. This is very powerful.

My sense, it'd be interesting to see people's reaction on this call, is that the vast, vast majority of leaders today at all levels believe that the old ways of leading are not working. The extreme focus on profit, the top-down management approach, this is not working. The world needs companies that are forces for good and needs leaders who are purposeful and able to create an environment that can unleash human magic. People are convinced. For many decades, people have said people are the most important thing. The challenge, I don't think, is convincing people intellectually. The challenge for others, myself included, is to learn how to lead in a different way. In my personal experience, most of what I learned at business school and in my early years as an executive was the old model of profit optimization and top-down management using incentives to drive behavior. We have to rewire ourselves. That's why I wrote this book: to be a manual for leaders who are keen to move in that direction and need help. Frankly, I don't have the corner on wisdom on this, but I thought with my experience, I could offer advice and very concrete examples. That's why I'm teaching it at Harvard. That's why I'm coaching CEOs on their journey. I think the vast majority of us are on that journey, and we know from experience it's not an easy one. We have so much to learn.

So, rewind to the summer of 2012. I became the CEO of Best Buy, and everybody thought we were going to die. There were zero buy recommendations on the stock. Our market cap was like two times something, so not good. The key advice was: you're going to have to close stores, you're going to have to fire a lot of people. We looked at closing stores, but all of our stores were profitable, so what's the point of closing profitable stores? It didn't make any sense. Firing a lot of people implied that people were the problem. I thought they were going to be the source of the solution. Our diagnosis was that the problems we had were essentially self-inflicted. Prices were too high. The online shopping experience was bad. The speed of shipping was bad. The expense in the stores had deteriorated. Our cost structure was bloated. These are all self-inflicted problems, so that's good news—you can fix them. Of course, we could talk about what we did, and it's pretty common sense. The more interesting point is the 'how'. It was a very human-centric approach. Every company on the bank says people, people, people. What did we do? The first thing I did, to your point, my first week on the job, I spent it in a store in St. Cloud, Minnesota, just 100 miles north of Minneapolis. I think they should say 'Cyclone' like in Paris, but it's St. Cloud. Why did I go to that store? I had this badge—CEO in training—and I spent a week there with the associates, essentially asking them three questions: what's working, what's not working, and what you need. My job was super easy: take notes and then make sure we did something about it. So, start with people. Start at the top as well. I'm a bit of a Maoist; I think fish rot from the head. If things are not going well, don't blame the front-liners, blame the top. We had to make some changes at the top. It starts with people; it also ends with people. What do I mean by this? In a turnaround manual, the first priority is always grow the revenue because it's amazing what revenue growth can do. It's not always intuitive because people feel cost reduction is more certain, but revenue growth is helpful. So, focus on that. In parallel, go after the cost structure, but first, focus on non-salary expenses—everything that has nothing to do with people, which at most companies is the vast majority of the cost structure. As an example, at Best Buy, we sell a lot of TVs. They're large, thin, so they break. We would break about $200 million worth of TVs every year. Working with vendors, the supply chain, stores, and customers, you can reduce that by 50%. It's good because zero percent of customers want to buy a broken TV. Out of the $2 billion of cost we took out, more than two-thirds were non-salary expenses like this. Every year, we improve efficiencies along these lines. If one plus two is not sufficient, you may have to cut headcount, but you do it as a last resort. Maybe you redeploy because you have turnover. There are ways to do this. Then, it's all about creating energy instead of being smart. It's about creating energy. In physics, we learned that energy is a finite quantity; you cannot create it. In an organization, you can actually create energy, and a role as a leader is to create that energy. How do you create energy? You co-create the plan as opposed to telling others what to do. You get going, start implementing, celebrate the early wins. If something is not working, you say it transparently: 'This one didn't work out; we need to rework this.' Then rinse and repeat. This was the approach in the darkest days. The focus on people is not just for when things are going well—that's easy—it actually is also when things are really grim.

How much time do we have? There's a lot to unpack. So, after three or four years, we could say the turnaround was over. We had stabilized the company; we were back on track. But we did want to define our future. We were doing some of the traditional work: understand the markets, segment the market, define your positioning, identify growth opportunities. Then we also wanted to focus on the 'why'—why do we exist in the world? Some of it, I'll come back to, was from a business standpoint, but it actually started with us, the leadership team, from within. I think a key conviction I have is that personal purpose is a key foundation for corporate purpose. So, one day, every quarter we would get together as an executive team. You guys probably do this: review the plans, changes, opportunities. On one day, I asked each of the executive team members to come to that off-site with a picture of themselves when they were little, maybe two or three years old. We had some really cute pictures, believe me. Over dinner, we spent the evening sharing with each other our life story—not our resume. We knew our resume, but a life story with the highs and lows, the crucibles, the difficult moments, and our purpose in life. Okay? Now we learned two things. One, everyone on the executive team was a human being—quirky, beautiful, messy human being—not just a CFO or CMO. And two, with a couple of exceptions maybe, all of us shared the same kind of purpose in life: to do something good for other people, the Golden Rule. Then we stepped back and said, 'Look, we're the leadership team of Best Buy. Why don't we use this platform, Best Buy, to make a positive difference in the world and create an organization that employees are going to love, customers are going to love, vendors are going to love, communities are going to love, and of course shareholders are going to love?' That changes everything because work is not just a job; it's part of our calling. That led us to spend time on the corporate purpose, which for me is at the intersection of what the world needs, the human needs you're trying to address, what you're uniquely good at, what you're passionate about, and how you can make money. We landed on saying we're not a retailer—that's not a purpose. We are a company that's there to enrich lives through technology, by addressing key human needs of health, entertainment, communication, and so forth. That was transforming because it's very inspiring and also unlocks huge growth opportunities because you're no longer limited to your traditional way of doing business. But of course, many companies in recent years have worked on defining their purpose, their 'reason for being'. Then sometimes they rush to communicate to everybody and cascade it down. Let's imagine you and I walk into a Best Buy store and say, 'We have big news! We have a new corporate purpose: to enrich lives through technology.' People would look at us and say, 'Alexander, we love you, but we have no idea what you just said.' It's completely corporate speech. So, there's a ton of work that follows. You have to make that purpose the cornerstone of your strategy. What are the specific manifestations of the strategy? For us, it was a health strategy focused on aging seniors and how we could help them. There's an in-home advisor program where we go to people's homes like a designer and become your CIO/CTO for your home. There's a new membership program where we're always going to be here for you. That's the strategy component. But the most interesting piece, the hardest piece, is how do you enable everyone at the company to write themselves into that story? Not by telling them how wonderful the purpose is, but by helping them connect what drives them with their work and with the purpose of the company. Then, how do you create an environment at the company that is very human, where you can actually unleash human magic? That's where I've learned the most, and maybe we'll come back to this. In broad terms, that's a summary of our journey.

To your points, I give credit to our team. They managed to distill this idea of enriching life through technology by saying what we're trying to be for our customers is an inspiring friend. What they did: one Saturday morning in June of 2017, we closed down all of the stores for a few hours before opening because we like the revenue on Saturdays in retail. No PowerPoints, no video from the CEO, nothing like that. We put people in small groups of three or four and asked them to do two things: one, share with each other your life story; and two, share with each other the story of an inspiring friend in your life. I was paired with a young woman who had been in an abusive relationship with an ex-boyfriend, had been homeless, and Best Buy was her home, her family. All of a sudden, I see her not as an employee but as a human being with all this complexity she was going through. For me, the inspiring friend is my older brother, Philippe, a wonderful guy. You should have invited him instead of me; he's much better. Hopefully, everybody on this call has an inspiring friend in their life and is an inspiring friend to somebody. Then we said, 'Look, what we're trying to do, which we already do when we are at our best, is to try to treat each other and the customers as human beings. Try to treat each other and our customers not as walking wallets but as an inspiring friend to them.' Everybody gets that because this is real life. Immediately, people understand what it means. Of course, we've all gone to trainings where you go back and you're in a poisonous environment, so training was not sufficient. Then you had to do the work of creating that environment. In the book, I talked about the five ingredients that can be used to unleash human magic. The traditional approach of creating new jobs and aligning incentives, hoping something good happens, if you use carrots and sticks, you get donkeys. In an organization, you don't want donkeys because motivation is intrinsic. You have to create an environment where people can find meaning in their job. I had a store general manager in Boston who would ask everyone in the store, 'What is your dream? At Best Buy, outside of Best Buy, what is your dream?' They'd write it down in the break room. My job is to help you achieve your dream. That's a very practical thing you can do. Sit down with your team, do the kind of dinner I did with my executive team, ask them what their dream is. It's about human connections, being vulnerable, and role modeling as leaders is really important. Making sure that everybody feels they belong. Creating autonomy, because none of us like to be told what to do. You have to create enough space for people to bring their unique genius to their job, as opposed to prescribing everything. Create a learning environment where everyone can learn and grow. What we've learned is it's one employee at a time. Because let's imagine for a second that Roger Federer and I have the same coach. The coach is not going to do the same things with Roger and with me. It's the same for our employees: what are the unique coaching needs that each employee needs? Then it's creating a growth environment. From a leadership standpoint, it's adopting new ways of leading, away from the leader as the superhero who knows everything and can fix everything, to the leader as an authentic human leader who is clear about their purpose and guided by the purpose of the people around them. A leader who is vulnerable, authentic, humble, empathetic, and is there to create the right environment for others to be successful. It's a fascinating journey, but so rewarding. You see 125,000 people becoming the best version of themselves and doing magical things for each other and for customers.

It's all of us.

I'll start with the second part of your question. The investors? Don't assume. I would not assume that investors have certain expectations. I think investors are human beings, and they're doing their job to take care of our retirement. But they're smart. In my experience, they understand that to create great results, it takes an army. Of course, they talk to the CEO and the CFO because that's the investor relations people, but they understand. I think sometimes the mistake we make in life is we assume others expect something of us, and therefore we do it. I think it's much better to be clear about our convictions and then share them with others. With our public investors, initially, we had zero credibility, but we worked hard to build it. We did what we thought was the right thing, and we never did something that we would have regretted. The share price went from $11 to over $100, even after the recent correction. On diversity: I think it starts with a business conviction that diverse teams perform better than non-diverse teams. There's a ton of research; McKinsey has done a lot, and Christine Lagarde, the head of the ECB and former head of the IMF, has famously said that if it had been Lehman Sisters instead of Lehman Brothers, the world would be different. So, I believe that. What I would add is that you have to be intentional about it. It's not just a matter of posting a job and hoping diverse candidates apply. You have to go out and find them. You have to ensure your hiring process is fair and mitigates unconscious bias. You have to create an inclusive environment where everyone feels they belong and can contribute their best. That's a continuous effort.

Brothers and sisters, as opposed to demon brothers, it would not have been the same outcome. And its diversity from a way of thinking, from a background, but also from a gender and ethnic standpoint. And so, you know, how crazy would it be to just recruit from a quarter of the population, the people who look like me? Would that be stupid, right? Because we don't have the corner on talent. And so it makes such a... So you have to start with this. And it's gender, certainly in the U.S., it's all of these other dimensions, right? Ethnicity and color and so forth. And it's very, very simple. And I remember sitting down with Melody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments, she's now chair of Starbucks. Amazing African-American woman. She said, 'You better do you know that the soap dispensers in the bathrooms in hotels do a terrible job with black hands. And if you're a black person with very dark skin, you're not going to be able to get soap.' So I had no idea, Melody, but this is crazy, right? Well, because infrared technology does not do a good job of detecting red. If you don't have anybody black on your team, you're not gonna know. Everybody in the black community knows. Same with cameras for smartphones. You know, for a long time they did a terrible job taking pictures of black individuals. And so, you know, you're gonna miss. Or in certain parts of Chicago, if in our stores we don't have Polish speakers, you know, we're not gonna sell much. Or in Orlando, when we had a lot of Brazilian tourists coming to Orlando, Florida, if your blue shirt didn't speak Portuguese, you know, not very helpful. And so it makes incredible business sense. And I think you have to realize it with your head and also, of course, your heart, right? And feel and personally understand the pain of our black African-American colleagues or of these young women who are denied opportunities. And I think that once you realize this, you know, in the corporate world we know how to deal with and to solve business problems, right? If it's a matter of going after a particular segment of the market, we know how to do this. So but then we have to do the work in the same way as it is to diversity and understand why are we not able to attract, promote, retain, develop great talent from different groups. You know, if I'm not in the U.S., I'm not able to recruit great talent. Oh, I was not recruiting from the HBCUs, historically black colleges and universities, of course. I'm not fishing in the right ponds. Or any of these things. And then as leaders, we need to move the needle. I know that, for example, when I left the board of Best Buy in 2020, we had a majority of women on our board and we had three black African-American directors. And for the recruiting of black directors, which we told Heidrick & Struggles, the search firm we're using, is that don't bother showing us resumes of non-black candidates. You know, don't bother. Oh, and by the way, if you believe you're not able to show us great resumes of black candidates, we'll accept that. Completely understandable. We'll accept that, except we'll work with another firm. And they, of course, they showed us amazing candidates and recruited them. And it made a big difference because the thing I've learned is that you cannot be who you cannot see, right? Then Melody Hobson shared that with me. So if you're a black employee and everybody at the top is white, you can say this is not a place for me. And so it made a huge difference to get an act together. So this is in the 'just do it' category.

So on the first one, time management. At Harvard, we do a program for new CEOs. In fact, if you know new CEOs of large companies, send them my way. It's a great program that we do with Michael Porter started it, and Bill George, Nitin Nohria, and I've become a member of that faculty. And one of the things that Michael Porter and Nitin have done is study how CEOs spend their time. And in a sense, that's their unique resource, right? Because they don't have more time than anybody else. And so deciding how to spend your time is really important. So I'm sure you guys do this, right? Being clear about your priorities, and then you decide how you're going to spend your time. So I set goals for myself explicitly. So when I was in the B2B business, when I was the CEO of Carlson Wagonlit Travel or the president of EDS France, I would make sure I would speak with or meet with at least five clients or industry partners like SAP or Oracle per week. So being on the front line of the business, because that's how you learn. At Best Buy, I made sure that every week I would visit a store, most of the time unannounced. I would also make sure that I would... That gave me this giant excuse to buy a lot of consumer electronics products, because I would go personally through the process of buying either online or in stores, and then accessing the service. So instead of asking my admin, 'The TV is not working, get somebody to fix this, it's unacceptable,' no, no, I would call the 1-800 number. 'Oh, I've been waiting for 60 minutes, this is not good.' And then because that's how you experience this thing. And I think it's part of... You're absolutely right, yeah, if you... It's dangerous. So I had no chief of staff, for example. I refused to have a chief of staff, right? And doing skip-level meetings. If there's a problem, you actually do focus groups on the areas where you're responsible. You don't want to mess up. And you know, do the job of other people, but these are some of the things. But it's a constant discipline to follow. As relates to remuneration, so I am on the compensation committee at both Johnson & Johnson and Ralph Lauren, and of course through my life I've spent a lot of time designing compensation systems, right? Here's what I know. One, financial incentives do a terrible job of driving performance. In fact, they deteriorate performance. In the old days, during a century ago under the time of Taylor, when work was quite mechanical, financial incentives could actually drive superior performance. But there's research now from MIT that shows that for complex jobs where creativity is important, financial incentives actually deteriorate performance because it narrows the mind. In fact, you could ask yourself this morning when you got up, did you decide the way you were going to organize your day was going to be based on how to maximize your bonus at the end of the year? You know, raise your hand if you... Nobody does this. So why should we assume that incentives are going to drive behaviors? Now, don't get me wrong, I do believe that rewards are important. We should share the wealth, right? And then the design of the incentives can help communicate what's important, right? But let's not expect too much, because the other thing I write from... I don't know your experience, but my experience is that you can never get this right. You know, you try to get something that's perfect, that's going to be completely aligned with what you want to accomplish. And in fact, in his book, Reed Hastings, who of course is the founder of Netflix, tells a story where they designed an incentive for their new head of marketing, and after the first meeting he realized that it was the wrong goals that they had set. So you know, so you have to say, okay, we need to have one, it allows to share wealth, but let's not use that as the key driver of performance.

Yeah, thank you for your question. You know, I can just share some opinions like you. I don't have the corner on wisdom. I have some opinions. I agree, you don't necessarily need to be friends with everybody or to treat everybody as friends. And sometimes people say it's dangerous actually to equate business with the family, because in a family, you know, by the way, there's some dysfunctional families, but in a family, people are a member of the family forever, whereas in business, not everybody is going to be here forever. So there's a limit to this. But in The Godfather, you may remember that scene where Tessio talks to Tom Hagen and says, 'Tell Michael I actually liked him. It was only business, nothing personal.' So we're celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Godfather this week. And I think business is indeed personal. And it's... You need to build... I mean, because you're going to spend a lot of time. And I think it's going to be more enriching, fulfilling, and performing if there is this humanity in the business, for sure. I know that the alternative is very grim, where everybody is just doing their thing and not paying attention. That's very different. The reality then is that, of course, there are times where you may have to ask a senior leader to go because they're not carrying their weight or their behaviors are not in line with the values of the company. But that doesn't make them an enemy or somebody to... You can still be human and treat them with humanity. Because we're not gods, right? We're not there to say, 'Oh my god, this is a bad person or a good person.' No, my judgment: I've made a decision, you should move on, and try to do this as well as possible. So I think that's how I'm thinking about it. So it's a bit nuanced. But I think that certainly the resurgence of Best Buy was largely explained by these human connections, this humanity, this heart. And you know, I love this poem from the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, right, who said, 'Work is love made visible.' So I think there's absolutely love in business. In fact, the best brands, you call them love brands, where customers love them. And of course, it starts with the employees loving working at the company and then loving the customers. So that's how I think about it.

You're making such a good point, right? The fact that you're focused on behaviors and process and people doesn't mean you don't care, right? There's two independent dimensions. In fact, the theme of one of our... Every year we would get the store general managers together ahead of the holiday season. In several years, the theme was 'All In,' right? You can be all in and being really driven, but also focus on people and process. Let me give you an example, a very concrete illustration, because yes, it takes time to really grasp this. So think about a frontline manager. A frontline manager would be only focused on results. And I remember early in my career, there was a boss who told me, 'Appreciate effort, but the only thing I care about is results.' And it sounded great at the time, but he was wrong. And so let's imagine a manager. Their communication with their team: they applaud if the results are good, they yell and scream if the results are not good. This adds no value. The team members are not stupid, they can see the results. So having the manager tell them the result has no value. One of the things we learned that was a game changer for us in our frontline performance was a study in the Denver market. Chris Schmidt, who was the manager for that market, created a program of individualized coaching of the sales associates. And every week, every associate would sit down with their manager, their supervisor. They would look at the results and look at the drivers of the results, and then we look together at which was driving the results, the behaviors. So for example, let's imagine I'm working in the appliance department and my sales are below the standards and what other colleagues are achieving. My supervisor and I look at it and say, 'Oh, that's because the average units per transaction is lower than what others are doing.' And then we do a role play. I come into the store, I'm looking to buy a washing machine, right? And the salesperson asked me, 'Why do you want to change it?' 'Well, it was an old machine, it was 12 years old, so it broke.' 'Great, we can help you with that. Oh, by the way, do you also have a matching dryer?' Here in the U.S., we have these big houses, and so yes, I do, and about it at the same time, it's a pair. 'To what extent is it important to you that your washing machine and your dryer match from a style and color standpoint?' 'Well, it is, because of course I like my laundry room to be neat.' 'Well, chances are that in one or two years, your dryer is also going to end its life, right? Because these things are not eternal. So we have a promotion: if you buy a washing machine and a dryer at the same time, there's a bundle, and I have a good deal for you. Would that be of interest to you?' And so the supervisor through this role play has helped me build new behaviors and skills, and that leads to a better outcome. And so both of us, we're all in, but we focus on behaviors rather than just yelling and screaming.

Oh, thank you for your question, Professor, and I love it when you call me professor, it makes me feel really important now. And I, you know, I've not done an exhaustive survey, but my impression is that these ideas are in the heart of most people. In fact, you know, we say they're new, actually they're not new, right? They go back, they're there in all of the monotheistic faiths, they're all there in all of the East Asian or South Asian spiritualities. This desire to do something good. And so it's always been there. I think the problem is that we've had a 30 or 50 year hiatus in business following Milton Friedman, and of course now everybody's realizing that it's not working. And I also have children who are in their late 20s and early 30s, and this myth that economic development and financial performance is the be-all and end-all, they don't believe in it. And it's not hard, right? Because even I, who is the eternal optimist, during the pandemic, like many, I stepped down and said, 'We have to say it out loud: the world we live in is not working.' Right? We have a health crisis, but also economic crisis, societal issues big time, racial issues, an environmental time bomb, geopolitical tensions. We know this. It's not working. We have to say it. And what's the definition of madness according to Einstein? Do the same thing and hope for a different outcome. And so there's this desire to do something else. And I think in particular, this notion of business being a force for good. You've all seen, I think, the study by Edelman on the fact that businesses are the most trusted of all organizations. And certainly the company you work for are very trusted because people feel that there can be a need to be a force for good, they can contribute to solving societal issues. There is a declaration of interdependence that we're all feeling. Best Buy is headquartered in Minneapolis, and following the murder of George Floyd, if the city is on fire, it's simple, you can't open the stores. Or to quote Rebecca Henderson at Harvard, if the planet is on fire, that's the biggest business risk we have. So the answers may not be easy, but certainly this refoundation of business around purpose and humanity, I think, is a widely shared view. Part of the reason why I went to endow a chair at HEC Paris on Purposeful Leadership and I'm teaching there is that business education needs to shift, right? Because it's too focused on techniques and not focused enough on these ideas. So I think we're at the beginning. It feels to me, Professor, that we're at the beginning of this journey. There's a great desire to move in a different direction, and we're all going to be on this learning journey and this leadership journey to try to invent and create a future that does not exist yet, but that needs to be better than what we have now. And I think that this next generation, they have expectations of the companies they're going to be working at. They want to work at a purposeful company, a company where they're going to be treated as human beings. That's my sense. I don't know whether you guys share that perspective. I'm sure you all have children, or maybe you are millennials yourself, it's hard to tell. It's great, this refoundation of business.

No, we can go a little bit over, of course. Pleasure.

So I think another way to ask your question is how do we grow as leaders, and how can we be on a journey to continuously get better leaders and learn, take the risk to learn new skills and new behaviors, without losing our ability to deliver great results? One of the things I believe, and I've certainly benefited greatly from working with a coach. And it's very interesting: in sports, I've done a very extensive study. Exactly 100% of the top 100 tennis players in the world have a coach, right? And it's not just on the way to being number one. Roger Federer still has a coach, or Rafa, and so forth. And it's interesting that for some reasons in business, we believe we're much better than anybody else, and for a long time, having a coach was limited to the remedial situation. So 'Jack or Mary are working with a coach, but what's wrong with them? Do they have a problem?' No, they're trying to get better. And so I think that I'm seeing a trend, certainly in the U.S., where more and more leaders and executives work with a coach, because it's hard to operate on your own. So it can be a coach, it can be a spiritual director, it can be a loving partner, it can be your own discipline around meditation, yoga. There's a variety of ways you can do this. But I think everybody's journey is this: it's learning to get better, because if we stop growing, that's when we get in trouble. And so yes, competition is stiff. I'm not saying for one nanosecond that winning at Best Buy was easy, right? Businesses, customers are demanding, employees are demanding, financial markets are demanding. It's hard, and it's getting increasingly sophisticated with all of these stakeholders who want us to do all of these things. So there's no doubt that we continuously need to get better. And I think the wisdom here is to say, 'My name is Hubert Joly, and I need help.' Because what I'm expected to do is new, hard, different. I want to get better at these things, and I'm going to need help. Maybe you come and visit with us at Harvard. We have some wonderful programs. You get a coach, or you ask a colleague for advice. My name is... So maybe everybody should raise their right hand and say... So everybody, can you please raise your right hand? Okay, so you're going to repeat after me. 'My name is Alexander or Hubert. My name is Angela.' Okay, 'My name is Angela.'

I do. And in fact, maybe the most important decision we make as leaders is who do we put in positions of power. And as we do this, a mistake I made for many years was to put too much emphasis or exclusively on experience and expertise. Increasingly, I've put emphasis on who is this person? What kind of a leader is she going to be? And that's how you get these great results. And the last thing I would say, Alexander, is during the COVID pandemic, if we couldn't go outside, we had to go inside. And spending time with yourself as a leader and trying to define what kind of a leader you want to be, how you want to be remembered. My beautiful wife, Thomas, who's an executive coach, asked her clients to write down their eulogy. What people are going to say on that day where you're not here to listen? And I think that picking the right leaders, because there's so little we can do as leaders, everything gets done through others. So taking leaders who have these qualities that you're describing is so critical. And by the way, in the category of needing help, so my name is Hubert and I need help. The book, at some point, I don't have the update yet, is going to be translated into Portuguese for the Brazilian market. So when that happens, I may get back to you all and ask for your help in launching the book in Brazil, right? Because it's hard work to launch and promote. So let me be back to you asking for advice or support on how to best launch the Brazilian translation of the book in your beautiful country. So my name is Hubert, I need help.

Thank you. Well, we'll join you during the launch event, so please, we're talented, please count on us.

Thank you so much.