Video Replay | Leading Through Change: Closing Keynote

As communicators, we understood the importance of leading through uncertainty, but recent years pushed us to new limits. From Fortune 500 veteran to disruptor CEO, Stacey Tank's career exemplified the adaptability and resilience required for success in a rapidly changing world.

This discussion explored how she moved from CCO to CTO to her role as CEO of Bespoke Beauty Brands. Through these transitions, she spearheaded growth strategies and revolutionized billion-dollar businesses. As the CEO of a high-growth beauty company, Stacey continued to push boundaries. She shared her experiences navigating incredible volatility and building resilient, adaptable teams. She also highlighted the critical need to invest in "third spaces" to cultivate healthier communities and counter the effects of polarization in society—something the Page community was uniquely positioned to do.

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 It's so great to be here with all of you. Really, when Roger reached out, I had a feeling that I don't think I've ever had before.

Coming and being with all of you in this moment, it means a lot to me personally, but also I recognize the kind of leaders that are in the room, the positional power that you all have to make a really big difference for a lot of people in your organizations, in your communities and society.

And I was really struggling with what earth could I possibly add and contribute. So I'm gonna share a couple of traditional things and I'm gonna share a thought that I have that I wanna plant with you in a world where

we can all feel so victimized and exhausted by the volatility and the polarization, actually think that there is one thing that we can all do starting right now to make a huge difference.

So more coming on that in a moment. So I thought we could talk about three things. One, let's talk about adapting and navigating what is a profound amount of change when I was Chief Transformation Officer at Heineken.

We were on this journey to architect a new growth strategy and try to bring 150 plus year old animal and teach it some new tricks and that was an interesting journey and one that I'll share a little bit about and then I want to talk about polarization in society but not just what's happening.

I really want to talk about what we can do because this is a room full of doers, really incredible leaders and I am personally trying to push myself every day to know.

not just opine about what's happening, but to put my money where my mouth is, and then I'm going to talk about leadership.

So with that, let's first talk about adaptability. On the last panel, we were hearing about change and navigating change.

If there was a skill of the century, I think it's this one. We've all had a lot of change management training, I would guess.

Adaptability is a mindset, and it's something that I learned we need to hone as leaders individually for our teams, but to build an organizational capability, to help us keep bobbing and weaving and thriving.

So in February 2020, I read a press release that went over the wire and it said, Heineken is named its next global CEO, Dolphin and Brink.

I work with the Wolf in New York originally, and we were still on board together. I texted him and said, This is great.

Congratulations. And he said, thanks, dah, dah, dah, can you talk? You know, and we all know what that means, right?

It means you're moving to Amsterdam. So we got on the phone and he told me, the quintessential story of what got us here won't get us there.

Heineken is a 150 plus year old company founded by this young man, art, Adrian Heineken. When he was 22 years old, his father, who was a cheese trader, if you know anything about the Dutch, they really love cheese.

His father was a cheese trader, he passed away. He left an inheritance to hard, and he bought a brewery called the haystack.

And that's how Heineken was born. Heineken is fourth generation family controlled today. There is one large shareholder, Charlene Heineken, and her wonderful family.

And it's also minority traded. So Heineken has been through many seasons when you're a storied company that's around for over a hundred years, of course.

You go through a lot of... changes. And the moment in 2020 was this sort of next chapter of the book unfolding, as the CEO who had been enrolled for 15 years, which is a long CEO tenure.

Jean-Francois van Boxner was retiring and Dolph was coming in. Now, at the same time, nobody knew that this novel coronavirus in Asia was going to become the global pandemic.

So the board had initiated CEO turn over right before the proverbial, you know, what hit the fan. So it was a really interesting time to write another chapter.

So off we went on an empty airplane with shields and masks and our little rescue chihuahua and my two little kiddos, and we were picked up in the Heineken mobile, and off we went to a house that we saw on the internet, and that's where we planted some roots.

Now, as we were going along this journey, there were a couple of truths. One was Heineken was run as a dramatically decent.

realized company, meaning it had a tiny head office, a tiny center, a regional structure kind of keep things a bit organized.

But with just a few people, the op-coze, called them, the 80 operating companies largely organized by geography. Serena, me and Mar, Brazil, Nigeria, Leone, the op-coze had all the power, all the decision-making.

And it's not a dramatic statement to say in January, Amsterdam would say, hey, Mexico, send us $200 million in EBITDA on December, luck.

And they would say, thanks, let's have a beer when we make the plan. And they didn't really have a communication.

There's a lot of good in that. And the pendulum swings and consumer goods companies, right? We know that bureaucracy is not great.

So you want to streamline your operations, but we also knew the world was changing. Standard deviations from the mean on excellence were way too big.

And we had the 80 ERP systems, a lot of what you, I'm sure, have all experienced. And we were trying to digitize our route to market and do a lot

things where we should be working better together. Because of COVID, people were actually up for change more than they would have been otherwise, but this was still an organization that was very deeply rooted in 150 plus years of muscle memory.

One of the things that I really admire about Dole that was not popular all the time was that he required the executive committee, the top team, to get together in person every single month from day one.

We spent a couple of days together, including our folks that were leading Africa, our folks in Singapore who had to go into two-week mandatory quarantine every time they left the country.

So our poor guy, Yako, he was basically just in a hotel going in and out of the country. But we would always get together and I think creating that sense of team established a buffer that we knew where we were all coming from because you're going to hit lot of snags and it's going to get a little spicy.

But when it did, at least we could say, ah, shoot, I made a mistake, ah, you were right, gosh, I still don't feel good about this, but hey, let's stack hands and go.

At least we had those interpersonal relationships. We always did something little wacky at these offsides. So we went skydiving, we raced in a regatta, we raced mountain bikes and squirrel in the beach of the Netherlands where I almost died, I felt.

And on one of the offsides in particular, we did an exercise that was the perfect physical expression of the metaphor that I know we all live every single day.

We literally learned how to herd sheep. We had a professional sheep herder and his dogs come and teach us sheep psychology, herd mentality.

And this is the executive team, we're literally holding hands, you can see me the short one there. Next. Olanda, who's our chief people, and all black.

And I'll never forget the kind of lived sense you get in your body of what it is to try to move a group of animals that have all kinds of ideas in the same direction.

So questions that we were holding as I was leading the transformation there, which was essentially co-creating our new growth strategy.

We called it Evergreen. We got 80 leaders together from all around the company for three months, and we co-created this thing.

We pitched it to the board, and God, they liked it. And we started iterating it together around key pillars, all the stuff that I'm sure we've all done.

But I was asking myself this question for me personally as a leader, for my team, the transformation network that we built to be those sheep shepherds and moving this Evergreen thing forward.

And also organizationally, how are we honing adaptability and resilience at all of those levels? And what I realized was we can have trainings and playbooks and change management, and I'll show you if you practice.

things because it's good to be practical. We don't want to live in theory, but what I realized was adaptability is mindset and the kind of organizational skill building that we needed to look different than just adopting the cotter model, which of course we did and we had a beautiful 100 page PDF as we did, but we also started to build trainings around mindset and what that needed to look like to navigate these wild times.

So there were couple of questions that I asked myself and we would talk about the team. One of the big learnings was that we had to let go of the idea of the path, the exact steps that we would take, but we couldn't lose sight of the mission.

We still wanted to achieve that mission, but how we got there was not linear, of course, and we also had to laugh so we didn't cry a lot of the time because if you don't find joy in the incredible imperfection of all of this, then it was just zacking our energy.

We had to look out for each other to make sure that our personal energy to Bob and we've was where it needed to be.

I remember when the prime minister of New Zealand, who I don't know if watched her reading bedtime stories and her pajamas during COVID, I was so moved by her leadership.

And for her next term, I remember she said, I don't have the energy to do this again. I know what's required, and I am an adult enough to call it out and to step aside so someone else can come, and they can lead in this moment.

That's real leadership. And this is exhausting to lead this kind of profound change. So watching out for our own energy and for each other, I love the old improv trick of yes and we have improv.

Yeah, you all have probably done this for team building. If we just start with no, we tried before and it doesn't work, then all the energy goes down.

But if we start with yes and mine and not my head, I'm often going, that's a crazy idea, like probably not going to work.

But maybe it could be this or that and we start iterating. That kind of mindset was really helpful and important to build open-mindedness, team

Asian and trust really spending time physically together and making sure we're bringing everybody along. did all the things you do in employee engagement, the big town halls every month with 90,000 people, the live Q&A with no filters, the voting up and down, bringing people along,-creating it together.

A couple of practical things because I'm also a practical person. I love the change curve. I would ask myself, especially if I was having a lot of stuck energy, where am I on this curve on a certain topic?

So maybe we had to do a big restructuring. I do not like no one likes doing restructurings. It affects people.

People are the most important thing in the business. So sometimes I might find myself kind of burgoning. Gosh, we really have to do that.

If we would have 10 years ago, then we wouldn't have to. Where am I and where am I hopefully be able to move through exploration, decisioning?

What's it going to help me get there? But where is my team? Where is the organization? The other Another thing I had to come to grips with, and it was hard for me, that people move at different paces through this change curve that's normal and it's okay.

Actually, we need to create the permission for people to go through this curve. Sometimes you're going from decision-back to denial or something.

It's not linear. I also realized that there were still people in my team and in the organization who did stay in resistance phase for Islam.

There's a time when it's okay to be there and there's a time when we have to move past it.

That just means that not the right thing for the right person in that moment, and that's okay too. We adopted the cotter model.

We had a 100-page PDF. Great. I think it's good to have. Did it solve all the problems in the world?

No. it good foundationally? Yes. There's a different model called theory U that came out of MIT, Auto Shummer, Sharmer that I really like.

It's not so different in the sense that you're going from the known into the unknown, you're prototyping, creating things.

that come out again on the other side. It's more creative. And if you're just bored with cotter model and some of these other models, I would check it out.

There's a great book called writing the creative roller coaster that goes into it. And I think if you have training fatigue, that could be a nice way to kind of freshen it up.

So that's a bit about what we did at Heineken and always happy you ping me on LinkedIn or whatever it is, always happy to share more.

But I want to talk to you about a topic that I think about constantly all the time. It terrifies me that affects everyone in this room.

And this is the one thing when Roger reached out. thought for like four or five weeks about this. What would be useful?

What is needed? What would be important to share with all of you in this room? Because of the unique superpowers that you have, the unique positional power in the world that you have.

And it has to do with polarization. I've got a bunch of very depressing charts. It's the state of the state.

But we're going to go fast because we're going to talk about solutions and what you can all do. Because I don't want to live in that place.

We all know. We have opportunities. And I really believe there's something we can do about it. has to do with me moving back from Europe to the United States and having a kind of aha moment.

So polarization, households, wow, they look really different. Singles are on the rise. Married parents are on the decline. You have single people raising kids home alone.

You have unconventional households on the rise. It is amazing in 30, 40, 50 years that households in the United States look completely different.

Not good. It's not bad. It's just really different and interesting. Okay. So you have more single parents raising kids and the US Surgeon General says being a parent is bad for your health.

And it's not bad for your health because being a parent is fundamentally bad for your health. It's bad for your health because of all the social norms and constructs.

We're not helping each other out. We're driving here and there and everywhere. It is so expensive. I've got a kid in ice hockey.

don't even want to think about how much time it went. I love that he's an ice hockey, but holy cow, not helpful, right?

This is a stressful time to be a parent based on our societal structure and norms. So are we feeling good physically?

Are we feeling good? No, we have an obesity epidemic. We have chronic diseases. We have an issue here in the United States more than anywhere else, but we do have GLP ones now.

Okay. Yeah. So is that back? Yes, we have it. maybe it will help us. know we have people here from pharma, but in general, are we feeling our best?

Not exactly. Youth. What's going on with our youth? Again, sorry, these are really depressing. Suicide is up, gun violence is up.

This is not great. It's not hyperbole. It's fact. You can see the charts. It's in the public record. We also have road rage.

I took that slide out because it was so depressing. when we look at young American self-harm rights are up, look at that line for girls.

This is shocking. The question is up, we saw obesity, overdose, gun deaths, again, we're gonna talk about what we can do about this because I really think that we can.

And 30-year-olds today do not have the net worth that they had a generation before. So we're feeling like we're getting left behind and that doesn't feel good.

We need to do something about it. Mental wellbeing, we're living alone. We are pack animals. not meant to be alone, but we're living the household data.

living alone more. Teens are not going out and socializing. And I'm not at all against gaming and we can be together digitally.

Yes, of course we can do it. pretty cool. I do it all the time. We all do it. But being together, it also counts.

need to spend time also together. We see that people have built these fabulous nests. I'm guilty of this. My home is this fabulous place with a bar and like a little movie, you know, set up and this and that and the garden.

And we never need to leave, right? We have this perfect little environment. And back to the US Surgeon General.

Telling us that lacking social connection is as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. We need to be together again.

This is making us sick, which isn't good. But there is hope. Okay, let's get to the hopeful part. Tell me, tell me, how many people got tickets last summer to the heiress tour?

Oh, yeah. A lot of people in here are swippies. Okay. So last summer, and I've been a Taylor Swift.

love Taylor Swift. love to play the guitar because of Taylor Swift and all her songs, which are very easy to play if you're trying to learn the guitar.

But I couldn't believe the fevered pitch of the heiress tour. It was telling me something else is going on here in the psychology of people.

What is going on? I think no science behind it and equals one. But I think this was an expression of a desperate need for third spaces.

We need places we can come together where we're not talking about divisive topics, where we can rally around shared passions and look out for each other.

Friendship bracelets that say, you go, girl, whole dream, like this is so great, right? I felt so good about this.

And I think that's exactly where we all come in. What is a third space? And the reason I bring this up is because I'm not hearing much talk about this at all.

Has anyone even heard the term third space? A few people. Okay. Well, that's actually really good because I think that was 25% of the room.

So what is a third space by definition? It's a place that's not work and it's not home. It's another spot where we engage and I'll give you a gazillion examples.

It's where we can interact with friends new and old, come across people in our communities, maybe do a hobby.

and relax a little bit. It can be youth sports. It can be the library. It can be knitting group, gardening, the VFW, the YMCA, hiking club, art museum.

This is Woodruff in Atlanta where I used to sit on the board. I love this place. It can be a drone club, a kickball league, can be art class, it can be sailing club.

So why do I bring this up? It's sort of a theoretical thing like okay, it's like on friends, coffee shop, people get together and they connect.

But when our family moved back from the Netherlands, we moved back to this place. We have someone from Syracuse in this room, don't we?

Yes, okay, Michelle. Thank you, Michelle. Yes, okay, go orange. So if you've been to Upstate New York or you want to come, we have a lovely guest cottage.

You are all welcome, please come and see us in the summer. Population 7,000 people, I want to tell you about Skinny Atlas New York.

is the Iroquois word for Long Lake. because the Iroquois were the first people here on this land. We have an inn.

It's hundreds of years old. It's called the Sherwood Inn. This is where I got married. And my first son's middle name is Sherwood.

We never knew we would live there. So now it's a little weird. We have one bar, but lucky for me, because I have a terrible sweet tooth, we have two bakeries.

We have a beautiful inn and spa that's inspired by Monet's Gardens. We have churches and people go to them.

We have three of them. And this church, you can actually do church service here on the lake in the summer.

It's really beautiful. We have parks and all kinds of sports. This is all also a walkable community. We have yoga studio.

We have an amazing community center that was built through pure philanthropy. From an entrepreneur, he was an ophthalmologist in our village, built a billion dollar business, sold it, and has been extremely generous.

to the community over the course of 50 years. We have passions. I'm going from here to Buffalo, because my son is playing in the New York State Ice Hockey Championships this weekend.

I'm so nervous, I'm so nervous. I get a lot of good energy from being on stage, but what I'm really nervous about right now is going to Buffalo and watching these kids play.

families in that picture, that's from last year. And what I love about this is not just about being go to sports and having fancy sports, you know.

Arena is in this type of thing. It's about the community. So at Christmas, you can see Santa Claus is there and the boys varsity team is there.

And we get all the little kids out on skates, families that can't afford skates or pads or whatever it is.

Everybody gets all the equipment together. It doesn't matter. This isn't about being able to afford it. about being together, moving our bodies and having some fun.

And so the big kids take the little kids and we try to have a nice time and introduce them to the sport.

We believe in philanthropy and giving back. And we. our flags out on game days. We also have the most incredible tradition.

This is what you do when you graduate from high school in Skinny Atlas. I can't believe that we were still allowed to do this this day and age.

We're doing backflips, know, and there are boats all around in the water watching and cheering. My son's a sophomore, my older son, and so this is coming up quick and it might be the best tradition of all.

We have a gazebo where people take their family photos in a really terrible orchestral blazer in the summer. We have field days where my husband and I had one of our first dates and I got really sick on the twirly wheel.

We have parades, half the town marches, the other half the town watches. We have a duck dash to raise money, a wonderful sleep away camp.

We've got a polar plunge and a turkey trot. We've got a boat show. We've got a wonderful volunteer fire department where people really step up and volunteer.

honor our veterans. We have a food pantry and a village hall where people meetings and they talk about what they care about in the community and invest time.

We also have pretty affordable housing. It's changed a lot in the last 10 years, a lot. We bought a property in this village 10 years ago.

It's tripled in value and still compared to lot of other places you can still buy a home and raise a family.

Coming back to Skinny Atlas has reminded me of importance of third spaces. It's reminded me what it looks like and feels like when I walk down the street and people pull over their car and start chatting with you or you chat about the history of we're looking at these old plots from the Revolutionary War and oh my house is on plot 32.

I think yours is on 33. You know it's just extraordinary to be part of a community where people are invested and I don't know a political party they're part of and I don't care.

I would implore all of us. to invest from your time, which is your most precious asset, volunteering in these third spaces, your personal philanthropy, we all do a lot of personal philanthropy, no doubt, and your organizations, which have huge ability to get volunteers into the community and to donate money.

And sometimes it's not philanthropy, could just be helping small entrepreneurs open a coffee shop in your town, but we need to get out of our houses and we need to get together.

The power of third spaces. So I've got one more thought and then I really want to hear what's on your mind, questions and debates and all-ing nonsense on any of this is very welcome.

Leadership. We've, I've heard actually a few people in the hallways say, I've taken an unconventional path and that's beautiful.

I think you could probably all tell the story of how we've taken unconventional paths. Mine was starting in communications and marketing, going into corporate audit, being a CFO for the industrial water business at GE and then bouncing around.

leading businesses for Home Depot. Now I run a growth-based company. What I know for sure is that you all have a skill set that has never been more important.

And I also know that we have, in the communications corporate affairs space, a little bit of a mental block around taking that stepping into a P&L leadership role.

Maybe we're afraid of the math part of finance people are really scary and mean which they are, which is why I went into and said that I would understand what they were talking about and they couldn't weaponize it against me anymore.

But I am telling you the world needs you in CEO roles more than ever and you are qualified. So if you have any interests at all, please take a P&L role in your current organization and explore this path.

You don't have to stay on it if you don't love it, but you have a really important skill set and not just for CEO roles but for board roles, public company, board roles.

There is a great mystery, sometimes how you get onto boards. There are all these organizations selling new certifications and very expensive $1,000 trainings and training is good and certifications are good and else that's good.

I will tell you right now how to get onto a board. It's going to be one of two ways, but I think it's going to be the first thing that I say, knowing the other board members on the board.

Really, I sit on three company boards, a private equity board, publicly traded board and a family owned company board.

All three of them are because I knew that it wasn't by design and knew or had worked with for over decade, someone that currently sat on the board.

They were doing a board search. said, you know someone and my name got put in and then I came out the other side.

Thinking about curating relationships or looking at the people and they don't have to be your best friends, people in your concentric circles of community, if they're sitting on boards of organizations that might be interesting.

you have a conversation about it. I really think that's how you will make a path to yourself to get on to a company board and then certainly we have a lot of great recruiting friends in the room and the recruiting firms can also help you of course.

So three things adaptability it's the skill of the century cultivate it with intention the world is fracturing it's so divisive and polarized but there's a lot we can do about it please invest in third spaces I believe in the power of third spaces and the world needs you and CEO and board roles don't be bashful and if I can ever help I'm 100% here for you guys so with that I would love to hear I see the page paddles are coming I would love to hear what's on your mind questions thoughts I think the microphone's coming

I'm Jason Yaley. I'm the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer for Parsons Corporation. I'm also a Syracuse grad, so I loved your skinny Atlas picture.

Amazing! didn't move it. My question actually, so it's obviously the relationship between the CEO and the CCO or the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer.

What have been some of your best practices that you've seen to build that relationship to make us really into that growth partner, not the functional leader?

100%. Oh, it's such a great question. And when I joined Home Depot, I had had these moments when I could have gone the P&L path, and then I kept choosing to go the Chief Corporate Affairs Chief Com's path.

And it was a conflict within myself because I loved being a Chief Communications Officer. It's a really great and fun hard, but also fulfilling job.

When I got to Home Depot, they had just done CEO succession from Frank Blake to, so you had Bernie and Arthur who the company.

Bernie ran the company, then Arthur ran the company, you had Nardelli Kamen, which was a period of volatility. some good things and some tricky things.

And then you had the unexpected CEO Frank Blake, who is a phenomenal leader. probably seen him speak or super generous, very smart.

And then Frank had done a long stint and it was time for Craig. So Craig hired me. He's a career merchant.

And I remember when I started, I set an intention that going to a new company, you are building a track record from scratch.

And so I knew he wouldn't know me from anything, but the just prior hat that I was wearing. So he wouldn't know she was a finance leader and audit and all these other things.

And I set an intention that I was going to show not tell. I wanted to demonstrate my interest in the business commercially and go above and beyond to contribute to all of those things in addition to, of course, trying to do the best job that I could in my immediate role.

And when we would just, how does that look in real life, we had to go to New York for something and we traveled together.

And he was super generous and And let's walk some stores. Let's walk some bar stores. Let's walk some competitive stores.

And let me take you through how I think about merchandising. And I tried to really show interest in, how do you think about line structure?

How do you think about price points? had not worked in retail other than folding jeans at the gap when I was at SU, hit Carousel Mall.

So at my first performance review, we sat down in his office, and we're going through my goals and objectives and all the things.

And he said, you know, I don't know if this makes sense or, you know, I was thinking, should I bring this up?

But you seem really interested in the business. Would you ever consider running a P&L here for us? And you can imagine, I was like, oh, really?

But in my head, was like, oh my God, I can't work somehow. So I think it's just understanding. the other thing, the sneaky thing is that there are always elements of the business that are hard for us to understand because, personally, we haven't had the exposure or we're not that.

familiar with how corporate tax works or whatever it is or a big litigation. Find some way, when you get that feeling in your stomach like back away and don't speak up on that topic, find a way to educate yourself about what they're talking about.

And I've found a lot of the time when people are talking about things and you can't follow it because they don't know what they're talking about.

So find a friendly bill or tax or something and come up to speed. But I've every confidence that this group is fully capable of coming up to speed.

Thank you. So I want to go thank you for your remarks. They were wonderful. The point you made on visiveness and the solution you posited was third spaces outside of work and home, which I respect.

So we are often in control of the second space and what do you recommend we do if we of, you know, in the United States of 50-50 population and globally we have all sorts of angst.

Those of us that are involved in global businesses, the global tensions that are going country to country right now are trickling into our offices and we want to keep cohesive cultures where everybody rose together.

So what's your counsel for us in that second space? Yeah, it's such a hard time, right? It's why all of your skills are needed so very much.

Every situation a little bit different but a couple of thoughts. I think having that open line of communication with your people is really important and someone earlier or maybe with yesterday said you just have to also have thicker skin because it's not going to be perfect but when you're doing all employee digital town halls guessing so you probably have tens or hundreds of thousands of employees some of you in the room.

When you're sharing information, welcoming the feedback, calling out the most unpopular topic that's coming up so. before we would do Town Halls at High and again, we would go through, you could pre-submit 24 hours in advance and then also in real time and vote up and down topics.

And this is, again, credits adult because he has really thick skin, but he would go through and say, pick the, like, I can't do his accent, but he would say, like, the nastiest questions, pick out the nastiest questions.

We're going to start with those. So people knew that we were not going to hide the peanut. We were going to talk about it.

And I think that if your part is in the right places, a company, a lot of the kind of squeaky exception cases, the majority of your employees are going to be with you and they're going to also speak up to defend you and the population can, can tend to correct itself.

I think there are also topics that come up where you might not know the answers yet. I mean, in when the Ukraine war broke out, I was living in Europe and we

at a big business with billions of dollars of assets in Russia. We had been there for 20 years. The people that worked in that business had worked with us for 20 years.

We felt they were our teammates and I had a woman who just came from Russia, was working directly for me.

Her husband was in the reserves and her aging parents, you know, the it was just such a human situation.

And yet everything we said was wrong. You know, we're on that Yale list being accused of things we're not doing.

Trying to get out. made the decision to leave and then the government wouldn't approve it and we're threatening to put our people in prison and our the leadership team.

And so we were just trying to navigate living the principles that we set forth to make the decision like in the safety of our people first.

And if that means we don't turn off the factory today, which is what some people wanted us to do because those children of those parents, you know, they were never going to see their mom and dad again most likely because.

threats that we were receiving from the government, we felt were real. So we would we published those internally, we published them externally and said this is how we're trying to do the right thing and these are the lenses through which were making the decisions and then we would learn and we would iterate but being open, transparent, all know we're not going to win everybody over and at the same time there can be the sense of just retreat and I don't think that's the answer either.

So I have a huge amount of respect for what you're all doing because it's it's wild out there. The DEI thing is just wild, wild to me right now and at the same time I believe that all of your organizations, you care about your people, you're investing in them and doing the right thing, that's what matters.

Just keep doing what you know in your heart is the right thing and a lot of this stuff, we just have to treat as a kind of misunderstanding and noise in the moment.

Yeah, thank Yeah. Yeah. Hi, thanks for a thought provoking presentation. Sorry, Rafferty. I think a lot of us agree in this room about being on boards and the contributions you can make.

And often when you get put into that situation, you have to go through a board interview process. So I would love to maybe help some of us think about how to package our skills for the board.

This is a really timely question for me because my public board role was announced last week and I just went through this process for that public board.

And it was really interesting because what I tried to do, I have a friend on the board, so that was helpful to hear her perspective on what the company was looking for in the culture.

then I had a lot of other discussions where I was trying to find that Venn diagram between I lived experiences and what the company needed and how I could potentially be helpful.

I've also gone through that exercise and realized that the Venn diagram, the circles don't touch. And that the experience,

because I have don't overlap with what's needed and that's also a worthwhile thing to do and I've opted out of a bunch of opportunities for that reason but I started to kind of piece together okay they're looking for someone with P&L experience so when I'm chatting with some of the board members I'm going to talk about those experiences maybe more than other experiences that I've had and they were looking for an audit committee seat but you had to have a CPA which I do not have for succession for audit chair so I wasn't going to talk about those experiences they really liked my nonprofit board work and I found it a nonprofit and some of those things so I know okay I'll make sure that I'm make them aware you know that I've done some of that work so piecing that together but my final interview in that experience was different than any of my other boards in the sense that the entire board was around you know this table and pretty far away from me and there I was sitting at the edge and they were just like like logs

questions for an hour and 15 minutes and yeah it was telling myself enjoy this it's like a challenge like what's coming next and there's always a bit the temptation of like if anyone needs to make themselves look really smart and there's going to be a gotcha in there they were lovely it was completely fine but it's not without you know a little bit of an elevation of the blood pressure and the preparation definitely helped yeah thank you Hi Stacey.

Hi George. Thanks so much for being here's a terrific presentation um you have done something that's extraordinary which is kind of expand your career grow your career from being a really talented communicator to a talented CEO but and I think one of the messages that you're trying to give us is that we all have the potential to grow as far as we want to grow and the tools to do it I think one of the things that maybe holds some of us back

is you talked about, for instance, going on the shopping trip with Craig and asking him questions about pricing and everything.

But there are times when we may have a contribution to make in a corporate meeting, and we're little concerned that other people in the room might think we're getting a little bit out of our way, swim lane, a little over our skis.

I'm just wondering, was there ever a time in your career where maybe others thought you were getting out over your skis, or maybe you were afraid that you did?

And what did you do about it? Yeah, 100%. It's such a good question. I can think of so many examples of really divisive moments when the eyes and room go over to you and you're like, okay, what I actually learned through those experiences is that one of two things, either that leader might be on their own development journey.

And there's nothing you can do about that. But the other part that I learned is sometimes I had partial information.

And what people were bringing up in the room was really helpful. And that if I could get myself to not push back and have that, like, protect, protect, protect, shut down and get curious, bring curious energy about that, it went much better.

And actually, I started to realize there's a sometimes it doesn't come out so elegantly from people to if they're being defensive, but there's a point inside of what they're saying that's worthy of consideration.

So thank you. Maybe one more question, because I see it says wrap up really big. I'll be brief. Thanks.

you for being here Stacey, Jason Dressel with History Factory. I was curious if you could talk a little bit about the transition you've made.

You've worked at a number of great companies with rich legacies. Now being at more of a startup in the CEO role, I was wondering what that transition has been like.

There, I can't believe that two years ago, I took startup CEO role. It's wild, I never, if I had a psychic reading and my psychic told me that this would have happened, I would have been like, oh no, you're reading someone else's fortune, not mine.

So it's just been a fabulous adventure that's a bit of a longer story, but I'll tell you what I've learned because there were some really profound learnings from me testing the hypothesis.

People say in a big company, if we were startup, we would, right? We heard, feel fast. We heard all the stuff on this stage the last few days.

Here's what I've learned. In a big company, most decisions are 49.51. You're basically choosing the least worst decision. If it was easier, it would have been decided before it got to and startups are 90, 10, 95, much more straightforward, growth and go.

Number two, having simpler stakeholder map, helps the entire organization go much faster and you spend. much more time on the customer which is so exciting.

The third thing that I've learned is that my workforce has a much higher incidence of mental health diagnoses and neurodiversity than I had working in big companies which can be a huge huge strength and required me to go up my learning curve for how to help all of my employees thrive.

There are probably a few more but those are some oh and cash is queen. I used to look at the P&L and now I look at the cash flow statement as my primary right?

Well thank you so truly so much for having me. I appreciate all of you.