Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:08 After reading, endless articles about Elon Musk with journalists pontificating on their opinions about what he's doing. I'd like to create some clarity around the idea of the role of business leadership in politics and society. And first let's talk about business people. I happen to be one, I know a lot of business people and we're all pretty much the same. The reason we go into business start companies create products, pioneer and innovate is because we wanna solve problems. We see problems in the economy, in society, in our communities, in our ecosystems, we see an opportunity to do something new and creative and we go after it and we measure our success by getting things done. And I would argue that Elon Musk is exactly that type of person in some sense, he's the Ben Franklin of our day. He has virtually invented the electric vehicle market with the interest of creating sustainable energy around the world.
Speaker 1 00:01:09 He pioneered and has certainly promoted very heavily the idea of commercial spacecraft to possibly populate another planet. When this planet is burned out, which will eventually happen. His business, the boring company is an absolutely fascinating engineering solution to transportation. If you understand the engineering of transportation, it is absolutely spectacularly, good idea. And now he wants to take his ingenuity and apply it to Twitter. And Twitter has the potential. It's not gonna be easy to become a global communication system. Similar to maybe mob bell was in the 1960s and 1970s. And he is probably gonna try to get us there. And I do believe that at the end of this, Twitter will be a better product and a better company and probably a better business. And if I analyze what I see from Elon Musk, not knowing him, he's a brilliant, somewhat autistic engineer. He sees problems.
Speaker 1 00:02:12 He sees them clearly. He wants to solve them. He probably doesn't think about the people issues immediately. Those probably come secondarily to him, as you can see from some of the decisions he's made, but he ultimately is a problem solver. And thank God we have people like him because he's solving some of the biggest problems in the world now. And by the way, most business people are just like that. I mean, most of the business people I know are ultimately problem solvers. And when they solve a meaningful problem in a productive way, they generate a profit and they use the profit to plow back into the business to solve more problems. It's not evil. It's not, AATI, it's not people taking away money from employees. They're simply solving problems. But of course the counterpart to all of this business activity is society. And as most of you know, we're in a period of time where we have a lot of societal issues, not only do we have a war, we have income inequality.
Speaker 1 00:03:13 We have global warming, environmental sustainability, diversity, and inequity and inclusion in the United States, a political system that doesn't really work or the minority rules, the majority, and a lot of unrest and mistrust in the political system and in the media in general. So those of us in the business community have to operate in this environment. Now you can choose to be like Ian Rand in Atlas shrugged, and you can ignore it and you can just check out. But that doesn't really work because CEOs of companies like Disney find out that their employees are upset about a system or a decision that's been made in the political environment. And they have to take action and they have to take a position. In fact, if you read the most recent Edelman trust barometer, which I find fascinating, they make a very strong argument that in the current day and age, when we have such mistrust in the political system and in the media, and by the way, journalists too, that the only trusted institutions left that can stand up for the right decisions are business leaders.
Speaker 1 00:04:22 And so it is becoming harder and harder for those of us who us who are business people not to weigh in, in some fashion on these cultural, political and societal issues. In the case of Elon musky. I think he does a pretty good job of staying out of it, but he's got some opinions and they're pretty well known. And for those of you that are HR people, business people, or C-level executives, you know, Doug on well that you have to be very careful what you say, but you wanna make an impact. And in the interest of getting things done, which is what business is all about. Oftentimes we do try to make decisions in the public domain and many business people actually go into politics, which is a completely different beast. Now, the counterpart to all of us as running our companies and taking care of our employees is the political institutions around us.
Speaker 1 00:05:17 The regulatory bodies, the legislative bodies, the judicial bodies. They don't look as efficient or as effective or as transparent as our companies because they're not politics is based on opinion. It's based on messaging. It's based on trends. There's all sorts of other aspects to it. I'm certainly not going to judge it because without a political system, we would have nothing but fighting. So as much as you may not like the nature of the political system, it is the alternative to us, just yelling and screaming at each other all the time, anytime a decision needs to be made. So you have to respect it for what it is, but we're in an era right now where the two worlds are coming together. And here's why for those of you in the business world and HR people. And I think that's most of you listening to this podcast, you know, very well from the podcast I just published last week, that employees, workers, citizens are really under stress.
Speaker 1 00:06:19 We have unprecedented inflation. We have a very, very competitive labor market. We have massive amounts of social stress, personal stress, psychological stress, and only 40% of Americans believe their lives will be better five years from now. We've pretty much hollowed out the middle class. And this is a sad state of affair because the middle class is what made the United States. It was the middle class that my parents were part of. And most of you that are my age grew up in where your fathers and mothers and other adults in your family felt that they could go to work, put their kids to college, buy a house and create a better life. We don't operate like that in the United States anymore. Most people in the middle class are barely getting BI. And so we've become a bifurcated society. And that's a problem that needs to be addressed too.
Speaker 1 00:07:13 And we face it in our workforce. Why do we have unions and pushback by employees in labor, in retail, in distribution, in all sorts of hourly in nursing jobs, because people want more, they want to have a better life. It's pretty simple. It's really not that complicated. And in a company where you're generating a reasonable profit, which by the way most companies are right now, it's okay to give employees a raise. It's okay to give employees even greater benefits. It's okay to give employees childcare. It's okay to give employees healthcare, okay, to give employees other things. If you feel it's the right way to allocate your resources. And those are in some sense, citizenship decisions that we make in the goal of building a culture inside of our companies, that's the kind of culture we want to have in society. You know, one of the ways to rationalize this balance between being a business operator and being a politician or a culture leader, is the fact that even if you don't want to get involved in the external political decisions going on around you, you actually are in a culture in your company.
Speaker 1 00:08:29 Every company is a society and the way people talk to each other, the way people share and help each other, the way people compete or don't compete to work together, the tone and nature of communications between people, the hierarchy, the pay equity, the sense of inclusion and belonging. Those are really issues of not only your culture, but your own little society in your company. And as those of you who are consultants know different companies are different types of societies. There are some companies that are hypercompetitive doggie, dog societies, and people join those companies knowing full well that that's the culture they're going to be a part of. They expect to get paid better for that culture. And they volunteer to be a part of that because there is some benefit to them, or it's just the way they wanna live their lives. There are other cultures, oftentimes healthcare education companies and others, which are almost the opposite where they're really caring, giving, supporting environments.
Speaker 1 00:09:38 And yes, they make a profit. Maybe they don't make as much of a margin as the more dog eat dog kinds of cultures, but they make a profit and they attract people that want that kind of a life. And that kind of a career. You get to decide which one you are. And interestingly enough, as I was writing my book irresistible, which is coming out this year, I realized that companies go through cycles. Many companies start with very altruistic entrepreneurial ideas, oftentimes a charismatic founder who came up with a good idea and pushes it through, brings it to market and creates a fast growing company. And then at some point the company slows down, a competitor catches up and the organization tightens the screws and tries to figure out what to do next, for example, what's going on at Facebook right now. And the culture changes.
Speaker 1 00:10:28 Sometimes the culture becomes hyper competitive. Sometimes the culture becomes very blame oriented. Sometimes the culture becomes very team oriented. It might bring people together. And one of the most interesting things on opportunities you have as a business leader and as an HR person is to diagnose where you are on this continuum and try to make a collective decision on where you need to go. Next companies that are altruistic and social oriented survive many, many, many years look at companies like Unilever at companies like Ikea companies that have been well-meaning institutions from the beginning. They tend to last decades, even centuries because they adapt to transformational complex changes by their culture in a sustainable way. Companies that shift cultures over time are much harder to sustain. GE is a good example. Most of the at IBM is a good example, to be honest, the company that I spent most of my early career in these are companies that have been culturally whip side by different leaders.
Speaker 1 00:11:40 And the boards of these companies have made decisions to bring in different leaders at different points of time to adapt and adjust the company in a particular way, only in interest of making the company successful and their cultures have changed. Do another good example of this is Microsoft. When Microsoft was run by bill gates and Steve bomber, as most of you know, it was a very competitive, very doggy dog company. Now it's very different. Now it's very much of a growth learning and collaborative organization and it's served them very, very well. So the reason I made this podcast is honestly, I'm almost a little bit tired of reading articles about Elon Musk and what he's trying to do to society. I don't think it's nearly as complicated as it may appear. Here's a man who in his own unique way really wants to solve some big problems in the world.
Speaker 1 00:12:30 He's got more than his share of brain power to do it. He's clearly a good leader. He may not be the most likable human being, but he has a lot of followers. He has a lot of employees, a lot of executives who work for him and do some pretty amazing things. And he likely sees a communication system. That's been underutilized in the name of Twitter and he thinks he can fix it and more power to him. You know, Twitter is a funky thing, uh, of all the social network companies that I've been sort of involved in and using. It's the one that's probably been the most stagnant, really hasn't changed at all. Since it was founded, the stock price virtually went nowhere for its entire life. Yet people still try to use it because it has some unique characteristics that people like and let's applaud people like Elon Musk for doing what they do. Let's allow them to operate with a certain degree of freedom and make sure that we all bring this code of responsibility, ethics, trust, and caring for the society to all of our jobs, whether we be in HR, in business management or in senior leadership. Thank you.
