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. Today's guest is Cyrus Friedheim, the former CEO of both Chiquita and the Chicago Sun Times, and an absolutely legendary management consultant. Now, look, I've got to tell you, I have always been pretty slow to hire consultants. Too many people bring them in because they just aren't willing to do the hard work themselves. They want the consultant to tell people what they have to do that's really hard to do. But I also know this, every business needs an outside perspective. That is truly the only way you can diagnose and fix your blind spots. So you've got to find it one way or the other because those blind spots are going to cost you if you don't really understand what they are. And this conversation is so great because Cyrus is going to show you how to use this outside perspective to grow your business. As a consultant, he's turned around countless organizations. He's served on dozens of boards and of course, he's faced his own leadership challenges as CEO of Chiquita and the Chicago Sun Times. He really has seen it all. And there's so much we can learn from him about the power of an outside perspective. So here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Cyrus Fried heim. You know, your book, Commit and Deliver, which is actually by the way, you know , it's a subhead that is on the front lines of management consulting. And speaking of the front lines, I understand you work directly with one of the most iconic leaders in American history, Lee Iacocca, and you helped him turn around Chrysler. Tell us about your role. I'd been in the firm for about 13 years or so. And so I had gone through the ranks and was a senior partner at that point and had done a lot of work in automotive and I had three years of direct experience with Ford. So among the senior partners, I probably knew as much about or had as much experience in the auto industry as any. The Secretary of the Treasury, Bill Miller, called our chairman, my boss, Jim Farley, and said, "We got a real problem here. Chrysler's failing and the president wants to help them, but we don't know if they're going to survive." And would you come in, take a look at their plan, and tell us whether the plan works. And so Jim called me in and we talked about it. The issue wasn't, would we do it? It was, how can we do it? And with no lead time, and oh, by the way, he wanted to do it in two weeks. And so we agreed we're going to do it. We identified the team that I wanted and off we went to Detroit. Now, I understand before you agreed to take on the Chrysler project, you had a few non-negotiables from your perspective, and one of which was you wanted Iacocca to call you and meet with you before you would begin the job. What drove that? Tell us about that. That's interesting. After two weeks, there was a stunning conclusion, and the conclusion was they didn't have a plan. What they had were all the normal planning tools, you know, a product plan, a marketing plan, sales plan, engineering people, all these plans. But the company was sinking fast, bleeding cash, and losing sales. And nothing that pulled together and said, okay, in order to survive, what we need to do is A, B, C, D, and nothing like that. So we called up Miller and said, we finished in these. He said, fine, what you find, and we said, just what I told you. And he said, hmm. When you put the plan together, and we said, you got to be kidding. And two weeks is almost up. And so he said, yes. And so we did. I presented that plan to the top management, and at that point, Iacocca was the president. John Ricardo was the chairman. But poor John Ricardo was almost in the state of shock. It was clear that he no longer was going to be able to lead the company. Iacocca had been hired a year earlier, and we all knew that he was the heir apparent. And it was just a matter of time before he would be appointed. So given the situation, I gave him three conditions. I said, we're willing to do it. Condition one was Iacocca becomes chairman immediately. Their board elected him that afternoon. I said, number two, you've got to rehire Solomon brothers, but with Jim Wolf enson in as the head of the team, not good friend. And the third condition was that Iacocca called me. And the reason for that is that I knew from my personal experience that he really didn't like consultants. I guess he tolerated marketing consultants or engineering consultants, but anybody who hired a management consultant, they couldn't do their job and they ought to be fired. So to be consistent, how could he do it? But I knew if he personally didn't hire us, nobody would pay attention to us. They'll just say, the government is making us take these people. So that's kind of a cost of getting the loan. Don't worry about them. You don't have to answer their phone calls. And I said, there's no way in the world we're going to get into a situation like that. So I said to Dick Dilworth, who was the lead director, I said, that's the third condition. Well of course he said, great, all set. Let's go. I said, no, no, no. It took almost three weeks. And remember at this point in time, Chrysler was in such bad shape, the damn ship was sinking right in front of him. And so I took a finely called me and I went over and saw him. He was delightful and we got along very well during the entire assignment. But I don't think it would have worked if we didn't do that. Yeah, to get him on board so everybody would truly listen to what needed to be done. Absolutely. One example of what you saw in Lee Iacocca that made him such a special leader because he was ranked very high up there. For leadership in a tough situation, I guess I might put him as first of those who I've worked with. And I've worked with lots and lots and lots of leaders. What is it? Well, number one, people trusted him. For example, he went to the union and asked him for a pay cut. I can't remember how much it was, but it was significant. He of course first took a cut himself, put himself on a dollar a year, and then he asked the unions, not to go that far, but he asked the unions to take a big cut. And he said, "I promise you that when we turn this thing around and we will, we 'll snap you back." And then he had to go back a second time and that was really tough. But he got it both times because the unions trusted him. And you know, in the world then, and I expect even now to have that level of trust between management and the union is really extraordinary. The second thing he did was basically the same thing with the banks. He convinced all of them to sign up for a haircut. He convinced the dealers who were not taking cars to start taking cars and to pay them for them. And so it was just a remarkable performance of a man who was clearly in command whom people trusted. And so he got things done that very few people could have. Cyrus, when I read your book, maybe he asked myself, "What makes companies like Chrysler getting trouble in the first place? And how can others avoid it?" There are as many reasons as there are companies. I don't know how many companies I worked with during my whole career, but it was probably in the hundreds. And I've never seen the perfect company. I've never seen a company that didn't make serious mistakes, that didn't have too much cost, that created the wrong product, that didn't pay attention to their customers, that ended up dozens of normal reasons. But clearly the only reason you go bankrupt is to run out of cash. And what happened in this particular case is that they just were fooling themselves for some period of time. I'm not sure why, was it to make sure the investors stick with them or what I don't know. But they were doing things with accounting that were wrong. For example, they kept production up even though sales had dropped. So what did they do? They put the vehicles, either stuffed them into the dealerships and counted them as sales, or they put them into what they called a sales bank and then put them into inventory. So it didn't show up, you had to be a real expert in accounting to have caught it just by reading reports. That's what happened to them. And as a result of those things, as you can easily understand, cash is a separate animal from putting things in inventory. You don't get any cash for that. And so they were just hemorrhaging cash. But why do those sort of things happen? Certainly leadership is an issue. There's an institutional organization that has to be clicking so that something like that is discovered. There are all different reasons. I've worked with a number of failing companies over time. As a matter of fact, over time, I expect that the principal area that I focused on was companies in major transitions and well over half of them were companies that were in trouble and therefore required to turn themselves around in some major way. But I don't see any real comedy nominator in what caused it. You say getting the facts right and uncovering and facing hard truths or always the first step towards solving a problem. Why does so many leaders struggle to orient themselves around the brutal facts of their business? Well, I think the good ones do it. And you'd ask, well, why not everybody? First of all, CEOs are, there's no CEO school and so each one is kind of like being a father. You're there and you suddenly figure out, well, it is what I got to do. And a lot of CEOs are appointed for a variety of different reasons. Not all of them come with a full set of skills and talents. But even if a person is up to date on all the financials, as you point out correctly, the hard facts on how the product is doing, how the people are developing, on a lot of other of the key pillars of success in any business require that facts-based, tough analysis and understanding. You have a number of CEOs that are instinctive rather than analytical. As a matter of fact, I'd say of the two characteristics, good instincts might even be more important. I've never seen a company that succeeded without a CEO that had good instincts. I have seen companies that have succeeded with a top guy not being a good analyst. But in those cases, he had people who could do analysis for him. And matter of fact, that's why Boozell and Hamilton existed because a lot of the CEOs just didn't know or didn't know how to figure out answers or wanted a second opinion or wanted just a partner. And so we made an industry out of it. But I think it's the analytical skill that misses, I think, rather than the instinct on issues like not paying attention to hard facts. You became a renowned expert in the automobile business. What do you think of Elon Musk as a leader and what he's doing at Tesla today? Well, I'm not close enough to know. This is a further disqualification. I thought three years ago it was a must short. And I'd have been taken to the cleaners so many times if I ever went ahead with that instinct. I do know the guy is extraordinarily visionary. The thing that really is stunning is how somebody from the outside can do something that is so obviously necessary in the industry itself and just blow by the whole industry. It's just stunning. Now, the automotive industry whipped once before this and that is on Japan. When I went around both in Europe and in the United States, the Japanese were quite clearly in the marketplace everywhere with products that people were buying, but fundamentally they were panned as cheap imitations. This was throughout the '60s and early '70s. And if you looked at the needle of market share both in Europe and the United States, it was moving up even at the time of 1979 when the Chrysler event occurred. It was still below 10%. And so nobody cared much. I remember going to Chrysler and one of their top guys told me it was not Iacoc ca. We're not worried about Japan because they produce these tinny little cars and Americans want big gas cost lawyers. And that's what we produce. Well, you know, really wrong, really, really wrong as we now know where the Japanese have at least a third, maybe more of the world market and that much there's number one seller in the United States. So this second major error should never have occurred. They should have been all over the electric car, but they weren't. So I guess this kind of a problem is characteristic, not just of automotive. But what Tesla did is it didn't produce a car, it produced a computer on wheels , which was a fundamentally different way to think about a car. And it's a marvelous car. You've probably driven one. They're really marvelous automobiles. Absolutely. The problems that he's had have all been not on the technology, but rather on the ability to produce a car. You know, it took hold forever to get the production up to where it is today. And every now and then the stock dropped because he wasn't getting the production. But the quality of the vehicle, the responsiveness, the driving pleasure are all really top notch. But Detroit was sleeping at the switch. Yeah, it's funny how people in categories just, they're so insular, they don't really look outside and see what's possible. When you look back at your consulting career, Cyrus, what was the most fun project you had? There were a ton of them that were fun. Matter of fact, I was in a situation for all those years. When I got up in the morning, I had half a dozen things to do at least. And they were all going to be terrific. I enjoyed them. The top of the list was working directly with clients. So I don't have one favorite. Chrysler certainly was one of the most notable and one of the most satisfying. But there were lots of others that had other characteristics that made it enjoyable. Sounds like you're talking about your children. You can't pick one. Yeah. I could pick one, but it wouldn't be true. What's the most challenging project you ever had besides Chrysler? I'll throw out one that wasn't actually consulting me. It was at a board. The company was micro age. And they were a part of Fortune 500. They were the largest reseller of computers and other technical equipment. I'd been on the board for about six or eight months and had done my homework. And it came clear to me that the company was strategically misfit for where they were going. Too much of the sales well over half were in commodity segments of the market, low margin, and becoming more and more competitive. And there was really no brand power that's micro age had. They had a good distribution system, but no real brand power to control the market. And the margins started to fall. So I concluded that they had to sell it. And if they didn't, the company would likely go into bankruptcy in the near to medium term. So this was a big deal because the question is, how does a board member make that point when the company is going along? There's a small board. There's seven people. And three of them had been with the CEO through the long march. They had been bankrupt once before and the CEO pulled them out. The other three, including myself, were not. And so what I did is something that I've never heard of before. And I'm certainly not recommending it for any outside board member. But I called an executive session of the board, excluding the CEO and prepared a presentation, laid the whole thing out. I thought it was compelling. They said, well, what should we do? I said, well, he has to sell this. And I knew one of the potential buyers because I had worked with him before. And so I offered to help in any way and told the board. I said, one of you guys should become chairman, go sell that. And then we don't have to fire the CEO. Well, one of the board members talked to the chairman about it. He basically said, no, would split the board three, four. Now, what I should have done-- and this is a terrible mistake I made in my career-- I should have resigned right then and there. And I believe that if you ever are in a situation with an organization where either you're for reasons of values or other disagreements which are major and you cannot resolve them, you should resign gracefully but immediately. And that was burned in my brain after I fell and didn't do it. So that was probably my biggest single challenge. That had to be some very interesting piece I could see you being in those. Now, you mentioned earlier, you've been a part of a lot of turnarounds and a lot of times when companies have gone awry. Give us the keys to what you think it takes to get a business out of the ditch. I think that an outsider can add real value in a situation like this because typically when I entered the scene, things were really bad like in the case of Chrysler and there are several others that I could pick off for you. And so the first thing they need is the answer to your first question which was , how did they get there? And that requires a level of understanding of what the dynamics are in both that business and that industry and those times which the current management team typically haven't been able to do. As a result, you get on a trajectory and as you well know, if trajectories are very important whether they're going up or down, they tend to continue in the same direction unless you change course in some fairly major way. And so it's finding that out first and then simply coming up with the set of things that are necessary to correct the problems, to change the trajectory and in every case they're different. In a couple of cases that I had, there was no way out. And I remember some of the tougher discussions with CEOs was saying the right thing to do for you now is to liquidate what you got. And if you wind up with some money at the end, then go buy something. If you don't, well then close the doors. And it's a very tough thing for any CEO to do whether he's a founder or just the current guy in the chair, but it's something that has to be done. It takes a lot of courage, I was to really take that head on with the CEO. Have you always been able to have productive conflict and really take somebody on like that? What does it take to develop that skill? In my case, it happened very early. It was in my first year of my consulting career. And there was one particular guy in the office, a partner who was kind of the terror. Nobody wanted to work with him because he was just too rough and tough. So I was a little older than most of the new guys because I had spent four years in the Navy and then went to business school. And most of the other guys had gone to business school relatively quickly. And so they were a couple of years younger. So I'm sure that helped me a little bit. I said to the guy who assigns consultants to projects, I said, "Look, I'd like to work with Joe, the senior partner." They said, "Why?" And I said, "Well, because I hear he's really a good consultant. He might be a little rough around the edges, but he's really good and smart." So I went in to see him and the interview was ridiculous. What do you want to do? What do you hear for? Who do you think you are kind of a thing? But we got along very well. So what I would do, and I was working alone on the project, and it was for a buddy of his who headed up a company called the Burton Dixie Mathras Company. And Burton Dixie was a really important name about 20 years before that. And it just slid down as new competitors came in. They didn't update their products. They wound up from being the V-brand slumber on to a commodity, sold for Motel 6s and stuff like that. I went through all the actions of figuring out, "Is there any cost we could reduce any product we could change?" And it turned out that the Mathras business was dead, and they had made it over the last few years by selling automotive seats. And they sold them by packing a frame with cycles like hay. So I went around and saw the automotive companies and asked them what their plans were. And he said, "Oh, we're switching to foam." And I said, "Oh, I beg your pardon." And he said, "We're switching to foam. As a matter of fact, it's going so well. We've been doing it for about a year, and we have decided to really accelerate ." Well, my poor old, Burton Dixie had no capability in that area, and would cost too much to get it. And it was over. And so I told Joe, and he said, "Oh, dear." But he handled it the first time. And I watched him and how he did it, and it was very graceful. And at the end, nobody was crying, nobody was bleeding, and he went on. And I think they might have gone out to dinner that night. So that was my lesson, and I've used it from then on. So there's tough guy was able to tell the client in a gentle way that it's hostile and it's a little bit too bad. Yeah, right. Of course, my reaction on the auto seat says, "How could they not have known?" Right? I mean, your client is moving from your product to something else, and you're going to have nothing in a year. Yeah, it shows you've really got to be on top of your industry and know what's going on for sure. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Cyrus Friedheim in just a moment. But one of my favorite turnaround stories comes from Alberto Carvalo, who helped lead an incredible transformation in the Miami-Dade County public schools when he served as superintendent. We did not bemoan. We did not go into the corner and just cry over the fact that charter schools were coming, because we knew they would come. What we did do is that we put choice on steroids. And if choice is what parents want, we're going to reinvent ourselves into the best providers of choice period. It's a great reminder when things aren't going well in an organization, you've got to have the courage to define reality. It's the only way things can actually get better. Go back and listen to my entire conversation with Alberto, episode 50, here on How Leaders Lead. You know, when you were talking about Lee Iacocca and his disdain for consultants, I have to tell you, I was in that camp. I really felt like too many people bring consultants in because they're lazy, they don't do the work themselves. So I was the last guy to hire a consultant. We did from time to time. But it took a lot to get me to pull the trigger on that. What rigor do you think a leader should go through before bringing a consultant on board? I remember asking that exact question of Dick Ferris. Dick was the CEO at United. He had been CEO for about a year and it was right after the industry had gone through deregulation. A former partner of mine at Booz Allen was a buddy of his and when Dick asked him, he said, "Who should I call?" He said, "Me." So I went over and saw him and we had a great relationship. So later on I said, "Number one, why did you do this? Why did you go to the outside?" He was not a natural guy that would go to the outside. He wasn't an intellectual that wanted a second opinion or anything like that. He was a hard driving tough, very similar to Lee Iacocca in the way he operated and behaved. He said, "You know, I am now telling all my friends. We've been working together for at least nine months at that point." He said, "I find one of the first things a CEO should do is find a consultant to be his partner, to talk to, to bump ideas off of, to occasionally do a project. But it's just a perspective that rarely exists within the company. You can have a board member you do that with, that oftentimes works. You can have somebody else on the outside, doesn't have to be in the consulting business. But if you've confined a consultant, his view was, "That's what you should do. There's got to be tremendous trust and respect mutually between the two for it to work." So I strived throughout my career to have exactly that relationship with every CEO I worked with. When we clicked, it was superb. That makes a lot of sense. Again, it's that trust factor that you're talking about and belief in each other and the added value you can provide. You were at Booz Allen for a long time. You paid your dues. You had great results. You wanted to head the firm, but it didn't happen. How did you get over that disappointment? That happens to all of us. Some things happen in our career where it just doesn't work out. What advice can you give? How did you personally get over the disappointment and what advice can you give others? It's a huge thing. And it's a thing that lasts kind of as long as you let it. And you can divert yourself from it by bearing yourself in your work, which I did. You can divert yourself with your family, which I did. It still takes time. It's like losing a loved one. It takes time. If you can get through the instinctive reaction of I quit, then I think you can make it because I have a strong belief that whatever you're doing in your career, the title on the door is not nearly so important to you, to your family, to your life as being happy with what you're doing and loving the work you're doing and being turned on by it. So I concluded that if I never become a CEO, that's the way it is. I love what I'm doing. I love it every day. I love it every week. I put in monstrously ridiculous hours, but that's because I loved what I was doing. And so I just stayed on. And as I look back over it, I say, you know, and I look back over my whole life , even from this point from here, I say, you know, it went great. I couldn't have asked for anything more. Not everybody should stay. And I respect that. But I didn't do it and I didn't leave and I'm glad I didn't have the guy had a great career following. So you let your passion and the love for what you were doing really drive your decision. And it's not always greener on the other side. That's exactly right. I don't know what would have happened if I had moved more quickly, but I know what happened when it didn't move. And it turned out I got the CEO spots anyway. Yeah, that's right. Well, that's a great transition because you ultimately move from consulting and I can't resist this, you know, how many times you ever heard this? You become the top banana, the CEO at Chiquita. How did that happen? And what did you do to really move that business forward? How it happened was my son, Steven, was in the, he was a hedge fund guy and he was with Ak Zif, which is one of the major, was at that time one of the major hedge funds. And he was hired to set them up in fixed income. They had made a major investment in Chiquita and the thing went down. And so they were looking for board members. Well, there were four investors that had taken them through and out of bankruptcy and my son was one of them. And so they each got a pick of one board member. I was just about to retire from Booz Allen and he asked me if I wanted to be on the board and I said, sure, I didn't know anything about their business or why they were bankrupt, but going into an interesting situation with something and I had enough turnaround experience to know what the pitfalls were of it. But he was the one who put me up and I became one of five directors, outside directors. We started working about a month or so before the company went back into the market and out of bankruptcy. And during that time, I did a lot of intensive homework trying to figure out, well, why did it go bankrupt? What does it need to do? How do we get it back on its feet? And during that time, we decided that one of the outside directors should be the chairman. And so I was the only one that was about not to have a job because I was retiring from Booz Allen. And so they said, you want to do it? I said, sure. I'd never been the chairman of a board of a major company before, but why not? We then met with the CEO a couple of times and Orange Lights started to go off and my head as well as in the other directors. And we concluded we can't just move ahead with the current CEO. So again, we took a look around the table and they pointed to me and said, well , how would you like to do that? And I said, well, that's a little different deal, but I had done enough study at that point to believe that it was possible to turn it around. And so I said, okay, for two years, that was the idea because I was already 66 at the time. And you had great success and what did you do to turn it around? What I did is what a consultant would do. I dove in to find out everything I could possibly know and why it went bankrupt and what is necessary. And we came up with a plan that the board agreed to very quickly, I think, within a few months of joining and off we went. And that was really the genesis of the term commit and deliver because at our first annual meeting, which was one year later, we had committed to all these several items on the turnaround plan and had achieved virtually all of them. And so we titled the report commit and deliver, which says we committed we were going to do this a year ago and we're here to tell you we did it. There was no one action we took that I think turned it all around. It was a series of actions in what turned out to be a well crafted and successful plan. You know, when you became CEO, you're now in charge of the whole ball of wax. How do you like that control and the ability to execute your ideas? Because you know, I've talked to a lot of consultants and one of their big frustrations is that they come up with the ideas, but then the client doesn't execute. Well, as one of my colleagues that I have brought over from Booz Allen to join us as an executive said, the difference between consulting and managing the enterprise is you're playing with live ammunition because the consultant, he can always toss over the recommendation and you know, it's up to the CEO to execute. Well, if you're the CEO, as you well know, better than almost anybody, it's up to you to do it. And so it was a lot smoother and easier than I thought it would be. And then you go full circle, you were a paper boy when you were a kid and you go from being a paper boy for the Chicago Sun times to actually becoming the CEO of the Chicago Sun times. You know, the newspaper business is absolutely rugged. How do you keep it in print today? I mean, how do you make that brand survive? I was on the board for a year before becoming the CEO. The guy that took over as CEO when Conrad Black was kicked out, didn't want to move to Chicago. He was an investment banker and he really wasn't running the company. And so we all agreed that we needed to have somebody full time on site. And so we started doing a search and during the course of that search, we had a meeting where we asked the management team to come and report exactly what should be done. And it was quite clear that the company was already in a downward trajectory. And if it didn't do something fast, it'd be out of business. And so I did kind of the same thing I did with Chrysler, which is spent the overnight during that conference we had with the management team coming up with my view of what it would take and presented it the following day. And we all agreed that we needed to make the change of CEO sooner than later. And so the next meeting they put me in. I have to say I went in with eyes wide open and I knew as one of my associates, not with the sun times, but another friend said, you know, you're trying to catch a falling knife because the newspaper publishing business is just head and straight south, which was true. But what we did was recognizing that situation. We came up with a series of actions that we had to take to be able to balance the ship. But we realized after a while, we would cut our costs in a month later, the lost revenues ate up the benefit. We would outsource every imaginable thing to wherever we could that worked. And I think we were a leader in that, but it still didn't stop the fall. And so it kind of at the end, I said, you know, guys, we can't continue really as a public, independent public company. So we've got to figure out how to sell it to some investors who aren't looking for earnings per share who believe in the newspaper industry as I did. It was one of the major reasons I took it over. I love Chicago. I've been in and out of Chicago my entire life had made a huge commitments in the way of my personal time and philanthropy to Chicago. And I believed strongly that two newspapers were better than one. And so that's why I did it. And I was looking for somebody and finally found that somebody who had the same kind of attitude and a big pocketbook. So we sold it to that guy. Unfortunately, he died a year later. The company's been sold a couple of times was sold again to a not-for-profit in the media business. So it'll now be part of that not-for-profit media organization. And I think we'll continue. So I'm delighted. I think that while I certainly did not intend to take it into bankruptcy when I first arrived, but I concluded that was the only way to survive. The newspaper business, the way you kept the Sun-Times alive then is you basically took a private and got somebody who really believed in it like you and kept it in print. Is that a fair summary of that? That's basically what happened. When you look at the newspaper business, what should leaders have done or was there anything that they could do that would have kept the demise from happening? Was the category itself salvageable or was just the decline totally inevitable? Well, there will be newspapers probably 10 years from now, but there'll be fewer, more limited in what they do and completely different than what they are today. And those few might be ones like the Wall Street Journal where there's a dedicated audience. Early in my time, we did a study of readership, not of us, but just in general. And we found that the cohort of 60 and above, 75% of them read newspapers on a regular basis. That number went down dramatically as you took each decade below that. So the decade of the people in their 50s was less than 50%. And for kids coming out of college was less than 10%. Now that was 10 years ago. And my guess is that the kids coming out of college now rarely subscribe to a newspaper of any kind, including the Wall Street Journal. I know my own kids who are now in their 50s read everything online. And their kids are not going to be doing anything different. What happened with the internet, which was very different from TV, radio, other forms of technology that made incursions on the newspapers job as the primary source of information. The television, you only get one thing at a time and it's not necessarily what you want to hear or what you want to see or what you want to know. But the internet has everything. And so there's basically nothing that is important to you that you don't know before you see the morning paper. So it isn't hot off the press. People find things out. So their core reason for them as the purveyor of news is gone. The primary purveyor of news now is the internet. And so it survived. The newspapers have to do something else to make themselves relevant and important enough for people to subscribe and advertise in it. And get even more focused on a core audience that makes them unique and different. Exactly. And of course one of the things that happens with that is that the way that most newspapers have focused on audiences is on political philosophy. And so you have papers that cater to the right and to the left. As a result, it's hardly news anymore. It's just opinion and stories that support a political point of view, which is a shame because newspapers I think from the time our country has created have been a crucial part of our freedom and informing the public. Yeah, the newspapers are going to be around, but there's no question the internet just basically obsely did the category. You know, Cyrus, I don't think you've ever really retired. I like to say I didn't retire. I refired. But what advice can you give people when they move into so-called retirement? I look at retirement from your full time, your last full time job or your career as one of the more important transitions that individuals make. And particularly those who have had some level of success. I look at it as a gift from God for however long we got to do whatever it is on the earth that we are here for. But it's a gift that we should embrace and use effectively. You've done it superbly. But I think having a mission is extremely important. There was a nun who put it best to me. Mr. Jean, who was the mascot of Loyola University's basketball team back about five years ago. And she was 95 at the time. She's 100 and something now. And she attended all the games and just was a personality. The news covered her as much as they did Loyola's team, which in their first NCAA appearance in basketball for at least a half a century, they got to the final four. And a lot of people credited her for it. I met her about a year later. And first thing she said is, "You want to take a selfie with me?" And I asked her one question. I said, "You know, I'm just so impressed with the energy you have for life." And she said, "You kind of looked at me and Sonny, better to wear out than rust out." And I believe that of all of us. We owe it to society to continue going. Because if somebody who's got the talent and the energy and the good health and sits on the sidelines, I think that's just a waste of an extraordinary asset. Sorry, it's just been so much fun catching up with you. I want to have a little bit more fun here before we cut this off by having a lightning round of Q&A with you. Are you ready for this? Okay. Okay. What word best describes you? Only one. Only one. I think inquisitive. If you could be one person for a day, who would it be and why? The answer is nobody. And why? Because there's a give up that I couldn't do. You know who that give up is my family. Because every other person that I've thought of, because I know you've asked that question before, I said, "Well, that'd be great. That'd be terrific. But I'd have to give up my family and I can't do that. So it's got to be me. I'm stuck with it." I love that answer. What's your biggest pet peeve? Hypocrisy. What's something about you that few people would know? My mother wanted me to become a professional pianist like Eddie Duchin. Now, I'm not sure if your audience has ever heard of Eddie Duchin, but he was quite the rage in the '40s. What's your favorite newspaper today and do you read it digitally? The answer is the Wall Street Journal and I read it both digitally and I do get a subscription. Do you have any hidden talent, Cyrus? I've asked that of my wife and she said she doesn't think so. I used to be a good golfer, but I'm no competitor for you anymore. As we close, I have one more question for you. What's the single most important bit of advice you'd given aspiring leader? I guess if I have just a one-liner, it's you are your most important project. I heard that. I'll confess that I heard it from someplace else who got it from somebody else, but I believe it. The someplace else was General Mattis, the Secretary of State, because he was asked that question and I believe it's absolutely correct. You are your most important project. You're going to determine whether you succeed or fail, whether you're happy or sad. It's not the circumstances. We're all knocked around by circumstances and everybody has their problems, but what you got to do, whatever your problems are, somebody else has had it worse and just suck it up and take control of yourself and that is the best I can give. Well, Cyrus, I really enjoyed your book, "Cabit and Deliver" on the front lines of management consulting and I appreciate you taking the time to be on this show with me. Well, it's been an honor. Thank you. I've listened to your podcasts and they're all terrific. Thank you very much. Well, it's a real treat to catch up with such a legendary titan of business. Cyrus' stories are always so fun, but you know, if you're listening, you're going to get a whole lot of wisdom too. One thing that's clear to me is that Cyrus understands the power of an outside perspective. I mean, let's face it. We all have blind spots and we can't fix them without help from the outside. The companies that falter and fail are usually the ones who never recognize their blind spots or who don't ask for help addressing them. So this week, I want you to ask yourself where you could benefit from an outside perspective. It could be for your company, for a particular product, or hey, even for your own leadership style. Then I want you to consider what an outside voice could offer you and the fresh perspective you could get from it. Do you need a mentor, a consultant? Find that partner you trust and respect. And I just know you're going to unlock so much more potential for your organization and for you as a leader as well. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders get an outside perspective. Coming up next on How Leaders Lead is Kelly Coffey, the CEO of City National Bank. Every time I built a strong team and then was able to move to whatever my next challenge was, but not take away from that business I just built, meaning not grab some of those leaders and move them over. Because why I don't like to take away from something I put so much blood and sweat and tears into to build to build the next thing. 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. [BLANK_AUDIO] [ Silence ]