David Novak 0:03 

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 that you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Today's guest is Paul Varga, the former chairman and CEO of Brown Forman, the largest distilling company in the world with brands like Jack Daniels and Woodford Reserve, they have a saying that Brown Forman build forever. The company started in 1890. And the way Paul sees it, it was his responsibility to steward two key parts of the business. He wanted to continue to build their iconic brands, but he also made it a top priority to build their people up as well. Because what a tragedy would be, if the brands grew and the people didn't grow with it. What you're about to hear is why Paul cares so deeply about developing his people, and ultimately, how that drove the success in their business. The great leaders I know build forever stewarding both their brands and their people. There's a lot for us to learn in this episode. So let's get right to it. Here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Paul Varga.

You know, Paul, I always like to start out at the beginning. Can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing?

Paul Varga 1:26 

Well, sure, very interesting to what I do today, I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, which is where the headquarters of Brown Forman is, and I grew up the son of a physician in a large Catholic family, which was pretty common in Louisville, Kentucky, big Catholic community here, three brothers, two sisters, and all close in age. So it created the environment, as you can imagine of competitiveness, we are all driven and the family you grow up in the activities you pursue, we were all athletic kids. And my mom and dad were having six of us. At some point, I'm sure they said Enough of this trying to get six kids to all these different activities. So my dad and some of his doctor buddies invested in the Louisville tennis club. And then what they went and did was bought a bunch of tennis rackets and said, you all play this. And so as a result of that, frankly, we all concentrated in tennis, and became pretty accomplished tennis family over the years and, you know, knocking around with each other competing, and, you know, raising the standard of performance. And there's no doubt that the size of my family, the proximity, the way we were raised, the sport we played, definitely imparted a lot of who I became.

David Novak 2:33 

Now, I know, you went on to the University of Kentucky and you played tennis?

Unknown Speaker 2:37 

I did. Yeah. You know,

David Novak 2:38 

what's the big life lesson you learn from playing tennis itself.

Paul Varga 2:42 

I didn't know it at the time. And as I've thought back about it, particularly as it relates to success in business, I mean, there are so many lessons from from athletics generally. But also, in this case, it was individual sports, tennis being much more an individual sport than a team sport, when you grow up playing. And so there's this sense of accountability, that comes for the mistakes you make. I mean, you couldn't turn to somebody and say, Hey, you should have passed me the ball or something like that. I mean, it was your account, if somebody beat the tar out of you, it was on you. And so I always felt like that gave people who came from that particular sport, a sense of accountability, I'll tell you the other thing that I didn't realize until much later, because of the nature of I think this is true of all athletics, but it was particularly true of the tennis experience that had you're making during the course of a match so many individual decisions. And then by the time you get through 1015 years of competition, and you walk into a corporate environment, and people are taking a lot longer to make decisions, the first thing I had to learn was patience. I mean, I was geared you know, I was geared to be competitive, you made 100 decisions a minute, you know, where to hit the ball, where to run all these kinds of things. And you'd get in and you'd look around and see people talk and they said, well, we'll get to that tomorrow. And it just felt like it was so slow. And I had you know, like a lot of kids who would have been growing up and being very competitive, I had a hot temper, I had all those things. And so all of the positive things that gave me you know, under particularly under stress and environment, it can cause negative things, you have to kind of tame it. You have to be very competitive, but also tame that competitive spirit of time and then throttle down your enthusiasm for you know, in terms of the pacing, and there were all kinds of things that I learned through that experience.

David Novak 4:27 

Now, I know you went on to get your MBA at Purdue after graduating from Kentucky and you actually started out as an intern at Brown Forman, tell us how that happened.

Paul Varga 4:38 

Yeah, in the mid 80s. I was up and looked at the Career board one day, near the end of my first year. It was a two year program, getting my master's and there was a sort of a prospect for being an intern down here at Brown Forman I came down. It was really funny story. My dad, who was a prominent physician in town, everybody was always coming up to my brothers and sisters and saying how much they I appreciated my dad because he, they typically were a patient. And I came down here and I had had a much older grade uncle who had worked here for years who had passed away. And I wasn't very close to him. So everybody was talking to me. And I'd been away at school for a year and saying how much they appreciated my dad, and how much how sad they were that he passed away. And, of course, I was like, Mom didn't tell me. They were actually talking about another man named Margo. But I will tell you, it was very interesting. It opened up the door, the fact that a great uncle had worked here generations before, and had that name recognition opened up the door to an internship for me. And so I came down here and work that summer and then took the job. When I finished up my second year, a year later,

David Novak 5:45 

you go from a summer intern to becoming CEO of the largest distillery company in the world at 39. Yeah, how were you able to move up the corporate ladder so fast?

Paul Varga 5:56 

I'll tell you what happened. I was willing to go do the early work to learn I felt it because there were I had offers coming out of business school that were probably in a short term basis, look preferable training development programs that very nice companies. And I liked the idea of being able to go up, but I thought I could go up fast here. I mean, that was an ambition. But I knew I would need to go learn the business. So I traveled around and went live in Chicago and LA and then moved to Nashville. And the move to Nashville was a move from the sales function into the marketing. So I was learning another function. My undergraduate study and masters had also included finance. So I was very curious about how the money got made, how that money got spent. So I felt I was getting a really well rounded experience early on. And then that opportunity in Tennessee was to work on Jack Daniels, which is our most important brand. And is I mean, such an incredible learning experience to go play any kind of stewardship role in that. And because of that, it gave me exposure to the Chairman and CEO and president of the company who frequently came and spent time with Jack Daniels because of its importance. So that almost happenstance created the opportunity for me to present to them be around them. And a few years later, they asked me to actually come do something pretty unconventional, which was to be their chief of staff. And the chief of staff at Brown Forman back in those days was sort of a ringside seat to how the company got run, and you did a lot of staff work, but you wrote position papers, you did a lot of communicating. And for the most part, I didn't know what at the time, you got an opportunity to see if you were gonna like the kind of job I ended up getting. And I know for a lot of people to see that kind of breadth and intensity of pressure, etc. It's not for everybody. And so I didn't know at that time that I would even have an opportunity to take on that kind of role. But that was a very important career move for me. And then I later went back into the organization to sort of help as Les Brown and Bill straight, who were the leaders at the time to really globalize the company, something you know very well, and would follow that were several years of really setting up the infrastructure for brown Foreman's globalization on a brand front on a distribution front, learning the ropes, seeing how to staff knowing how to sell all of those kinds of things. And then, several years later, after taking on the role of the Chief Marketing Officer, it did surprise me at the young age that I was that they tapped me on the shoulder and said, We, at the time, Beale Street was turning 65. And so he was the head of our beverage operations, they asked me to run that while I was the remain CEO of the company.

David Novak 8:35 

Now I know that you're a well known and famous marketing person, and you're really known for being a great marketer. And I saw your eyes light up when you even mentioned Jack Daniels. And it's not six o'clock, and it is somewhere, as you would say. So tell me, how do you build iconic brand like Jack Daniels? I mean, I know you can't do that one minute. But what was the big key to that brand taken off?

Paul Varga 8:59 

I'll tell you what it had already. Of course, by the time I had the opportunity to work on it. It was already so prominent in popular culture, and had been so well marketed by the people who had been the stewards of it prior to my arrival for sure. So I was a student at first. And then the other aspect with this popular culture piece was Jack Daniels had taken hold of the hearts and minds of consumers, particularly in America. And as Americana was piped around the world, whether it was through movies, music, and concerts, or books, or authors, etc. Oftentimes, an expression of masculine independence or America was expressed through Jack Daniels. So in many instances, I remember the early days of going out into the emerging markets and we had no distribution, but everybody knew what Jack Daniels was. And so for us, a lot of it was how do we get this thing available in a scalable way so that we can then also educate them more about the book And so that would say a lot of our job in those days was to make something that we knew was already attractive and desired around the world and people were aware of it was a hell of a head start, then to go in and then supplement it with the real story about its roots and origins. And so there's a whole bunch of us that went out and undertook that work.

David Novak 10:19 

Yeah, you traveled all around the world. What was the funniest marketing story you could give us about Jack Daniels the experience?

Paul Varga 10:25 

Oh, well, I'll never forget. I was in London. And we were over there for Wimbledon. We actually staying at the house that Steffi Graf was staying and at the time, she won the Wimbledon Championships, there was a buddy of mine from college who was working as one of the agents for her. So I said, Come on over. So we went over. And we went out that night, you know, after we got in and watch some of the tennis and so we were out. And there was this huge line outside this bar. And I had a Jack Daniels business card, and it looked like about an hour and a half wait now walked up to you huge bouncer standing there, and I walked up, and I handed the guy the business card. And I had said, Hey, any chance we'd be able to get in here and something shorter than about an hour or two. And he went and grabbed the owner, the owner came out and he said, I hear you are Jack Daniels. No, I wish I was close enough and that I work for the company. And you wouldn't have believed I mean, it just the door it opened. And so that was the reality to me of the brands fame. And so one of the important lessons about that is that if you author something that's iconic like that, and I know you've had experience with this as well, there's only you guide it, you don't try necessarily to overhaul or champion your your your part passenger, because in the instance of Jack Daniels, the consumer and their adoption and love of the brand is very much a part of who it is. And so there's an art to stewarding that kind of brand, which is very different than say something we might launch today that nobody's ever heard of,

David Novak 11:51 

you know, Bourbon ism is really, really taken off. How does that happen? What drives a trend like that?

Paul Varga 11:58 

What happened? I think, David was that over years and years and years, and we've seen this across so many categories where categories nationalized. And like the beer business, nationalized we saw very national Chardonnay brands in our category vodka took off of in vodka became the phenomenon. And what happens, I just think it's one of those things and consumer tastes is everybody's swung to things that were white or sweet or easy to drink. And then as they tired, and particularly with millennials and a new generation, they wanted to drink things that were more substantive, more flavorful, had greater stories behind them. In the instance of bourbon, the hospitality behind bourbon is essential to his success. I mean, how many companies or businesses or industries open up their doors, the way the bourbon category does, even in our category, very few people tour vodka, distilleries or factories, but everybody wants to go to their favorite bourbon distillery. And I mean, think about the packaged goods business as you and I know so well, I mean, very few people long to go visit macaroni and cheese factories. There's something about the people who make and tell the stories that go back so long about bourbon that is intriguing.

David Novak 13:08 

It's fun to see how people are not doing the wine tastings. Now they're doing the bourbon tasting. I know, my son in law he loves Does he really likes her Woodford desert. You know, the whole trend towards bourbon is a great example, as something happens, you know, Can Can a marketer make a trend? Or does it just happen through osmosis?

Paul Varga 13:30 

I do think that marketers and companies and brands can spark renovations in a category? Absolutely do they need cooperation and some help from society, of course. And it's never been easier. You know, with the emergence of social media, David, I mean, what's happened with the entrepreneur, who can get to their audiences today so much more efficiently and targeted, then say you and I would have been able two years ago where you had to structure the right media plan to get to the eyeballs. I mean, with social media and modern media today, the ability to spark something almost on a neighborhood basis is amazing. And it might take persistence to I mean, even if three or four efforts or campaigns or ideas aren't working, sometimes it takes a while and the magic comes. We became the sponsor after yum brands, of course of the Kentucky Derby. And we've been associated as the official bourbon of the Kentucky Derby for years. It didn't occur to us until we took on the presenting sponsorship at the derby that we could express what that partnership was through the phrase, the most exciting two ounces in sports. And I think for marketers persistence is critical. And never be afraid to bring new ideas in order to accomplish what you're suggesting,

David Novak 14:48 

you know, you just mentioned mentioned Never be afraid, you know, which kind of brings me to you know, a failure. Is it as ever been a failure or an apparent failure that really ended up setting you up for success? What's your favorite failure story?

Paul Varga 15:02 

Probably the two greatest are those inevitable people choices. I would say if I look back on my career, I'm a believer in people. And I think this came from upbringing. And so I probably demonstrated more patience and tolerance with people at times, when I probably needed to make a tougher decision and move on, you know, and that actually was a lesson I learned through maturation and ag, you only get it through experience. And those are the toughest judgment calls and businesses, because people are everything. And so I had several where I said, I wish I'd have done this earlier done that more. So it's certainly in that whole area of people selection and trying to get the right people, you know, set up for success on the right projects. The other thing are those simple judgment calls that we make those business judgments. When we acquired our very, very wonderful tequila business today called Eritrea tequila. Early in that process, we were very anxious to get it, our portfolio had a gap, we felt this was the right one, we went in and had an agreement to do it. And I knew going in that we'd have to pay up, we did pay up. And then we found out afterwards that as can happen that not every aspect of the business, you know, was exactly as we thought it might be. And actually in that case, I call it I considered that a on my part part of my diligence and part of my accountability. And so what I learned from that was, I got to stand up for it. And we actually, it was very rare to do, we went and actually pursued and achieved in that case, something in the range of about a 12% purchase price adjustment. But there was a moment where I said, I'm accountable for this, this will be on me. And I think that comes with anybody who takes on the role of the CEO, I really do feel like I define the role of a CEO in part now, years later, as there's the feeling that comes from what I call the never ending immense responsibility that is so associated, I mean, it's just never ending and you feel accountable if somebody has a bad day in Indonesia, right? I mean, it's kind of back on you. And so once you've embodied that, you just want to do what you can to help the system succeed.

David Novak 17:08 

You know, great leaders, all are great coaches, can you tell us your best story about how you help someone achieve their potential?

Paul Varga 17:16 

Yeah, I mean, I think more often than not hit has come from trying to, for the purposes of personal development, to try to convince people to take jobs outside their comfort zone. I think the greatest development comes from challenging yourself in areas that you're less familiar with. And great growth comes from. And I have several senior executives today, the versatility that exists at Brown Forman today across our senior ranks, because my chief financial officer at once asked to leave the finance field and go head up our manufacturing and production operations. And that conversation is not an easy one for a career financial person. Similarly, the person at the time who was heading up our production, we asked to go head up the Regional Operations encompassing North America. David, as you know, when you go to people and they've, they're professional, and they've had very clear career tracks, and you challenge them to go lead different people and experience new things, the coaching that's required first, to get them excited about it, but then also to help them navigate the uncertainty has always I think it's one of the joys of my career is to so to watch and observe. And then on the other end of it, just see them succeed is one of the great things. So

David Novak 18:27 

you've established that you're ambitious, you've established that you're competitive out. And you really now are talking about the need to be collaborative and working together. It's very difficult to marry those two things for a lot of people. How have you been able to do that? Is that something you've always been able to do, or if you had to evolve from being competitive, ambitious, and then collaborative,

Paul Varga 18:49 

definitely evolved? I mean, yeah, predict if you grew up in an individual sport, I mean, I can think of no more training to being selfish than growing up playing competitive tennis, because it's you against your opponent. And so the thing that kept me from being some lunatic later on, was the upbringing I had, frankly, Dave, I mean, I would have none of the capabilities that I've got today. And the grounding in the values without my mom and dad had instilled in me, and then what I experienced, I'm still very close to all my siblings. And so to me, that grounding, and I'm trying to impart it in my own family today, were critical and vital. I mean, having perspective, it's just I'll give me the example right around 2003. We would have had three kids in four years, and they were infants took on the CEO job and just before that, my sister had been in a horrific car accident and gone through, you know, coma and then significant disabilities. And that's it in these meetings, and have changed diapers in the morning, come down to work and be preoccupied with my sister and her plight, and I'd hear people you know, sort of groping and moaning about some of the stuff too. out here and it just would hit me and I'd say, this stuff's easy. This stuff is so easy. Let's bring some perspective to people that have solved this problem, how to diagnose it, how to converse about it. And a lot of that comes from being observant about what happens. I think a lot of the life lessons we have outside of our company walls are as are more important to your leadership development than what you experienced inside the walls. I really did.

David Novak 20:28 

We will be back with the rest of my conversation with Paul Varga. In just a moment. on Episode 66, I had the opportunity to talk with Ginni Rometty, the former chairman, president and CEO of IBM,

Ginni Rometty 20:40 

you will only grow when you're uncomfortable. If you're feeling so comfortable in a role, you do need to change it because you are not learning. So, growth and comfort never coexist.

David Novak 20:51 

Isn't that the truth? As you're developing as a leader, you have to remember that it won't always be comfortable. But take heart, the uncomfortable moments are making you stronger. Go back and listen to the entire conversation with Ginni, again, that's episode 66. Here on how leaders lead. You know, many companies, all great companies have a noble cause. What's the higher purpose for Brown Forman,

Paul Varga 21:20 

we express it in two ways. And some people use the word vision or mission. For us what brings meaning is what we call enriching the experience of life. That goes on to say that building strong consumer brands essentially in responsible ways that will endure for generations. And we actually, ultimately I love to write, and so a lot of coming up a marketer and enjoying it. I mean, we found ways to brand what that meant. And we took our initials of BF and created the phrase building forever. Now that had a double meaning that meaning was, obviously the process of continuous growth and building building forever. And that applied knowledge just to the business. But it was very important to express that people could come to Brown Forman and build themselves, it would be a great place to fulfill your own ambitions for career growth. And I thought it was so important about that is that you had to have synchrony between if the company wanted to say, grow 10%. So to to the employees in order to drive it, when you couldn't have the employees growing at two and the company at 10, everybody had to keep growing, it was a continuous improvement thing. The other thing at a family controlled company, which this is that was really important about the building forever was that was ultimately an expression of the company's desire to be independent and endure for a long time. You know, many companies, you might turn around and say, well, they're trying to drive to a certain goal that maybe they're gonna sell, or they're going to exit. When I took over the company, it was 133 years old. I mean, a look at it already been very successful for I got in there. So one of the things I wanted to do is to make sure that the family and the out the audience is outside Brown Forman as well as for the benefit of people inside knew that we were here to stay. And one of the ways to stay and endure was to grow, and to be successful and to continuously improve. And thankfully, for us, that's occurred.

David Novak 23:09 

You know, I've learned that the best CEOs are great storytellers. They're great communicators, they can articulate where you want to go. What advice could you give others in terms of how to hone those skills, like you just talked about how you like to write?

Paul Varga 23:22 

For me, it was writing it down, I think, because people are different communication, they have different communication styles. I'll tell you what I wrote down. This was an interesting one for me, I after years of doing it, I kept thinking about when was at my best as a leader. And it goes to the basics of what we do as human beings. But at first thought I had to think very clearly I had to communicate clearly, I had to act very clearly. And then I felt like I had to feel I had to show emotion. And the way I ended up remembering that to myself, on almost any big decision or big occasion was I would ask myself in advance, and after, did I think for myself, did I say what I thought? Did I do what I said? And did that feel what I do? And I've answered yes to those questions. I felt like I would have had a great influence and impact on people. When I made mistakes. I usually shortcut one of them. I might have thought it beautifully. I might have said it. But guess what I forgot to follow up on it in the way that I should have. Or maybe I didn't show enough emotion. And it's really interesting, as I've replicated that with some of my colleagues here, they feel that they I've heard them play it back to me, Hey, you know what, that helps me to know the completeness that's required of leadership. And the most important thing is it has to feel natural to you do you get to be who you are. And so the way I have always tried to teach it to my colleagues is to continuously go back and ask some of those questions and there's an interest it's an easily remember a sequence obviously, it then encompasses the impact that you can have as a leader,

David Novak 24:53 

you've mentioned most importantly, being natural being who you are. Talk about just the criticality of being In an authentic and why that's such a big driver of success?

Paul Varga 25:03 

Well, first and foremost, I think you is an individual little selfishly, it takes less time and energy to be yourself, if you can be yourself, it's so much more efficient. And if you can encourage other people to communicate with each other being themselves and be tolerant of and I think that's one of the whole messages behind the diversity inclusion work that companies do is allowing people to be themselves but finding common ground and being tolerant of each other being respectful of each other. But I No, I absolutely think that it's just more enjoyable to to not have don't I mean, just think about it, there's times where we go do things where we feel like we might have to fake it, it just doesn't feel as good, right. So I mean, there's something so much more natural when you fit with an environment or a place. And, and as we all know, this was one of the early awakenings, when you take on the role of a CEO, somebody comes and tells you, you realize your personality is going to be the greatest influence on the culture of this place. And you go, wow, I don't know if they're ready for this. Again, it becomes the weight of immense responsibility. So how difficult it would be to have to fake it through that. And think of the impact you're having on people. So for me, it's just there's an efficiency to it, there's an enjoyment to it. And I think people have a pretty good BS meter. They know if you really care about something they know if you know your stuff. So to my eye, I'm willing to follow people with that know that they're authentic. And they're both thinking and messaging. You know,

David Novak 26:32 

you're a great brand builder. How would you describe the Paul Wagner brand?

Paul Varga 26:36 

Paul, Varga Miranda, I do think has some authenticity. I think it has some competitiveness, that I've tried to channel toward the company and my competition. I really do think David had the word that I was raised to be this way. And I think it has happened to find a company where this was appreciated, which is I really try to be respectful of other people. I mean, I've never tried to impose my will on him. And even if I'm competitive with my point of view, in the end, I try to do it in a way that is, in my view, just respectful of people. And I just feel like it's such a more enjoyable way to go through life, if you can try to treat people the way you want to be treated. And I think people pick up on that it's effective over time. Well, how

David Novak 27:19 

do you determine the areas that you need to work on to become an even better leader?

Paul Varga 27:24 

By watching others by observing others and seeing how much better they do some things than me. And then I'm a written word learner. I like to write myself and actually write poetry, I love to write stuff down. As I've gotten older, I've been so curious about psychology and other things like, why would people think this way versus that way. And so even an unknowing ways, I think it makes me more an agile leader, it makes me a little bit more adaptive leader. And so I'm constantly sort of looking around saying, Boy, that person does that really, really well. Or, I mean, the one that I would have observed view, that is just your passion for recognition, something like that does not come as naturally to me. So when I hear about or read about or watch something you're doing, that's something that somebody can pick up, I can go over to another area, and watch people who are tolerant and patient where I'm ready to engage in debate. And I can say, I'd like to practice some of that patients that they've got. So I'm an observational learner, and I like to read,

David Novak 28:22 

you came up as a traditional marketer, and then social media comes in and the game has changed. How did you get your game up to speed as the world has changed so much in terms of how you communicate, because you're in a brand building business, you got to be all over the consumer at? How did you evolve,

Paul Varga 28:38 

hire people who can teach you, I mean, I think if you're at the top of the company, I mean, I'm not gonna go do all the work, but I still have to keep my instincts sharp. And so being around people who can describe the and they don't always have to work or they can be agencies, they can be other people. But the basics of coming up with something compelling, no matter how it's delivered, have remained the same that's timeless that you know, to express something that can compel somebody to want to consume your product, share it with others, be an ambassador for it, whatever it happens to be, those haven't changed, the mechanisms for doing it have changed considerably, the frequency with which you can do it is changed. And that area was more foreign. So hire great people who know how to do it. And then what they might not know as much are some of these standards that do cross time. And then those of us who've been around long enough can maybe impart a little wisdom around those and it becomes a great merit.

David Novak 29:32 

It kind of sounds like a little bit of reverse mentoring. It's reverse math. So you sought out the young people who really knew how to do this and they taught you and you taught them things about the business it

Paul Varga 29:41 

isn't it? Yes. You know, the hardest part if you grow up through a company, which we both attempts have done, is you can get out of touch because of the responsibilities of the most senior office, right? I mean, you got administrative things, financial things, but if in the end selling things to consumers and then paying more for it than it cost you to make it It's the end. If that's what you're trying to do, you've got to find ways to stay in touch. And so I even reorganized Brown Forman a little bit at the top, some for developmental reasons, but one was to have the head was very unconventional the head, the head of Jack Daniels report directly to me, so that I could stay so close to that particular brand for which not only I love and enjoy and can impart knowledge and wisdom, but also so I could learn from them. I mean, sometimes you and that's that was that those are unconventional decisions sometimes. But what I thought was very appropriate in the case of Brown Forman,

David Novak 30:34 

you know, Paul, you've talked about your family, your upbringing, and I know you're very committed, devoted family, man, how have you been able to balance the 24/7 demands of being a CEO? And you know, having three kids in their teenage years? How can you do it all

Paul Varga 30:50 

it's prioritization, I was taught the skills of prioritization. When I first started in college, I was studying pre med, really was wanting to be active in fraternity and was playing collegiate tennis. And I would look around at everybody else who had a little more time on their hands than I did. And but I have learned to juggle it, and ultimately changed my major for personal choice. And so throughout my life, I have kept very busy schedules, trying to do as much as I could, today, it might be civic service, it could be working on the board of St. Xavier, high school, these kinds of things. But I find it important to try to do as much as I can to have the best impact I can, but you have to prioritize. And I also think a really helpful thing in the management style that I have is this idea of shared leadership, if you have a lot of people, and you're not just a heroic CEO, who does everything, you can delegate, you can have other people lead. And so for me having many, many people who are well trained, if I'm off doing something else, whether it's in my personal life, or traveling for work, or I've got outside board service, we've got people here who are well trained to carry on the work of the company.

David Novak 31:58 

You know, curiously, I didn't know this until this discussion, you had you were a pre med major, your father was a doctor, how hard was that for you to go to your dad and say, Hey, Dad, I'm gonna go down another path.

Paul Varga 32:10 

It was really hard. It was really because I had two older brothers who were already in in the court either becoming doctors or studying it to be as well. But I realized I didn't have a passion for it at the time, I thought I might have a chance to go play beyond college tennis. And so I wanted to give that a run. And I didn't think I could do both. Although I'll tell you, the irony of it is for all those years that I thought it, that's what I was going to do. When I first joined Brown Forman, this great distilled spirit and bourbon company, one of the first bits of marketing I saw on a wall was a great poster for our old forester brand, which was the founding brand and the company at the very, very bottom of it. It said, for medicinal purposes only. And I remember thinking, by God, I'm going to practice medicine anyway.

David Novak 32:59 

That's funny, you know, you are talking about corporate responsibility, or how do you really communicate the need to drink responsibly,

Paul Varga 33:05 

it has been so much in the DNA of the Brown family, I gotta remember the way this company went public was coming out of prohibition in 1933, they needed capital to restart the company, basically, they went public. But as part of that, there was still very much at the temperance movement in the regulations and laws of the country. You know, almost 100 years later, now, one of the Brown family members took on the responsibility of starting the Industry Association, that would commit to marketing codes and responsible drinking. And so that has traveled over the generations in brown Foreman's cultural DNA. So it was so easy when we got into leadership positions, and you're always reflective, a little bit of what's going on in society. But it is vital to our business to do it responsibly as all in alcohol responsibility is the most critical component of our corporate responsibility. And the other thing I'd say is anybody who has ever over consumed beverage alcohol, they don't feel so good. And the last thing any marketers sell, or once a consumer to feel from the use of their product is not feeling good. So for the benefit of lifelong consumption, and lifelong friendship with our brands, we need and want people to enjoy our products responsibly. So M is in some ways, a benefit to us.

David Novak 34:27 

You mentioned that you love to read. Yeah, what book have you given out mostly as a gift to others? And why?

Paul Varga 34:33 

Probably be a couple of them. The one there's a book on the psychology of leadership, I call it that, but that's not what its phrase. It's called reclaiming the fires by Dr. Steven Burgas. I give it to leaders who are oftentimes new to positions of power, and it fundamentally gets into the psychology and the traps that leaders can fall into and inherently fall into depression with a call encore anxiety, the need to constantly please all the things that CEOs may not be able to describe, but almost all experience, like gets into the loneliness, it gets into all kinds of things that all leaders in and accomplish. People from all walks of life experience a lot of people from the sports world, and fundamentally talks about what precipitated the falls of some of these people. And I always liked it. I mean, I like to practice humility. But I also never wanted to take for granted the responsibility and privilege you have to lead and the trappings of power that come from it. So on some level, I wanted that, and I do share that particular book. It's not for everybody, because it has some deep psychology. Some people have responded and told me, it's the best book they've ever read, it caught my attention as a great reminder, for CEOs who wanted to stay humble.

David Novak 35:53 

That sounds like a great gift to give your people and I want to thank you, Paul, for the gift. You've given all of us by taking the time to share some of your learnings on leadership and your life lessons. You are, you are one heck of a leader and I hate to end this podcast because I could keep talking to you for hours, you probably will. So thank you very much. I appreciate it very

Paul Varga 36:14 

much, my pleasure.

David Novak 36:23 

Paul is obviously one heck of a leader. And if you're anything like me, you're fired up after hearing that conversation. There's so much wisdom to pull from and to apply. But the big one I want to call out is the idea of our brands and our companies never outpacing our team's development. How do we as leaders keep that from happening? Well, we have to be intentional about it. This week as part of your weekly personal development plan. I want you to look for an opportunity to get someone on your team outside of their comfort zone. Encourage them to say yes to something that scares them a little bit. Because these uncomfortable moments are how we grow and develop. We can't just focus on growing our company and growing our brands. We have to be intentional about growing our people as well. So do you want to know how leaders lead what we learned today is the great leaders steward their brands and their people. 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 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. I'll see you next week.