How great cultures are built and rebuilt

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

ANGELA AHRENDTS: When you have a team whose values are aligned and they trust each other, to me, it’s no different than the Warriors winning or a great rock band. It just unlocks the creative thinking. It unlocks the innovation. 

ERIC SCHMIDT: Turnarounds are just different, right? You need to make clear what the goals are and you need to deal with all the people issues which you undoubtedly inherited.

You only have six to nine months to change the culture of a company before you’re stuck with it.

DARA KHOSROWSHAHI: Ultimately, you’ve got to be authentic. And, only if you’re authentic can you then effect authentic change within an organization.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Angela Ahrendts, the former CEO of Burberry and former head of retail at Apple, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber. 

The three appeared together live at the Masters of Scale Summit to address the question: How do you build and rebuild a great culture?

I’m Bob Safian, former editor of Fast Company, founder of the Flux Group and host of Masters of Scale: Rapid Response. I wanted to share this lesson-packed conversation now, because with AI poised to usher in an era of radical change, the idea of building and rebuilding a business culture has never been more central. 

And Angela, Eric and Dara are all accomplished culture-creators. Angela reinvented both Burberry and Apple retail. Eric, as the first outside CEO of Google, scaled the organization to new levels. And Dara had to renovate a much scrutinized workplace at Uber. 

The three share personal stories and insights, including what we can all learn about culture from Steve Jobs, from our fellow office-mates, and even from our own mistakes. It’s great stuff. Let’s listen in.

Welcome to the Masters of Scale cafe. We have our coffee here. It’s breakfast and you know why we’re at a breakfast table, right? Because culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? We’ve heard this line, right? 

So everyone wants a piece of this, of this culture conversation. You all have been in the center of culture. So, Angela, do you wanna start, do you have a story about culture at Burberry or at Apple that was particularly evocative for you?

Copy LinkHow to lead a cultural turnaround

AHRENDTS: I was leaving Burberry and going to Apple and of course they left six months in between. And so a lot of time for the 60,000 employees to really, you know, kind of figure out who I was and why this girl from fashion was coming in, et cetera. And a lot of comments on how I was gonna flip everything and change everything. And, so I literally started my first week and the head of HR and the head of PR, they bring me this email, and they’re like, would you sign this? And we’re gonna translate it into 30 languages and send it out to all the employees. It’s like, we’re in a YouTube, Instagram, WeChat world, and I’m gonna send an email? And at Burberry, we had done videos every week, and so I said, we’re gonna do a video. And they’re like, okay, well we have a studio over here, hair make….

I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. YouTube videos don’t have studio lighting and hair and makeup. This has gotta be authentic. We’ll do it in my office with an iPhone. It’s gonna be three minutes. One take, three thoughts, just a thank you. We’re gonna turn ourselves inside out, because I, you need to tell us what Apple needs to be doing more of in your community. You have a voice and we want to hear you, but we didn’t have the mechanisms. Shooting the video, halfway through my phone rings ,and it’s my youngest daughter. I just picked it up. You okay? Yeah. Great. I’ll call you back in two seconds. Finish the video. Now, this is Apple. Everything has to be perfect. And, and I said, no, send it out. And it was a bit of a battle. I said, one take. It has to be authentic. So they sent it out, and literally the next couple of days, thousands of emails thanking them for communicating on video because they could feel me, thanking me for taking my daughter’s call, because it proved I was a human. But it helped set the culture, it helped galvanize the teams and make them realize, I’m just like they are, I’m just a part of the team. 

SAFIAN: Mm-hmm. So Dara, what are you thinking, hearing this story?

KHOSROWSHAHI: It reminds me of a lot of conversations I’ve had with my leadership team, which is a distinction between management and leadership, right? Management’s about the head. You, I might be someone’s manager because of the org chart, but leadership can come from any place, right? Leadership is about the heart. And, and it reminds me of the authenticity that you bring. Like, was the leadership style one that was more about the head and then you had to bring the heart into it, or did that play into how you thought about culture change?

AHRENDTS: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting because I always said that I thanked Steve for me turning around Burberry because we were the first to buy the iPads and digitize everything in the stores, et cetera. So I was a pretty good student on the company and very quickly I learned that all of those retail employees, they just revered Steve. And he told them they weren’t allowed to sell, that their job was to enrich lives, and they needed to do it through the lens of education, through his products. And so I knew that that culture, you know, already existed. And so I just honored it. I just said that I’m only gonna pick up where he left off and take it to the next level because I want to make him proud. And so I think when you’re creating a culture, you know, it’s different if you’re a founder, but when you walk into something so big and so perfect and so successful, it’s not about me. It’s about me becoming a part of it and just evolving it and making it better. 

SAFIAN: Eric, do you have any…

SCHMIDT: I, uh, I wrote a book about Bill Campbell, my coach. You guys knew Bill? 

AHRENDTS: Yes, yes.

SCHMIDT: Both well, and, um, he spent half of his time working with us. But what he really did is he fulfilled the human mission that we as executives kept forgetting. And what I learned from Bill is, you have to actually spend some time on this. So now what has happened is there’s been this view that you should bring your whole self to work, and now we’re being forced to crawl that back because your whole self is maybe not what we want in work. And so I think that the story you told is exactly correct, but you could imagine variance of it, which would be not correct. And we’re navigating a new world of that perception.

SAFIAN: Mm. Did you struggle with that about how far you go, how much you bring or show of yourself?

AHRENDTS: You know, no, because I, you know, again, I took the job at an older stage in life. I wasn’t a kid. And luckily I had done a couple of things before Apple that, that had turned out pretty good. I always say the higher up you go, the more authentic and the more human you need to be. Where I think it’s often the opposite, you know? And ego kicks in and it’s like you said, it’s not about managing, it’s about inspiring and encouraging. And I’ve always said, I’m just the enabler. I’m the connector. I just bring in incredible people. We build a trusting relationship and then they’re empowered to go. I’m not the smartest tool in the shed.

KHOSROWSHAHI: And the universal law of management I’ve seen is, the higher up you are in the organization, the less you really know about what’s going on. 

AHRENDTS: Absolutely. 

KHOSROWSHAHI: Right? Like, everyone talks to you in paragraphs and there’s a beginning and a middle and an end, and they’re, and they prep, you know, there are prep sessions for the prep sessions. So I think you’re absolutely right, which is, the only way to get an organization to be authentic with you, is if you take the first step and be completely authentic and transparent. Because everyone’s got a good BS meter, right? And if you as a leader are BS-ing your team, they’re gonna BS you right back. So I think that authentic leadership and really opening up to them, it’s hugely important.

AHRENDTS: Yeah and especially when you’re doing with 60,000 people around the world. This was long before this hybrid thing we talk about, right? We were already hybrid, any global business, right?

SAFIAN: So, Dara, you’re mentioning sort of, whether you get all the information you need. You came into Uber and you know, there were cultural challenges. 

KHOSROWSHAHI: Yes. 

SAFIAN: Is there a story that you have for us?

KHOSROWSHAHI: This is only for half an hour? 

SCHMIDT? Let’s make the list. 

KHOSROWSHAHI: Yeah, exactly. It, you know, for me, one is that we’re still going through that cultural journey, so we’re not done by a long shot. And I think that you can never say, “hey, put a pin in it, we’re done.” The minute you’re done, like you’re done. You’re in a really bad spot, actually, I think. But, but for me, one story that stands out was, weekly all hands. We do weekly all hands in front of all employees, and we answer a bunch of questions. And Uber, of course, was this enormously successful company that ran into real cultural issues. And was trying to relate to that because when I met the team, it’s a group of people who really wanted to have terrific impact. You know, these were not bad people by any means.

And there was a lot of the culture that was great, but then some issues that were problematic. And at this all hands, a question that was voted up was, what are we going to do about our PR problem? You know, we are in the news constantly about an issue, one issue after the other, and I got up in front of the company, I said, listen, we don’t have a PR problem. We’ve got an “us” problem. Like first we have to fix ourselves, how we act, who we promote, et cetera. Then the PR can follow. Because ultimately, especially in this world, the substance always comes out. You can’t pretend anymore. So I think that was a pretty important moment where I said those words in front of the company and that allowed me, that opened the door for us to start making some significant changes. But we are still on the journey. We got a long way to go.

SAFIAN: Eric, what are you thinking, hearing this story from Dara?

SCHMIDT: The problem that you were doing is a turnaround, whether you called it a turnaround or not, and turnarounds are just different, right? And you have to get everyone’s attention on the short term. You need to make clear what the goals are and you need to deal with all the people issues which you undoubtedly inherited. And I think that your example is just one of the 20 things you gotta get right. Which of course you did, boom, boom, boom, boom, right? It’s a real test of leadership.

SAFIAN: Yeah. Well it’s a question sometimes too about like what are the culture changes and what are the people change? Like, are there people you have to move?

KHOSROWSHAHI: Oh, yeah.

SAFIAN: Or do you just have to adjust the environment so those people operate in a different area? And I don’t know how you answer that question.

KHOSROWSHAHI: It’s actually funny. One of my favorite pieces of advice, and this is gonna sound pretty twisted, I, of one of my mentors, I, when I got a new job, I said, what’s the first thing I should do? Uh, he said, fire someone. And what he meant was, that’s when people start taking you seriously. You know, they, your team’s gonna kind of listen and they’re gonna go right back to what they were doing. The minute when you actually make painful changes is when the organization in a turnaround knows you’re dead serious.

SCHMIDT: By the way, the number is 80% of the management team will turn over in a turnaround. It’s just a question of what the rate is.

SAFIAN: How soon it happened. 

SCHMIDT: Yeah.

KHOSROWSHAHI: Yeah. We’re, we’re at about 50/50, so we’re okay. And everyone’s staying. No one else is going. So this is not a threat.

Copy LinkThe difficult conversations behind a turnaround

SAFIAN: I mean, Angela, you had to do a turnaround at Burberry and had some difficult kinds of conversations, not unlike Dara’s talking about. 

AHRENDTS: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think like you said, you know, you pull everybody together, you gotta be transparent, and you can tell by looking in the audience at your top 100 who’s going to be on your team and who’s aligned to your strategy and vision. And then not mine by the way, the one the team had put together. And funny… my first offsite at Burberry, literally, had three days in and I looked out in the audience and I said, I can tell you right now who’s not on board, and I am very happy to give you an incredible package, will be a great reference for you, but everybody needs to be a hundred percent in or we’re not gonna win.

KHOSROWSHAHI: I’m curious as though what Eric said for Uber, it was pretty clear as a turnaround for coming into Apple from Burberry, it wasn’t, did you have to state whether this was a turnaround or keep, keep going the way you’re going, et cetera? 

AHRENDTS: Yeah, no, no. I said the opposite. 

KHOSROWSHAHI: Okay. 

AHRENDTS: I said again, the most successful retailer on the planet, five times the productivity of any of its closest peers. And so, no, I had to honor and respect what was built and say, might sound odd, but I don’t know what to do. So together, you know, you are on the frontline and that’s why we’re gonna put all these communications in place so you can tell us and you can problem solve. And so almost the opposite. And I said, I know there’s things we can do better inside of the store. So what are those? And I know that, well, we actually did a huge crowdsourcing exercise with, and the teams kept growing as we were rolling out more stores. And we said, in order to inform the new in-store experience, we asked them over the course of six months: what did they feel Apple should be doing more of in their community. And that’s when that informed the whole experience. But it involved them. So then when you launched it, I mean you could ramp up to, you know, 20, 30,000 sessions a week and they owned it cuz they were part of creating it.

SAFIAN: Angela, Eric and Dara show here that a cultural reset requires both urgency 

and respect for the past. After a short break, they’ll explore how to foster communication within your company, and how to find the authentic cultural practices that work for you. We’ll be right back.

[AD BREAK]

SAFIAN: Before the break we heard Angela Ahrendts, the former Burberry CEO and Apple retail chief, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, and Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s current CEO, talk about the foundation of building and rebuilding a great culture. 

Now, the three iconic leaders share deeper insights, including what supports a must-win mindset, how many opinions are too many, and how to learn from the smartest people in your organization. Let’s jump back in.

Eric, you asked Dara a question and sort of identifying that this is as a turnaround, it’s different. So what’s different when you’re building?

Copy LinkLearn a culture before you try to change it

SCHMIDT: Let me tell a turnaround story because I think it’s very much consistent with this. So, a long time ago, I was recruited to be CEO of Novell and Novell was headquartered in Utah. Culturally, extremely different from where we are today. I mean, trust me, very different. And I, you know, I was sort of naive but well-meaning. So I show up and I sort of meet everybody and I ask for advice and everyone’s very generous. Bill Gates said, spend 80% of your time on 80% of your revenue. Good advice. Um, Jim Barksdale said, if it’s a snake, kill it. He had a whole bunch of Texas sayings that were very funny. Um, and, and what I did is I took a notebook and I wrote everything down and I found myself on, you know, one of these United flights and coached next to somebody who wanted to give me lots of advice.

I had five hours of note pages of advice of what to do. People were really helpful. So here I am and I start meeting people and so forth, all sorts of problems in the company. And the company at the time had a little shuttle, you know, knee to knee seats going from Utah to San Jose. I said, I can’t quite figure out who the really smart people are. Right? I’m just casually saying this cause I’m an elitist, right? And the, and my friend says, find one and they’ll know the others. Okay, good advice. So I’m sitting there and this guy, right? He’s like, brilliant. And I go, stop, okay, give me the list of the 10 smartest people in the company, okay? You know, and write down. And I put it in my little briefcase, go to the meeting and I give it to my assistant.

And I said, I want all of these people, come to my office each for half an hour and I just want to listen to them. Okay? So a week later I’m in my office in Utah and the first gentleman comes in and he’s white as a sheet. I’ve never seen someone so upset and I thought, well maybe this is like Utah culture, you know, they’re just like, it’s like not a normal place, right? And we’re chat… and he’s nervous. He’s like really nervous. This is one of the smartest people. And I said, well, okay, I’m sorry to ask you, but why are you so upset? And he says, you’re firing me. And I go, what? And he goes, in Novell, the way you’re fired is it’s a 30 minute appointment with no agenda. And I realized that I had notified the top 10 smartest people in the company, right?

So, so… So, so, and I have a hundred examples of Eric’s stupidity of that nature. But here’s what I learned. What I learned is that culture does trump everything else. You think you understand how people work and you don’t, and you have to take the time to listen. So at that point, I decided I would go get Utah training and this is code for Mormon. And so I would sit down and I would listen and I would learn and so forth and actually work with them. And that produced a good outcome. The other thing I learned, and this is from Lou Gerstner who said, who had written the whole book on this and his IBM turnaround, and he said, you only have six to nine months to change the culture of a company before you’re stuck with it. And when you and I met, when you took over the job, I told you that. Yes. And you executed against that, whether you knew it or not. It was originally a Lou Gerstner principle.

KHOSROWSHAHI: Once in a while I listened. 

SCHMIDT: Thank you, thank you, Dara.

Copy LinkHow to learn about company culture? Crowdsource it

SAFIAN: But like, I’m curious, Dara, cause like culture comes from the bottom, but also you’re put in place to kind of change it from the top.

KHOSROWSHAHI: Yeah, yeah.

SAFIAN: Like how, how do you balance those two things?

KHOSROWSHAHI: You know, it’s a tough balance. We actually, you were talking about crowdsourcing. We originally crowdsourced the new culture of the company because I had to move fast once in a while. I listen to Eric. And we wanted it to be… I was a bit of a foreigner there, right? I didn’t know the company. I wanted to understand what the company thought. So we crowdsourced a good bit of our culture bottoms up. And for me, there was a great outcome, which is, the culture very importantly stated what we weren’t, because the company really wanted to separate itself from the past. There were some parts of the culture, we make big bull bets, et cetera, that we retained. But at the same time, because it was crowdsourced, it didn’t have a strong enough point of view in my opinion. Because, you know, if you crowdsource, if you get the average of 20,000 people what their opinions are, you kind of get to the average opinion.

You’re not getting, you know, the really juicy stuff, what makes you different. So, we’ve actually now revisited our cultural norms and some of them we’ve kept, but I found that it’s a combination of bottoms up, but then it does have to come top down as well. You’ve got to put your own stamp on the organization. I didn’t have the permission to early on because Uber had such a strong culture, et cetera. Once I got there, after a couple of years, I had the permission with my team. And now I think we’re in a pretty good spot. But the journey keeps going.

SAFIAN: As you’re talking about the … I’m reminded, so there’s a book that Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar, wrote called Creativity Inc. I don’t know if you guys have read it… terrific book. And I read it, and when I was the editor of Fast Company, I was like, this is what I wanna follow, right? And I try to sort of create this culture flywheel, you know, and then it would like, drift back. And so I met Ed at one point and I said, so Ed, like what am I doing wrong? You know, like, why, why? And he’s like, and he starts laughing at me, he’s like, no, you gotta muck out the stalls. Like over and over. People go back. And so I’m curious for you guys, like how much of a culture is something that can be a flywheel and how much do you have to keep, you know, like just you, you said you’re only part of the way through, like just keep at it.

SCHMIDT: Well, remember that people opt in, right? So you have selection bias. So you are, you have the people who chose to come and the people who didn’t like your culture are not there, right? So you have to always start with the premise that there’s a reason why people are here, right? And you better validate it. And then you need to figure out how you want. And this is exactly what you said. You then, and both you actually said, then you have to figure out what the touch points. One way to say this is to say, we like to win, right? And what is it gonna take to win? And one of the things I learned from Larry and Sergey is to be impatient about that, right? Whatever idea I had was not good enough. Whatever idea anybody else had was not good enough. It was always not good enough. And that drive for excellence is what leadership really is about. 

SAFIAN: Mm-hmm.

AHRENDTS: No, I was just gonna say, and I think too, I agree a hundred percent, but I think also as you are scaling, right? So Burberry was relatively small. And so as you scale and you’re bringing in thousands of people a year, how do they know what that, of course you wanna hire for it, but there’s so many new people coming in. So we discovered at Burberry and at Apple that, that you actually had to document it. We brought in a cultural anthropologist to study everything that we had done. We doubled the business, we said we were gonna do it again. What did we learn? What did we wanna make sure gets embedded in onboarding, et cetera. So, so kind of the same thing at Apple. I mean, we did the same thing. We, but you know, there’s a financial report, there’s a supply report, there’s an environmental report. So we actually created the first human responsibility report to share, you know, what we were doing with this culture, how we were keeping this momentum. And that way, there was no ambiguity in terms of like, expectations, performance or otherwise.

Copy LinkA cultural lesson from early days at Google

SCHMIDT: Let me give you a Google example in my first year. So at the time, the company was in one building and I had an 8×12 office, and I had a little desk and a door to the office. And one day I walk in and someone has moved into my office, okay, with me. And I said, hello. And he goes, hello? And I said, who are you? And I go, he goes, I’m Amit. And I said, what are you doing here (in a nice way)? And he said, well, I was, uh, one of the five people in the office across the hallway, and you’re never here. So I just moved myself. Now, because of my previous errors at Novell, I knew that this was a test, okay? Okay. And, and you know, when you’re being tested, it’s like I’m being tested. Think Eric, think, okay. So I said, did anyone authorize it (in a nice way)? Did anyone authorize…? He said, sure. Wayne Rosing, who’s the VP of engineering said, sure, move into the CEO’s office. So anyway, so he’s, he puts his headphones on and he’s typing away doing whatever.

And so he was, you know, he’s an engineer, he doesn’t say anything… perfectly fine roommate, works all the time. So I’m sitting there and and I’m on the phone with Omid, who is the VP of sales at the time, and I’m having this conversation and Omid is saying, I think that the revenue numbers at the time were about a hundred million a quarter. And he said, I think we can get to 120. And I said, I think you’re, you’re sandbagging Omid. I’m sitting there talking to him and he said, yeah. And so, uh, it’s an unsuccessful phone call. So I hang up the phone and Amit next to me takes off his headphones and says, I know the revenue numbers. And I go, I knew you were listening into my phone calls. So I said, what’s the revenue number? And he goes, it’s 142 million. And I said, well, how do you know? I said, I do revenue analytics. And I thought, maybe I should have talked to my office mate. So I call Omid the sales guy, and I say, Omid, you’re sandbagging. You have another 12 million in the bag, you just haven’t found it yet. And he said, how do you know? And he said, I’m not telling you.

So all of a sudden, and by the way, the revenue number really was 142 million. I discovered having the chief revenue analytics guy in my office at all times is a great idea. We, we… Right? Running a small company. So…

KHOSROWSHAHI: Note to self. 

SCHMIDT: Note to self. We actually liked each other so much that he stayed as my office mate until we were a public company where I couldn’t violate the various SEC laws. So what I, so then I thought, how can I get the same thing? And so I had a small office and I had a larger office, and I put four physicists next to me and I said, your job is to notice something strange and you run into my office. So in May of 2008 or 2009, whichever the month and year was, they run in and they say “something strange,” these are the physicists. And I go, okay, this is why we have physicists. And that was the beginning of that crisis. So I learned something, which was keeping these kinds of people around and close to you is really helpful. And plus, you know, if he moves in, don’t say what the ****. I’m sorry.

SAFIAN: Well, I mean…

SCHMIDT: Do not commit cultural faux PAs. 

KHOSROWSHAHI: Yeah, yeah.

SAFIAN: I mean, I think, I think one of the fascinating things about culture is, right? Like, every organization has a culture, right? Some of it’s articulated, some of it’s by design, some of it’s intentional, but some of it is… just evolves. I mean, you know, and you don’t necessarily know where it comes from. I know we, we only have a few minutes left, but I wanted to ask each of you, do you have a lesson for the folks about something that when, you know, when they get back to their office, you know, that they should do that will improve their organization’s culture, something they should keep in mind, something they should act on now.

Copy LinkDara’s anti-lesson from the Uber turnaround

KHOSROWSHAHI: I’ll give a little bit of an anti lesson, call it, which is, you can, it goes to all the advice that you took. You can take all the advice, but ultimately, don’t try to be someone else. Be authentic to yourself. I still remember, I read a… I think it was like, Forbes article about this manager who walked the halls, you know, he managed by walking the halls, and that’s how he found out what was really going on at the company. I’m like, I’m gonna walk the halls. So I started, and I’m pretty structured. I started booking kind of “walk the halls time” and I started walking the halls and it was so awkward. Like it was, you know, I’d be like, what are you doing? You like, I’m working, like, get outta here, or I’d like go into, you know, a conference room in dead silence, you know, how’s it going everyone?

So I just started hating walking the halls and my assistant, she like saw how much I hated it. So she, she took leash, she’s like, Dara, it’s time to walk the halls, you know. And so eventually, like, listen, it profoundly didn’t work for me. Now, I’m sure, you know, I would say walk the halls is good advice, but I do think it goes to what you started with, which is, ultimately whatever you do, whatever advice you choose to take, whatever fits in with you, you’ve got to be authentic. And only if you’re authentic can you then effect authentic change with an organization.

AHRENDTS: Yeah. And I think that, you know, it’s funny because it’s often the word “culture.” It’s like, you know, as humans we come up with these words, “metaverse” and you know, and, and not everybody knows exactly what they mean and so, but culture’s kind of one of those words. And so I just used to always say it, you know, everybody has an individual personality and it’s simply the personality of the company. And to me, it’s no different than the Warriors winning or a great rock band. It’s, you know, when you have a team whose values are aligned and they trust each other, and it’s just natural handoffs. But then when you have that incredible foundation of trust, it just unlocks the creative thinking. It unlocks the innovation. And you know, that’s that old adage, “success breeds success.” So to me, it’s just, you know, understand that the culture is, it is a giant personality and it’s living and breathing and goes up and down. But it is just constant, consistent, authentic communication and listening. I mean, and it’s not your culture. Even if you’re a founder, this thing will take on a life of its own and, you know, hold on for the ride and keep pace as things change. I mean, you know, just with technology, with everything, because they can’t go home and live one way and come into your culture and live another way. And…

SCHMIDT: You said, if a person in our audience goes back to the office, whatever, let’s say they’re doing a startup, the answer is simple. Hire the smartest people you possibly can and put up with them, right? And we all understand what that means, right? But you really need them for competitive advantage. But let’s say you have an established organization that you’re managing, doing the best you can. The best way to do it is to say, are we at the state of the art? Are we using best practices? And then let them answer that question. What you discover is that your employees are all part of a network of people that you don’t know. They actually know what else is going on, even if you don’t. So if you just listen to them and say, okay, how do we get there? You end up with roughly the right outcome. 

AHRENDTS: Yeah.

KHOSROWSHAHI: I do think on surrounding yourself with the smartest people, that is absolutely no regrets. And like you said, the smartest people in the organization have followership. So anything that you do with them, et cetera, has echo effects. And I think on the cultural side, that can turn if the smartest person in the organization isn’t aligned with you culturally. That can actually be pretty dangerous. And so, as an organization grows, you make allowances certainly for your most talented people, but if from a cultural standpoint they’re not aligned with you, that can be quite destructive.

SAFIAN: And at a certain point you…

SCHMIDT: Yeah, exactly. He’s exactly right. 

AHRENDTS: Yeah.

SAFIAN: Well, guys, this has been great. I’m sorry that we’re out of time. Thanks so much for doing this. Thanks everybody.

Listening to Angela, Eric and Dara, it’s a reminder that a company’s culture is never finished. 

Even the most accomplished leaders experiment and remain open to change. 

You may make mistakes along the way, whether it be awkwardly walking the halls or convincing your best employees that they’re about to get fired. But it’s crucial to be your authentic self and cultivate a shared mindset of creativity and egolessness. Especially in the face of a new technology like AI, this can be the difference between being a business that’s prepared for the future, and one that’s left behind. 

I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.