The Art of Being an Effective Leader: A Conversation with Joel Peterson

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This is a podcast episode titled, The Art of Being an Effective Leader: A Conversation with Joel Peterson. The summary for this episode is: What do all great leaders have in common? What does it mean to solve for fairness? What exactly is an “entrepreneurial leader”? Joining us to answer these questions and more is Joel Peterson, former Chair of the JetBlue Group, Founding Partner of Peterson Partners, Stanford professor, and author of "Entrepreneurial Leadership: The Art of Launching New Ventures, Inspiring Others, and Running Stuff." Joel's extensive experience on the frontlines of business inspires him to nurture the minds of future leaders. Today, he shares tips for leaders and managers and explains why he thinks a culture of feedback and transparency always wins.

Joel Peterson: I learned early on in my career that if I could solve for fairness, that was a much better thing to solve for than winning because you're building longterm relationships. And so the idea that negotiations are cereal and not episodic is a really powerful idea. If you think everything is one and done, everything is transactional in life, you're actually going to build low trust. So I'm really a big believer in the longterm. Think about the other party's interests and try to solve it.

Michael Rivo: Words of wisdom from Joel Peterson, author, former chairman of JetBlue Airways and Stanford Graduate School of Business professor. Welcome back to Blazing Trails, I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios. How do you lead in a time of crisis? How do you build trust with key stakeholders? And how do you build commitment across teams, customers, and suppliers? Those are questions that Joel Peterson has been asking and answering for his entire career. And in his latest book, Entrepreneurial Leadership, Joel lays out a framework for a new type of leadership that's more relevant now than ever. And today he's going to share his thoughts with us on the art of being an effective entrepreneurial leader. But before we jump over to Joel, a quick word about work. com. Work.com is an all new suite of apps and resources that leaders around the world can use to reopen, re- skill employees and respond efficiently to the COVID- 19 pandemic. Reopening will be a journey, but work.com is your guide. To learn more, go to work. com. And now, welcome to the show, Joel. Let's start with Entrepreneurial Leadership. It's a great book filled with lessons from a lifetime in business and academics, and it really lays out a framework for this new type of leadership, this entrepreneurial leadership. Tell me about that. And what inspired you to write the book?

Joel Peterson: Well, I've taught a course for many, many years at Stanford that's quite popular. And of course now, a lot of MBAs come through and they're not interested in going to the corporate world, they're not necessarily interested in going into banking or all the things that were traditionally what MBAs did. When I got my MBA, I would say at least 25% of all the courses taught at Stanford are about entrepreneurship. And so I got really interested in this idea of, why so many companies fail, why they're kind of flashing the bands and why so many then adjust what their business plan was and how they do that. And the issue of how do you become an enduring company, which I thought that's really amazing when you get a leader who can take an idea, turn it into a product or a service, figure out how to make that profitable, and then actually create the systems and the people around that, where you have a culture and a way to deliver that over time. So I've spent years and years teaching courses, trying to figure out how that happens. The other course that I teach at Stanford is one we call leadership perspectives, where we have this parade of phenomenal, Alan Mulally, Steve Ballmer, we just had Jim Mattis, and last night, Marissa Meyer. So these amazing people that you get to ask these questions, how did they do what they did and what mistakes did they make? So all of this kind of came together and I just thought, I'm getting old, I'm going to write all this down and get in a place where there's kind of a checklist for people to really think through the mindsets and the ways to go about really becoming an entrepreneurial leader.

Michael Rivo: Yeah. And there's so much wisdom in the book. So thank you for putting it all in one place. It's so helpful for all of us. You mentioned all of those leaders. Is there a thread that you see the runs through as you talk to different leaders from different industries and different experience. What are some of the core threads that run through that have helped them be successful?

Joel Peterson: Yeah, there are several. One is they have grit, resilience, they bounce back, they make mistakes, they admit them, they absorb blame, they reflect credit. So most of them really have this ability to connect with people. We talked for a second about Marc Benioff. I don't know him personally, but he's somebody that I admire for a lot of these kinds of characteristics. So what I've tried to do is define the different categories of leader. We have politicians, we have administrators, we have managers, we have presiders and we have pure entrepreneurs who light fires, but maybe can't manage it after that. And really kind of knit all these skills together and say, the entrepreneurial leader is the one who actually sees around corners, who creates this durable enterprise. And it's fairly rare. I kind of think coming out of COVID, we're going to have a lot more entrepreneurial leaders and a lot fewer presiders and politicians.

Michael Rivo: One of the questions I had was, so many in our audience are going to be working in larger organizations or smaller organizations, part of teams and inside of these bigger groups. And how do you relate the ideas around entrepreneurial leadership? It's so different to start from scratch, to start a company versus being in a company. How do you take these ideas and work those inside of an organization?

Joel Peterson: Yeah. So I'm so glad you mentioned that, Michael, because I actually think that entrepreneurial leaders can exist anywhere. Teachers can be entrepreneurially. I mean, these are people who kind of get the big picture, who are not afraid to make decisions, who will take risks and they can be in big organizations. I had one of my colleagues at Stanford read the book before I had it published. And he said, " The only question I've got is, you list Alan Mulally who ran Boeing and Ford, and you have Stan McChrystal, who's a four- star general that ran Joint Special Operations Command. Are they really entrepreneurial leaders?" I said, " Absolutely." These are the kinds of decision makers and leaders who take risks, but not a lot of CYA with them. They really are the kinds of leaders that we want and need going forward. I'm really kind of selling a brand of leadership that has something to do with entrepreneurship, but it's not pure entrepreneurship.

Michael Rivo: Let's talk about some of the obstacles to doing that inside of a larger organization. There's politics, there's headwinds, there's everything else that goes on in trying to align people around your ideas and trying to be other minded as you described, which is thinking about others while others may not be doing the same thing. How do you navigate that inside of a bigger organization successfully? What are some tools for doing that?

Joel Peterson: So I think there are several principles that really matter. One is, you have to see yourself as a fiduciary. And what that means is that you put others' interests on the same level or ahead of your own. That's a really powerful thing for building trust. And to me, that's one of the keys. And actually one of the ways that you do that is by doing a lot of listening and you validate others, you show respect for other people, that can create this culture of trust in which the best idea wins. You mentioned politics. Politics are a lot of times the most powerful people win or the most aggressively asserted idea wins. And I think in really healthy enduring organizations, it's the best idea wins. It doesn't matter where it comes from, but that's hard when you're buried down in the organization to make that the norm. But if you become a leader even of a team or whatever, you can build that in the DNA of your own team in the way that you deal with things. You're rigorous around these few principles that actually build that kind of a culture.

Michael Rivo: You mentioned in your book, a story about when you were CEO in the real estate business, about some of the other salespeople in the company being aggressive and taking that as, you maybe the younger people in the organization. I think the term used was cutting people up, or it was kind of destroying the other person in these negotiations and how you could see that you need to look for win- wins, you need to have it be a more equal kind of conversation. How did you change that culture or try to impact that when you were CEO in that situation?

Joel Peterson: The term that you were thinking of is people talk about carving people up.

Michael Rivo: Carving.

Joel Peterson: That's easy to happen in a young organization with aggressive people who are trying to make money fast or whatever, carving people, having the kind of negotiations where if you have the power, you get your way, so you're solving for a win. I learned early on in my career that if I could solve for fairness, that was a much better thing to solve for than winning because you're building longterm relationships. And so the idea that negotiations are cereal and not episodic is a really powerful idea. If you think everything is one and done, everything is transactional in life, you're actually going to build low trust organizations, mistrust, slow things down, have legally dense documentation that is inflexible, et cetera. So I'm really a big believer in the longterm. Think about the other party's interests and try to solve it. It doesn't mean you cave. What that means is that you understand their interests and you try to get it to them at a price that's worth it to you. I will always trade a dime for two nickels. And a lot of times, if you just make that trade, people are happy. You're solving for fairness and you're solving for longterm relationships. I think that's a really powerful mindset.

Michael Rivo: It is. And it seems that's also connected to the listening and empathy and thinking about the, if you start from there, what is it that the other person needs to get here and how can I align to that? It just solves so many problems right out of the gate.

Joel Peterson: It really does.

Michael Rivo: And since you were talking about trust as such an important factor and that's the number one value at Salesforce, tell me a little bit more about trust and when you're building an organization, everything from being a CEO or chairman of the board, how do you think about trust and all these different interactions and how that becomes part of culture?

Joel Peterson: I think if you're building an organization, so I'm going to take the position of somebody who is CEO, chairman, entrepreneur, building an enterprise, I think it starts with you having what I call integrity. And I don't mean by that honesty. I mean that there's no gap between what you say and what you do, your personal life and your professional life are congruent. So people don't have this notion that there's this big say- do gap in your life. Therefore, you're delivering on promises. Fundamentally, we believe people, we trust people who do what they say they're going to do. So if it's doing things on time, on budget, being on time for meetings, following up, we start to trust those people. So I think it starts out with you being trustworthy yourself and then requiring that of others. I actually got interested in this whole issue of trust because people were treating it as if it's this fuzzy feel- good concept. We love to talk about integrity. We like to talk about trust. We like to frame mission statements, hang them on the wall of boardrooms, that can actually create cynicism, unless reality is there. So I started thinking about, are there ways to ensure that you build a high trust organization? And so this first book that I wrote, it's called The 10 Laws of Trust. And it really says, if you want to build a high trust organization and I put a diagnostic in there, so you can kind of test whether or not what the level of your organization is, here are the things you've got to do. And it starts out with the leader's integrity.

Michael Rivo: You talk about the gaps between what you say and what you do. And that's hard sometimes.

Joel Peterson: You're right. Exactly.

Michael Rivo: You mention in your book, you are not your emotions. I think for so many of us, the ability to step back and be reflective in real time, as you're having those emotions is really challenging. How do you think about that? And you've seen so many students come through and dealt with so many different people in business, what do you see are the hallmarks of someone who can have that kind of separation and be able to close that gap?

Joel Peterson: I think it starts out with being vulnerable enough to admit your mistakes and to want negative feedback and to embrace it. We're all tragically flawed. And that's really where some of the hypocrisy comes. But I think the people that end up being trusted are those that say, " Oh gosh, I did make a mistake. I can learn that. Here's what I'm going to work on." And we like those people, we start to trust those people. And sure there are going to be gaps, but you correct them and you correct them quickly. And you listen and you seek for ways to do that. I mean, people will work with you if they know you're really working to build trust. They'll learn to mistrust you if you're covering, if you're spinning, if you're doing all the things that are natural. You asked how do you do that? I think you have to get used to the idea that this doesn't happen overnight. Trust is built slowly. It's destroyed overnight. You can destroy it in what they call a New York minute. You really have to be committed to building it over time.

Michael Rivo: And I think once you do build it, then, like you said, there will be these moments where if something doesn't happen right or that gap exists between what you say and what you do, and that's where if you come in and admit that and address it immediately, then that trust can stay there. And we've had that at Salesforce for sure, where there's, the system will go down or whatever happens and just very quickly addressing that and being transparent about it, is so critical.

Joel Peterson: Well, a lot of time, the reason people don't fulfill promises is they either didn't understand the assignment or there was an intervening variable, something happened that they didn't expect. And those are actually relatively easy to fix, if you say we fix these in real time and that you don't really lose trust by doing that. If you let it stay open for a while and you don't say anything about it, actually mistrust builds. So there's a lot of breaches of trust. They're easy to fix if you do it in the moment. If you wait too long, they actually become a cancer. They metastasize.

Michael Rivo: And it really is that, it's scary in that moment. And I think that's where the grit and the practice of, " Okay, I have identified now, I need to say something now, because if I don't, it's just going to get harder and harder."

Joel Peterson: Yeah.

Michael Rivo: That's how it builds.

Joel Peterson: One of the things I find, I'm sorry to interrupt, but-

Michael Rivo: No, go ahead.

Joel Peterson: ...I've found that kind of helpful in that is I'll just say something like, " May I give you some feedback on that?" Just asking for permission is actually a nice, polite, respectful way to do it. And even better if you say, " I think I blew it. I kept selling after the sale was made," or, " I think I pushed too hard on this. What do you think?" That's a really nice way to open up these feedback loops and you really want those highways to stay open, and that way, you can correct people, they can correct you. The more you're specific, the more you're open, the more you're honest, the more you make it fun. The more you embrace negative feedback, the more likely you are to build a high trust organization.

Michael Rivo: You had mentioned that so many students coming out of graduate business school, don't go into fields where they have to sell and have to interact with customers and be on that front line, it's immediately into your investment banking or whatever it is, where it's much more analytical. Talk to me a little bit about that, about what the experience you get from really interacting with customers hands- on and what that process is.

Joel Peterson: The advice I give students that they like the least, they always want career advice, " How do I get where you got?" And I would say, " Take a sales job, take a job as close to the customers you can get," because really, if you think about sales, not as pushing product or trying to convince people of something they don't want to do, if you think about it as, " I want to solve people's problems, where is their greatest pain point? How do I come in and sort that out and give them a solution that's worth more to them than it costs them." That's really what you're doing. You learn to listen to people. You learn to empathize. You learn to get inside their skin and tie their organizations, sort through problems, no business survives without a revenue line. And to me, people who are closest to the revenue... In fact, in many organizations, the salespeople make more than the CEO. It's incredibly valuable. And if you're ever around a really gifted star salesman, you recognize there's some magic sauce there. In fact, many of the people who ran companies today have had sales experience, is pretty powerful.

Michael Rivo: Do you think it's a prerequisite to being a good executive?

Joel Peterson: Another thing that I would say Michael is if you're a CFO... So I was CFO for about a decade, and about a couple of years in, I realized this is sales. I had to work with a bunch of CPAs and lawyers and whatever on certain technical matters, but a lot of what I was doing was financing projects, getting people to see the value in those structuring deals. And it really had a lot of the same persuasive elements that appear sales job had. So I actually think that the sales function cuts across most things that you do.

Michael Rivo: One of the interesting things I was thinking, you've sat on so many boards and had to provide feedback to CEOs and to look at those different situations where they might be coming and trying to sell the board on a particular direction or idea of what should happen. How do you see that in that relationship between sort of the board member and the CEO and how that plays out in terms of the exchange of ideas and trust and selling and all those things we've been talking about?

Joel Peterson: That's a great question because it's a complicated relationship. I mean, in the one hand, you're there to inspire, remove obstacles, help, coach, encourage, be a shoulder to cry on. On the other hand, you're there to hold accountable the CEO. And so there's this delicate place. And I have always found that it starts with developing a high trust relationship with them. And that starts with listening. It starts with feedback. It starts with principles. I used to give a lot of formal feedback to CEOs, what you do just annually or semi- annually, there's a formal process, but I always made sure that after every board meeting, I would pull the CEO aside immediately. I wouldn't wait a few days because they can get uptight worrying about how did the meeting go? What did people think, et cetera. Even if I had to cancel my flight, I would stay in and sit down with them and just say, " Let's talk about how the meeting went. Let's talk about what came up. Let's get your thoughts." Listening is again, a really powerful form of communication. If you understand what they think, they can hear anything from you, if you understand what they say. So it's this exchange. I think people who think top- down hierarchy, et cetera, actually miss an opportunity to influence powerfully, but you want to develop that relationship. In the end, one of my favorite, I don't know who to credit for this, but early on, I heard somebody say, " Everybody wants to be a respected member of a winning team, doing something meaningful." And if you really think about that, if you can show people respect, if you can find the pathway to the summit and people feel like we are really going to summit, and then if you can help them understand why this is meaningful, why this makes a difference, you've won as a leader, you really can give people any kind of feedback.

Michael Rivo: You mentioned becoming from an individual contributor to a manager, to a leader, what are some of the core skills maybe, or ideas at each one of those levels that you need to think about?

Joel Peterson: My experience as a leader is that if you'll get alignment between your values, your objectives, your strategy, your tactics, and what you measure, organizations almost run themselves. Now they don't really, but people start to understand that and they get predictability. If you have a highly predictable or is that... I want everybody to say, " Joel would make the following decision," because that way I've empowered them. Some leaders are mercurial, you don't know what they're going to decide. They maintain a lot of power and a lot of fear in that, to me, that's a failed leader. So I think one of the things you'll learn moving to the level of leadership is how to let go a little bit. That will help you, but if you're still making 70, 30 decisions, you failed as a leader, you ought to be only making 51, 49 decisions and you're going to get some of those wrong.

Michael Rivo: Right. Right. So switching gears a little bit, I wanted to talk a little bit about brand and there was another interview that I saw where you had said that one way or another coming out of period that we're in right now, companies are going to have a change to their brand, and it's going to happen whether they like it or not. I thought that was so interesting. And just thinking about brand with all the companies you've been associated with as an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, all these different roles, how do you think about building a brand? And talk a little bit more about this period right now and how brands should think about how they're presenting themselves to the world.

Joel Peterson: Yeah. So I love brand questions. I think each of us is an individual as a brand. Two, I don't think people often think of themselves that way, but I think it's a really powerful way to think about it. And the way I've always thought about it is, choose the five words that you would like to be known by and debate what really the refinements are, the nuance in those, is really important. But I think most companies that we care about and love and everything, you'd find their customers clustering around four or five words, four or five terms really capture that. I think when you go through something like this COVID thing, it's incumbent upon management teams, leadership, to step back and say, " Are we still delivering that promise? Is that the same promise customers want? And are we still delivering that promise?" I'll give you an example. At JetBlue, we went through the drill and decided on the five words and I've lived with it for 20 years, but coming out of this, we said, " Are they still relevant? Are they still the ones that customers want, and our crew members, all our constituents, does this really capture who we are?" And the first one was safety. And as we started thinking about it, we said, " Air travel is still is the safest way." If you want to get from point a to point B without an accident, air travel is infinitely safer than any other form of transportation. But now we've added this element of self and people want to feel safe from our standpoint. Are we delivering that? You cram people in a cylinder and put them up at 30, 000 feet, going 600 miles an hour breathing the same air. And people say, " Gosh, that doesn't feel very safe from a health standpoint." So we need to rethink that and say, " We want to make sure we've got HEPA filters, so the air is the cleanest on the planet. We want to make sure we sanitize the planes in between flights, take a little bit of extra time, but we've got to do that. We want to block the middle seats. We want to have people wear masks. We want to take temperatures." Again, this idea of super imposing a new element to your brand to make sure that that brand still fits, I think is a really important thing. And that's actually one of the things that's quite entrepreneurial about coming out of COVID. I think we're not going to want a bunch of politicians and presiders, as I said before, that's not going to get the job done. Pure entrepreneurs may not either, or they may only for a little while, but I think entrepreneurial leadership where people see around corners, think about principals, think about the longterm, have checklists. I think it's a really powerful way to start thinking about rebuilding brands.

Michael Rivo: I think one of the challenges right now is that we're all having to make this up and you'll get certain directive from leadership, but I think it's just going to be critical that at all levels, people are coming up with ideas and putting those forward.

Joel Peterson: I actually, when I started teaching this fall at Stanford, I asked the person who was in charge of training the trainers what they have learned and I was amazed. She had a bunch of ideas that I never would've thought of that had come from customers. The customers will joint venture with you a great product. And so going out and getting that feedback and refining what it is you're doing, is kind of an entrepreneurial leader mindset.

Michael Rivo: And so getting that feedback, what are some of the processes that you've seen be successful for getting that feedback? Again, thinking about this from a couple of different perspectives, one is you're in the C- suite and you're too far from the customer on what's happening on a day- to- day basis and you might not get the feedback, or you're just deeper inside the organization and there's other groups that are talking to customers and you're not getting that feedback. How do you go and get that information if it's not in the flow of how you're typically working, which I think is probably true for a lot of people?

Joel Peterson: You put it in the flow for one thing. One of the things you do after each event with a customer is you say, " How did that go? What worked for you? What didn't work for you? It's simple. It doesn't take much time. And it says you care. The other thing, I actually learned this 30- some years ago, when I was at Trammell Crow. I remember telling all the partners, " Guys, you've got to get out and spend time with our tenants." I just was promoting this notion of, tenants are really important, that's how we live. You need to know what they're thinking, how they're expanding, what their problems are, get out there. And no wonder one day, my assistant pulled me aside and she said, " You never talk to tenants." Anywhere would've been carve out, an hour or two every week, it didn't take a whole lot of time. Often I do it at lunch or something like that and I'd just call them up. And at first it was, " What's wrong? I mean, why are you're calling me?" I learned to make it a fun thing and I've made a lot of connections. And I really understood that my advice had been good advice, but it was hypocritical.

Michael Rivo: Right. You identified one of those gaps or your assistant actually identified one of those gaps.

Joel Peterson: Yeah. And I was willing to embrace the negative feedback and do something about it.

Michael Rivo: And embracing that friction because that's where stuff happens. If you shy away from those moments, then you don't get the outcomes. And I think we've all had that experience of something that we were nervous about or didn't want to do. And then once you do it, not only is it, " Oh, that wasn't so bad," it's like, " I've moved to the next piece after that."

Joel Peterson: Yeah, I can do this. What's interesting, when I wrote the 10 laws of trust, one of the laws was to embrace conflict, this idea of embracing respectful conflict. I conflict can be disruptive and painful and have agendas and things like that, but the idea of respectful conflict, different points of view, debating them, you're triangulating, you're coming to a better solution. And so high trust organizations have learned to embrace conflict. Low trust organizations like hospitals, they're quiet, people are dying.

Michael Rivo: There's a section in the book where you talk about meetings. I'd love this segment. It talks about, I think we've all had our challenges with meetings, and this is another one where we're not trained in how to do it. Let's have a meeting and they're not run well and they feel like we're wasting our time. Can you give us some insight about how you think about meetings? I think there's some great stuff in there.

Joel Peterson: I think meetings like almost everything respond to principles and rules. Let me just step back and say that I was interested when I first got in the airline business to see these 25s, 30 year pilots sitting in the cockpit, going over a checklist. And I would say to them, " Wait a minute, haven't you done this before?" They said, " Yep, every time for hundreds or thousands of flights. We do this every time, we go over these checklists." So I think a lot of life responds to mindsets and checklists. So to me, there are some rules around meeting hygiene that are just really smart. I've always found that meetings earlier in the day are better than the ones late in the day. Meetings earlier in the week are better than ones that are late in the week. Meetings where you make sure you've got the right people there and only those people there are better than ones where you have big audiences. Meetings where everyone makes a noise are better than where people are just audience. Meetings where there's, follow- up, where the next meeting does, what I call Daisy Chain. In other words, it grabs onto what we decided in the last meeting and starts the next meeting with it. That feels like there's continuity. We're making progress. Those are just some of the things, but there's a bunch of them that are listed in the book, that are just sort of checklist items, nothing brilliant, nothing that everybody doesn't kind of know already, but we're like pilots. We need to sit in the cockpit and go over the checklist and make sure our meetings are run well because much of our lives in business are spending in. Particularly, if you think about a meeting is where... You and I are having a meeting right now. When I talk on a phone, I'm having a meeting. The more you think about your life as a series of meetings and say, " I'm going to make sure these are really efficient and fun," the better your life goes.

Michael Rivo: Right. It's such a difficult time right now. And as the former chairman of JetBlue, you've had such a great insight into how the industry is dealing with current situation and thinking about it. What's the way forward here for really airlines and travel as a whole, as a category? What do you see in the future?

Joel Peterson: First of all, I think you have to embrace reality. Whatever reality is, you have to say, " These are the facts, we're going to deal with facts." I have a friend in the hotel business who said, " I never thought I'd be so happy to see 30% occupancy." Because really when it first happened, the airlines and the hotels were down around 3% or 4%. That was just brutal. So you have to say, " Here's where we are, here's why, what can we do about it?" And then, we've actually run scenarios that say there will be a V- shape recovery, there'll be a U shaped recovery. There'll be an L- shaped kind of non- recovery. And what do you do then? But you've got to deal with reality. Facts are stubborn things, and you've got to build around those facts. I actually think that there are some bright lights. One of the things we've learned from COVID is we do love being with people. It's really tough on all of us to be isolated. And so I know people put off marriages, put off graduations, actually getting together to celebrate them birthdays. I've got two grandkids on the East Coast, but I tell my daughters, I say, " I hope I meet them before they graduate." We have to think around all those things. There's this yearning. I think business travel will probably come back a little more slowly than some of the other kinds of travel because people are learning new skills, they're learning that they don't need to fly to LA for a one hour meeting. So I think there are some of those things that are probably more or less permanent, but I'm pretty optimistic that they'll come back. I lived through 9/ 11, JetBlue was supposed to ring the bell on 9/ 11. We were going public. That was our original going public date. We had people up in the towers working till 2: 00 in the morning there and they all got away, but we did lose some friends from the port authority. That's an aside, only to say that, that was one of these events where everybody said, " Gosh, is anybody ever going to fly again?" And it took eight or nine months and it took some adjustment. We put titanium doors on the cockpit. We had increased security. The TSA came in, as you recall after that. So people adjust and also the flying public gets smarter, more used to things and watches things.

Michael Rivo: Well, great. This has been a fantastic conversation. I'm honored to be able to have this hour with you. It's been great, Joel, thank you so much for joining us. I hope you enjoyed it as well.

Joel Peterson: Oh, it's been great fun, Michael. You're a great interviewer, great conversationalist. And tell Marc Benioff, I love him, I admire him and that I've used him as an example.

Michael Rivo: Absolutely. And you'll have to come visit us again on the Ohana Floor, up at the top of Salesforce Tower. We all haven't been there for a while. So we're excited to get back to that too. That was Joel Peterson talking about how to lead by inspiring others and building trust. For insights into this topic and others, head over to salesforce. com/ blog for resources to help guide you through today's changing economic and social environments. Hey, and if you're not a subscriber, make sure to subscribe with your favorite podcast app. We've got a great lineup of guests coming up and we hope that you'll join us. I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios. Thanks for listening.

DESCRIPTION

What do all great leaders have in common? What does it mean to solve for fairness? What exactly is an “entrepreneurial leader”?  Joining us to answer these questions and more is Joel Peterson, former Chair of the JetBlue Group, Founding Partner of Peterson Partners, Stanford professor, and author of Entrepreneurial Leadership: The Art of Launching New Ventures, Inspiring Others, and Running Stuff.  Joel's extensive experience on the frontlines of business inspires him to nurture the minds of future leaders. Today, he shares tips for leaders and managers and explains why he thinks a culture of feedback and transparency always wins.