David Novak 0:04 

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. You know, leadership can be tough, it can be thrilling, it can be fun, but it should never, ever, ever be boring. And I can guarantee you my guest today will back me up on that. In this episode, I'm talking with how Rosebud he's currently the chairman, CEO of new ocean Health Solutions. And he's had an incredible career building and selling successful companies in the travel and healthcare spaces. And at every step, he's looking for ways to challenge the status quo. That ability to push boundaries and ask questions is the key to his success. If you want to make sure you're not playing things too safe in your world, as a leader, you definitely want to keep listening. Here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Al Rosenbluth.

I want to start at the beginning. What's the story from your childhood that shaped the kind of leader you are today?

Hal Rosenbluth 1:22 

Well, might be a little unusual. I really had more negative role models, and I had positive role models. So I learned not only what I didn't want to be as a leader, but also how I could affect people in a very positive way from those negative experiences.

David Novak 1:42 

Yeah, I understand you once taught your eighth grade English class for three full days. What that experience teaches you about leadership, obviously, you didn't think much of the teacher you had to take over the class.

Hal Rosenbluth 1:54 

We were learning poetry. And now it's basically classical poetry. And we all seem kind of bored. And she made the mistake of saying, well, if anybody thinks they can teach his class better than me, you just raise your hand. Well, sitting in the back row was always I said, Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go for it. And I raised my hand. And next day, I came in with the record player and a 33. And it was a Simon and Garfunkel album. And she said, what was that? I said, Well, that's poetry. She says, What are you going to do tomorrow? So we'll flip it over the other side, and we'll listen to the next part of the album. Well,

David Novak 2:42 

it seems to me like you probably enjoyed challenging the status quo to teach that class and take her on like that. Is that something you've carried throughout your career?

Hal Rosenbluth 2:50 

Yeah, I do, like challenging the status quo. It's boring. status quo is in itself status quo. So there's no movement forward. I don't think that's interesting to anybody. You know, you

David Novak 3:05 

ended up becoming CEO of Rosenbluth International, which is the world's third largest travel management company, and, and this was a family business started in 1892. As I understand it, when did you first get involved?

Hal Rosenbluth 3:18 

The day after I graduated from college, I really wanted to be a criminologist, quite frankly, but I saw that my dad was, was overworked and, you know, getting stressed out and frankly, I thought it was getting sick. And you never want to see one of your parents that way. So I decided I joined the business and next day i i did so give me

David Novak 3:41 

a snapshot of the business back then and and what it became as you eventually took over the company, when

Hal Rosenbluth 3:47 

I joined the company, travel agencies were simply Mom and Pop type of companies, three 410 15 people maybe doing vacation travel or booking a business flight and hotel for somebody. But I looked at all this and said there's an unknown unmet need here. Corporations look at travel as a unmanageable expense and people just haphazardly called whoever they wanted and companies paid for it. And I thought, Well, let's find a way to manage this and help corporations save money. And so we created the travel management industry. Our first three clients were GA arco FMC right after that the first bid for national contract went out from the DuPont corporation and we're fortunate to be selected and that got us rolling. And we kept on inventing new and innovative ways for companies to understand why people travel, how to make it much easier for them to do so. Provide them with information that they could used to internally manage the travel, create policies, etc. And then took that and decided, well, you know what, they're not getting a fair shake from the airlines. So we decided to create an exchange and bid out their travel based on travel patterns, which we had in our data center. And airlines would then create different discounts. For each Corporation, based on information we provided and did a lot of innovative things. And one thing led to another and a national contract then became a global contract. And then as we open to offices, guests in 35 countries around the world, we would be awarded, not only the travel, the companies we were servicing, it had offices in those locations, but then get the headquarters of companies in those countries and, and start serving them in all of our other offices around the country, we kind of looked at it as a popcorn effect that and we'd pop up and then the popcorn would pop down and end up in offices throughout the world. You

David Novak 6:07 

turn this into a global powerhouse $6 billion company. And, you know, as we started out our conversation, you kind of talk like you are this, I would say, mediocre student,

Speaker 1 6:21 

you know, that kind of goes to your family business.

David Novak 6:24 

But you had to get pretty focused in a hurry. I mean, all of a sudden, I mean, you don't come up with all these ideas and make things happen like you did without getting really focused. When did that light go off? And you that really got you pumped up and excited about this business? First

Hal Rosenbluth 6:40 

of all, thank you for the compliment of being a mediocre student. That's the best I've heard yet.

Unknown Speaker 6:47 

Well, it's kind of how you position yourself. I'd say that's a true. Oh,

Hal Rosenbluth 6:51 

that's, that's the way it was fact, by my parents, they both passed away over the last couple years. And they were hoarders of everything, including my report cards. And going through them, I could see why I was rejected by most of the colleges that I applied to and found out I actually went to summer school to be able to graduate high school. So I joined the family business, and I didn't like In fact, I didn't like anybody that worked there. They were all prima donnas thinking that they were God's gift to travel and, but I was also the owner's son. And I knew people would resent me right off the bat. And they did, rightfully so I probably would have to. And I didn't want to make any decisions until people started coming and asking me for advice within the company. And that points that okay, let me let me start doing some different things that nobody's thinking about. And that was the beginning of business travel and corporate travel management. And I felt that it was really important to not only provide the best service and save the most amount of money and make it easier for people to travel, but that we had to have a company that was made up of friends, not friends that we knew and hired, but an environment where people could become friends, because in that environment, friends never let friends down. And so we would just constantly think of different ways to create competitive advantage and help those that we're servicing. And we're eventually awarded the service company the year by Intel, which was one of our clients and one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For in America and all those really nice things that we never saw it, it kind of just just happened, companies have far too much an effect on people's lives. And in a lot of cases, it's very negative. So I've always wanted to create a, an environment where people wanted to come to work, and rather than having to come to work, and I think that's always been a key part of our success and listening to the ideas of people throughout each of the companies that were you know, closer to the customer than, you know, maybe I was and some of the other executives, and then taking that advice and researching and talking with the customers again and asking them if this made sense. And so we're successful in that.

David Novak 9:29 

So you come in as the owner, son, people resent you a little bit, you decided to basically go into areas that nobody else had done and innovate. And that led to you becoming CEO I take it well,

Hal Rosenbluth 9:46 

yeah, that night said to my dad and his partner at the time, that kind of time for them to relax a little bit and they kept their $20 million of people going To St Maarten are taking a cruise and I was building up billions of dollars in business. And so I thought, Okay, I'm going to take over it's time.

David Novak 10:10 

How did you navigate that is that probably wasn't easy for your dad to take. Now,

Hal Rosenbluth 10:16 

I was easy for him to take in the we had a very trusting, open, honest relationship from whenever I was able to comprehend anything. And so he knew it. I mean, there comes a time when everybody kind of knows it, whatever that it is. He knew what time and he was very proud of what my colleagues and I had accomplished. It was something we never thought would be in the future for the company. I was the fourth generation I was supposed to destroy it. You know, there were times where I thought maybe I was getting close. But nevertheless, we we survived. It

David Novak 10:55 

doesn't sound you got to lucky on this, how I you know, I'm not gonna buy this humble act, you know, all the way here, you know,

Hal Rosenbluth 11:01 

hey, I had to self educate myself after college. I mean, I didn't, I didn't learn much. I read and I read and I read and about 20 or 30 of us in the corporate travel department that time, eventually, I guess 6000 And if their work each day, we go to a bar and I was no longer how Rosenbluth I wasn't even how it was, hey, you I got something that you know, want to talk to you about. And that was perfect. Because then you get very open, honest discussions going through this

David Novak 11:31 

all as I understand it on the side, you become a rancher. How'd that happen? One

Hal Rosenbluth 11:37 

night, I guess back in 19. Ada, I was watching. I think it was ABC nightly news. And they were talking about this horrendous drought in the upper Midwest. People were losing their farms and ranches. And at the time, we were doing a lot of data entry on hundreds of 1000s of people by hand into computers. Did they want an aisle seat smoking, non smoking frequent flyer information, so on so forth. So I knew that we could do that anywhere. I asked a couple of my colleagues to go to the agriculture department and ask them what part of the Upper Midwest was having the toughest time and they said North Dakota, and ask them to go out and meet with the governor and staff and ask them what part of the state was having the toughest time and they said, the admins County and this town of Linton, which maybe 1500 On a good day. So there was a John Deere implement center that had nothing but concrete nest, Woodburn burning stove, because there weren't any implements anywhere to be bought. And so the church gave us a bunch of tables, and we got some chairs, and we hired 40 foreign wives. I always knew that foreign wives kept the books. And so they were going to be very meticulous and accurate. And so we decided that we were going to consolidate all of our data entry out in this little town of Linton and eventually, we hired 250 Farm wives in the area. And they were all fantastic. And one day, one of the folks who was working there, she said, Would you like to come and have lunch at our ranch? And I said, Sure. And I went out there and sat at the table with the rest of the family or young kids. And her husband said, Hey, would you like to come take a look at my cows? I said, Well, yeah, sure. I mean, the only cow I had ever seen was in the Philadelphia Zoo. I couldn't get up close and personal. There was so there I was in the pen in a nice set of loafers, and khakis, city boy. And I started to sink in the mock. Yeah, he said, So what do ya think of my cows? Lovely. Life. I mean, I didn't know anything about cattle. I didn't know I think I will girth or bags or anything else. It goes on with cows. And but I just felt boy, this is interesting. So I went back out again. And he said, Hey, let's get on a horse and we'll go ride and check the cattle and we went out. I loved it. I love the fact that our entire center out there was built on the handshake. You could trust people, everyone knew each other. Anything that was said, spread throughout the community. You didn't need the internet then there are still some party line phones. You said one thing to somebody in it, it just spread and I just fell in love with the people the honesty, it was heaven for me and eventually we ended up with five All centers around the state and you know 1000s Of, of people and you you bought a ranch. Yeah, I got a call from this guy turned out to be a real estate agent said hey, hell, I understand you're looking for some land I said, Yeah, I really, um he says, Well, how quickly can you get on a plane and get out here? I said, Yeah, I'll be out later in the day and I made my way out to North Dakota and pick me up the airport and we drove 60 miles out there, you just make a left when you get out of the airport and drive ventually reach my ranch. As we're standing there, he says this is it. I go, this is what we're in the middle of a whiteout. I can't see a damn thing. He goes, Well, there's a really nice valley below or up on a bluff the Missouri River is, you know, is out there. I said, Alright, fine. I'll, I'll take it. That was 35 years ago, and the most fabulous place to go.

Koula Callahan 16:06 

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David Novak 17:00 

You've learned a lot as you've been in the ranching business farming business. Now I've heard you say that you should treat your employees like cattle and run your business like a farm. Explain what you mean by this. A

Hal Rosenbluth 17:13 

farmer ranch their assets or their crops or their their cattle are both and they tend to them with care. They provide the right nutrients. They're out every day five in the morning, back at six o'clock at night work ethic is fantastic and everybody helps each other. If a neighbor needs something, you just go run in, you don't charge, you just know that they'll be there for you that the next time and that work ethic that honesty, I believe very strongly, you can't fake farming can't say that, hey, my corns knee high by the Fourth of July. It's all browned out. It is what it is. I've learned so many lessons on taking care of people through the way that my neighbor's ranchers take care of their family, family is big, and take care of their their assets. You know, you're obviously

David Novak 18:12 

a people person. And the success of any business, as you well know, comes down to the people you're able to hire and retain. And I understand you would take candidates that you were really interested in hiring to strengthen your team out to your ranch as part of your interviewing process. You got a lot of common sense. Now, what's the thinking behind this?

Hal Rosenbluth 18:35 

Well, first of all, they're, they're in an environment, which is unusual, it's not known to them, which would be very similar to a company that might be joining. And I wanted to get to know how they are. And out there you can do different things that really bring out what's real and in a person, how they handle and you know, unique situations, are they willing to jump into something? Or are they definitely afraid of taking a risk? You know, you spend a couple of days out there you have a bunch of whiskies and things come out number one person we're looking for a CFO and I had my colleagues with me and we were in the ranch house, and he starts talking about how he defrauded an insurance company and how proud he was about it. And I'm going oh, this is gonna be a beauty. So the next day we had to put up fence so he had like a half a mile fence to be put up and you know, you have the barbed wire, you have the stakes, and so on so forth. So we drive out and I said hey, look, why don't you just take this? Yeah, this car is a dirt road, make a left, keep on going. You'll get to a highway, make another left and take those 60 Miles get back to the airport. And it's been great spending a couple days with you.

David Novak 19:54 

You know, and you're an author as well. You wrote a great book called The customer comes second, which became a New York Times bestseller when it was a more common belief in business that the customer comes first here, you kind of challenging the typical way out people think, tell me a story about how you lived out this big idea as a leader, because it's one thing to say that people come first, how do you live it out?

Hal Rosenbluth 20:22 

I mean, you just have to recognize that the customer can't come first unless you remove all the obstacles that one of your colleagues would face in a business, whether it be bureaucracy, whether it be poor leadership, benefits, whatever, you want to make sure that there's nothing at the forefront of their eyes other than the customer, you create a culture

David Novak 20:46 

where you know, the people come first. And you call it common sense. But you know, you build a $6 billion dollar company, you've got to spread this and offices all around the world, What process did you put in place so that your culture could be what you wanted it to be everywhere, because you can't be everywhere at once?

Hal Rosenbluth 21:05 

No, which is why you have to have great leaders everywhere. And you have to remove bad leaders, if they surface and everybody that joined the company, we would fly them actually into Philadelphia, and I would serve them T we'd sit around a conference room table and just have a conversation about what the company was about and what they were about. All of a sudden, they saw me serving them, and taking an interest in their lives and their culture. Because we had to have the same culture, whether it was in Singapore, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Shanghai, wherever, regardless of the culture outside of work inside, it had to be the same. And so our training department and human resources were so so critical I, I am such a firm believer that the head of human resources in the CEO need to be taught at the hip. And you can't delegate in the motion. You can't say I you know, Thursday, I'd like you all to begin to care. Now, people will care if they want to care, they're not going to care if they don't want to care. And that's a result of the environment that they're working in. And so we made sure everybody got all the training we could possibly provide so that they felt confident and made sure that like ranching, you know, if you have a big cow that's messing up the herd, you got to get rid of it. And so we had different ways of knowing that there was a bad leader. I mean, interestingly enough, one day, I was looking at some productivity reports, and I saw that our average speed of answer in Singapore had doubled from typically 15 seconds from time somebody calls a reservations agent answering the phone. Yeah, we were up to 3040 seconds. And so I knew something was wrong. So I asked our Chief Human Resource Officer to fly with me the next day to to Singapore, we went there and got everybody together. And yeah, after about an hour or two, came out that half of our people were of Malaysian descent, and the other half of Chinese descent and the Chinese have always been leaders. And our leader happened to be of Malay descent. And people resented that. So I talked to everybody and said, Look, yeah, I get where you're coming from, I understand culturally, we're all at, but inside here, it's gonna be the best person. So give this person a chance to lead. And we just stuck with it, eventually

David Novak 23:54 

sell Rosenbluth to American Express walk me through how you thought about that decision? Well,

Hal Rosenbluth 24:03 

we were competing with two other companies. One big American Express on every global contract was just the three of us. And I could see that there was really no pricing power anymore. And I could also say that there was going to be a change in travel that the cost of cooling or reservations center is going to be much higher than if people can book online. It was just at its infancy. And so we embrace that started our own online booking and allowed for our corporate customers to decide past $45 to talk to reservations agent or 15 to do it on your own. We made sure everything was programmed with their corporate travel policies and personal preferences, etc. But I also knew at the same time that you I was going to be the end of travel agencies travel management companies. And so I got a hold of Blackstone and asked them to put us up for sale. And at the time, I decided that all those corporations would use that use American Express card, we'd change them over to Visa or MasterCard, or whatever. And when you have $6 billion of that, that American Express can say, Oh, we'll get three and a half percent. And if we flip them back over to our card, they won the auction. And they, they were great. They lived up to every word, they went best to breed on, you know, for leadership, and so on, so forth. In fact, the other day, person who started as my executive assistant then went into corporate communications, she then you know, Rose within American Express, and now she just became Chief Marketing Officer of Delta Airlines. So that's always great. When something like that happens. That's

David Novak 26:01 

fantastic. And, and after the sale, you started, the new company called Take Care Health was created some of the very first in store health clinics. I mean, you were ahead of your time. Tell me about what you call your electric cocoon, and how it launched you into this next big idea? Well,

Hal Rosenbluth 26:20 

I had recently read a book called The popcorn effect, I think it was by faith popcorn, and I went up to sear and in New York, iced little office to sit down and there's not coffee, there's a shot of vodka, I think, and

David Novak 26:41 

I've been in her office.

Hal Rosenbluth 26:44 

So you know, and, you know, I asked her, you know, how do you see the future? When she goes, Well, I, you know, I collect, you know, articles from all around the world, probably, you know, 1500, magazines, whatever. So I went back home, and I got about seven different video displays. And I created this cocoon of cacophony to a great extent, but I kept everything at the same decibel level, or bringing in audio feeds or, you know, reading something, or what have you. And I just sat there, I wanted to figure out what was the unknown unmet need? And, yeah, my wife would come in, and she'd see me sitting there and doing nothing, and she'd say, What are you doing? I said, I'm working. She says, No, you're doing nothing. I go, I know, I'm doing nothing, but I'm working. So how can you do nothing and work at the same time? I said, I don't know how you do it. But something's going to come through to me. And eventually, what came through was in Massachusetts, they had started universal health insurance. And as a result, you couldn't get a doctor. And if you got a doctor, it took you weeks months to be seen, you know, I said to myself, that's an unknown unmet need, that we can take advantage of by creating affordable, accessible, high quality care. And so I got together with my son's soccer coach, who was president of one of j&j subsidiaries Janssen and I loved the way he coached. My boys was like Bad News Bears. They were like, 11. Yeah. 11 year olds running and then not even a circle what they were running, but it was nowhere near the ball. But he taught them self esteem. And they taught them how to how to win. And so he said, Hey, how I'd like to do something with you. I go, okay, Peter, you will be out of your mind. You're the youngest president of j&j. And you want to do something with me? He goes, Yeah, it would be fun to be a lot of laughs huh. Okay, great. So, we talked about this idea of, you know, how do we create this affordable, high quality, accessible health care, and we came up with the idea of putting clinics inside of pharmacies. And we looked for the right provider level, which was the nurse practitioner that had a great scope of practice for all the things that people would typically need. So we put together a business model, and we quickly got single source national contracts with Rite Aid, Eckerd Osco, Walgreens just about all them other than CVS. And I think we opened 1500 or what have you, and I was having dinner with the president of Walgreens and he asked him if he wanted to take a small strategic position in our company and he goes, No, I want to buy you. I know, came to have dinner with you. I don't want to walk out of your cell in my company. plus, it's being funded by private equity. So I'm not going to make that decision without sitting down and talking with them. And so I went got together and they said, Well, hey, let's go for it. And one thing led to another and I had to change all the other contracts that we had and dissolve them and Walgreens purchased us.

David Novak 30:24 

And here comes the interesting twist. I'm sure in your career, you now become one of the top executives at Walgreens. And it's obvious your bureaucracy Buster, you run by a lot of instinct with a lot of intelligence, obviously, as well. How did you go into that big company? And you went in as the president, you know, a very high level, what was that like for you? And what did you learn as a leader doing it? Oh, first

Hal Rosenbluth 30:54 

thing I learned was everybody thought I was Rodney Dangerfield, you know, they had executive row or death row as I refer to it, where had all the executive assistants which they refer to as secretaries with, you know, fallen hairdos are whatever it is, and they weren't allowed to talk to each other. And their executives were behind the doors outside of their cubby holes, or what have you. And, and I come with an Apple computer, we'll know Apple computers around this place. And so I said to the everyone, after a couple of days, I said, Why didn't they talk around this place? You're all so quiet. Let's come to Christmas time. Let's do a love train. I'll turn it on. And we'll we'll rock and roll and like, silence dead silence. Oh, boy, have I gotten myself into a mess here. People were afraid, afraid to live, let alone think. So what happened was people would come to us and said, we we like your culture. We want to be more like, take care of health systems in Walgreens like that, well, that's going to be a problem. So the first thing I did I think my first Grace accomplishment was changing the dress code, getting everybody out of suits. And getting word of the root of the word. Mr. Course there weren't any Ms. Executives at the time, they all were Mr. and I said, That's ridiculous. Got to stop this stuff. And then I would meet every morning, I guess, 5:36am with the President, CEO of the company, and we would talk and, you know, he began to give me more and more responsibility and, and he said, Well, let's try and change the culture.

David Novak 32:49 

We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Hal Rosenbluth in just a moment. You know, it can be hard to challenge the status quo, especially when you're in a big corporation. But when I talked with Waze co founder, Yuri Levine, he shared an incredible insight on how to do just that. And

Uri Levine 33:07 

therefore the only way for corporates to innovate efficiently is actually to invest in to invest in something that will make them irrelevant. So every corporates need to ask themselves one questions every year, right? What will make me irrelevant? What if this happens, my market is disappearing is not going to be the remain the same. So. So that might be digital camera for codec. That might be Netflix for blockbuster, that might be the smartphones for the digital cameras. And if you can answer that, if you can basically say, You know what, in five years or in 10 years down the road, if this happens, I have no job for my corporate, then you should invest in doing that. And you should either spin off or invest in a company that is doing that, because you will not be able to carry that by yourself throughout the entire journey. If

David Novak 34:02 

you want to be more disruptive and innovative. There's a wealth of wisdom waiting for you in my conversation with Yuri, Episode 129 here on how leaders leave.

What was the single biggest thing that other leaders could really benefit from when you think about your time at Walgreens?

Hal Rosenbluth 34:24 

I think you have to take a good hard honest look at where you're working and recognizing whether the company is going in the right direction or not. If it's not do something about it changes direction. I created a whole ecosystem of health care for Walgreens recognizing that just having stores wasn't going to do it. But if you bring it all together, that you can create a lot of not only traffic but you create a lot of wellbeing for people and and can become known as the place for healthcare. Unfortunately, they didn't take everything that I suggested they got halfway there. And then leadership change, and I was gone. And I think CVS pretty much did everything that I suggested to Walgreens. But you were very successful.

David Novak 35:19 

As I understand it, you created a corporate innovation team, which contributed over $2 billion in incremental revenue to the company, you know, what advice can you give leaders on how to drive innovation, even in a staid, boring company like Walgreens was at the time?

Hal Rosenbluth 35:39 

I think you've got to begin to create relationships with different people throughout the company where they want to get involved in in new ways of thinking and looking at opportunities for an unmet need. It's great when there's an unknown unmet need. There's actually two right now, I think, and in the country that would be defined as such, but what would they be? Or is that your next business idea? One is the country is becoming more and more depressed. And the unmet need is, what are the root causes? And how do you change them. And the root causes are everything from social media to media itself, to cry to anxiety, global events, divisiveness, government, education, parents, worrying about their kids, kids wearing a birth, the parents, it just, there's so much anxiety, and we don't have enough providers to deal with it, whether it's done digitally, or it's done by professionals. Now, the country's, unfortunately getting more more and more depressed, and we need some catalyst to get us out of it. And I just don't know what that is,

David Novak 37:05 

what would be the second one, so depression, which could be solved with the caretakers on that front?

Hal Rosenbluth 37:12 

The hidden costs of health care, my co author, Monty Hall and I are writing a book on hypochondria, and the hidden cost of health care, the cost the system of people who suffer from illness, anxiety disorder, which is a nice way of saying hypochondria, that's been caused by pharma commercials where, you know, every third ad is, here's what you probably have. And then you take this pill and you're all of a sudden, picking flowers and dancing through the, you know, the hill tops. So then everybody gets on that drug until the next commercial comes out. And you go, maybe I got that till I haven't thought about it. And then it just goes on and on. And then it goes, and you go the you know, after you get the script, and that's obviously not going to work because you don't even know if you have what you have. But then you get, you know, you have to have this test and that test and a procedure and you start adding up you're getting into 10s of billions of dollars and it affects everybody's premiums, that affects just everything, but I think we can solve that. I think that unknown unmet need is one that when our book comes out in the spring, I think we have come up with the solutions to that or at least explaining how a hypochondriac can deal with themselves and how the system can deal with with hypochondriacs because a lot of us then there's gonna be more kind of goes with depression and anxiety which is building. This

David Novak 38:39 

has been so much fun and I want to have some more with my lightning round of questions. Are you ready for this?

Hal Rosenbluth 38:44 

Sure.

David Novak 38:45 

Okay. What's one word others would use to best describe you and you can't say hypochondria

Hal Rosenbluth 38:53 

unusual.

David Novak 38:54 

Who would play you in a movie?

Hal Rosenbluth 38:57 

Larry David. Okay.

David Novak 39:00 

If you could be one person for a day besides yourself, who would it be?

Hal Rosenbluth 39:03 

One of my kids, I think I live vicariously through them.

David Novak 39:07 

What's your biggest pet peeve?

Hal Rosenbluth 39:09 

Honesty, and lack thereof?

David Novak 39:12 

You've got two hours to yourself. Are you jumping on a horse or a motorcycle?

Hal Rosenbluth 39:19 

depends on the weather.

David Novak 39:22 

What's something about the ranch? You'd only know if you were a rancher?

Hal Rosenbluth 39:26 

You can't fake farming.

David Novak 39:28 

If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear? You would

Hal Rosenbluth 39:32 

hear country you would hear news you would hear Motown pretty much what you'd hear now a little symphony. My age these days. My dad was he they love the symphony. So I have I have the symphony channel on

David Novak 39:46 

what's something about you few people would know

Hal Rosenbluth 39:49 

I don't know I'm such an open book and I don't want to be I'm a wreck lose typically.

David Novak 39:53 

Hi, just a few more questions that we'll wrap this up. You know, you know after four years with Walgreens You go out and you launch and create another business in the health and wellness space, tell us about new ocean and what you're up to now, new

Hal Rosenbluth 40:09 

ocean is really an extension of what we did with brick and mortar. And you do it in a digitized way to provide personalized medicine and personalized journeys for people on their phones or tablets, or what have you that taken to account all the costly effects of health care and allowing people to have access to helping themselves or knowing where to go, whether it be like chronic diseases or lifestyle, or what have you. Just making it easy and accessible once again, and of high quality for people to be able to take care of their, their own health in between visits to doctors, or if they don't have a doctor to be able to learn more and educate themselves. And then we help them through whatever they're dealing with.

David Novak 41:02 

As you look at that business, you know, how's it going? And what's the biggest leadership challenge you have? It's

Hal Rosenbluth 41:09 

going great, I guess the greatest leadership challenges to make sure that we're, we differentiate ourselves from an overly fragmented industry where there are so many companies that get into wellness and health and well being and but they are all single source solutions where you no one is this one is that and they're all very, very expensive. So we try to be the lowest cost producer with the most content. And one of the errors is by taking what others have as live coaches, if you have a problem with diabetes, or cardiovascular or what have you. And we've digitized everything. So that if you do a crosswalk between what a life coach would say to you and what we do using our algorithms, etc, you get the same results, but at a fraction of the cost.

David Novak 42:04 

That's fantastic. And, you know, one thing that's true in leadership and is true in life is people don't like change. And I know you've invested a lot in behavioral science with new ocean, what have you learned about change management, or change itself that leaders can really think about as they're trying to make change with their teams and within their organizations?

Hal Rosenbluth 42:27 

Well, first of all, we have to one toe, I think the reality is that if leaders understood that, they need to have an agile organization, they need to know what they don't know. And they need to see where where things should be going. Try to be the first out of the box. In getting there. It's the old lead dog gets the best view of what's ahead. But most are afraid to do so. And I think that's kind of because of the way corporations have become institutionalized in so many ways. You've got to be safe. Well save is dangerous. Safe is very dangerous right now you need to be able to innovate and look to the future and create the future. You can't let it create you you're dead in the water if that's the case. Last question.

David Novak 43:18 

What's the best piece of advice you have for aspiring leaders? Take

Hal Rosenbluth 43:22 

what you do very seriously, but don't take yourself too seriously.

David Novak 43:26 

And that's good advice. And this has been fun. I mean, you're you have definitely done a lot of very, you know, powerful and unique things in your career and you're trying to change the world in a positive fashion. And I look forward to reading your, your book when it comes out to spring. Well,

Hal Rosenbluth 43:44 

thank you very much. It's been a pleasure having this conversation.

David Novak 44:01 

I absolutely love how how operates by his own set of rules. I mean, he's been doing it since his eighth grade English class. And I think we can all learn something from the way he leads. There's a real risk and being content with the status quo. If you're too comfortable. If you're not pushing forward, then you're probably missing opportunities, or failing to see threats in the distance. This week, ask yourself what parts of your business you might just be a little bit too comfortable with? How can you lean into healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo? Remember what House says safe can be dangerous, and I bet that will help you find the motivation you need to go out there and create the future instead of waiting for it to come to you. So do you want to know how leaders lead? Well, we learned today is that great leaders aren't afraid to challenge the status quo. And coming up next on how leaders lead Just in time for the 100 and 50th Running of the Kentucky Derby, we've got Bill Mudd president and chief operating officer at Churchill Downs. What keeps you up at night? I think is a question that everybody likes to ask what is the thing you're most concerned about, you know, going down on Derby Day, you know, as part of Derby 150 We're gonna get a lot of attention, which it could be good attention, it can be bad attention. I think those type of questions I think are the most productive. 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 will become the best leader you can be