Welcome to How Leaders Lead, where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Okay, imagine this. Your alarm goes off and it's 1 a.m. And an hour, it's your job to be on the back of a trash truck. Oh, and by the way, you're one of the top leaders of the company. Believe it or not, that's exactly what today's guest did, every week for 7 and a half years. Jim Fish, the CEO of Waste Management, is just that kind of leader, one who spends time on the front lines to be with his team and truly listen to him. And I'm thrilled he's joining us today. He's connected to the people he leads and he's focused on putting them first when he makes decisions. And he knows that by taking care of his people, they'll then take care of customers and that in turn provides value to shareholders. It's a fantastic formula and it's inspiring to hear how Jim is putting it to work while also finding new ways to think about sustainability. And that includes being the title sponsor of the Waste Management Open on the P GA tour, which somehow is a zero waste event despite the 700,000 fans who come for the party. We get into all that and more today, so let's jump right in. Here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Jim Fish. The first time I met you was on a golf course and I was impressed right off the bat with just your infectious smile. And we had a big smile on your face. You bring a sunny disposition to your work in life or did you just have a low round? I did not have a low round. So that was not it. No, I just think sometimes I feel like the world's too serious and it is serious and there's serious things about it. But I think my mom and my dad as well always and maybe that's been continued by my wife who is very positive, but always taught me, "Look, life can be pretty short and so have a sunny disposition, be happy about things. We're all blessed in our own way." Maybe that's the way I feel about it. But it definitely wasn't my round. My round was actually, I should have been frowning if it were about my round. Well, I've heard you say the stress is overrated and I just, I think you explained why. That's just part of your DNA. We're in a fairly complicated business, but if you would, I'd like you to simply describe what you and your team at Waste Management do. It's complicated in some respects because it is a big logistics challenge for us. We run 20 somewhat thousand routes a day. We touch a lot of customers, 25 million customers. So there are some challenges there. We're not splitting the atom here. It's not biotechnology or complicated business like an AI business. But there is some complexity to a big logistics business. Our landfill business is more of an engineering business. And then recycling is really almost manufacturing. So there are challenges in each aspect of Waste Management and they differ. I would tell you probably the single biggest challenge for us is labor related. We have 50,000 people that work for the company. The pool of these trade type jobs has been shrinking over time. It's a challenge for us. It's a challenge for all companies that employ tradesmen and women. And so that's been, I think, the most complicated part of the job is not so much the technologies and that is evolving. It's been dealing with people. And I think people are, they're always the backbone of every company. They're also the least predictable part of every company. Yeah. I can relate to that. We had a lot of people at Young Brands and that people in Tensei business is difficult to run. Well, you've been at the company since 2001, I believe. How has the business evolved since that time? I think the change from, for me, from 2001 until today, aside from just kind of the career changes, has been that we've really started to recognize that people are the backbone of our company, that we have to cultivate people and make sure that we help them grow. It's different than when my dad was in a small business. I think people had fewer choices back then in my dad's generation. Today, our young people have lots of choices. And if I don't treat them the way they would like to be treated, the way they deserve to be treated, they'll jump ship pretty quickly. The average number of job changes for a young person today, I read somewhere that's somewhere between 15 and 20 job changes over their career, I don't know what it was for me, but I sure haven't changed jobs, you know, companies, I guess, 15 or 20 times. I think I might have been with maybe five. What was it about waste management that made you stay for over two decades? I probably didn't know whether I was going to stay for two decades or two weeks when I started with the company. I mean, and that's probably no different for most of us. We don't know what to expect. We might say it looks like a good opportunity, it looks like an interesting company with some interesting prospects. But we don't know whether we're going to really enjoy it. I think what ultimately causes us to enjoy where we work is do we feel like we have a purpose? Do we like who we work with? Do we like who we work for? It's almost never about things like compensation. We've all had jobs where we made pretty good money and we left because it wasn 't about the money. That's something that's pretty easily fixable. If I love what I'm doing but I'm not compensated enough, I can always walk into my boss's office and say, "You know what? I love this. I love working for this company. I feel valued. I feel like my opinion matters." But I'm getting offered a position from a different company and they're offering me $25,000 a year more. That's an easy fix. But if I don't like who I work for, that's a little tougher conversation to walk and say, "Look, my compensation's good. I like the company, but man, you're kind of a jerk." That's a tough conversation to have. I do think that part of why I've stayed here and really almost all of why I've stayed here is because I feel like I always felt like if I took one more step, I could continue to make even a bigger contribution. I never had a title in mind. I didn't come to the company in '01 and say, "Someday, I want to be CEO of this place." I never really had a title in mind, but I always thought, "Gosh, I'd love to ultimately move into our operations." So I did. I was in Boston and then we lived in Pittsburgh and we were moving over to Philly when they moved me back to Houston. The reason that I made those moves was not because I was trying to climb a ladder in any way. It was because I felt like I could bake a bigger contribution in the next job. I've been allowed to do that. Hopefully that contribution has been valuable. I'd like to think it has. That's why I've stayed here as long. I didn't come into this thinking I was going to make my career at waste management, but it's turned out that way. I think part of it is because I've enjoyed not only the business, but I've enjoyed the ability to make a contribution. You began your career as an accountant at KPMG, Pete Morwick. How has that impacted the way you lead the day? I was there for a short period. It was 12 to 18 months, something like that. I would tell you that it probably didn't impact me as much on the leadership side as it did on the technical side. I mean, I've tried to tell young college students that an accounting degree is a good degree. You're always going to find a job coming out of college with an accounting degree. Maybe less about the leadership side and more about the technical accounting/f inance side. I use that accounting background to this day, even in today's board meeting, talking about certain things that are pretty finance heavy. I'm relying on a college degree and ultimately a graduate degree that really has served me well over a long period of time. Look, I think leadership starts not with your company, not with your career. I think leadership in many respects starts in your very formative years. For me, with my parents. Most of us is with our parents. I really felt like my parents gave me such a great foundation and some of the things that they instilled in me as a kid, I've tried to really keep all the way through to this day. Well, tell us a story about your upbringing that really shaped a lot of who you are today. My mom was a wonderful lady. She passed away nine years ago, dad passed away two years ago. Mom was a very, very humble lady, such a sweet person. You talk about an infectious smile. That was my mother. She was the first female from the state of Wyoming to go to Stanford University . I said, "Mom, that's such a neat little factoid." She said, she whispered and said, "But there weren't a lot of women in Wyoming ." That was just my mom. She used to take us as kids. You remember the old nursing homes that were kind of miserable places. It's basically where you put old people to go die. Mom recognized that. We would go over to these nursing homes. She would ask, "Who doesn't have any visitors?" By the way, it was surprising how many people at those nursing homes had no visitors. We're just social creatures as humans. Mom was such a social person. I remember a little old lady. A little old black lady, her name was Magdalene Mayes. Mom would drag us. I have two sisters, a twin sister and a little sister. She would drag us in to her. We used to call it mom's little old ladies. We go in and we see Magdalene Mayes or another little German lady named Mrs. S oggy. We'd go see these folks. They had no visitors. Their family, whether they just didn't have any family that was still around or whatever the case was, we would go in. Mom would make a point of bringing Christmas presents to them or a birthday gift or Valentine's card or whatever it was. These little old ladies. I would tell you, I think mom lengthened their lives by 10 years just by providing some social interaction but bringing these young kids around. Again, as kids, we hated it. We're like, "Oh my gosh, this is miserable." What I've learned, I believe, from that experience is that people matter so much and mom treated people with such respect and such dignity. I remember when mom was getting ready to pass away about a month or two before she passed away and I asked her when she and I were sitting down, I said, "Whatever happened to Magdalene Mayes?" And mom said, "Oh, she passed away." I said, "Did you go to the funeral?" She said, "I sure did." I said, "Was anyone there?" She said, "Yep, there were two of us there, Magdalene and me." What a story that is. And I mean, still even kind of jokes me up a little bit, telling that story because that was Eve Fish. And hopefully I took some of that and I've been able to use it in my role today . You obviously have had great success at Waste Management and you worked your way up in a number of roles from being the GM to the CFO. When was it that you had that aha moment that said, "I want to be the CEO?" Do you remember that hitting ear to do that ever? I do. Yeah, I do. I mean, I honestly, we didn't have a great succession plan. I hope that they're happy with how I've turned out, but I'm not sure they were happy when they made the selection. And there was really very little discussion about who the succession candidates were. But I do remember talking to David Steiner, who was my good friend of mine today and my predecessor and him saying, "Look, there is a succession plan and you're on it ." And then there was not a whole lot more conversation about it. But at that point, and I remember actually where I was at a golf course kind of out by you at Sage Valley and David and I were staying in a house together and that's when he told me that. And I thought, "Wow, I mean, maybe I do have another step in my career." And so I went home and talked to Tracy about it and thought, "Gosh, I don't know. I think I could probably make some pretty good changes." Not that David hadn't done a good job. He did a great job. But I think I could do some things as well, particularly on the people side. And so that's probably the time that I first thought about maybe being CEO of a big Fortune 200 company. Waste management was founded by the legendary Wayne Heisinger. What did you learn from him? Well I never met Wayne, but it's interesting his family, his grandfather, I mean, I believe it was his grandfather. That was really the forerunner of waste management. Wayne kind of put this roll up together that then he called waste management. But his grandfather was Polish, I believe. His name was Harm Heisinger. Started with just a horse drawn buggy that they threw trash in in Chicago in reading about Wayne. And about Harm Heisinger, what I learned was the value of a strong work ethic and how much that will serve you well in your life. Sometimes I feel like today I look at our two daughters and I think we've inst illed a strong work ethic in them. But I would like to see them put their dish in the dishwasher every now and then when they finish their meal. Because I had to put all the dishes, even though I had two sisters, somehow I ended up doing a lot of the dishes. So I do think though in all seriousness, I think that the Heisinger family, that work ethic was just instilled in them from such a young age. And I have met a lot of the family, even though I never met Wayne himself, that have talked about that and talked about how important work ethic is. I hope that we're able to not only instill that Tracey and me and our children, but also make that kind of a core tenant of still of waste management that carries through from those days 51 years ago when the company went public under Wayne. You know, you have something called the recycle plan in the future. You know, what drove your thinking on this, Jim, and how are you leading that plan in your organization? It really stems all the way back to my childhood and somewhat of a conservative nature around consumption. I feel like we've become such a consumer society that everything is single use and we throw it all away and can't we do something better? Isn't there a better use? It doesn't mean by the way that I'm anti-plastic, for example. I think plastic is a very important material, but how do we do something more productive with it? And that does for me, stem back to my childhood, and not being wasteful, but trying to use recycling as a way to preserve the earth's natural resources. So the recycle plan of the future is really about increasing that. If I get right down to that level of detail, it's increasing from 10% to 50%. How do we get to 50% of that material being truly recycled instead of just 10%? And it not only preserves natural resources, but ultimately I think it gets to a point where there's a better use for that material than just throwing it into a hole. How do you galvanize your organization around that? Well, fortunately in this case, it's pretty easy. There aren't many people that say, "Yeah, you know what? Just not a big recycling. That's not what I like to do." I'd much rather just throw my plastic tie bottle in the trash. Most people, particularly young people, are saying, "Look, I'm very pro-recy cling. In fact, some are religious about it." But I do think galvanizing around the environmental aspect is less challenging than galvanizing around the economic aspect. I've said many times, I've said it on Squawkbox and a lot of my business interviews is that sustainability has to be both environmentally and economically viable in order to really work. It can't just be one. It can't be that, "Hey, putting my PET bottle in a recycle bin is better for the environment and therefore it's a good thing." No, it has to make money for us as well because most of this is processed by big businesses like ours. And our shareholders are going to hold us to an economic outcome, not just an environmental outcome. So it has to be both. And I think making sure that people understand that is really where that's the piece that may be a little tougher to galvanize than the environmental piece. Because you're listening to this, I can tell, you're the kind of person who wants to learn how to lead well. But there's a lot of companies out there who want to take that desire and charge you $500 or $1,000 or heck, even $20,000 to try and show you how to lead. That's just not right. If you want to be a better leader, I believe you deserve to have access to something that will truly help you and it shouldn't cost a fortune. So I want you to go to howleaderslead.com and start my leadership class. It's really and truly free. And after you take this class, you're going to feel more confident in your role and you'll be on your way to getting big things done with your team. Go check it out at howleaderslead.com. I understand that you hired your first chief digital officer in 2018. How is technology driving your business? As we think about this pool of shrinking positions and you saw it at young brands, a lot of these positions are becoming more and more difficult to fill. The turnover is higher in these positions. So we started thinking about this a few years ago, kind of right around that time in 2018, 2017, which is if this pool of labor is shrinking and you hear about the great resignation, then how do I prevent that from ultimately jeopardizing the business? Probably of our 50,000, I'm going to say close to 40,000, if not a little more, are hourly positions, trade type roles. And if I can't fill those, then my business is in jeopardy. On the other hand, if I can fill mine and you can't fill yours, then it's actually a competitive advantage for me. And so how do you do that? I mean, there's only a couple of ways to really reduce your labor dependency. One is process change and there's some overlap here between the two, but one is process change and the other is technology. And that's why I say some of those are interrelated. But as we think about technology, I'll give you an example of customer experience centers. Airlines started doing this, I don't know, 20 years ago. I can't remember the last time I called Southwest Airlines and actually spoke to somebody. I just go online to their website and I book my seats. It might surprise you to learn that waste management wasn't there until very recently we weren't there, if a customer wanted to self-serve, check the status of a payment or order an empty in return for a can or order a new service until fairly recently, within the last five years, they couldn't do that. They had to call. And I don't care how good our customer experience center is, it's never a pleasant experience calling customer service. I mean, you got to go through an IVR and you got to talk to this thing and it's trying to, and sometimes it doesn't understand me. And it's a much better experience to do it online if that's available for you and if it works. So what we've been doing though to still keep in this people first mentality is that we're using technology to replace people who leave the company. We're not riffing anybody. We're not saying, "Okay, David, you don't have a job anymore." What we're doing is when 50% of our customer experience folks leave every year and that's really what the number was. It was almost 50% turnover. Then my question for our tech team was, how do we use technology to minimize the impact of turnover and actually not have to replace all of those folks that leave? So that was kind of the impetus behind it. Had your customer service metrics improved with the technology? They absolutely have. In fact, if you think about our customer service center call volume, which is a good proxy for how we're doing because a lot of the calls that come in are complaint calls, we were taking about 15 million calls a year. So if we had 25 million customers, that means kind of 60% of our customers were calling at least once a year. That's not necessarily a good thing. You'd like to think that I don't call very often. I've been a customer for 10 years. I haven't called in 10 years. If I am calling, it means I probably am calling because there was a problem. There was a problem with my bill. There was a problem with my pickup. Something happened with my driver or whatever the case is. If you look at that as a proxy for how we're doing on customer experience, our number of calls is down 25%. That's a good sign for me. That tells me that folks aren't calling in with problems. The people that have to call in for new service, they can do it online. If they want to do it, if they're like my dad who was afraid of a computer, he 'll still pick up the phone and call and he would at the time. But I think the reduction in call volume of 25% is as good an indicator as any that our customer experience is topped here. I would agree with that. Jim, you've said that the environment only has a voice because people advocate for it and who better to advocate for the environment than waste management. How are you taking the lead to achieve your goal of being the most sustainable company in the world? Maybe a microcosm of that is the golf tournament itself. I'm talking about the WM Phoenix Open. It's 180 degrees from your master's tournaments. I've characterized it as a gigantic fraternity party that also happens to be zero waste. If you haven't made it out, David, you've got to come out for the tournament last year on Saturday. We had 400,000 people there on Saturday. I think it's a representation. That's why I say it's a microcosm of what's the art of the possible with respect to recycling and ultimately our view to be the most sustainable company out there. We've taken that event and turned it into truly turned it into a zero waste event, which means that none of the containers, none of the food waste, none of that goes to a landfill coming out of that event. 400,000 people, you can imagine, produce a lot of material. I don't call it waste because waste then implies that it goes to a landfill. It all goes for either recycling. It goes for reuse. It goes for donation. It goes for waste energy. It goes to something other than just a waste plant or a waste landfill. When you talk about those constituents and the voiceless constituent being the environment, we really want to make sure we take care of all of our constituents. I always say we have five big constituents, our shareholders, our employees, our communities, our customers, and then what I call the voiceless constituent, which is the environment and the reason I call it a voiceless constituent is because it doesn't call me in complain. I get plenty of complaints even though I think our customer experience is much better than it was. I still get customers who call me and say, "Hey, the wheel's broken on my container and I want a new one and you guys haven't been out to pick it up." The environment doesn't call me. It speaks in long term. It speaks over the long term and if we don't take care of it, it is going to speak to us and it's not going to be happy. It's not going to be a good conversation over the long term. I think we have to make sure that we not only take care of those first four, but we take care of the fifth one, which is the environment. That's interesting. This silent constituency, going back to the Phoenix Open for just a second, I understand there are zero trash bins in the golf course. This probably is one of the most heavily consumed alcoholic golf tournament in the world. I would say, how did you get everyone aligned around a vision like that and go out and execute it? That had to be a different mindset. No alcohol at that event, David. No, you're right. I think it takes everybody to, this is one where it truly takes a village. We took over the events in 2000, so I think this is our 13th year as the title sponsor. It took us about five or six years to get to zero waste. All of the participants, that means the vendors have to make sure that the flat ware, for example, the forks and knives and spoons are compostable. If you're not going to bring a compostable fork or knife as a vendor, then you can't be a vendor for that event. Certainly people want to be vendors for that event because it is such a huge event. It's a money maker for them, but we dictate to those vendors what they can bring. It's important that the fans understand how to recycle. What goes in the recycle bin versus the compost bin? There's an education process. We have as many as 200 coaches, if you want to call them that, walking around. We've tried to label these bins, a compost bin, and show pictures. People tend to focus on those pictures and say, "Oh, there's a fork there. This goes in that bin." They don't know what is compost. Sometimes they know what's recycling. You probably know that your plastic bottle is recycling, but you don't always know. Is this fork a compost item or is this a recycle item? We put pictures on those bins to try and help them. That does help us because all that non-recyclable material that's in their cycle bin ultimately has to be sorted out. The more that the fans can self-sort for us, the better off we are. There's the fans, there's the vendors, there's the players themselves being big advocates for a zero waste event. That's been helpful to us. The PGA has been all in on this. There's a lot of different parties that play a role here. Of course, not the least of which are our employees. We have, I think last year, it was in thousands, might have been close to 2,000 employees who were actually out there working in the event. It might have been north of 2,000, but a big, big number of waste management employees, many of them fly in from Toronto or from Miami to actually volunteer for this event. Whether they're driving customers out to the golf course in golf carts, whether they're actually working on as one of those coaches, helping people differentiate between recycling and compost, whether they're on the sales side. There's a whole host of different functions out there. The golf tournament has been unique. The interesting part about it is I've asked Jay, you know, Monaghan, Jay, and he's the commissioner of the PGA, we should be able to make every event a zero waste event if we can make the W&F Enix open, which is almost a million fans, in fact slightly over a million, I think, be zero waste, then why can't one of the smaller events, an event that only has 200,000 for the week be zero waste? And so that, Jay said, I totally agree with you, but it does involve all parties getting together to make it happen. You mentioned earlier that when you first had the idea or first thought that you could be become the CEO of waste management, you thought you could make some changes, you know, particularly on the people front and the culture front. What have you done, Jim, on that front? What's the culture today versus what it was and, you know, where are you trying to take it? Maybe I'll answer it this way. I was asked by probably the lead Wall Street analyst, and he brought a bunch of investors into Houston. This was, I'm going to say this was five years ago. And he said, Jim, what do you want your legacy to be as CEO when you retire? And I think he actually thought that my answer is going to be something along the lines of, you know, double digit total shareholder return or something like that. Very much a kind of a financial answer, I believe is what he was expecting me to say, and I'm sure that the investors in the room were expecting something like that. And my answer was, I hope that when I retire, that people say, Jim helped make this a great place to work, to make a career. That is what I hope people take away from my leadership is that, first of all, that Jim honestly cares about 50,000 people. And it's not just 50,000 people, it's 50,000 people plus their families, that I honestly care about every single one of those people. And I want what's best for them, whether it's pay or whether it's benefits or whether it's recognition or whether it's happiness, that the small amount of happiness that I can provide them in having a job that's fulfilling. That's how I hope I come across. That's what I hope my legacy is. That's how I answered the question in that meeting. And I think it was surprising to that investor group, whether they were disappointed in my answer, I don't know. But I think they've seen that, and this is, I'm plagiarizing a little bit here from Herb Callaher because I never met Herb, but I always thought he was a great CEO and maybe a little bit ahead of his time because he recognized back in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, that if you take care of your people, and they're happy with what they do, then they in turn will take care of your customers and your customers will be happy. And then your customers, happy customers will make for happy shareholders. And it has to be in that order. You can't change the order around and have a successful long-term model. So I think our shareholders after that meeting five years ago where I said, I want to be known as the CEO, helped to make this a great place to work, who maybe at the time we're saying, well, that's a dumb answer, maybe they think, well, it wasn't so dumb because the stock price has done pretty darn well for us. That's a great formula for success. There's no question about that. But you've got this in your blood. You really believe this, the genuine care for people. You run a big organization. How do you cascade it so that it's not just you? I mean, you're one person. You got to have everybody drinking the Kool-Aid. Drinking the culture is not something that happens over even a period of months or even years. I think it happens honestly over a period of probably decades. I'm not going to be here for decades. I've been with a company for a couple of decades, but I've only been in this job for coming up on seven years. And I'm not going to be CEO for decades. But I would like to think that my successor carries forward at least that piece of what I think I've started to accomplish. I'm sure there are things that the board says, "Boy, we don't want that out of Jim's successor." But hopefully one thing that they do say they want is someone who really genuinely cares about their people. And so as you said, David, it can't just be me. It can't be one person because there's 50,000 people here. So it has to be something that we teach through leadership development that we 'd look for in hiring back to Herb a little bit here. They really looked for it in every position that they hired, whether it was a flight attendant or a pilot. You get on Southwest Airlines as I was this weekend. It's just a fun airline to fly. And it wasn't, look, it was a full flight. So I wouldn't say it was fun from that standpoint. Good for them for having a full flight. But it is still to this day. And Herb's been, I think Herb passed away probably 10 years ago. But they have still somehow been able to maintain that. And the way they did it was not just Herb Kelleher. Herb really cascaded that down through his hiring practices, through his leadership development, through everything that affects people, through succession planning. All of that was something that I think Herb really emphasized. I'd like to think that I'm doing some of that. I understand that your father-in-law gave you some advice a while back to not sit in the corporate office but to get out and be with people. What's your rhythm for doing that today? Well so my father-in-law was, and again, he was similar to my parents passed away too young and he passed away 14 years ago. Pipe Fitter, Union Pipe Fitter from St. Louis, and I always used to go back and forth on labor unions, you know, good or bad. And I don't have a view either way. He had a very strong view. But one thing that he did say where we completely agreed is, because I used to say, look, Union or non-union, we're all just people. And so he said, I totally agree with that, Jim. And the advice that he gave me was, look, when you go out into the field, and I mentioned that I started in Houston but then we went out to Boston. I'd never been in a field job. I'd never had field employees, operations type employees reporting up to me. And so what my father-in-law said was, when you go out there, don't just sit in your office. He said, go out and find out what your team is doing. He said, if you can, he said, do they have any kind of meeting, you know, like a weekly meeting, a safety meeting, and I said, I think they do. He said, well, if they do, go to one every week, make a point of going to a safety meeting every week. And so what I found out when I got out there and I called him back and said, well, they do have safety meetings and they're at two o'clock in the morning, or three o' clock in the morning, he goes, great, perfect. Go to the two o'clock in the morning meeting. And he said, make sure you go to the early one. He said, if they have a two, three, and four, and then a six, don't just show up for the six because then the people at two will say, yeah, he couldn't make the early bell. But he came out for the six AM one. Go to the two. And by the way, go every week and maybe you ride along with a driver every week . So I did that for the seven and a half years that I was in the field. You can count the number of times that I was at a field location riding on a truck by the number of weeks on the calendar. So for every single week, I made a point of going to a site. And initially what I was learning was about the business. I mean, it was, it was, you know, how do I learn about this business? But after a while, after seven years, I wasn't learning as much about the business. It was more about to your, to your previous question about how do I kind of cascade this down into the organization? So people know who I am. And people have started to learn who is Jim. I've, I've said this for many years, started saying it when I, when I went out to Boston. And I was, look, my priorities in my life are my faith first, my family second, and my job is a distant third. And the reason I say it's a distant third is not because it isn't important. It's just because the first two are that much more important to me. And so often our leaders, we don't really know who they are. We don't know what their values are. We don't know what their priorities and life are. And so I've made a point of letting everybody know what those are. I think that's been an important aspect of my leadership. And certainly when I look back at my father-in-law, giving me that advice and saying go out and spend time with those, with those drivers, with, with heavy equipment operators , with customer experience folks, I think that was maybe the best advice I've ever received. I'd like to think that, that he's looking down on me and saying, good job. That was exactly what I told you to do and look what it turned into. Do you still do that, Jim? Now that's your CEO? I do. In fact, I went to, we call them crew outs. They're kind of safety meetings, but we also talk about other things. I went to a crew out in Philadelphia last week on Thursday morning. I'll be doing it again here in Boston in a couple of weeks. So I wouldn't tell you I'd do 52 of them a year, but I bet you all do 20 this year. I'll probably do 20. I used to actually go out on the back of a truck about once a quarter and actually throw trash back there. And the board did say, you know, that's probably not a great idea. That would be a bad article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal that Jim Fish was injured behind the back of a truck throwing trash. Isn't there something better for him to do than throw trash? And while I think that's a very important job, they're right about that. I shouldn't be on the back of the truck. I'm a little too old to be doing that anyway. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Jim Fish in just a moment. As the leading recycler in North America, sustainability is a key factor for Jim and his team at Waste Management. And not too long ago, I got to talk to a real pioneer in the world of sustainability and entrepreneurship. Joy Zwilinger, the CEO of Alberts. The conversation we had is full of great insights for anyone who wants to truly understand what it takes to make your business more sustainable and successful. The two worst conversations I've had at Alberts have been from two former executives from very large companies that had played a major role in creating the industry as it stands today. And they both said, there's no way this is going to be successful. A, because no one's done it before and B, because it's just dumb. They're disheartening because those conversations are with people who know a lot about your industry. And they know a lot more than you'll almost ever know than what they've lived in their industry. So how could you just ignore that? But you got to put it into context. And I think of myself as a network learner, where when I have a hard problem that I don't know the answer to, I generally go out to the five to 10 smartest people I know who know something about this issue. And I ask them the same question and I get their advice. And then I try to put context around where those people are coming from and what's smartest with the idiosyncrasies of our business and then come up with an answer or a solution that we think will work for us. And so I would say in those situations, I take those as data points and I try not to get disheartened. And I think entrepreneurship, you run into these situations, you run into a lot more nose and you run into yeses and you can't be disheartened by those. And if you would be, probably stop getting out of bed every morning. So no point in letting them, letting them get you down too much. Go back and listen to my entire conversation with Joey, episode 31 here on How Leaders Leave. Did you're not on the back of the truck anymore? What do you think is the most important characteristic of being a great CEO? Well, first set implies that I'm a great CEO. I don't know whether I'm or not. But first of all, I think being decisive, and this is all something David that you can relate to. I think being decisive and as one of our board members said, being decisive is easy, but being decisively right is not. So if I'm decisive but I'm decisively wrong, that's not a really great trait to have as a CEO. But I think being able to see around corners and think a little bit into the future. So for example, one of the things we talked to the board about today was not so much what does the economy hold over the next 12 to 18 months? I think there's a lot of opinions on that. And yeah, do we go into a downturn maybe? Probably do some type of soft downturn. Here's what we talked about. And here's what I kind of laid out for them at the beginning of the meeting today was if you look at the amount of debt that the United States has, and there's a lot of books and I read a lot on this, the amount of debt of $32, $33 trillion plus what's not even on the balance sheet, which is Social Security obligations and Medicare obligations. There is the real potential for a really, really ugly downturn. I mean, I'm not talking about a 20 Q4 of 23 or Q1 of 24 downturn. I'm not talking about a soft landing. I'm talking about a really ugly downturn. And I've talked to a couple of Federal Reserve folks about this. And so those are the types of things that I think you want to see, you know, at least to be able to think about how does it affect my business potentially? And if I'm 100% wrong about that, that's okay. In fact, I hope I am. But if I'm right about it, then at least the business is somewhat prepared. I do believe that you want someone in this job who can think about the what does the future hold for us? And then secondly, how do I prepare the company for that possible future outcome? And if it's a negative future outcome, how do I really protect the company? Let's use China as an example. If I'm a big manufacturing company and I have a big percentage of my supply chain in China, do I want that? Should I prepare for something that could be ugly? I don't know whether it happens, but it sure could and there's a lot of conversation about it. So having that type of educated foresight, I believe is important. I also think that, you know, look, I'd like to think that people think of GM as being a fairly humble guy. I think that's important. I think it's an important trait. I could be better at that, but I do think it's an important trait. I think a level of intellect, I'm not the world's smartest guy. But there was a study that showed that, you know, there's a minimum IQ for CEOs . And then, and there's a direct correlation between shareholder return up to that minimum IQ. And then everything above that is driven by other factors like EQ or whatever. Those are all, I believe, important leadership traits as a CEO. You've had a lot of success. You know, your stock has grown, which has been great. You know, when you're leading a team that's had so much success, how do you build a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo? It's kind of a double edged sword in our space because we've been so successful and sometimes you're a product of your own success and you get a little bit of ap athy there. We've really tried to weed out that apathy and help people understand that the burning platform is not that we might not make payroll next week, but the burning platform is that demographically we're looking at the United States. The average American has gone from age 30 in 1980 to age almost age 40 today and will continue to climb. That's a risk. And that's also a risk not only to the macro economy, but it's a risk to our business because we hire a lot of folks in at that entry level. So I think that while it may not be something that they can see that is next week, uh oh, I might not be able to make payroll. That's not the issue. Look, we're always going to be a successful business. We're always going to generate solid returns to shareholders, but there are some risks and trying to make sure that people understand those and that there is this sense of urgency. It is a challenge to your question, but hopefully we've done a decent job of building that sense of urgency and maybe that's been part of our success. You know, I want to have a little, little fun here, but before I go into my lightning round of questions. I want to go back to the Phoenix Open and I understand that you play in the program every year. Tell me about what Darks Bentley is coined the fish effect. All right. So Darks, I played with him a couple of years ago and we've developed a nice friendship with Darks. Such a nice guy. His father was actually a Thunderbird in Phoenix and the Thunderbird group. The Thunderbirds, we partner up with them. They've been running this golf tournament for 80 years. So Darks, his father was a Thunderbird. I played with Darks, I played with him a couple of times, but when I first met him, it was in the program and at the time I played in probably five pro-amps and just purely coincidence, but every single pro that I played with, not only did they win a tournament that year, but they won a major that year. So I played with Vijay Singh the year that he won the Masters. I played with Webb Simpson the year that he won the US Open. Played with Calcovecchio and Calcovecchio won the British Open. So they're the, I guess they call it the Open Championship. But anyway, so it was just purely coincidence, but I told Darks, I said, and that year it was funny, we're playing with a guy named Jonas Blix, who was ranked number 185 in the world or whatever. And we didn't even get to pick. I wasn't CEO at the time. And so I told Darks, I said, there's this thing called the Fish Effect. He goes, what's that? And I said, you know, every year you play with me, you win a major and Jonas is listening in. And so he says, wow, he goes, Jonas, that should make you happy. So anyway, long story short here, late Jonas, he didn't qualify for the Masters . He made the US Open and missed the cut, didn't play in the Open, gets to the P GA. He had won an event that year and he is literally leading the PGA with two holes left. And Darks Bentley sends me a note and says, the Fish Effect is real. And he said, if Jonas wins this tournament, you should auction yourself off next year for to play with GM and the pro AM. That's funny. You know, this has been a lot of fun and I want to have some more now with my lightning round of questions. And so you ready for this? I am. I hope. That's one word others would use to best describe you. Competitive. What would you say is the one word that best describes you? A learner. If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be? Tom Brady. And I'm not a, and I'm not a Pats fan, but Tom Brady. What's your biggest pet peeve? I think apathy is, is for me as a big pet peeve. What would you know about Houston only if you lived there? That Houston really is a great place to live. In a word or phrase, describe what it's like hitting a tee shot on the 16th hole of the waste management Phoenix Open in front of 20,000 people. It's exhilarating because there are a lot of people there. It's not pressure packed because it's a nine iron or a pitching wedge. And for me, the driver is the much bigger risk for me, but it's, it's exhilar ating. If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear? You'd probably hear SiriusXM radio or maybe a podcast or two. There's something about waste management that few people would know. I don't think people realize we're the biggest recycler in North America. They always think of us as a landfill company or, or the big green trucks. What's something about you few people would know? I can barefoot ski, David. I really can. I can barefoot ski. And I have to ask this one for my wife, Wendy, who wanted to know what's the most unusual piece of garbage that you or your team has ever picked up. We had a boat anchor from a cruise ship, somehow end up in our recycle plant. I don't think it was a cruise ship because those are gigantic, but it was a big anchor that ended up somehow, and I don't know whether it came out of a big rolloff box, but it ended up on the floor of a recycle plant. Obviously, that was not recyclable through a small conveyor belt that processes tin cans and plastic cups. I'm just curious, you mentioned earlier your faith, family, job, way down the list versus that, and you're in a 24/7 type of job. How do you balance all of that? I try not to take the job really too seriously. I know it's an important job, but I also try and keep it in perspective. As a CEO, yes, the job's important, particularly to 50,000 folks, but also try and recognize that, look, if I think about this in the scheme of all the great people in history of which I am not one, there are so many people that I look to and say, "Wow, whether it 's Abraham Lincoln or whether it's Winston Churchill or Martin Luther King or whatever, their legacy will live forever." So part of this work-life balance, which I think is what you're alluding to a little bit, is recognizing that I'm not that important. I'm never going to be one of those folks. I do have to recognize that I'm important to those 50,000 people and try and do everything I can to make sure that we're helping, as I've said, make waste paint as a great place to work. But keeping that priority in line, and that's why I oftentimes say that job is a distant third, is because I recognize that I'm just not that important. And so let's keep that in perspective, not get too. I try to keep my highs pretty low and my lows pretty high. And so I'm fairly even keeled. And I think that's important. And while we didn't talk about it in terms of traits of a good CEO, you don't want to be a CEO that has real high highs and real low lows. So I think that's important if you are one of those types of people to try and temper that a little bit. All right, last question here, Jim. What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone who wants to be a better leader? I think if you want to be a better leader, first of all, I describe myself as a learner and leadership in some respects is an eight. There are some leadership skills I think that we're born with. But a lot of leadership is learned. So I always tell folks, if you want to be a better leader, there's some things that you can do to better yourself. Watch others who you perceive to be good leaders. And what are they doing? Read about it. Listen to podcasts. I think this is hopefully this is a helpful tool for folks who want to be a better leader. Hope they look at this and say, you know, I think this Jim Fish guys is a decent leader and I can learn something from it. A lot of leadership is learned through experiences. So take advantage of those experiences. Jim, I got to tell you, it's just been a blast, you know, getting this time with you. Thanks so much for being with us today. Well, thanks for having me. I had a great time as well. You know, Jim drops a line in this conversation that I absolutely love. He says, people are the backbone of every company. They're also the least predictable part of every company. Boy, isn't that the truth? And in order to lead well, we have to understand both of those realities. Yes, people are 100% your priority because taking care of them is the key to taking care of customers and driving results. But people aren't predictable. You can never take your eye off the ball. As your business grows, as the labor market shifts, as competitors make moves, you always have to stay tuned to what your people are thinking and what it really takes to prioritize their best interest. You got to get out there, make connections, and heck, maybe even ride on the back of a trash truck at 1 a.m. in the morning. So how can you really apply this big idea at work this week? Well, here's a suggestion. Before you make a decision, just pause. Take a moment and think about how it will affect the people on your team. You might even write yourself a little sticky note to remind you to take that moment of consideration. This simple discipline will help you frame up every decision around the people you serve. But it might just do more than that. You may realize you don't really know your decisions affect certain team members. And in that case, you'll need to make stronger connections with your team and really understand how to take care of them so that they can take care of customers and grow your organization. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders put their people first. Coming up next on How Leaders Lead is Jeff Colvin, Fortune Magazine senior editor at large, and the author of two of my favorite business books, Talent is Overrated and Humans Are Underrated. In the world of business, we spend virtually all our time actually performing and very little time, typically doing what you'd call practice. And so what you have to do is find ways to practice within the work. And you can do that if you have the right mindset. You're thinking even while you're working, okay, what skill am I working on right now? You have an ability to step outside yourself and look at the situation, like what am I working on right now? And how am I doing? And then you think afterwards, how did that go? What did I miss now that I think back? How could I have done it better? That's a little more work than most of us put in, but it really, really pays off. So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How Leaders Lead, where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you can become the best leader you can be. And one more thing, we started a new How Leaders Lead podcast called Three More Questions, and in this podcast, I team up with Kula Kallahan. Kula turns the mic around and actually asks me questions, three questions about the podcast that I just posted in the prior week. It's a lot of fun, and hopefully it'll give you insights that you can start putting to use every single day. 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