[00:02:41] Intro: You are listening to the Investor’s Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected.

[00:03:01] Trey Lockerbie: Welcome to the Investors Podcast. I’m your host, Trey Lockerbie, and before we get into today’s interview with Bill George, where we talk a lot about what it takes to lead a great company, I brought on our co-host Clay Finck to talk about Berkshire Hathaway’s Q3 earnings. That just came out mainly because when I think about leadership, I think Warren Buffet, cause I think he’s one of the greatest business leaders of our time, and I’m always eagerly awaiting these earnings reports so I can dig in and see exactly how Warren’s thinking.

[00:03:25] Trey Lockerbie: Clay, I know that you do the exact same thing and I wanted to get your thoughts, especially because I know you just did an episode. You guys talked about Berkshire a little bit with Stig, so I want to get your high level opinion on these quarterly earnings that just came out.

[00:03:37] Clay Finck: It is always interesting to see what Buffet is doing in terms of buying and selling stocks, what he is doing in terms of repurchasing shares and that.

[00:03:45] Clay Finck: So I can give you a quick rundown on what I saw. Looking over the quarterly report, they were a net buyer of stocks overall. They purchased roughly 2 billion in Oxidental. They had 3.7 billion in net purchases, so a lot of it was that Oxidental position. Their 13 F for Q3 is gonna be coming out here in mid-November.

[00:04:06] Clay Finck: So we can’t look into that to see the full details of what else he was purchasing. But looking at the Q2 13 at filing, I saw that their accidental position then was around 9 billion. So that’s roughly 20% increase in their position. Rough. So not too much of a change really to their stock portfolio relative to what we saw when we saw him in person at the meeting earlier this year when he was purchasing tens of billions of stock.

[00:04:29] Clay Finck: Then turning to their earnings, their operating earnings totaled around 7.7 billion in the third quarter. That was up 20% year over year, which might, kind of surprise some people in this environment. But Chris Bloomstran made a really good point that you need to adjust the operating earnings for their currency gains.

[00:04:48] Clay Finck: So after making that adjustment for the currency gains, the increase in the operating earnings only ends up being 10.1% year over year for that quarter. So Chris also made the really good point that the S&P 500 500 overall, the operating profits for the S&P 500 500 are flat over the year. So that just goes to show how resilient Berkshire has been through 2022 with this higher inflation.

[00:05:10] Clay Finck: In terms of repurchases, they’ve repurchased roughly $1 billion worth of stock. Stig brought up a really good point during my conversation with him that’s gonna be coming out here in a couple weeks. We talk about Berkshire Hathaway. Stig kind of assumed that Berkshire is probably looking to purchase other stocks outside of their own company when the market’s down, because on a relative basis, you might find some cheaper company, since Berkshire isn’t trading down near as much as a lot of other stocks.

[00:05:35] Clay Finck: So their nine month total repurchases on the year are 5.25 billion. And for those of you who looked at the reports, you might have noticed a $2.7 billion loss that was posted. And for those of you that are familiar with the accounting rules, we know that, their stock portfolios essentially Mark Market on their income statements.

[00:05:57] Clay Finck: So, you can’t really look at those, that profit and loss at face value because it assumes that, stocks that are down, they’re selling some of them at a loss, which we know Berkshire isn’t selling. I was also curious to get an update. The year to day performance on Berkshire relative to the overall market, and man, it’s really held up really well.

[00:06:15] Clay Finck: The Berkshire shares are down 2% on the year. The S&P 500 500 is down 20%, and the ARC Fund is down 63%. Berkshire actually received approval to purchase over 50% of oxidental, so there’s some speculation going around that they may just go ahead and purchase the entire company. So that is interesting given that Buffet has increased his stake in energy substantially over this year.

[00:06:39] Clay Finck: His cash pile is at around 109 billion at the end of September, and that’s compared to 105 billion at the end of June this year. Another figure that really stood out to me when doing some research on Berkshire was that 70% of their equity portfolio is in just five companies. A lot of that’s Apple, and then the other four are Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Chevron, and American Express.

[00:07:03] Trey Lockerbie: So a couple really interesting points there. You mentioned Oxy, which we’ve all been watching really closely, and the equity position there is really astounding. I’m not sure people actually realize this, but basically if you calculate the warrants that are actually included in this deal, which are now $1.1 billion in the money, and if you assume Berkshire actually exercises those warrants, they would control 29.2% of Oxy.

[00:07:26] Trey Lockerbie: So this is a staggering amount of the company that it’s consuming. He’s obviously very bullish on energy.

[00:07:32] Clay Finck: Oxidental today is around a 63 billion company, so if he owned 30% of the company there, that would be an 18 billion position. Just some rough math, 18 or 19 billion.

[00:07:42] Trey Lockerbie: You also mentioned Arc. Berkshire has now outperformed the flagship funded arc since 2020.

[00:07:48] Trey Lockerbie: You see all these charts going around where Cathie Wood was just going parabolic against Berkshire. While it’s now come crashing all the way back down to where Buffet is now ahead, it’s always the tortoise and the hair race with Berkshire and Buffet as he does gets the last laugh, just shows the consistency of Berkshire and why you want to own it.

[00:08:04] Trey Lockerbie: A defensive stock like this in an environment like we’re in.

[00:08:07] Clay Finck: Since you bring up the distinction between growth and value and we’re discussing Berkshire Hathaway, I wanted to mention that I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on how different asset classes actually end up performing during times of inflation, which, something we’ve all kind of studied up on this year.

[00:08:24] Clay Finck: As inflation finally showed up, I wanted to share two of my big takeaways from prior inflationary periods, and I think the first big takeaway is that when inflation comes, oftentimes it doesn’t just go away. Like many would just hope. Especially if it gets as high as it’s gotten recently. So I believe that investors should be prepared for potentially an inflationary decade ahead.

[00:08:48] Clay Finck: Think about if your portfolio is positioned to weather through that type of environment. The two inflationary decades that come to mind in prior periods were the 1940s and the 1970s. Inflation wasn’t, persistent throughout the entire decade. It somewhat showed up in waves or had these inflationary spikes.

[00:09:06] Clay Finck: So we may see inflation come down in the near term, but due to unforeseen circumstances or the way our economy is structured with just in time delivery, we could very well see it spike back up in late 2023 or 2024, really, Who knows when. Just using the 1970s as an example, inflation first started to show up in 1969, in 1970, and it really didn’t get back down consistently below 4% until the early 1990s.

[00:09:35] Clay Finck: So that’s a 20 year period of, these inflationary spikes, and it never really stayed below that 4% mark, just as an example. So it can be really difficult for policy makers to tackle that inflation problem, especially today with the debt to GDP that we have in our economy, and that just makes it so difficult to continue to raise rates as the overall system is essentially reliant on this lower interest rate environment.

[00:09:59] Clay Finck: Again, I think the first thing to keep in mind is that when inflation does show up, it tends to stick around for a long period of time or longer than people would expect, and that’s just looking at prior periods. Second, I wanted to mention that during these inflationary periods, we see a good dispersion between the performance of growth and value stocks.

[00:10:18] Clay Finck: Historically, value stocks do outperform growth. Stocks on a relative basis, but of course there are some periods where growth does outperform, such as the 2010s that we’ve just come out of because of what investors saw during the 2010s. I think a lot of people can have a bias towards growth investing and have that recency bias where they saw that recent outperformance and just assume that it’s going to continue.

[00:10:41] Clay Finck: But I think it’s really important to zoom out and study history because the 2010s are almost the exception to the rule in terms of value investing, outperforming growth investing given the data. I am much more interested in investing in something like a Berkshire Hathaway or a value type fund or a value type company.

[00:10:59] Clay Finck: Given what we’ve seen in past period, Lynn Alden put together this great chart in article titled Investing During Stagflation, and it shows the relative performance between value and growth in value stocks far outperformed during the 1940s, the 1970s and eighties, as well as the two thousands.

[00:11:17] Clay Finck: And three of those had relatively high levels of inflation. I think it was the two thousands. It wasn’t super inflationary relative to those other three periods. And when looking at the previous 50 years, the only times that growth outperformed value were around the 1990 timeframe during the late nineties, and then from 2010 up to 2022.

[00:11:38] Clay Finck: And that trend has drastically turned the other way. A lot of that performance that we saw during the 2010s, I believe, was due to two reasons. First, we saw the mega caps carrying the indexes and the FANG stocks carrying the indices, and I think that was one big driver of the overall stock returns, especially for the growth.

[00:11:57] Clay Finck: The other reason, I think, is that investors were, almost just forced out onto the risk curve because of artificially low interest rates. So if we end up, seeing higher inflation, seeing a more normalized interest rate environment, then I would really expect that value play to work a lot better than the growth play, especially after what we’ve seen in 2022.

[00:12:16] Trey Lockerbie: Well, Clay, thank you so much. I always appreciate your insights, especially with Berkshire. We gotta see a little bit more here about how Buffet is leading his company. Now we’re gonna get to know a little bit more about what to look for in a great company and its leadership with Bill George.

[00:12:29] Trey Lockerbie: Welcome to the show.

[00:12:30] Bill George: Thanks, Trey. Good to be here.

[00:12:32] Trey Lockerbie: I’m honored. I’m really excited to chat with you. You’ve written this incredible book, or at least kind of updated a book that was previously a big hit and you’ve updated it with a lot of cool new leaders in the space, especially who have endured or maybe even thrived through COVID And I want to touch on the concept of the book.

[00:12:49] Trey Lockerbie: It’s called True North. From what I’m gathering from the book. In order to develop a true north, you need to have this clear idea of your purpose, both in business and in life. So I’m curious what purpose is driving you to write the book and update it now and also be out promoting it as much as you’ve been?

[00:13:07] Trey Lockerbie: Because I’ve seen you’ve been very hard at work getting the word out here. So what’s the purpose that’s driving you?

[00:13:13] Bill George: I figured out, I’ve done a lot of things in my life. I’ve been in business, worked in the government for a while, ran a company called Medtronic and then went Ben at Harvard teaching the last 19 years.

[00:13:23] Bill George: So what’s the through line to all that? And for me, it’s enabling people to reach their full potential. So these days I’m not leading anything. I always thought I wanted to be a leader and I did have the privilege of leading a lot of organizations, but my whole goal right now is to enable everyone listening in this podcast to reach their full potential.

[00:13:42] Bill George: And I’ve been working very hard at that. I do a lot of mentoring, a lot of teaching and writing. By the way, this book is almost entirely new. We held the title True North cause people really seem to resonate with that. And the idea that, which I haven’t mentioned is before you can figure out your purpose, you really have to know who you are.

[00:13:58] Bill George: You have to know what’s important to you. Where do you find fulfillment? Where do you find joy? If you jump too fast to the purpose, like, I wanna change the world. Well that’s interesting, but how are you gonna do that? A lot of people have tried and have been unsuccessful, so, where do you wanna concentrate your energies?

[00:14:13] Trey Lockerbie: Yeah, I just went through an exercise like this with my own coach and his question to me was why does Trey exist? , so it’s a great question to kind of, to ponder right. And say, Why am I here? And the exercise we went through was actually kind of adapting the Jim Collins approach, if you will, where you established some core values purpose and what Jim would call a big, hairy, audacious goal.

[00:14:33] Trey Lockerbie: But I’m kind of curious, does this approach still resonate with today’s corporations, or is there an evolution or even clarification needed to this approach in your opinion?

[00:14:44] Bill George: Well, I think finally it is resonating. I went to a lot of time in business where it was all about maximizing shareholder value, hitting the quarterly earnings, buying back stock to raise the stock price, all this stuff that really kinda lost sight of the humanity and the people then.

[00:15:01] Bill George: So I think it definitely does resonate with people more than ever, and everyone, all the corporation, I’m talking about purpose, but the key is, Okay, there’s a corporate person. Can I align with that? Do I feel a part of that? Is that something, those values that resonate with me, is that how I wanna put my life?

[00:15:17] Bill George: You only got one life to live and you ought to be doing what you really love to do. You shouldn’t be trapped in trying to serve someone else.

[00:15:24] Trey Lockerbie: One thing I’m particularly interested in is the big audacious goal. How important is that? Maybe even personally and professionally, but even more so personally to have a big audacious goal.

[00:15:34] Trey Lockerbie: Cause I think the downside of that is that it could potentially be limiting in some ways. It might make you close minded, but at the same time, you really need focus in order to achieve any kind of goal, right? So what’s the balance there?

[00:15:46] Bill George: Well, for you it might be, I creating these great drinks and we wanna create a whole family of drinks to really make people healthy.

[00:15:53] Bill George: That’s a big audacious goal. Or I’ve got a podcast and there’s a lot of really interesting stuff here. I want everyone to listen in cause then no one listens for me. My big goal. Now, it almost sounds arrogant and almost hasn’t to mention it, but I really wanna change leadership cause I grew up in an era of the command and control and saw a lot of toxic leaders that were just ordering people what to do and they created pretty poisonous environments in the workplace.

[00:16:18] Bill George: And if I could change it, I would have people that really are interested in inspiring people of their purpose and unifying them are on a common goal and a common set of values and getting rid of all the toxic leaders. So that’s kind of my big audacious goal. And so in writing a book just like your podcast, you want people to read it.

[00:16:36] Bill George: So the reason I wrote the Emerging Leader edition is because I think it’s time for new generation of leaders because a lot of the baby boom don’t really get it. They’re thinking, Oh, these millennials, they’re a bunch of slackers. I said no, they’re not. They changed jobs because your company has no sense of.

[00:16:52] Bill George: They’re not just working for a third party. They wanna actually make a difference. And why are you making them stand in line? Give them the opportunity right now, and that’s how you’re gonna inspire them.

[00:17:01] Trey Lockerbie: Yeah. I heard a phrase the other day that kind of resonated, which is that people don’t quit companies, they quit management.

[00:17:06] Trey Lockerbie: There’s something to that, right? And you have a theory that you need to endure a crucible or two maybe, but at least want to truly find out who you really are. And the last few years have felt like nothing but one long crucible for most leaders. Could you share maybe your own crucible that has shaped your life and given you this realization?

[00:17:29] Bill George: Sure back when I’m an only child of older parents, my father thought he was a failure. So back when I’m nine, 10 years old, he’s saying, Son, I’d like you to become the leader I never became, and I’d like you to run a major company. He even named the companies, said, you could be CEO of Coca-Cola.

[00:17:46] Bill George: I held stock in that company, or Procter and Gamble, or ibm. Of course I didn’t know these companies. I’m a little boy. But kind of, even though I’m pushing him away at the same time, subliminally puts the idea I’m gonna be head of a major company. So I never got elected to lead anything cause I hadn’t learned what leadership was all about.

[00:18:02] Bill George: I finally ran to the president of senior class in high school and lost by margin two to one. So then I went off 800 miles from home to Georgia. Tech ran six more times, plus all six. So it’s pretty clear I had a lot to learn. I remember some seniors pulled me aside and said, No one’s ever gonna work with you, much less be led by you cause you’re moving so fast to get ahead.

[00:18:21] Bill George: You don’t take time for other people. And you know what, they were spot on and so I had to do a lot of rethinking, but you know, it’s interesting that I did come back and have a chance to lead a lot of organizations, but interesting. Then I’m at Honeywell, I’m now early to mid forties and I’m on route to become that CEO.

[00:18:38] Bill George: My father wanted me to come and got nice family. My wife and I have been married for some time. We have two kids in junior high and high school. You know what one day I’m driving home. I look at myself in the rear view mirror and I see that ugly side of Bill George and I’m realize I’m miserable.

[00:18:53] Bill George: I’m kind of faking it to make it and telling you, Oh, I’m doing great. We’re turning around. These business actually was deeply unhappy and that’s when I decided to go to Medtronic. And it was the best thing I ever did. But I think if I hadn’t really faced myself and realized how unhappy it was, I went home and told my wife and she said, Bill, I’ve been trying to tell you for a year, you just didn’t wanna listen.

[00:19:13] Bill George: And she was right. And I was kind of traveling 80% of the time and didn’t love the business. And so, was it striving for a position I’d kind of gotten away from What I really wanted to do is make a difference in the lives of other people. And I knew nothing but chasing numbers. So I had to get out of that environment.

[00:19:31] Bill George: Say I’m giving up on being head of a major company and I’m going take this wonderful company, Medtronic good, great mission and values. It’s the best thing ever did. So interestingly

[00:19:40] Trey Lockerbie: What I’m hearing there is that, was it that the company had a lack of purpose, if you will, they were chasing numbers as you said?

[00:19:45] Trey Lockerbie: Or was it just that your role, you felt like you didn’t have a purpose in that role or just wasn’t fulfilling in some way? What was driving that kind of deep unhappiness you mentioned?

[00:19:55] Bill George: The company’s purpose was making money. And so I couldn’t get excited about bowels in the boiler room and things like that.

[00:20:01] Bill George: What I could get excited about was Medtronic we’re restoring people to full life and health. So I remember talking to the founder, he didn’t even interview me about what I had done. He just wanted to know, Can you align? Can you get excited about this mission? We’re trying to restore health, extend life and alleviate pain.

[00:20:16] Bill George: Yeah, I can get excited about that. I’m not a medical guy, and he, they bet on me that I could learn that and bring people together to lead them. But it really had to do with the mission. And I led, I was so engaged with that and used to be with new employees and everyone I came up with talking about the mission of the company and the values all tied together.

[00:20:35] Bill George: And so it was really, it’s really, and that’s why Medtronic was so. Because people were so committed, we used to measure ourselves, Trey, not by earnings per share. We measured ourselves by how many seconds to take till another person’s life is restored by a Medtronic product. It used to be a hundred seconds when I left to a seven today it’s two per second.

[00:20:53] Bill George: So yeah, we’re helping a lot more people. And that became, that, that’s what inspired our people. They weren’t inspired by just making 290. Wanna share.

[00:21:02] Trey Lockerbie: Now as I understand it, you were driven by, I think what you call adulation, where you turned down Medtronic three times, I believe. I think they were for the role of president, right?

[00:21:11] Trey Lockerbie: Which is kind of the number two guy. And I think you were striving for them to be number one. So that just kind of shows everyone the type of drive you had back then. So was there a sense of swallowing your ego or something? Was there a moment there where you kind of had to self reflect and say, Hey, it’s not number one, but that’s okay because of xyz.

[00:21:28] Trey Lockerbie: And then, and it was the mission that was kind of filling in that blank.

[00:21:31] Bill George: Absolutely. That was it. And it had to do more with my father’s desire, having me run a big company, which Honeywell was, is, and it’s a great company to day, didn’t get me wrong. And versus doing what I really wanted to do, what I was passionate to, going to midsize company.

[00:21:46] Bill George: And of course I never met Ryan would grow so fast and be so big, but it was more someplace where, this is where I really fit. I remember I went, when I first went in the door, I’d had all my interviews off site, felt like I was coming home to a place I’d never been before. I felt like, hey, this is where I oughta be.

[00:22:01] Bill George: It’s just I had ego, as you say, in front of it and getting caught up with that. And I always tell, don’t get caught up with money, fame, and power, or the title.

[00:22:11] Trey Lockerbie: Now you mentioned you grew to a big company and as I’ve read it here, you grew Medtronic from around 1.1 billion to 60 billion in 10 years, which is an insane amount of growth.

[00:22:20] Trey Lockerbie: During that time, what were some of, or maybe a few of crucibles you experienced during your time there? cause that growth, sometimes can come at a cost, right?

[00:22:30] Bill George: Yeah. And they weren’t so much personal crucibles. I did have one with my wife’s health, but in terms of that it was more, we put a lot of money in r d, all the new products and it took three or four years and it wasn’t happening.

[00:22:42] Bill George: And it took forever to get the FDA approved, our nudity defibrillators, which were key to the growth. And finally we did. So that was a challenge. And also, I made some mistakes. I promoted some of the president of Europe and finally out, he is running a bribery fund. So I got, I had to bit my own mistakes, but I think it was more I could see the future.

[00:23:00] Bill George: And we did have a big, broad goal, not just to be the world’s leading pacemaker defibrillator company, but to be the world’s sleeping medical technology company. And we set that on place. I did about a year after I arrived, even though I wasn’t CEO at that time, and my boss said, Well, what’s wrong with being all we are?

[00:23:16] Bill George: No, I saw potential to do a lot more good for a lot more people. And so I took on some of those things and that were quite challenging, but we got everyone inspired around doing it.

[00:23:26] Trey Lockerbie: And speaking of getting everyone inspired, culture is a big component of success, right? And to, in order to get everyone rowing in the same direction, you have to really have a really good culture.

[00:23:34] Trey Lockerbie: So I’m curious how the culture was different between Honeywell and Medtronic and how you helped shape Medtronic. What were maybe the first things you helped do to get the team rowing in the same direction?

[00:23:44] Bill George: Well, at Honeywell it was, the people were great. It was engineers company, very dedicated.

[00:23:50] Bill George: You didn’t, you weren’t allowed to bring your passions inside the door. They had good values. You didn’t talk about them. It was just everything straight. But when you got to the very top, it was all about how do you make earnings per share? And a lot of gamesman in the room that kind of played games.

[00:24:03] Bill George: And that’s not who I am. I’m pretty straightforward. And so the, this gamesmanship, or a lot more selfishness among the top 20, 30 people just made me very uncomfortable. It was, who looks good and how can you make yourself, maybe we aren’t growing our business, but we beat our plan. It was, that’s the gamesmanship.

[00:24:21] Bill George: So, at Medtronic it was kinda, everyone’s out there, they, they show you their strengths or weaknesses and put it all out on the table. And so there wasn’t this, And so that made me a lot more comfortable. And so I tried to build it around that. And we did bring in, and we did grow the business rapidly, but we never had enough leaders.

[00:24:37] Bill George: So we had to grow a lot of leaders into the business that. People probably didn’t think they could lead, but they did a great job. Ultimately.

[00:24:44] Trey Lockerbie: How did your leadership style evolve over your tenure at Medtronic?

[00:24:49] Bill George: Well, I’ve always wanted to be a letter. I started my career first 10 years running the Cons, starting the consumer microwave, Bevin business for Living industries, and that was ideal.

[00:24:58] Bill George: I loved it. And it was 27 years old and I did that for nine and a half years. And it was just great. I loved everything about it, building a team. I didn’t like the parent company. I didn’t wanna buy into their culture out in Beverly Hills. So I went to Honeywell thinking this is the place. And it was hard for me to change that culture.

[00:25:16] Bill George: It was kind of a locked in culture, slow moving, did not move innovatively. And so I’m much more a kind of person that likes to be out with employees and be out with customers. And that was not, it was much more of a let’s have a meeting and customers are up to the sales department. And that was true in those days of a lot of companies.

[00:25:34] Bill George: I remember Alamo wanted to visit a factory and became CEO of Ford, and he said, Oh no our executives don’t visit factories. Well, how do you know what’s going on? So when I got to Medtronics, totally customer oriented, I saw, went in and gowned up, put on the green saw between 700 and a thousand procedures while.

[00:25:49] Bill George: 12 years of Medtronic. So it was, that was my kind of place and just wandering around, talking to people in their offices, going into the r and d labs and finding out what the engineers were working on, Going to the production lines or going to lunchroom and having, having a lunch with a government factory employees, or, I used to have breakfast with Bill every time I met.

[00:26:07] Bill George: I went to a different location, just first line people, no supervisors, just say, Cause I had to figure out what was going on. So that’s what I love, That’s where I love to be. And I think big corporation to fall into the trap of too many meetings, too many PowerPoint charts and not enough engagement with the people who are doing the work.

[00:26:25] Trey Lockerbie: What are some questions we should ask ourselves if we’re trying to establish our own true north?

[00:26:31] Bill George: Well, I think the most important one is one, your coach. Ask him what do you want out of your life? What’s important to you? Who are you really? Let’s overcome the what you are, where you went to school, your race, religion, all those things.

[00:26:43] Bill George: The identity things everyone’s talking about these days. Let’s get down to what’s this tray want out of his life? What would feel really good at the end of the day? If you could look back and say, here’s some things I’ve done. Here’s some things. Here’s what I’ve stood for. Here are my values and I’m gonna stay true to these values.

[00:26:58] Bill George: It may cost me some money, it may cost me some opportunities, but that’s what I’m gonna do. So I think that’s, everyone on this call needs to look at, decide it for themselves. And it’s hard, I think you have to process your life story as you ask me. You have to process your crucible. The difficult times you faced before, you can really figure that out.

[00:27:16] Bill George: Look, when you’re doing well and you go through school and you get good grades, you got a good job. You get promoting help that you start to think you’re better than you are. And it’s only when you get knocked down a pig, you lose your job. Maybe the boss comes in, you can’t stand him, you have to resign.

[00:27:30] Bill George: Or maybe you have troubles in your own marriage, I don’t know. But you have those difficulties. That’s when you learn, you know who you really are and what’s really important in your life. And a lot of times we don’t figure that out until our forties. Like I didn’t, that it wasn’t important to be seal a big company.

[00:27:45] Bill George: It was important is to work somewhere. I felt I could make a difference and work with a group of people that I think were all going the same way and trying to make a difference in the lives of the people we serve.

[00:27:55] Trey Lockerbie: We have a lot of listeners who are investors. I know that they would wanna understand what questions we should ask or what we should look for in CEOs that are leading companies that we might want to invest in.

[00:28:07] Bill George: Great question. I wish more investors did this. Looked at the leadership. Let me give you an example. Somebody, a feature in the book, Microsoft was, has company I loved to hate and I tried to work with them back in the late nineties, early 2000, and they were the most arrogant group people I’ve ever met.

[00:28:22] Bill George: They thought they were God’s gift to creation. If Steve Bomber was CEO 14 years, they went nowhere. Satya Adela comes in. Great leader. I’d say he is good or maybe better than any leader in the world today. Totally transformed the organization, but he brought. We have to have empathy, which he had learned from his own son who had cerebral palsy.

[00:28:40] Bill George: We have to bring empathy and compassion to people, to our customers that are struggling. And if you wanna work here and you can’t be a know-it-all, you gotta be a learn it all. And I would invest in Microsoft just because Asa and the organization he’s created, it’s gonna have ups and downs, all tech socks do.

[00:28:55] Bill George: I invest in Facebook cause of the character integrity of Tim Cook. I wouldn’t invest in in Facebook, even though the, because the stock’s now down 60% until you invest in a year ago, you would be way out. So, but look at the character of the people because it may feel good now, but if you’re investing in something without character and values, you better know when to get out.

[00:29:14] Bill George: And so leadership changes. Bigger difference in corporate’s rising success than any other single factor, more than the economy, More than you can ride through the economy. You can ride through difficult time, but if you choose the wrong leader, it’s not gonna end well. If you choose the right leader, it could be great.

[00:29:30] Bill George: You bear Jo, my good friend, I feature in the book on purpose Best Buy was a disaster. I thought it was going out of business. And he comes in, they were losing out to Amazon every time they turned around, he comes in totally turns company around, a great leader and he had learned through his own hard docs how to lead, but he totally turned that company around.

[00:29:48] Bill George: Now, Corie Barie’s sticking it on to the next level, but that’s the kind of leader I would invest in. So I tended to look, I’m not, If you wanna be a day trader, , you’re, my advice is not good for you. But if you wanna be a long term investor, then you like Warren Buffet, you invest in people for the long term are gonna get you.

[00:30:04] Bill George: And figure who they are and then watch the transitions. Look at GE was the world’s most valuable company. Jeff ml comes in and lost more money and shareholder value than any company in history. 320 billion, 80% of its value. And so just not have the right leadership. So that’s my recommendation.

[00:30:22] Bill George: Not just company image, but who’s leading it.

[00:30:25] Trey Lockerbie: You set a 10 year term for your role as CEO at Medtronic, which I found very interesting because, over 10 years you learn a lot. I’m sure with that level of success as well. Going from, one to 60 billion, you probably are feeling like you’ve got a lot of momentum.

[00:30:40] Trey Lockerbie: There’s things you maybe still wanna do. So how did you decide to set a limit of 10 years and do you think this should be a standard policy for most companies?

[00:30:49] Bill George: I studied a lot of leaders who had stayed 13, 14, 15, 16. They always did less well left than they did in the first 10. First 10 they did better. I think high tech companies that come from need new creative leadership every decade and things change.

[00:31:06] Bill George: You have a great leader in healthcare at Mayo in the last 10 years, but we need a new leader that can figure out what’s gonna happen in the next 10. So I believe in this new leadership also, when you have a new leader, you open up opportunities for everyone else. Otherwise you tend to keep people around.

[00:31:21] Bill George: You’ve had the young people don’t have a shot. So now that’s on the professional side. On the personal side, you only go around once in life. And so I figured, I wanted to see what else I can do. I didn’t know I was gonna come teacher or writer and, I had lasting, I thought I was gonna come an author and but you do this and you say, that’s the way I wanna fulfill my goal is to, as I said earlier, help the people reach their full potential.

[00:31:43] Bill George: Well, how can I reach in with, by writing I can reach a lot more people. So I hope everyone reads the book, but then they’re go to write if no one reads it. So that’s how I look at that and. That’s why I’m not gonna set a rigid rule. Maybe it’s 12, who knows, But maybe it’s eight for some people. But I think the point is that you only are around months in life, so you gotta look at all the things you can do.

[00:32:05] Trey Lockerbie: When you are looking to invest in a company, are there any quantitative metrics that can tell you whether a company has strong leadership or not?

[00:32:14] Bill George: Well, I think sustainability of their revenues, their culture. You mentioned culture earlier and their values and quantitative measures. I’d look at revenue growth because if revenues, companies, great companies either.

[00:32:28] Bill George: Building up or they’re declining. When they start taking the company apart, you know it’s not gonna end well. It may just be 5,000 layoffs a day and stock price goes up. cause the short term investors think you’ve got a good thing. I’d look at that because when you have, when your revenues are growing people are liking what you do.

[00:32:45] Bill George: I mean, one company you’ll look at PepsiCo since 2018, the revenue’s just taken off compared to other food and beverage companies. What’s going on? They have a very positive culture and they’re winning. And so you look at things like that I think boards try to stop looking at quarterly earnings, and I’ll look at market share and what your, how your customers feel about you.

[00:33:05] Bill George: And then they look at employee surveys to see what’s the engagement. If your employees aren’t engaged, you’re not gonna have a great company.

[00:33:12] Trey Lockerbie: Very interesting. When you’re leading through a crisis, how do you think through focusing on the realities at hand versus a more hopeful, aspirational focus? So for example, going through covid, you wanna address the elephant in the room, or even now, hey, we’re entering recession.

[00:33:27] Trey Lockerbie: How do you balance the reality or being reactive versus proactive and also reality versus aspirational?

[00:33:35] Bill George: I think today leaders have to be very agile because we’re, that’s why need new generation of leaders that have led in crisis, not in good times back in the eighties and nineties, but people who can adapt.

[00:33:46] Bill George: We now have, instead of one crisis, like say nine 11 or the financial meltdown in 2008, now we have multiple intersecting crises, From Russia’s war in Ukraine to the post covid psychological fallout to 9% inflation and supply chain shortage. And you can’t hire anyone, 11 million open jobs.

[00:34:03] Bill George: So I think we need leaders to know how to lead through that, to keep their center know what their purpose and the company’s purpose. They stay on that, but they adapt very quickly. I’ll give you an example, Corie barie. When Covid hit early in March, mid-March, that was very early in Covid of 2020, she made the decision to close 1,026 stores in furlough.

[00:34:23] Bill George: 52,000 people. Very painful. They didn’t believe in that. She allowed it to. She waited a month so it could be tied in the government subsidies. But hey, that was a very courageous move. But she said she never mentioned earnings per share. She mentioned that we’re gonna come out of this even stronger. And they changed her whole business model instead of just being a showroom where people went in and bought products, they did so much online and people could stop in and get the product and it was a whole different approach she had to take.

[00:34:49] Bill George: So that’s the kind of ad adaptability. Now, Corie was 44 at the time. So, I think younger people tend to be more adaptable, not set in their ways, That’s why we need more young leaders. But I think you keep what’s really important, your purpose, mission, your values, and your culture. And the culture itself in a big organization has to adapt rapidly to change the conditions.

[00:35:10] Bill George: If you can’t, then you’re gonna be in trouble. So if that’s my recommendation,

[00:35:15] Trey Lockerbie: As I understand from the book, Corie didn’t, she was very reluctant to even become CEO. Right? So what does that say about Corie and her ability to adapt Best Buy through the pandemic? Is that a good sign? If you want someone who’s a little reluctant, is it show humility or just some characteristic there that is important?

[00:35:32] Bill George: Well, she and that’s true a lot of women, they, she asks the classroom, Push ready, take this job. People like me all put up with their hands. A lot of the women say, I’m not so sure I’m not perfect. And she, yeah, she had concerns. She was very young, 43 at the time, and she got the job and should she show her hat in the ring?

[00:35:48] Bill George: And she got encouragement by her mentor, Huber Jo encouraged her to do it. And she turned out to be a fantastic leader. Amazing. But he saw qualities in her maybe she didn’t see in herself. And so, he had to go through with her. She even wrote him a 10 page memo saying why she shouldn’t take the job.

[00:36:04] Bill George: And he just went down each of the 10, each of the points in the 10 page memo saying, How’s she gonna do it? And yeah now she’s much more confident. But yeah, sometimes you get over the hurdle. She’s not the first one that someone need to encourage them to step up. And they came great leaders because people saw in them qualities they didn’t see in themselves.

[00:36:24] Trey Lockerbie: You mentioned sat Nadella and he’s operating a nearly 2 trillion company. Right? So I’m kind of curious, when you’re practicing what you call servant leadership, is it different if you’re running 2 trillion company versus maybe a smaller company? Because you can’t interface with everybody at the company that you don’t have that same kind of maybe daily touch point with a lot of the team.

[00:36:44] Trey Lockerbie: So how do you kind of manage that? Or how does it scale?

[00:36:48] Bill George: Well, you gotta be out with your people no matter how big you are. And if CEOs, we did a study at Harvard. My colleagues did. I didn’t do it. 72% of the time a CEO spent in meetings. Average hour. Average length, hour and a half and 5% with employees and 3% with customers.

[00:37:06] Bill George: This is a disaster, if you’re in the tea business, you go out to retail and say, How are people responding to your product? Do they like it or not? Talk to people that drink it. What would they like? What don’t they have? And that’s what, the people like Satya got out and he’s available for any customer, any time to call and express concern complaints that totally unlike his predecessors, you couldn’t get through, You can’t get through at Amazon by the way.

[00:37:28] Bill George: You could certainly go to Jeff Bezo, but I think this is really important that CEOs spend time with their customers. I think we need to flip it upside down cause we think about it, people that really leave the Alaska impression. Your customers are all the front line people. You know the people concerned about quality in the production line, the people frontline in stores, hotels, restaurants, you name it.

[00:37:50] Bill George: You need to be out with these people to find out what’s going on. You’re not just reading statistics. I can tell you at Medtronic the quality was determined. The people of the production, not the quality department. And they would tell you when I would sit and talk to a group of, they’ll tell you exactly what’s wrong.

[00:38:03] Bill George: So I think we’ve lost that site. We’ve gotten so big. So yeah, you’re 2 trillion market cap company. You still, you need to be out there and find out. Let’s take Microsoft owns LinkedIn. They kept the LinkedIn culture. It’s the one site social media I really love because you have to put your whole career history out there, education, everything.

[00:38:23] Bill George: So people tend to be very thoughtful on LinkedIn, unlike Twitter or Facebook, they may just say anything cause you don’t know who they.

[00:38:31] Trey Lockerbie: It’s almost like some people have different personalities depending on the platform. Right? That’s true too. So speaking of that, of consistency, let’s say in order to be a great leader, you have to build trust with your team.

[00:38:42] Trey Lockerbie: And I’m curious how you think through consistency versus flexibility, especially when you’re leading with empathy. Because I don’t know, when I think of empathy and leading with empathy, I think of something that’s less rigid, I guess, and some, I’m trying to find the balance here between consistency and flexibility as a leader.

[00:38:59] Bill George: Let’s start with trust. Do I trust you to have a good conversation here? Okay. And I remember it was on only once I go on, I do a lot of immediate things, a lot of podcasts. Only once that I go on a particular TV station, they mocked me cause I was teaching at Har. And that’s the last time I’ve been on that whole station, just the one person.

[00:39:19] Bill George: But do I trust you? And how do you build trust? And once you have that trust, if you break it, then I’m not going back to you. I don’t deal well with people that I can’t trust. So I have no interest being just to do a transaction with somebody I can’t trust. So that trust has gotta be consistent.

[00:39:34] Bill George: You’ve gotta be trustworthy all the time. And that means you’re true to when we speak. You tell me the truth, I tell you the truth. I’m open, I’m transparent. And that truth, transparency leads to trust. And so that’s the consistency. On the other hand, we can adapt. Trey, we got a problem here. Covid is affecting everyone.

[00:39:54] Bill George: We’re gonna have to change everything we do. People are not gonna be teaching in the classroom and gonna be doing it online. We need to find how do we get to them? How can we broaden that base of people we can reach? So you have to adapt rapidly to changing conditions. I think today. You gotta be very flexible and leaders.

[00:40:11] Bill George: So I think you can do that and still pull you together and say, How do we have to change? Mary Barra is making a mega change in the General Motors culture, but she had to say, we’ve gotta look at things differently. It’s a world’s electric vehicle, so we’re not making any more possible fueled cars.

[00:40:26] Bill George: That’s big change for gm. They’ve been doing it throughout their history. So that takes a bold leader. So you have to have the vision of where you want to go, the courage to make the call to do it, but then you have to have the leadership to bring everyone with you. You can’t leave them behind. They’re not there.

[00:40:42] Bill George: So that’s who you have to be out with the people and bringing them with you on this change when you’re moving so quickly.

[00:40:48] Trey Lockerbie: In the first edition of the book, you highlighted Bill Campbell, who’s now known as the Trillion Dollar Coach from Eric Schmitt’s book. His approach seemed to be this mix of deep care, but also tough love.

[00:41:00] Trey Lockerbie: Does Tough love still play a role in today’s leadership style? And if so, when is it applicable?

[00:41:06] Bill George: Absolutely. And we have the whole, we converted everything at chapter called the Coach. The Leader is Coach, and that’s an acronym. It starts with care, because you’re not gonna give me your heart and soul.

[00:41:17] Bill George: You might give me your brains, your heart and soul. You don’t think I care about you. And if you’re going through a rough time, do I have compassion? Do I recognize that? Or maybe you’re spouse has a problem or you’re having a problem with your kids, Whatever. Do I have. But then, I have to organize people in the right places.

[00:41:33] Bill George: And Bill Campbell is a genius at coaching people. But you gotta help people find their own hearts. That’s why I say reach their full potential, cause you have to align them around a common goal. But the most significant thing about Campbell and any good coach you’ve said you have one is they challenge you.

[00:41:47] Bill George: Trey, you have tremendous potential. You’re not being it your best game right now. What’s going on? Are you turned off? Or you feel like you’re in the wrong mode. That’s a challenging and every good coach, I think every good leader challenges people to be better. So when I say, you have so much potential, what can I do to help you step up to it?

[00:42:05] Bill George: So that’s the final letter in coach is to help. What can’t I do it to help you step up to greater things. But I am challenging it’s not okay just to kind of be on a flat to decline, but I think you can do so much more. So it’s kind of interesting you’re both challenging people and you believe in them.

[00:42:20] Bill George: Now my danger as a leader or a teacher sometimes challenge people too much and shuts them down, scares them. But I don’t mean to do that. But I think, you really want to challenge people.

[00:42:30] Trey Lockerbie: Now, does that say more about you or the person you’re trying to coach? If you’re coaching too hard? If you are challenging too much?

[00:42:37] Bill George: Well, that says more about me, but there are different people. I mean, some people are really up for it, some people are not. You know what I mean? And you have to sense that some people are shy and you might intimidate them. They might back off. And then you’re not bringing the best of, I made a rule at Medtronic that we have never make a decision.

[00:42:54] Bill George: So we’ve gone around the room, got everyone to speak, because if you just listen to the people that are mojo outspoken, maybe the person most thoughtful idea is a little hesitant to say. So you draw them out and you get those opinions out on the table. So that’s, to me, the engaged style of management, participative style, where everyone gets a chance to say what they.

[00:43:13] Bill George: But I think it’s important you draw people out their best qualities and not that you intimidated, that would be a negative on me.

[00:43:20] Trey Lockerbie: You’ve noted that Mary Barra from GM is a great talent when it comes to coaching. What examples have you seen from Mary that exemplify this?

[00:43:28] Bill George: Well, interesting enough, when they had the ignition crisis, she takes over, she gets blamed for it.

[00:43:33] Bill George: Of course, she didn’t know anything about it and she said, she went to Congress and said, This is very courageous. Her first week, on the first month on the jump, she said, I don’t want this crisis ever to go away. I want us to keep it in mind because our job is to produce safe cars. Okay? And then she went beyond that and said, We wanna have zero accidents, zero congestion, and zero emissions, which meant all electric guard.

[00:43:54] Bill George: But you know, she had the courage to do that and then rally people around that. And frankly, she had to make a lot of changes. A lot of the old guard was kind of betting against her, and she had to move some of those people out and bring in a whole new team of people, mostly from inside. That could step up and take these new challenges that weren’t stuck in the old way.

[00:44:13] Bill George: Let’s put more chrome and aluminum on the car, more fins and everything else that really wanna design great cars. cause in the old days, her predecessor, every time their decision about cost versus quality, it always went for cost, not for quality. So they were willing to sacrifice quality to get a lower cost car.

[00:44:30] Bill George: And then you get a cheap car and no one will pay for it. You just look at some cars, said, Hey, they never fail. Well, General Motors needs to get there and they’re catching up. And so she’s got a big challenge, but I think she’s doing it.

[00:44:42] Trey Lockerbie: You also write about Tracy Britt Cool in the book who most people might know as being Warren Buffet’s protege, so to speak.

[00:44:48] Trey Lockerbie: So at one point there is even speculation that she might even succeed him and he was kind of tutoring her. What can we learn about Tracy’s style and how does it bear any resemblance to buffet in your opinion?

[00:45:01] Bill George: Tracy’s one of my students from Harvard Business School, and the thing it picks out on Tracy, when we had a case.

[00:45:06] Bill George: Maybe people are running numbers, things like it. She saw the human side and she brought that out and that was really important to her. And she had that great humanity and great depth of understanding of people. And so she actually solicited Warren to try to get a job there, and he finally gave her a chance, and I think he saw those qualities in her that she could figure out who we could work with because Warren’s always been the kind of person, if you get this person position, leave them in the job.

[00:45:33] Bill George: Don’t a lot of private equity firms turn people over every two or three years. He wanted to keep them for the long term. And so she had that capacity to think about people. Now, he did mentor her. She got a lot of it, she told us, but on the other hand, she went on for her own firm. With its own sound values.

[00:45:48] Bill George: Why? Because Orange Business, Berkshire Hathaway is so large that they have to make many multi-billion dollar investments. I mean, they just made what they make, 200 billion or something like that on Apple, some incredible amount. And she wanted to work with people that were more in the startup mid career, early career stages that could build into great companies, but she would invest in them.

[00:46:09] Bill George: So it was a different model. And these companies were too small for virtue halfway to invest in, but she had the same philosophy, play it for the long term. So she’s still a very good human being. They, in other words, hadn’t gone to her head. Right.

[00:46:21] Trey Lockerbie: All right. Now I’d like to talk a little bit about where CEOs go wrong.

[00:46:25] Trey Lockerbie: So let’s just take a couple main ones that everyone knows. Jeff Bezos, for example, has written 40,000 or so words in his annual letter spanning 25 years at Amazon. And a lot of these letters are now used as case studies for strong leadership and clear vision. But you know, recently Jeff is having trouble getting his half a billion dollar yacht under the Danish bridge that’s been standing for 500 years.

[00:46:48] Trey Lockerbie: So are we seeing a deterioration of leadership from Jeff at this stage in his life, in your opinion?

[00:46:55] Bill George: I think so. Yes. I think, look, he built a great company in Amazon. It was a sweat shop. It is a sweat shop. Andy Chassis’ trying to change that a bit, but yeah, they drive people pretty hard and they didn’t mind it.

[00:47:05] Bill George: They had high turnover. Look at Medtronic. I hate turnover. I want a turnover three, four, 5%. I couldn’t stand it who was 10, 12%, but they had, 20, 30% cause they just burned people out. And I think, maybe they did in the startup phase, but, and by the way, they have the world’s greatest logistics system.

[00:47:21] Bill George: They in Walmart. So, but I think they have to take a different look. There’s a problem of people make too much money, They get into the, what I call the adian trap. Zuckerbergs fall into that. Jeff has Elon’s right on the verge of it right now. You start getting too caught up on how great you are of all the things you’ve done.

[00:47:40] Bill George: You’re gonna be in deep trouble. And so yeah, he goes over tells the Dutch sink down the bridge, Let my yacht onto the harbor. Thought somebody would’ve thought about that when they designed it, that maybe they couldn’t get up into the ocean. But no, but the question is why is he spending 500 million?

[00:47:56] Bill George: One of the people I feature my book is Alan Page, who was a na NFL football player for the Vikings here. I know a well or neighbors and but he’s more interested in education. He’s not so much in football. He wants young people to have opportunities. Many of them haven’t had, That’s his. So I went to Allen.

[00:48:12] Bill George: I said, A how many people, the money that Jeff put into us yacht, how many people could get a college educated for a two year college? He said 16,000. Now, amazing. If you think about that number, 16,000 people, where’s the charity? The biggest charity come out of Bezos says his wife, McKenzie’s former wife, McKenzie Scott, who is giving, doing a remarkable thing, transformative things with what used to be his money.

[00:48:36] Bill George: So, yeah, I think there’s a danger that you get caught up. That’s why, Mark has clearly gotten caught up in that. But Elon is even on the cusp of it. He is the world’s greatest inventor today, a Arvi. There’s no better inventor than Elon Musk, but I wish you go back to invent. And stop pulling around with Twitter.

[00:48:52] Bill George: I don’t know what he’s gonna do that, but he’s not gonna invent anything there. He might change the model a bit, but you know, first he says he is gonna fire 75% of the people. He don’t even own it yet. And so, Well, I’d give you my resume out there. So, we’ll see. But I think people do get caught up in their own celebrity and the media and you can really get interact with that.

[00:49:12] Trey Lockerbie: Speaking of Elon, I recently heard this theory, and I have to agree with it. Someone was saying that his persona is beginning to overshadow Tesla. Meaning when, when I bought my Tesla in 2019, it was thought of a, as a luxury car. And now when people hear Tesla, I feel like there’s a lot of almost like baggage and his, and people think about the kind of cult following that Elon has, who and his childish Twitter persona is this an example of Main Street wanting to hear from the man in charge and getting maybe a little more than they asked for.

[00:49:43] Bill George: I think so, and you have to realize when you’re a founder like that, Howard Schultz at Starbucks, you are the brand and people identify the brand with you and you can take your own brand down. Tesla saw us 36% of its value in the last year. Why? Why they’d lost so much. And, but I can say this about Elon, its amazing what he’s turned out.

[00:50:03] Bill George: I lived in Michigan. I watched, General Motors couldn’t turn out Ford, no one else turn out a car like a bmw. It’s amazing what he turned out right out of the chute. So we gotta give him a lot of credit and he is transforming transportation. When General Motors said We’re only gonna do electric cars, they’re serious.

[00:50:19] Bill George: But it probably wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t stepped into that. And now everyone wants selection car and they’re all behind. So he is a transformative leader, but don’t get to caught up in your own celebrity because it actually can hurt your brand. And so, I. I love Howard Schultz. I got him in the book Starbucks Amazing what he created.

[00:50:36] Bill George: But then they got so focused on growth, they lost sight of what was the key thing was creating a relationship between the barista and the customers. And a good meeting place. And now it’s just, come in, take out and grab your coffee and go. That’s fine. But and they have long lines, but you know, are they losing it?

[00:50:52] Bill George: And so I think you have to work really hard. Medtronic back to my old company, Haston, other different CEOs, has to say very true to, we’re an innovation company. We have to invest in innovation. That’s what we do. We’re not just a big company. So I think you have to stay true to what you believe. Okay, so you’re in the healthy drink business.

[00:51:10] Bill George: You wanna you don’t wanna go into the unhealthy drink business, , I don’t think. So you wanna keep that in mind. How do people identify your brand? People today, pickling, millennials think about the brand a lot and they either identified with it or they don’t. But you can lose it too.

[00:51:25] Bill George: Like Facebook, everyone was so excited about Facebook, what happened? They let you know Cambridge Analytica steal 50 million profiles and it came out that they’re selling your profile. My profile people, maybe, I’m selling it to that’s wrong. But they wouldn’t change. They haven’t changed the model yet.

[00:51:40] Trey Lockerbie: Now on the flip side of that Bezos example, Bill Gates just came out saying they’re gonna increase the foundation contribution investments from roughly 5 billion a year to closer to 9 billion a year. And so he’s done an incredible amount of philanthropy upon retiring from Microsoft. And, his reputation, I guess, was a little bit more tyrannical at Microsoft and running a hard, a rigid company.

[00:52:01] Trey Lockerbie: And you mentioned bomber, his successor kind of, I think carrying on that culture, maybe even, building upon it. Is Gates a better example of someone who is evolving or progressing in your opinion? Going into retirement?

[00:52:14] Bill George: Absolutely. And what he has done is spectacular. I mean, and he was the visionary about all the vaccines and pandemics and all that.

[00:52:22] Bill George: We didn’t listen to him. I didn’t listen to him. I didn’t see this coming. And but he’s, what he is done in healthcare is, and communal diseases Third world. He is amazing what he has done and how he’s used his money. And of course he brought in his bridge playing partner got named Warren Buffet, who’s given him 40, 50 billion of his money.

[00:52:39] Bill George: So that’s one of the reasons he can go from five to nine a per year of giving it away. But think about the impact the am which I had that kind of money to have that kind of impact. Think about the impact that Elon Musk could have. You see, any gifts he’s made, he’s worth 250 billion. Look, Trey, I can’t imagine we’d like to be worth a billion, but two 50, what are you gonna do with it?

[00:52:58] Bill George: It was sad that Steve Jobs died. Now is widow is giving away a lot of money. But why not? You can’t take it with you. I don’t care what your religious philosophy is, you can’t take it with you, so why not do some good with it? And so to Gates’ credit, he’s doing a lot of, and he shifted from computers to healthcare and look what he has done.

[00:53:17] Trey Lockerbie: You’ve been a little bit critical of Zuckerberg and mea mainly because his lack of leadership in your opinion, and I mean just the name alone, right? MEA and that change, even though it’s at very attractive valuation levels at this point, there’s a lot of concern about its future.

[00:53:33] Trey Lockerbie: I’m kind of curious what you’re seeing in the leadership over there at META.

[00:53:38] Bill George: Well, first of all, the only reason you say the evaluation attracts cause they lost 60% of their value. So they’re, no one else is losing that kind of money. I think Apple’s down 20 and, I realize all the tech stocks are down, others are down 29 to 30.

[00:53:50] Bill George: But no, I think Mark built his company on a false s supremacist on Facebook. And I think when he announced Meta, he kinda lost interest in Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and he’s moving on to something new. It could be fantastic. It really could. He’s investing 10 billion a year. Can he sustained that?

[00:54:06] Bill George: Well, shareholders let him, It’s a public company. Well, they let him continue to spend money without producing anything. I think it’s. Probably a 10 year move, and I’m not sure, I’d just soon see little kids out running around on a soccer field or going to national parks, and I would see them just playing with these things like up and down, with all the vr, There’s nothing wrong with it though.

[00:54:26] Bill George: It’s gonna be a great thing at healthcare. He’s probably gonna do some great things, but yeah, almost want you to split the company. But I worry about the core underlying values you have there as a company. When you get that big and that powerful, you better be thinking about that. So that’s what worries me.

[00:54:40] Bill George: I hope Meta and VR will be successful and I hope they’ll do some good in the world.

[00:54:46] Trey Lockerbie: Now, he’s changed up his mentorship a little bit, right? The leadership and bringing in some younger people, which in a way is kind of aligned with what you’ve been saying, which is, Hey, we need to, the boomers have had their shot.

[00:54:56] Trey Lockerbie: We need to bring in some young blood and get some new energy in here. And it seems like Mark has been doing that, but where has he been going wrong, in your opinion, with that strategy?

[00:55:05] Bill George: Well, they said, power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely. He’s got total power. His board’s more like an advisory board.

[00:55:13] Bill George: Even they have some good people on it, they have no power. And and he pushed out Sheryl Sandberg, who we thought was very good leader, thought one day she’d become CEO. And so, and he used to have a mentor and Don Graham was on his board, former the Washington Post. And right now I think you need, I’m not against baby boomers, but you need wisdom leaders in your life.

[00:55:32] Bill George: And so who is advising him? And I think he has some great young people working for him, but I’m not sure he’s getting any, listening to any advice. So you can get the advice, like you have a coach, you don’t have to listen to your coach. You can get the advice, but you really listen to that person. So that’s the key to the whole thing.

[00:55:50] Trey Lockerbie: I’d love to learn a little bit more about who’s been teaching you, and I’ve heard you say that you’ve had a men’s group you’ve been meeting with for 46 years every week. And I, in a CEO peer group myself I see some benefit obviously from that. But I’m curious how this has shaped your career, because this is a very long time and I’m curious if that’s been your main source of mentorship or if you’ve had someone more of an individual in your.

[00:56:14] Bill George: No, the guys in my men grew up are peers and we share challenges and problems we all face. Some of them had some health problems lately and they were there for me when I was going from Honeywell to Medtronic and had great mentors. Warren Benes was a great mentor to me when I started writing, Unfortunately passed away.

[00:56:31] Bill George: I had mentors in business like Ed Spencer and Honeywell, We great mentor that unfortunately passed away. I have younger mentors now. The dean at Harvard, Bico Nory is my mentor. He’s 18 years younger. And Zach Clayton, my co-author who taught me all about dealing millennials and social media and everything.

[00:56:50] Trey Lockerbie: Given the discussion today, how do you think through worklife balance, and is it possible to achieve billionaire status as we study on this show while still also maintaining a work life balance in your.

[00:57:02] Bill George: I don’t know what it’s like to be a billionaire, Trey. I don’t know. You may be, but I have not studied that.

[00:57:06] Bill George: But I can tell you this, when I started out at age 22, I thought I was gonna be, I could be quite successful. But the thing I wanted to have is I wanted to have a good home life. A very fulfilling and meaningful home life and a successful career. And I didn’t wanna have to hold back my home life, sacrifice, my home life for my career, and I didn’t, might have to sacrifice my career for my home life.

[00:57:24] Bill George: I worked very hard at it, even coaching soccer for 12 years with my son’s teams for when I was EBP at Honeywell and CEO Medtronic. So, yeah I think you can do it all, but you gotta make some tradeoffs and you gotta work really hard at it. But I encourage people to do that. Have a life. The idea of people, you say I work a hundred hours a week, you’re not gonna have a life and be on your third marriage for, it.

[00:57:45] Bill George: Nothing against second marriage, just most of my friends are happier. But I think you really have to think, what do I want out of life and how do I get that and have a successful career at the same time, so I can do both. And I think it’s very doable, but it’s challenging. So I encourage everyone listening in please think about how do I have the kinda life I want?

[00:58:05] Bill George: And most important, can I be the same person at home as I am at work in my community and my personal life? Can I be that integrated person? And if you can do that, then you can look yourself in the mirror and say, I feel good about myself. If I have to fake it to make it at work, it’s not gonna work out.

[00:58:21] Bill George: So be that same person that can work for having all of it and work hard at it.

[00:58:27] Trey Lockerbie: Where would you like our audience to go to learn more about you and find the book?

[00:58:31] Bill George: Well, you can find the book on Amazon, just, you can go to Bill George, you can go to True North and one, not hard to find. Same at Barnes and Noble, going to the store or online.

[00:58:39] Bill George: And I, of course, I’ve got a website, BillGeorge.org. Not of course, I’m billgeorge.org and I’m on all social media sites. The LinkedIn’s the biggest one. I’m active on twitter primarily. So, anyway, I hope people will read the book. So thank you for giving me this opportunity.

[00:58:55] Trey Lockerbie: It’s a fantastic book and Bill, I really appreciate the time you’ve given us today. And best of luck with the book.

[00:59:00] Bill George: Thank you for having me on. Let’s meet in person and keep going here. Thanks Trey.

[00:59:04] Trey Lockerbie: Thank you.

[00:59:06] Trey Lockerbie: All right, everybody, that’s all we had for you this week. If you’re loving the show, don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app and if you’d be so kind, please leave us a review.

[00:59:13] Trey Lockerbie: It really helps the show. If you wanna reach out directly, you can find me on Twitter at @TreyLockerbie. And don’t forget to check out all of the amazing resources we’ve built for you at theinvestorspodcast.com. You can also simply Google TIP finance and it should pop right up. And with that, we’ll see you again next time.

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