Betsy Atkins
Business Executive, Entrepreneur, Board Advisor, Author
“The ability to understand what you're good at, and match yourself to the right thing, I think is important to being successful, and then to figure out where you want to grow and develop and being self-aware enough to know what your talents are and what do you have to hire for.”
Summary
In this episode of Leadership Matters, Alan and his good friend Betsy Atkins talk about the importance of boards and how their leadership impacts a company’s business and culture.
Betsy Atkins has been a CEO three times during her career, has been through 13 IPOs, and has served on over 34 boards.
In this episode, Betsy opens up about the importance of her parents’ encouragement to her development. She believes in the innovation of board governance and that board members should be “all in.” Betsy and Alan discuss how to get on boards, and to ask what one can bring to the position.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
Be Board Ready: The Secrets to Landing a Board Seat and Being a Great Director, by Betsy Atkins, Gina Sims, et al.
Behind Boardroom Doors: Lessons of a Corporate Director, by Betsy Atkins
Guest Bio
Betsy Atkins is an American business executive and entrepreneur. She is President & CEO of Baja Corp, a venture capital investment firm, which she founded in 1993. She was the former Chairman & CEO of Clear Standards, Inc, a leading provider of SaaS Software enterprise carbon management and sustainability solutions. In 2010, Clear Standards was acquired by SAP.
Atkins is on the board of directors of many companies, including Wynn Resorts, Docker, Covetrus and Volvo Car Corporation. She previously served as chairman of the SAP AG advisory board and was a member of the ZocDoc advisory board. She was a member of the NASDAQ LLC Exchange board of directors and is a member of Florida International University's Health Care Network board of directors.
Atkins is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and frequently appears on CNBC, Bloomberg, and Yahoo Finance as a corporate governance commentator.
Follow Betsy on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
Clips from this Episode
“The first thing a board should do is take a Hippocratic Oath.”
“You get the best board members when you build a pool of talent for the future.”
Episode Transcription
Alan Fleischmann
You're listening to Leadership Matters on Sirius XM. I'm your host, Alan Fleischmann. I'm here with Betsy Atkins and we're talking about leadership, the purpose of boards, and how we can change our governance and our countries through good leadership. Betsy calls herself a serial entrepreneur and she is one. She's an extraordinary businesswoman and a true leader. She has been a CEO three times during her career and has served on over 34 boards and been through 13 IPOs. Betsy currently serves on the boards of Wynn Resorts, real estate investment trust SL Green, and Volvo Cars. And as a founder of investment firm Baja Corporation, Betsy Atkins has built three early-stage funds investing in enterprise software, healthcare, and energy. Betsy is probably most widely recognized as an expert in corporate governance, where she knows how to make boards a competitive asset while ensuring that they embrace the values of environmental and social sustainability. Betsy often shares her business outlook as a contributor in publications such as Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and she has published several books, including Be Board Ready, The Secrets to Landing a Board Seat, Being a Great Director, and other books as well. In fact, I have all of them. It's an honor to have you on the show today, there's much we want to discuss, Betsy. You are quite the legend in the corporate world. And I am so glad that we get to talk with you today on Leadership Matters.
Betsy Atkins
Thanks for having me. It's great to be with you, Alan.
Alan Fleischmann
You are really truly—when people think of boards and service and how you make corporate life work with other big questions, you are the person that people think of and talk about at every level globally, and nationally. And certainly, company by company. You've had an amazing career, you continue to have an amazing career. And I'd love to go back to your earliest days, look at chronology here, and see how you got started. When did you realize you had this entrepreneurial spark? And where do you think it came from?
Betsy Atkins
I think that, as a little kid, I wanted to be the boss. And I think I was a bossy rotten little three-year-old and didn't want to comply with other people's structures. I always wanted to be an independent thinker and have the chance to have some influence and impact.
Alan Fleischmann
Is there someone in particular who had the strongest influence on your life, the early days of your life that instilled those values of finding your own voice? Because honestly, it usually takes someone else to inspire you that your voice matters.
Betsy Atkins
I was probably the luckiest person in the world to have the family I grew up in. I had two fabulous parents. And my mother always told me to be courageous and go for it. Of course, you're worthy of being heard. Do your work, be diligent, and make your voice be heard. And when you have that kind of encouragement, and somebody who says, Don't quit, don't give up and get in there, you're very blessed and lucky. And I was.
Alan Fleischmann
Did you have a big family?
Betsy Atkins
Three kids, myself and two brothers. And I always thought I was an only child though.
Alan Fleischmann
So which number were you in the three? I was putting ham in the sandwich.
Betsy Atkins
Yeah, I understand. The ham in the sandwich is always the best. Right? That's awesome. Where'd you grew up?
Alan Fleischmann
Newton, Massachusetts. That's a beautiful place. It's a beautiful place, right outside Boston. Were there any CEOs or corporate leaders who you looked up to over the years? And were any of them women? I'm curious. Also, whether there were women role models, for example, that use you said, Hey, I can do that as well, or whether gender didn't play a role. And you just said, I have a voice and I'm going to go for it. And have those mentors or role models? What did you see?
Betsy Atkins
I actually didn’t think of myself as a female leader, I thought of myself as a person and why shouldn’t I have a seat at the table? If not me? Who would? Why not me? What do I have to do to be good enough to get there and just explain it now and do the work? There really weren't women in corporate positions when I was growing up. I mean, if you look for a woman leader of aspiration, the only model there was Margaret Thatcher, and she had that weird squeaky voice and that was really it.
Alan Fleischmann
I guess one of the first women in the Fortune 500 with Katharine Graham, but she actually had a different trajectory that got her where she got to. So very different role model than, frankly, had she been like you an entrepreneur, and started her own company. Any mentors along the way that kept you going?
Betsy Atkins
I think that the best lessons were adversity, not individuals, but going through hard things. Starting companies on my own writing the business plan, getting the funding, going through all the hard things when you build a business, where you're taking a brand new concept, an idea to market and you're trying to figure out how to make your solution unique when people haven't ever tried the concept before, and how you show them that this is going to help their business. So I think the biggest mentors were the challenges along the way and the corporate adversity you face when you do entrepreneurial things.
Alan Fleischmann
And did you ever go into a corporation directly and work within the bureaucracy it was it always entrepreneurial?
Betsy Atkins
Well, I did. My first job out of college was at General Electric in the industrial division. And I was definitely a round circle in the square peg. I gave them corporate indigestion. And it was clear that this wasn't going to be a good long-term fit. But I learned a lot. And it was absolutely interesting to also figure out that products like industrial products just don't change that much. Lighting, transformers, AC and DC motors, that was what was in the industrial division. And it just got boring because once you mastered the product and where it fit, it just wasn't innovative enough. So it helped me to see that I'd be happier in a high velocity, high change environment of technology.
Alan Fleischmann
Did you go from there to co-founding your own digital tech and consumer company firms?
Betsy Atkins
Yes, I went from there into the semiconductor industry, and was in that for a while. And then I joined a small company to run all of their go-to-market and professional services and marketing. And we were supposed to go public. And I looked over at the guy running engineering, and I said I think the CEO is cooking the books. I don't think we're going public. I think you and I should go and do something. You've got all the ideas. And I'm the person who brings it to market makes all the money. Lets you and I go do something. So he came up with the great idea of local area networking, which was very exciting technology. It's the yellow coaxial cable that connects everything in your home or business. And it was very innovative then. So we went off and I wrote the plan got the funding, and we launched the company and it was very successful. And from there, it was off to the races. One sort of entrepreneurial venture after the next.
Alan Fleischmann
How long did it take for you to realize that that was the right move? Did you know it from day one before you felt it was successful or did it take a little while?
Betsy Atkins
I knew it from day one because I was in a small/midsize company that we were scaling to hyper-growth. And I realized I really like those environments. But it was clear that if you really want to control your destiny, you had to start your own business.
Alan Fleischmann
Now how long did you have a company?
Betsy Atkins
I had it four years as we were about to file the S1 to go public, we got acquired. And then was just kind of onto the next unusual and innovative company and idea.
Alan Fleischmann
What was the next thing that you did?
Betsy Atkins
It was absolutely the best thing that nobody ever heard of. It was a Department of Defense prototype shop. A think tank named Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. BBN. And here's what they did. You know what they did? They created the ARPANET Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is our internet today. I got to productize and commercialize the internet and the ARPA Advanced Research Projects Agency and DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, they had this research network they created the ARPANET to connect the universities. And then they used it. They called it the MILNET for the military to move bullets, boots, tuna, whatever the military was moving around. Then it became an opportunity to commercialize it. And that's what I did. So I worked with 3000 PhDs from MIT. It was like the biggest group of genius geeks that you could ever imagine. And they did amazing things. They did massive neural networks, speech recognition technology. They did early email and encryption systems. And so they would do one-off prototypes for the defense and research agencies in the fed-civilian and fed-defense side of the government. And I got to productize and commercialize all these great things.
Alan Fleischmann
How long were you there?
Betsy Atkins
Seven years.
Alan Fleischmann
Sounds amazing. You were both a pioneer and part of something that actually was pretty amazing. I haven't seen that in your bio. When you talk to people in Silicon Valley, and I'm an entrepreneur talking to entrepreneurs, they love to talk about their failures, even more than their successes. That adversity you talked about, but actually looking at your track record, you didn't have too many setbacks. Or is that just the way you approach things? You say in every slowdown there is an opportunity. Because you really do have this incredible trajectory that always seems to go this way. By this way, I mean go up.
Betsy Atkins
There were lots of different setbacks. From there, I went and ran a big professional services organization inside what was then Unisys, the merger of Sperry and Burroughs, and then I went out to Silicon Valley and took over a supercomputer company, which was too late to the market. Nobody needed more supercomputers after Cray. We were late. So I got to keep it from crash landing and do a soft landing and sell it. And then I co-founded a big blockbuster named Ascend that did what Cisco does. So it took public and got it from zero to five and a half billion in top-line revenue and a little over eight years.
Alan Fleischmann
Were you living in California during this time?
Betsy Atkins
Yes. And went out to Silicon Valley. I had been at Unisys, as I said, and I thought, Oh my god. I don't want to end my career in Bluebell. I have to be in Silicon Valley. Why am I in Bluebell anyways? What's wrong with me? Let me go to Silicon Valley.
Alan Fleischmann
It's an amazing journey there. But you also you were there and probably breaking down barriers back and forth the whole time you were there.
Betsy Atkins
Well, I just didn't think of barriers.
Alan Fleischmann
I love your mother, by the way. It says that this is a great lesson in parenting. Your mother actually said, go for it. Don't look back, you have a right to be at the table and you went for it.
Betsy Atkins
And with every defeat, I'd come back home to the kitchen table. And you know, I whine and whimper and cry a few tears. And after about 15 seconds she'd say, Well, that's enough crying, what are you going to do about it? What's next? She grabbed me by the eyebrows and shake me and said—dust me off and push me back in the rain.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. That is amazing. What was your first board experience? I guess at this point, you had a lot of board members. And you were on a board probably when you started your own company.
Betsy Atkins
Exactly. Whenever I founded the company, I wouldn't take the money if I couldn't be on the board. And then as I worked with venture capital companies, I went on their private boards. And then I started to go on other public boards. For example, I went on the board of Loosens and started on my career there. And I started to think about it. You know, when you're a founder and an entrepreneur, you look at the board through this lens of—especially with investor board members who haven't operated anything. I always think the first thing a board should all do is take the Hippocratic Oath of do no harm to the patient. And you experience a lot of extra help and overstep from investor board members, sometimes. So I think that understanding the balance between oversight and help. And by the way, that shifted. That was many years ago. I think boards, mostly investor boards now get that they have to be a resource and helpful, not just finding people to be oriented, looking at it through the lens of their investor limits.
Alan Fleischmann
Before we go deep on the board experiences, and I really want to because I think people have realized, especially this year, how incredibly important boards are. Something that you've known about and, frankly, you’ve built an entire team. We'll get to that a minute because I found your approach to be pretty extraordinary. Your background is CEO because I think part of why you're a great board member, I suspect is because you also understand the lonely job of a CEO. And you understand how the board can be either your greatest adversary or your greatest advocate, and your partner. And you were once CEO of Clear Standards, which develops enterprise-level software, and to the food manufacturer NCI. How did you manage to be successful running these companies and how much of that has played a role in what you do?
Betsy Atkins
I think that when you run and build and operate a company, you experience a lot of challenges and business decisions you have to make on your own. And you have to build a network of people who are thought partners, and it's ideal if they can be your board member. Otherwise, you have to find and build and cultivate that network. But you've got to have someone breadth test the logic of your idea. And I think that it's made me more empathetic. And the board is there to be an asset to be an accelerant and a competitive differentiator, not just backward-looking oversight and corporate hygiene on the committee work. You’re a steward to investors. But to be a good steward, you're really helping the CEO maximize their effectiveness, and a be a thought and strategy partner for the long term.
Alan Fleischmann
And how do you think CEOs should look at their boards because that's a very interesting perspective of the boards. You see yourself as a great partner with the CEO, I guess, there's got to be a two-way street,
Betsy Atkins
You have to find and you have to learn how to do active listening to what they say. And really understand the CEO and their vision of what they want to accomplish. And you have to build the trust. And you can only build that if you invest in a relationship. When you're there to help the CEO and mentor the CEO. And think about what would help that leader be more successful, whether it's forward building the team, getting access to outside resources, through different parts of their strategy, for whether it's organic, or inorganic growth, whether it's staying in one geography or expanding. Whatever are those business issues. And if you put the time in, cultivate the relationship, then you can get to that trusted consigliere role because you really can't add enough value till you built the relationship and cultivated the chemistry.
Alan Fleischmann
If you were the CEO, how would you want them to actually think about balancing a board. Because of what I understand from reading your books, it's not the individual only. It's the collective body that you get to pull together as a CEO, and you're very good about advising, on making sure you have the right variety of leadership on the board. That you get a variety of good advice, counsel, both internally and externally. That's what I learned from Betsy’s books. But I'm just curious, how do you actually go about advising a CEO in their choosing of board members?
Betsy Atkins
Well, first of all, I think it's important that the CEO have a final veto. Depending on how big a public company is or how they've structured things on their board, it's really important that the CEO be able to just say, I don't feel a good connection, and I'm not sure I'm going to learn or get the value here. And I just don't feel great chemistry, they need to be able to not have board members put there. And so first of all, for a CEO, I think making sure that they have got that level of autonomy, and ability to have their voice really listened to on the board is very important. When a board is all built strictly by other board members without the CEO having that ability, I think that that's a very outmoded model and not helpful. Now, of course, you have committees, you want independence on the board, but you need to have that. I secondly think smaller boards are much better where possible. As with anything, if you're making a big decision, you ask three or five people. You don't necessarily ask 16. There's just too much noise. And you really need your board for their qualitative character attributes. You need the board when things are bad. When things are good, the board is cheerleading and supporting and helping. But you really need the board when you step on a landmine and there's something very bad that happens. You restate your finance order, you get an activist, you have a cyber breach, you have a hashtag scandal. You need the board for the bad times. So you got to be sure these are the people you want to be in the foxhole with and that they have the courage and the calmness and some battle scars and pattern recognition. Because when these bad things happen, they are bad. And they are still a board. So you do need some board members who've got that experience because if not, bad things get a lot worse really quickly. So in picking your board, pick the board members you would really want to go to battle with, your sort of lifeboat picks, on their character attributes, as much as their intellect and domain expertise and their pristine resume and their fancy career accomplishments.
Alan Fleischmann
Do you think the best way to get a board member is through an executive search? Or is it through word of mouth? Is it through your own echo system?
Betsy Atkins
I think that you get the best board members when you take the time to build a pool of talent for the future so that you're not waiting till the last minute and you have to do it quickly. So that would say through network, through your associations, I think there's value in having search vetted and have an objective process. But I think you tend to get better outcomes, when the CEO is able to help build the pool with the board. There's an interesting correlation to CEO longevity. And selecting board members, I think is very interesting. After 34 public boards and a bunch of research, there's a direct correlation. Your CEO term will be probably double the average of four or five years if you've selected and had a voice, at least a third of the board. And that you put a third of the board in place in sort of the first two or three years. It directly correlates to your longevity, because they're aligned with your vision, they understand your cycle time, your urgency, your style. When you inherit a board and you haven't had the chance to put your imprint on it, it's not quite that good long term.
Alan Fleischmann
So if you as a new CEO, it probably would be a good idea to actually start to transition the board.
Betsy Atkins
Refresh about 20 to 30% of it in two to three years would be a really good idea.
Alan Fleischmann
It's amazing for a long time, people didn't think about boards as much as they probably should have. And then along the way, the audit committee became a very powerful committee and you needed it. Sarbanes Oxley people started talking about real fiduciary responsibility, although you always had it. People tried to look at the board members as being responsible. That changed, I'm sure the dynamic the last few months during this pandemic, in particular, post-George Floyd when people are talking about good governance, people are looking at the top-down, and the bottom up. How do you get a pipeline of talent into companies. And then actually made sure that the right decisions are being made. And I bet you do feel the same. People are appreciating not only the power of a board, and maybe understanding it for the first time, but also their potential impact in changing companies and frankly, investing in stakeholder capitalism, if you will. You’ve been writing about this, you've been living it, you've been leading it. Do you feel a certain change has happened in 2020 that makes you go recognize what you've been doing for a long time?
Betsy Atkins
I think there's been a significant change and it started in 2019. The Business Roundtable redefined shareholder capitalism as inclusive of stakeholder capitalism. And this is really coming to the forefront where people have thought about the different constituencies. Certainly, of course, your investors. That's who we're stewards for as public and private company directors, but without your employees, your human capital how good is your company, without understanding how you fit into the community and how the mission and vision of the company fits into a framework and where you can share your narrative, you're going to have a hard time recruiting Gen Zero and millennial investors, customers, employees. So I think that's all become more important. And to your point on 2020, and the importance of culture, the board sets what they call the tone at the top, right? Do we follow the rules? Or do we run hot? Do we really comply with regulations? Or are we in the gray zone? That kind of tone at the top. What's the culture? Are we sharp-elbowed? Are we inclusive? Are we diverse in employee base? Are we inclusive of different thoughts and viewpoints? And so the culture or the tone at the top is sort of part of this bigger environmental, social governance framework, which is part of stakeholder capitalism. If stakeholder capitalism is the umbrella sort of concept, you operationalize stakeholder capitalism by putting in place a series of frameworks and programs that are called environmental social governance. We used to call it sustainability, or corporate social responsibility. That's what they call it in England, CSR. But here, it's really come home full force as environmental, social governance.
Alan Fleischmann
And ESG, as you put it up, it kind of is one of the very few things I've ever seen where it was very present not long ago, for many years, and then kind of disappeared. And now coming back, same term, same thought, same ideals, with a bit of a vengeance. It's coming back with a real priority at the board level. So you're setting the tone of ESG, environmental, social governance, right, at the board level?
Betsy Atkins
Absolutely. Well, there's a little fact, and it was such an eye-opener, when I looked it up. If you look at the total worldwide, global assets under management, it's 46 trillion with a T. That's a big number. 25% is already dedicated to ESG investing. So that is going to go from 25% to 50% in just five years. By 2025, half of all assets are going to be dedicated to ESG. And any public company probably has 60% or 70%, or more of their stock held by the big index funds. So Fidelity, Blackstone, T. Rowe, State Street, Vanguard, you name it. And they, in the last two years, of course, have quadrupled the headcount in their governance group dedicated to ESG. So index funds, who own your stock care deeply. And the laggards are sort of the corporations who are waking up saying, What's this ES1? Oh, my goodness, how do I put this in place? What do I have to do? I'm going to get measured on it? What framework, what rating agency? How do I do this? So there's a big scramble now, since you're actually going to get a numeric score, and your big index funds care deeply and passionately about how you have thought about your company's mission and purpose in the parlance and framework of ESG.
Alan Fleischmann
And that's becoming a big conversation at the board level? You're talking about kind of holding your company to the fire saying, we got to do this, we got to do right and take on these issues.
Betsy Atkins
Yes. And all companies have been doing it. So companies had been doing it kind of incrementally. Almost every company had already known about maybe two-thirds or three quarters of American companies had a sustainability report that spoke about that they were good corporate citizens with energy and they didn't pollute. And they were running energy-efficient buildings and careful with water and waste. And so we had that as sustainability. And it's all things companies were doing. They just didn't report on it and capture it in a framework. So all companies have really good HR policies. Everybody has policies of equal pay, safe workplace, wellness, data privacy, ethical supply chain, data, privacy, cyber, oversight. But they weren't really reporting it, necessarily in their proxy. So now there are these frameworks that you can put the information in. And by the way, if you don't do it, and you're a Fortune 500 company, these web crawling algorithms are going to be out and take off ingest all of your public filings that give you a score that will get reported on MSCI. So you're better off to tell the story yourself than let some algorithm tell your story and give you a score. And if you don't score well, the index funds care. And then it's a sort of a Trojan horse for the activists to come after you.
Alan Fleischmann
If you had a choice between being on a public board, which you've done many, and a private board, which you've done many, either pre IPO or maybe not even considering IPO, do you have a preference?
Betsy Atkins
It's all about the CEO in the business, and that there's something big going on. So a perfectly run company where nothing is changing wouldn't be my choice. A company going through transformation, tech enablement, digital transformation, going through a lot of change, even if it's tough change or hypergrowth, that would appeal to me. A complex business, a global business, those kinds of things are the things that that are most interesting. So it could be private or public. So my private board Volvo, we're going through tech-enabling via autonomous drive and infotainment systems and this big digital transformation in the whole automotive industry. So it's fascinating, I love it. Wynn Resorts, we’re going through a big culture shift. I came in after the hashtag me to insist incidents as part of the cleanup crew, and so is a chance to refresh and rebuild what is a great company and look to the culture there. So I like a very differentiated range of corporations. It depends on the CEO, and what's going on.
Alan Fleischmann
Is there a certain number, where you say I can’t be on more than these boards right now? Or does it really depend on what the budget is and how much you're spending and doing?
Betsy Atkins
Well the governance watchdogs, the independent institutional shareholder services, and the index funds, they say that five is the maximum of public boards, I think that I can comfortably do four. I'm on three now. So I will probably add one. On private boards, the key thing is, can you make every single meeting? Can you put the time in? Can you do your committee work? And can you put in the time to really work closely with the CEO and management and be available? And part of how I do that is I take my public board fees and I invest them in my team. I've got a team of four. And I kind of think corporate governance can be done better, this sort of modern, next version of corporate governance, where you're there to kind of help look around the corner and look at future trends. And think about future proofing as well as today's challenges. Because most of the time, boards and companies don't go out of business because somebody did something improper or cooked books, like WorldCom and Enron. They go out of business because they're just not competitive. And they're not vibrant, and they're not contemporary enough. So I I like to kind of bring that lens of entrepreneurial, tech-enabling, looking at some of the future things, and who might be the next generation of interlopers that will come up behind the company, and adding that perspective. And then by having a team, it enables me to really do all of the work that I want. Curate the research and be able to have the capacity to really be helpful where and when you've been invited in and develop that trusted relationship.
Alan Fleischmann
So I get the great pleasure of working with CEOs and leaders all the time and boards, and I had never heard that before you. Someone who actually takes their investment being a board member, and creating your own infrastructure with our sole goal of being a more effective board member. Most people separate the rest of their lives with their board life. And what you're saying is to be a really good board member, you want to be all in. If you're really going to be a partner with the CEO, you got to really be part of it. You're not just waiting around from board meeting to board meeting. It sounds like there's a life between your board meetings when it comes to Betsy and your work. You know that you don't just attend board meetings, you actually are part of the infrastructure of the company in which you serve.
Betsy Atkins
I think that the old model of someone who has retired a decade ago and wants to have one or two public boards to chat about on the fourth hole of golf. Your playbook gets really stale. The business models have so changed. We have marketplace, business models, we have gig economy, we have everything being AI, machine learning, analytics, tech-enabled. The old, standard, traditional models just don't stay. So you have to be constant, in my opinion, to be a good board member, you have to be pretty full time. And you have to be constantly learning. And you need to be working with a big range of resources. So I work, for example, with venture capital and private equity, with futurists, with strategy companies. McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Accenture. And then I work with public companies. And I think, also by mentoring and working with startups, you're able to stay very contemporary. And I just feel that if you're not thinking around the corner—like how am I going to engage with Gen Zero—they're already a pretty big part of the demographic, who's coming into the workforce and the customer, and the investors of the future. So I don't think it's a job anymore, where you can be static and only look back and sit and say, Well, these experiences in the past are still gonna all be relevant.
Alan Fleischmann
Are you in the midst of the transformation now? Are you finding people are open to this transformation as you're talking about how you serve and what you do? Or do you think it's or the early side still.
Betsy Atkins
I’ve met others who have actually invested and built a team. But maybe because I've served on all these private and public boards and seeing what was good, and what could be better. And then I've seen a few real kerfuffles and snafus and friendly fire from the board. I thought there's just a better way. And if I wanted to do it, I wanted to innovate on board governance and come up with something that would be a better model. And it's not done, I'm still working on it. But I think it's getting to be more and more useful.
Alan Fleischmann
You're the CEO of your own company. You invest in things. Do you miss being CEO of a bigger company? Or do you find that the variety of what you get to do is be a board member among many as being better?
Betsy Atkins
I find it, for me, having the variety of working on all different stages in size companies. And I work in all different industries deliberately. Deliberately all my public boards worked in pretty much every vertical industry out there. And my private boards tend to be technology, but not all. I find that really satisfying. When I was a full-time operating CEO, I just sort of disappeared and got swallowed up and all your friends and family like, forget who you are because you you're working all the time. I don't know how to do that balance thing. So this works for me because having been a CEO, I know what overstepping too much help is. And by having all these other things in the portfolio, from investing to working with early-stage to very late-stage and public companies, it works well for me.
Alan Fleischmann
So let's talk about leadership since this shows about leadership, you being one of them. You've certainly seen a variety of different things. Along the journey that you've had thus far. What would you describe as the best qualities of a leader? There have to be certain qualities when you think of a future CEO or current CEO, that you see okay, that that person, she has it, he has it? I'm curious, what do you see as the greatest qualities and for those who are listening who are CEOs and for those who are listening who hope to be a CEO. What would you say is the greatest qualities that you think actually fit well across all or do you think it's not one size fits all?
Betsy Atkins
You know, most CEOs and leaders get really good at one stage in a company. So they might be great at zero to 50 million. Or they might be really great at running a billion-dollar company. Or they might be outstanding at running a global multinational that's 30 billion. But I don't necessarily think that everybody can go from different stages. You develop a particular style and skill in your leadership. So it may be operational growth, or it may be turned around, or it might be hyper-growth. So it's the size of company and the stage of company. And I think that there are different leaders who are extraordinary at different things. So the innovative—there's very few people, if you look at it, who've been able to go the whole journey. A Bill Gates. There just aren't that many people—a Jeff Bezos—who can still be entrepreneurial but run, and delegate and allow a big global company to thrive and grow and continue. The ability to understand what you're good at, and match yourself to the right thing, I think is important to being successful. And then to figure out where you want to grow and develop and being sort of self-aware enough to know what are your talents and what do you have to hire and how do you get—companies break into a third, a third, a third. A third will follow you, a third will be on the fence, and the third will be naysayers. So how do you co-opt and get buy-in from that center third, on where you want to take the company? And how much of it is authenticity and the qualitative listening and engaging kinds of skills? And how much is intellect? And where do you hire people to augment you? And thinking that through and being aware of what you need to make yourself most successful, I think is what builds a great leader and figuring out where you fit and what else you will help build around you as your ecosystem of your top team so that you can be really successful.
Alan Fleischmann
At this point, you must be also a great mentor. Because you can pull from the things you've seen that have worked and haven't worked, and they're probably very few crises you haven't lived through. Have you seen certain CEOs who have just grown into their job? I've seen it. They're CEOs who found their voice and have been profoundly impactful. And along that, I assume the answer to be yes. Have you had a few that are just, they're just worthy to say, this is a great CEO. This is a role model I'd love to share. I'm sure you've got too many to pick, but are there a couple you'd say, this is a great example of a great leader?
Betsy Atkins
I have been really fortunate to work with some great CEOs and it's about continuous growth, actually, and their ability to change as they go along. I think Jean-Pascal Tricoire, who is the CEO of Schneider Electric, is a remarkable CEO. He's taken an old-line, kind of stodgy industrial company, and tech-enabled it, and morphed it using technology and capturing data and sensor technology to drive deeper insights. And he's been a leader in energy efficiency, energy management, and built a really big 30 odd billion very global company. Why he's special is he's able to lead in a five business unit, matrix organization, and get everybody aligned and be nimble at scale and be innovative, while not losing their heritage. I think he's a pretty remarkable CEO. That's hard to do.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah. Other examples, too.
Betsy Atkins
I thought that Peter Leaf is a fantastic CEO. He took Polycom, which was stalled, and did a good turnaround and dealt with an activist and did a very good transition to private and he subsequently got on to do a big turnaround at BMC that he built and took a legacy enterprise software company that was kind of stalled and reinvigorated and repositioned the whole strategy and got it back to growth and sold it and now he's the CEO at McAfee, the security software company that he's just taken public. So I think to do three very different companies. And he's a very talented exec. And he's an executive who could do hyper-scale hyper-growth, not just companies that are legacy slower growth companies that have to be turned around and reinvigorated. And not many people can do it. Turn around, reinvigoration and high growth. And so I think he's very unique that way.
Alan Fleischmann
That's pretty cool. Because I think I that's what makes this show so popular is people like you who come in and can kind of share what are the things that make one be able to lead and find their voice? I guess the next question would be—.
Betsy Atkins
Certainly, Matt Maddox at Wynn has done that. I mean, he came in under the shadow of the founder, Steve Wynn departing and he's come out from under that shadow. Pardon me, I walked on your words a minute ago. But he's done a remarkable job of taking Wynn resorts, which is, of course, in the time of COVID, struggling as is any hospitality company. And he's done a great job stabilizing it, reinvigorating the culture. And now moving to sports betting and online gaming. So he's taking us forward in a terrific way. And he's now, I think, seen as the entire gaming industry thought leader for the work he did through COVID. And the protocols and the advanced work. He's been invited to the White House. His sort of playbook is what the state of Nevada is using. So he's kind of become the spokesman and really is a remarkable leader for how he has forward-built the team and repositioned the company.
Alan Fleischmann
Do you ever pick up the phone and call the stranger CEO or board chair and say you're doing it all wrong and give advice?
Betsy Atkins
I pick up the phone and call the ones and say, hey, you're doing it right. Can you tell me what you did? So I spoke to Hubert Joli, who turned around BestBuy and was its chair and I said, How in the world did you take a stalled retailer that was on its heels and totally change it? So I look to have the opportunity to learn from others all the time. I take the phone calls from people who want to brainstorm a little bit. I think that an unsolicited inbound call from somebody saying I think you're not doing this in an ideal way. I don't think that's probably going to be too successful.
Alan Fleischmann
You know, when I think about the folks who are listening to you, who say, Look, I'm not on any boards. They're saying to themselves, I want to be on one. This sounds really cool. You can have a real impact and have a variety of things in your lives. What would you recommend to someone who says I want to be like Betsy. I want to be able to be on boards. How do I get in there?
Betsy Atkins
Well, I actually wrote a book on it because I got asked, and I was mentoring all these people? And I said, Well, why don’t I write it down? And first of all, I think board work to me, is the best work I've ever done in my career. I get my psychic paycheck filled when I can make a small contribution or have an impact and be useful, whether it's visible or not. That's what really is the most motivating. And to actually get into a boardroom. I think the way you think about it is, as in any new venture you're taking on, you have to be organized and think about it as a business development challenge. What would be the ecosystem that surrounds the boardroom that I might cultivate? So it could be the accounting firms, the law firms, the investment bankers, the public relations firms like yours who consult and guide companies. I would look at private equity and venture capital because they build boards. I look at governance groups, like the National Association of Corporate Directors. So I look at what are all the things in the ecosystem of boards. I would first look at what are you going to bring? Why do they want you? And how can you help them? Never mind that you want to do it? What's in it for the board? That's the first thing you have to be able to answer. How are you going to help them grow their business, be an asset, be a resource? And if you don't have a good answer to how you're going to contribute, sort of irrelevant that it's your aspiration. I mean, the fact that I might want to be an astronaut is sort of, well, that's nice. But why do I think I would be a good astronaut? What do I have that makes me worthy? So I think you have to be able to answer that first. And then I think you'd figure out and plot your way to, perhaps you could start with not for profit boards, private company boards and figure out that ecosystem and as with anything you have, you have to work at it, you have to pursue it.
Alan Fleischmann
The next two questions for you is what's the best piece of advice you've been given? And what is the best piece of advice you often get?
Betsy Atkins
I think the best piece of advice that I've learned that's worked for me, has been to go out of your way to be helpful to other people. And by actively listening and trying to learn from them, and helping people, over time, when you go back and ask for some help, you've built some credibility, or you've forward-deposited some psychic credit that you might be able to then go back and say, could you give me your opinion and your guidance and counsel on how I could go about my aspiration to join a board or whatever. I think that people who look at things as a transaction, not a relationship, don't build long-term relationships that are resilient where you could actually go and ask for help. And I think people genuinely know if you're trying to be helpful. So I think that is very valuable. What piece of advice that I've been given? It's to always try and think of it from the other person's perspective of what is their goal, and what are they trying to accomplish? Because if you can put yourself in the other person's head, and what's important to them, and what would be helpful and useful in their objective, then you can then least begin to be potentially a valuable resource.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s great. I think walking in other people's shoes, understanding where they come from, helping them get to where they want to go, even if you're on the other side of the table. I'm sure you've been on many, many sides of the table, that you're with your allies, and you're negotiating on the other side, is the only way to win. You've had this remarkable journey. Thus far, you've defined more than anyone I know, why board services as a critically important part of good governance, and frankly, beyond even the private sector, but greater societal impact. Is there one thing you haven't done that you want to do? Is there one thing that you say that you'd like to see in your future that you'd like to seize?
Betsy Atkins
Well, I haven't figured out the great next aspiration, I don't think I'm going to run for public office. I think I haven't done a $200-300 billion scale corporation. So that would be interesting to see. And how can you be able to contribute and help a truly top 30 Global multinational? That would be very interesting. I've done boards in five or six different countries and cultures, and in pretty much every different industry, which allowed me to learn quite a bit and see how a tech perspective could be helpful, but I haven't yet done one where it was sort of a $200-300 billion one, so I guess that would be it.
Alan Fleischmann
And then this is the last question I promise. This has been wonderful to have you on the show. I can have you on for another hour. It doesn't have to be a board person or a CEO. Is there one person that you would admire, a hero, someone you admire, that you actually would just want to leave us on a positive note and say, Okay, this is the kind of person that we all should aspire to be a little bit more of?
Betsy Atkins
I have tended to look at admired people who create new categories who change our world. And who can continuously keep reinventing themselves. So in some ways, I'm very intrigued and I admire Jeff Bezos. That he's been able to take what was an electronic book company and build it into an e-commerce giant, a cloud company, an analytics company. And then he continues to be able to innovate at a global scale. I think that that is really remarkable and that his company hasn't calcified and become bureaucratic. And that the best idea still wins. It's a pure meritocracy. And where ideation is prized and taking risks is encouraged. So I'm very impressed. And I guess if I was going to pick somebody that has changed our world, that would be somebody who would come top of mind.
Alan Fleischmann
I agree. Along the way, many people have counted him out. But he says don't count me out. And tomorrow is day one, which is pretty powerful. Betsy, this has been such a pleasure. You're listening to Leadership Matters on Sirius XM. I'm your host, Alan Fleishmann. And we've just spent the last hour with someone quite extraordinary, who is leading a movement and making board service transformational, and she herself has served in so many boards that bring so many perspectives. It's Betsy Atkins. I would recommend you to get her books, not just her book, if you're interested in serving on boards, if you're a CEO and you're interested in having great board members, hear from Betsy, read her book, you'll get a lot of great insight. The future is better and brighter because of you, Betsy, and we're just so grateful for all your service and I look forward to spending more time with you here on the show and elsewhere.
Betsy Atkins
Thank you, Alan, and it's been great to be with you.
