The Exchanges

Q I always find CEO ship quite a lonely prospect in many ways. Do you have people to talk to you, whether it be a CEO coach, whether it be mentors, how do you think about that?

A I've had a bunch of them. One that was very valuable to me was a gentleman by the name of Matthew Key. Hopefully he's listening. Matthew was the head of, of O to UK and then O to Europe and then Telfonica. And I got introduced to Matthew when I took over my role leading our IP products group a number of years ago. It was amazing in just spending time with Matthew. He helped me with that. I just intuitively didn't understand or get. So for example, when you're leading 5000 people, there is no way you'll ever be able to talk to someone individually. You'll be able to reach every single person. So how do you reach out to people in an indirect way? And he gave me so many anecdotes in terms of When you do all hands, when you do town halls, to reach out and connect people, and to be sure that you are able to do that in such a way that not only you get your message out, but they can help you amplify that message. That was just an amazing learning to me.

AI assessment note: “I've had a bunch of them. One that was very valuable to me was”

Q What's the hardest element of your role with ARM today?

A People really, really watch what I say. People really, really watch what I do, and people read a lot into my words, and people will come back and say, I did that because Renee asked me to. And there's a part of me that thinks, why don't you just not do it if it wasn't a good idea? But then I think back, well, I'm the CEO, and if I'm going to ask somebody to do something, when I was working for a CEO and the CEO asked me to do something, I pretty much did it. I think the hardest thing that I had to adapt to is just what I say, what I do really impacts a lot of people. The job itself is massively complex, whether it's the IPO, whether it's customers, whether it's roadmap, but those are all things that I've been trained to do. The new part is everybody's watching you. Every single person watching you in terms of when you get on a zoom call and you're kind of frowning, is it because something's wrong with project? Is it, is the IPO delayed? No, actually it's because the Roku box that I tried to boot up didn't work. That's why I'm frowning. So it's things like that.

AI assessment note: “the hardest thing that I had to adapt to is just what I say”

Q I always find CEO ship quite a lonely prospect in many ways. Do you have people to talk to you, whether it be a CEO coach, whether it be mentors, how do you think about that?

A I've had a bunch of them. One that was very valuable to me was a gentleman by the name of Matthew Key. Hopefully he's listening. Matthew was the head of, of O to UK and then O to Europe and then Telfonica. And I got introduced to Matthew when I took over my role leading our IP products group a number of years ago. It was amazing in just spending time with Matthew. He helped me with that. I just intuitively didn't understand or get. So for example, when you're leading 5000 people, there is no way you'll ever be able to talk to someone individually. You'll be able to reach every single person. So how do you reach out to people in an indirect way? And he gave me so many anecdotes in terms of When you do all hands, when you do town halls, to reach out and connect people, and to be sure that you are able to do that in such a way that not only you get your message out, but they can help you amplify that message. That was just an amazing learning to me.

AI assessment note: “I've had a bunch of them. One that was very valuable to me was”

Q What's the hardest element of your role with ARM today?

A People really, really watch what I say. People really, really watch what I do, and people read a lot into my words, and people will come back and say, I did that because Renee asked me to. And there's a part of me that thinks, why don't you just not do it if it wasn't a good idea? But then I think back, well, I'm the CEO, and if I'm going to ask somebody to do something, when I was working for a CEO and the CEO asked me to do something, I pretty much did it. I think the hardest thing that I had to adapt to is just what I say, what I do really impacts a lot of people. The job itself is massively complex, whether it's the IPO, whether it's customers, whether it's roadmap, but those are all things that I've been trained to do. The new part is everybody's watching you. Every single person watching you in terms of when you get on a zoom call and you're kind of frowning, is it because something's wrong with project? Is it, is the IPO delayed? No, actually it's because the Roku box that I tried to boot up didn't work. That's why I'm frowning. So it's things like that.

AI assessment note: “I think the hardest thing that I had to adapt to is just what I say”

Q If you learn one thing from listening to the show, as you kindly said you did beforehand, it That I have a schedule, and then I ignore it when I find some great pearls of wisdom. You mentioned the decision-making speed there. How would you reflect on your own decision-making style today with Arm, and has it changed over time in your progression as a leader?

A Yeah, it's gotten better. I think I was slower in making decisions earlier in my career. I was more careful to make sure I had all the information as we talked about, and I think being with NVIDIA, I Really, really helped me. And then as I got into arm, I tried to influence the organization with that a bit in terms of let's be a bit bolder. Let's move a bit faster. Let's increase the pace of innovation. If we make mistakes, that's okay. In fact, the only way you genuinely learn is by failing. You learn far more from your failures than you do from your successes. If you don't have a lot of failures, it means you probably not push the envelope enough. And there's always room for improvement. I view myself as a constant work in progress, even though I'm in the later years of my career, but I think you always learn. I think that is part of the continually evolving piece of me is to continue to evolve in terms of moving at pace, being bold with your decisions, and be ambitious.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it's gotten better. I think I was slower in making decisions earlier in my career.”

Q If you learn one thing from listening to the show, as you kindly said you did beforehand, it That I have a schedule, and then I ignore it when I find some great pearls of wisdom. You mentioned the decision-making speed there. How would you reflect on your own decision-making style today with Arm, and has it changed over time in your progression as a leader?

A Yeah, it's gotten better. I think I was slower in making decisions earlier in my career. I was more careful to make sure I had all the information as we talked about, and I think being with NVIDIA, I Really, really helped me. And then as I got into arm, I tried to influence the organization with that a bit in terms of let's be a bit bolder. Let's move a bit faster. Let's increase the pace of innovation. If we make mistakes, that's okay. In fact, the only way you genuinely learn is by failing. You learn far more from your failures than you do from your successes. If you don't have a lot of failures, it means you probably not push the envelope enough. And there's always room for improvement. I view myself as a constant work in progress, even though I'm in the later years of my career, but I think you always learn. I think that is part of the continually evolving piece of me is to continue to evolve in terms of moving at pace, being bold with your decisions, and be ambitious.

AI assessment note: “I think I was slower in making decisions earlier in my career.”

Q What do you know now that you wish you'd known five months ago when you started as CEO?

A I wish I had an appreciation for how the speed the job was going to accelerate so much. All these things that kind of get thrown at you in a CEO role, suddenly everything kind of goes to you that didn't go before, and Simon and I, Simon was my predecessor, and we talked a lot about it, and I didn't have an appreciation for just, I used a baseball vernacular, how many fastballs would come at you. I wish I knew that a little bit more When I started, would it have changed anything at this point in time? Probably not, but it would have been nice to know that, hey, you're going up to level nine in the video game, and you better up your game here because it's moving a lot faster now.

AI assessment note: “I wish I had an appreciation for how the speed the job was going to accelerate”

Q Okay, question. How do you create that sense of urgency and disruption within your teams when it's a very strong existing business? In large companies, things can get very comfortable. There isn't 12 months of runway like a Series A or Series B company, and you've got to go, go, go. How do you create a disruptive culture within a comfortable environment?

A It's a great, great question, but If I think about the things that I've learned that are really important as a leader is around alignment and ensuring that everyone understands what the goals are, understands what's important relative to the objectives, and understands what it is we're trying to go off and do. That's table stakes, and this I've learned a little bit even more so in my five months as a CEO. I'm always learning, and I should have kind of known this before I became a CEO. People really listen to what the CEO says. People really want to understand what's on his or her mind. They really want to understand what's important. So, If the CEO is having conversations often about the future, often about what can disrupt us, often about what's the next big trend that we need to know about, often about where is the industry going to five to eight years, people start to align with, gosh, if he or she really cares about this and I want to be able to participate in the conversation, I need to start thinking about that. And I think it starts again in the executive room about what are the conversations that you're having? Where do you spend your time? One of the other things I always like to believe in is strategy is not what you write down. Strategy is what you do, your behaviors. If you're in a room constantly with your leadership team talking about the current quarter or talkin…

AI assessment note: “If the CEO is having conversations often about the future, often about what can disrupt us”

Q the team need to know that. How do you think about the balance within teams of it's okay to fail? It's our job to try things and go big without also creating a culture of acceptability of failure where, oh, it's fine. We failed. It's just another, it's just another fail. How do you think about the balance between it's okay, but not creating a culture of acceptance around it?

A You really have to be sure that you understand the high level deltas between failure and then accountability, because if you Can't hold people accountable for their outputs and being able to really measure where they're making progress. That is a real problem because back to repeated failures, if you don't have accountability in terms of, well, who was responsible for that action? Who is accountable for that result? If you don't have that, you are going to have repeated failures because it's not going to be obvious in terms of who actually owned it, who actually felt that, that if they didn't deliver, it was, it was on them. And I think that's a really, really important balance to strike. I'm okay. With teams trying something and failing. What I'm less okay with is the project failed. Well, why did it fail? Well, no one kind of really knew whose job it was to take something over the line. That's a problem. So you have to be really, really clear on accountability.

AI assessment note: “understand the high level deltas between failure and then accountability”

Q What do you know now that you wish you'd known five months ago when you started as CEO?

A I wish I had an appreciation for how the speed the job was going to accelerate so much. All these things that kind of get thrown at you in a CEO role, suddenly everything kind of goes to you that didn't go before, and Simon and I, Simon was my predecessor, and we talked a lot about it, and I didn't have an appreciation for just, I used a baseball vernacular, how many fastballs would come at you. I wish I knew that a little bit more When I started, would it have changed anything at this point in time? Probably not, but it would have been nice to know that, hey, you're going up to level nine in the video game, and you better up your game here because it's moving a lot faster now.

AI assessment note: “I wish I had an appreciation for how the speed the job was going to accelerate”

Q Okay, question. How do you create that sense of urgency and disruption within your teams when it's a very strong existing business? In large companies, things can get very comfortable. There isn't 12 months of runway like a Series A or Series B company, and you've got to go, go, go. How do you create a disruptive culture within a comfortable environment?

A It's a great, great question, but If I think about the things that I've learned that are really important as a leader is around alignment and ensuring that everyone understands what the goals are, understands what's important relative to the objectives, and understands what it is we're trying to go off and do. That's table stakes, and this I've learned a little bit even more so in my five months as a CEO. I'm always learning, and I should have kind of known this before I became a CEO. People really listen to what the CEO says. People really want to understand what's on his or her mind. They really want to understand what's important. So, If the CEO is having conversations often about the future, often about what can disrupt us, often about what's the next big trend that we need to know about, often about where is the industry going to five to eight years, people start to align with, gosh, if he or she really cares about this and I want to be able to participate in the conversation, I need to start thinking about that. And I think it starts again in the executive room about what are the conversations that you're having? Where do you spend your time? One of the other things I always like to believe in is strategy is not what you write down. Strategy is what you do, your behaviors. If you're in a room constantly with your leadership team talking about the current quarter or talkin…

AI assessment note: “If the CEO is having conversations often about what can disrupt us”

Q There we go. My references don't fail me. We look at you today, and we see the seasoned CEO. We see the seasoned leader. There's always insecurities and vulnerabilities within every feeder. When you think about yours today, are there any that stand out to you that you think about often?

A I think as everyone kind of goes through their career, if they're high achievers, there's this always balance of what drives you is what drives you is the success, or is what drives you is the fear of failing. And I think there's always a mix of that to some extent, and I think I would fall into that camp. I think I would always view myself as a high achiever, wanting to be successful and wanting to win, but always having this Insecurity as I went through my career, but what if I fail? And what if this doesn't go right? And what if the project doesn't ship? And I think what happens is as you get older and as you get more experience, you realize a couple of things. First off, everyone fails. Everyone who has been extremely successful, depending on how you measure success, have had some train wrecks in their career. For example, we were talking earlier about Tony Fidel's book. Tony was very open about some of the fantastic successes he's had, which are brilliant. And some of the mulligans. Arm is owned by SoftBank. So, Masayoshi-san, who's, I think, in the top 50 most wealthy people in the world, in the year 2000, he was the wealthiest man in the world, I think, for, he likes the joke, for about 20 nanoseconds when the SoftBank stock was higher than Microsoft. Somewhere in that period, he lost 90% of his net worth and has since recovered it all. So, what does all that mean? I've …

AI assessment note: “always having this Insecurity as I went through my career, but what if I fail?”

Q asking the easy questions. How do you think about the balance between committing resources to those projects, to those very futuristic, disruptive ideas, but then also honoring the core business, which Wall Street loves and is the cash generative business. How do you think about the balance between maintaining the core revenue generating business and optimizing that, but also investing in disruption in the future? Because it is a balance.

A It is, yeah. And if I was thinking about the one biggest change about the previous roles I've had to now the CEO role is that you are faced with that balance question maybe 15 times a day in terms of what gets rolled at you, whether it's an operational issue in terms of something that's gone wrong inside a facility versus The strategic discussion with the customer about five years, your face are those pivots and choices every minute, and they come at you really fast in the CEO role. You're always having to kind of navigate through that video game, if you will. But for me, I think the North star is thinking about the long game. If you're really focused on looking past the horizon and understanding that on the margin, that is really where I add the greatest value to what the company needs to do. I try to remind myself that every day. We've got lots of great people in the company. We've got all kinds of people who are going to work with the internet being down today in our office, and we've got all kinds of people that are going to worry about what that critical customer call takes place and I need to be part of. But the one thing that I can do and should do that the others cannot is looking over that horizon. And if at the end of the week, I feel like I've spent all my time on stuff that's in the near term, I try to give myself a pinch and say, that's not where you add the greate…

AI assessment note: “for me, I think the North star is thinking about the long game.”

Q There we go. My references don't fail me. We look at you today, and we see the seasoned CEO. We see the seasoned leader. There's always insecurities and vulnerabilities within every feeder. When you think about yours today, are there any that stand out to you that you think about often?

A I think as everyone kind of goes through their career, if they're high achievers, there's this always balance of what drives you is what drives you is the success, or is what drives you is the fear of failing. And I think there's always a mix of that to some extent, and I think I would fall into that camp. I think I would always view myself as a high achiever, wanting to be successful and wanting to win, but always having this Insecurity as I went through my career, but what if I fail? And what if this doesn't go right? And what if the project doesn't ship? And I think what happens is as you get older and as you get more experience, you realize a couple of things. First off, everyone fails. Everyone who has been extremely successful, depending on how you measure success, have had some train wrecks in their career. For example, we were talking earlier about Tony Fidel's book. Tony was very open about some of the fantastic successes he's had, which are brilliant. And some of the mulligans. Arm is owned by SoftBank. So, Masayoshi-san, who's, I think, in the top 50 most wealthy people in the world, in the year 2000, he was the wealthiest man in the world, I think, for, he likes the joke, for about 20 nanoseconds when the SoftBank stock was higher than Microsoft. Somewhere in that period, he lost 90% of his net worth and has since recovered it all. So, what does all that mean? I've …

AI assessment note: “always having this Insecurity as I went through my career, but what if I fail?”

Q the team need to know that. How do you think about the balance within teams of it's okay to fail? It's our job to try things and go big without also creating a culture of acceptability of failure where, oh, it's fine. We failed. It's just another, it's just another fail. How do you think about the balance between it's okay, but not creating a culture of acceptance around it?

A You really have to be sure that you understand the high level deltas between failure and then accountability, because if you Can't hold people accountable for their outputs and being able to really measure where they're making progress. That is a real problem because back to repeated failures, if you don't have accountability in terms of, well, who was responsible for that action? Who is accountable for that result? If you don't have that, you are going to have repeated failures because it's not going to be obvious in terms of who actually owned it, who actually felt that, that if they didn't deliver, it was, it was on them. And I think that's a really, really important balance to strike. I'm okay. With teams trying something and failing. What I'm less okay with is the project failed. Well, why did it fail? Well, no one kind of really knew whose job it was to take something over the line. That's a problem. So you have to be really, really clear on accountability.

AI assessment note: “you have to be really, really clear on accountability.”

Q Speaking of adding value to the team, we've mentioned resiliency, we've mentioned North Stars. I think often like about high performance in business, and it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. When I say the words high performance in business to you, what does high performance mean to you?

A It's all about outputs. I am very much a measuring the output as far as worrying about exactly how many people are working on it versus how many hours spent, for example. Just to back away from hybrid working versus working at home versus everyone in the office. Our policy is it's all about outputs. It's really not about I need you in the office Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, or we're going to be hybrid. It's really all about the output, which means high performance is a bit adaptable. And particularly in this world today where remote working has been put thrown upon us in a way that we never planned for, but now is the new reality on some level. I think it's about measuring outputs. And I think high performance teams are all about outputs. Inside the team, I'm a huge, huge believer in diversity of thought, diversity of opinion, diversity of skills, and diversity of people to get the best output. That is one thing that I think ultimately high performance teams have as a common characteristic. They have a diverse set of individuals and thoughts. So to me, it's outputs and diversity.

AI assessment note: “So to me, it's outputs and diversity.”

Q Not at all. As I said, I was so excited for this, but I want to start with a little bit of context. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of tech first, but come to be CEO at the incredible institution that is on today?

A I had a bit of a wandering path in terms of becoming the CEO. I get asked by a lot of our young graduates and such who are starting out in their careers who want to know, Josh, when you were starting out in your career, was the CEO of a major tech company your goal? I can surely say most certainly not, but I was a very curious kid. I would say it that way. And my parents were both had advanced degrees. My mom was a Romance Languages PhD in Portuguese Spanish, French, Latin, and my dad was a research scientist, so books and technology were kind of always around the house, and I remember my dad bringing home a, gosh, this is the middle, late-nineteen-seventies, what looked like an old typewriter, but it had two suction cups on the edge of it, and what it was, was a terminal that could plug into a phone, which back in the day was sitting on the wall. You would take the receiver off, you'd put in the two suction cups, you would Dial a number, and it would connect you into the Xerox mainframe, and I got introduced into computers that way, and I was so fascinated by the fact that I could type something in, and something of regional intelligence would get spat back at me off of the Xerox mainframe, so I wandered into computers that way, which then kind of led me to a math and science proclivity in high school. It was kind of my fascination with technology and curiosity that got me sta…

AI assessment note: “I had a bit of a wandering path in terms of becoming the CEO.”

Q asking the easy questions. How do you think about the balance between committing resources to those projects, to those very futuristic, disruptive ideas, but then also honoring the core business, which Wall Street loves and is the cash generative business. How do you think about the balance between maintaining the core revenue generating business and optimizing that, but also investing in disruption in the future? Because it is a balance.

A It is, yeah. And if I was thinking about the one biggest change about the previous roles I've had to now the CEO role is that you are faced with that balance question maybe 15 times a day in terms of what gets rolled at you, whether it's an operational issue in terms of something that's gone wrong inside a facility versus The strategic discussion with the customer about five years, your face are those pivots and choices every minute, and they come at you really fast in the CEO role. You're always having to kind of navigate through that video game, if you will. But for me, I think the North star is thinking about the long game. If you're really focused on looking past the horizon and understanding that on the margin, that is really where I add the greatest value to what the company needs to do. I try to remind myself that every day. We've got lots of great people in the company. We've got all kinds of people who are going to work with the internet being down today in our office, and we've got all kinds of people that are going to worry about what that critical customer call takes place and I need to be part of. But the one thing that I can do and should do that the others cannot is looking over that horizon. And if at the end of the week, I feel like I've spent all my time on stuff that's in the near term, I try to give myself a pinch and say, that's not where you add the greate…

AI assessment note: “for me, I think the North star is thinking about the long game.”

Q Um, ok, René, final one for you. What do the next five years hold for you and for Arm? If we sit here in twenty-twenty-seven, my word, You'll still be a spring chicken. I would have aged, but where will we be?

A Back to the dialogue we were having earlier about looking around corners and looking around in terms of what the future brings. I think we are entering a golden era for ARM, and I think the pandemic accelerated this a little bit, but the digitization of everything has really fostered immense opportunity, whether it's around phones, PCs, the cloud, Autonomous vehicles. And I think when you layer onto that, everything going on with sustainability and climate change, and the things that Arm is really good at, which is around energy efficiency and ecosystem, we have an unbelievable amount of opportunity. So five years from now, and there's been a lot of articles about Arm being the most important technology company you've never heard of. I hope five years from now, a lot more people have heard of us, but I do think we're going to be in some very, very important places. And I think the world is setting up for that in terms of everything that's going on. I think the next five to 10 years are going to be just amazing.

AI assessment note: “five years from now... I think we're going to be in some very, very important places.”

Q said about kind of narrow the focus and increase the quality. Obviously Frank from Snowflake. I did want to talk to you about prioritization because especially when you, you'll see of Arm, there are so many different Avenues and routes you can go down. How do you think about your prioritization framework for deciding the one to two decisions that you do decide to prioritize? What does that look like?

A It's a very emotive topic inside our company. One of the balances that you always want to strike is priority and also inclusion. You want to be sure that you're not listing a set of goals and objectives, and then the team looks at it and says, well, My output is not listed there, so therefore my job is not meaningful. So there's always that balance to strike. But I am a very big believer in setting out a very small number of priorities that to me are a bit like air and water. That if we don't do these things well, the other stuff really doesn't matter. And I've done a few of those inside of ARM. Full disclosure, they've been a bit controversial. It's trying to strike the balance between being very clear on what is air and water and What is not isn't going to be seen by the entire population at times as being inclusive. It's not intended to be that way. And that's sort of the key point. What it is intended to do is in an area where the team is trying to make a call in terms of what's important. And most importantly, I'm not in the room to help them with that guidance. They know which way is South and which way is West and which way is East and which way is North. And I think that's incumbent for any CEO. I think it is really, really incumbent to be very, very clear with the priorities. And there may be times where, as you list them, all 5000 people, or 10,000 people, or 50,000 p…

AI assessment note: “setting out a very small number of priorities that to me are a bit like air and water”

Q I spoke to, obviously, some of your teammates before, and they mentioned that you're an execution machine, which I would always like to be described as, so I think you should take that as a great compliment. My question to you is, when thinking about velocity of execution, how do you think about not losing quality while maintaining speed?

A I think, again, it comes down to priority and clarity around the number of priorities. Because if you've got too many priorities, as a result, you can't move fast. And that kind of goes back to, if there's only a small number of things that need to get done, i.e. air and water, That helps with speed, and that's why I am very, very big on a smaller set of must-haves, because must-haves happen with speed. If everything's important, then nothing is important, and if nothing is important, nothing gets done at pace. So you really have to reflect to the team, here are the non-negotiables. We have to do these, and if we don't do these, those are table stakes, and it's interesting you got that feedback from talking to folks. I'm super big on that.

AI assessment note: “it comes down to priority and clarity around the number of priorities.”

Q Not at all. As I said, I was so excited for this, but I want to start with a little bit of context. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of tech first, but come to be CEO at the incredible institution that is on today?

A I had a bit of a wandering path in terms of becoming the CEO. I get asked by a lot of our young graduates and such who are starting out in their careers who want to know, Josh, when you were starting out in your career, was the CEO of a major tech company your goal? I can surely say most certainly not, but I was a very curious kid. I would say it that way. And my parents were both had advanced degrees. My mom was a Romance Languages PhD in Portuguese Spanish, French, Latin, and my dad was a research scientist, so books and technology were kind of always around the house, and I remember my dad bringing home a, gosh, this is the middle, late-nineteen-seventies, what looked like an old typewriter, but it had two suction cups on the edge of it, and what it was, was a terminal that could plug into a phone, which back in the day was sitting on the wall. You would take the receiver off, you'd put in the two suction cups, you would Dial a number, and it would connect you into the Xerox mainframe, and I got introduced into computers that way, and I was so fascinated by the fact that I could type something in, and something of regional intelligence would get spat back at me off of the Xerox mainframe, so I wandered into computers that way, which then kind of led me to a math and science proclivity in high school. It was kind of my fascination with technology and curiosity that got me sta…

AI assessment note: “I had a bit of a wandering path in terms of becoming the CEO.”

Q I'm so enjoying this. What are the biggest Reasons why companies lose their agility, their nimbleness. If you're fearful of characteristics or traits developing, what are those characteristics or traits that other incumbents can develop, which makes them lose that agility?

A It's really interesting when I look at kind of how I grew up, and this is the class, what shapes you, and what are the learnings that you get? I grew up in Rochester, New York, and Rochester, New York in the Tons of money on photocopiers. And then the biggest haymaker in Rochester, New York back then was Eastman Kodak company. Back in the day, Eastman Kodak was the largest employer in Rochester, New York. They probably employed a 100,000 people. What people did back then is believe it or not, they would buy a, they had a camera. You would buy boxed film at the drug store. You would take 12 exposures, 24 exposures. And believe it or not, back in the day, you put that film into an envelope and you sent it to be processed. It was processed in Rochester, New York. And they had huge plants, and Kodak was an icon in terms of a brand, and they were making hay in terms of profits associated with film, etc. We all know what happened, right? So what does all this mean? Lesson learned. I saw this happen in real time. I saw Kodak shut plants. I saw them lay off people. I saw a shrinking of Rochester, New York as a result of that, and I would not go so far to say that it deeply scarred me, or I have emotional wounds from that, but I watched it happen. And I saw it and I said, yeah, this was kind of Captain Obvious. And by the way, in defense of the leaders at Kodak and Xerox at the time, th…

AI assessment note: “How do you disrupt yourself relative to digital photography versus classic photography?”

Q I do want to ask one final one for a quick fire. People often say that it never gets easier over time. I think, personally, that's bullshit. I would love to hear, in terms of CEO-ship, what gets easier over time, and what gets harder over time?

A So, I consider myself to be always in a learning mode. I was talking to our CHRO, Kirstie Gill, and she knew I was kind of doing this session. And one of the things I always get asked about a lot is, what's your leadership style? And I was thinking to myself, I can tell people what I think it is, but it's probably more important for other people to describe what it is as opposed to me. So one of the things I asked her was, well, how you describe it? And we got into a conversation. One thing she said was, you take feedback really, really well, and not all CEOs do. So to your point of your question about what gets easier with guitar, I think I'm a constant work in progress. I think the CEO job is all about constantly evolving, learning, and adapting. Particularly in the tech space, because the world is moving so fast that if you're not adaptable, I don't know how you can actually survive and be successful long-term.

AI assessment note: “So to your point of your question about what gets easier... I'm a constant work in progress.”

Q I do want to ask one final one for a quick fire. People often say that it never gets easier over time. I think, personally, that's bullshit. I would love to hear, in terms of CEO-ship, what gets easier over time, and what gets harder over time?

A So, I consider myself to be always in a learning mode. I was talking to our CHRO, Kirstie Gill, and she knew I was kind of doing this session. And one of the things I always get asked about a lot is, what's your leadership style? And I was thinking to myself, I can tell people what I think it is, but it's probably more important for other people to describe what it is as opposed to me. So one of the things I asked her was, well, how you describe it? And we got into a conversation. One thing she said was, you take feedback really, really well, and not all CEOs do. So to your point of your question about what gets easier with guitar, I think I'm a constant work in progress. I think the CEO job is all about constantly evolving, learning, and adapting. Particularly in the tech space, because the world is moving so fast that if you're not adaptable, I don't know how you can actually survive and be successful long-term.

AI assessment note: “to your point of your question about what gets easier with guitar, I think I'm a constant work in progress”