Motley Fool Money - Do CEOs Need Term Limits?

Episode Date: August 6, 2022

What does it take to be a great CEO in 2022? Leading with a True North, and breaking down some of the crusty hierarchical structures. Some leaders get it, and some really don’t. During Bill George��s tenure at Medtronic, the company’s market cap rose from $1 billion to $60 billion. He believes that leading with authenticity is one of the reasons he was able to help do that. Ricky Mulvey caught up with George to discuss his forthcoming book, “True North: Leading Authentically in Today's Workplace” as well as: - How Best Buy CEO Corie Barry pivoted during the pandemic - Mark Zuckerberg vs Satya Nadella - Why more companies may benefit from giving CEOs a term limit - Mary Barra’s big goals at General Motors - How to find your own True North Stocks mentioned: MDT, MSFT, META, BBY, VMEO, GM Host: Ricky Mulvey Guest: Bill George Engineer: Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, I'm Charlie Cox. Join us on Disney Plus as we talk with the cast and crew of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. What haven't you gotten to do as Daredevil? Being the Avengers. Charlie and Vincent came to play. I get emotional when I think about it. One of the great finale of any episode we've ever done. We are going to play Truth or Daredevil.

What? Oh, boy. Fantastic. You guys go hard. Daredevil Born Again official podcast Tuesdays, and stream season two of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again on Disney Plus. CEOs instead of talking about last quarter's earnings, look, that's history. It's interesting, but it's history.

You should be talking about market share, net promoter scores, customer satisfaction, new products, new innovation, what's coming? What do your employee survey is showing in terms of the engagement of your employees? I'm Chris Hill, and that's Bill George. He knows a thing or two about spotting great leaders. He's a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School, and before that, he spent a decade. decade as the CEO of Medtronic, overseeing the growth in the company's market cap from $1 billion to $60 billion. Ricky Mulvey caught up with Bill George to talk about how investors like us can evaluate CEOs,

turnarounds at Microsoft, General Motors, and Best Buy, and why more companies could benefit from giving CEOs a term limit. Let's first talk about what a True North is, and then we're going to have a discussion about maybe some leaders with a strong true north, maybe ones that are wavering from it a little bit, and then we'll see where we go from there. Your true north is who you are. It's your most deeply held principles that you lead by, your beliefs, and your values. And it's also where you find fulfillment and satisfaction in your life. It's not about the external money, fame, and power. It's really about who you are.

It's not about external identities. And I think it's so important. that every leader, every person, discovery their true north. Let's say you're struggling to find that a little bit. You don't know where to start. What are some questions you would encourage a listener if you were to ask themselves to help find where their true north is leading them? I think it starts some introspection, going back and looking at your life story. Who am I?

Where did I come from? Who influenced me early in my life? What would my parents influence, mentors, coaches, teachers that had a big influence. and what shaped me as a person. And then second, then to look at kind of in your lifeline the difficult times you face, which we call crucibles. And I think that's where all the pretense is stripped away and you find out who you really are. And so looking at that hard because a lot of times with crucible,

people say, I don't want to talk about that. Actually, it's where you learn more about yourself than anything else. Because when things are going well, you kind of think you're better than you are. but in a crucible moment, you have to look at yourself in the mirror and say, hey, do I have to change? You know, who am I? And I think that is critical to so many leaders of development because oftentimes they find in that what do they really want to do with their lives. It took you a little while to find your true North. You write about how you found it in your 30s.

I would say doing professionally well at Honeywell, but personally not finding a lot of satisfaction in it. What it take for you to find your true North? Well, actually, Ricky, it goes back deeper than that. I'm an only child of older parents. My father wanted me to lead a big company. And he, you know, I'm nine or ten. He's even naming companies like Coke, Cole and Procter & Gamble. But I saw, you know, never as elected lead anything in high school and junior high.

Finally, threw my hat in the ring me of president's senior class, lost by a margin of two to one. So you see, kids in our school didn't think I was a leader, which I wasn't. So I went off to college and repeated the same thing at Georgia Tech. And I ran for lecture six more times. I was over six. And now I'm really feeling down. And some people, seniors at the school gave me the best advice I ever got. Said, Bill, no one's ever going on to be working with you, much less be led by you because

you're moving so fast to you the head, you'd never take time for other people. And you know what? They were right. And so I kind of put my own self-help leadership development program together. Now, it's interesting all the way into my latter Honeywell years when I was on the way. It was actually in my early 40s. on the way to the top of Honeywell, and I was one of two leading candidates. But then again, you know, I had the same issue I had way back in high school and college of trying to need that

title. So I'm looking for be chairman and CEO of Honeywell, and decision was about three years off. One day, I was driving home, and I looked myself in the mirror, and when I saw it was a miserable person, me. Why? How can you be miserable? Because, you know, I had a great wife and two great kids, great friends. I was miserable because I was losing sight of my true north. I was losing sight. I was putting more emphasis on getting the title than I was in helping develop other people. And it kind of turned out it was more about me than it was about the team. And I wasn't passionate at all about the business. So I talked to my wife about it, talked to some friends, finally had the courage to call Medtronic back. I'd turn the company down three times to be number

to in the company, much smaller company at that time. You know, and I felt like when I went to the company, I felt like it was coming home to a company with a really great mission of restoring people to full life and health and a great set of values I could relate to. And my job was to build a company from what it was at that time, $750 million to, well, I can't take credit for going to $32 billion today. But it clearly was to put them on that course where the company wanted to go. But I think if I hadn't gone through that tough time, I would never have taken.

done a good job at Metroni. Let's focus on some leaders who have found a True North, some who haven't. One you highlight in the book is Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. You've had some conversations with him. In your view, why is he a leader with a strong True North? And then also, I mean, that's got to be intensely difficult to maintain when you're running a company worth a couple trillion dollars. So how do you think he maintains it? Yeah, exactly. Well, Satya, I had been with Mike Shawf, he's a lifer. And he took over from Steve Baumar. Honestly, the company had been going sideways for 14 years under Balmer. They missed every single new opportunity coming along in Silicon Valley and then the whole IT field. And wisely, Thacha came in and he knew how to lead with his heart, not just his head. And he'd had a crucible early in his life when his son Zane was born with cerebral palsy. And Shacha really, as a computer engineer, had to learn some empathy. In fact, he said to his wife said, wow, this is going to be really,

we're having a really tough life, but the son was cerebral palsy. And his wife pulled him up short and said, Sacha, if you think it's going to be tough for us, how do you think it's going to be for our son? Well, sadly, his son just died this winter at age 26, but he did have a good life for 26 years. But that changed Sacha, and he realized that you had to lead with empathy. You had to have compassion for people. and your customers and your employee. Beyond that, he said, you know, we used to think we were God's gift of creation back in the late 90s.

And we had to go from learn it all to know it all. So he challenges everyone. How are you growing? And I think that's why he's built such a great company. He's got a group of tremendous people, but he's very customer-oriented, client-oriented, very oriented towards his people. And as a result, stock price has gone up eight times since he took over 2014. So that's pretty good. I wish I'd invested back in 14 with him.

And it's always easy to look back in retrospect, but that was a stock that had suffered for, I think, more than a couple decades under Steve Balmer. And I guess, as you would call it, the know-it-all instead of learn-it-all style of leadership that seemed to have dominated, I would say, maybe the 20th century of CEOs. You nailed it. I tried to work with Balmer really hard, and I'd gone out and met with Bill Gates. But it was impossible because it was all we want to dominate you. We couldn't be a partner. And it was all about ego, you know. And, you know, it was. It was about charisma, power, ego, and how much money they can make.

You know, and that wasn't what we wanted to do. So we had to pull back now. Medtronic is partnered with them. So that just shows you, though, how leadership, as you said, has changed from the 20th century when I was CEO to today. I'd say it's actually much harder today because, expectations are so high of leaders, but you can't get away with just being a big, powerful person on top.

But also, it must be, there's got to be some sort of balance. If you're Satya Nadella, you know, you're dealing with thousands of employees. You can't listen to everyone's individual concerns, which would seem to me to make it even more difficult to lead with the style of empathy you're talking about. No doubt. And I think, you know, it's not just trying to create an inclusive organization. organization or everyone feels a sense of belonging. Yeah, but you have to really care about your employees, but you can't take it out every complaint everyone has, but you do have to and build

leaders at all levels. See, I think with a powerful command and control leader, you build, you build followers. I don't believe in that. I think people want to lead. And the whole purpose of my new book, the Emerging Leader Edition of True North is to say, open up the door to people in their 20s and 30s and 40s. Don't make them stand alive. They don't want to be followers. They want to show their own creativity. And that's exactly what Satch has done. I can tell you, I had the door open for me, Ricky, when I was 27 years old, I got the chance to be general manager and then president of the Litton Industries microwave valve division. Well, at the time I started in 1970, there was no microwave oven market. It didn't exist. So we had to build the market.

And hey, it was very challenging for a young guy like me, the people who work with me on average or about twice my age and made twice as much money. But what was important is I had to find out how to bring people together. But somebody gave me that opportunity to learn how to do it and how to build a company. Then grew the company 20 times in eight years. So it was a very exciting ride.

And I love the experience. And I think companies need to look, who are your young talents? And let's give them a chance to show they don't have to go through every step before he give him the job. On the flip side of that in your book, you highlight Mark Zuckerberg for perhaps the wrong reasons. I'm a shareholder in meta, perhaps unfortunately right now. But in your view, why is Mark Zuckerberg exactly the leader you kind of don't want to be

in this new inclusive 21st century environment? Mark is a brilliant guy, and he did. He had a brilliant idea about building a social network. But he started age 19. He never took time to learn his true north. And he was measuring everything by how many, how many users? as he have. And frankly, he never really went back to figure out clearly, at least never would admit how many of those are bots and phony users, and frankly, some pretty evil people.

And I remember he found out right after the 16 election that Cambridge Analytica had invaded their site and influenced a lot of people. And he suppressed that information for two years because he didn't want to hurt his user base. And why didn't he come forward and admit that? Then it became a huge scandal. So he's never solidified in his values on what he's believed. He talks a great game. And so I even thought, you know, frankly, I think they're losing if you want to know the truth because just this week he came out and, you know, they have down earnings. But that's not as important. What's important and they lost, they're losing users because everyone's moving away from Facebook. And so now what's he going to do is no longer going to be a friend

site, which was the core, he's going to move it to more like TikTok. And you know what TikTok is. it's something my, nothing, my 10-year-old granddaughters love to use TikTok and make videos, but that's not what Facebook. So, and I think the whole meta is a great idea, but it's maybe five, 10 years off. And I think that's because he's seen Facebook tipping over. So I think you see sites like LinkedIn doing much better because I respond to every comment. I get LinkedIn because they're really serious thoughtful comments. And I learn a lot every time I get comments. So I think you can see Mark never solidified in that. And it's, really too bad. There's some others, unfortunately. We have the stars of Silicon Valley, but also

people like Elizabeth Holmes, which created a phony company. And so did Adam Newman at WeWork. There's nothing wrong with the idea. But in Elizabeth's case, I knew it wouldn't work. I'm in the healthcare business. I was on the Mayo board. We talked about it's not going to work. But in Adam Newman's case, you know, it's real estate. If you want to sell real estate, fine, but don't try to fake it. You wrote about Elizabeth Holmes. And I want to dig into the comment that you kind of knew it wasn't going to work. There were a lot of investors, very, very smart people who kind of got suckered into the scheme. What did you see at the time? Well, first of all, I know a lot about blood draws. I'm on the board of Mayo and I consult with

the top doctors in Mayo. There's no way one finger prick, one drop of blood can replace a whole draw from your arm and allow them to do 400 or 500 tests and differentiate it. And there's a lot of things on your fingers to keep it from being a clean drop. But beyond that, she didn't do the testing. She wouldn't be honest. Mayo had an agreement with her, and she never would find any data in Mayo, and so they never got going because they said, until we can see correlating data between what you're doing, we're not going to risk our patients' lives. And so I think she wouldn't go through all the steps. Now, I feel sorry for her. She's going to jail as a young woman to just try to move too fast. Yeah, a lot of people got, a lot of very smart people got suckered into that

deal. But that's the problem. If you don't really, know what you're investing in, in the end you're not going to do well. Crypto may sound good, but you better know what you're getting into before you dive into these kind of investments. So you can see, I'm working, serving a lot of people. At least is investing, not in business, but investing. With a lot of those leaders as well, it's people who seem to get suckered into the cult of personality versus essentially true leadership. You described this in your book is searching for Wii leaders. I guess, as a stock investor, someone who's kind of farther away from the company, what are some signs of spotting a wee leader? And then in a moment, I'd like to

highlight Anjali Sud, the CEO of Vimeo, who you highlighted in True North. The eye leaders put themselves ahead. They're more interested in money, fame, and power for their own sake than they are in building the company. And I have said to CEOs, we teach CEOs at heart. I said, if you have anyone on your team that's putting their own self-interest ahead of the companies, move them out. You don't need those kind of people. The company's interests have to come first. You have to build a team and build a company where you take advantage of your teammates. It's like I went to Medtronic, and I knew nothing about medicine. I knew a lot about technology, but nothing about medicine. So I teamed with a doctor and highlighted the people that are real experts in medicine. And boy, that gave us a powerful team. And then we brought in a brilliant CFO and some other things. But the important thing is that you build a great team at the top. No company today can be successful with a single individual on top. Even Mark Benioff, who's a fantastic leader and a very, you know, very charismatic individual. He has a co-CEO. He's turned over. You know, he's got a partnership. And of course, that's why Tim Cook did so well at Apple because he'd been Steve Jobs

partner. You need that team at the top, going all the way back to the guys at Intel like Andy Grove and Bob Noyes and Gordon Moore. They were the team. So the best thing to do is look to see who is that team and is the CEO taking all the credit or not. But watch out for that, because it will implode over time. And Anjali-Sood, Vimeo is someone who embodies that, someone building a great team around her. Of course, that's a company that might be going through some cruciples right now coming public via SPAC and then like a lot of software as a service companies, kind of getting hammered by the market. But can you talk about her leadership and why you chose her to exemplify this.

Yeah, by the way, getting hammered by the market, a lot of companies do that, particularly startup, and you just have to power through that phase to stay true to what you believe. And she had this idea of transforming Vemio. She got the job at a very young age. And so she, a little bit like I tried to do in the microwave business, build a strong team around her. And I think that's what's led to her success. Another woman who's done that at very young age is John Hyman and run the

runway. And when COVID hit, man, their business model, you know, people weren't going to fancy dinner parties and balls. So why do I want to get your dresses? And she really transformed rent the runway under great pressure and still under some pressure. But, you know, she has that team. And I think that's what counts is you have people around you who have different skills. And I think your thing as a leader, Ricky, think what you've got to do is like you're trying to build a great sports team. You know, you don't want to take your point. yard and play them at center. You know, you want to build a team where people are best in their position. But you don't want to have all stars that won't play to each other, won't give each other

the ball. So you have to get people to play together as a team. So it only works when people are in their sweet spot, which is where they're really good and they're highly motivated, and then they play together as a team. So if you get too many stars on your team, it will fall apart, like AOL time, Warnered did years ago. And so I think that's the key to building a Wii organization in my opinion. That's what I've tried to resolve my career. Through the pandemic, you've certainly gotten a lot of new material for the new edition of True North. And I think one of the interesting pivots that happened in the pandemic as well that you highlight is Best Buy with CEO Corey Berry. Here you have a CEO who did not even

want the role, which in some ways would make you think that she's even more suited for it, right? Like power should maybe be for those who don't seek it as much. But how did Best Buy pivot during the pandemic? And why do you think Corey Berry was, was, was, so suited to make that pivot well. She did a brilliant job. She's 44 years old when she took over a CEO Best Buy and her successor, Hugh Bergeraldi, who I know extremely well, had been highly successful. And the company had totally turned around.

She took it over when she's at its peak. Well, she's been in the job about six months when all of a sudden she sees COVID coming from Asia. She misjudges that initially think it's a problem with her supply chain. Then she said, when she's out coming to Seattle, she said, oh, my God. it's going to spread throughout the U.S. And she, in a matter of like two weeks, totally transformed the company. And she closed down 1,026 stores. She had to furlough 52,000 people and changed their stores from places where people

who went in to look at all the equipment to do everything online, to really beef up their online ordering, and then put in a whole different way of selling where the stores became more distribution centers. and you could drive up and have so-called touchless, some of you deliver your television set, your computer. And frankly, the business flourish because all of a sudden people are working at home and they need to have computers at home and they need to be fully equipped with it. Your phones like you have or whether they have multiple screens at Harvard.

They gave us like two or three screens. You know, you just had to change everything overnight. So that's a leader that was very flexible and transformed. And her predecessor even said, you never want to lay people off. Well, she did for a little people, but as early as May, she started calling him back. And so that's that's at flexibility. But what she did is also extremely important. She laid out three criteria of what we're going to do, none of which had to do a short-term

profitability. It had to do with long-term value creation. And, of course, she cut her own salary 50 percent and the salary of all her executives because they had to preserve cash and she took down her lines of credit. But she knew the most important thing is that we're preserving our, relationship with our customers. And so she did that, I think, extremely well. And it paid off for her. And that's the mark of a really good leader. So I'm very proud of her. I think she's doing a great job. Great leaders also have great mentors. How did Hubert Jolie help prepare

Cory Berry for that role in those crucibles? You know, Corey was kind of not the odds-on favorite. There was somebody who'd been running all their stores, had been her boss and maybe 10, 15 years older. and Hubert saw her potential. And he says, I'd like you, conserving CEO. And she says, oh, no, I'm not ready for that. I happy to be CFO, which I am now. And he said, well, I want you to go home and think about it. So she writes him a 10-page paper and says,

here's all the reasons I can't do the job. So he said, let's have dinner. And he went down each one of the points and helped her see she could do the job and realized she was the right person for it. And a great teaming relationship. And he stayed with her as a mentor even now that he's no longer. on the board. Talking about companies that really focus on customers, you write in True North, quote, in my experience, many proponents of maximizing shareholder value never understood how

companies create sustainable shareholder value, or they don't care because they are simply short-term traders of stocks, not long-term investors in companies. What led you to that conclusion? Because I think we don't understand how shareholder value is created. It's not created by saying we're going to earn $3.91 a share or buying back, as General Electric did under Jeff, ML, $50 billion in shares to try to get the stock price up. That's artificial. That's financial engineering. That's what a lot of these guys that have failed. But the only way you can create sustainable shareholder value is create better value for your customers than any your competitors can and create unique value with it. That's what Tim Cook does at Apple. That's what Chacha is doing in Microsoft.

So if you can create that unique value, then you're going to have, and that's what motivates your employees. When you go out and talk to, not your senior executives, go on talk to the front line and people, employees, they don't understand, you know, 390 want to share. They understand if I'm making 1,000 heart valves a year and one out of 1,000 is defective, someone's going to die. They understand perfect quality. They understand innovation that can save a life from new medical advances.

they understand working and working with doctors and supporting them. That applies to every business. It applies to finance, the great financial companies like U.S. Bank and Goldman Sachs. And Goldman Sachs had to go through a little transformation. We realize that you make money for your customers, not off your customers. And when you do that, you can create sustainable share of it because it's going to drive your profits. It's going to drive your revenues. And, you know, growth does a lot of good things going when you're growing.

and you throw off a lot of profitability, but you have to reinvest in the business, you have to invest in R&D, invest in your people, invest in capital. And companies that just cut it short, cut, cut, cut, that's what happened to Boeing. That's just a tragic example. So it wasn't just a 737 max. It said Boeing decided it was more important to buy back stock than it was to invent new planes. And my friend, Alam, a lot of you, before he went to Ford was there, should have been the CEO. And, but, you know, Boeing, that's how they got in trouble.

Notably, 346 people died in two crashes. But hey, from a shareholder value standpoint, billions and billions lost off their stock value because they didn't make the right investments long term. So that's what I'm saying. Look at what people are doing to build for the long term, and are they continuing to invest in a company. When they stopped doing that like GE did, and it was just cut, cut, cut, you're never going to get there.

an idea among stock investing now. It's, well, backtracking a little bit. It is sort of a strange relationship, which is if you're buying stock in a company, I don't want you to focus on too much on me as the investor. I want you to think about your customers. And one of the great metrics that I think is not talked about is the net promoter score. Are your customers willing to recommend your product to other people? And that might be, it doesn't show up in the financial reports, but I think it's something that is as I start thinking about investing more, something that's going to drive a lot of decisions for me in the future. You know, this is very true.

We should be CEOs instead of talking about last quarter's earnings. Look, that's history. It's interesting, but it's history. You should be talking about market share, net promoter stores, customer satisfaction, new products, new innovation, what's coming? And on one hand, on the other hand, what are your employee surveys showing in terms of the engagement of your employees? You know, Gallup has some terrifying surveys.

So, you know, 30% of, only 30% of the people are engaged. I said, well, I get rid of the other 70%. But companies that are not engaged in employees and they're turned off are going downhill. I can tell you, it is just inevitable. You've seen this in a lot of big retailers that are eventually gone out of business. And yeah, they try to, Jay Crew tries to come back of the gap. Some of these retailers, they aren't coming back. You know, the ones they tell of their employees like Walmart and Target app are going to flourish.

So you've got to look, I think, beneath the numbers to see what's really happening and how motivated other people. And that's how I think you can do good long-term investments. One way that you can be a more engaged leader is to see yourself as a CEO as a coach for your organization. I've heard you say that Mary Barra, General Motors, is one of the best in the business. What is she doing to be a great coach for her employees, pushing them, encouraging thought diversity, and then also holding extraordinarily high standards. Ricky, let me preface that. I grew up in Michigan, and I watched for 50 years General Motors going downhill.

They had brilliant financial people. You know what? They never focused on cars that people wanted to buy. Their market share went from over 50% of the U.S. market to like 18%. Look, if you have that, you've got to realize people are voting with their feet because you aren't designing high-quality cars, and they had this problem in the ignition switch. And just when Mary took her, she knew nothing about it. She was in charge of R&D.

They sent, when people died in a crash, they didn't send it to the design department, the quality department to get her fixed. They sent it to the legal department. So she came in and she had to go in front of Congress. And she said, we have to transform the culture. We have a sick culture and we have to change the culture. That was pretty gutsy. And Congress typically mocked her about this.

She was absolutely right. And she has done just that. Now, understand all these finance people that came in never got engaged in the business. never got their fingers during, never designed a car, never really were involved at the root of the car business. She'd been there since 18 years old. They helped send her to Kettering to get her engineering degree in Stanford Business School. But she has been there, I think, now over 40 years. She knows the business. She knows the labor union. She knows the people. She knows what their life is like. She knows the front line. And so she cares about her employees. And then she's done a great job organizing and bringing in new people. She's in a lot of her people.

She sends a lot of her people to my class at Harvard Visdom. It's a totally different type of General Motors executive. It's not these arrogant people that know it all. It's more like Microsoft. These are really good people that are really learning. How are they going to shift electric cars? And she gets them all aligned around this idea of zero, what is it, zero emissions, zero congestion, zero accidents. I mean, amazing, you know, big vision.

And then what she's done is, but she's very challenging. She says, I hope we'll never forget. get this ignition switch problem. We've got to speak up for safety and never have another quality problem. Well, that's idealistic, but the idea is. And then she's out there working with the people rolling up her sleeve, solving problems. So that's what a good coach does today. I don't think we need people command and control people sitting up giving orders. I think we need people that really are coaches for their employees and bring out the best. I think their job, and my mission personally, is to bring out the full potential in every person.

And in that, what you would want and someone you're working for, someone who is more interested in your full potential in helping you develop than he or she was in themselves. As we wrap up our time together, one final question. You gave yourself a sort of 10-year term limit as the CEO of Medtronic. Do you think those sorts of term limits help limit the desire for power? And do you think more companies would benefit from those sort of term limits for CEOs? Absolutely. I think they would. I don't know if it's 10 or 12. All I know is that before, after I was elected CEO, but before it actually took over, I told the board, in a high-tech creative company, you need new energy, new people coming in. And so I should now work here more than 10 years. I have no contract. You can fire me anytime. And I held it to the day and I would count succeeded me. But I think what, you know, I think what's more important, Ricky, is that we're going to be.

We're giving the younger people a chance to step in. David Solomon, son that at Gobin, when he took over, you've got to elevate the emerging leaders. See, your generation of leaders knows how to lead in crisis. That's all you've seen for the last 20 years since the Twin Towers toppled with al-Qaeda back in 2001. And then we had global financial meltdown. That was, I was in front lines of Gobin's axe. And yeah, it was terrifying. No one knew what was going to happen. And we went to the great recession. Now we've got COVID. We have Russia invading Ukraine. You've not seen an invasion like this in your lifetime. I'm too young to have remembered World War II, but that's the last time we saw anything like that. And, you know, what it's creating, gas prices, food shortages, inflation. Are we going into recession? Very confusing times.

And I think you need a different caliber of CEOs. You need caliber of CEOs that pull out the best in everyone and creates an inclusive environment. It doesn't look at what people color of their skin or where they were born is what can they contribute to the company. And so I think it needs a whole news. I think the baby rumors, to be honest, have had their day. And it's time to step aside and let the emerging leaders,

Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z step aside and the baby boomer step aside and let the younger emerging leaders take over. And I'll tell you, they will perform like Gary Bore Berry and Angelouet, and many others have. That's Bill George. He's the co-author of True North Emerging Leader Edition, which he wrote with Zach Clayton. Bill, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against.

So don't buy ourselves stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.