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 Anil Bouchery, the co-founder, chairman, and co-CEO of Workday . When Anil started Workday with David Duffield, they defined a handful of core values for their company. This is a pretty common practice for business leaders. But here's the problem. A lot of leaders write down the company values and never think about them again . They even laminate them, put them up on the wall. But I gotta tell you, all they do is collect dust. But that wasn't the case with Anil and his co-founder, Dave Duffield. They decided that investing in their people was going to be the number one value at their company. So how did they live out that value? Well, believe it or not, they personally interviewed the first 500 team members they hired. Now that's something that says they value people over anything else. The key lesson here is that they align their schedules and their priorities with the company's number one value. You see, the great leaders I know walk the talk of their core values. They just don't write them down and forget them. They actually use their core values to dictate how they spend their time and how they focus their energy. We have a lot to learn from today's conversation, so let's get right to it. Here's my conversation with my good friend, and soon to be yours, Anil Bouchery , the co-founder and co-founder of Workday. Anil, you're a good friend and I can't thank you enough for taking the time to be on this show. It's always great to be with you, David. Anil, you've built one heck of a company. Workday is just a fabulous company. Could you start just by giving our listeners a snapshot of the scope of your company today? Yes, so we started the company in 2005, and what we saw was this opportunity to take the legacy HR and ERP applications into this new model called Software as a Service , now called Cloud. It covers the areas of human resources, payroll, talent management, financials, procurement, and specifically for higher ed, we actually have a student system business. We really target medium and large companies. Half of the Fortune 500 actually uses Workday in some way or another. Well I know young brands, when I was CEO, we used you and you did a fantastic job. We certainly appreciated that. Anil, I can't wait to really dig into how you lead, but first, tell us a story about your childhood that really shaped the kind of leader that you've become. Well, I was fortunate to have wonderful parents. Your immigrants from India, they came in the 1960s, my dad with $400 in this pocket, and made a life for himself and for all of us by working hard. He was an electrical engineer. He's probably the reason I didn't go into engineering because I wasn't as smart as him, but I just watched the way he raised our family and the way that he was always about values. I've always gravitated towards leaders and individuals like you, David, that are values driven and it starts with my parents. I grew up on the East Coast in New Jersey and Boston and the other defining thing is, I loved sports and I played them all. Not all well, but I played them all. Baseball, basketball, tennis, I stuck with tennis. That was also a defining experience just to be competitive at a young age. I know you love winning and I know you probably hate losing, but which one really drives your success and how you go after things? Well I like to win, but I like to win with grace and being a sportsman. I think that's everything. That's why you and I have this passion for golf. It's not just about winning, it's the sportsmanship, it's the camaraderie, golf 's the one sport where you can actually call a penalty on yourself. I just think it's just such a great sport for values. I like to win, but win the right way. Also thinking business, there's a lot of chances to do win wins. You don't have to be, win, lose in sports you do, but in business you can be win-win. You mentioned earlier your dad was an electrical engineer and I saw you got a degree in electrical engineering at Brown. How did you find that that has helped you along in your business career? Well it's a great background for number one understanding technology and back then electrical engineering included software. I'm old enough where they didn't have a specific software degree, so that was just an emerging category. So I did a lot of software and that has served me well. But also electrical engineering is a lot about problem solving and in business there are just problems that come up on a pretty regular basis. You need to know math really well especially for a public company and with the financial statements and then problem solving and I feel like engineering prepared me for both. Now I know you got your MBA at Stanford, which is a hotbed for entrepreneurs. Did you always have it in the back of your mind that you wanted to start your own company someday? You know I actually wanted to go work at Apple. So I was working at Morgan Stanley between college and business school had a great experience and I was always lured out west that came out to visit San Francisco once. I thought wow this place is pretty cool. And when I got out here my goal was to get a job at Apple upon graduation and I never did but I always wanted to work at a cool technology company at that time. The coolest company was Apple. Instead I veered off into the world of HR and financial software because I met this amazing guy Dave Duffield. You know and Dave was the founder of PeopleSoft and he hired you right out of business school as I understand it and you were the company s first planning director. Tell us about how you thought about that decision and what made you want to work for Dave. Why was he somebody you wanted to hook up with? Yeah I get goosebumps just thinking about it. So I was pretty set to go back to the east coast and work at a venture capital firm. It would have been a good decision but it wasn t the right decision for me and I kind of knew it and I ran into a mutual friend of ours, George Still who had been my mentor over the summer between years of business school at a Burger King near Costco where I was doing the weekly Costco run for my roommate tonight and he convinced me to go see Dave and so I went to go see Dave and you know here s a guy that s already had quite a bit of success. PeopleSoft was already a public company and he took me out for a beer and after an hour and an interview he said, you know, I don t know what I m going to do with you but why do you take a break for a couple months and you come back and figure it out? And you know the rest of his history we ve been together now for almost 30 years and I just thought this guy is an amazing guy. I could learn a lot from him. He s great entrepreneurs and software. I also thought HR and financial software, not a big market. I ll probably do this for a couple of years and go do something else. 30 years later I m still doing HR and financial software. And the rest of the story is, you know. So Dave hires you, you go to PeopleSoft, you re their first planning director and then you rise within that company, Device Chairman, tell us a story about an event that really accelerated your trajectory of your career as you were moving up the ladder there. Well probably the biggest event was actually having that beer with Dave. But afterwards, less of an event but more I would say a series of conversations with Dave. He decided to invest in me and so we would go out once a month for a breakfast or a lunch or a dinner and I d ask him any question I could come up with about how he thought about things and how he built the business. And if you know Dave, he s all about building businesses the right way around core values which wasn t the most popular thing in the 90s. It s now very fashionable but he was always wired that way. And over time I just had this great benefit. I accumulated the knowledge of someone that had been around the block. PeopleSoft was his fourth company, Workday s his fifth company. I just got to learn from him and it s just become this amazing friendship and relationship that s lasted 30 years. You know I really want to hear now just the story of how you two teamed up and you left PeopleSoft and you formed Workday. You know how did it happen? It was one of those emotional times where you remember everything right. Your brain always imprints those things that are emotional. So I had actually left PeopleSoft on a day to day basis and gone off to be a venture capitalist at a firm called Graylock. Dave had retired as chairman and we brought in a new CEO to run the company. I had been passed over for the CEO job at PeopleSoft which was totally the right decision. I wasn t qualified at that time. Then we got into this situation with Oracle where they launched the hostile takeover on PeopleSoft and after a period of time the board asked Dave and I to come out of retirement to try to save the company. It was during that time where they asked the previous CEO to go who s still a friend. Ask Dave and I to come back. Dave focused in on the culture being more customer focused like we have been in the early days, more employee focused like we have been in the early days. During the time we were away we had gotten away from that and I focused in on what would happen with PeopleSoft s products. It was during that time I came to conclusion that what we were doing at People Soft was not going to work in the future. There was a small company salesforce.com that pioneered a new model for sales and customer services and I thought well, someone s going to do that for HR and finance. Might as well be us. We actually had a plan in the very early stages to do it at PeopleSoft but Oracle prevailed took over the company and a hostile takeover. Didn t ask Dave and I to stay. Dave and I three months later started Workday. The basic premise was let s take those PeopleSoft applications, start from scratch and rebuild them for this new model and let s have fun along the way. We brought our value system with us and that value system continues to be the one that we live by today. Tell me about that value system. What is that exactly? Well, so I have to give my co-founder Dave just a lot of credit. We thought about values and created a framework for how to build a company around a course that of values way before people ran businesses that way. Number one is employees. There are a lot of companies that have number one as customers. Dave s view was if you don t have happy employees, you re not going to have happy customers. To this day, I see that in spades. I ve never seen happy customers and unhappy employees that have appeared together. It just doesn t work. One, employees, number two, customers and customer success, number three, fun, number four, innovation, number five, integrity, and sixth, not really core value, but important to pay for the rest profitability. We reward those core values. We measure people against those core values. I think about that all the time. How are we doing against our core values? How are we doing the employees? How are we doing via customers? What I m proudest of is we ve been in the top 10 list of great places to work multiple times. It s because we take that employee core value seriously. Our customer satisfaction levels have always been 95% or higher because our happy employees know that taking care of customers is the right thing to do. It s a virtuous cycle. I was talking with Ryan who s in your communications group a little bit earlier . He said the thing that really has driven home daily is walking the talk of your values. How do you cascade that to everybody in the company because it just can t be you and Dave? Yeah. Well, so Dave and I interviewed the first 500 people purely for fit with our value system. We assumed that if it was a marketing person or a sales person or an engineering person, that the managers would have made sure that they were the right level of talent . We would screen for values and we would look for people that were we, not I. We looked for people that had committed to their previous company or something in their life endeavor that showed they would do something for a long time and they wouldn t jump around every few years. We would see if they had a sense of humor. Dave and I were crack jokes. Sometimes they probably weren t funny to the interviewee, but we had fun with it. Then we told those 500 people, you re going to protect the culture and the value system. We need you to be part of interviewing the next 5,000. We re past that group, but we continually perpetuate the culture carriers and the people that really embrace our values. It has to be one on every interview cycle to make sure that we re getting the right people in the door. I ve never heard of any two leaders interviewing the first 500 team members. That is such a sensational thing. That takes a ton of time. Here you are, you ve got this startup, you ve got to get going, you ve got all these business priorities. How did you stay true to that? Again, it comes back to employees being number one. We re up against two formidable companies in SAP and Oracle and we thought, hey , if we get the first 500 right and they really are the best in our industry, that will give us a shot. We want a shot, but we re going to need the best people because we re up against these really formidable companies. We ve got a great idea. We ve got disruptive technology, but we need the best people. Dave and I are passionate about this topic. We just agreed we didn t review the first 500 and that took precedent over everything else we had in our schedule. Was there something that changed the way you approached the business because of these interviews? You know, I say something that I m not necessarily proud of. I had a bias towards people from the right schools and it turns out talent is everywhere. Sometimes you just have to look a little harder and in some cases, some of the right schools didn t actually produce the best employees because there can always be a sometimes a sense of entitlement. And so I really got to see this attitude of hungry. I ll do whatever it takes to be successful. That s invigorating. It s exciting and you just want to hire more people like that. So less and less about educational history, more about what they d done with their lives and what they wanted to do. You ve got to be one of the most experienced interviewers on the planet. What advice can you offer the rest of us? You know, I think what every CEO or management team wants are dedicated employees who have good values. And importantly, you want them to stay as a company for a long period of time. People that leave every two years, it s really painful and it s very costly, right? You ve just trained them up. They now know the company and I call them shiny new penny folks. They re looking for that next opportunity. It s really digging into someone s background to get a sense that they ll be committed for the long run because every great company I ve seen or been around, there s a whole host of employees that have been there from the start or if not from the start for a long period of time. We have quite a few tenured people in our company that both bring the value system to work every day, but also our folks that have so much expertise now in our products and technology that it s just invaluable. You ve had so much success and when you have that kind of success, everybody wants your people and recruiting people s one thing, retaining them is another. You know, I really believe recognition was key to retaining people. I mean, what s your belief on how you keep people beyond just having that fantastic culture that you have? Well absolutely, and it s in your book, I think recognition is a huge part of it. And what we ve tried was recognize our people around our core values. So someone that had done a great job around a customer go live or a customer experience would be up for an individual, we call them OCA s Outstanding Contributor Awards and we give out those awards on a quarterly basis. There s a team award for a group of people, hopefully that was cross-functional that did great work on a product, on a sales situation, on a customer, whatever it is they were together and the more cross-functional the better because that creates those bridges across the company. Innovation, we have a quarterly innovation or innovator award. So we try to just reward behavior around the core values and people take notice . And I have to ask you, who came up with the workday name? The Dame s daughter who was a very talented marketing executive, Amy Duffield. I will just say that Dave came up with a name that I wasn t a fan of. I came up with a name that he wasn t a fan of and named and said, let me go do a project and we ll come up with a better name than when we would come up with it. I m not even going to mention our two names because I think they were so bad. And when she came up with a list of 10 names working with an outside agency, Dave and I both looked at each other on a workday. The minute we saw it, we both knew. It s such a great name. That s why I had to ask you that. I had a terrible name too. We actually went with it before we had Yum, it was Tricon. And nobody knew what that was. It was terrible. It sounded like an industrial cleaning company. But anyway, I m glad we moved on to something a little bit more upbeat. And taking you back again, we talked a little bit about the culture. What was the process you and Dave used to lay out the original vision for work day and the company that you are today? I mean, how did you guys formulate it all? Well, we do the space from our days at PeopleSoft. And what we saw was a market that needed a fresh solution, some fresh insight that had old products that were harder and harder to go from one version to the next. Customers didn t like running these products on their own premises. And as I mentioned, we saw the small company Salesforce. And we thought, well, Salesforce is doing it in small, medium sized businesses, but that s not really my background or Dave s background. So we said, let s start with HR. Every company needs a better HR system. And an HR system happens to be an application that touches every employee in the company. And so one of our big bets in the transition from the old legacy systems to the cloud systems was that the user experience had to be much better. And so building a great UI was a huge part of what we set out to do at the start at workday. And we started out with medium sized companies, but always with the intent to grow to larger companies. And over time, the product line grew from HR to HR and payroll to HR, payroll and talent. We always knew we would go into finance because that had been a big part of the PeopleSoft vision. Really, if you think about it, for lack of a better term, but the administrative backbone, HR and finance and procurement, just end up being the administrative backbone and they naturally work together. So that really was our vision from day one. And I had had that time at Greylock. I had the time running at products at PeopleSoft. My great moment was convincing David 65 that he had one more left in him. I said, hey, boss, come on, let s just do this. You got this one more and he did and he moved his family down for a period of time to California. And I see him quite often. He s an amazing guy, but a big part of the reason work day exists is I convinced him he had one more in him and I come up with the basic outline of what a product idea would look like. And he said, okay, let s do it. Now as you have made some shifts, how do you go about making strategic shifts to take on new product categories? You know, you ve evolved your core strategy considerable. Well, I think there are two pieces on the technology side. Every few years, I take the smartest technologists off site for a day or two and we ll just talk about what would you do today? Like we ve built work day around and you set up technologies in 2005. What would you do differently today? And something always comes out of that conversation. In 2010, it was mobile. Well, we built the application for mobile first. In 2012, 2013, it was all about big data. And three or four years ago, it was about machine learning. And what we do is we take that insight about what a startup would do and we try to incorporate it. We rebuild things from scratch and so there s no lines of code from our product 15 years ago because we re-written everything to take account of these modern technologies. On the expanding the footprint, we just listened to our customers. We just acquired a company called Pecan just a couple months ago that is all about employee engagement and measuring how happy your employees are and how engaged they are in a really formulaic machine learning way. It s a really powerful application. We were dabbling in that area, but as we talked to CEOs and HR leaders, especially during the pandemic, they really wanted to get a sense of the level of engagement of their employees. They said, what are you doing in this area? And we looked at where too far behind. So we went on, bought this company Pecan to fill that gap. And I think it s constantly listening to your customers. They re not going to be the ones that tell you, hey, build an in-memory database and come out with a new application. But if you ask them what they would like next, they ll tell you. If you re really close to their customers, they ll tell you. Neil, I ve heard you talk in the past just about the importance of listening to your customers and solving their big problems. How do you go about finding out what the most important problems are so you can be focused on the big ideas? So we ve got multiple ways of getting feedback from our customers. We have one called Brainstorm where any customer can log in a request and then the request will get voted on by other customers. So we ll figure out where we have some hotspots or where we might have a whole or an issue. The next level down would be we have meetings of CHROs and CFOs where they give us general feedback about whatever you want to move into. But then when we re designing an actual product or feature, we create design groups with our customers. We ll look at a new area. We came out with a new product called Accounting Center which is a high volume accounting engine for parsing all your accounting transactions. We looked at the customer and said, okay, we need somebody out of financial services. We need somebody out of retail, customers that are passionate about it. We collected a group of eight customers and they helped us define what they needed from the product. So we ll come out with that kernel of an idea but then we really let the customers shape what they want in the product. The great thing after that is if you pick the right customers, they re representative of future customers but also they re really bought into it because they were part of creating it and it s great to have advocates like that out when you re trying to sell it to a new customer. You know, you just have passed on so much credit to Dave and the partnership that you ve had with him and now you re passing on credit to your customers when you have the right customers, you build your business. When did you learn the importance of recognizing other people, celebrating other people s success even more than your own? Well, part of the idea is also Dave. All roads lead through Dave. I was very fortunate. I went to work for him at 27 and I got to see a CEO who had learned a lot from his previous experiences and now he ll come up with a model of what an ideal organization would look like. Dave s very humble. He s one of the most humble people you ll ever come across and he s been very successful and so after working with Dave, I would think, well, it s hard to have an ego. He doesn t have an ego so how can I have one? I watched how people would react to his generosity, his nature about always wanting to pass out compliments and reward people who had done a good job. And again, it was really a forming experience for me to work at PeopleSoft with Dave and then I got to apply it at Workday as CEO and with Dave as my touchstone and my sounding board on a lot of these decisions. But I ve just been very fortunate to have great mentors and I mentioned George still also one of those kinds of folks. Fantastic people. You know, and Neil, you re such an innovative company but the whole category in what s going on in business right now is just changing at warp speed. How do you keep you and your management team into that rat-a-tat-tat of staying on top of what s going on? Well, you know, part of it is you just have to stay connected again to your customers. And in my case, what I try to do is stay connected to a group of CEOs who I think are at the vanguard of dealing with this change. So I think about people like Doug McMillan, Wal-Mart s our biggest customer and Doug is a fantastic leader. And I get a really good sense of what s happening, talking with Doug or Mary Barra, GM. I ve got John Donahoe at Nike. We ve got all these great folks and I just try to stay in touch with them and listen because that s the way we can keep up with it. And then from a technology side, you ve got to be on top of all the startups. There s so much innovation happening right now. What I ask our team to do is, hey, you ve got to focus on what you re doing day to day, but please pay attention to what s happening in the startup world. And so we invest, I think at this point in 50, emerging technology companies that are relevant to workday, that are usually partners of some sort, it keeps us fresh and we get to see the new ideas because the new ideas never come from the really big companies. The new ideas come from small startups. It s always been the case, at least in the business to business area. What innovation today are you most excited about at Workday? And tell us how it came about? Well, probably the one that I m most excited about is one that we ve been working on for a while around machine learning. And I m a big believer that there is a right partnership between humans and machines, not like Terminator where the machines are going to take over the world. And what it is, is the partnership is built around the fact that machines are amazing at analyzing huge amounts of information in seconds, but they have no judgment. A machine now can tell you that it s going to rain in eight minutes and a human knows, okay, that means that you take my umbrella to work. When we think about weather forecasts in 20 years ago, we didn t really know what we re doing, but how we actually do. And it s that kind of partnership where the machine will say, here s the analysis and the human being will make a decision. The machine will say, hey, your business in Japan is doing poorly. Here are the top three reasons why we think that s the case or the machine thinks that s the case. And then the human does the exploration to figure that out. And I think the more and more we can get humans to be great at judgment and not have to worry about just crunching numbers where machines are good. And I think it s really powerful. We re trying to fuse that across all of our applications. And it s a journey. We ve been at it for four years now. There s more to do. But I think it s just part of this trend and road towards humans getting to do more and more valued work and not being replaced by machines. I don t see that future. And there s a book that s behind me called Prediction Machines. I highly recommend folks read that to really get a sense of how machine learning can be used in a powerful way and in a safe way and in an ethical way. And you have these new products and these new categories that you go after. What s absolutely critical when you assess opportunities? Well, I say the number one thing is, is there a real market for it? And again, we talked to our customers. Number two is something that we can do uniquely. If it s something that 10 other companies can do, why would someone want this from Workday? And then the third piece is we may be able to build it uniquely, but does it fit into our existing sales and marketing model? And if it does, if those three things fit big market, something we can do uniquely and it fits into our sales and marketing model, we get pretty excited about it, whether we re building it ourselves or whether we re doing an acquisition. Neil, I loved it when you say you get together with your team and you say, what would we do if we were a startup? As you get bigger, is it harder for you to get people to think like a startup? And how do you do it? There s always a group of engineers that want to be on the cutting edge that are thinking that way. I think it s making sure that you re in touch with them and that you have relationship with them and that you give them time to think about those things. Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, three amazing technology companies, they all have people who are at the innovative cutting edge, even though they re huge companies. And so, innovators are in all companies. You just have to find out who they are and how to stay connected to them. We re definitely in an extremely competitive world and disruption is the buzz word in almost every category. How do you look at competition? Well, we have two very traditional competitors in SAP and Oracle and four little companies, but we know a lot about their products and we ve been competing with them across two companies between people so after workday, we have the same competitors. And when Dave and I started Workday, I think a lot of folks thought we were crazy and so not a lot of startups came into our market. And it s a big undertaking, building an ERP system, where you have to worry about HR and financial regulations across the globe. It s not something you just build with three or four people. In terms of new competition, it s always looking at those startups and understanding what they would do with that new technology base. And so, today, you would start with machine learning as the underlying part of your platform. You would never build out your own data centers the way we did. You would work on Amazon or Microsoft or Google s data centers. And so, you constantly looking for those emerging companies that might disrupt you the way, frankly, we disrupted SAP and Oracle and learn from them or in some cases, acquire them. You know, I understand, Anil, that you recently became co-CEO. Now, most experts say this is very difficult to play out. Why do you have the co-CEO structure? Well, first and foremost, Dave and I had that structure for, I think, four years, right before IPO through, I think, 2014. It s great having a partner. Dave doesn t have an ego. I like to think I don t have an ego. When two people can come together and solve problems together, it can be magical. And after seven years of being alone as CEO, I wanted to go back to that model. And so, we elevated a gentleman named Chana Fernandez, who was our head of Europe, then our head of worldwide sales, then our head of worldwide operations, co-present, and now he s my co-CEO. And he s phenomenally talented. The way we carve up the world is he really focuses on sales and customer services and customer facing activities. And I focus in on the products, HR and finance. And we have a great partnership. And I ll frankly say, especially for a B2B company where sales is such a huge part of what you do, being able to share the workload is a great thing. It s a big job. I ve never run a company this big. People s off wasn t nearly as big as workday is. And so, when people ask me how you get along and how you do, I was like, I m making a lot of stuff up as I go. And I ve got great mentors like our friends like Sam Palmasano and Dave Dorman, who have run companies at scale. But for me to be able to get back to the product side, which is my passion and hopefully what I m probably best suited for at workday and be able to have a partner in Chana, it just makes the business run better. You know, Neil, I understand that you have technology that will help people figure out their next career move. How s that possible? Well, it s part of our career plan and succession planning efforts where this is machine learning again at work. It will look at the person who is looking for a new opportunity and then try to look at people who have been like that over the last several years and look at the ones that have been successful and what was their career path. And it will then, based on previously successful career paths, make a couple of recommendations to employ about what they should do next and what training they might need. And so, it s like a machine learning based coach that s coaching you through your career based on people that have been successful in those roles in the past. How would you describe the state of the business world today and more importantly, what s it going to take to be a truly great company going forward? Well, I have to say, I am so proud of how some of the biggest companies and their CEOs have led during this pandemic. I ve always believed that business should have a soul, that we have a broader purpose than just profits and in a world where there s a social crisis, a political crisis, an economic crisis, you name it, there s some sort of crisis. I think business leaders stepped up and we try to be that place where at least our employees and our communities could feel like someone was looking out for them. And it s leaders like I mentioned before like Doug McMillan at Walmart or John Donahoe at Nike or Merid Bara at GM or James Gorman at Morgan Stanley. I can just keep going through that list and they led with a mindset of more than just running the company but being good citizens in this world and taking care of their employees but also taking care of their communities. And I think that s the future of business going forward. It s that whole stakeholder theory discussion we ve had for the last 20 years and I think it s time is here. And I know people will say that s really not important to business. Businesses needs to be focused on profits by actually having a stakeholder approach, stakeholder management approach that s multifaceted rather than just shareholders actually leads to a better business. Better attachment to customers, better attachment to the community. Employees that are far more engaged because they think their company is doing the right thing in the community. I think those things matter a lot, especially the new generation employees. They want to see how you re making the world a better place. So I m excited about where a business is today. You know, a lot of people talk about purpose and you use the word soul. Is there a difference from your perspective? Why do you use the word soul? Because I think soul means you ve got a heart, right? Like you ve got to care. It can t just be I have a purpose about building a certain type of company but you ve got to care. You ve got to care about your employees. You ve got to care about your customers. And I think those all those things mean to me a soul and companies shouldn t be soulless. They should care about these things and the management team should care about these things. And I m very proud of our management team. They care deeply about the topics that we ve been dealing with the last 18 months. We have a foundation, the Workday Foundation that s been active well before the pandemic in creating opportunities for all. Opportunity on RAMS is a program that we created and we re in HR software companies. So we see that there s all this talent but they don t have opportunities to get into the companies. And so it helps vets get opportunities in companies. It helps homemakers who might not have been in the workforce the last decade get into the workforce. It helps underrepresented minorities who might not have the right avenues get into the workforce. And something that I m really proud of and I think we re making a difference but we re also helping the economy. I mean it s again it s one of those things you do good but it s good to do. I ve talked to a number of CEOs about Workday and it s preparation for this. And you know you get such high marks for helping their companies get back into swing of things post pandemic. What are you particularly proud of that Workday s done? Well you know David so many companies, CVS and of course young brands were on the front lines during this pandemic. Whether they were serving food or being a drug store. And what I m proud of is those folks were taking care of all of us and in turn our employees were keeping their HR and finance operations running so they didn t have to worry about them so we took care of them. But it all starts with those people who are on the front lines during this really difficult period of time. And I m proud of the way our employees figured it out working from home in many cases to support our customers really without missing a beat. Shifting gears you know you really do some fun advertising with Phil Mickelson and you ve linked up with other golfers as well. Why Phil and why golf for Workday? The C-suite pays attention to golf. There s no better sport to reach CFOs, CHROs, CEOs, maybe F1, maybe at a lower level tennis. But if you want to get to the decision maker, golf is a great way to do it. And so we started down the golf program. Brandt Seneca was the first person we worked with who is just a great human being. And then you know a chance came up with Phil and Phil is a needle mover. He s iconic. He goes by one name. I don t know if it s Phil or Lefty, either one works. And I would just say as an ambassador for Workday, he works so hard on our behalf. He never says Workday. He says we. He talks about it as if he s part of the company. And you know the other part as you see in the ads which we didn t know when we signed them is he s a pretty funny guy. He s got a great sense of humor. And our marketing people you know are very focused on one thing when we do an ad. People don t want to watch boring ads. They want to watch something that makes them laugh. He might leave a good message but makes them laugh and Phil is really good at that. A lot of his acting on TV is completely ad-libbed by him. That s great and you know it was so much fun to see him with the PGA CHA. That was a big deal for us. Yeah absolutely. Well you had Workday plastered all around the world for sure. You know shifting gears another time here. You know I know you ve been an advisory partner. You ve mentioned this earlier at Graylock. And you have a renowned ability to assess startups. They have what they call the Forbes Midas list and you ve been on it six times. What would be the top three things you look for in a startup? Number one the entrepreneur. There s nothing that s going to happen great without a great entrepreneur. And I typically like the technical entrepreneurs that are really trying to solve a problem. Number two disruptive technology. If the technology is 10% better it s not going to be enough to convince people to lean SAP or Oracle or IBM or a big company. It s got to be 50% better, 80% better. Number three a big market. And I think that third part is not always easy because sometimes big markets just don t represent themselves as big markets upfront. But I found if you partner up with the right technical founders network now there are lots of models that work that just happen to be my model. And I in consumers different consumer something gets hot without a lot of technology built in it. I don t know much about consumer technology. I m a business to business person and that model of technologists really deep technology that s disruptive to the existing players and a big market. The big market sounds obvious but it s not always clear. I would say like in the case of Workday maybe the cloud model wasn t going to take off and it s going to end up being a $100 million market. At the time we had no idea that the whole market would shift to the cloud. So you just kind of have to make leaps of faith on the market. Neil, you ve had so much success but almost every leader I know as an epic fail or a huge personal issue that they have to work through. Could you share yours with us and what did you learn from it? You ve been outside of my golf career? Well, I know you just lost a tournament in day two but let s put that aside. You know the biggest one I went through is the loss of people soft to Oracle. That was very, very personal. I feel like my career and Dave s career intertwining for those seven or eight years we re working together. I didn t need to leave Greylock to go back. I took a leave of absence from Greylock to go be part of the management team running PeopleSoft in the middle of a hustle takeover for $1 a year salary. I did it because I love Dave and Dave asked me to go back with them and I thought we d win. And you know we didn t. It was heart wrenching. PeopleSoft stood for all the core values that you and I have talked about today and to see the company go was heart wrenching. And also you just felt like you lost. You just right on lost. And there was no way to recover. And it was a long three months. Dave and I both got the flu. I think we re just still run down trying to run a company in the hustle takeover. But you know that was the classic Phoenix story. What happened was workday rose from the ashes. If workday hadn t gotten created I would still be living through that last six months of people soft because I love that company. I love all the folks that were there. How did you maintain or get your positive person? Did you lose your positive attitude during that period? How did you get your positive mindset back? I had moments where I was depressed. I listened to a lot of music that was inspirational and I watched. I like a certain type of movie that is a true story that s inspirational like Seabus get or Greatest Game Ever Played. I just watched those movies that said, hey you know we might have lost the battle but the war is just beginning. I hate that. It s just a chapter and I need to move on from this chapter. My girlfriend at the time who s now my wife was also very supportive of what I was going through. She knew it was painful but I tried to exercise a lot and just try to do anything to get my mind off of it because it was just really hard. Yeah I can tell it was definitely painful. Neil I m a big believer in self coaching. How do you build self awareness and determine how to take your game to the next level? You know I think number one you have to have a great relationship with the people that work for you and with you. I ask on a regular basis maybe I don t always get great feedback or honest feedback but I hope to get feedback from the people I work with on a day to day basis. Then I surround myself with mentors who have no problem giving me direct feedback whether it s George Still, Chairman Payne, Stan Pommesano, you know, Colin Urey said all these people I admire and look up to in some way or another involved with work down and I ll just ask them how are we doing? How am I doing? You saw me in the rack of my team. What can I do better? So I think it s always asking questions and listening. I know you also mentor others and coach others. What s a one on one coaching session like with you? I just ask a lot of questions. What are you trying to be as a leader or who you re trying to be as a leader? Where do you think you re doing well? Where do you think you re not doing well? Let s talk about some recent examples. Where is it that you want to be in a year or five years and aspirational kind of discussion and let people talk and just out of the conversation, good comes out of it. Then I try to suggest my books to read. Workday is built around the good to great concept that Jim Collins, he wrote several great books and everyone he comes out with is something that Dave and I read and refer back to and a lot of good to great is not just about how to build a great company but how to be a great manager, how do you be a level five manager, someone that deflects credit and absorbs blame. That s the epitome of a great leader. Sometimes when you read those books, it just reminds you of those principles. That s why I always have my three or four books I recommend to someone who is aspiring to be a great manager. Neil, I m having so much fun with this conversation. I d like to have some more here. You up for a quick lightning round of questions. Sure. Okay, three words that best describe you. Optimistic. I don t know how to say it in one word, but I ll say family and hopefully everybody will agree fun. I would agree with that. If you could be someone beside yourself for a day, who would it be and why? I ll look like Phil Mickelson. And I know why. I m a lefty golfer too. Just experience hitting the ball like that one time in front of 20,000 people and the shot actually worked. I think that would be pretty cool. I wouldn t even need to be a day or just be a couple of shots. What s something about you that few people would know? My favorite food is pizza. As I travel visiting our customers, the first thing that I try to do is find the best local pizza joint. And then have a journal from all the pizza joints I ve visited across the country. Sounds like a good book to be. Do you have any hidden talents? Not that I know of. What s your biggest pet peeve? You know, probably ego. For me again, growing up with Dave, I pride myself on being confident and not having ego. You can be confident but not have a huge ego. And I think egos are pretty off putting. A favorite interview question. What s your favorite movie? And funniest thing that ever happened to you? I ve got so many things. Well, when I was an electrical engineer, I was always better at the software side than I was the chipboard side. And once during an experiment, I actually wired my chipboard properly but I wired the capacitor boot between positive and negative. And a puff of smoke rose off the board and it set off the water sprinklers. That s what I thought. Maybe I should do software. That s hard where things don t work out. I almost set the lab on fire. That was fun. You know, thanks for that. Now, what three bits of advice would you give to all the aspiring leaders that are listening in right now? I would start with separate out being a manager from being a leader. There are two different things. You need to be both. But a leader is inspirational. How are you going to inspire your team? How are you going to set ambitious goals? And the way you get there, number one, is being empathetic. Listen to your employees. Listen to what s important to them. You know, understand what s important to work. We also understand what s important to them at home. And that will help you get that loyalty and get those folks to be really focused on the inspirational goals that you have in front of you. So that would be empathy. Number two would be set goals. To me organizations that come across the goals are diffused or they are not really achievable, set specific goals. And probably the third part is get a mentor. And there are so many great mentors out there. I have been a great beneficiary. I am sometimes known as someone that collects mentors and I will keep collecting mentors because I learned something different from all of them. You can either go through the world and make mistakes on your own and figure out after the fact or you can learn a lot from the mistakes that other people have made and focus in on making new mistakes. But let s not make the ones that other folks who are already made who are willing to be mentors and can help you be great leaders. You mentioned home and you have so many irons in the fire and eels. How do you go about balancing work and family at home? Well I would say before the pandemic it was a challenge. I was on the road a lot and my wife would schedule a night or two where I would be around for dinner and then during the pandemic I was around for dinner every day. It is finding a balance where I need to travel for work but family is really important so I try to devote weekends to family. And a big part of having a co-CEO now is I don t have to be on the road through weeks out of four. I can spend time with my wonderful wife Alison and our two kids. And last but not least when you look out into the future what s the unfinished business for you as a leader? The tech companies that we measure ourselves just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. But I think Workday is this company that does business the right way that takes care of its employees and takes care of its customers and I want to see it have an independent future and we re on that path I think in three or four years we ll get to 10 billion in revenues and at that point I think we have secured our future and that s really important to me. I want to be that independent company the way in today s world of applications company still forces now on that path adobe s on that path and I hope we re next. Well I m sure with you at the leadership as a co-CEO and just the founder that you have been Workday s best days are ahead of them and Neil I want to thank you so much for taking the time and thank you so much for the candor that you ve had in this conversation of ours. That s great to be with you David. You know having my conversation with the Neil was like having the conversation with the brother. We are absolutely philosophically aligned. People are absolutely the most important thing you can focus on and the way how I really wanted to drive that home was using recognition as our number one behavior, our number one core value and I knew that I had to lead the way. That s why I created the personal recognition award, my walk the talk teeth and when I would see somebody doing something great I would recognize them. I d take my walk a talk teeth out. I d ride on top of it. I d number it. I d take a picture of the person and say hey I m going to send you a picture. You can do whatever you want but I m going to put your picture on my wall in my office because what you re doing is what s making our company great. And guess what happened? I filled the walls in my office with people that I recognized all around the world and when I was running out of wall space people said hey David what are you going to do next? And I said just start looking up because I m going to start putting pictures of people that I recognize on the ceiling which is exactly what I did. But let me tell you something. People love to come into the CEO s office. The reason is they kind of want to learn about the person. Well let me tell you something. I wanted people to learn about what makes our company tick when they walked into my office and it wasn t me it was the people that we re recognizing all around the world. Now the good news is I cast a shadow and other people followed and everybody else in the company started developing their own individual recognition award and doing recognition themselves. And that s how it really became something that young brands actually became famous for. We got all kinds of accolades, other companies best practiced us because they wanted to learn how we used recognition to drive results. And we got great results at young brands. Now I don t know about you but I love that quote. You cannot be what you cannot see. That concept applies to us this week in that you cannot expect your team to do things that you re not going to do yourself. You have to live out your core values if you want anyone to follow you. Do you want your core values to simply be forgotten? Of course you don t. I ve got to tell you it s really up to you as the leader to make sure that doesn t happen by living your core values every single day. So here s what I want you to do. I want you to pull out that list of core values that you have in your company or you created for your team. Which are the one or two that you re going to put time and energy into this week? How are you going to prioritize these on your calendar? This simple exercise really matters because what we learned today is that great leaders walk the talk of their core values. 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 in your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. See you next week. [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]