Welcome to Howl 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. Let me ask you, have you felt stuck not knowing how to prioritize areas of your business? It's hard to figure out what's worth focusing on and what isn't. And hey, let's face it, it's tempting to chase every shiny new opportunity that comes along. But when you listen to today's episode, you'll see some pretty incredible things can happen in your business when you understand the power of focus. My guest today is Jim Weber, the CEO of Brooks Running. When he took over 20 years ago, they were trying to compete in every athletic category and they were losing 4 or 5 million bucks a year doing it. Jim said, hey, let's focus on one category and that category is going to be running and let's master it. At first, the business shrink, but the next year, the strategy was working. Now they've crossed over the $1 billion milestone in revenue and they've gotten an extremely loyal customer base of runners, including my daughter Ashley, who ran a half marathon in Brooks. It all started with the power of focusing on a single type of customer. If you want to learn how it happened and how to use the power of focus in your business, well keep on listening. Here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Jim Weber. First of all, you and I have a great friend in common, Warren Buffett. I used to go see Warren Buffett every fall for nearly 20 years when I was running young brands and you now work for him because your company is part of Berkshire Hath away and he wrote a glowing forward about you and your new book, Running With Purpose. I want to start by just asking you, what's it like to work with Warren Buffett? Oh gosh David, I feel like the luckiest person in the world and I often describe myself as having the best job in the business world because we're building a brand, etc. But having Berkshire Hathaway as an owner, I have found, is just an amazing platform to build a brand. So Warren, I told him when we first met that he'd been mentoring me from afar for some 20 plus years because I'd been reading everything he ever wrote. But he said, "That's great. Roll up sleeves. Let's go." Just David, as you know, he's like a kid in a candy store. He just absorbs everything about your business and it tends not to leave his brain. But he's just such a great human being. His sense of situational awareness, self-awareness, really understanding people is just stunningly effective. So I'm a lucky guy, it's fun. Tell us the story of how you two hooked up to begin with. We've had an interesting journey at Brooks, since I've been here we've had four owners. And the third one was Fruit of the Loom, which was a Berkshire Hathaway company . So we were buried a couple levels down from Warren and he absorbs everything from every business on the weekly monthly report. So every now and then we'd get a note saying, "Great, we're good results, etc. Keep it up." But we started to sell shoes at the annual meeting and I sent him a note and gave him a report. So that's fabulous. We're going to sell more next year. People love Brooks. If you're having Omaha, come out and we'll have a stake. And so we did, David, and I just knew he was going to love Brooks because we had been building this brand uniquely with a moat competing against giants in our industries with great returns and good margins in the life. So he did and six months later, I was in holiday with my family over Christmas and New Year's, David, and I was checking my emails every day. This is when a voicemail didn't link into your phone, but I didn't check my voicemail. I got back to my office, I always like to start the year prepared, so I met my desk at 7 a.m. in the red light and my phone is blinking. And sure enough, I pick it up and said, "Jim, this is Warren. I've got an idea. Give me a call." David, it was five days old and I had just left a voicemail from Warren Buffett in my phone mail box for five days. And so I rang him right away. He answered the phone and said, "Jim, we got an idea. Fruit of the loan's going to focus on apparel. Build that out. You guys are a little bit different. You're doing well. We're going to spin you out and set you up as a standalone subsidiary of Berkshire." And David, I just said, "Warren, I think that's a great idea." And we went. He's just been so helpful around strategic issues and the like to keep us focused, mostly on our customer. That's what he orients back to. You've been CEO for quite a while. Tell us what it was like when you took over Brooks 20 years ago and what Brooks is like today. Talk about the transformation. Really in my career, I ended up running smaller businesses that were all turnaround in brand repositioning. And Brooks was the fourth one that I would run. And I came in, private equity owned, very leveraged, $30, $40 million of debts. Only a $65 million of revenue was losing four to $5 million a year and it lost money for about five years. And it was a 90-year-old athletic foot-wren apparel brand that was kind of everything to everybody, almost mirroring what the big brands were doing. You know, court shoes running, every category, every price point, good, better, best, broad distribution. The problem, David, is we were six or seven, they're eighth at everything. We didn't lead anywhere. And so, you know, we just decided to burn the boats and focus on one category running and never look back. We put everything into that category. We made the products better, focused our distribution on it, focused our whole team on it. And 20 years later, you know, we shrunk the business in 2001 from about 65 million to a core performance running business, so maybe 45 million. Last year we finished at $1,130 million and right now we're kind of growing at a 20-30 percent clip, which is really fun. So, you know, we'll hit over a billion three in a supply chain impacted business this year. We probably could have hit a billion five if we could have made it all. $2 million, the billion three could have been a billion five will be probably two before you know it. Congratulations. That's fantastic. But you know, as I understand it, Jim, when you became CEO of Brooks, you were like the fourth CEO in the past two years. It was sort of like the graveyard for CEOs. What gave you the confidence that you could fare better than your predecessors? First, I came in off the board, David, which was helpful because, you know, I'd been there at a board level for a year or two. In fact, one of my good friends had run the business profitably in the '90s, Helen Rocky, but had gone through successive CEOs and now had private equity owner too much leverage than alike. So, I had understood what leverage and private equity look like. I'd had experience with that. I bought businesses, sold businesses, and I started my career actually as a commercial banker. So, I knew there was financial engineering in a turnaround sense that had to happen. But I also love products. I love brands. You know, if you get into the consumer products world, it just becomes part of your blood. And I was a runner. And so, we had two shoes and I used to say two and a half shoes that the market liked. And the half-issue was the adrenaline GTS. We had to perfect that product and get it right so that a frequent runner would be confident around it and we gained trust. So, we had to solve so many things, David, in that early going, but we identified them all. And I remember my first board meeting, we had reset the plan in May. We had a board meeting and I said, "There's like 12 things we have to do." And the board said, "No, Jim, pick three or four. You can't get 12 done." I said, "You don't understand. We actually have to do all these things." And that execution focus on critical success factors, David, was so key. That year we hit our plan for the first time in four years. Everybody made a bonus. We made a half a million dollar profit. We generated almost 10 million in cash flow. And most importantly, we set our product lineup for 2002. The adrenaline GTS really saved the company. That shoe became one of the best sellers in the industry today. It's a five million parachute and a leading shoe for runners in our industry. So in those early days, though, the task at hand was to gain trust from everybody that matter. I had to gain trust from our banks, our investors, our board, our employees, our leadership, our retailers, obviously runners, our factory partners. That's the job, right? You really have to get everybody around that turnaround plan in the early going . And yeah, the employees I'm told had a pool on how long I would last, David, because they heard it all before. I was four-seater in two years. And I knew that progress and results were going to gain trust over time. And that's what we had to deliver. It's interesting to say that you had 12 things you knew you had to do in the board and said, "Oh, you can't do 12." But sometimes you have to do 12 so you can do the three and get to the one. What gave you the courage of conviction at that point to say, "Hey, guys, I love how you used to say no, we've got to do all of them?" Because I think I knew we had done our homework, roll up your sleeves, right? David, we had done the work on which products had margin in them and which didn 't, which customers we were losing money on and why, where we could free up inventory to generate cash, the critical factor of great products and telling really strong stories around them. As to our partners and retailers and distributors and then translating those stories in front of the customer and the runner, I had experience in all of that. Here is one of the things I also understood that the process, there were two cycles in the business. There was a development cycle on product and then there was delivery cycle and go to market, which was very inventory-focused because in a parallel and footwear, you never have the right amount. Too much is death, too little is a problem. So I learned that in seasonal sporting goods at O'Brien Water Sports and Sim Snowboards, where if you're late, you don't miss a week or a month or a season, you miss the year. And so I brought in that discipline and I just knew all the things we needed to do around the brand and those two cycles. It's always great when you can persevere those lonely moments, darker moments and really get through a tough time. I love your advertising or your marketing language is run happy. Tell us about the happiest day you've had at Brooks. One of the things I believe, David, and I think you're in this camp, too, is that you have to celebrate the journey. You have to celebrate milestones of success and recognize great work and great outcomes from people along the way because finish lines are great. We all have goals. We all want to hit key goals and milestones, but in a way, they're fleeting. You have to enjoy the journey, but we've had great milestones. Hitting a billion last year was our be-hagged, this big, hairy, audacious vision goal that we put in place 10 years ago. And it was an outcome of a performance running strategy and performance product strategy attached to this run happy brand, which is really about celebrating your run. Not the winners of the marathons run, but your run, whatever level you're at. We thought that positioning was a big idea, a billion dollar idea. So achieving that billion dollar goal was super rewarding because it really reflects the trust of customers. We had probably about 15 million unique customers last year, and earning their trust is just so gratifying. The coolest thing about the consumer products business is its creative puzzle to create a product that they pay full price for, love it, and tell their friends about it. I just think that puzzle in business is just one of the most rewarding things when you solve it. So last year's achievement was a great milestone for a brand. I once asked Warren, what do you look for when he buys companies? And he said he looks for leaders who are like artists. They're painting this picture. They're absolutely in love with it, but it's not finished yet. What would you see as your unfinished business? Oh gosh. I can so relate to that David because I think as I've come through the years, you get to know yourself as you grow older. And I've come to know that I really, really want to be part of building something. And in this case, a brand. And secondly, I want to do as part of a team. I just love the team dynamic that business allows. And so we're painting this painting of a leading performance brand right in the middle of the sport of running, which no one else is doing. We compete against big athletic platforms, outdoor brands, fitness brands. And there's so many great brands. There's so many great products, but we're creating this really unique performance lifestyle brand in the middle of the biggest sport and category and all the sporting goods. And I just think it's a blast. And so that's the painting we're painting and we've been doing it. I've been doing it now for over 20 years and it will continue to be painted long after I'm gone, David. And that's why I love this job. I always wanted to be part of creating a brand and the opportunity to create a great one that's sustainable and also great business. It's interesting that you started out with a financial background and became a consumer markets guru, which very rarely happens. That requires, you know, you've got a great left brain and a right brain. So I want you to use your right brain for a little bit and tell us how you used it. Tell us how you came up with Run Happy. Oh, gosh. I don't take credit for it, David, but I saw it at the beginning. It was created by our marketing agency, probably about a year or two before I got there. And it really was about branding the glass half full culture of Brooks and the people that were there and celebrating every runner's run. And so when I came in, we added, you know, a real focus on performance product to that because that's really a requirement. It's a piece of equipment for runners, especially frequent runners, especially at a half marathon or a marathon level. That's what we wanted to build in. So when we added performance product to this Run Happy brand that celebrates your run, whether it's your first 5K or 20th marathon, that was a unique positioning for us. And it is our culture, you know, we're a glass half full culture and we're inclusive in the sense that if you've just started or running as your sport and your dream is to be in the Olympics, we're going to celebrate each and every one. So yeah, I think that, you know, we had to add to it. I think to be competitive, but it's a really unique position. I think the Run Happy really sticks with you because my daughter, her first pair of running shoes, which he ran her half marathon was a Brooks pair of running shoes. And she still remembers it to this day and talks about how great the product is . But she said, you know, I really felt happy when I ran that marathon. And you know, you guys really tapped it with that Run Happy. When you're running and you enjoy it, it's a great feeling, isn't it? You know, it is David. And here's the truth, though, probably over 40% of people actually don't enjoy the active running, but they just need how it makes them feel afterwards. And so Run Happy is about the afterglow of a great run to even if it's not fun while you're out there, but it makes your day better. Every day can move, you can be active, you can get a run in, you're going to have a better day. Now, I'm sure you'd agree, you can't get better as the leader without a plan to help you develop. It's why I send out a weekly leadership plan. This weekly plan gives you practical steps you can take to develop leadership skills that will help you grow. Each week focuses on a different leadership topic, topics like culture, control , innovation, and handling conflict. Now, you might know a lot about these things, but how often are you taking time to actually get better at them? This free weekly leadership plan will help you do just that. It will improve your leadership skills and give you simple ways to navigate any leadership challenge you'll face. Sign up for the plan today at howleaderslead.com/plan. I want to keep digging into how you lead, Jim, because you are one of the best leaders in the world. I want to take you back for a minute. Tell us a story from your childhood that impacted the kind of leader you are today. One of the reasons I wrote the book, and it started with a memoir on just my own personal life from my first memory, I think I got to age 31 in this 80 pages that I wrote, was just to unpack my hard wiring. I think coming out of my family, there was a glass half full side of positive energy, and a glass half empty side of struggle and bitterness and alcoholism, and just not being healthy day to day. I woke up first at a young age, maybe fourth grade, in that attitude is a choice. I wanted to be glass half full. As well, I wanted to be good at something. I wanted to be happy. I wanted to put my focus into something and get really good at it. At first, I picked hockey. Sports were so foundational for me. In my head, I'm still a hockey player, and I bring that into my business mode, persistence, and never give up, and just hustling, hustling, hustling. But I loved hockey. I just loved it. When I quit playing competitively, I started to run. So that was part of it. But then I was just inspired by a teacher in seventh grade to write a paper on careers. One of the careers I wrote that if I couldn't play hockey was really the one I focused on, was running a company someday. I can't even quite explain why that was what I chose, David. Since seventh grade, I've wanted to be in leadership. I was president of my class. I was president of my fraternity. I just pursued leadership opportunities at every turn. When I came out, I only got two real offers coming out of the University of Minnesota undergrad, and they were both at the banks. I learned so much there about seeing through financial statements into consumer behavior, but man, it looked like it's so much fun across the table. We were financing projects and strategies and investments. It just looked so much more fun to be on the other side of the table, and I got there as quick as I could. You have a history of being an avid runner. I used to run, I think, three to five days a week. You did it for 35 years. You're a very committed runner. How much of a factor do you think that is? You're understanding for running the empathy for runners. How much of a factor has that been in your success at Brooks? I think it's been a factor, David. We often say you don't have to be an avid runner to be at this company. I think an appreciation for the sport and what it is for people is pretty important. For me, I think it was an advantage, and here's why. When I came into Brooks, I was a runner. I worked, I spent time with my family, and my hobby was staying fit, and running was my jam to do that. Then I got to Brooks, and I thought, "Oh my gosh, these people are fast." I came to the conclusion that I'm not quite a runner, I'm a person who runs, but the truth is I'm a runner, and it just fed me at every level, physical, emotional, processed. Every big question, man, I'd go out for a run and just process those questions. That really helped me because as we started to identify behaviors and segments and running, one of the ones we identified is the sole runner, and that's the person that loves running. They need to run, and almost nothing gets in the way of it if they can help it. That's what defined me. I didn't run for competitive reasons. I didn't run for speed. I ran a lot of half marathons and a few marathons. I ran races, but it was just the means to an end, I would say, in staying fit and getting that meditation time almost David out there. It certainly helped me understand the customer at Brooks. I love how you break down running, and the segmentation of runners, the sole full runner. I used to run a lot, and that time that you have the quiet time, that's when you get a lot of the creativity and ideas. Can you recall the best idea you ever had on one of those long johns? Oh my gosh. I processed really big questions on my runs. We had one leadership offsite. We were to write a paper on what leadership is from our point of view. It was 40 of us in this management offsite, and I was stumped on it, but I went for a run that morning and it just spilled out. I included that essay in my book. I did it from the perspective of a person and employee. I want to be led. That was one. The other one, we built a brand new headquarters in Seattle for Brooks in 2013 and 2014. It was probably the biggest business risk I've ever taken because it was a bet on growth. We were going to have to grow into this building. Deep green building, very unique, living building standard almost in the way it operated, but it's right on a trail. It's looking at downtown. It was a perfect place for a running company, but it was a huge bet. We were looking at a couple options. I actually took a Sunday run, six mile run around a local lake here just to process it. It was clear that we were going to make that bet, and it worked out, fortunately. That's great. Then you got to run around that big headquarters you have. We've now filled it and now grown it, David. I'm grateful that one worked out. Now, I've heard you describe your company as being a challenger brand. Brooks is a challenger brand. What does that phrase mean to you? I consider myself a student of business. I just love understanding how successful companies and brands navigated their challenges in their industry to get there. I'm just intrigued by that. You walk into any given category today, and there's usually a market leader. In many cases, there are platform brands. In our case, the leading brand in our industry is one of the greatest global brands ever created. I think everybody could see their logo and state their name. They're based in Oregon. They're a platform. They play every category so well, and almost every range of price points in each category. I've seen other competitors come into our category and essentially line up a strategy to go head to head with them, David. For me, I think if you're not the lead brand, the platform, and the category, you're a niche friend, your focus is required. If not in your brand and your choice of customer, which I think the biggest choice every brand makes is who their customer focus is. All that led me to, where can you win? It really goes back to my childhood. I'd rather win at something and dominate it, be known for it, get credit for it , try to create a successful profitable business behind it, than be eight things to lots of different people and be an also ran in the category. Success is so challenging given how competitive every category is, David, that I think the barges are thin. Every year we sit down on our strategy work, one of our biggest strengths we think is our focus. Absolutely. I want to thank you, Jim, for codifying your leadership principles and sharing it with world with running with purpose. I think too many leaders don't do that, and I think it's really special that you took the time to really do that. I love in your book that you laid them out, and you just covered one, the fact that you really got the focus to be a niche brand. The other thing is you really think it's important to make money, really understand making money and knowing what your business model is. Talk a little bit about that, because it sounds obvious, but it's kind of a fundamental that a lot of people miss out on. In traditional consumer products and especially sporting goods, I just saw too many people work incredibly hard on product innovation, incredibly hard on an enthusiast brand positioning and getting customers into their moat, but never solve on making money. Those brands don't sustain, David. They can't play the next inning. They can't play the next game, the next season, because they just end up, frankly, getting sold usually. You can build a product line and a brand to become part of a bigger platform, but if you're really trying to build an enterprise to last that includes culture and a brand identity around it, you have to solve for profitability. That's what we challenge ourselves to do. In 2001, when I came in, we just looked at our whole product line and we were not going to invest a penny. It's not so much the money, it's the effort of the people. I'd seen that movie happen in earlier businesses, both at Pillsbury and Coleman , where you created all this effort to put something in a marketplace and you get three years down the road, and with all that work, there's no profitability to sustain it. That was something I just learned earlier on, especially again for a niche company that wants to stand the test of time. I just think you have to solve for that. Certainly, that's what we believe we had to do. In our industry now, there's great brands. Some make great returns and profitability and are growing. Some don't and they're growing for now, but it's a question mark of how long it sustains. That solid profitability model has got to be in place for you to have the enduring growth that you have had. You mentioned moats. You know, Warren Buffett, he talks a lot about moats. He said, "Do you want to have a moat? Then you want to have this stream around it, then you keep putting sharks in there and eels, and you make it harder and harder to attack you." The moat thing is really obvious. You brought it up. It's really sunk into you. You know, have a building a moat around your business and making it hard for people to attack you. What kind of actions have you taken at Brooks to build that moat and make it stronger and stronger each year? Yeah, David. It was a realization for me that came in my second CEO position. I was running O'Brien water sports, another turnaround. My boss at the time said, "Jim, admirable. You've proven you can turn around brands. You're making money well done, but you still haven't proven that you can actually grow a brand." And David had stopped me because he was right. I didn't learn that at business school. In a way, managing a brand, I didn't learn that at Pillsbury. It's this entrepreneurial sort of sensibility that you have to earn the customer. I'll say it every day. You have to solve for the customer so that at the margin, you don't just hold on to a sale. You actually gain market share. With that mindset, we just challenged ourselves is that our product has to stand out. It has to get the nod when people put the shoe on their foot. When they're on their 20th mile on their shoe, they know they're not only going to buy it, they'll buy it again. I think challenging ourselves to really, really solve for that customer, both in terms of their needs and their unspoken wants and desires. That is a constantly evolving puzzle, but the curiosity around that and the passion to really solve for it, I think is what creates the moat. Because nothing ever stays static. Now, I think our moat is fit, feel, and ride in our products, mile after mile after mile. Runners know and they have so many choices. Our moat is on time delivery to our retailers and complete. We're a customer service company. If you have the best selling shoe or the most in demand shoe, it doesn't matter if you can't supply it. We've always been focused on that. In this positive engagement on the joy of run and the power of run and the transformational element of run, those are all part of our moat. Now we've built culture to support those elements. I think the key is that they're relevant to our customer, but also that we're executing them at a level in our industry that's at the top. Not a given. We've got to earn that sale. I often say that we've built this brand, David, a pair of feet at a time. We had 15 million unique customers last year. That's just how we think about it. You talk about building a culture that supports your moat, and you also talk about culture being your ultimate competitive advantage. What do you do as a leader to champion the kind of culture that you know is going to keep making that moat stronger and stronger? In the last five years, the realization came that if we're going to scale to over a billion dollars and to two and three and four billion in the future, we're going to have to scale this culture. We literally started creating a plan on how we're going to scale this culture. It became very clear that our next levels of leadership, the VP level, the director level, the senior manager manager level are top 200 people. Those people are going to be critical to execute the strategy and the kind of culture that we want to create inside that we think is essential to execute the strategy and succeed. Long story short, we have values, of course, but we turn those values into identified competencies and behaviors. We did five days of training with all of our people managers, and we're executing really well as a team now. We're integrated. We're aligned as about 1,200 people running. I describe it as a small global brand, but we're all in the same playbook. Wow. Five years ago, we weren't. So it's a lot of hard work, and it's not an accident. It's been very deliberate, but that's what scaling our culture has looked like for us as we've approached a billion and a half dollar company. I think it'll change again as we go down the road, but the work we've done in the last five years, I'm really proud of because it's really served us well to navigate all the challenges that we're all facing right now in the business world. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Jim Weber in just a moment. If you want to listen to another leader who is absolutely focused and really revitalized his company, listen to my conversation with the former CEO of Honeywell, Dave Cody. Everybody makes it sound like you choose. You kick either to be short term oriented or long term oriented. And I said, that's wrong. This is inconsistent with how I looked at the world or how I ran Honeywell, which was that success was always about achieving two seemingly conflicting things at the same time. Like did you want people closest to the action empowered for quick decisions? Or did you want good control so nothing bad happens? Did you want good short term results or did you want good long term results? The answer in every case was you wanted both. They're not mutually exclusive. They're mutually reinforcing. Go back and listen to my entire conversation with Dave Cody, episode 20 here on How Leaders Lead. It's interesting. A lot of companies talk about values. I think it's great to have values, but that sounds kind of amorphous. You don't have values. But when you talk about behaviors, you get really specific. And that's what you've done is you've identified the specific behaviors you want to have in your culture that allow you to win. What process did you go through to get at those behaviors, Jim? We rolled up our sleeves. I can tell you there were hours and hours and hours of drafts of meetings. And it came from this. It was a singular event, David. We had an employee survey that was really focused on net promoter score and P.S . Would an employee recommend Brooks to a friend to work there? And it'd been so powerful for measuring affinity for our brand. We thought, why not use it for our employees? And we were going through a reset in our industry in 2015 and our NPS scores went down. And it was really frustrating, David, because we knew with all the work that we were doing on behaviors and our culture and our values in action, culture is values in action, which is behaviors. We knew our culture was getting stronger, but yet the survey went down. So we stepped back and we created, I think, 35 questions that all pointed to behaviors in the department, on your team, from your leader, that really lattered up to our values and the kind of culture, how we wanted to treat each other, how we wanted to work together, make decisions, engage people, communicate, transparently, have authentic connections and relationships with people that would build trust from a basis of integrity, all those behaviors. And that was powerful because this is another element that I think was a bit of truth that we became very proud of in the summer of 2020, four months into the COVID lock downs, we had the highest culture scores we've ever had and we hadn't been in the office. We were doing town halls, just like everyone else, we could all write books on the COVID lockdowns and how businesses navigated that. But our culture scores were the strongest we ever had. And so again, I think that five days of training and our people leaders, biggest investment we've ever made in people, but we're getting a great return on it. It's been sticky and the toolkit is making us all better managers. Fantastic. You know, Sam Walton used to say that the more you know, the more you care, how do you go about sharing what you know with your people and how broadly do you communicate your message? You know, communication is one of those things where I just believe you can never do enough, you know, and you have to use all the channels and pipes at your disposal and none of them carry all the water. So almost every presentation that I make to our teams, our employees at our annual meetings, we have a half year meeting, we have global town halls now, four times a year, we are having them weekly during the pandemic, David. But every one of those, our purpose of inspiring everyone to run their path is front and center. I always lead off with that. We do three days of onboarding for new employees. I talk about the history of the brand and the company because that's the way to really understand the culture. If you understand what Brooks has been through and how we focus to be successful, you understand a bit of our culture and our hard wiring. So I was on campus once, David, with a student and meeting with different groups on campus at a business school. And he was listening to me with four or five different groups. And he said to me, you know what? You see the same thing over and over and over again. And I laughed and I said, yeah, I do. You know, when I introduce myself to the employees at Brooks in 2001 with this frame of building a performance brand, I said, you're going to get really tired of me hearing me about our focus, but that's how you build a brand. So yeah, I repeat and reinforce the core of what we stand for and what we're trying to accomplish at every turn. One of the things I do know that you say, and it's one of your mantras, is don 't beat your competition when you're a customer. When did the light bulb go off in your head that this was a critically important way to think? You know, David, I think all of us that are watching businesses and categories and the competition that goes on, you're sitting in the stands watching the game and it 's brand A against brand B or brand C or brand D. And you look at an industry and you think about, okay, let's size up these companies, who's going to out compete, who's going to win. And what's missing in that picture is the customer. You know, it's the customer. And I think if you're in the consumer products business and you're successful, you probably are wired that way. So I think it's so important to know your competition and how they go to market and what they're all about and how they compete. But the most important reason to do that is because that's a choice that your customer is going to have. And you have to compete with that. You have to win the sale with your customer. So in our industry, there's so many people that have come in and gone head to head with the leading brands in the category. And you know, under armor, I think fell into that trap a little bit. Great brand. What a story of a fantastic brand and business that was built. But you know, I think they got into a little bit of a fixation in focusing on their biggest competitors. In fact, I think they referred to Adidas once as their dumbest competitor. And it made me cringe because the real challenge is about the customer. And of course, two years later, Adidas was really gaining momentum and they were not. So I just think it's a truth. If you spend too much time looking to your right or to your left, you're going to miss what's right in front of you. And that's winning the customer. You know, speaking of competition, you've had some unusual competition. Tell us about the barefoot running craze and how you managed to navigate your company through that. You know, there's no shortage of disruptions if you're in business for long enough, David. So in 2009, we had a double hit. First, the great recession. And we've all navigated through that. And it was tough in retail, especially in Footrun apparel. So that was a challenge. But at the same time, there's a great book out in our sport, Born to Run, Chris McDougall. It's really inspiring. It's about trail running and and ultra's and it featured Scott Jerick, who is one of our athletes, the greatest ultra runner of the last decade of the 2000s. And it was really inspiring. And then there were two chapters where he threw the industry kind of under the bus that if it wasn't, you know, for cushion shoes and higher cushioning in the heels like Nike Air and all the other brands products, if everybody was running barefoot, there 'd be no injuries. And it just created this firestorm conversation of our shoes really good for you. And should we all be running barefoot or on super minimalist shoes? And it just undermined, you know, what was underneath, I would say the entire performance running industry and certainly everything that we knew and were building at Brooks, because we'd always been biomechanically science based in terms of the natural habitual joint motion of a runner. Every stride, you're putting two to two and a half times your body mass into the ground. And so, you know, especially on asphalt, it's a repetitive motion, so your mechanics matter. And so where was the shoe? And you know, long story short, there was no clinical research on barefoot running or running with shoes and the injury propensity of one versus the other. So huge wake up call for us. And we spent the next four years doing clinical studies with some of the leading researchers in the world. And the outcome of that was everybody's unique, David. For some people, you know, running in minimalist footwear is a savior and it's healthier and they're more efficient and everything about it is better for them. Others, you know, they don't stay in their natural habitual joint motion when they run. And so a bit of support or a support shoe can be absolutely different in them being comfortable and being less prone to injuries. So, but we didn't know that at the time. It was an earthquake in our industry and just kind of underneath all of our assumptions created down. And so what do you do? You have to go to work on it and we invested in research. And I think we found some truths that we share out with the industry because there's only one truth about the mechanics of human motion as it relates to running, we're all learning. But anyway, that was a big wake up call for us and created a lot of uncertainty for a period of time in the industry. That's very interesting because it's obvious to me that you're a leader who you deal with so much optimism and energy and hope. But how do you go about depicting the tough reality that a business faces? Because you could have put your head in the sand on that barefoot running craze . I'm going to refer to some advice I got from Warren Buffett and it's been reinforced by Greg Abel, the vice chairman at Berkshire is we had so committed to focusing on runners and running and where they were going that we just knew we had to solve for it. We had to focus on the customer and figure out where this was going to go and get smart on it. And so I think for me, that was the task. It wasn't a question of game over. People weren't going to stop running. And that's the beauty of this category that we picked and this customer. But they're going to change. They're going to evolve and you really need to understand their needs. That was on us. And every brand I believe David is anchored in trust. And if they're going to trust us, we need to be right about this. And so we got smart on it. And I think that's been so critical for us. Run Signature, which is the platform of the science and understanding that came out of that era, is driving all of our product design today. And now it always has been, but we refreshed it out of that crisis. And we got smarter and stronger because of it. So we're fortunate again that we're focused on a category that will never go away. I believe we are, it is primal. We're sort of born to run. Somebody wrote a song on that. Yeah, sure did. And wrote books and everything else. So we were fortunate in the sense that people are not going to stop running. And we just have to figure out where it's going. You know, you've been a consumer goods guy pretty much your entire career and you're a big believer in earning trust. You talk about trust and loyalty with your customers. Did you have an experience that you'll never forget that really drove that point home to you? Oh, I got a couple of stories there. I'm going to start with a Pillsbury story, David. When I came into Pillsbury, I was a young product manager. And we were always looking at new flavors and new products and new line extensions and the like. I had hungry jack, honey taste and biscuits. And I was in the dovoi business. And so every three years at Pillsbury, we'd have a profit improvement program. And it'd be a broad based program for everybody to find cost reductions, find margin, just improve the profitability of the business, which obviously makes sense to do. Here's what happened over three of those subsequent programs over literally a five or six year period on a product. They had tuned the recipe, tuned the recipe, taste tested, head to head, head to head. No one could ever taste a difference. But by the time they got through three of those cycles, the product ended up tasting bland. If you compared it to the one five years earlier, some of the core customers had left because it just wasn't the same. And so that is trust in the product and quality and boy, do you have to keep your eye on that? It brooks. It's about fit. And we have this crazy process that we update shoes every season to bring in modern materials and hopefully some innovation, hopefully some technology and design that just improves the shoe year to year. But if you move the fit too much, you lose the core customers that you're trying to bring forward in that shoe. And so that's the trust piece that you have to understand why customers are falling in love with your products and your brands, what they're actually relying on you for. And if you don't understand that, especially as a junior person like I was, where I was just brand new to the business, you can actually make mistakes unknowingly and lose that trust. So I just think that's foundational and it's true in every part of the business . But on the brand side, your customers are becoming loyal to you for reasons you really need to understand those. You know, when you took over brooks, as I understand that you had 60 employees around that number and you used to say that you had the whole business in your head. Now you have 1200 people working with you. How do you lead differently? And what can we learn about how to lead a growing business and scaling it? Yeah. When I came in running businesses, I thought, you know, what the CEO had to do, they own strategy and they had to be right, you know, three years down the road, you wanted to end up in a place you wanted to be. So the strategy piece and how to execute against that, the game plan, the playbook, all the things that you need to create to execute at a business level and a strategy level. And I thought that's what the CEO did. And I think a person that you know of maybe no well, Ram Sharan, we had Ram Sh aran, who's just a fantastic strategist and great author. We had him at a strategy offset, I think in 2009. And we were beginning to grow and scale. And yet I still wasn't people focused. I thought everybody was sort of wired like I was and looked at the world like I did. And at that point, I think we're just under 200 million, it was so clear that it was going to be all about people to execute and scale this business. It wasn't going to happen if it were up to me or our key leadership team. So Ram said at that offset, he'll never forget he said, Jim, you've got strategy, you've got vision, you've got a good plan around it. Now you have to spend another day or two and you've got to dive into your people's strategy. You've got to dive into the organizational structure that you have in the people. You have everything you need to execute that plan. And that was a huge growth moment for me as a leader because it was sort of a duh, of course, right? And so since that time, people are the center of all of our planning and work because that's where execution comes from. And we have, I think, a great brand, a great vision for it and a strong strategy, but nothing good will happen unless we can execute through a lot of great people. And so it was a huge growth moment for me as a leader. I had one of those very similar moments with Ram and Larry Bossey, who wrote the book Executioned and it really helped our company a lot. This has been so much fun and I'd like to have a little bit more with some rapid fire questions here. It's my lightning round. Are you ready for this, Jim? I'll do my best, David. Okay, the three words of best describe you. I think one is prepared. So in any puzzle or conversation or meeting, I'm going to come in prepared. I think people would describe me as authentic and what that means in this context is that what you see on the outside is exactly where I am on the inside. I don't have a lot of filters in the sense of holding things back. So often I'm thinking out loud and so I think what you see is what you get with me and I think from a human perspective, that's authentic. And then the third, I would say, it's not one word, but I'm on a mission. A life is short and to be part of a team and a brand that's going somewhere, I love it. And so we're in the game and I'm just on a mission. Your biggest pet peeve. Playing in an organization where somebody's hiding the ball, where there's an agenda there that's unspoken and not communicated. And so you're all going forward on a plan and somebody's hiding the ball. It's just destructive and it's not going to be successful. Something about you that few people would know. Well, this is one that I've exposed more so, but I love music and there's a soundtrack to my life and I'd love to be a musician and a frontman. I wish David I just loved music. What's your superpower? Competitive strategy is just so fun for me and I've tried to get good at it over the years. It's a craft that I think I'm pretty decent at. Yeah, I'd say so. And your favorite place to run? Oh, man. Lightly falling snow on a 30 degree evening with an inch on the ground so you can still run in it in Central Park in New York. It's just heavenly. And I want to wrap this up with just a couple more questions and you and I have another thing in common. You both have really had to struggle with cancer and come through that experience. What did it teach you and what advice can you give people who have to persevere through the most difficult challenges like that? You know, I think it is so personal, David, because here's in my view what happens. When I got cancer and the truthfully, every time a friend or a family member got cancer, I go to the web and I just try to understand it and research it and what the treatments are and they always have that survival rate. And it stops you. December 7th of 2017, I was diagnosed at esophageal cancer and the survival rate was one in five. In five years, there was a 20% chance that I would be there. Wow, life gets real, right? And I think in there comes this fire hose of reality on what really matters to you and how you're living your life and what you want to be doing. And so first family comes in and I just decided right away, looking into the eyes of my wife, my kids and four grandkids, that I was going to do everything I could to be here for them. They did not want to see me go. And so I was going to find a plan and fight this thing and put everything I had into it. But then secondly, for me, it just brought to the forefront is how do you want to spend each and every day? And for me, it was just clear, I didn't want to spend it in fear. I didn't want to spend it in regret of what I hadn't done or fear of what I had to lose. I just wanted to soak in all the things I enjoy doing as much as I could every day. And so again, I think everybody has to process that kind of news in their own way. But I learned a lot in the sense of anchoring in again on what was most important to me. And that's the path that I went forward with. And so I wanted to obviously spend time with my family. I wanted to be on this team at Brooks. I still wanted to build a brand. I wanted to be a CEO in addition to being a papa and a father and all those things. So that's what I learned, David. And I think that's powerful in the sense that I was doing what I wanted to be doing. But that's it for people, right? If you're in that moment, I think life gets real and super fast and you have to make the right choices to do what's most important to you in your life every day. What's one piece of advice you'd give to anyone who wants to improve as a leader? I think be curious, David. I think that's the core of it. I think curiosity means you recognize you don't know everything. You're still learning. You're going to actively listen and be in the moment for all the people that are important on your team. And I just think that's it. And curious means you're humble enough to keep lying. Jim, one of the questions I always or conclusions I come to anytime I interview somebody is, would I want my daughter to work for that person or would I want to work for that person? And I have to tell you, after this hour I spit with you, I think I would have actually enjoyed working for you. I think you're one hell of a guy. And I thank you very much for taking the time to share your wisdom with our listeners. And I hope I get to meet you one day in person. Likewise, David, thank you for having me. I'm a big fan and it's been fun to chat with you. Brooks Running is an incredible turnaround story. And boy, Jim is an incredible leader. The bold vision he has is inspiring. But I got to say, I'm just as amazed at the courage and discipline he's actually used to execute that vision. It's all too easy to chase shiny new opportunities. But Jim reminds us just how powerful it is to focus on one thing and be absolute specialists in that area. Customers appreciated and they're more loyal as a result. This week, assess your own organization's level of focus. Do you have a clear idea of the customers you want to serve, the areas you want to compete in, the areas you don't? Find more focus and discipline to your work and see how fast you can outpace your competitors too. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders understand the power of focus. Coming up next on how leaders lead is professional, mentalist, Oz Perlman. Whether you're in sales, finance, marketing, or something else entirely, you're going to learn about the power of learning to read people and how to lead yourself. These look to see the value you deliver to others. I have a profession where it's very focused on me and it's like look at the cool things I can do and look at how I can fool you and people will think, "Oh, I'm smarter than you because I can do a trick. Can't I always take that out of the equation and I want to walk into a room and I want to make it all about my customer." And my job is not for you to walk out of that room thinking how great I was. It's to create a memorable moment for you to take with you, for your life, that I hope you will continue to talk about and tell others about. 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. [end]