Welcome to How Leaders Lead, where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. You know, leadership can be tough. It can be thrilling. It can be fun. But it should never, ever, ever be boring. And I can guarantee you, my guest today will back me up on that. In this episode, I'm talking with Hal Rosabluth. He's currently the Chairman and CEO of New Ocean Health Solutions. And he's had an incredible career building and selling successful companies in the travel and healthcare spaces. And at every step, he's looking for ways to challenge the status quo. One ability to push boundaries and ask questions is the key to his success. If you want to make sure you're not playing things too safe in your world as a leader, you definitely want to keep listening. Here's my conversation with my good friend, and soon to be yours, Hal Rosabluth . I want to start at the beginning. What's a story from your childhood that shaped the kind of leader you are today ? Well, might be a little unusual. I really had more negative role models than I had positive role models. So I learned not only what I didn't want to be as a leader, but also how I could affect people in a very positive way from those negative experiences. Yeah. I understand you once taught your eighth grade English class for three full days. What that experience teach you about leadership. Obviously, you didn't think much of the teacher had to take over the class. We were learning poetry. And it's basically classical poetry. And we all seemed kind of bored. And she made the mistake of saying, "Well, if anybody thinks they can teach this class better than me, you just raise your hand." Well, sitting in the back row as always, I said, "Okay, I'm going to go for it ." And I raised my hand. And the next day I came in with a record player in '33. And it was a Simon and Garfunkel album. And she said, "Well, what was that?" I said, "Well, that's poetry. She says, "Well, what are you going to do tomorrow?" So we'll flip it over the other side and we'll listen to the next part of the album. Well, it seems to me like you probably enjoyed challenging the status quo to teach that class and take her on like that. Is that something you've carried throughout your career? Yeah, I do like challenging the status quo. It's boring. Status quo is in itself status quo. So there's no movement forward. I don't think that's interesting to anybody. You ended up becoming CEO of Rosenbluth International, which is the world's third largest travel management company. And this was a family business started in 1892 as I understand it. When did you first get involved? The day after I graduated from college, I really wanted to be a criminologist quite frankly, but I saw that my dad was overworked and getting stressed out. And frankly, I thought it was getting sick. And he never wanted to see one of your parents that way. So I decided I'd join the business and next day I did so. Give me a snapshot of the business back then and what it became as you eventually took over the company. When I joined the company, travel agencies were simply mom and pop type of companies. Three, four, ten, fifteen people maybe doing vacation travel or booking a business flight and hotel for somebody. But I looked at all this and said there's an unknown unmet need here. Corporations look at travel as a unmanageable expense and people just have has really called whoever they wanted and companies paid for it. And I thought, well, let's find a way to manage this and help corporations save money. And so we created the travel management industry, our first three clients were GE, ARCO, FMC, right after that. The first bid for a national contract went out from the DuPont corporation and we're fortunate to be selected. And that got us rolling and we kept on inventing new and innovative ways for companies to understand why people travel, how to make it much easier for them to do so, provide them with information that they could use to internally manage the travel, create policies, et cetera . And then took that and decided, well, you know what, they're not getting a fair shake from the airlines. So we decided to create an exchange and bid out their travel based on travel patterns which we had in our data center and the airlines would then create different discounts for each corporation based on the information we provided and did a lot of innovative things. And one thing led to another and a national contract then became a global contract. And as we opened offices, I guess in 35 countries around the world, we would be awarded not only the travel, the companies we were servicing that had offices in those locations, but then get the headquarters of companies in those countries and start servicing them and all of our other offices around the country. We kind of looked it as a popcorn effect. We'd pop up and then the popcorn would pop down and end up in offices throughout the world. We turned this into a global powerhouse, $6 billion company. And as we started out our conversation, you kind of talk like you were this, I would say, mediocre student that kind of goes to your family business, but you had to get pretty focused in a hurry. I mean, all of a sudden, I mean, you don't come up with all these ideas and make things happen like you did without getting really focused. When did that light go off in you that really got you pumped up and excited about this business? First of all, thank you for the compliment of being a mediocre student. That's the best I've heard yet. Well, it's kind of how you position yourself. I'm not saying that's the truth. Oh, that's the way it was. In fact, my parents, they both passed away over the last couple of years and they were hoarders of everything, including my report cards, and as I was going through them, I could see why I was rejected by most of the colleges that I applied to and found out I actually went to summer school to be able to graduate high school. So I joined the family business and I didn't like it. In fact, I didn't like anybody that worked there. They were all primadontas thinking that they were God's gift to travel. I was also the owner's son and I knew people would resent me right off the bat and they did. Rightfully so, I probably would have to. I didn't want to make any decisions until people started coming and asking me for advice within the company. At that point said, "Okay, let me start doing some different things that nobody 's thinking about." That was the beginning of business travel and corporate travel management. I felt that it was really important to not only provide the best service and save the most amount of money and make it easier for people to travel, but that we had to have a company that was made up of friends, not friends that we knew and hired, but an environment where people could become friends because in that environment, friends never let friends down. So we would just constantly think of different ways to create competitive advantage and help those that we were servicing. We were eventually awarded the service company of the year by Intel, which was one of our clients and one of the 100 best companies to work for in America and all those really nice things that we never saw it. It just happened. Companies have far too much in effect on people's lives. In a lot of cases, it's very negative. So I've always wanted to create an environment where people wanted to come to work rather than having to come to work. I think that's always been a key part of our success in listening to the ideas of people throughout each of the companies that were closer to the customer than maybe I was and some of the other executives and then taking that advice and researching and talking with the customers again and asking them if this made sense. So we're successful in that. So you come in as the owners son, people resent you a little bit. You decide to basically go into areas that nobody else had done and innovate and that led to you becoming CEO, I take it. Well, yeah, that and I said to my dad and his partner at the time that kind of time for them to relax a little bit and they kept their $20 million of people going to St. Martin or taking a cruise and I was building up billions of dollars in business. So I thought, okay, I'm going to take over. It's time. How did you navigate that because that probably wasn't easy for your dad to take? No, it was easy for him to take in that we had a very trusting, open, honest relationship from whenever I was able to comprehend anything. So he knew it. But there comes a time when everybody kind of knows it, whatever that it is. He knew it was time and he was very proud of what my colleagues and I had accomplished. It was something he never thought would be in the future for the company. I was the fourth generation and I was supposed to destroy it. There were times where I thought maybe I was getting close, but nevertheless, we survived. It doesn't sound you got too lucky on this how. I'm not going to buy this humble act all the way here. Hey, I had to self-educate myself after college. I didn't learn much. I read and I read and I read and about 20 or 30 of us in the corporate travel department at the time, eventually, I guess, 6,000. After work each day, we go to a bar and I was no longer Hal Rosenbluth. I wasn't even Hal. It was, hey, you, I've got something that I want to talk to you about. That was perfect because then you get very open, honest discussions going. Through this all, as I understand it, on the side, you become a rancher. How did that happen? One night, I guess back in 1988, I was watching, I think it was ABC Nightly News and they were talking about this horrendous drought in the upper Midwest and the people were losing their farms and ranches. At the time, we were doing a lot of data entry on hundreds of thousands of people by hand into computers. Did they want an aisle seat smoking, non-smoking frequent flyer information and so on and so forth? I knew that we could do that anywhere. I asked a couple of my colleagues to go to the agriculture department and ask them what part of the upper Midwest was having the toughest time and they said North Dakota and asked them to go out and meet with the governor and his staff and asked them what part of the state was having the toughest time and they said the Emmons County and there's town of Linton, which maybe 1500 on a good day. There was a John Deere implement center that had nothing but concrete and a wood burning stove because there weren't any implements anywhere to be bought. The church gave us a bunch of tables and we got some chairs and we hired 40 farmwives. I always knew that farmwives kept the books and so they were going to be very meticulous and accurate and so we decided that we were going to consolidate all of our data entry out in this little town of Linton and eventually we hired 250 farmwives in the area and they were all fantastic. One day one of the folks who was working there she said would you like to come and have lunch at our ranch and I said sure and I went out there and sat at the table with the rest of the family, well young kids and her husband said hey would you like to come take a look at my cows. I said well yeah sure. I mean the only cow I had ever seen was in the Philadelphia Zoo. I couldn't get up close and personal there. So there I was in the pen in a nice set of loafers and khakis, city boy and I started to sink in the muck. He said so what do you think of my cows? Lovely, delightful. I mean I didn't know anything about cattle. I didn't know anything about girth or bags or anything else that goes on with the cows. But I just felt boy this is interesting. So I went back out again and he said hey let's get on a horse and we'll go ride and check the cattle and we went out. I loved it. I loved the fact that our entire center out there was built on a handshake. You could trust people. Everyone knew each other. Everything that was said spread throughout the community. You didn't need the internet then. There were still some party line phones. You said one thing to somebody and it just spread and I just fell in love with the people, the honesty. It was heaven for me and eventually we ended up with five call centers around the state and thousands of people. And you bought a ranch? Yeah, I got a call from this guy turned out to be a real estate agent. He said hey Hal I understand you're looking for some land. I said yeah I really am. He said well how quickly can you get on a plane and get out here? I said yeah I'll be out later in the day. I made my way out to North Dakota and took me up the airport and we drove 60 miles out there. You just make a left when you get out of the airport and drive eventually or reach my ranch. And so we're standing there. He says this is it. I go this is what? We're in the middle of a whiteout. I can't see a damn thing. He goes well there's a really nice valley below. We're up on a bluff and the Missouri River is out there. I said I find I'll take it. That was 35 years ago and the most fabulous place to go. Hey everyone it's Kula, co-host of Three More Questions and I have some exciting news to share with you. We just launched a breakthrough app that will help you become a better leader in less than two minutes a day. It's called how leaders lead. As you know on the podcast David spends about an hour each week interviewing some of the top leaders in the world. People like Tom Brady, Condoleezza Rice and Jamie Diamond. But we know that leaders like yourself are pressed for time. So we've taken the very best clips from these conversations and put them into an easy to use mobile app that you can learn from in less than two minutes a day. If you want to become a better leader start a daily leadership habit with the how leaders lead app. It's available now for free and the app store. Download it today. You've learned a lot as you've been in the ranching business, farming business. I've heard you say that you should treat your employees like cattle and run your business like a farm. Explain what you mean by this. A farm or a ranch their assets are either their crops or their cattle or both and they tended them with care. They provide their right nutrients. They're out every day, five in the morning, back at six o'clock at night. Work ethic is fantastic and everybody helps each other. If a neighbor needs something you just go running, you don't charge, you just know that they'll be there for you the next time. That work ethic, that honesty, I believe very strongly you can't fake farming. Can't say that hey, my corn's knee high by the 4th of July and it's all browned out. That is what it is. I've learned so many lessons on taking care of people through the way that my neighbors ranchers take care of their family. Family is big and take care of their assets. You're obviously a people person and the success of any business, as you well know, comes down to the people you're able to hire and retain. I understand you would take candidates that you were really interested in hiring to strengthen your team out to your ranch as part of your interviewing process. You got a lot of common sense. What's the thinking behind this? Well, first of all, they're in an environment which is unusual. It's not known to them, which would be very similar to a company that might be joining. I wanted to get to know how they are. And out there you can do different things that really bring out what's real in a person, how they handle and unique situations. Are they willing to jump into something or are they deathly afraid of taking a risk? You know, you spend a couple of days out there. You have a bunch of whiskeys and things come out. Number one person we were looking for a CFO and had my colleagues with me and we were in the ranch house and he starts talking about how he defrauded an insurance company and how proud he was about it and going, "Oh, this is going to be a beauty." So the next day I had to put up fence. So we had like a half a mile of fence to be put up and you know, you have the barbed wire, you have the stakes and so on and so forth. So we drive out and I said, "Hey, look, why don't you just take this car? It's a dirt road. Make a left. Keep on going. You'll get to a highway, make another left and take those 60 miles, go back to the airport and spend great spending a couple of days with you." You know, and you're an author as well. He wrote a great book called The Customer Comes Second, which became a New York Times bestseller when it was a more common belief in business that the customer comes first. Here you kind of challenge in the typical way how people think. Tell me a story about how you lived out this big idea as a leader because it's one thing to say that people come first. How do you live it out? I mean, you just have to recognize that the customer can't come first unless you remove all the obstacles that one of your colleagues would face in a business, whether it be bureaucracy, whether it be poor leadership, benefits, whatever. You want to make sure that there's nothing at the forefront of their eyes other than the customer. You create a culture where the people come first and you call it common sense, but you build a $6 billion company. You've got to spread this in offices all around the world. What process did you put in place so that your culture could be what you wanted it to be everywhere because you can't be everywhere at once? No, which is why you have to have great leaders everywhere and you have to remove bad leaders if they surface. Everybody that joined the company, we would fly them actually into Philadelphia and I would serve them tea, sit around a conference room table and just have a conversation about what the company was about and what they were about. All of a sudden they saw me serving them and taking an interest in their lives and their culture because we had to have the same culture whether it was in Singapore, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Shanghai, wherever, regardless of the culture outside of work, inside it had to be the same. Our training department and human resources were so, so critical. I am such a firm believer that the head of human resources and the CEO need to be tied at the hip and you can't delegate in the motion. You can't say, "Oh, Thursday, I'd like you all to begin to care." No, people will care if they want to care, they're not going to care if they don't want to care and that's the result of the environment that they're working in. So we made sure everybody got all the training we could possibly provide so that they felt confident and made sure that like ranching, if you have a bad cow that's messing up the herd, you got to get rid of it. So we had different ways of knowing that there was a bad leader. Interestingly enough, one day I was looking at some productivity reports and I saw that our average speed of answer in Singapore had doubled from typically 15 seconds from the time somebody calls in a reservations agent answering the phone. We were up to 30, 40 seconds. So I knew something was wrong. So I asked our chief human resource officer to fly with me the next day to Singapore. We went there and got everybody together and after about an hour or two, it came out that half of our people were of Malaysian descent and the other half of Chinese descent and the Chinese have always been leaders and our leader happened to be a malay descent and people resented that. So I talked to everybody and said, look, I get where you're all coming from. I understand culturally where you're all at, but inside here, it's going to be the best person. So give this person a chance to lead and we just stuck with it. You eventually sell Rosenblud to American Express. Walk me through how you thought about that decision. Well, we were competing with two other companies, one being a American Express on every global contract. It was just the three of us. And I could see that there was really no pricing power anymore. And I could also see that there was going to be a change in travel that the cost of calling a reservations center is going to be much higher than if people can book online . It was just at its infancy. And so we embraced that, started our own online booking and allowed for our corporate customers to decide past $45 to talk to reservations agent or 15 to do it on your own. We made sure everything was programmed with their corporate travel policies and personal preferences, et cetera. But I also knew at the same time that that was going to be the end of travel agencies, travel management companies. And so I got ahold of Blackstone and asked them to put us up for sale. And at the time, I decided that all those corporations would use the use of American Express card. We changed them over to Visa or MasterCard or whatever. And when you have $6 billion of that that American Express could say, "Oh, well , we'll get three and a half percent." If we flip them back over to our card. They won the auction and they were great. They lived up to every word. They went best to breed for leadership and so on and so forth. In fact, the other day, a person who started as my executive assistant then went into corporate communications. She then rose within the American Express. And now she just became Chief Marketing Officer of Delta Airlines. So that's always great when something like that happens. That's fantastic. And after the sale, you started a new company called Take Care Health, which created some of the very first in-store health clinics. I mean, you were ahead of your time. Tell me about what you call your electric cocoon and how it launched you into this next big idea. Well, I had recently read a book called the popcorn. In fact, I think it was by Faith Popcorn. I went up to Sierra in New York. A nice little office to sit down and there's not coffee. There's a shot of vodka, I think. I've been in her office. The heavy house that you know. And I asked her, "How do you see the future?" And she goes, "Well, I collect articles from all around the world, probably 1, 500 magazines, whatever. So I went back home and I got about seven different video displays and I created this cocoon of cacophony to a great extent. But I kept everything at the same decibel level if I were bringing in audio feeds or reading something or what have you. And I just sat there. I wanted to figure out what was the unknown unmet need. And my wife would come in and she'd see me sitting there and doing nothing. And she'd say, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm working." She says, "No, you're doing nothing." I go, "I know I'm doing nothing, but I'm working." So how can you do nothing? I work at the same time. I said, "I don't know how you do it, but something's going to come through to me." And eventually what came through was in Massachusetts, they had started universal health insurance. And as a result, you couldn't get a doctor. And if you got a doctor, it took you weeks, months to be seen. I said to myself, "That's an unknown unmet need that we can take advantage of by creating affordable, accessible, high quality care." And so I got together with my son's soccer coach who was president of one of J& J's subsidiaries, Janssen. I loved the way he coached. My boys, it was like bad news bears. They were like 11 years old running and not even in a circle. I don't know what they were running, but it was nowhere near the ball. But he taught them self-esteem and then he taught them how to win. And he said, "Hey, I'd like to do something with you." I go, "Yeah, Peter, are you really out of your mind? You're the youngest president of J&J. You want to do something with me?" He goes, "Yeah, it would be fun. It would be a lot of laughs." "Mm-hmm, okay, great." So we talked about this idea of how do we create this affordable, high quality, accessible health care. And we came up with the idea of putting clinics inside of pharmacies. And we looked for the right provider level, which was the nurse practitioner that had a great scope of practice for all the things that people would typically need. So we put together a business model and we quickly got single source national contracts with Rite Aid, Eckerd, OSCO, Walgreens, just about all the other in CVS. And I think we opened 1500 or what have you. And I was having dinner with the president of Walgreens. And yesterday, if he wanted to take a small strategic position in our company, he goes, "No, I want to buy you." I go, "Well, I came to have dinner with you. I don't want to walk out of here selling my company." Plus, it's being funded by private equity. So I'm not going to make that decision without sitting down and talking with them. So I went and got together and they said, "Well, hey, let's go for it." And one thing led to another and I had to change all the other contracts that we had and dissolve them and Walgreens purchased us. And here comes an interesting twist. I'm sure in your career. You now become one of the top executives at Walgreens. And it's obvious you're a bureaucracy buster. You run by a lot of instinct with a lot of intelligence, obviously, as well. How did you go into that big company? And you went in as the president at a very high level. What was that like for you? And what did you learn as a leader doing it? Well, the first thing I learned was everybody thought I was Rodney Dangerfield. They had executive row or death row as I referred to it where had all the executive assistants which they referred to as secretaries with, you know, bun hairdos or whatever it is. And they weren't allowed to talk to each other. And their executives were behind the doors outside of their cubbyholes or what have you. And I come with an Apple computer. Well, no Apple computers around this place. And so I said to everyone after a couple of days, I said, why didn't anybody talk around this place? You're all so quiet. Let's come into Christmas time. Let's do a love train. I'll turn it on and we'll rock and roll. And like silence, dead silence. I said, oh boy, if I got myself into a mess here, people are afraid to live. Let alone think. So what happened was people would come to us and say, we like your culture. We want to be more like, take care of health systems and Walgreens. I go, well, that's going to be a problem. So the first thing I did, I think my first greatest accomplishment was changing the dress code, getting everybody out of suits and getting rid of the word mister. Of course, there weren't any Miz executives at the time. They were all, we're mister and I said, that's ridiculous. Got to stop this stuff. Then I would meet every morning, I guess 536 AM with the president and CEO of the company and we would talk and he began to give me more and more responsibility. And he said, well, let's try and change the culture. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Hal Rosenbluth in just a moment. It can be hard to challenge a status quo, especially when you're in a big corporation. But when I talked with ways co-founder Yuri Levine, he shared an incredible insight on how to do just that. And therefore, the only way for corporates to innovate efficiently is actually to invest and to invest in something that will make them irrelevant. So every corporates need to ask themselves one question every year, what will make me irrelevant? What if this happens, my market is disappearing, is not going to remain the same. So that might be digital camera for codecs, that might be Netflix for blockbuster, that might be the smartphones for the digital cameras. And if you can answer that, if you can basically say, you know what, in 5 years or in 10 years down the road, if this happens, I have no job for my corporate, then you should invest in doing that. And you should either spin off or invest in a company that is doing that because you will not be able to carry that by yourself throughout the entire journey. If you want to be more disruptive and innovative, there's a wealth of wisdom waiting for you in my conversation with Yuri. Episode 129 here on Hal Leader's League. What was the single biggest thing that other leaders could really benefit from when you think about your time at Walgreens? I think you have to take a good, hard, honest look at where you're working and recognizing whether the company is going in the right direction or not. If it's not, do something about it, change the direction. I created a whole ecosystem of healthcare for Walgreens, recognizing that just having stores wasn't going to do it. But if you bring it all together, that you can create a lot of not only traffic , but you create a lot of well-being for people and can become known as the place for healthcare. Fortunately, they didn't take everything that I suggested. They got halfway there and then leadership changed. I was gone and I think CVS pretty much did everything that I suggested to Walg reens. But you were very successful as I understand it. You created a corporate innovation team which contributed over $2 billion in incremental revenue to the company. What advice can you give leaders on how to drive innovation? Even in a state boring company like Walgreens was at the time. I think you've got to begin to create relationships with different people throughout the company where they want to get involved in new ways of thinking and looking at opportunities for an unmet need. It's great when there's an unknown unmet need. There's actually two right now, I think, in the country that would be defined as such. What would they be? Is that your next business idea? One is the country is becoming more and more depressed. The unmet need is what are the root causes and how do you change them? Are the root causes or everything from social media to media itself to crime to anxiety, global events, divisiveness, government, education, parents worrying about their kids, kids worrying about their parents. It's just there's so much anxiety and we don't have enough providers to deal with it, whether it's done digitally or it's done by professionals. No, the country's unfortunately getting more and more depressed and we need some catalysts to get us out of it and I just don't know what that is. What would be the second one? So depression, which could be solved with caretakers on that front? The hidden costs of healthcare. My co-author, Marney Hall and I are writing a book on hypochondria and the hidden costs of healthcare. The cost of the system of people who suffer from illness, anxiety disorder, which is a nice way of saying hypochondria, it's being caused by farmer commercials where every third ad is, here's what you probably have and then you take this pill and you're all of a sudden picking flowers and dancing through the hilltops and then everybody gets on that drug. So the next commercial comes out and you go, "Maybe I got that too. I haven't thought about it." And then it just goes on and on and then it goes, then you go after you get the script and that's obviously not going to work because you don't even know if you have what you have but then you get, you have to have this test and that test and a procedure and you start adding up, you're getting into tens of billions of dollars and it affects everybody's premiums and it affects just everything. But I think we can solve that. I think that unknown unmet need is one that when our book comes out in the spring, I think we have come up with the solutions to that or at least explaining how a hyp ochondriac can deal with themselves and how the system can deal with hypochondriacs because a lot of us, then there's going to be more, it kind of goes with depression and anxiety which is building. This has been so much fun and I want to have some more with my lightning round of questions. Are you ready for this? Sure. Okay. What's one word others would use to best describe you and you can't say hyp ochondriac. Unusual. Who would play you in a movie? Larry David. Okay. If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be? One of my kids, I think I live vicariously through them. What's your biggest pet peeve? Honesty and lack thereof. You've got two hours to yourself. Are you jumping on a horse or a motorcycle? Depends on the weather. What's something about the ranch you'd only know if you were a rancher? You can't fake farming. If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear? You would hear country, you would hear news, you would hear Motown, pretty much what you'd hear. I had a little symphony. My age these days, my dad would, they love the symphony. So I have the symphony channel on. What's something about you a few people would know? I don't know. I'm such an open book and I don't want to be. I'm a recluse typically. All right. Just a few more questions that we'll wrap this up. You know, after four years with Walgream, you go out and you launch and create another business in the health and wellness space. Tell us about New Ocean and what you're up to now. New Ocean is really an extension of what we did with brick and mortar. You do it in a digitized way to provide personalized medicine and personalized journeys for people on their phones or tablets or what have you that take into account all the costly effects of healthcare and allowing people to have access to helping themselves or knowing where to go, whether it be thine chronic diseases or lifestyle or what have you. Just making it easy and accessible once again and of high quality for people to be able to take care of their own health in between visits to doctors or if they don't have a doctor to be able to learn more and educate themselves and then we help them through whatever they're dealing with. As you look at that business, you know, how's it going and what's the biggest leadership challenge you have? It's going great. I guess the greatest leadership challenge is to make sure that we're, we differentiate ourselves from an overly fragmented industry where there are so many companies that get into wellness and health and well-being but they are all single source solutions where you know, one is this, one is that and they're all very, very expensive. So we try to be the lowest cost producer with the most content and one of the areas is by taking what others have as live coaches. If you have a problem with diabetes or cardiovascular or what have you and we 've digitized everything. So if you do a crosswalk between what a live coach would say to you and what we do using our algorithms, et cetera, you get the same results but it's a fraction of the cost. That's fantastic. And you know, one thing that's true in leadership and in strong life is people don't like change and I know you've invested a lot in behavioral science with new ocean. What have you learned about change management or change itself that leaders can really think about as they're trying to make change with their teams and within their organizations? Well, first of all, you have to want to. I think the reality is that if leaders understood that they need to have an agile organization, they need to know what they don't know and they need to see where things should be going, try to be the first out of the box in getting there. It's the old, the lead dog gets the best view of what's ahead. But most are afraid to do so and I think that's kind of because of the way corporations have become institutionalized in so many ways. You've got to be safe. Well, safe is dangerous. Safe is very dangerous right now. You need to be able to innovate and look to the future and create the future. You can't let it create you. You're dead in the water if that's the case. Last question. What's the best piece of advice you have for aspiring leaders? Take what you do very seriously but don't take yourself too seriously. And that's good advice and this has been fun. I mean, you have definitely done a lot of very powerful and unique things in your career and you're trying to change the world in a positive fashion and I look forward to reading your book when it comes out to spring. Well, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure having this conversation. I absolutely love how Hal operates by his own set of rules. I mean, he's been doing it since his eighth grade English class and I think we can all learn something from the way he leads. There's a real risk in being content with the status quo. If you're too comfortable, if you're not pushing forward, then you're probably missing opportunities or failing to see threats in the distance. This week ask yourself what parts of your business you might just be a little bit too comfortable with. How can you lean into healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo? Remember what Hal says. Safe can be dangerous. I bet that will help you find the motivation you need to go out there and create the future instead of waiting for it to come to you. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders aren't afraid to challenge the status quo. And coming up next on Hal leaders lead, just in time for the 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, we've got Bill Mud, president and chief operating officer at Churchill Downs. It keeps you up at night, I think, is a question that everybody likes to ask. What is the thing you're most concerned about going down on Derby Day? As part of Derby 150, we're going to get a lot of attention, which could be good attention. It could be bad attention. I think those type of questions, I think, are the most productive. So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of Hal leaders lead, where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]