The Exchanges

Q And does that circle back into the kind of the stories that we tell ourselves? It's like this negative feedback loop.

A There's stories that we tell other people about ourselves, you know, our resumes, and there's stories that other people tell about us, like a eulogy or your performance evaluation. And then there's the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. And what happens is that we typically see them as either or stories. Either I'm really competent, they're self-affirming stories, or they are what we call self-doubting stories, self-doubting narratives. Now, what we've observed is that for high need for achievement personalities, they spend far more time focused on their self-doubting narratives, and we actually ask the students, and I model it because I want them to To know what it feels like, and how I actually get nervous doing it, so I will, I'll be in front of 80 students. And I will tell them my self-affirming story. The story that, that your mother would tell her friends about you. And I, I lay it on, youngest tenured professor, da da da da. I can go, and I go on and on and on and on. And then we have, then I have, or I tell the students my self-doubting story. You know, failed law school, entrance exam, and I go right down the line, and at the very last thing I say in my self-doubting story is, and here I am at Harvard Business School, and I still feel like a failure, because my goal was to be a university president, and I'm not going to make it. So the students write their…

AI assessment note: “And then there's the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves.”

Q Joe, how did you decide when it was time to leave Morgan Stanley?

A I tried to capture, I think, in one of these books, but I was sitting on a bench in Grand Central Station, and I didn't want to get on the train to go home. And I never wanted to go back to work. And I, I knew it was time to go when I started to tell John Mack what he wanted to hear as opposed to what was in my heart and I knew he needed to hear. And I think I wanted so much to impress him. And we had knocked down drag outs yelling at each other. I mean, it was a very, talk about intense relationship. Just, we loved each other, still do. But I started saying to myself, you know, I don't want to do any more battle, and so I'm just going to tell him things that I think he wants to hear, and that's when I felt like I wasn't worth anything anymore, and so I haven't told that story, I think, anywhere, but I think that there's a lecture in it around when it's time to leave.

AI assessment note: “I knew it was time to go when I started to tell John Mack”

Q And how did you take that as a path? I have in my head now, we have Tom DeLonge, we have Tony Robbins, we have my father, the psychiatrist. There are so many different ways you could take that interest. How did you take the interest into an academic study and then go from there?

A I think after my Bachelor's degree in English. I continued to feel like, well, I don't know enough to, to leave here, and, and I love academic institutions, and I remember as a kid being on my bicycle in Portland, Oregon, and riding around, looking at the different schools, and I was just enamored with it, and so I felt comfortable being in a university, and then I actually had a professor A professor named Stephen Covey that has passed on now. We had a conversation. He says, you need to go into organizational behavior, and I took the law exam, entrance exam, and, ah, it didn't do well, and it broke my heart, and felt like a total failure at 23. So I decided to go into this because I was impressed with how he could, in some ways, capture an audience. And so then I went into organizational behavior, became his teaching assistant for two years, and then I said, well, I know some of this, some of the theory around how organizations work. I'm going to go in for more, more study. So I went to a combined PhD program at Purdue where I could study organizational behavior and also family systems and see the interaction, intersection with that. So I remember getting in my Uh, Camille and I had, oh, we had been married five years, and we had a 65 Chevy convertible, and we headed from Utah to West Lafayette, Indiana, and then from there, a postdoc at MIT, and then back to the academic rout…

AI assessment note: “I went to a combined PhD program at Purdue where I could study organizational behavior”

Q So did you From an early age have this deep interest in people?

A I was the fourth of six children, and while at the time I thought I had an ideal family, and I'm finding myself self-editing right now about how far to go into this, but I will just say that I felt like it was my responsibility to figure out all the family members and make everything great, and so I was An observer of systems and of relationships, and I wouldn't have used the word when I was eight or nine about symmetry in relationships or power dynamics, but I think that I kind of made it my goal that if I could somehow help small systems, whether it was a dyad or other people or larger organizations, simply to make their lives And not just meaningful, but, but make it so that they're getting traction in ways that are self-satisfying for them.

AI assessment note: “I felt like it was my responsibility to figure out all the family members”

Q That's an interesting story you're telling yourself, right?

A Yeah, it's an interesting story, because, because the reason I've studied these high need for, for achievement personalities is because I am one. And I must say, I'd recommend anybody listening to this To look up the research on Bob Keegan, and I think Bob Keegan at the School of Education here has done the best work on adult development, and he, I wish I had known his work when I was on Wall Street, because he says there are certain adults that are stuck in what he calls an imperial phase. An imperial phase is, or imperial stage, is when you only form relationships based on whether you think You can get something out of them. And everything is instrumental. Everything is as, well, this person could help me. I'm not going to sit over at that place with those people because they're not players. I'm going to want to sit here. And then he says, the second stage is a little better, but also problematic. And that is as you get up in the morning and you say to yourself, you don't really say to yourself, what do I have to do today to convince a lot of people that I've really got my act together? And so, you spend the whole day selling. And the problem with that is, is that you can convince a hundred people, and you may not convince two that think, I don't buy that, or I don't think he's that good. And what we know is that we obsess over the two. We discount all the hundred, and we dis…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it's an interesting story, because, because the reason I've studied these”

Q And what you've done or, or what you're doing. They're still in the world. You're constantly. Trying to create an image. You're trying to grow in different ways. Do people get to a point in time where they just are comfortable with who they are? Or is this always this tension between how I'm trying to achieve something and therefore I need to present a certain type of an image?

A I think that the people that I've, I'm attracted to, and by the way, when I walked on a trading floor at Morgan Stanley, I said to myself, I've come home. I said, this felt like home. Felt like family. However, what I do know is that I believe our need to cross things off our list is an addiction. I have a brother who his whole life has dealt with addictions, and he tells me, he says, Tom, your addiction to achieve is not much different than mine with drugs. There's not a whole lot of difference. And he says, so this is what I'm suggesting. Is that I don't believe I'm ever gonna get to the stage where I woke, when I wake up in the morning and go, you know what, I just feel, I feel good about myself just because I'm Tom. I think every day I'm gonna have to manage the dilemma of achieving and feeling good about myself. In my, in some ways, I almost feel like they are irresolvable, but it's, it's the process of managing these tensions simultaneously. And that to me, that is a daily experience. This is not something, this is not a problem to be solved.

AI assessment note: “I don't believe I'm ever gonna get to the stage where I”

Q And is it, can they not do it because they were never, they were never trained to do it?

A I think that there's a psychological makeup a bit. I don't think that they ever believed that it was important for them to have necessarily honest conversations, that they could just do their work, they could be distracted, and if they were the smartest person in the room, Then that's all that counts. I don't think that they wanted to push it. I think they wanted to basically keep their beliefs and, ah, believe that people have joined, ah, Wall Street because of the money. But I, I don't know a lot of my grad, a lot of the graduates here who are in, for example, asset management or who are in private equity who talk about having a rich and fulfilled life. There are some private equity firms, and I've known hundreds of partners, and all of them leave feeling hollow with truckloads of money. Truckloads.

AI assessment note: “I think that there's a psychological makeup a bit.”

Q again, high need for achievement, which is a fascinating term, a high need for achievement individual can fall into these traps where they don't have the courage to make changes because they don't want to look bad and all the implications of, of looking bad. So how does someone in that situation get themselves into that position, and then what do they do to work them, work their way out?

A On the first day that MBAs show up here, the cohort will be around 900 students, and the dean has asked me on a number of occasions to get up and give some words of wisdom, and one of the, one year, I held up a resume, and I told our students, I said, students, you've worked 27 years to build a perfect image. And now you have two years to figure out who you really are. So I want you, I say, I just want you all to know that you aren't your resume. And then I talked to them, I said, so we want you to move from image managing to essence managing, and that's gonna be very tough, because you're addicted to the image part, and you're gonna be going, you've already started evaluating everybody and sizing people up. But I said, What I tell people is the, the sooner they can get to a point of saying, I don't have all the answers, then I'm encouraged, and I don't care how old you are. And what we also say is, is that because high achieving people, professionals deal in either or situations, we talk to them about, there's some small things you can do that'll have a profound effect. One might be, is that just notice in your meetings how much time you spend talking and how much everyone else is. And so another thing I would tell folks is, is that they need to put people around them that will tell them when they're full of it. And the more you can get, the better. And I would not just put re…

AI assessment note: “move from image managing to essence managing, and that's gonna be very tough”

Q seriously, but, you know, people have this technical expertise, they have their heads down, they're trying to make money, and the stuff you're talking about, as you said, you know, these tough Wall Street guys are gonna call that soft stuff. What, what did you, what were, you know, were there one or two incidents that you remember that either broke that open or allowed you to have an impact?

A This is what I've come to believe, and here I am teaching this, the so-called advanced course on leadership here at the business school, and get a chance to go all over to different companies, et cetera, et cetera, but what I've realized is that leadership, in my mind, is something that's deeply personal, and I don't think I knew it then, but what would happen is I'd have a conversation with somebody, and while I think that their internal dialogue could have been About criticism. I found them kind of leaning on at the edge of their seats, and I actually think that, that folks were having the same kind of experience with me that I had with John, and I realized, and John told me, he says, Tom, I don't want you to learn the business. I could care less, and I'm going to put words in his mouth, but basically he said, I want our managers to be the kind of managers where Other people experience themselves differently when they're with them, and that has been, in my mind, the mantra, is what happens inside another person, and so I started having conversations with folks. I couldn't believe the way people were compensated. I couldn't believe the way people were promoted. It was literally an old boy system, and I went right after that, and helped create the first performance evaluation in the history of Wall Street. And again, that's another story in and of itself.

AI assessment note: “helped create the first performance evaluation in the history of Wall Street.”

Q What did the actors say? Because anyone can learn from how to have a conversation.

A Well, what we did, what we did is they had an actor, and then I brought in some managing directors that I knew would be irascible And thought it was nonsense, and I said, I want, managing director, give the art, the actor some crap, and the actor's gonna give you feedback about, about your career, and then we were videoing this thing. They were mean-spirited, they were arrogant, they were self-serving, they were selfish, and, and good people, I guess. And then I showed these clips of them getting feedback from these actors, and the place went nuts, and I think what, The, the partners could see is, is that I had a sense of humor, that I had a sense of understanding how, how systems work.

AI assessment note: “and the actor's gonna give you feedback about, about your career”

Q And are there organizations that you've worked with that embraced it and did things to support and promote the B players and then saw the positive results of that?

A What, These organizations have realized is that for many of them, they've, they've squeezed the rock on cost. And they can't squeeze anymore. So now they're trying to figure out, oh, oh, how do we get more productivity? So I'm doing much more of what I would call leadership development. I do much more about calling people to accountability at all levels and pushing training down. Again, my premise though is, is that if you're not doing it in the top, Then you can kiss a lime and goodbye. It's just happy talk. One of the things I really appreciated about Mac, and our mantra actually together was, is that as long as younger professionals pay for the sins of bad bosses, you are never going to be able to create the kind of organization you want to create.

AI assessment note: “So I'm doing much more of what I would call leadership development.”