[00:00] Doug Conant: I had roles in achieving my mission, which was being a good Christian, a husband, a father, a son and brother, a friend, a business leader, and a family steward. And I wove those roles together so that they were one. It’s complicated. It’s not just a thinking exercise because when you show up, it’s thinking and feeling together where the magic happens.

[00:24] I started living into this. Now let’s talk about some specific habits I have.

[00:31] Jim Harshaw: Welcome to another episode of Success for the Athletic-Minded Man, real talk on harnessing your athletic drive for clarity, consistency, and focus in business and life. This is your host, Jim Harshaw, Jr. And today I bring you Doug Conant.

[00:45] Doug is a retired Fortune 500 CEO. He was the CEO of Campbell Soup from 2001 to 2011. He took over the company when they had lost 50% of their market share. Sales were declining. Actually, wait, I’m not gonna tell you more. Wait until you hear what Doug. Says about what the company was like whenever he took over.

[01:04] It was just such an interesting story and we get into it pretty early here in the conversation. Prior to that, he was the president of Nabisco, led them through turmoil and he was also the chairman of Avon. So he’s been with these massive companies and he’s instituted change. And you wonder how a guy like this can come into a company, turn it around, a massive behemoth of a company, fortune 500 kind of companies.

[01:27] How do you go about. Turning them around, how do you go about selling more cans of soup? And what he shares is not what you expect. And he wrote a book called The Blueprint, six Practical Steps to Lift Your Leadership. And we’ll have a link to that in the action plan. Uh, of course, just go to jimharshawjr.com/action, and you put your email in there, and I’ll get you that action plan. Every time a new episode comes out, I just deliver it right into your inbox. You don’t even have to go anywhere, the links to the podcast or, you know, just the PDF of the action plan. So you can always get those. But, um, conant leadership.com is also his website, so check that out, C-O-N-A-N-T, and wait until you hear the end of what he shares.

[02:09] The very last thing that he shares in this episode just blew my mind and my respect for him just went up so much. ’cause of one of the last things he shares, actually the last thing he shares here in this episode. So here we go. My interview with Doug Conant. But, but first, make sure you share this with somebody who do you know who’s in a leadership role, maybe in a struggling company.

[02:30] And this would really help lift them up and lift their leadership and give them some tips, tactics, and tools to become an even better leader. Alright? Give it a share. Thank you in advance for doing that. Let’s get into my interview with Doug Conant. You were a student athlete, you were a tennis player at Northwestern University.

[02:50] How was your experience as a student athlete?

[02:53] Doug Conant: I, I was incredibly blessed. It was a great experience. It, you know, I thought I had grown up not far from Northwestern, thinking I was gonna go away to college, and then I had an opportunity to, to attend Northwestern. Athletic scholarship and I couldn’t turn it down.

[03:10] It was, uh, a perfect opportunity for me to play the sport I loved at the time, which was tennis and to get a great education. And what I didn’t realize was that I would have lifelong friends. The best man in my wedding, my best friend, until he passed away from cancer, was a college roommate. That’s what I didn’t realize.

[03:33] What I did realize was I was gonna get a great education. And I was gonna have an opportunity to compete at the highest level in the collegiate tennis world.

[03:43] Jim Harshaw: Yeah. I’d say I had the same experience, right? I showed up at Virginia knowing that I was gonna get a great education and get to compete, but it’s really all the other stuff that, that becomes so much more meaningful.

[03:54] The lessons and the the connections, the shared suffering that you go through. Especially as a division one college athlete, you just carry those bonds and those connections

[04:03] Doug Conant: and you learn so much from those experiences. But when you go through them and you see people you hold in high regard, going through them and navigating them.

[04:13] You sort of, by the time you’ve done that for four years and then I stayed and I was an assistant coach for a couple years while I was in graduate school, so I was both a player and an assistant coach for almost seven years. You come out of that experience remarkably well prepared, as prepared as you can.

[04:33] For the next chapter of your life, even though you haven’t experienced much of that, cha, any of that chapter? I’d never worked. I’d never worked in an office until the day I started my first job in Minneapolis, in General Mills, seven years after I’d started school. Uh, but the life lessons I learned from my collegiate experience both athletically and academically and socially really gave me a good start.

[05:01] Jim Harshaw: And you, you put those lessons to the test in your career, quite a few lessons. You know, you’ve led some of the biggest name brand companies in America. You faced your fair share of challenges. So let’s talk about your experience at Campbell Soup. You take over a company. When sales were in decline. Take us back to the first day on the job.

[05:22] Doug, if you can, if you like, what, what did you step into? What were you thinking? What were you feeling? Were you, were you overthinking like, I’m in over my head here. I don’t know if I can save this thing.

[05:33] Doug Conant: Yeah, I remember the first day vividly, but let me just set the stage for you. I had been president of the Nabisco Foods company for.

[05:42] Five years prior, I had worked for Nabisco for 10 years. It was coming out of private equity. It was the world’s largest LBO. There was a book written about it called Barbarians at the Gate, and uh, I came in right after it was L bd, the world’s largest help out to this day. I think it’s the second or third largest, and it happened in 19, I wanna say 90, 89, 90.

[06:09] Those were challenging times. I thought I’d seen it all going through that. And then I had a chance after we sold the company, I had a chance to go become the president and CEO of Campbell Soup Company, and I took six days off. And then I started the new job. Campbell was in trouble. We’d lost half our market value in the prior two years.

[06:32] We were tethered to a product that was 120 years old and unchanged canned soup. And meanwhile, consumers eating habits were changing, but canned soup was not. And uh, we were headquartered in the poorest, most dangerous city in the United States, Camden, New Jersey, where there was. 75,000 people and 70 murders a year.

[06:58] We had razor wire and guard stands around the headquarters facility. It looked like when you drove in, it was a minimum security prison and it was actually there to protect so the employees felt protected that their vehicles and they were gonna be safe when they came in.

[07:16] Jim Harshaw: Boy, it sounds like a great job opportunity.

[07:18] Doug Conant: It makes sense. They didn’t, they didn’t interview me there. They interviewed me. In New York City and at the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia, not at the facility. I didn’t really see the facility in all its splendor until I started my first day and a car drove me and I said, this can’t be Campbell. He said, oh, yes it is.

[07:41] And uh, I was in, in shock. I got there my first day and things had gotten so bad that they had plants all over the. Headquarters building, but they had fired the people that were there to maintain the, the service that maintained all the plants. And so all the plants were basically dead and all over the, wherever you walked, it was a dead plants.

[08:09] And it was sort of a metaphor for how the company was feeling at the time. They’d had round after round of layoffs, everyone. Virtually everyone there, either someone to the left of them or to the right of them had been let go. So they didn’t feel respected in any way, shape, or form. They all felt like pawns in the game, which many of the people at Nabisco had felt too.

[08:33] And so trust was low. It turned out we did a, did some work with the Gallup organization shortly after I started, and we discovered that yes, trust was low. In fact, employee engagement was the worst they’d ever seen. In the Fortune 500 and, uh, I thought, well, they haven’t seen that many. This was a new idea at the time.

[08:55] In 2000. They haven’t, couldn’t have seen many. And it turned out the, uh, owner of Gallup told me that, well, actually we’ve done almost 300 of these Fortune 500 and you’re the lowest. So financially we weren’t going well, and certainly from an employee perspective, we weren’t doing well. So that’s what I took over and.

[09:17] The board gave me one job my first day, and that was to fire the CFO. So I get there and my first job is to have a conversation with the CFO to say, obviously this is a difficult time for the company, but I’m gonna have to let you go. Which he knew was coming. So, but the optics of it were not good for me.

[09:42] Because here I come, the first thing I do is I let go of the CFO and oh, now they’re really gonna have a lot of confidence in me, the employees. But it all worked out. We took the bull by the horns. We sort of built a culture that ultimately went from being the
[10:00] worst employee engagement in the Fortune 500 to when I retired.

[10:04] And 2011 was the best employee engagement in the Fortune 500, and we had systematically built it up in a very intentional way over that decade. And so I left the company with world class employee engagement. Uh, when I started, there’s an, uh, ratio called the engagement ratio for, for every two people that were highly engaged, one person was not at all engaged.

[10:34] That engagement ratio basically says that a third of the employees, at the time we had about 25,000 were looking for a job. So you had 14,000 people doing the work of 25,000, basically. It was crazy. And by the time I left, we were at 23 people engaged to one person who wasn’t, which was the highest in the Fortune 500.

[10:58] At the time, but the important thing was out of our top 350 leaders, the leaders who set the tone for everything, we had an engagement ratio of 77 to one. So we had 77 executives highly engaged in the work for every one who wasn’t. So we had like four executives out 350 who weren’t highly engaged, and that created a spring in the step.

[11:25] In the culture, every department, everywhere. There was a spring in the step culture that grew over time there. Stephen Covey had a great line once he, he was, he was one of my mentors and he said, Doug, listen, you just cannot talk your way out of something you behaved your way into. You gotta behave your way out of it.

[11:44] And that’s basically what we did at Campbell. We declared our intent to make it a high engagement culture. But then we realized words weren’t enough. We had to behave our way into it. We had to take actions, time and again to make it a better place. And in the fullness of time, people got engaged. You can’t just order them to get engaged, you have to win them over.

[12:07] And you start by saying to yourself, well, if I want them to care about my agenda, our agenda, then I damn well better show up and care about their agenda. This isn’t rocket science in many ways. And so we created a culture that cared, and the more we cared, the more they cared. The better we performed. And by the way, we brought all of our other stakeholders with us, our customers, our investors, our suppliers, even the regulators were rooting us on by the time I left.

[12:38] So these simple maxims about you can’t talk your way outta something you behaved your way into, if you want them to care, you damn well better show that you care. These simple maxims. They work, but you gotta work ’em and you’ve gotta do it every day with consistency, just like you probably had to do in your practices every day when you were preparing to wrestle.

[13:03] Every day. You had to be consistent with it. You had to be disciplined,

[13:07] Jim Harshaw: show up and do the work every day. Not now, and then not when you feel like it.

[13:11] Doug Conant: Yeah. I interviewed Daniel Pink, the author, uh, the other day. He had a great, I’m, I’m gonna butcher this, but he had a great way, he’s really structured and disciplined and he has sits down to write until 1230 every day and he works it and he’s, he’s got his.

[13:31] Very disciplined life and uh, it’s led to seven New York Times bestselling books and a lot of other things. And this is his sort of second career. But he said, you know, you have to be disciplined with your work. You work, and the epiphanies will appear. You can’t wait to have an epiphany and then go to work on it.

[13:53] You gotta go to work every day. You learn, you grow, and then you’re gonna get an insight about how you can do better, but you gotta put in the work every day. That made sense to me.

[14:03] Jim Harshaw: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Um, you see that in athletics and you certainly can apply those lessons to, to, to leadership and in business.

[14:11] And you did that. I know the listener is wondering the same question that, that I am and I’m gonna ask this. So, you know, you. You take over a, a company declining in sales loss, 50% of market share, barbed wire, the whole, the whole bit. Everything you just laid out for us, like dream job scenario it sounds like.

[14:28] Right? Uh, tongue in cheek here, of course. And you, you turn this around it, it’s not just that you turn the culture around. Of course you turned. Sales around you turn the entire company around you. You have this saying, you say, to win in the marketplace, you must first win in the workplace. To win in the marketplace, you must first win in the workplace.

[14:47] And that sounds like a nice thing to say. Like, I, you know, don’t you just need to have a, a good product and have good product placement on the shelves and do some good marketing. And you know what, what do people really have to do with selling soup, Doug?

[14:59] Doug Conant: Everything. First of all, just to go back to your opening set.

[15:04] The job I, the opportunity I had at Campbell, that’s when opportunities come up. When companies are failing, that’s when the jobs open up. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been there. So if you wanna be a CEO more often than not, either you’re gonna start your own company or if you’re invited to go run something, it’s because it’s not working.

[15:26] Otherwise there’s no job there. So that sort of comes with the territory when you’re in this line of work. Now you have to create an ecosystem. When you’re running a company that encourages and produces excellence every day in all you do, and if you don’t create a system that breeds that every day, you might have a one hit wonder.

[15:52] You know, you might have a successful product, but the world is very competitive. And if you wanna be competing across everything you do, you have to have an ecosystem that’s built on the backs of people and they’re thinking and they’re collaboration, and with a performance profile that’s dedicated to excellence every day.

[16:19] You have to create a culture that does that. It, it just doesn’t magically happen. And so what I believe is, and those aren’t my words, to win in the marketplace, you have to first win in the workplace. And gallops has since done all the, the assessment of how important employee engagement is winning in the workplace.

[16:41] That’s the proxy forward employee engagement. And where you have higher engagement, you have better enduring performance. The financials are better. The market share is better. The customer relations are better. Why? Because the salespeople are better and because the finance people are better and the marketing people are better, they’re part of a culture of excellence.

[17:03] I’m sure the same thing is true in wrestling. When I was at Northwestern, Northwestern had a good program. Iowa was unbelievable. And, uh, they had a culture of excellence and the best people wanted to go wrestle there. And then they, they learned from each other and they got trained there. And, uh, Northwestern was good.

[17:25] They had a really good, Ken Kraft was a great wrestling coach, but we weren’t Iowa. And uh, they created an enduring proposition there that went on for decades. And I think in my experience and Gallup’s experience. If you wanna create something that promises to be enduring, you’ve gotta have a differential level of employee engagement where they’re giving a little bit extra every day, where you don’t even have to ask, they’re gonna do it.

[17:55] Individual initiative. We had 25,000 people taking individual initiative every day to do a little better. I’m gonna have to stay late today. Oh, I don’t mind. We gotta get this out. Oh, can you come in early? Can you come in over the weekend? Sure. If that’s what it takes. So if you create that kind of culture, it feeds off itself.

[18:15] You start seeing it everywhere and you know, all of a sudden. The language I used earlier, you create a spring in the step culture. Now, to do that, you’ve gotta create the right conditions for it. I call it living, loving learning, and leaving a legacy of contribution. It’s basically Maslow’s hierarchy.

[18:35] You’ve gotta have the right working conditions. The right training conditions if you’re in athletics. So people are gonna show up and know I have the tools I need to do my job. The next level is loving. And you gotta feel appreciated. Gallup would tell you, you’ve got to literally, you’ve gotta hear words of appreciation from your boss once a week for something you did, right?

[18:58] Not just saying Happy birthday, but you did that. Well, good job. You’re gonna get plenty of feedback on what you can do better. Their point is there, there’s, there needs to be some evidence that says you’re appreciated. There words of appreciation. So living, loving, learning, you gotta have opportunities to learn and grow because this is your life and you wanna prosper in that life.

[19:26] And so there needs to be opportunity to learn and grow. And then at the peak of the pyramid, Maslow’s peer pyramid, which would be self-actualization, I would say. It’s leave a legacy time. This has to be something special. You know, if you’re gonna be asking me to give more of my time and more of my effort, or inviting me to give more of my time and more of my effort, I have to feel as if it’s special.

[19:52] This is my one life, I’ve, it’s gotta be special. And so you create this sense of,
[20:00] uh, mission for the enterprise. A purpose, a higher purpose, a higher calling. And if you can do those four things well with any organization, any team, living, loving, learning, leaving a legacy, you’re on the right track. And I found I could do that and still do all the tough stuff.

[20:22] You know, this is not all, let’s hold hands and sing kumbaya. When I got to Campbell, even though it had. It changed a lot in the first three years. We let go 300 of the top 350 leaders in the company. That was a heavy lift, tough stuff. We gave them three years. We said that you had to be all in with what we were doing, and we actually measured employee engagement and we said the first year, this is our base, but the next two years we need to do better.

[20:55] You with your team, you need to do better with your team. And in year two, if you’re doing better, great. And if we can help, let us know. In year three, we’re gonna help and we’re gonna have to make tough calls. So there’s, there’s a process here. We’re not just lopping you off. And if we can, if it does, if this job isn’t right, we’ll find another one for you within the company or else we’ll help you find another job.

[21:24] But we had to make tough calls because, well, you know, from your athletic experience, you have to have the talent necessary to win because you, the, the concept is winning in the work workplace and winning in the marketplace. And we would also say winning with your community. Beyond that, you’re playing to win.

[21:43] So you gotta have the talent you need to get the job done. And uh, so even though we were doing all this positive stuff. We also had some heavy lifting.

[21:55] Jim Harshaw: How do you go about this? Let’s talk a little bit tactically how you know, for the listener who may be in a leadership role, maybe they’re an entrepreneur, maybe they’re a founder or a CEO, maybe they’re a mid-level manager and they want to increase engagement tactically.

[22:11] What are some ideas, what are some examples you’ve seen of companies doing this in, in, in your coaching, in your leadership consulting, in your own experience? What are some things that people do and have done that where you’ve found, so you’ve seen success?

[22:26] Doug Conant: First of all, this is my belief and, and our current president and I are not on the same page, but in terms of change evolving an organization, I think going in, I think you need to honor all your stakeholders.

[22:41] They need to feel. Respected and honored. You may disagree with them, that’s okay, but you have to honor them and you sort of have to build a relationship that’s that’s gonna withstand some testing, some heavy tests. In my case, I think you honor people. You build a layer of trust that says, I’m gonna respect you, but I’m gonna make tough decisions.

[23:03] Stephen Covey would, his concept of the emotional bank account is important here. Because you gotta be in the black before you start making all the changes if you want it to be an enduring success. So you can’t over promise, but you can be fair and uh, and you can be my language, tough-minded and tenderhearted, not one or the other.

[23:27] Both. Just in as, as an aside, it’s sort of like parenting, you know, when you’re raising your kids, do you have high standards for them? Absolutely. They also know you have their back

[23:39] Jim Harshaw: and just like a great athletic coach really too. Right? They can share the hard stuff and, and, and love you at the same time.

[23:45] Doug Conant: Yeah. When you’re leading an organization, they gotta know you have high standards and you’re tough minded, but they also have to know that when push comes to sve, you’ll have their back. Uh, but you won’t compromise on the standard. And so you, you create this expectation level. It’s, I’m gonna be tough-minded and tender-hearted.

[24:07] I’m gonna respect you, but we are gonna make hard calls. And if you can’t move with us, we’re probably gonna have to move on, but we will help you. And uh, so I start from a place of build a platform that can withstand the pressure you’re gonna put on it year one. And be prepared to make meaningful changes at the end of year one and year two and year three.

[24:34] Because in, in the corporate world, if you’re a CEO, you got three years, you’re at risk. If you haven’t figured it out yet, the first year, it’s the other guy’s fault. The second year, well, we’re learning, we’re starting to get a, we see a few green shirt shoots of opportunity the year, the third year. It’s your fault, you own it.

[24:54] And so you’ve gotta be building a team. That can get you traction by year three. And if you think about any team building work that’s been done, or any models for team building, you know, there’s a something called the Tuckman model, which is forming, storming, norming, and performing. And guess what? It takes about three years for a team to get to high performance.

[25:17] So you gotta start making changes in year one, establish the expectations. Start to act on the changes and be really ready to hit the ground running by year three. But I think the key is start with respect, but also start with high standards and hold yourself accountable to that the whole way through.

[25:39] People tend to be on pins and needles when leaders come in and start to make change, and leaders tend to focus just on what’s wrong. Even in the most broken companies, Nabisco and Campbell are two of ’em. In my experience, eight outta 10 things are being done right. But nobody’s talking about those.

[26:00] They’re just talking about that one move you did. That’s wrong. Meanwhile, you got 87 moves that are just fine and we’re gonna focus on the one that I’m gonna make you better. That’s not good enough. You gotta find a way to celebrate what’s working while you deal maniacally with what’s not working. I recommend that leaders set the standard focus on what’s not working, but have this underlying current that says, I realize there’s a lot of good work going on here.

[26:28] And so you gotta celebrate what’s working all along the way. If you think about what I said earlier, think in terms of the Gallup. Once a week, everybody’s gotta hear. That you did something right, if not more. If you’re doing more right. Uh, because typically with organizations, we’re very good critical thinking machines.

[26:48] We can find what’s wrong and we’re gonna pound it, all right? We’re gonna fix it. But we tend to overlook the things that are going right. So for a leader today, I would say deal maniacally with what needs to be addressed. Set your standards. Build a base of trust that so people will know that we dealt fairly act with dispatch and all along celebrate what’s working.

[27:13] Jim Harshaw: When you see a company who gets this right, what kind of programs, trainings, initiatives. Activities are they doing, like when a company gets it, when the leadership gets this right? What are the things that, that are showing you, not just the, the Gallup poll results and, you know, sort of maybe success and sales and that sort of thing, but what are, what are some of the trainings or activities, engagements, you know, the things that this company might be doing?

[27:41] Doug Conant: Well, I think tone at the top is the beginning of it. So, uh, you know, you’ve gotta pull a Gandhi here. You’ve gotta be the change you wanna see in the world. So all this stuff I’m talking about, I have to be living this every day and I have to be unbelievably consistent with it. ’cause one step backwards and everybody’s gonna know.

[28:03] So you declare a commitment to here’s how we’re gonna do things, and then you gotta live into that commitment 24 7 for 10 years, which is what I, or 11 years what I did at Campbell. So that’s the first thing. You set tone at the top. The next thing you do is you can’t change the world, but the leadership has gotta embrace it at a high level.

[28:28] It’s not just one leader. It’s usually your cadre of leaders at the top. Most leaders have in an organization, have even a big one, have maybe 10 people that are really leading various parts of the department, even at athletic. Department, you know, they have a cadre of leaders at the top and they have to all be on the same page.

[28:54] They’re gonna be different because leaders are different. They’re thoroughbreds, they’re not pack horses, and they’re gonna need to run and they’ve gotta have their own lanes. But the tone at the top has to be the same. You have to be sharing the same sense of purpose, the same values, and you have to have a commitment.

[29:17] To what I would call an employee value proposition for everybody in the enterprise that is unwavering and your whole team has to live into that. They have to understand what it is they have to buy into it, and if they can’t buy into it, they have to be somewhere else because we, we have to serve you.

[29:37] Interestingly, out of the 350 leaders that left every year, we acted on that in the first three years. Employee engagement went up. Why? Because they knew those changes needed to be made because there were people that were getting in the way of the progress that the company had the capacity to make the people know. I was like the last one to know, you know, every year we’d let these people go and I’d never been a CEO before I, you could argue I didn’t know my ass from my elbow. But I knew everything you could know without being A-C-E-O-I, I was a real student of this. And every year I’m waiting to see OI hope the results are encouraging.

[30:18] So it, they just say, we’re on the right track, and every year they got better and better. And it was, wow, we are on the right track. And why, what, what am I missing here? And I finally dawned on me well. The company knows what we need to do and we just needed to do it in, in a responsible fashion that had elements of due process around it, not just lopping off people or departments.

[30:45] Jim Harshaw: So you shared a lot about your philosophy in terms of, in terms of engagement and leadership. I wanna ask about you, Doug. So you were in these very high pressure, stressful jobs and, and you have a family, right? Married with three kids and. Like what were the personal habits like what were the things that helped you manage the pressure?

[31:07] What were the like personal disciplines or habits that kept you grounded? Any morning routines, evening routines, midday resets, kind of how you went about your own personal habits to manage all of this stress.

[31:20] Doug Conant: Well, I’ll give you some specifics in a minute, but I remember, uh, when my life was, uh, a couple episodic things.

[31:28] I was fired from a job 10 years into my career and I had to go home to my wife, my two small children at the time, and my one very large mortgage feeling every bit the victim, not prepared to go look for work. I, I was. Caught off guard and devastated and had the gift of a outplacement counselor who really helped me get back in the game again.

[31:51] And he was a trusted mentor for life, and his name was Neil McKennan. This was when we had landlines, no cell phones, no internet, and every time you called him, he didn’t know who was calling him. He’d say, hello, this is Neil McKenna. How can I help? And he was just there to help people and he became, he was revered in Boston.

[32:12] He ran the outplacement program for Harvard Business School, among other things. He’s just an amazing guy. And so I, I saw the power if I was just trying to help people do better, like Neil did. I saw such power in that and it, it began to shape my approach to the way I was working. And then about a decade later, I ended up working with Stephen Covey and I did my personal mission statement.

[32:42] I, I sort of codified how did I wanna show up in my life? And I called out and I was feeling stress, probably like a lot of people who are listening to this. I was trying to balance work life, you know, and I realized it’s all one lane. It’s not different lanes. And uh, so I committed. I thought a lot about it.

[33:06] I committed to my mission. I’ve got it right here in my office, right over there. I did it around 1995, so 30 years.

[33:16] Jim Harshaw: Do you mind sharing what it is?

[33:17] Doug Conant: This is a first. I’ve never done this on a podcast. Or, uh, anything else.

[33:23] Jim Harshaw: Ah, that’s great.

[33:24] Doug Conant: And I’m not gonna get into the detail of this. It’s, I was very aspirational back in 1995.

[33:30] Jim Harshaw: Yeah.

[33:30] Doug Conant: So there’s a lot on here.

[33:32] Jim Harshaw: Yeah.

[33:32] Doug Conant: There are nine key things that I have in my overstatement, and then there are about 35 other things that I wanted to live into. That’s it.

[33:42] Jim Harshaw: Wow. All typed out, framed. Full page. Yeah.

[33:46] Doug Conant: And I also, in my office, I had it under glass at, at Campbell Soup at Nabisco and Campbell Soup Company.

[33:53] But you know, I recently went back and did this for some of my leadership work. I said, well, how did I do on all this stuff? And you know what? Living with intentionality, which Stephen Covey would say would be the single most important thing you can do is live with intent. I have lived into these 35 things.

[34:12] I was astounded.

[34:14] Jim Harshaw: You stopped. You thought these through, you framed them, you put, you saw them every day. You put effort into it. You were intentional.

[34:21] Doug Conant: I revisited them and I started living into them. I didn’t look, I didn’t think, think about them like this, but, and in there, embedded in here was I had roles in achieving my mission, which was being a good Christian, a husband, a father, a son and brother, a friend, a business leader, and a family steward.

[34:42] And I wove those roles together so that they were one, one lane, and it’s complicated, but I thought my way through, but probably more importantly, I felt my way through them. It’s not just a thinking exercise because when you show up, it’s thinking and feeling together. Where the magic happens. So I started living into this.

[35:07] Now let’s talk about some specific habits. I had a habit when I became a CEO. It was a tough job, so I made a conscious change. I, I got up an hour. I was an early riser before I got up an hour earlier, and I sat in my garden. In New Jersey with a cup of coffee when the sun was coming up, and I just reflected on my day and I reflected, you know, I had the birds and the bees and some deer in the backyard and I, I just sort of gathered myself and settled a bit and thought about what am I gonna be doing?

[35:43] I then had a two to two and a half hour commute. I had somebody driving me. I had a process for preparing myself when I went into work and I had a process for coming home from work and if I managed it right, which for the most part I did, I was able to be fully engaged with dinner at home.

[36:02] Jim Harshaw: That’s a trick that’s hard to do, being fully engaged when you have such a big job and you’re coming home to a family.

[36:08] You have shifting gears, so would you mind sharing any insights into what you did on that drive to work and that drive to home from work to, to make that shift, that mindset shift?

[36:18] Doug Conant: What I was able to do is I delayed because I could work from the car by phone anyway. Again, there was not a lot of internet.

[36:26] I mean, I was able to work off the phone. I went to work later and I took one of my kids to school every day. Then I would work from the car on the way in, but I was, I tried to make it a point to take one of the kids, we had three kids and take one of the kids to school every day. They, of course they went to three different schools for the most part, but then as they got older, I did less of that.

[36:52] But I, I made it a point to connect to breakfast and to take one of them to school every day. That was awfully important, and I also made it a point to fully engaged three out of five nights, and then I was there for the weekends for the most part. My family would be away for the summer at a lake cottage, and I would go there every weekend, which was flying halfway across the country, and I’d be there in time to be with them Friday night, and I would leave Sunday night and get back to work on Monday.

[37:27] And so I had this personal discipline. I think you have to show up. You know, and ideally in person, but if not, my daughter, my youngest, she started calling home from college at Northwestern. Between classes, I was she walking from one class to the next and we started to figure out the schedule. So I was able to talk to her almost what felt like every day, if only for two minutes.

[37:56] But she was talking to her mom all the time. But I was able to get enough of the action. Because I, we could figure the schedule out, but you sort of gotta do this with intention, you know, it wasn’t just gonna happen naturally. So those were the kind of things I did with the kids. We had an active church life, which helped pull us together every Sunday.

[38:18] And uh, and they all had sports and things like that, and I fully present for enough of that to be dangerous anyway. Given that I had to work my office was two and a half hours from where we lived. Oh, we didn’t move. We didn’t move. We stayed in the town where, uh, my kids had grown up. So those were some of the things we did.

[38:40] Jim Harshaw: Yeah. So Doug, for the listener who wants to take action on what they learned here today from you. What’s an action item? Something that they could do in the next, I don’t know, 24 to 48 hours to start moving on, taking action on what you shared here today.

[38:58] Doug Conant: Well, you know, I wrote a book about this and, uh, I’m gonna shamelessly, uh, sell the idea now, and, and the book is the blue.

[39:07] Six practical steps to lift your leadership to new heights. And what I find is that people today are feeling overwhelmed, anxious, all this stuff come a tsunami of stuff washing over them and they’re not quite sure how to react to it with conviction, which is required to be intentional. So the word that I am encountering there, there’s people are saying people don’t have the courage of their convictions.

[39:37] And my belief is the reason for that is they don’t know what their convictions are. And that’s the problem. Where do you stand on things? Have you ever thought about it? Who do you wanna be? How do you wanna walk in the world? Have you thought about it? Have you committed to it? And most people would say no.

[39:52] They’re just reacting by the seat of their pants. I got news for you in these days, that’s not good enough.
[40:00] So we created this process where we challenge people to, we believe your life story is your leadership story and that embedded in your life, you have all the life lessons you need to lift yourself to new heights of contribution.

[40:14] But you know what happens? Most people take all those life lessons. They live them, and then they put them over here in the parking lot and they just keep reacting to stuff. There are all these beautiful lessons right here in the parking lot, and what we do is we take them off the highway of life and into the parking lot and we say, okay, we’re gonna spend a day in this parking lot figuring out what’s your story?

[40:41] What are your values? What’s your purpose in life? It’s all here. You’ve got it here. You’ve lived it. You know it. We just gotta go excavate here and we gotta dig in and we gotta find it. So what I would say for people is really examine your life. Think about what you wanna stand for and if you need help, get the blueprint book.

[41:01] But the, the concept is commit to something just like I did with Stephen Covey 30 years ago. He said, what do you wanna do with your life? And I, I don’t know. I wanna have a good job. I wanna raise my kids. Well, you know, live happily ever after. And do you think, is that all you got? Is that good enough? And you know, no it wasn’t.

[41:22] I needed to actually spend some time thinking about it and living it and making it better. And so all of your listeners have the capacity within already to lift their contribution profiles up. They need to go in and find their way. Our book will help. But so will Stephen Covey. If you just do the seven habits, it’ll help.

[41:49] And, uh, then you’ll have a sense of purpose. You’ll have your values codified and you’ll start to live into ’em just like I did. Now I’m slow. It’s taken me 30 years to live into ’em, but I can’t. I’m telling you it works.

[42:02] Jim Harshaw: Yeah. And for the listener, they know, the longtime listener, they know exactly what I’m about to say.

[42:07] This, this idea of the parking lot is something that I’ve, I’ve. Heard so many different ways. Talk to, you know, talking to, you know, world class performers and leaders like you over the years, Doug is, I’ve, I’ve boiled it down to a concept that I call the productive pause. And a productive pause is defined as a short period of focus, reflection around specific questions that leads to clarity of action.

[42:33] And peace of mind, right? It is not the doing it is stopping extracting yourself as one of my clients says, you know, extracting myself from the matrix, getting out of the chaos, getting out of the rat race, pausing, thinking, asking the right questions, usually with somebody else helping you, guiding you through those so you can identify these core values and identify the intention and how you actually want to live your life.

[42:57] So, great wisdom, Doug,

[42:59] Doug Conant: and you need to commit to doing, I mean. You can’t do this by the seat of your pants. Not good enough. You can do better than that. It’s your one life pause is a good idea, but the productive pause, you’ve gotta, with intentionality, you’ve gotta make that pause productive, and you gotta devote time to it.

[43:17] Using the Daniel Pink thing that we talked about at the very beginning, you gotta do the work. Then you’re gonna have the insight and the epiphany of how you wanna lead your life, but you gotta do the work first. It requires some work.

[43:31] Jim Harshaw: Doug, where can the listener find you? Follow you, buy your book, et cetera.

[43:35] Doug Conant: Conantleadership.com is our address. We’ve got a website, Conant leadership. And we’re active on social media. We have a conversation going across everything we do with 500,000 leaders every day. So we got a lot of good productive conversation going there. I would say one other thing about me, I’ve been doing Conant leadership for now.

[43:59] Since 2011, 14 years, I don’t have a paycheck yet. I don’t do this for money. This is all about paying it forward. We don’t charge for most of what we do and what we do charge for. We charge in order to pay the staff so that we can do the quality of work that I think is essential here, which is high quality, and we wanna be able to pay the team, our small but hardy team so that we can keep doing the work.

[44:26] But we’re in this for all the right reasons. And, uh, and it’s important for people to know that

[44:32] Jim Harshaw: yes, it is unbelievable. Doug, you are a living example of, of living. Intentionally grateful for your wisdom here today. Thank you so much.

[44:41] Doug Conant: Thank you.

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