Full Transcript: Robert Joss on Top 10 Life Lessons (Last Lecture Series)

The rules, he said, matter a great deal.”

Shackleton said, you know, the game has to be played fairly, or it’s no game at all. And even to win the game is not the chief end. The chief end is to win it honorably and splendidly. And in Shackleton’s mind, honorably and splendidly meant living it by his values, the things that mattered most to him, by his rules.

Now, those of you who know cricket know, it’s got a lot of rules. But another thing about cricket that I think is relevant, it’s a long game. You know, life ebbs and flows. And endurance is a virtue. Stamina is very important. Work at staying in shape — work at staying in shape physically, mentally, emotionally. In many respects, your determination and your drive will have as much to do with your life as your DNA.

Like cricket it’s a long game. You need to pace yourself. And another thing a well known cricket commentator observed is that in addition to being a long game where perseverance and resilience and patience are critical, it’s a game where he said, nothing happens and then everything happens. Again, only a true cricket aficionados might appreciate this. But applying it to life, I can tell you that often, out of the blue, that big opportunity or that big challenge hits you in the face, you can’t plan your life. You can’t plan your career, but you can plan to be prepared, and preparation is an awfully key aspect.

Number 9: Life is too short to deal with “bad” people

“A reputation of 1000 years may be determined by the conduct of one hour.” – Japanese proverb

Number nine. Now this is a lesson that I got over and over again from our CEO at Wells Fargo, Carl Reichardt. He liked to say this. I don’t think Carl necessarily believed the world was divided into good people and bad people but we all grew up understanding that there were people with very bad behaviors. You know, and life is too short. You don’t have to deal with people who are abusive, people who are dishonest, people who are unethical. You can just say no. In fact, you better just say no.

You know, in banking where you make loans every day, you take deposits every day, you accept investments, you have a lot of opportunities to say yes and no. Even at the GSB, when raising money, there are times when it’s appropriate to say no because the motivation isn’t right. And I think this lesson, aside from saving you an awful lot of unpleasantness, can also save you. Because — oh, we’re going backwards — Because your reputation is everything. And you’ve got to guard it scrupulously.

For me, a corollary to this life’s too short lesson, has been another one I’ve always applied, which is, don’t sign something you haven’t read, don’t sign something you don’t understand, or that you don’t agree with. Life’s too short.

This is another Wells Fargoism. This is a– this is a slogan or a phrase, it’s still very much a part of the company today. And it’s something that we began adopting when we wanted very much to change the culture from one that was more bureaucratic to one with a real sense of accountability.

You know, when you think about a small store, and you encounter the person that owns that store, you have a much different experience and encounter than when you’re dealing with a temporary, hired clerk. That sense of ownership. That comes from true ownership is a very real and different behavior that we all recognize and we all appreciate. Run it like you own it. Spend it like it was your own money, not somebody else’s, or somebody else’s enterprise. Whenever you’re in charge of something, anything, anywhere, any group, if you adopt that ownership mindset and mentality, it serves you well.

Number 8: Run it like you own it

After all — next Johnny — leadership is not about fame and fortune and power, it is about responsibility. And it’s a responsibility for the group that you have inherited. It’s a responsibility for helping that group to be better, to helping that group to do better, and that’s that same responsibility that an owner feels of his or her establishment. That is often missing when you come to somebody working for a large organization.

Now, the challenge in a big organization is if you can get everyone and every group to have that same ownership mindset you see in a small shop or a small business. If everyone in the group can adopt and have that kind of sense of run it like you own it, you create a culture and a climate of discipline and accountability that has enormous power and energy for the enterprise.

Another thing about running like you own it, next Johnny, is that when you have that sort of mindset attention to detail really matters. You know, in that post Enron and WorldCom world we got Sarbanes-Oxley. And a lot of people love to complain and winge about Sarbanes-Oxley, too much paperwork, too many rules. And yet, at the same time you would see CEOs in front of Congress, saying, well Mr. Congressman, understanding the accounting wasn’t part of my job. And that lack of ownership, if you will, of the details, is a real sign of difficulty. If it was your business, you’d want it to be in control. You would want it to be under good control, without surprises. That’s not micro managing, but it is investing the time that it takes to really understand what’s going on in the operation.

You can’t manage and lead something you don’t understand. And a final point about ownership — next Johnny — is that just like the owner of a small enterprise, when you have something that you own, people will watch what you do. They’ll watch how you do it. Much more than they’ll listen to what you say. And in particular, they’ll watch what you pay attention to, because leaders really do cast long shadows. So, run it like you own it.

Number 7: Don’t forget to manage side-ways

Number seven. This one, I think, is particularly important for GSB graduates. I know it was for me in my career life. You know, when you think about leadership and management, you often think, we think about leading a team, leading a group. And it’s our group that we’re responsible for, and you think you spend most of your time managing downward. Working with a team, building a, a lot of excitement and enthusiasm, building loyalty, and commitment, and achieving whatever it is that that team’s about to achieve. So we spend a lot of time managing down, and yes, there’s an understanding that, you know, I should spend some of my time managing up. The boss needs to know what’s going on. The board needs to be aware of what’s going on. The regulators need to know what’s going on. But this kind of, we have an up and down mindset, often.

And yet we often forget, next, that wherever you find yourself, you’re always part of some team. You need to manage these relationships with peers and other team members. You want to be part of a winning organization. That means you need the strongest team possible. That means other parts have to do just as well as your group if you’re going to be successful. Even a CEO is part of a team called the Board of Directors. A dean of a school is part of a team, the executive cabinet of the university.

And another way of viewing this, I think, is on the next slide. You know, don’t be so competitive that you just stick to that narrow job description of your own job. Wherever you are, think about your unit, yes. But, the entire company, and if you are in charge of your entire company, think about your industry. And if you are an industry leader, think about your country, or your world in terms of the way your mind operates and works. Don’t forget to manage sideways, it’s a big world out there.

Number 6: Don’t take yourself too seriously

Number six. I’m sure the number one reason that leaders fail is because of hubris. They take themselves too seriously, as I would put here. In other words, they stop listening, they stop learning, they start believing in their own unique importance, they forget that an awful lot of success has to do with luck and timing, the work of others. You leave here, I know, with great confidence, and you should have great confidence, given who you are, and all that you’ve done, and what you know as you leave here, you should have self-confidence.

But there’s always a fine line between confidence and arrogance. And on the next slide, you know, don’t let yourself cross that line. Leadership is about earning followers. People want to follow a genuine leader, they don’t want to follow a self-proclaimed, self-important one. That’s not who you want to follow and that’s not who you want to be when you’re interested in motivating and attracting other people to your cause.

You know, in his book, Good to Great, our alum Jim Collins who taught here and obviously got his MBA here. And this is one of the what, 25 best selling business books of all time. He coined this term Level 5 Leadership and in Jim’s concept of Level 5 Leadership, it was not arrogance but humility that he saw in these people combined with a very, very disciplined focus on the organization’s needs. In other words, take your job seriously. Take the group and its needs seriously. Just don’t take yourself that seriously when it comes to attributing what’s making all this happen.

And I think another way to keep yourself humble is, stay close to people at the entry level, stay around people that are smarter than you. Stay around people that will give you honest feedback. Feedback is one of life’s great gifts. Feedback man you know, is right, that’s absolutely. When you’re lucky enough to get honest feedback, treat it as what it is: one of life’s great gifts. Stay around the University, it gives you great perspective on the future.

Number 5: Without fear — there is no courage

Number five. I’m not sure who actually came up with this saying. You find it a lot if you look on the Web and Google it. I don’t know who the original source was. But I heard it at one time, and it had a lot of resonance for me. You know, there are a lot of powerful emotions in life. There’s greed, and there’s envy. And fear is certainly one of them. And fear can impact us in a number of ways. It can cause you to withdraw and just not deal with a situation. It can cause you to freeze, in the sense you just can’t decide and you can’t move. But it can also give you the courage to act, to risk, to change when change is appropriate, to change yourself when change is required.

My wife said to me, you know, fear can paralyze you or it can energize you. And it can energize you to seek those changes in your life that are really critical, when it’s time for you to make a change. And in doing so be prepared, I think in three dimensions. Number one, the next slide, be prepared to take intelligent risks, as I would call them. Here, use your powers of analysis. What am I afraid of? Why am I afraid? What’s the worst case that can happen? Have I got it covered? There is an approach to problem solving, an analysis that I would call intelligence, an intelligent risk taking. And use that power of analysis to unlock some of the fear.

But also be prepared to trust your instincts. How does it feel? In addition to what does my analysis show, and it’s that combination I think of your analysis and your gut feeling that can give you the courage to act when action is called for. And finally, you don’t have to be alone in all this. I remember when I went to the first parent’s weekend at my daughter’s undergraduate college, and the person up front speaking said to the parents, as we were sitting out there, well you know, we’re trying to get these young men and women to understand that asking for help is an act of independence. It’s not a sign of weakness. And I thought, as a wonderful sentiment you know, I heard that now, almost 25 years ago. But it’s so true and yet it’s so often not accepted or practiced. We see it as a sign of weakness.

Linda Hill in her studies of MBA graduates of the Harvard Business School go off to the their first time jobs as managers or in managerial roles which can be a real struggle. A lot of difficulty in terms of, why am I having so much problem here? She said in fewer than half the cases, would people actually ask for help, which is pretty amazing. You don’t have to face these fears alone. You can ask for help. It’s not a sign of weakness. It is an act of independence.

Number 4: Life is full of “character building experiences”

Number four. I had a wonderful director at Westpac named Chris Stewart, and every time we seem to confront the most difficult problems and challenges, the kind that led to sleep deprivation and cause your stomach to churn a bit he would have a smile on his face, and say, this is such a character building experience. I didn’t necessarily find it all that amusing at the time, but I came to appreciate over and over again, just how right he was. And you know, in particular when I reviewed the literature and the research on adult learning, and you realize, adults learn most of what they learn through experience, and in particular, they learn the most, we learn the most when we have to acquire a skill or develop a behavior that’s necessary for us to accomplish something that’s really important to us. That’s when we learn the most. And that is almost always without question when you step outside your comfort zone. That’s when you get these character-building experiences.

So don’t stay in that zone too long. You’ve got to stretch yourself. Give yourself a cold call. You need these experiences. You’ll learn the most from these experiences. They will do the most for you in life. And then when you have these experiences, the key is to learn from them. You know, how often do we see two people have a pretty similar experience? And yet you can see a huge difference in the way people might react or learn from that experience. There is the experience. There is the feedback hopefully you might get. There’s the listening you might do. In particular, there’s the reflection. Now what was this experience trying to teach me?

And then, learning from that and integrating it into who you are and growing, and really reinventing yourself. Becoming a different person as a consequence of that experience. You know, learnings — learnings are not possessions like diplomas that you put in a drawer or frame on the wall. Learnings are things that you integrate into your life and who you are. And change yourself because of what you’ve learned.

I had a boss, a different boss at Wells Fargo. Not Carl Riker but another CEO who said, you know, I’ve got to leave you in this job long enough so that your mistakes bites you in the rear end. And again like the character building experience of my director, I didn’t necessarily get it until I started to have some mistakes that bit me right where he said. And in particular, I hired the wrong person in a very important role and how do you learn to hire people? Usually by hiring the wrong person, that’s the first thing. And having to live with that and work your way out of it so that you don’t make the same mistake twice. So there is a certain resilience that comes from having to learn from experience.

Number 3: Find the words

Number three. This comes from my great, great friend and role model and somebody that was such an inspiration: John Gardner. John taught here at the business school. He taught at the Ed school. He passed away about eight years ago. But one of America’s great human beings. And John had a wonderful phrase, you know? He said “Leaders find the words.” Leaders find the words. And he was talking about the fact that leadership is about earning followers. And you earn followers through honest communication. A communication that connects with people. And the only way you know if it’s connecting is to try the words and to try different words. And it rarely works with that first set of words that you might try. And it could be the second or the third or beyond. It might be a story. It might be an analogy. It might be relating it to whatever connects with the audience. Leaders find the words.

You know, it’s interesting at the reunion here just a few weeks ago, one of the students that was in my seminar last year, he came up to me, he said you know, we had to lay-off 40% of the people where I work and I kept thinking over and over again what you said in the seminar, leaders find the words and he really worked, he said I worked so hard at finding the right things to say. It’s not a big speech, it’s not about a big speech, it’s often best to think of it as just an honest conversation.

As someone once observed in the next slide, you know, after all life is an endless series of conversations. It’s so true, that’s how you build relationships, is through conversation. And it’s building relationships that is the essence of how you lead people and organizations. It is all about building relationships with the people. So if someone asks you to give a talk or asks you to teach, do it. You’ll find the words. I know.

Number 2: Use CAT and GSB learning throughout your life

Number two. Use critical analytical thinking and the GSB learning throughout your life. It works. You know, we had a former faculty member here who used to delight in saying to the classes as they left, he’d say, you know you’re not as smart as you think you are, but you’ve learned a lot more here than you know.

I went abroad in Australia of a company. We had a young general counsel there. A couple of years ago, she said to me, you know, I’ve noticed that you always seem to have the right question. It just gets right to the heart of the issue. Just enough to cause the management team to squirm a little bit because they haven’t nailed it down, but get to the issue and get us to solve a really difficult challenge. She said to me, how do you learn to do that? And I thought to myself, well I think it starts at the GSB. That’s where it started. You know, that’s where I learned to think very clearly about well what’s the problem? Why is it a problem? What are the alternative solutions to the problem? How are we going to go about evaluating those alternatives and get to a decision that seems to make sense? It’s a real skill, a real learning, and then to take that learning and translate that into a skill that you develope through practice. You know lots and lots of reviews, listening to a lot of people. Beginning to recognize patterns when you pose a question, and you really can develop the art of asking great questions.

Ron Heifetz, who’s a leadership scholar at the Kennedy School, had a marvelous phrase that I think is really, really great. He said, you know, one can lead with no more than a question in hand, and it is often so true, that, asking that penetrating question that you learn to get a start on here, is the real beginning in leadership.

Number 1: Don’t forget to renew yourself

Number one, I’d like to talk with you in this last point about personal renewal. You know, John Gardner, who said leaders find the words, was passionate about leadership, but his other passion was about something he called personal renewal. And particularly later in his life, after he was about 70, he was quite interested, he wrote some of the most interesting things, I think, some of the most insightful about personal renewal.

And what John observed was, he said, you know, I’m puzzled. I’m puzzled why some men and women go to seed. And others remain vital all throughout their lives. He said I’m not talking about a failure to get to the top in some achievement. He said that’s not the point anyway. He agreed with Shackleton on this. That’s not the point. But he said I’m talking about people who, for whatever reason, stop learning and growing. And they’re operating far below the level of their potential. It is, John said, as if their clock stopped. Now he observed, most people enjoy learning and growing. And to do that, it’s critical. It’s very important to make a periodic self assessment. How am I doing in the learning and growing department? It starts with that awareness. Awareness is a key because if you’re going to make a change, if you’re going to fix the course you’re on to a better course, if you’re going to get that clock, that maybe is slowing down rewound. You have to start with that assessment. How am I doing in the learning and growing department? And I hope you’ll do that periodically throughout your life.

But I also hope when you engage in such assessment that you won’t be too hard on yourself. That’s something John cautioned, don’t be too hard on yourself. He said, someone once observed that life is the art of drawing without an eraser. He said it’s good to look back for lessons learned, but look forward for optimism, for change, for confidence. But above all, when making those assessments, don’t imagine that the story is over. Life, John said, has a lot of chapters. Just keep learning, learning is not just for young people, learning is a life long journey. Learn from your mistakes. As he said, we all want to be interesting, we want to be interesting people. And the way to be interesting is to be interested.

So be interested, be curious, care about things, risk failure, and reach out to other people. Life, John said, is not a mountain that has a summit, and it’s not a game that has a final score. It is, he said, an endless unfolding, it’s an endless process of self-discovery. It’s an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and they are much greater than you can ever imagine. Our own potentialities and life situations in which we find ourselves. The challenges will keep changing. But life pulls things out of you. He took particular delight in examples of people who were over 70 and, or at least in that age group, and kept opening new chapters.

John-Paul the 23rd was made Pope when he was 76 years old, but he launched the most vigorous renewal of the Church that had been seen in a century. Winston Churchill was 66 when he became Prime Minister in 1940. You know a friend of Churchill said he was a man who jaywalked through life. But as John observed, you know, it’s okay to be a late bloomer, if you don’t miss the flower show. And Churchill didn’t miss it.

Ronald Reagan turned 70 two weeks before, or two weeks after his first inauguration. Life has many chapters if you allow them to open. And above all as John said, we all want a life of meaning. We want our lives to have meaning. And he said, look meaning is not something you stumble across, you have to build meaning into your life. And you build that meaning into your life by the commitments that you make. Perhaps your commitment will be to your life’s work, perhaps to your loved ones, perhaps to your religion, perhaps to your fellow human beings, the important thing is that they be commitments beyond yourself.

Now as John said, self-preoccupation is a prison, and the key to getting out of that prison, are these commitments to something beyond yourself. When we’re young we search for identity, who am I and what will my identity be, and as John said, your identity is what you’ve committed yourself to. And it is so much the case at any point in your life where your commitments are, becomes your identity. And at any moment in time that may simply mean just doing a better job at what you’re doing. That may be your commitment and that’s a great commitment.

As John said, in a marvelous phrase that’s been quoted over and over again, some men and women make the world a better place just by being the kind of people they are. They have the gift of kindness, or courage, or loyalty, or integrity and to be that kind of person would be worth all the years of living and learning.

So keep learning, never stop. Keep trying, pick yourself up when you fall. Stay interested, so that you’ll be interesting. Stay involved, but above all make and keep commitments, commitments to things greater than you. So you can keep building meaning, into your lives. And my greatest wish tonight for each of you, for each of you, would be a life with meaning. And I take great comfort in knowing that such lives will make the world a better place.

So that’s my top ten. And I thank you for the privilege of being invited to give a last lecture to the class of 2010. Thank you.

Question-and-answer session

Audience: Could you talk a little bit about the capability of students? I know recently

Robert Joss: Being here at the school, and yeah. Yeah we certainly had a situation starting in the fall of ‘08 when we can see our endowment revenues were going to be down, and our giving was going to be down and the last thing I — you know, this was my last year and I didn’t want to turn the school over to the new dean with the expenses going up and the revenues going this way. And I guess I’d had the benefit of living through quite a few recessions and ups and downs and recognizing, again that’s this pattern recognition. Recognizing that the best way to deal with these situations is to deal quickly, you know, confront reality and deal with it.

I had a director at Wells Fargo who actually was the dean of the business school at the time R.J. Miller, famed for friends of R.J. Miller. And R.J. had a wonderful saying at the board. He’d say, you know, if you have to cut off a dog’s tail, do it once. Don’t do it an inch at a time for the poor dog, you know. And it’s painful but we also knew look the best thing is to get it right sized, the way it should be. We ended up having to lay off 50 staff people. Make some decisions about what would stay open and not but to figure the priorities, make the move, do it and get on with it, and it’s never easy, it’s never easy. I think having done it a few times and know you’re doing it for the right reason, you’re doing it for the good of the greater group and it turns out to be easier in that sense, but it’s never easy. But that was — I’d been there before. I could see the bad news coming, better to get on it and get on it early. And I certainly didn’t want to leave it to dean Saloner to have to do that.

And most — interestingly the rest of the university kind of caught the same momentum and we really are much better as a university on top of things. A lot of universities are still now in a budget cutting rollback phase whereas Stanford made the move and we’re in much better shape today.

Audience: Which CEOs you most admire —

Robert Joss: There are a lot of people I have admired. Today, unfortunately, the world of CEOs is — it’s come to the point where no one trusts anybody and I think part of the problem is compensation. I think compensation got out of whack. I admire Jack Welch enormously when Jack was CEO, admired Bill Gates, I admired Meg Whitman when she was running eBay. Anne Mulcahy is a friend of mine, I admire her enormously for the way she inherited way she did at Xerox without any experience and pulled them out of the doldrums and, and has really got them back on track and I particularly admire people who have taken important institutions that got off the rails and brought them back. I have huge admiration for Steve Jobs who got fired when he was the CEO of Apple once, he came back later, and like resurrected into a whole new company and there are lots of and lots of great admiration for the CEOs, we’ve had at Wells Fargo, Carl Reichardt, Dick Cooley. So it’s — Dick Kovacevich, what he built when he brought the two together. You know, there are lots and lots of really great CEOs out there and great leaders. But it’s very hard now to get much in the way of decent press. And it’s difficult for CEOs to get much airtime, I think. But that’s partly a problem of compensation.

Yeah?

Audience: Can you talk a little more about renewal, specifically the times that you’ve renewed yourself

Robert Joss: Yes, I think the things that helped me the most was when I had some of the biggest struggles and the biggest challenges and I needed to change. We needed to change an organization. We needed to change a company or change a unit whether I was at Westpac in Australia or, or the business I inherited at Wells Fargo in various areas. And it took me quite a while to realize, you know, you’re not getting any change if you don’t change. I think that’s the single biggest learning that I didn’t have at business school but I got later. You have to model the changes you want other people to implement. If you want more customer orientation, if you want more attention to detail, if you want more discipline around finance, whatever it is that’s really critical to make the organization successful, you have to be willing to change yourself, and oftentimes people aren’t. You know, they’ll bring in a consultant, they’ll run a training program, they’ll have other people do the training and I kind of learned the hard way that, you have to do it yourself. You have to lead the training. If you want to run a program for all your senior management, you better lead the first class and show what you’re willing to do yourself, and therefore what you want other people, what you expect from other people.

So I guess I went through that, the hardest for me, I was in 1981, I had a group at Wells Fargo that I inherited and I got — I needed change and I gave some orders and all sort of things and six people emailed me that they were quitting and they quit. They went to form — they went to a competitor to form a competing firm. So that was a character-building experience. Suddenly everyone was gone and I was able to recruit a person very successfully but he said look you’ve got to go out there and apologize to all our clients. And that was hard for me, you know I thought I didn’t do anything wrong, I’m just trying to get this thing right. That’s the way they see it and I think that was part of a reinvention was to be able to say oh, you know, he’s right. I could’ve done it better and I think that’s one of the things about — and I am not telling you about being a different person. You know, you have to be yourself.

But as we talk about it in class you can be yourself with more skill. And that’s what reinvention is about. It’s getting more skillful at being yourself. I don’t how many of you have Deb Gruenfeld’s Acting with Power, but I know in talking to Deb, I love what she’s trying to do because, she’s talking about using more than just your brain power. We all leave here as MBA students, very good at the analytics and using our brains, but we’re not necessarily good at using our emotions and our ourselves sometimes, and other aspects of our personality. And in particular just yourself as an actor and a lot of people would say as she says I can’t do that, that’s not me. And the question well, how do you know if you’ve never tried that part of you? Often you’ve only exercised about this much of who you might be. And I think willing to take those risks I’ve become — I really came to see particularly in leadership, is an awful lot, as John Gardner said, you know, leadership is an art. It’s a performing art, and you’re the instrument. And you’ve got to use every bit of that instrument that you can and that may — and that, it doesn’t just include your analytical brain power, so there’s an awful lot of that I learned along the way and, I’m still learning. You know, I think particularly the power of symbolism and the power of what you might call almost what an actor — you think of an actor getting into character, he’s trying to connect with the audience in an emotional way, as well as an intellectual way. And I think that’s something that I try to developed over the last ten or 15 years of my career.

Audience: [Audio Inaudible]

Robert Joss: What do I currently don’t have time for that I’d like to have time for? You know I should be spending more time with my wife. But I’m spending time now with my family and my grandkids. And I’m spending time doing some things I really enjoy doing. I’m working — I’m back in banking again. I’m working with Citigroup quite a bit. I’m working with Bechtel and I’m doing a little teaching. And that’s kind of what I like to do. I like to work with a couple of companies I admire and would like to help, in one case get back on track and in another case just a great company. And I like to spend some more time teaching and stretching myself in that dimension.

Audience: You’ve seen a lot of classes lead the GSB, and I’m wondering if you can comment on what mistakes you see them make commonly out of the gates and how we might avoid making the same mistake?

Robert Joss: What mistake do I see people making out of the gates? Well I don’t — I don’t know that I — all I can tell is what I hear, and feedback from alums, and feedback from recruiters, I think by and large our students do a tremendous job. And they get started out of the gate very good. If there’s one mistake they make out of the gate it’s relying so much on the analytics and on the intellectual and less on the team work or the peer relations. I think just the interpersonal skills, the people management. But I think our students do that better than any other group of MBAs in the world. So they all had touchy feely, right?

You know, I hear lots of great things about us, but I think if there’s something to be on guard for it’s that managing sideways, that was a huge thing. I never even thought about that until I was about 15 years into my career, I realized how many enemies I was making of my peers. Because I was just so focused on doing a good job and I felt if I do a good job I’ll get ahead, I’ll be fine and I just wasn’t focused on those peer relationships like I should have been. It doesn’t mean schmoozing and all that it just means being aware of what they’re trying to do and what it takes from them to be successful, because it’s hard for — it’s hard for me to be successful if the other units also aren’t even though I — even though they’re not my responsibility. If I’m thinking about the greater good, they are my responsibility.

Audience: How do you gain credibility and trust of local stakeholders? And what are some of the main defaults you’ve seen managers make when meeting internationally for the first time?

Robert Joss: I think the biggest challenge in working in another culture which usually we’re talking about another country but I know in my case even I saw academia as another culture. And it really was almost like another country. You know, they come here because of just you know, the way people think — the things they value, the way decisions get made are different. And I think the biggest mistake people make in another culture is they make too many assumptions. They just assume that this is the way people are thinking, and acting, and behaving. That is, they come from their frame of reference. Years ago, the first time I was involved in Japan for example, it was very easy to make a mistake that, that the good English speakers were the bright ones. Because those are the ones you can connect with and communicate with. And we often put the good English speaker in a job when they really weren’t the best for that job. And that is a kind of assumption that you make that’s really flawed. And so you make the assumption that because someone is quiet, they haven’t got anything to offer. But, in fact they have a lot to offer. You got to find a way to bring them out.

So I think the biggest mistakes are not taking the time to understand the culture. You never fully understand that, those of you know that, and you never fully understand it, but you need to spend a huge amount of time listening. So probably a mistake out of the box is too much of talking, not enough listening, particularly if you find yourself in another culture. I think that’s the biggest challenge, and you never can learn — you’ll never learn and understand deeply another culture. But, so I think partly is to recognize that. And to be quite humble about that. And do your best at listening a lot and trying to figure out, what is the value system and the things going on in that culture so that you might be more effective.

Anything else, Casey?

We got where you want to get?

Audience: I think we’re good, thank you so much.

Robert Joss: Yeah, thank you, thank you very much, thank you.

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