The Exchanges

Q And if I was an employee and I'm working there and I'm on the dock and I want to see my specific performance or a driver, can I do that?

A A hundred percent. So the way we make it work and we implemented those tools as well. And you know, there's one thing, everybody goes to work every day wanting to do a good job. And when you get feedback and positive reinforcement, obviously you're gonna do it in a more effective way. But every time one of our drivers or dock workers Scans a pallet on the dock, they automatically see two dials on their handheld. The first one tells them what their productivity is versus their peers, so they can see effectively if you had 10 people working the dock, are they number one or are they number five? And if you're number one, there's a lot of bragging rights that go along with that, but that's more on the productivity side. And then the second dial shows them how many damages they could have caused by either not strapping the pallets or not. So every time you scan a pallet, To move it across our docks from one trailer to another trailer, we actually show folks what their numbers would look like. And similarly, the supervisors, they have a system as well, very modern platform, all proprietary, our own engineers build, build these solutions where effectively they can see then the performance across the entire workforce or a, or a certain shift and how they can actually manage that more effectively.

AI assessment note: “A hundred percent. So the way we make it work and we implemented those tools”

Q On the notion of risk taking, how did you navigate the yellow bankruptcy? Somebody reached out to me, a mutual friend of ours, and told me it was pure genius. Can you tell us that story?

A Yeah, so one of our large competitors went bankrupt in twenty-twenty-three. Very sad, obviously, for the company and for, for the folks, for the folks involved. But at the same time, as a less than truckload network, one of the most important forms of capacity to grow and service the customer is the terminal network that you have. So how large are your buildings? And some of these buildings, Jane, are, are a mile long dock, effectively. So very, very large facilities. And having enough capacity in key market is incredibly important. And it's very hard to be able to permit and build a large trucking terminal. So effectively when, when Yellow went bankrupt, all of that real estate came up for sale and we had to figure out, well, how much we want to buy and in one markets we want to buy. So in that particular case, and I was a new CEO, Going in there, the question is, well, how much do you buy, and what markets do you buy them in? How do you justify the return you're gonna get on the capital that you are deploying? One of the things I learned from Brad very early on, as a CEO, one of your most important part of the job is to make sure that you are allocating capital in a way that can create the most amount of shareholder value over time. Now, when yellow went bankrupt, we started looking at, well, okay, if we look, what is the data telling us? Based on different markets, where are…

AI assessment note: “when Yellow went bankrupt, all of that real estate came up for sale”

Q I want to come back to the family part there for a second. So you have a wife, you have three kids who are all young. How do you run a business and have time to be a part of the family?

A So I mentioned earlier on that one of the, the most important, um, things that as you see, as a CEO you have is where you spend time, where you spend your personal time and then where you have your organization spend their time. And I think I once get, got a very good piece of advice that when you're trying to do a lot of things, naturally you have less time, but you also have to simplify the goals and the targets and the things that you are driving to what is the most important. So when it comes to family, you know, obviously when you have, when you're doing a lot of things at work, you have a limited amount of time, but I try to make it the most amount of meaningful time that I can. So when I'm with my kids, for example, I don't use my phone. I put it away. I do meaningful activities with them as a engineer. Last summer, we actually built a robotic arm that we programmed and we actually tried to make it solve a Ruby cube. It didn't, didn't work as expected, but we kind of give it a fighting shot. There, or whether it's taking my kids fishing and spending time with them, actually doing activities that are outdoors. So I think when you are limited on time, what you can focus on is making the quality of that time be the highest possible. And also figuring out where you want to spend your time. So for example, I don't watch TV. I don't play golf. I don't, you know, have for me, I…

AI assessment note: “I try to make it the most amount of meaningful time that I can.”

Q Is that real time? So like when I take that photo, it reminds me of something, or is it sort of post when we aggregate the data the next day, you're like, Hey, this truck went out yesterday. You didn't see this, uh, just a reminder to strap it down better.

A Historically, we've done it where you are looking at it after the fact. So historically we met, we manage all that data through the shift. You are still getting it in the system in real time, but the person taking the photo was not getting immediate feedback. So let's say I'm a supervisor. As I close the trailer door of a given trailer, I would take a photo. And then I would actually rank the quality of loading of that particular photo. So in that case, it's not AI doing it. And then the next day we can tell which super, because then the next person in line in our, in our terminal network, when they open up your trailer, they take a photo and they rank your quality of loading. So you're effectively getting somebody, if you think about software development, it's almost like doing a code review, but you're doing a trailer review for the next person who's actually opening up Opening up that trailer. But now with AI, with the new versions we are launching, we actually are intended. It's not, it's not live yet. It's gonna go live, um, over the next few months, but effectively as a supervisor, whenever I take the photo, AI automatically tells you what it found wrong in your trailer. And now we can actually fix that before you actually send that trailer on the, over the road.

AI assessment note: “Historically, we've done it where you are looking at it after the fact.”

Q So often people assume that means consensus. What does gets along mean? The third aspect of what you just talked about, what does that mean in practice?

A What it means in practice, by the way, it's not necessarily consensus from the onset, because in business, as in life, whenever you are trying to solve for something big or something small, whenever you have something that as a team you want to address, I usually worry if I'm in a team meeting and everybody's aligned on a solution. And the reason why, because the first question I asked myself, did we look at that problem or that solution in 10 different ways to then have different perspectives of how to solve that problem? Because if you want to create alpha, it's not about only settling for a local maximum. It's about looking at a problem from different angles and being able to get different voices around how to solve that problem. Analyzing each one of them, having data behind each one of these perspectives, and then being able to land the plane on what is the right outcome to get to the right place. So getting along, however, is that we can disagree. We can disagree on, you might think that this solution is better than my solution or vice versa. However, it's a very respectful disagreement. It's a disagreement where when we leave that room, After debating, after looking at the numbers, after looking at the data, we all agree that this is the go forward path that would lead to the best solution to whatever problem or whatever thing that you're trying to solve for.

AI assessment note: “getting along, however, is that we can disagree... However, it's a very respectful disagreement.”

Q I love that. I want to come back to talent for a second. One of the stories that you had told me when we spoke last was about ABC. Can you tell us that and how it's useful for you?

A So generally, when you, when you assess talent, you want to be able to assess who are the top performers on your team that you either not only want to make sure you retain them, but you also want to invest in them. You want to grow them. You want to see them do amazing things over time because they have a lot of untapped potential. You also want to look at who's not performing on the team, who's somebody on the team who, for whatever reason, whatever circumstances happen, that they are not adding value. They are not being able to contribute to the best outcome for the company overall. But if you think about ranking folks as A, B, or C, typically an A player is somebody that they are, again, a top performer. They are somebody that you're proud of them. You're proud of their work. You think the world of them. And I learned this actually test from, from Brad as well. If an A player walks into your office and say, Mario, you know what? I don't try to talk me out of it. Maybe my wife is moving to a different state and I, you know, I took a job with another company and You know, don't try to talk me out of it. This is done. If the outcome out of that is feeling that you have a pit in your stomach, that you go back home, you're talking to your wife and say, I don't know what I'm going to do. I just heard the most horrible news today. And if it's a feeling of angst, it's a feeling of, …

AI assessment note: “if you think about ranking folks as A, B, or C”

Q That's fascinating. I want to stick on the meeting thing for a second here. Do you use AI to record the meetings?

A Depending on the meetings and not, not all of them, we use AI, but any type of structured meeting where we are discussing effectively, say an operating review, we do use AI to both take notes and summarize the meetings. And in many cases we send back out the takeaways to the team. So they actually get to see what was discussed and what were the key things that we focused on as a, as a team. But I would say for any meeting where it's more structured, where you have more attendees, et cetera, then I'd say it's consistent how we use AI. If it's a small get together to figure out something that we get a status update or a progress update, then we might not use AI for that.

AI assessment note: “Depending on the meetings and not, not all of them, we use AI”

Q How do you think that shaped your approach to taking risks?

A Now, keep in mind, I was very young at the time, so when you're very young, you're still, your brain is developing and forming, but it's really when you get to your teens is when you start thinking differently about different levers and risk. I think, overall, I would probably put myself in the more risk-averse category, but I think that's more of my engineering type education, where as an engineer, you're always assessing Risk, or you're, you're trying to quantify everything that you are dealing with. So when you look at risk, you're looking at all the information, all the data behind that risk, and you're assigning a probability of what's the probability of that risk materializing. Now, if you're only looking at the downside, it's very easy to say, I'm not gonna, you know, I'm not gonna go there because that's too risky. However, if you look at the upside and your probability adjust the upside Of whatever area you're looking at and the risk that is involved with it, it changes your perspective of how, of how to deal with risk. But I, I'd say I have a very analytical view of risk, but I lean towards being more risk averse than risk taking. And I do think part of the upbringing, but more importantly, my engineering education is what kind of governs some of that approach.

AI assessment note: “I do think part of the upbringing, but more importantly, my engineering education”

Q I want to come back to a couple of things that we talked about earlier before we wrap this up. One, where does your work ethic come from?

A I think it started with my, with my parents. My dad has been, was an entrepreneur, and he's also an engineer, and was also an amazing business person as well. Very wise person. If you, if you meet him, you just spend 15 minutes with him, you say, okay, that person is very, very, very wise. And I saw, since we were kids, the work ethic that he had in being able to deliver, you know, to effectively Build great things, but also be able to provide for our family as well, and that was rooted in me at a very young age that working hard has to be part of the equation, has to be part of, if you want to build big things in life, you cannot do it by not being hundred percent in, hundred percent dedicated on what it is that you're doing, which means when you wake up in the morning, you're thinking about it. When you go to bed, you're thinking about it. Now, you couple that with being the leader of an organization, You're responsible for 40,000 people. I take this responsibility very seriously. If I work an extra hour, and I can actually somehow improve the lives of 40,000 people, I'm gonna work this extra hour. And, and I think that's the reason why when I think about work ethic, it's, it's part of the ingredient of being all in, to, to be obsessed by every KPI, by every lever, by every team interaction, and to give all yourself For the team and the company you're working for, because whe…

AI assessment note: “I think it started with my, with my parents. My dad has been, was an entrepreneur”

Q This is going to sound crazy, but could you use that system to identify talent? In the sense that this person's very junior, but they're actually recognizing patterns that would be expected of like a senior person.

A You definitely can use it for identifying talent, but, but I do think generally to identify talent, you need much more touch points than just a takeaway or a question or, but, and the way we think about talent development is a lot of touch points. So for example, a lot of companies do performance reviews once a year. Or maybe twice a year. I don't believe in that. I think performance reviews should be done on a daily and weekly basis. You gotta give a person feedback that what you're doing here is fantastic, and what you're doing here needs improvement. But at the same time, doing it on a constant basis, you can identify also who is trending in the right direction, what their core skills are, where they need to improve, how they're improving, and you can identify talent that way. But also we have leadership team discussions about talent that goes beyond You know, the first few layers of the company about who is up and coming talent. So then members of the leadership team can give their feedback on this manager or that director level person, or maybe individual contributor who have a long runway and they're impressed by them and how this is what they are seeing in the performance of that particular person. And I think this is, this is a more effective way because you get a wider perspective from a group of people specifically about talent development, as opposed to the small win…

AI assessment note: “You definitely can use it for identifying talent, but, but I do think”

Q How did you learn to give feedback like this? That seems atypical of somebody with a computer engineering background.

A That's a great question, Shane, because if I go back earlier in my career, that was a big shortcoming of mine. But the way I led teams was based on, let's say I'm looking at a certain goal, certain solution we wanted to build. I would analyze it and I would come up with a, going back to the engineering design process, I would say, well, okay, this is a goal we want to achieve, what a problem we want to solve. Then I would think through the requirements. I would think through the highlights of the solution. Then I would go to my team member and say, well, you know, listen, this is where we are here. This is where we want to get to. I personally believe that's the best way to go from here to here. Naturally, when you do that, you automatically atrophied that person's brain from them being able to find the best, the best outcome. So over time, what I realized is that then if I didn't have the time, or I wasn't a subject matter expert in a certain area, we just don't get to the optimal solution in a given, in a given area. We just short-cutted that quite a bit. So then I started learning more and more with time, as opposed to give somebody what I think the solution is. What I need to do is actually teach them a process Where they are analyzing the data, and they are coming back to me with insights of what their data, the data is telling them. Similarly, they are designing a solutio…

AI assessment note: “So then I started learning more and more with time, as opposed to give somebody”

Q So it doesn't sort of like mail me here your actions from this specific meeting that you're supposed to be doing, or mail other people in the organization who might not have been at the meeting and inform them of something that was decided in the meeting that affects them, or how does that, how do you think of that evolving, I guess?

A I think overall, so if you look, you look at late last year, typically on a one, once a year basis, we get together the team, and then we walk through the strategic levers that we have as an organization, and we, we give ourselves a score, an assessment. How did we do in this area, that area, that area? But then we think about how should we evolve the strategy? Should we do something different when it comes to that particular lever in the company? So for those kind of much more Elaborate or involved type sessions where you're spending two, three days with the team to change your strategy. In that particular case, we use AI and then we send back out the action items, and then we effectively use that to inform or change the levers of our strategy. But then you still have to summarize them and come up with the key themes in terms of how we address that. So depending for something that elaborate where you're spending a lot of brain power over a few days to Potentially change the direction we're going in as a, as a company. We, we use AI extensively for those kinds of sessions. If we're having a weekly staff meeting where we are actually going through the key KPIs, how they perform for the prior week, how they are performing month to date, how they are performing quarter to date. Obviously AI becomes a bit less important because even the actions that come out of those meetings typic…

AI assessment note: “In that particular case, we use AI and then we send back out the action items”

Q What surprised you the most about people coming from an engineering background where things are sort of predictable?

A Well, first I'll start by introspecting, looking at myself as a, as a person. As I was growing up, I remember I always used to think that perfection is a good thing. So every time I was set to work on a certain project, on a certain task, that the outcome has to be perfect, that the outcome, and you tell yourself in your own mind these things that, you know, like, this is not good enough. It can be better than that. Or you're building a piece of software. This piece of software has to be just exactly right. The code has to be simple. It should not have any bugs in it. And I think the human mind Typically doesn't operate in, in perfection. We all have our own idiosyncrasies. We all have our own biases. We all have our own way of doing things. So for me, in terms of managing people, a lot of it goes back to looking at how they view solving a problem, how they look at the world, how they look at being able to deliver value, how they look at being able to treat others with respect. And I think what surprised me the most is that you, every person is different and every person in their own way, they are beautiful. Their mind works in a beautiful way and being able to take their own methods, their own way of thinking, believing in what's best in them is what creates the most amount of outcome. And it's also a pleasure because then you're effectively working with a group of smart peopl…

AI assessment note: “what surprised me the most is that you, every person is different”

Q Your time in Lebanon was one of the craziest and your escape was one of the craziest stories I've heard. Can you share that with us?

A I grew up in Lebanon in the, in the eighties. During that time, the country was at war. And it's remarkable to look back at those times because I remember many, many, many nights where at night we wouldn't sleep at home. We would actually be sleeping in a shelter, in a bomb shelter. And it was a period of time for the country. That was a very, very dark period of time. Now, my brothers and I were very lucky because we had parents who were unbelievable. They, they, they provided us a, Beautiful childhood that was surrounded with love. And although the world around us was crazy, we actually could, we were not impacted to a certain extent, but you're still obviously dealing with the, with the trauma of war around you. So it teaches you a lot about, about how, you know, when you're under pressure, it's one thing to be in a bomb shelter and your, your neighborhood is getting bombed versus any other type of pressure you're seeing in business or in life. But we were lucky that our parents created, again, a cocoon to a certain extent of safety and gave us What every child want to have in their childhood, which is love, which is a lot of support and a very, very loving environment. But also we, we had to flee the country because, because of the war, we lived in multiple countries. We lived in Egypt for a while. We lived here in Canada for a while. So it's good to be back in Ottawa. I ha…

AI assessment note: “we had to flee the country because, because of the war, we lived in multiple”