Founder's Story - Thrive During Times of Disruption | Ep. 24 with CEO and Best Selling Author Charlene Li

Episode Date: May 27, 2020

For the past two decades, Charlene Li has been helping people see the future. She’s an expert on digital transformation, leadership, customer experience and the future of work. She’s the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller, Open... --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ibhshow/supportOur Sponsors:* Check out PrizePicks and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: www.prizepicks.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to Inspired by Her, the podcast that will give you the inspiration, motivation, and tips for success from some of the top executives, CEOs, and influencers from around the globe. With your host, serial entrepreneur, and named one of the most influential Filipina in the world, Kate Hancock. And we are live. Hi, everyone. This is Kate. And today I have Charlene Lee. Hi, Charlene. Hi there. Hi. I have two. I mean, I was just talking to Charlene and her bio is just so amazing. So everyone, for the past two decades, Charlene Lee has been helping people see the future. A graduate of Harvard Business School,

she is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller, Open Leadership. Her latest book is The Disruption Mindset, Why Some Businesses Transform While Others Fail. With over 20 years of experience advising Fortune 500 companies, Shirlene is an expert in digital transformation and strategy. Over 20 years of experience advising Fortune 500 companies,

Shirlene is an expert in digital transformation and strategy, customer experience, and the future of work. She has spoken at TED, the World Business Forum, South by Southwest, and even appeared on 60 Minutes. Shirlene, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited. Now, Shirlene, you're the founder of Altimeter, right? Can you tell me more about your company?

Yes. We started back in 2008, right before the last recession, started like a few months right beforehand. And the idea was to be a disruptive analyst firm. I had been an analyst at Forrester Research for about 10 years and was just really happy there, but realized that my growth was really slowing down. And I wanted to just be an analyst in a very different way. So I started Altimeter, hung up my shingle, and then started doing what no other analyst firm did. We gave away our research instead of striving a subscription for it. So just gave it away for free. And the idea was that we would write the research, use design thinking to really solve a particular problem that was

multidisciplinary that went across industries. And we happened to be writing a lot about social media and how to use that. And when the recession hit, we grew like game busters because everybody was reading it because it was free. And then people would call us up and say, we need your help. So that's how we actually made money was from people literally just calling us up. So it's all 100% inbound based on the research. Wow. Do you remember who's your first client? I do. So it was an agency, PR agency called Horn Group. And Sabrina Horn had been working with me just on and off. And her COO, Shana Lata, was very keen on having me come on board. And later on, about five, about eight years later, I brought on Shana as my own COO.

So she was ready for a transition. And so she came on board. So my first client became an employee, a very trusted employee. That's amazing. That's amazing. Now, Charlene, what was the city or town you grew up in like? The town that I grew up in, it was a little town outside of Detroit, Michigan. So I was born on the east side of Detroit and then moved out to the suburbs like most people do. And my town was very diverse, so to speak. It had a lot of Italians and Irish and Polish. And then my family showed up. I'm the first family of color to be there in that community.

So it was very disruptive for me to show up and be in that group of people. So I was kind of used to being different right from a very, very early age. Wow. And what kind of kid are you in high school? I was quite the geek, I have to admit. And quite proudly a geek. So very academic, really studious. One teacher said to me, you know, your grammar isn't very good.

And I went, well, that's not good. And so I went home and pretty much memorized shrunken whites elements of writing, got a bunch of other grammar books. And I said, I never want grammar to be an issue ever again for me. And so I'm kind of like the grammar police around our family. And they kind of like, just kind of get sick of it. But so I was, I would geek out about those kinds of things. Wow. That's something I can totally relate. You know, I grew up in the Philippines. I moved out here right after college. And when I was in college, I didn't think of it, how important it is for me to learn English or something. So I struggle at it now. So I really wanted to redo and fix my grammar.

So I need your help. This is a tool called Grammarly. I love it. I pay for it. And I'm like, this has saved me so many times. And I have a copy of Strunk and White in my other room there. But yeah, I pull it out once in a while, just review it. Grandma gal. So yeah. Grandma gal. I'll get to use it all the time. And Shalene, tell me, what was your journey like to get where you are? I came out of college just doing straight business. I did classic management consulting and then actually lived overseas for two years, lived in Amsterdam after living in

Boston for a year. I then came back to business school and really didn't know what I wanted to do. My original plans fell apart. And so when I was closing out business school, it was 1993, and this internet thing was happening. I said, I think I want to move into that space, interviewed all around it, like hardware and software, and then settled on content, and then eventually newspapers. Not very many people go to business school, graduate and go to newspapers. It's not the logical place to be.

And I just felt that this is, this was an industry that was going to be fundamentally changed because of the internet. And when I graduated, there wasn't even a worldwide web. So this was, this was quite the risky thing. My when I graduated, there wasn't even a worldwide web. So this was quite the risky thing. My friends were like, that's weird. Why would you go do that? And I've long believed, and I stick my career on this idea that disruption creates opportunity. So I tend to go and find disruption created, tend to move into those cracks that are created by disruption because I think those are the places where I tend to thrive. Wow. And this is the biggest disruption ever. What do you think is

the opportunity? Oh, so many. I mean, people's needs haven't gone away. They have shifted. So I'll just give an example. In the past, we would fly all around the world and to just do a couple of meetings. And now we would never even think about doing that. It's too dangerous. Like, why would I do that? And besides, we can just get on Zoom and have our meeting. And it may not be as good, won't be as, you know, fundamental of an experience, but we're going to think twice now about is it worth it to travel halfway around the world to meet face-to-face when we can just do that from the comforts of our home. That has fundamentally changed everything. And so the opportunities around this is how do you have better interactions? Zoom may feel like it's

the best thing, but you see all these other players coming up with alternatives. So Facebook just announced something. I know Google is doubling down on Hangouts. Microsoft is pushing Teams. And even virtual meetings are just terrible. I mean, if you actually wanted to have a big meeting or a conference or something, that tool doesn't really exist yet. And we're focused so much on our mental health now and our exercise i think people are much more aware of their relationships um so think about all

the different needs that are coming up today and how you can meet them absolutely now what was your key driving force to become an entrepreneur well i, I have as my purpose, helping leaders thrive with disruption. And I felt that I couldn't do that anymore at where I was. And I kept looking around interviewing to see if there were places where I could do this and join an organization. I like being part of an organization, like being part of a team. And I couldn't find any. So I said, you know, I'm just going to take some time off, hang up my shingle, be independent, you know, create a company so that if I wanted to add more people, I could. And I realized I was really onto something. So I brought on more people and brought on more people, started doing a lot of publishing and

I had a company. So I kind of fell into it, but it was a little bit planned too as well in terms of what the focus and the direction was going to be. But I kind of left it open to say whether it was just going to be me or with a lot of people. And I would rather have done it with a lot of people. But if you had asked me, are you going to start a company? I'm like, nah, because my husband's a serial entrepreneur. I see what he goes through. I'm like, I don't want to do that. And while I am a pretty decent manager, I wouldn't say I was the greatest. I'm not even close to being really good at it. It's not the thing I get out of bed and say, I love managing a team. I don't. It's not where I naturally go to. I'm oftentimes in my head and my heart,

writing and researching and sharing the thought leadership. That's what I really do really well. And so I go back and forth between wanting to activate new ideas and say, no, I don't want to do that. So I kind of go back and forth. But being an entrepreneur is fantastic, not because you can call the shots. If anything, being an entrepreneur means that you are beholden to everybody else. You serve everybody else. The best part about running your own,

starting your own company and running your company is that you're aligned with everybody else and we're all working together on the same thing. You have the same values. You're driven by the same purpose, and there's nothing better than that. And you're aligned around a sense of purpose. Absolutely. Let me go back when you started hiring your team. How did you know that you had the right idea? You don't until you throw it out there. Right. And so you do some testing. Okay. It looks like good. You test two ideas. This seems a little bit better than the other ones that would go with this one. No, no, no. That's not the right one. This one is. So I look at it

this way. Very few ideas are very few decisions you make are permanent. You can always go back with the wrong one. So we were not afraid to try a lot of different things. And so I go back to, you know, when you're starting a company, you're taking a chance. You don't really know what the answer is going to be. All I know is I have a lot of questions and we're going to work together to try to answer them. Wow. And how should leaders respond in chaos like right now? I've recently written quite a bit about this. And I think that the most important one is to give people a sense of safety and security. And that could be as simple as everyone here, everyone okay, take care of yourself and your family first that has to come first then let's take care of ourselves we're here to support each

other but unless you have that safety and security you can't think about anything else so once you have that then you can think about how are we collaborating and changing and working together because we want to make sure we can do that. And then finally, the most important thing is, okay, so where do we go from here? As a leader to say, this is what we're going to focus on. And you don't even have to have all the answers. You can just say, I'm looking at all the chaos. These are the three most important things we have to work on. I don't know what the answer is, but here's the question we have to work on. Here's the problem we have to address. Here are barriers or opportunities that we need to take a closer look at. It's that focus. And I was just reading a quote from Warren Buffett, the difference between successful people and very successful people is that the very successful people say no to virtually everything.

So you have to say no to a lot of different things so that you focus only on the most important things. Wow. And during this coronavirus, what did you learn about yourself, your business and your priorities? I learned about my business, which a lot of it is made up by speaking is that it all went away so it's all gone and i went okay and then um what i also learned again is this idea that even though the physical manifestation of speaking is gone the need for the type of work and the ideas and the training and the thinking that I do is so much more needed

right now. But because there's so much chaos, honestly, I was thrown for the first two weeks of March into a huge funk and was just so upset, so sad. I could see all the huge problems that were going to come down the road, the huge disruption that were going to come down the road, the huge disruption that was going to be there. And this was before lockdown happened. And I was really upset because we weren't going into lockdown. And when we didn't go into lockdown, just kept delaying it, delaying it, I could just see that the number of people who would get sick and die

was just going to be horrendous. So I was thrown into this serious state of funk. I mean, just like depression and grieving. It was a lot of grieving for the world that was about to just completely change. And all around me, people were just going around their daily life. Just like, oh, it's not going to happen. I'm like, oh, no, it's happening. It's happening.

So as soon as lockdown happened, I was much better actually. So it was kind of like, okay, finally we're here. We're here. Now I can move on. And I came back to that purpose again, helping leaders thrive with disruption. That pulled me out. That pulled me out of my funk. And I was so glad to have that there that, you know, once the lockdown was declared here in San Francisco and California, I could then again, focus and that my purpose brought me back to what I needed to focus on and do. So that, that was really instructive to me and just made me realize just how important a sense of purpose, a sense of why you exist, what you get up every morning to do is such an important thing, especially now during this crisis.

Wow. You know, I actually get affected by this. I have a business in the Philippines and we started, I have a resort there. So I get affected early in January, half, I mean, second week of January. And I was telling my friends here, like, this is happening. And they're like, not taking me. So I was like, what do you mean? Like, so I bought actually my supplies. I was prepared because I have to cancel all bookings for all February, March, like I'm already got hurt.

Like so early that I have to refund a big amount. So it's like, oh my God, everyone's still look, you know, normal here. And then this happens. Like I told my friend, see, I told you so. I told you so. Yeah. As an analyst, I learned early on not to say that, those words over and over again. But I look at it this way. This is a, it's an interesting time right now because we are kind of comfortable being in this very uncomfortable space because we know what tomorrow is going to look like. What's really hard is as we restart our lives, we don't know what it's going to look like. And it's going to be really hard for us to leave this nice, somewhat safe cocoon and go out there into the wild where it's unknown.

We might get sick. We might get our loved ones sick. So this is almost a harder time. It was really hard to get the door slammed on us. Then after about a week, you kind of settle down, you figure it out and hopefully no one is sick. And if the family is sick, it's just horrendous. But I find that this next stage, it's going to last for months, this rollercoaster ride as we try to figure out how to go about living a real life. We've been in sort of this stasis for the past month or so. And so it's going to be really hard. I wish I could say it's going to be easy. It's going to be extremely hard. It's really hard. Yeah. And how do you keep your company's culture alive during this pandemic? Well, I sold my company in 2015. So I had an exit, which was like one of the best things ever. So we're part of a new company, a fairly well-established company called Profit. It's

global. It's about 500 people. And it's a great company. It has a great culture. And again, what our CEO has been doing for the past couple of months, couple of weeks, since we went to lockdown, is have a call every Wednesday, global. Everyone's on Zoom. And he's talking about reading letters,

reading posts, sharing emails, doing a little bit of exercise, and just reminding everybody that we're in this together and just sharing and just checking in with everybody. So that is a huge culture boost in terms of creating a shared experience and creating this ritual that we do every week together. And what do you think is the future of retail? Retail. If you don't have an e-commerce, you have to have e-commerce. There's like no way around it. So we've just been pushed,

the entire retail sector has been pushed into the e-commerce space. So you have to have an e-commerce, delivery, all those things. But also how do you engage with people? Because you don't have just sort of the drive-by in the neighborhood, in the mall kind of space. Where are the agency spaces that you can have? And where can you engage and interact with your customers?

The biggest issue with retail is staying on top of the trends, understanding what it is that people want. And so using digital, using social to engage with people, not just influencers, but every single person at that personal level, you can do that at scale. You can do that. I find it very hard because I own a luxury spa and we sell skincare. How do I transform my website to be like an in-store experience? Right. I mean, it's one of those things where you can't smell the things, right? You can't feel the texture anymore. But you think about a different type of experience, not just in-store. In-store, it was just you and the product, but now you can tell an entire story around that product. Where did it come from? Why was it made? What were the decisions that you've made in terms of making these products? What do other people think about

it? Don't just do a review with stars. How has it, how do they use it? Show pictures of how it's being used. What are people's fall-like experiences? And so there's a different way to do storytelling and discovery that because we have the in-store experience, we didn't invest in the digital experience. This is not about replicating and replacing what we lost. This is about creating something new. Yeah. That is the best advice I've ever heard. How to transform your website into like that.

Like that's a new thing. Well, people are looking for experiences. We're dying for experiences. Like, so what do we have? How much more Netflix can we watch before we've watched everything we want to watch? How much more YouTube can we really absorb? A lot. But you realize at some point, I want something, I want an experience that's more interactive. And so if I can go and think about products, escape a little bit and have this custom made experience from me, from the retailer, we can do that. I mean, even small businesses can do that. Wow. That got me thinking so hard now. Yeah. And Charlene, what was your typical day like before coronavirus? And what is it now

as well? On the days when I'm working at home, it's pretty much the same. The biggest difference is I have a lot more meetings on Zoom. So that's the biggest difference. I don't travel anymore. Obviously, I was traveling about half of my time before this. So I actually have a garden that won't die on me. I'm baking a lot. I've always been baking. I have a lot more sourdough going on because I'm actually home. My kombucha looks beautiful. So I'm having I'm doing all my my little home type hobbies because I am home all the time. My cat wants me to go away, I think. But other than that, it's great to be home. And I think that the thing that has been really nice is that just being able to keep a schedule. So in some ways, the coronavirus has

been a huge disappointment and not just the physical distancing, but the social distancing. But in other ways, it has brought people together from my various parts of my life that I have not connected to for years and decades. So the fact that everyone's more comfortable with us and for my family, being able to get together on Zoom a couple of times a week, extended family has been wonderful. I was like, why didn't we do this before? Before, right? Now we are. Yeah. And Charlene, what are some of the mistakes you wish you could have avoided? Yeah. I think my biggest one is with my company. I was, I took my eye off the ball. I was finishing up a book and kind of left it to my team to run. And we both, we all knew that the weak point of the team was really in financial planning

and cash management and cash is always king. So we came to a point where sales didn't come in, cash was going out. We grew too quickly. So I had to do a round of layoffs. And there's nothing worse than that. It was completely my mistake. Grew too fast. Didn't anticipate that the sales, the cash wasn't coming in. And so literally within weeks just had to make a huge change because I just wasn't paying attention. Biggest mistake. And that's on me. Yeah. What, what would you say are the top three skills to be a successful entrepreneur? I think, um, first of all, just generally being a leader,

right? Um, people think that, Oh, I just have to have a great idea. No, you have to be a great leader and leaders, um leaders are creating change, but they also inspire other people. You bring people along. So thinking about how you want to bring people along and in particular your culture. I talked to so many entrepreneurs. I've been on a few boards now and almost none of them talk about culture. I'll do that when I have a hundred people. No, you got to do that right now. Not now. How are you going to show up as a leader?

What kind of culture are you going to set? How are you going to ask people to enter into this adventure called a startup with you? How are you going to treat them? How are you going to give them agency so that they can make decisions and you will step back? How are you going to disagree? We don't have to worry about disagreeing. We all get along great. We're like best friends.

I'm like, you better figure out a way to disagree because you will inevitably. So how are you going to make decisions when it's two people and you both want to go in completely different directions? How are you going to disagree? Got to figure that out. Yeah. And what entrepreneurial tricks have you discovered to keep you focused and productive in your

day-to-day business schedule? I write down every single day what my purpose is, right? So if you don't have a clear vision of what your purpose is, not what your strategy, not what your product is, but why you get up out of bed, get dressed and go to work. You have to be super clear about what it is, because that will keep you focused on the most important things you have to do every day. Not the most urgent, but the most important things. So, and it's really hard to separate out that time to be able to work on the important things. Because everybody is screaming at you. Like, give me this.

Help me with that. I need more cash for this. I need your time to look at some prototype or something. And everyone's going to be demanding your time. And so imagine you only have X number of hours a week to do something. How will you spend those X hours? And I encourage people to not think that they have 80 hours a week because they don't. It's not even 60 hours a week or even 40 hours a week. Let's say it's one hour a day,

two hours a day, and that's all you could work. What would you do first? Now you get another hour. What would you do second? Now you get another hour, what would you do third? And you start allocating your time that way. And then you realize that meeting, that's not on my list of important things to do. We're canceling the meeting. This initiative, not on my most important things to do, not doing it. And so having that discipline, knowing that you only have so many hours a day, and what you focus on is really important. My entire career, I have averaged about 45 hours a week of work. Again, sometimes it flexes up more, sometimes it's less, but on average, it's about 45 hours a week. First of all, I can't think much more than that

because you're not getting my good quality time. Second, as a working parent, I had no choice. If I wanted to be there for my kids and for my family, I had to work 45 hours a week and really cut it off. And then third of all, just for my own sanity, I can't focus on these things unless I have other parts of my life also somewhat being looked at.

So I think I often say to entrepreneurs, you need to work smarter, not harder. And your organization, your products, your customers will be so much better off if you work less. And they look at me thinking, I have no idea what I'm talking about. And they go back and do 80 hours a week because that's what startups do, right?

Isn't that what entrepreneurs do? No, that's a myth. It's a complete myth. Yeah. How old are your kids? They're in college. Oh, they're old. Yeah, they're home right now because their college is all closed down. So it's great to have them around.

I thought they were like 12 or 13. I'm a lot older than I look. Go ahead, I. But they're in college. I'm a mentee nester, as I like to call it, a free birder. I'm a free bird. Yeah, it's great. It's great having them around.

Great to ship them off to college. Great to have them back. And I'll miss them dearly when they go back to school. Now, Charlene, what is your greatest fear and how do you manage fear? I was just saying to my son, my greatest fear is that my kids die before I do. There's nothing, it just strikes me right there, right? And so it's not so much, so I can do all the things. I differentiate between fear and worries. Fear, something clear, very tangible, I make kids go die. Likelihood of that happening, none, very, very low. But I still remind them, buckle up, take your vitamins, whatever it is, be safe, because that's what moms do. But that's addressable, right? Because then I've done all those things. I can set that fear aside. The other types of fear, a fear like failure or something like that. Um, I, it, it doesn't really bother me.

I mean, one of the things I do, I realized when it's holding me back, uh, cause I worry that people aren't going to take me seriously or they're going to say no to me. And I stand back and I go, what happens if they say no? Well, I'll just go find somebody else. And I really address those fears, like really address them. And they become less of an issue and I just move forward. So I do realize, though, that we get fatigued from making those kinds of decisions. So I try to work on my fears and my worries early in the day. That's my biggest piece of advice.

Don't do it late at night right before you go to bed. It's like the worst time because you just have no more psychic energy to deal with this. So if I get a worry or something, I'll jot it down on a piece of paper or put it on my phone and I'm going to deal with it first into my morning. Yeah. And night is always the worst. That's when all the worst started happening. Yeah. But realize that your mind is, in your emotions are doing a trick on you. It's coming up because you're tired and you're tired physically and you're tired emotionally. You're tired psychically. This is not the time to be making decisions. So even sometimes I'll make a decision or whatever. I'll just write it down, but I won't send off the email until the

next morning where I can take a look at it. Like I know, cause I know my brain will be working then. And, um, but it doesn't work at 11 o'clock at night. Yeah. You know, when you write those not so good email and you draft it at night and you hit send like, Oh my God, I wish I could take it back it back i mean the only emails i'll send at night because sometimes i have to are completely factual completely transactional like send me this file send me this whatever i need something completely transactional wow and uh sheldon what advice would you give to an to an aspiring entrepreneurs um don wait. I talked to a woman the other day, and she goes, yeah, I really want to start my own company. And I went, great. So what are you going

to do? And she goes, well, I need to take care of a few personal things. And I was asking her, well, are these personal things like you've got some relatives with health care issues, or you need to move out of your house. I'm like, what are those persons? Is it those kinds of personal things? Or is it personal? Like I need to take a course. I need to do a job before I'm ready to start a company. She was, Oh, definitely. The second I'm like, you're never going to be ready. You're never going to be ready. I mean, who's, who on earth is ready to be an entrepreneur? Cause's the it's the craziest thing to do right you'll never be ready and so like I said I would say what's the one thing you can do to begin

being an entrepreneur today what's the one thing for you to take a step in that direction and if you can't even take that first step then really get yourself ready emotionally, because there's nothing you can do that can prepare you to being an entrepreneur. Other than being an entrepreneur, you can talk to tons of people, read as many magazines as you want, listen to as many of these podcasts as you can, but there's nothing like putting your feet in the water and jumping in. And so I look at it this way. If you don't like it, you can always come back out.

Nothing is permanent. You just walk away. No shame in it. And I think this is the reason why a lot of people don't jump in. It's like, well, what happens if it doesn't work out? I'm not going to be ready for that. I'm like, well, why wouldn't you be ready for that? Do you not have cash? Do you not have the skills? This is the way I always said it. Because I grew up in a medical family. Everybody's doctors and I'm the oldest. And so when I told my father, I wasn't going to be a doctor following his footsteps. And he goes, well, what are you going to do then? I mean, you get this, right? I said, I'm going to go into business. He goes, what do you mean you're going to go into business? There's nobody who looks like you.

They're all men. They're all white. And they're all tall. You are none of those things. And so I'm like, yeah, but worst comes to worst, I type 100 words a minute. And worst comes to worst, I will be the most amazing executive assistant you've ever seen. Right? So I'm pretty confident I'm always going to have a roof over my head. I will always be able to put food on the

table. And knowing that gave me a lot of confidence that no matter what I did, I was going to be okay. And I assured my father and my parents, don't worry about it. I'll be okay. And so I think to say to entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, if you start this business that you are thinking of doing, know that you're going to be okay.

No matter what happens. If it works, great. If it doesn't work, you'll be fine. You still have your skills. You still have your health. You still have your family and your friends who are 100% behind you and supportive of you, you'll be fine. You still have your skills. You still have your health. You still have your family and your friends who are 100% behind you and supportive of you. It will be terrible.

It won't be fun. Either way, it's a huge amount of work either way. And again, I think, you know, even if it's great and awful when it's going really well, it's great and awful when it's going really bad. And it's all an adventure and it's one of the most wonderful adventures you could ever go on that's true now charlene is your dad still alive he is okay so what does he think now when he like remember that time when he

questioned you to be an entrepreneur what was he think of you now? Like, well, he, when I said, I thought he was going to be really upset about it. And he says, well, you'll be fine. So, and he was like, yeah, you'll be fine. I goes, he goes, I know nothing about that world. All I see is a ton of prejudice and no role models for you to follow, but Hey, you're smart. You're ambitious. You're figure it out. So I think that was one of the biggest blessings I had growing up is that my parents were unconditionally a hundred percent behind me. And I always knew that. I never doubted once, not even once that they weren't a hundred percent behind me even to this day. Right. So it's, it's wonderful to have people like that. And I'm

considering myself incredibly lucky to have that relationship with them. They don't always agree with me. But yeah, they get, they get very proud and very happy. They watch every single one of the videos that I post online. It's very funny. They call me like, Hey, I like that part, but your hair didn't look very good. That's so amazing. Now, Charlenelene how do you want to be remembered that's really good i just recently wrote my five wishes which is like a um a living will that gives instructions to people and i wrote in there i want to be remembered as somebody who really helped people um find uh, their purpose, and help them thrive. I keep going back to my purpose, helping leaders thrive with disruption. And I would hope I would

be remembered for that, that people will look back and they can recall the impact that I had on their lives and that was positive. So that's what I want to be remembered for, because what else could you ask for? I mean, somebody came up to me the other day and said, you know, you ran this newspaper at this conference and it completely changed my life. I'm a journalist not because of that. And I completely forgotten that I had done that. Completely forgotten. And so what I remember, what I try to do every single day is that it's not the big things. It's not the getting in front of 5,000 people that makes a difference. It's when you're walking down the street

and you look somebody in the eye and you say hello to them, you wave to them, you see each person for their individual gifts that they have. That's probably the best gift that you can give is to be present for whoever it is that you were there for. Because you never know what kind of impact

and impression they will have one of the most impactful people I ever met was this person I talked for maybe about three minutes and I was being checked in to go do an interview at a conference and she was just like a temporary person just checking people in saying sit here wait okay now it's your turn, go in. And she had on her arm the word adventure tattoo. And so I asked her, that's a really cool tattoo. Why is that there? And she said, it's because I've been traveling the world for two years and decided to settle down here.

And it's to remind me to look for the adventure in my everyday, that I don't have to go halfway around the world to find adventure. I can find it just exactly where I am. And then I was doing the interview and that was it. I don't remember who she is. I'll never be able to find her. Hopefully one day she listens to one of these podcasts and says, hey, I have a tattoo. Am I on this as adventure? Maybe she was a person. I'd love to connect with her again. But you never know where you're going to have these learnings true yeah now can you name of a person who has a tremendous impact on you as a leader yes um i just recently met up with her her name is kathy h she was my first boss at right out

of business school she was like two levels above me or whatever. She was like my mentor at the San Jose Mercury News and had an MBA, had young kids. And she was just, just really helped me see how to do this working professional women, just a tremendous role model on so many levels. And every time I see her, it's like once every decade or so, it's just great to see her connect and just learn something more from her. So it's's it's one and and i don't know so much if it's a mentor relationship but just her being and operating and and leading in the way that she was um really taught me a lot because the way that she developed relationships with people so genuine genuinely interested in people really foster that kind of relationship with people and i think if you ask people what kind of leader they aspire to be, it's usually somebody like a Kathy Yates.

They have somebody who they really gravitated towards as a leader, really admire. And we consciously or subconsciously try to be that leader too as well. And what are you most grateful for? Oh, so many things. So so many things I write down my gratitude let's see what did I write down for you for yesterday um I wrote that I liked this little cake that had was in the shape of a pig that we ate the other day so just like just brought so much joy that there was this little pink moussey cake, you know, but I am also really grateful for my family, my husband, my husband has been so supportive in terms of making all of this possible. And then my kids just at same roof has been wonderful. We have dinner every night.

And I think you hear this from people over and over again, that during this time, it's been amazing to see, to gather with the family and really realize what's the most important things in our lives, our family and our friends, our community. These are the things that we keep at the center of our lives and we take for granted. And we can't. We really have to have gratitude for that and invest in it and preserve it. Wow. Well, Charlene, I had such a great time talking to you. I wish I could talk to you forever.

Yeah, thank you so much. It's such an honor having you here. And where can they find you? You can find me at my website, charlenelee.com. But you can find me at my website, charlenelee.com, but you can find me on all the usual social sites. I also have a new community called Quantum Networks. So it's quantum-networks, with an S, dot com.

And it's a community for disruptive leaders. I feel that I'm very passionate about the fact that we need more leaders, confident and capable of driving disruption and exponential growth and impact in our organizations, but also in our communities

and in society. We need more people out there to create huge amounts of change because we have so many problems that need to be addressed right now. So I hope if you're interested in finding more about it, it's a free community

and people are in there supporting each other on quantum-networks.com. I'll definitely join in. Thank you so much and have a wonderful day. Thank you. Take care. Bye Sherilyn. Bye-bye. We hope you enjoyed the show. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and visit katehancock.com so you don't miss out on the next episode.