Latest / The Action Catalyst / Always Learning, with Gary Kusin (Leadership, Improvement, Mentorship, Software)

Transcript

Always Learning, with Gary Kusin (Leadership, Improvement, Mentorship, Software) · The Action Catalyst

• 0:00
  Stephanie Maas: Well, hey, Gary, it's super nice to meet you.
• 0:02
  Gary Kusin: Nice to meet you also, I'm at your mercy.
• 0:06
  Stephanie Maas: Well, thank you, you may come to regret that. But
• 0:09
  in the meantime, thank you. So I'm super curious. I'm gonna
• 0:13
  just jump right in out of the gates in your book always
• 0:17
  learning. You know, I think that's such an interesting
• 0:20
  perspective. Because folks often would look at your background
• 0:24
  and go, What does he possibly have left to learn? Tell me a
• 0:28
  little bit about where the idea behind the book came from. Walk
• 0:32
  me through some of that.
• 0:33
  Gary Kusin: Be glad to. So after I sold Kinkos, to FedEx, and
• 0:36
  after the two years that I integrated it into FedEx
• 0:40
  reporting to Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, I was trying
• 0:44
  to decide what I wanted to do next. And I started getting a
• 0:48
  lot of pressure because of the way that Kinkos turnaround
• 0:52
  happened and a lot of things about that from a lot of
• 0:56
  interesting quarters saying you have to write a book, this would
• 1:00
  be a very big book. And I said, you know, I'm not I have never
• 1:04
  been good about talking about myself. But I'm a big introvert.
• 1:08
  And I would just assume, not be in the limelight. And so it
• 1:12
  really kind of pushed back, but they were really pushing pretty
• 1:17
  hard. I told everyone, no, thank you, I am looking forward to my
• 1:21
  anonymity. And that's it, and I let it go. Fast forward to the
• 1:25
  last year, we had our 11th grandchild. And our view of the
• 1:29
  world is quite different. Both my wife and me, we decided while
• 1:34
  we while we still could, we wanted to write a memoir, that's
• 1:38
  where I started. And through a lot of friends who are authors
• 1:42
  and a lot of people, I ended up meeting with some publishers, I
• 1:46
  mean, I went through the whole drill, and I found a spectacular
• 1:51
  editor that I really wanted to work with. And I started
• 1:54
  pounding away on a memoir, gave it to Maria, and she came back
• 1:59
  to me and she's a highly experienced person in the book
• 2:03
  industry real Book Pro, and part of my belief and my talk track
• 2:07
  about my life is essentially I'm the luckiest sob in the history
• 2:11
  world. I've fallen up everything that's ever happened to me good,
• 2:16
  pure luck. Well, Maria pushed back, I read intention on every
• 2:20
  page. And I have a hard time reconciling the intention that I
• 2:24
  see that you have written in your own words about your own
• 2:28
  life, with your thought that you have just been lucky. And
• 2:32
  following up. She said, I don't believe that. And I would like
• 2:36
  you to rethink how you have thought about your life. Luck is
• 2:40
  what happens when opportunity meets preparedness that stuck
• 2:44
  with me. And my book took on a very different, intentional
• 2:48
  look, and frankly, morphed into more about my business. I'm a
• 2:53
  mentor. That's the one thing that came out of my whole career
• 2:57
  that I love the most. And there are reasons and I tracked
• 3:01
  through all of those in the book. But I've had over 1000
• 3:05
  mentoring sessions last 20 years. And so this book is a way
• 3:09
  for me to mentor more broadly, let my my podcast the same
• 3:13
  thing. All I'm trying to do is level people's playing fields
• 3:17
  who might not have had the advantages I've had my career,
• 3:21
  because that is my joy. It's my love out. I spoke a month ago,
• 3:25
  and I wrote about this recently on LinkedIn. But I spent I spent
• 3:29
  an hour with the eighth grade of a charter school in St. Paul,
• 3:33
  Minnesota, who were all Somali refugees. And one little boy had
• 3:38
  his hand up. And I said yes, because I was asking for
• 3:41
  questions. And he said, When did things get better for you? Now
• 3:46
  think about that question. It stopped me dead in my tracks.
• 3:50
  And I was able to just talk to this young man about things that
• 3:54
  I did at his age, what I learned and what I felt was a way
• 3:58
  forward for anybody who is trying to figure out how to
• 4:02
  better themselves. It filled me up that interaction with that
• 4:06
  young man was what I'm that's what I live for.
• 4:09
  Stephanie Maas: There is so much I want to unpack. So let me
• 4:12
  circle back to these leadership principles. And respect
• 4:16
  alignment, accountability. What else?
• 4:18
  Gary Kusin: Well, I actually do alignment and accountability is
• 4:22
  one and two. For me. It's critically important in any
• 4:25
  company, for everyone to understand, what are we trying
• 4:29
  to do hear, hear and to understand, here's the mission,
• 4:32
  there's the flag on a distant hill. That's the flag we need to
• 4:36
  take. We're going to take it and then why they're so linked is
• 4:40
  you can't give responsibility without authority. And so many
• 4:44
  companies do that. They they tell they tell someone, you've
• 4:48
  got to get this done. And then when you start to do it, someone
• 4:52
  else tells you can't do that. That's a misalignment, it'll
• 4:56
  destroy everything. So alignment and then have a culture that
• 5:00
  does too. distributed authority, then you can move into respect
• 5:04
  for others. And that means that and it TPG were US did a nice
• 5:08
  stint as a senior adviser, they had a sign in their lobby that
• 5:12
  said, No, it's allowed. That's, you know, I think that's pretty
• 5:16
  straightforward. And you can figure out what that is, in the
• 5:20
  honest honesty and integrity is a requirement. But there are a
• 5:24
  lot of people out there who like to cut corners. And I'm never a
• 5:28
  part of that. And the last one is continuous improvement, but
• 5:32
  my co founder at GameStop, and I've been talking about the
• 5:36
  book, obviously, and he really thinks I should rethink that.
• 5:40
  And I am to make a continuous change. Because we could have
• 5:44
  been accused at GameStop. being excellent, with continuous
• 5:47
  improvement because we work but we should have been thinking
• 5:51
  change. Because we came in at the dawn of a new industry, we
• 5:55
  were the first software store in the world, when our first store
• 5:59
  open, and the things we did to start, were right at the start.
• 6:03
  But 10 years later, every one of our kind of pillars of our
• 6:07
  business needed to be reevaluated every single one of
• 6:11
  them. And all we were trying to do would be better, smarter,
• 6:15
  faster, and what we were doing and continued to succeed, but we
• 6:19
  were missing the very large and important aspects of change.
• 6:24
  Stephanie Maas: Next thing I want to touch on is this idea of
• 6:27
  toxicity. How and when do you recognize it? How do you change
• 6:32
  it? Just talk me through some of that.
• 6:34
  Gary Kusin: The key question you're asking there is, how do
• 6:36
  you change it, and I will get to that in a minute, it is pretty
• 6:40
  obvious to see when there is a culture that people talk down to
• 6:44
  people in an organization or they yell or they scream, or
• 6:47
  they belittle people, there is no reward and recognition, there
• 6:51
  is an expectation that people might work all hours be
• 6:54
  available all hours in those kinds of things, and not then
• 6:57
  not want to pay people keep all the money for themselves, you
• 7:00
  know, all that kind of stuff. How do I change that, in one
• 7:04
  case I left in life, there are good reasons. And there are real
• 7:07
  reasons, I ended up having a good reason. And I'm not gonna
• 7:11
  get into it any more than that. And one particular company I was
• 7:15
  involved with had a good reason for leaving, but it wasn't the
• 7:18
  real reason. And the real reason was, I couldn't stand the tone
• 7:22
  at the top. And unfortunately, I'm at the top also. So that was
• 7:25
  getting guilt by association. And I decided I didn't want to
• 7:29
  go into hand to hand combat with the other top leadership. So it
• 7:32
  was easier for me because I wasn't at all concerned about
• 7:36
  being able to find something to do, because it's never been a
• 7:39
  problem for me. And I decided I can create a new situation for
• 7:43
  myself. And I had a good reason everybody believed it. And
• 7:46
  that's great. But it's tough. That's one thing people know
• 7:49
  about me. And when I was at TPG, again, as a Senior Advisor for
• 7:53
  13 years in that meantime, helped assess companies to see
• 7:56
  whether we should buy him or not those that we bought, if I
• 8:00
  wanted to join the board, I could I could be lead director,
• 8:03
  I could be exec Chairman, I could be whatever I want it to
• 8:06
  be. But no situations, I was very clear very quickly. If I
• 8:10
  saw toxicity at the top, I had very difficult conversations
• 8:13
  with CEOs, presidents, and other BNI I have no problem doing
• 8:17
  that. I just close the door and I sit down and I say I'm about
• 8:20
  to have a very difficult conversation with you. And when
• 8:23
  you say I'm about to have a difficult conversation with you
• 8:27
  to someone, they kind of sit up, go up, something's come in, I
• 8:30
  need to in a focus and you get a very different kind of focus
• 8:34
  when you start a conversation like that. And I would tell him,
• 8:37
  not on my watch, not on TP G's investment. We're not going to
• 8:41
  do things that way. And you need to understand that. And if you
• 8:45
  have an issue with that, let's talk about how to gracefully get
• 8:48
  you out of here. And I had no problem having those difficult
• 8:52
  conversations, because I'm having with people who are
• 8:55
  inherently difficult, who have been part of the toxicity who
• 8:58
  seem to not understand what their presence is like how
• 9:01
  they're being received by other people. So I've had those times
• 9:05
  I had much those conversations.
• 9:07
  Stephanie Maas: Again, the wisdom that just comes from that
• 9:09
  so many people from a leadership perspective, talk about the
• 9:13
  difficulty of difficult conversations, and you just gave
• 9:16
  beautiful language. Hey, we're just going to have a difficult conversation.
• 9:21
  Gary Kusin: And I'll give you another lesson I learned along
• 9:24
  the way that helped me with that. Actually, that lesson came
• 9:27
  from Jack Welch. And I asked him, I was having quarterly
• 9:30
  business reviews with him. And I asked him, I was very curious. I
• 9:34
  had assembled an entirely new management team and 12 months
• 9:37
  later, I'd replaced half of them. And I said, I feel very
• 9:41
  guilty about that, Jack. And so give me give me something to
• 9:44
  think about, as I think about am I a failure at recognizing
• 9:47
  talent? What did I do wrong? Or what did I do right? And I
• 9:51
  learned from him. First of all, he said 50% is completely
• 9:54
  average. He said, I'm not gonna tell you good job, but I'm not
• 9:57
  gonna tell you a bad job either. Because when you're rebuilding a
• 10:01
  senior team from the ground up in a turnaround situation, you
• 10:04
  won't know if you lose half of them. That's, that's average. He
• 10:08
  said, Now, the second time around, since you now understand
• 10:11
  the business much more closely and the replacement kind of
• 10:15
  people, they should have different characteristics. I
• 10:18
  learned about that. But the best one I ever got was first time I
• 10:21
  ever fired anybody. It was one of those things that has stuck
• 10:25
  with me forever. So I started a new job in Sacramento for a
• 10:28
  different department store that I had started in a department
• 10:31
  store in San Francisco, they and another division in Sacramento,
• 10:35
  they offered me a big promotion to go there. My boss in the new
• 10:39
  situation, when I sat down, he said, Look, I've been here for
• 10:42
  three months longer than you and I've identified the areas that
• 10:46
  are weak, we need to make changes. And I think these few
• 10:49
  people as needed, we probably need to change them out. Figure
• 10:52
  out what you think. And let me know so one of them. I came to
• 10:56
  him said, You are right. I need to fire her. She's clearly not
• 10:59
  going to be the person to get us the next level. He said, Great.
• 11:03
  I couldn't bring myself to fire. She, you know, I was 26. She was
• 11:06
  much older. She had a family. I just couldn't I didn't know how
• 11:10
  to do it. I mean, I just didn't know how to do it. And every
• 11:13
  week at my weekly meeting, he would say, Hey, Gary, have you
• 11:17
  fired her yet? No, I haven't. Finally, six weeks later, after
• 11:20
  asking me half a dozen times. He said, You know what? I've done
• 11:24
  this for a long time. I'm obviously more experienced than
• 11:27
  you. This is not my first rodeo. I'm the one that identified or
• 11:31
  would you like me to go ahead and do that for you? And now I
• 11:34
  know I'll do it. I promise you, Marvin, I'll do it. He said,
• 11:37
  Well, I have no problem doing it. So I said, Well, gee, you
• 11:41
  know, if you have no problem doing it, maybe yeah, if you do
• 11:44
  that, that'd be great. He said, super. I'll do it. He spins
• 11:47
  around in his desk. He picks up an old desk phone a dials HR. He
• 11:51
  said, Would you please send me Gary's next paycheck? Thanks,
• 11:54
  but and he turned around, I said, What? He said, Gary, we
• 11:58
  do the stuff we like, for free, we get paid to do this stuff we
• 12:01
  don't like. And he said, that's something you don't like, I'm
• 12:05
  not gonna like it, but I won't get paid for it. If you're not
• 12:08
  going to do it. I want your pay for doing that. I said, I'll do
• 12:12
  it right away. And and that served me well then. And it
• 12:15
  served me well in conversations. Since then, when I've had those
• 12:18
  same issues, because nobody liked your first time you
• 12:21
  terminate someone, it's a nightmare. Yet, you're up all
• 12:25
  night, throwing up it just horrible. And so sometimes you
• 12:28
  need a little pep talk. And that was the one I got. And it stood
• 12:31
  me in good stead ever since.
• 12:34
  Stephanie Maas: And I think to one of the things I appreciate
• 12:37
  that I heard from you, it's just the humanity of it. If there
• 12:40
  wasn't that human element, firing people wouldn't be easy.
• 12:43
  But to your point, she was older, she had a family older
• 12:45
  than you, you know how to family. And here you are up at
• 12:48
  night, and but not forgetting the humanity side of it. It's
• 12:52
  super important. Okay, so if I'm hearing correct, so you start
• 12:56
  out kind of on one path in your career, when did you know you
• 13:00
  really had this entrepreneurial bug?
• 13:04
  Gary Kusin: I didn't know. I think it's safe to say I had no
• 13:08
  idea. I'm not sure I could spell entrepreneur. But what I'm sure
• 13:12
  of is when I graduated business school, my first desire was to
• 13:17
  figure out how to make sure my now wife would marry me if asked
• 13:21
  her to marry me. And I had mentioned to her if you could
• 13:23
  live anywhere in the she's in law school down in Texas, if you
• 13:26
  could live anywhere you wanted to live in the US, where would
• 13:29
  that be? And she didn't take long to say San Francisco. So I
• 13:32
  went back to graduate school and I wandered into the placement
• 13:36
  officer. I said, Well, what do we have in San Francisco? And it
• 13:40
  was two big department store chains. And since I've grown up
• 13:43
  my family in the retail furniture business, I said,
• 13:46
  Yeah, okay, I'll do that. And that's what I did. But once I
• 13:50
  got into the department store business, and I started to
• 13:53
  understand it in I started to go into our stores and malls. I was
• 13:58
  realizing that specialty stores were popping up in the malls
• 14:02
  that were stealing our lunch in department stores, you know,
• 14:06
  stores like the gap. All of a sudden they went our denim
• 14:09
  business, you know, Lane Bryant there when our large size
• 14:12
  business, I could run right jewelry there, Zales there when
• 14:15
  our jewelry business. And I started developing a point of
• 14:19
  view about department stores that were so fragmented with
• 14:21
  different names on in each city go to the major department
• 14:24
  stores had a different name, even though they were owned by
• 14:27
  the same large company. So I started lobbying. I started with
• 14:31
  two things. One, we're getting our lunch taken. And if you
• 14:34
  can't see it, here's the data. And there was data that just we
• 14:39
  were growing at 10%. Well, that was great. But the specialty
• 14:42
  stores were going 40 50% A year and it was crazy. It was just
• 14:47
  very obvious what was going on. And I developed a point of view
• 14:50
  that said in any category of consumer goods that reaches
• 14:55
  measurable size, measurable size being a billion dollars back at
• 14:59
  that time. I said a specialty channel will emerge that will
• 15:03
  end up being an important if not dominant channel and
• 15:06
  distribution inside that segment. And I could prove it
• 15:10
  with data. So I went on this big tear inside of Federated
• 15:13
  Department Stores, telling anyone who'd Listen, guys, we're
• 15:17
  a dinosaur heading into the swamp. And we don't have to be,
• 15:21
  if we had a national name, we could compete with the limited
• 15:25
  by being called Macy's coast to coast or picking name. But
• 15:29
  everywhere we could develop the programs, we could do everything
• 15:32
  to compete. Well, when my business school buddy, we play
• 15:36
  poker every week, and we were on the same little section there.
• 15:40
  He had just been moved to the Silicon Valley to start working
• 15:45
  with video game publishers. And he was coming through Dallas and
• 15:48
  some business. And we were dear friends. So he came over for
• 15:51
  dinner. And we sat at the kitchen table. And he showed me
• 15:55
  all the data about the coming video game, and computers in the
• 16:00
  home, all the penetration curves going back to the first record
• 16:05
  players to the first black and white TVs to the first alarm
• 16:09
  clocks, the penetration curves were the same. And he said there
• 16:13
  is no way video game machines, and the software that goes on is
• 16:18
  not going to become an enormous sector, there was not a single
• 16:22
  video game store in the world. So he's pushing on an open door
• 16:25
  with me because I have been preaching to anyone who had
• 16:28
  listened. But in any category of consumer products that reaches
• 16:32
  measurable size, the specialty store channel will be an
• 16:35
  important if not dominant channel of distribution. And I
• 16:38
  told him all that I explained, Jim, this is really interesting.
• 16:41
  Let me tell you why. And by the time we were through, it's like,
• 16:43
  Well, Jim, you got to quit your job at banking, I have to quit
• 16:47
  my job at Federated Department Stores. And we got to do this.
• 16:50
  And he's like, really, and I'm like, I go home. My wife said
• 16:56
  what I said, Hey, wait, if Jim does it because Jim was talking
• 16:59
  to the class and our business school, if Jim thinks it's a
• 17:02
  good idea, that's our insurance policy. Jim was, of course go in
• 17:06
  and tell if his buddies have kids. And being a retailer, he
• 17:09
  thinks it's a good thing. So we both quit our jobs. And the rest
• 17:12
  is history. And so we opened when we opened our first stores,
• 17:15
  the first software store in the history of the world. We had so
• 17:19
  much fun for the next 12 years until I jumped to start the
• 17:23
  cosmetics company. And we had gone public and we just bought
• 17:26
  our biggest competitor and it felt like the right time and
• 17:29
  somewhere in there. Towards the end of Babbage's I realized I
• 17:33
  could do something else. And I just enjoyed the intellectual
• 17:37
  stimulation of coming up with what is the what's the
• 17:41
  hypothesis? Or what's the investment thesis if you're in
• 17:43
  private equity coming at something very rationally, and I
• 17:47
  had been meeting because I still had a little bit of department
• 17:50
  store blood in my veins had been meeting quarterly with the CEO
• 17:54
  of Neiman Marcus back then who was here in Dallas, he lived
• 17:57
  down the street from me. And I'd ask him anything new. And he
• 18:00
  would always say nope, nothing new, nothing new. But all of a
• 18:03
  sudden, one one time at lunch, he said, Let me tell you about
• 18:05
  this company called MAC Cosmetics. And I had cosmetic
• 18:10
  responsibility. And when he's talking to me, my brain started
• 18:13
  working. Oh my gosh, and I and I had a whole idea about what it
• 18:17
  might mean. And that's when I figured out I'm probably more of
• 18:19
  an entrepreneur than I give myself credit for being and
• 18:22
  that's where we went from there.
• 18:23
  Stephanie Maas: That is awesome. That is one of the coolest
• 18:27
  stories. Oh my gosh, we shift gears ever so slightly. You talk
• 18:31
  about you know, 1000 hours in mentorship conversation. And
• 18:36
  that's you mentoring others, correct?
• 18:39
  Gary Kusin: Yes, I probably needed it for myself. But I was
• 18:41
  too dumb to know better.
• 18:43
  Stephanie Maas: You're doing just fine. I think so. Talk me
• 18:45
  through both sides of that. When do you recommend that somebody
• 18:49
  starts looking at a mentor? What do you look for in a mentor? How
• 18:53
  do you know they're the right person? What are the
• 18:56
  expectations to get out of that? And then we'll go to the flip
• 18:59
  side about where you focus, etc.
• 19:02
  Gary Kusin: Well, I think it's important to know that and I
• 19:06
  will tell you as I got into mentoring, it was very organic,
• 19:09
  is people I had worked with, who was family members, it was a it
• 19:14
  was people who knew me, who called me and said I've got this
• 19:18
  thing going on and I need some I need some advice. And that's how
• 19:22
  it's kind of started as opposed to I never have mentored someone
• 19:26
  that's we're going to meet once a quarter we're gonna go to
• 19:28
  Starbucks, we're going to that's not me. But the last few years
• 19:32
  is the pace of this has picked up and I've started realizing
• 19:37
  actually the dangers of some mentoring. I am becoming more of
• 19:43
  a student of mentoring. And they all just tell you I have some
• 19:47
  real issues with the use of the word mentoring and corporations
• 19:53
  who as part of their leadership and development,
• 19:55
  organizationally, set up mentoring relationships now I'm
• 19:59
  in favor We've all heard because it sounds good. And it should be
• 20:03
  part of any leadership development. But there is a very
• 20:06
  large risk. I know from the other side of the table as a CEO
• 20:10
  of companies that had 25,000 or more employees, I have seen what
• 20:15
  bad things can happen if you use the word mentor. And let me
• 20:19
  just, these are not exact numbers. But I'm going to say
• 20:23
  somewhere between a third and 40% of the times that I have
• 20:28
  gotten a call from someone in a corporate setting, who really
• 20:32
  needed to talk with something about me, at least a third to
• 20:35
  40% of them had to do with hostile environment had to do
• 20:42
  with the legal goings on. And so let me tell you why I
• 20:46
  immediately get very upset about that. Now imagine if you are a
• 20:51
  mentor, and I am your mentee. And I tell you, I don't know
• 20:56
  what to do with this. But my friend and my peer is having an
• 21:01
  affair with my boss. Now, let's just say in that situation, you
• 21:06
  are dear friends with that boss, and you can't believe what you
• 21:09
  just heard. Now you are in trouble because you have a duty
• 21:15
  as a senior officer of a big corporation to report to HR if
• 21:21
  there's malfeasance hostile environment, anything like that?
• 21:25
  Well, if it's a third to 40% of every mentoring situation, it's
• 21:33
  my belief that companies should not use the word mentor mentee,
• 21:36
  it suggests a confidentiality it suggests, which is not true. It
• 21:43
  can't be true in a corporate environment. But it suggests
• 21:47
  things that can't be delivered. And especially if my heart goes
• 21:52
  out to young people in a career trying to build a career for
• 21:57
  themselves, who maybe they stumbled into relationship with
• 22:02
  someone higher up in the company, or who knows, I've seen
• 22:05
  every permutation of this you can do. But so I'm an advocate
• 22:10
  of using the word coach. And and this isn't just semantics,
• 22:14
  because if you asked 100 people what it means to be a mentor and
• 22:18
  100 people what it means to be a coach, you're going to get a
• 22:21
  very narrowed scope for a coach. There's something very specific,
• 22:25
  they've got a very specific skill set. And they can teach
• 22:29
  that. So maybe there's a workgroup in an in an area in
• 22:32
  the IT area that's coding, and doesn't quite, you know, they
• 22:36
  got to work through things. Well, their coach should have
• 22:38
  been there before. So they can sit down and tell people, okay,
• 22:41
  in this situation, here's what you did. And you can multiply
• 22:44
  that by every functional area of a company because the coach has
• 22:48
  a very narrow purview. And as a potential mentee, I don't have
• 22:52
  to tell you, if you're my coach, about something about there,
• 22:56
  someone just got a kickback in my work group, and they're
• 22:59
  gonna, and they're gonna open a restaurant with it. I mean, I've
• 23:02
  seen that one too. So I worry a lot. A lot of the people that in
• 23:07
  the corporate environments who have ended up on my doorstep
• 23:10
  wasn't their first doorstep. They realized in their mentoring
• 23:14
  session, oh, you know, red flag goes up, and I can't, I can't
• 23:19
  have this conversation. But I need to have it because I don't
• 23:22
  know what to do. And that's where they end up on my
• 23:25
  doorstep. And that's why I have this thing about mentoring is
• 23:31
  not so wonderful. If it's not really thought out upfront. And
• 23:36
  what could go wrong. All those issues, Jelena who's my co host
• 23:41
  on INR. Our podcast is about mentoring. And in fact, it's
• 23:44
  eavesdropping on mentoring sessions we're having with
• 23:47
  people so the listener can hear honest God real mentoring
• 23:50
  sessions, we are talking about having CEO and we both know a
• 23:54
  bunch of them CEOs of really interesting companies on to talk
• 23:58
  with them about leadership and development on their watch. How
• 24:01
  do they think about it, throw out this hot sports opinion I
• 24:05
  have about mentoring being risky, and get feedback, because
• 24:10
  maybe I'm wrong. You know, maybe they're maybe there ways that
• 24:13
  they do it. That is safer. But I'd never paid attention.
• 24:18
  Because I wasn't out there advertising myself as a mentor.
• 24:22
  I was just getting inbound. And the more inbounds I got, the
• 24:25
  more I got and it grew. And then next thing I know the people
• 24:28
  that I talked to three years ago call and say, Hey, you helped me
• 24:31
  three years ago, I got a bigger situation now. And next thing
• 24:35
  you know, I've been mentoring some people for 15 years, but
• 24:38
  only episodic and only if it's something that they didn't see
• 24:42
  coming and they really it's an issue.
• 24:45
  Stephanie Maas: This has been super cool. I so appreciate your
• 24:48
  time as we kind of start thinking about wrapping up
• 24:52
  anything else we haven't touched on that you want to make sure
• 24:56
  that we do?
• 24:57
  Gary Kusin: No, I read your website. And I've listened in to
• 25:00
  some of the things you put up on YouTube. And it's, I'm so glad
• 25:04
  you guys do this. I mean, I think this is I think what y'all
• 25:08
  are doing is awesome. There is something that I feel close to
• 25:12
  when I hire people, you talk about helping people get better
• 25:16
  and intensity and all that. And how do you get the energy up to
• 25:20
  do what needs to be done? We put a big accent on this. When I've,
• 25:24
  in companies I'm involved in on hiring, what do you look for?
• 25:28
  And because I think so much of this can be if you are
• 25:31
  interviewing against that as a skill set, you stand a better
• 25:35
  chance of having people come into the company that are
• 25:38
  emotionally set up for what you want to do. And for instance, in
• 25:43
  a in a turnaround situation, like like we had at Kinkos, we
• 25:46
  interviewed for kind of four things as mission critical and
• 25:50
  that we have to have a point of view after you spend an hour
• 25:54
  with a potential new person in the company, you got to have a
• 25:58
  point of view about these things. One is energy level. Did
• 26:02
  they feel like they had energy that I feel like they're gonna
• 26:05
  bring it every day to work? intellectual curiosity? Okay,
• 26:09
  did I? Did I ask interesting questions? Do they wonder about
• 26:13
  things three, and this is really important, I'll tell you why
• 26:17
  this is my most high aspiration. If I'm interviewing someone, and
• 26:21
  I say, what is your, what's your end of the rainbow job. And
• 26:25
  they, if they say something like your job, I want your job. It's
• 26:29
  like, boom, you're hired, because I need someone with
• 26:32
  really high aspirations. And then the fourth, which sounds a
• 26:36
  little weird, but I found it to really be true. If I talk to
• 26:40
  someone, and I don't feel like they're driven to win, that's
• 26:44
  fine. As long as I do feel that they will refuse to lose. And
• 26:48
  those are two very different thoughts. Because sometimes
• 26:51
  people who are hyper competitive and they got a win, win, win,
• 26:55
  win win, well, maybe they're too much, maybe too much glass is
• 26:59
  gonna get broken. But if someone refuses to lose, that's a
• 27:03
  different thing. That's when they're, when they're in the
• 27:06
  middle of the night, and they're thinking about something they
• 27:10
  are no, I'm not gonna let this happen. And when I mentioned the
• 27:14
  highest aspiration, the most probably the most proud thing,
• 27:18
  and I'll leave it at this that I've had in my business career.
• 27:22
  13 people on my turnaround team at Kinkos are CEOs. And that, to
• 27:26
  me is a incredible tribute to them. Because they were all of
• 27:30
  these they refuse to lose at a minimum. They had high
• 27:33
  aspirations. They were intellectually curious and they
• 27:37
  made stuff happen. High energy, it works.
• 27:40
  Stephanie Maas: That's incredible. And thank you so
• 27:42
  much for sharing that and I really appreciate your time and
• 27:45
  availability today. This has been for lack of a better word
• 27:48
  energizing, but also very insightful. So thank you, Gary.
• 27:52
  Gary Kusin: You bet. Thanks for having me.