#118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/e7bdc50ef1ea3235

The key to making hard decisions at the top
You have to
Be in the black with your emotional bank account with the culture.
As a leader, you have to build that bank account. You have to be making deposits every day into that account.
To build trust.
And to build credibility with the people that work there.
Knowing.
That there are days where you're gonna make some giant withdrawal cause you're gonna screw up.
Because you will.
And the the companies that are doing well in today's challenging times?
Or the ones that are are are building trust with their associates.
It's gonna help them navigate the challenges of the day.
We have challenges today, we had challenges yesterday, we'll have more challenges tomorrow.
Welcome to the Knowledge Podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parish.
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Doug Kannard is here today.
Doug was the CEO of Campbell Soup and worked at Nabisco during the toxic leverage bioculture that prompted the book Barbarians at the Gate.
Doug is full of leadership advice and lessons. We talk about why you can't win in the marketplace, if you haven't won in the workplace.
The first one hundred days as CEO of Campbell Soup.
Adjusting to shifting consumer preferences.
How to know when you have the right people.
And the wrong people.
And so much more.
It's time.
to listen and learn.
Set the scene for me in the eighties and and not only like how did you end up at Nabisco, what was it like working for the LBO, largest in history at the time?
Uh and the pressure that you must have felt internally and the employees as well.
And then how you applied some of this learning from Covey inside.
Well, I there were two guys that just they say when the uh the s when the student is ready the teacher appears.
I was ready for two people that really had a profound influence on me more than others.
One was Steven Covey and the other one was uh Jim Collins.
And they both became very good friends.
I was wrestling with my life. I had gone into Nabisco and it was at Nabisco that
you know, the the magnitude of the challenge was overwhelming.
And I I was realizing without knowing it
That I needed to
step up my game. Stuff was coming at me as part of the world's largest LBO and KKR.
the poster child for barbarians at the gate. You're young for this, but it was a huge deal.
at the time in the corporate world.
we were being challenged to do things that just were
more substantial than I'd ever been challenged before.
And I realized I needed to get
Better anchored.
in what I believed in it so that I could have the courage of my convictions to deal with all of it.
in a way that where I would survive because it was it was
challenging. So that's where I and I was searching for help.
not knowing I was searching for help, but I was searching for help and I
discovered Steven's book and I read it on a trip with my wife and
totally neglected her and I ultimately
She said, What are you reading? I said, This is an amazing book.
And she said, Why is it so amazing?'Cause he thinks just like I do, and it was The Seven Habits by Stephen Covey. And uh I wrote a whole book on it in the blueprint, but I believe you gotta tend to your own foundation so that when you get put in the thick of thick things and having to make
Tough decisions about people and performance and
every day where you're pushed to the edge.
you have to be incredibly well anchored and have the courage of your convictions.
It's hard to have the courage of your convictions if you don't know what your convictions are.
And uh and most people are flying by the seat of their pants.
Especially all the people that were listening to you on Wall Street.
They're they're doing life by the seat of their pants, they're reacting to what comes of them.
Which I do too.
uh seventy percent of the time.
But
When you're in these tight
Fight.
situation
You gotta know where to draw the line and where you stand on things and
I wasn't
Confident enough
Uh so I needed to do some inside work to say, well, what do I want to stand for here and how do I want to make this work?
So that I can
Not only
Contribute.
And perform.
But I can do it in a way where I
You know, I can look at myself in the mirror every day.
And nobody can do that work for you.
And I tell ya, you can't reading the books about all these great leaders and how they did it
Has nothing to do with you.
So
I did my homework and I
Lift it my game.
Talk to me about being inside and the pressures that you felt and and learning on the fly.
Going through that. I mean it must have been
You know, you turned around multiple divisions, you rose up the ranks. It didn't always seem clear that was gonna happen.
Oh no, I had been fired earlier in my career.
And it wasn't that I did
Anything particularly wrong. I just
Don't think I did enough right.
And but you know, every time I do a Myers Briggs test, I'm an introvert.
And
That's hard, you know, if you're trying to be a leader.
And influence the direction and you
uncomfortable in the spotlight.
I discovered that I I needed to uh
really get anchored and what I stood for it was even
extra hard for me because I had a I had to overcome my introversion.
And my
Shyness.
And my reserve nature.
And so
The only way I could do that was to
Get really firmly grounded in what mattered most to me.
And uh
when I was firmly grounded, I was able to step outside of myself and express it. And so I spent a lot of time working in this territory more than most because I felt like I needed to.
You know, uh there's a great Brene Brown quote.
You can either walk inside your story
And own it.
Or you can stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness every day.
And you know
As a shy introverted oldest child
I was going through and I was try walking inside my parents story for me.
My teacher's story for me.
My coach's story for me.
My boss's story for me.
My organization straw I was walking
Inside everybody else's story.
And I sort of began to realize when I lost my job in my early thirties.
Like
This isn't working.
I need to figure out what my story is.
And in fact when I when I got let go
from my job the first thing my outplacement counselor
Did for me.
He said, Look, I want you to sit down and write your entire life story for me. Handwrite.
And I want every detail in there.
And uh I want it back in two weeks.
But I handwrote fifty pages.
Front and back, a hundred pages.
Small handwriting.
I wish I had that. I I don't know where it ever happened to it.
And I as I got into my life story, it was like, wow, look at all this stuff. And I haven't really reflected on any of this. I've just been going
From you know, one step at a time, here to there, boom, boom, boom.
Yet I had this incredible story being
exposed to people who had profound influences on me.
But I just sort of left that in the dust.
And moved on.
Although I carried their lessons with me.
Below the surface.
Uh but as I wrote it all down I realized, wow, this is really rich stuff.
And I started to ruminate on it, manage it, and then uh shortly thereafter I met Stephen Covey.
When I was at Nabisco to get get directly to your question.
I was doing this covey stuff and
These guys were
Talking about me doing all this lovey dovey covey stuff.
And
our our mission for
The LBO was E cubed.
Earnings, earnings, earnings.
And it w had nothing to do with people, it had nothing to do with organization.
You know, you were just expected to manage all that, but I need my quarterly earnings. You gotta hit our targets.
I just felt that was short sighted.
Mm.
But I knew I had to deliver the earnings, but I also knew we had to create a roadmap
for uh prosperity that was gonna
allow me to make the earnings a year from then when I had out lap that quarter and deliver again.
As I was being challenged with all that, I sort of landed on this
Philosophy
That said, look, there are two things that matter here.
in in all the corporate world.
It's performance in people. It's not just performance. It's performance in people. In fact, you take care of the people.
And they'll take care of the performance.
You know, I'm this guy from the Midwest who shows up on the east coast.
Pollyanish kind of perspective that
You take care of the people, they take care of the work and
And the more I care about them, the more they'll care about our agenda and the better we'll do.
I mean, logical to me, but it wasn't the language of of of the day.
the heyday of the nineteen nineties and
It was counter cultural at the time, both within Nabisco and in the broader world.
I just became wildly committed
to assembling a world class team.
And then to g give them
all the tools they needed to fight the fight.
And to give them air cover when I could because nobody else agreed with me.
And uh so we started doing that and I started paying attention to them.
Ultimately
We performed well one year, we performed yep well the next year, and the next year I was made president of
Nibisco Foods and for five years we outperformed ever any other food company in the United States.
Which is how I ultimately ended up getting the Campbell job.
Before we get to the the Campbell job, I I wanna t hone in on two parts of that story that stick out for me. One is where did you get the courage in an organization to do something different that goes against what everybody else in the organization is doing?
Right after you were fired from your previous job.
Well, I had time in between.
I had one other job before then.
I I'd gone to craft and I got my sea legs again.
Okay. Uh
And I worked for some pretty tough guys there.
And I learned I could do it.
I mean it wasn't an incidental amount of time, it was seven years.
But it was the s it was seven years I needed to sort of mature and
You know, I talk about
the importance, my language again, of being tough minded on standards of performance and tender hearted with people.
I was inclined to be tender hearted with people.
And I need to I need it to kind of
get more comfortable w with being tough minded on performance.
And I did that at craft and I I learned you can do both.
The culture I grew up in was either your
you know, either you're Vince Lombardi tough
Or your
Lovey dovey covey.
And what I found is, in my opinion, the best leaders that create enduring value
Have tough standards.
And care about people.
They're not mutually exclusive, and I learned that at Kraft.
I applied it at Nabisco.
And uh then I really brought it to life when I got to Campbell. So that that's where that came from.
Is there a particular story that comes to mind when you think of a great example of
Being tough on standards and
Kind with people.
Sure.
Uh
I got to Campbell.
I I thought I'd seen everything.
When I got to the wild west of the world's largest LBO
And I was there for a decade. I thought I'd seen everything.
After
After Barbarians at the gate.
And then I got to Campbell and
It was there was a whole new world.
And it turned out to be a very, very toxic culture.
And I was bringing my same philosophy
In fact, day one when I talked to the employees at Campbell, I said, You know
We cannot expect you to value our agenda until we tangibly demonstrate that we value yours.
It just to me it just doesn't make any sense.
So my commitment is you're gonna see that we care about you.
And we're gonna trust that in the fullness of time you're gonna
care about our agenda and help us
Lift this company up and we were in bad shape.
We started in the nineteenth century.
And we were still selling the same products canned soup.
the leading analyst in the sector was comparing us to a buggy whip.
And we were headquartered in the p poorest, most dangerous city in the United States, Camden, New Jersey.
Uh where we had
A city of seventy five thousand people and seventy murders a year.
And we had razor wire all around our facilities with guard towers.
It looked like a minimum security prison.
The razor wire and the guard towers were there to make sure people felt safe when they got inside.
And they had been through several years of
Poor performance.
A lot of layoffs.
No trust.
over promising, under delivering
Churn at the top.
uh investigations by regulators
You name it.
It was happening.
So I got there and I said, you know, here we go.
New day we're gonna
Value you, we're gonna trust you're gonna value us.
And it's gonna take a while. It's gonna take us three years to get to get
to a place where we can really
Lift our heads up.
Because we're not gonna overpromise and under deliver.
We are not gonna be able to talk our way out of something we behaved our way into.
It took us years to get into this mess, it's gonna take us years to get out.
And I'm convinced all the leaders were saying, Yeah, we'll see how long this works.
You know
You know, here here comes Mr. Lovey Dovey Covey again.
And he's not tough enough.
We turned over three hundred.
of the top three hundred and fifty leaders in the company.
Six out of seven.
We gave them a year and a half or so to
Get with the program?
But if it wasn't working
They knew
Because I was very upfront, we're gonna have to make some tough calls here.
And we're either gonna find a job that you can do
as an individual contributor
reporting to some we're gonna f try and make it work.
Or else we're gonna help you find another job somewhere.
But we gotta be tough minded on standards here. We've gotta perform.
And
In terms of performance, we said there are two things.
It's the what and the how.
The what was we have these standards that we want to hit in terms of our business performance.
And the how which was
more important, quite frankly.
Is and here's how we're gonna comport ourselves as leaders.
And if you can't sign up for the what and the how
You're probably in the wrong place.
And I think people were saying, Oh yeah, yeah, we've heard this before. We'll see how long you last. We turned over three hundred of the top three fifty. You talk about tough, that was
Tougher than anything we did at Nabisco.
Uh we promoted a hundred and fifty from within, but we had to go outside and find a hundred and fifty more blue chip
young Turks to come in and transform the company into a
twenty first century fighting machine.
That was
probably the single toughest thing I ever had to do'cause some of these people were not
poor performers. They were just in the wrong place.
and a at the wrong time, uh, from their career perspective. But
I had a greater good to look after. I had twenty four twenty to twenty four thousand people.
Counting on me to
Did it right.
A footnote to this conversation is
We started tracking employee engagement every year.
with Gallup and
When we first did it the year one, uh, Gallup said this is the worst we've ever seen in a Fortune five hundred company.
This is horrible.
We had an engagement ratio of
Which is
How many people are engaged compared to how many people are not.
Of two to one.
uh the average for Fortune five hundred was four people wildly engaged for every one who wasn't.
We were two to one. So basically we had
uh two people doing the job of three everywhere in the world.
And uh
We tracked it every year for the decade.
And while I was making all these ch
Changes.
Uh I wasn't quite sure how it was gonna turn out, you know, we've made all the changes and then I
didn't know how em employee engagement was gonna come out, but I couldn't imagine doing it any other way.
So we the chips were gonna fall where they fell when we measured it.
Turns out every year we made the changes, employee engagement went up.
Because all the employees knew what needed to be done.
They were just waiting to see if there was a leader who was gonna be
Tough minded enough.
To do it.
And we weren't perfect.
But we tried to be wildly supportive of everybody we've moved out.
Uh I had been fired in a tough way.
That wasn't particularly caring, and I said I don't ever want to do this to anybody else again.
I won't be associated with it.
So we tried to be
uh really compassionate with the people we turned over. They didn't all agree with it.
But
I I I know we did the best we could at the time.
That's an example of
Where you you know, you declare you're gonna commit to building this kind of culture.
You damn well better do it.
And and if you're gonna build a culture that's gonna be tough minded on standards and caring about people.
Either you as J as Jim Collins would say, either you get on the bus or you don't.
You gotta get the right people on the bus.
I wonder to what extent hard decisions at the top make for easy decisions at the bottom.
You know, the the key to making hard decisions at the top
You have to
Be in the black with your emotional bank account with the culture.
As a leader, you have to build that bank account. You have to be making deposits every day into that account.
To build trust.
And to build credibility with the people that work there.
Knowing.
that there are days where you're gonna make some giant withdrawal cause you're gonna screw up.
'Cause you will.
It's just too complicated.
But you know
that when you have that big withdrawal, you're still gonna be in the black.
Then
It makes it much easier.
to make those decisions at the top because you're not running on empty
With the employees.
But the key is how do you build that a bank account?
Before you need it.
And before you have to make those tough calls, I had three years
to demonstrate to all the employees that we cared about.
And that we were gonna upgrade the facilities and that we cared about their work environment and we cared about how their
uh supervisors treated them.
The number one expectation of a leader at Campbell was that you had to inspire trust.
If you couldn't inspire trust, how could you inspire performance?
And if you weren't inspiring trust, you were at risk.
You'd lose your job.
So you declare that, you live it, you work it every day.
And then if people aren't able to get with the program
You kindly and gently but firmly move them out.
And you do it in a way wherever possible that honors the individual
Who's been affected.
It's not that they're
Bad people.
It's just that they're not in the right place at the right time and they oughta be honored.
Everything I do emanates from a commitment to honoring people.
That that and that's where it all starts. And so all of the stuff we're talking about.
is really about
Okay.
How am I gonna honor
uh this person in this situation at this time right now.
And uh do it in a way
That
acknowledges whatever has brought them here.
what we have to do in the present and also
Sets the
table for a more prosperous future conversation.
As a leader, you gotta live in three time zones.
Simultaneously.
The past, the present, and the future.
Everything you do.
has got to honor the past, deliver in the present, set the table for a more prosperous future.
And as you think that way
That's why trust
Building becomes.
Mission critical.
And the the companies that are doing well in today's challenging times?
The ones that are doing well are the ones that are are are building trust with their associates.
that's gonna help them navigate the challenges of the day.
We have challenges today. We had challenges yesterday. We'll have more challenges tomorrow.
Walk me through the first hundred days at Campbell. You you I think you mentioned in a previous interview you felt like you had three years to turn it around. What was the first hundred days like? What steps did you take?
Look, as a leader at a senior level, at the outside you've got three years.
The first year
It's the other guy's fault.
The second year it's our fault, but we're learning.
The third year you own it.
So in that spirit
The first year
I had to declare myself with the organization, who I was and what I stood for.
And I had to bring that to life with tangible actions.
First hundred days you you establish a principle centered framework for leading.
And then you listen a lot.
First hundred days you'd lead by listening.
to the point where everybody says, G my God, you've listened enough. What are we gonna do?
They're exhausted. They don't want to talk anymore.
Yeah, I you understand. You clearly wanna understand. Great.
By uh
The second hundred days you've got a plan together.
And
I use Campbell as an example. I started January first.
I declared myself, we started to set the organization up.
uh made some early hires that started to set the tone.
That I was serious about it.
And we committed to having a plan by July, so
The first hundred days was doing a situation assessment and listening.
The next hundred days was
building a plan in a collaborative fashion with the leadership.
And by July we had launched our revitalization plan for Campbell.
And
And then we were off to the races implementing the plan.
My experience you've got
Hundred days to figure it out, a hundred days to
operationalize it and get going.
Knowing that it's not gonna be perfect, you're gonna have to course correct along the way.
That's how I see managing turnarounds, which I've done everywhere I've been.
There are some people would say that's too slow.
For a turnaround.
I find if you go a little slow at first you can go fast later on because everybody's
felt heard and been part of the process.
If you go real fast out of the gate, it's your idea, nobody owns it.
And you're
Y you're off
leading the team only to turn around and see the team is back at the starting line.
So
There's an art to this.
You gotta bring people along with you, and I think
The first two hundred days are the most critical with that.
You declare yourself and then you
Then you create a plan to bring it to life.
How do you think about the the mismatch timelines between sort of what you do in the first year is probably going to affect the profits in the second year.
But a CEO, you're probably wanting to invest for a decade or two decades in the future.
And yet also knowing that the average tenure of a CEO in the S P five hundred is probably what, three to four years.
How how do you how do you address these mismatch timelines between immediate results
And long term performance.
Yeah, I think there are a couple of things. First of all, you've got to be
You've gotta know.
What you want to stand for.
Uh when I took this job I
I uh at Campbell, I had said, you know
This is a heavy lift.
And uh
we can't talk our way out of something we behave to went into, we're gonna have to
Build
something that's an enduring proposition, it's gonna take time.
And we've got to be willing to live with the results.
Uh but
We have to have clear
Gates.
of performance and we have to constantly be getting better.
There has to there can be no question.
That we're getting better.
in the workplace and in the marketplace every year.
No question.
And then you have to perform.
and meet or exceed those expectations.
Today it's easier because
When I first started it was
How what were your earnings this quarter?
No, they th we don't even report. Most people aren't reporting quarterly earnings. They're doing annual. They provide guidance.
But they're looking more long term in nature, which is appropriate.
I was willing to not have my job if I had to do it
The wrong way.
This is where you have to be incredibly well anchored. We talked earlier about
If you're not
Well anchored in the leader you want to be and how you want to lead.
You're gonna be
Whipsawed by analysts and
And Wall Street and
boards and activists and
We were gonna build a better company brick by brick.
And we were gonna make sure we served all of our stakeholders, not just our shareholders.
And we s said that at the beginning and I
Basically said it at the end ten years later.
And uh
I think if you're clear about what you intend to do and
And then you do it.
And you put points on the board every year.
You get
The opportunity to do it again.
But if you're worried about saving your job
You're in trouble before you start.
You mentioned the board. I'm wondering maybe there's particular story that comes to mind, but
W what makes for a helpful board member versus an unhelpful board member?
It's not individual members, it's it's the culture of the board.
Because you know, we had
fifteen directors, which is a large board.
But they represented all kinds of points of view, so we could we could deliberate on anything.
And look at it.
in a three hundred and sixty degree way that I thought was incredibly healthy.
I found it to be a blessing. We also had
members of the founding family on the board.
who were tethered to the long term interests of the company.
Which I also found enormously helpful.
I think it's not one board member or another. I think
The k the key is to create a culture where all points of view can be heard.
And where people are
Comfortable enough to
Share them.
And that's what we had at Campbell when I was there.
We had people that
We would go toe to toe and we disagree on some things.
But you know, those points of view, it was better to have it in the boardroom than it was to
Have it out with
with Wall Street or or the Alice.
Or
Any activists lurking out there to
critique what we were doing.
So I I loved having a very candid uh a large candid
arguably unwieldy board.
Everything that mattered came up in those board meetings. And so we were able to deal with it before we took it outside.
A good board member constructively engages in the dialogue.
I guess the other observation about a good board, in my opinion
a good board member is that they kn they understand their role in the process and it's one of oversight.
It's not one of
execution and management.
You know, the their job is to is to make sure the
organization is properly governed.
And that uh
that the enterprise is living up to the standards that have been set for it.
Not.
uh to make sure
You've done the right job with your marketing that quarter or that year.
Before we get to leadership, I wanna ask you how you went about making decisions
Did you have a particular process or routine was uh for for decisions that matter, I'm thinking high stakes decisions.
You know, first of all
This conversation makes all this stuff sound simple.
It's not.
It's messy every day, and you're anguishing over every
Every decision about a person, every decision about a
Board meeting.
Uh I'm I'll just use a CEO life, but it could be any life. I spent more of my time not being a CEO.
than I did being a CEO. I was
basically in that wor wor in that lane of work for forty years.
I was only a CEO for ten. The other thirty I was uh
entry level marketing person to a lead to a manager, to a leader, to
So uh
For me the decision making got easy if I
If we created a framework for
What mattered most. If people knew what mattered.
It made it easy to decide.
If you know all stakeholders matter.
And you know
that you're expected to do better tomorrow than you did today and you know that
your enterprise is committing to w committed to winning in the workplace
Before you went in the marketplace.
You create this framework
Everybody knows what's expected, you know, the Gallup survey
They ask twelve questions, which get at the hygiene.
of an organization. It's called the Q twelve survey.
And one of those twelve questions is I know what is expected of me.
And the more you know what is expected of you, the easier it is to do your job.
So as a leader, the key is make sure the expectations are crystal clear.
And make sure that if it push comes to shove.
that if it if you've gotta pick performance over people
then you better get somebody else in the boat with you because
That's a that's something that's taken very seriously in in in our in my organization.
When it came to process
We would do a strategic process where we would
Assess the situation every year.
And revisit our strategy for the next three years.
We would then say what are the implications for the coming year?
We would then do an annual plan.
We would then break that annual plan down into quarterly
Expectations.
And
As we
Did that.
In a c in a
collaborative way with
Every leader.
Uh, it was another example of where slow uh is uh you start slow, you can finish fast, because everybody's on the same page and they all execute against it.
Then you're just doing modest course corrections.
The other thing, uh so there's a planning process you put in place.
And then there's a a process for interventions.
Where uh you you you find out what's working, what's not and what's needed in the
In here and now.
And
between the planning process and a simple intervention
Process.
What's working, what's not, what's needed.
Uh you can find your way through almost anything.
What have you learned about leadership that most people miss?
It's all about the people.
You know what we tend to do and I
Guilty of it. You know, you tend to have these huge jobs
And you got all this list of stuff that has to get done and you get all caught up in the tasks and you forget about the people.
'Cause I gotta get this done now. It's due by the end of the month and they're not getting it done and
And all of a sudden you're compromising the relationships with the people that work for you and with you.
I found
that leaders get so caught up in the delivery of performance that they lose sight of
uh taking care of the development of the people.
That's the thing I have to constantly remind myself of,'cause you still have to perform. You've got to perform and take care of the people.
But typically where you end up
Compromising.
is you you you just say, Well, I I'm I don't have time to deal with him or her right now. I'm just gonna
take over this project and get it done because it's gotta be done by Friday.
Sometimes you gotta do that.
I mean that's
Reality.
Most of the leaders I encounter
They lead by the seat of their pants.
They create great business plans.
You know, and and financial plans and
And then you say, What's your leadership plan?
I have no idea.
And it's like Wait a minute.
Leading your people is the most important thing you do when you have no plan.
Well yeah, I just kind of work my way through it.
Oh, that's bullshit.
My point of view.
You know, I would c I I tell people that leading your people you're on sacred ground.
You're having a profound influence on these people's lives.
And you're doing it by the seat of your pants?
Give me a break.
You know, these people are working all day.
Then they're having dinner with their kids and what are they doing after dinner?
They're getting back on email, working at night.
falling asleep thinking about what they did do and what they didn't do and what they gotta do tomorrow. They get up thinking about what they have to do that day.
Squeeze some time in with the kids of the dog.
And they'll do it all over again.
And you want them to be wildly engaged in what you're doing?
And you're not thinking about it?
Hello?
And
What I find is most leaders do it by the seat of their pants.
And some of them are better at it than others.
But
Largely.
That's not good enough.
Uh leaders can't be born.
But they are most certainly all made better.
You know, I think leadership works off a mastery model.
I think the world works off a mastery model.
In terms
All the way from Darwin and the species mastering their environment.
to leading.
And I believe you apprentice at it.
You learn from it, you study it, you study the craft.
And then you get better at it.
I can't imagine the first podcast you did was as good as the podcast you do now.
You get better. You work at it.
And these leaders
They just think by virtue of
Making decisions by the seat of their pants today they're gonna be
better at making decisions by this
See that her plants tomorrow.
That may be true, but I I just contend it's inadequate.
So most leaders I see
Haven't been intentional enough.
And haven't really thought about it.
That's where I challenge them to do better.
And to be clear.
Seventy five percent of my day when I'm leading is by the seat of my pants.
You know, that's just light. We got a lot of
Crap coming at us every day, right?
We're overwhelmed.
By data.
by stuff coming at us.
But I'm saying
twenty five percent of the time you ought to know what matters most.
And you ought to really be attentive to it every day.
Most leaders haven't done that enough.
in that territory in terms of reflection
And study.
To be world class.
to be world class leaders.
What does a leadership blueprint look like, a leadership plan? What's the blueprint for that?
I think a blueprint
Has to be
for your leadership has to be anchored in how do you want to lead.
It has nothing to do with anybody else.
Yet.
All right.
It's
uh the process we take people through is envision the leader you want to be.
Uh do some reflection.
Uh
your life because I contend your life story is your leadership story.
And then study the world around you and see
What other people are doing that
might relate to what you the way you want to be.
You know, and uh I've got lots of mentors like Stephen Covey, Jim Collins.
But the people I've worked for
Who I've learned from.
So take that reflection and study and then actually build a a l what I call a leadership model.
I believe models can be incredibly useful.
You create a mental model for how you want to show up as a leader.
And then
As you do that, you build practices into your life.
that bring that matel to l model to life in a very tangible way.
So it's not just talk and
And leadership mumbo jumbo. It's here's how I show up.
And then you commit to a continuous improvement process of doing a little better with that model regularly.
So that's what a leadership model is.
But that is not enough because then you gotta take that model, which is all about you.
and how you wanna walk in the world and then you gotta actually go into the real world.
And think about it in terms of the Venn diagrams you had in school.
You have your leadership approach here.
And then over here you have another
Circle.
That is the leadership approach that is expected of you in the world at large or in your organization. In the middle, hopefully, is a cross hatched area. Yeah.
Where
There is stuff that you value
And how you wanna show up.
And there is stuff that the enterprise values on how they want you to show up.
And the process we taste you through is
It's
putting those two things together so you can show up in a way
That's a fact of
for the enterprise and fulfilling for you.
And every enterprise I've been in, I've been in some crazy ones.
There are some things they all want.
And that everybody wants in most of their leadership work.
Certainly, uh well, in virtually every sector, but in corporate
I can say look, there are two things.
Performance in people.
that you're s expected to perform.
If you're a leader you want to perform.
And the enterprise wants you to perform.
And they also want you to perform through people because you're they're having you manage people.

So
Typically.
A bluprint for success is
Thinking about how you want to lead
figuring what's expected of you and then creating a reentry approach that says, Okay
Here's how I'm gonna lead.
in a way that meets the needs of my organization.
And
We see just wild success with this.
As people are really tethered to what matters to them.
And they're doing it in a practical way that matters to the enterprise.
And you can do both.
That's my belief. And what I what I struggle with is
And I have
Lots of friends who
Study leadership and write about it.
But arguably have never really done it.
But they've studied people and done it, they add a lot of value.
You've got to be able to do this.
In in the real world
And you've gotta be able to work on lifting your leadership.
In the middle of your Kakamami life.
And who has time for this stuff?
Nobody has time for it.
So the process
That I'm talking about.
was built so that it could fit in
When you do it, it nests perfectly in your Kakamami life.
And you can do it in a way that speaks to you
and meets the needs of the enterprise. You can do all of that.
As long as you do it in small chunks with a continuous improvement mindset.
That's the concept of a blueprint.
Being true to yourself is
Is at the heart of it.
But then
You have to walk in the world with others.
So you've gotta
Take that into account while you're being true to yourself.
And that's the bridge we try and help people build when we work with them.
One or the other just won't do it.
If you're just trying to meet the needs of others, you're hustling for your worthiness.
in uh Brene Brown language, you're not walking inside your store.
We want you to walk inside your story and be effective inside your enterprise.
I have yet to find somebody that can't do both.
If they are intentional about it.
And not just doing it by the seat of their pants.
Talk to me about the things that
People who teach or write but haven't done miss.
when you're reading that or you're thinking about it, is there something that
You're like, Oh, how do you think about that?
Well, first of all, I don't I think it's it's more important to realize what they hit.
Because they're able to step outside of it.
They bring perspective and objectivity that I think enhances understanding. Big time.
Yeah. So I think there's a lot more value addition.
Then I think there is what they quote unquote miss.
But you never know.
Until you're in until you
You're trying to you're dealing with these people shoulder to shoulder.
Day in, day out, grinding away, trying to make it all work, amidst all of its complexity.
And ambiguity and
He said, She said what do we do?
There's no substitute for living it.
You know.
It's just like my friends who are professors.
I can't understand their life either.
I haven't walked in their shoes.
uh to the extent that they have.
So uh what they miss is I think the
The visceral.
Understanding.
Of what it's like to be on that side of the table and walking in those shoes.
That's what they miss.
Uh, but they add so much more value because
I've learned so much. Uh Stephen Covey.
Never ran anything.
And he and when he did, he didn't do it particularly well.
But his thinking and
Enlarged my world, Jim Collins.
I mean he sees a lot of stuff, but he doesn't want to go run something.
Of any scale.
Yeah.
And really invested time and energy and research and work.
in understanding it.
And that adds a ton of value.
But
You gotta walk a mile in their shoes, too.
Are there common patterns that you see that keep people with high potential from achieving their goals or realizing their potential?
Patience is one.
You know, we're conditioned now to
want change faster and faster and
And there's no substitute.
for cultivating wisdom.
Mm. Through experience.
I talk to it when I'm out on the West Coast or I'm
talking to folks in Silicon Valley, it's like
My perspective is discounted.
Which is annoying, but understandable.
And uh because
I'm almost seventy years old.
And how could I possibly understand what this thirty pr year old person is going through and
We get in this conversation and I say
Well, how much wisdom have you accumulated in the last decade since from twenty to thirty?
A lot, you know, I've learned a lot.
Well, how much more do you think you'll accumulate from thirty to forty?
Or forty to fifty.
Or fifty to sixty.
There's and there's no substitute for it, and there's no way to go faster with it.
The demands of society are such that you
Gotta do more better faster now.
And
the leaders today sort of hunger for the quick fix.
Just like the Wall Street hunger for the
Good quarter.
Yeah. And we're saying, Well, you know
You gotta look at this on longer term.
Time horizon if you want
corporate responsibility.
We gotta create room for people to create corporate enduring corporate
Enterprises.
That can serve society better.
uh and not live quarter to quarter.
The same thing is true about young leaders.
You don't live quarter to quarter. You've got to
create room for yourself to grow over time.
And to have
Patience and to just
Focus on how can I help the enterprise?
To better
Today than I we did yesterday.
And how can I grow?
And be a little better today than I was yesterday and and get into a continuous improvement mindset as opposed to a quick fix mindset.
That's the tough
piece and I was just like'em.
I wanted more, better, faster too.
And I kept track of when I was gonna get my next promotion and
D was I gonna get promoted before this person or that person?
But ultimately
Mm.
That's where I've landed on.
I want to switch gears and ask you a few personal questions before we wrap up. Um
I when I was doing some research, it came up that you wake up between four and five every morning.
Pretty much, yeah. I'm a morning person.
I actually uh cultivated that habit in an intentional way, interestingly.
Um
Because as I was uh
company president and then a chair and then a CEO and then a chairman.
My evening life got crazy.
But my morning life I realized that if I wanted to sort of get centered for my day and everything, I just needed to get up earlier.
And I was early morning anyway.
But I started getting up an hour earlier.
And gathering myself I'd sit up
In my garden in New Jersey at the time.
Where I lived for most of this time, twenty five years of
My work.
And uh would have a cup of coffee as the sun came up.
And reflect on what was expected that day and
And
Gather myself a bit.
uh before all hell broke loose.
And then I would go into the inside, shower, shave, and shine.
And uh
I I I remember putting on my suits
Every day.
And it was like I was putting on my armor and I was getting ready to go into battle.
I found it to be
A real important part of my life.
Two
give myself some space and quiet time.
to get anchored in what mattered most.
The other thing I did was one of the things that mattered most was
My kids.
And uh and my family. And so
I would be up with them.
For breakfast.
And then I would always try and find a way to take one of them to school.
Before I would go to work.
So I tried to be available.
in the early mornings, knowing that the afternoons and nights were
were risky.
I I moved my
Wake up time up.
And it worked and to this day I I mean I was up to day it
Well, actually I slept in today. I slept in till five today.
But uh
I got a ton of work done.
You sort of need to figure out what matters most in my life.
And my work was part of it. My family was another part of it.
And my own personal well being. Those are three of my five cylinders. The other two were uh my community.
And uh my faith.
So I have five cylinders that I work off of.
And three of those cylinders
With the practice of getting up early and reflecting
I was able to center myself.
And sort of help manage those three.
Cylinders
in a in a s in a in a way that served me well. Gosh, now for
Almost thirty years.
Well, you were the CEO uh of Campbell's, you wrote over thirty thousand thank you notes, I'm or gratit notes of gratitude or thank you notes. I'm curious as to what what started that practice and what have you learned about writing good ones.
When I was fired from my job.
And my outplacement and I was shy, my outplacement counselor said, You're never gonna get a job.
You're too shy. You only answer the questions that you're being asked.
You're not selling yourself. You're not
You know, I I've read your
fifty pages of
handwritten life story.
You've you're committed you're wildly committed to
contributing and excelling.
Yet you show up in such a
Shy reserved way.
And he said, You've got to figure out a way to make your
Job search distinctive.
And as try as I could, I I I I was just horrible at interviewing. At least I felt I was.
So I said, I gotta do something here. So what I did was
When I would go if I came to your building in Ottawa and I was interviewing for a job there and there were
I'd be
six people and I'd meet the receptionist who opened the door for me at the building.
I would get all their names.
When I was done, I would walk next door to the coffee shop and I would handwrite each one a note.
And I would walk it back over to the receptionist before I left.
And ask them to deliver it that day.
to the people that I had
Just Matt.
And I would make sure to to thank them for something specific.
Maybe two or three senses.
That they did for me.
As a way of being distinctive.
I gotta tell ya, it was transformational. The key to making hard decisions is the top.
You have to
Be in the black with your emotional bank account with the culture.
As a leader, you have to build that bank account. You have to be making deposits every day into that account.
To build trust.
And to build credibility with the people that work there.
Knowing
that there are days where you're gonna make some giant withdrawal'cause you're gonna screw up.
Because you will.
And the the companies that are doing well in today's challenging times?
Or the ones that are are are building trust with their associates.
It's gonna help them navigate the challenges of the day.
We have challenges today, we had challenges yesterday, we'll have more challenges tomorrow.
Welcome to the Knowledge Project Podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parish.
This podcast sharpens your mind by helping you master the best what other people have already figured out.
If you're listening to this, you're not currently a supporting member.
If you'd like special member only episodes, access before anyone else, transcripts, and other member only content.
you can join at fs.blog slash podcast.
Check out the show notes for a link.
Doug Kanaud is here today.
Doug was the CEO of Campbell Soup and worked at Nabisco during the toxic leverage bioculture that prompted the book Barbarians at the Gate.
Doug is full of leadership advice and lessons. We talk about why you can't win in the marketplace, if you haven't won in the workplace.
The first one hundred days as CEO of Campbell Soup.
Adjusting to shifting consumer preferences.
How to know when you have the right people.
And the wrong people.
And so much more.
It's time.
to listen and learn.
Uh-huh.
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Set the scene for me in the eighties and and not only like how did you end up at Nabisco, what was it like working for the LBO, largest in history at the time.
Uh and the pressure that you must have felt internally and the employees as well.
And then how you applied some of this learning from Covey inside.
Well, I there were two guys that just they say when the uh the s when the student is ready the teacher appears.
I was ready for two people that really had a profound influence on me more than others.
One was Steven Covey and the other one was uh Jim Collins.
And they both became very good friends.
I was wrestling with my life. I had gone into Nabisco and it was at Nabisco that
you know, the the magnitude of the challenge was overwhelming.
And I I was realising without knowing it.
That I needed to
step up my game. Stuff was coming at me as part of the world's largest LBO and KKR
the poster child for barbarians at the gate. You're young for this, but it was a huge deal.
At the time in the corporate world.
we were being challenged to do things that just were
more substantial than I'd ever been challenged before.
And I realized I needed to get
Better anchored.
in what I believed in it so that I could have the courage of my convictions to deal with all of it.
in a way that where I would survive because it was it was
challenging. So that's where I and I was searching for help.
Not knowing I was searching for help, but I was searching for help and I
discovered Steven's book and I read it on a trip with my wife and
Totally neglected her and I ultimately
She said, What are you reading? I said, This is an amazing book.
And she said, Why is it so amazing?'Cause he thinks just like I do, and it was The Seven Habits by Stephen Covey. And uh I wrote a whole book on it in the blueprint, but I believe you gotta tend to your own foundation so that when you get put in the thick of thick things and having to make
Tough decisions about people and performance and
every day where you're pushed to the edge
You have to be incredibly well anchored and have the courage of your convictions.
It's hard to have the courage of your convictions if you don't know what your convictions are.
And uh and most people are flying by the seat of their pants.
Especially all the people that were listening to you on Wall Street.
They're they're doing life by the seat of their pants, they're reacting to what comes of them.
Which I do too.
Uh seventy percent of the time.
But
When you're in these tight, tight
situation
You gotta know where to draw the line and where you stand on things and
I wasn't
Confident enough
Uh, so I needed to do some inside work to say, well, what do I want to stand for here and how do I want to make this work?
So that I can
Not only
Contribute.
And perform.
But I can do it in a way where I
You know, I can look at myself in the mirror every day.
And nobody can do that work for you.
And I'll tell you, you can't reading the books about all these great leaders and how they did it
Has nothing to do with you.
So