The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 392: Robert Rosenberg - Leadership Lessons From The Former CEO Of Dunkin Donuts

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

Text LEARNERS to 44222 Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12 Notes: Sustaining Excellence = Passion for what they do Persistence - "Life is lumpy." People fall and have to dust themselves off. Character - Must be trustworthy, caring, and sensitive to others Values driven - "When things go wrong, take the pain" Bill Gates is an example of sustained excellence - "His persistence, his relationship with his wife Melinda. He's a great example of sustained excellence." Bob describes the time early in his career when he made big mistakes and the board fired him. He said, "I needed to learn strategy. You can't blame your followers. You must take 100% ownership." Read the book, The Best and The Brightest by David Halberstam "You need humility, you need to learn, you need emotional intelligence." How he felt when he got fired? "Unbelievably sad. It hung heavy on my shoulders." There are two ways to respond: Be a victim Be introspective "I remember the moment vividly. I was reading The Best and The Brightest. Hubris was the problem. They weren't going to the front lines to understand what was happening. I thought, Oh my God, Halberstam could be talking about me." "Our job is to LISTEN, get feedback, and fix it." As a leader, you must have the willingness and ability to define reality, not what you want it to be. Read Max Dupree - The Art of Leadership Understand The Stockdale Paradox - "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose —with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be." ~ James Stockdale Building trust in a crisis: The 4 elements to be trustworthy: Sincerity - "Your public and private conversations should be the same" Competence - It's not the same as never making a mistake. Reliability - "Make promises. Deliver on those promises" Care - "Treat people well. Care for their well being. It's not transactional. Treat them with dignity and respect." How Bob stays so sharp at age 82: Lots of exercise - He trains 5 days a week Time with grandchildren Planning - "I still have a lot of gas left in the tank" Have a dream -- "Happiness is a mood. You can design a mood." Satisfaction Peace Fulfillment The four primary functions of a leader: Strategy - The CEO must shepherd the strategy People - Get the right people in the right jobs Communication - Align all constituencies behind the business. People must understand the mission Evolve - The world changes. Find a small team of experts to identify the issue, and leave the rest of the team alone to do their work "You need thrill customers continuously." "People will always be evaluating you as a leader. They look at your body language, and see how you respond." Hiring qualities Bob looks for in a leader: Crisp thorough about the job assignment. Complementarity - The use Gallup's strengths. Focus on strengths and them filling a gap on the current team. Fit the culture. Need to be able to work with a team and collaborate.

The world is constantly changing. It's the one constant you can count on, and you have to be adaptable and agile. One of the things that's, I think, core to good strategy is the willingness and the ability to define reality. Not the world as you want it to be, not the comfortable world that you're in, but the world as it really is and how it's moving in the future. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show, presented by Brixton Meyer. I am Ryan Hawk.

Thank you so much for being here. Text, learners to 4422. In order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world. Received Mindful Monday updates. What I'm reading, writing, watching, thinking about. Also give you more details about how my book, Welcome to Management will help you

become a more effective leader. Text, learner. to 4-4-222. Now on to tonight's feature leader, the great Robert Rosenberg, former CEO of Duncan Donuts. Bob took a company with 100 shops and $10 million in sales when he first became CEO and grew it to 6,500 outlets and nearly $2.5 billion in sales the year he retired throughout his 35-year tenure. Bob dealt with the near-death business challenges of a class action lawsuit and a hostile takeover battle, among other tumultuous changes, all of which threatened the very existence of the now world-famous Duncan Donuts brand. A few of the topics we discussed. He shares the four primary functions of a leader and how you can do those effectively.

And then there is one book at one critical moment in Bob's life that changed the course of their business forever. And he shares that. And then how to lead and build trust in times of crisis. Ladies and gentlemen, I know you'll get a lot of value out of this one with Robert Rosenberg. Bob Rosenberg, I guess your former name is Robert, but you told me to call you Bob. So it's good to have you here on The Learning Leaders Show. Welcome. Thank you. My pleasure, Ryan. I've been looking forward to this one and to get us going quickly.

Bob, you have an amazing story and we're going to get to a lot of it. But if you had to think about the leaders that have been in your sphere who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time, what have you found to be a few of the behaviors those people have in common? My observation is that those that sustain for long periods of time do have some common elements. I think a passion for what they do, I think a passion for the job that they hold, persistence is incredibly important. I often tell my children, life is lumpy. Very few people ever come through across the river without falling off the rocks and into the water

having to get back up and dust themselves off and continue on. That was certainly the case with me in my journey. And I think it's true most people, not only in business, but people in life in general. So persistence is a wonderful characteristic you have. And I think behind it, you'll also find a couple of other things. I think you'll find people of good character. By that I mean people who are trustworthy, who are authentic, who are real, who are caring, sensitive to other people. Basically, business life is really a social activity, it's a social enterprise, and people are at the core of it. And the more successful, the relationships, generally the more successful, I think the outcomes are likely to be, whether it's a family, a country, or a business, I think all those things apply. And so I place character

at a high level in terms of looking at people that have been successful. So as a beginning, I think we'll probably touch on others as we go along, but those are the first things that sort of pop into my mind in terms of my observation of leaders who have been successful, people I look to for inspiration. And those are the things I look for, style, character, very, very good. And I look for. And values all critically important. And I think you have to find them for long, live executives who have achieved some elements of success, I think, if you pull back the curtain. And I think the other element, I would say, the one that really pops in.

And it's the one I touched on earlier. It really is a people activity. And my own view is that when you look at the success of a family or business or a country, it's never generally one person riding in on a white horse to save the day. you often will find one or two or three people that are highly compatible, highly complimentary in sets of skills, people who like each other, respect each other, maybe even say go so far as to love each other, that are working together to complement and help, that no one's competing for the limelight, that there's plenty to go around out of success to share with everybody, both the rewards,

as well as the glory. and the other thing I would say that falls to the leader is when things go wrong, you have to take the pain. And when things go right, you have to be able to share the credit. And I think that's another hallmark of a successful leader. So I'm giving you a whole. Oh, man. A whole partful of things that cross-minded. I guess the thought I had is, is like, who's a person or two maybe that come to mine?

that has this passion and persistence and great character. They're trustworthy and caring and sensitive to others. And they take the blame when things are tough and they give credit when things go well. Who is a person or two that comes to mind immediately that you've been fortunate to have in your life? Well, not so much directly in my life, but people that I read about that I have taken on as models. And quite obviously, we're all human. we all have our strengths and weaknesses. We all have fallibilities.

But the person that I look to often and read a lot about and admire a lot is Bill Gates. And he had a reputation for being kind of tough when he was in business. But basically, I find that his persistence, his ability to stay in the game, irrespective of his wealth, his relationship with his wife, Melinda, the work that they've done when their business days were over, they've taken their energy and competence and directed for the public good. I think are all strong indications of a strong character and personal qualities that I admire a lot. Do you know him? Have you guys met?

No, no, I've never met him. Only through what I read that he reads. He's a big reader. I like to read. So I take some of his suggestions and wherever I can. I try to figure what's going on, what's going on with him. Yeah. And something I pay attention to.

Given your job as the leader, the CEO of Dunkin' Donuts, for so long. I love to dig into some of the story there because you took a company with a hundred shops and $10 million in sales when you first became CEO to 6,500 outlets, including Baskin-Robbins, to nearly $2.5 billion in sales the year that you retired. That growth is insane. And I know your book, which I highly suggest people get around the corner around the world is going to share some of that story. But when you think about that crazy growth, what were a few of the keys or maybe even key moments or inflection points that led this just dramatic rise through the course of your time in charge? It's a story that goes for 35 years and 35 years is a long run and with plenty of opportunity. for some success, but for some significant setbacks.

So I have broken down this 35-year journey into six distinct areas, roughly about five years or so apiece, where both the customer, the competition, the technology that exists, were constantly changing, requiring a different kind of response. And quite truthfully, even as a young man at 25, assuming responsibility for what was not called Dunkin' Donuts, but a business called Universal Food Systems, which was a group of eight disparate,

small food service business, vending machine company, cafeterias, pancake houses, hamburger stands, and what I would call the diamond and the rough, the nugget that existed in their Dunkin' Donuts. I had an idea coming out of business school as to how to fix the problems that existed with the business.

The business was basically stagnating, faltering profits had plateaued. out. My father had a partner, my uncle. He bought my partner, his partner out in 1955. My uncle, Lord Behold, took that money and started a competitive donut chain, not encumbered by all the other disparate businesses. And we're overtaking Duncan at the time when I came back out of the Army and graduate school to assume responsibility. And the second era, we had the first era went for five years. We ended up going public, highly successful could do no wrong. The second era, I would love to have said, but that is when the big learning took place,

because I changed the strategy of the business and had the wrong aiming point, got seduced by public ownership, kept my eye on stockholder returns as opposed to the business itself, decided I was no longer a focused donut and coffee company, which had provided the strategy that was so successful in the first era, to becoming a franchising business, which was a totally different set of skills, requirements, spread my organization way beyond its capabilities. We almost choked on indigestion. And I came to the profit stagnated, lost the $1.7 million in the, in 1970s, and the board turned around and said, we've had just about enough of you and fired me. And I had to talk my way back in. And that was sort of the inflection point where all the pain,

my best, one of my best friends. It was the CFO, who I recruited out of business school and gone to Goldman and joined me, left because he didn't have confidence in my leadership. We had some disenchantment among our franchise owners at the time. And the pain was intense. And it was there that I really came to the realization of the importance of strategy, the importance of organization. My responsibility as leader, not to ever blame followership when something goes wrong. You got to take not 100% of the responsibility. It's not kind of 50-50. It's not 90-10. It's you get paid when there's a problem. It's your job to figure out what's at stake, how to fix it, and apologize and go on from there. In my case, that kind of inspiration came out of a book that I was reading by David Halvestam called

The Best and the Brightest. Then we can go into that if you want. But if you ask me what along the way was a critical turning point, it came out of a real, serious reversal of fortune, some terrible mistakes. And my experience out of that whole thing is that you need humility. You need to learn that even having the right strategy, if it doesn't go along with the right kind of emotional intelligence, didn't have that language in those days that we're now talking about 1972. But you really are really blocked from true success.

And for me, that was a huge turning point and learning point. The importance of if the strategy isn't right, if the organization to implement that strategy isn't on target, almost nothing else that you can do will save the day and create success. How did you, Bob, if you can you, can you, let's get in the time machine and go to that moment when, when the board said, you're not good enough. And your friend and CFO said, I've lost confidence in you to do this well. How are you feeling? Unbelievably sad, lots of pressure.

The fact is that I was disappointing a lot of people, including myself and my own aspirations. I'm a competitive person, wanted to do well, wanted to please my dad who had given me this responsibility. And it all hung heavy on my shoulders. And I was open and ripe for change. But there's two ways that people can take that kind of situation. You can either become victimized and blame the way. world and blame everybody else or you basically can begin to become introspective look at yourself say you know what's my responsibility in the matter and I quickly came to the conclusion that

100% of the responsibility was my matter and it was I who had to do the changing before we could get ourselves how did you how did you come up with that because given the situation you find yourself in there's a lot of leaders that could just start pointing fingers or blame the market or blame economy or blame other people. What was it, was it something you were taught from your dad or others or a book or a combination, which it usually is, I guess, but what was it that gave you this self-awareness to say, I need to look in the mirror. I need to get reflective about what I'm doing. I need to take ownership of this situation instead of blaming other circumstances. I mean, it's now almost 50 years later, but I remember the moment vividly.

I was sitting in my living room reading a book by David Halberstam called The Best and the Brightest. And Halberstam was writing about the American government's response to the Vietnamese War, particularly the Kennedy and Johnson's administration of the war. And that our senior management and government were led by Ivy League as the best and the brightest our country had to offer. But big but, they were not going into the hamlets and towns where the war was being fought and finding and touching. to people who really were fighting the war and living it on the front lines. They were relying on body counts and third-hand information from way afar. As a result of that, Halberstam said clearly that he thought that the problem lay with what he called hubris.

Huberus is the Greek word for arrogance. And as I sat in that chair in the early 1970s, I had this lightning bolt transformative moment. And I said, oh my God, how was them could be talking about me? And that was the moment that we as a management team convened together, shared this story with the team. We decided that we would take 100% of the responsibility for the outcome of the business, not blame a fewer Kraltariffin franchisees for our problems. But it was our job to fix it.

We then decided we'd all go in and visit 100 stores a year, travel with district managers, front line managers, go in and talk to the owners. I had a series of questions. I would go to listen to get feedback. We would create a much more robust board that would ensure that mission creep that existed in the second era of my administration wouldn't recur. We created an advisory council, franchise owners to counsel with us and guide us. We invited the franchise. We apologized for our oversight, for our mistake, invited franchisees to come in and help us fixed the problem, which they were more than willing to do and did it in tremendous numbers to my everlasting gratitude. And it really spun a difference. And the next four errors of five

years, each the next 20 years, we never looked back. But that was the fundamental turning point. It was sort of my maturing moment. I had taken over at 25, had too much success, too early, got too preoccupied with perpetuating it rather than keeping my own. It was truly important and serving the purpose of why we were in business to satisfy people, satisfy custom, create returns for our existing franchise owners. And as I began to grew those lessons in my mind, we started to fix the problems. But it had to start at the top.

Leadership starts at the top. If it's faulty, you take a lot of people off a cliff and I came awfully close to doing that. And I vowed I would never ever to let that happen again. So looking back, it feels like you're grateful for that moment. Is that accurate? Are you grateful for the tough things you had to go through after some initial success?

Then it seems like there's a dip and there's obviously a problem. And that moment feels, at least to me, as if that was the critical, I guess, adversity that needed to happen in order for you to take it on a path like this for the rest of the time. I'm pointing my hand up. So true. I mean, it was my sophomore slump. It didn't happen in my sophomore year. Did you just get lucky at the beginning? Like what was at the very beginning when you were young?

Do you feel like you got lucky or what was it? No, I was in business school and I had an opportunity to review the company. I took courses in strategy so I knew the language of what a CEO should be doing. And then in my retailing classes, I was able to look at the company. I had a hunch about what was wrong with the company. Okay. A company can die from being starved from lack of capital or resources, but it can also die because of indigestion.

And this company was dying of indigestion. And even at a young age, I saw that and thought I had a way, a hunch that I had a way to see our way clear of it. It was an anxiety-producing moment to be given that responsibility. I expected to join the family business. I had gone to hotel school. I had gone to business school. I had worked in the business. I'd run cafeterias and commissaries and did all kinds of jobs.

So I learned my trade, but I never expected a couple of weeks out of school to become CEO of of a business. But I did have a strong feeling how to fix it. And the team and I created a new strategy out of the business. We were not no longer universal food systems, this eight business conglomerate, mini conglomerate. We were now a focused donut and coffee company committing ourselves to the best coffee and donuts, standardize the menu, standardize the stores. Everything before I joined the last 26 stores they had opened up were really like diners. They served breakfast. They served hamburgers, a hot, and it was kind of chaotic.

And so that got us off to a good start. But then that success led to the next era and the real learning. So I don't mean to come to tell people that I came to the job at 25 fully formed because nothing could be further from the truth. It was a long journey, continues to be a long journey of growth. And I think also when you really look behind people that are long lives and those jobs, you'll find I think this. same story, the people are continuing to grow. The world keeps changing constantly. You have to

keep changing with it. If you don't, you're not going to grow up. Yeah, it's funny. I was told early in my career by a senior level leader who was a mentor of mine, still is. And he said, as you progress in your career, the ability and willingness to adapt is a superpower. I was like, what does it even mean to adapt? He's like, because the only constant is change. It really true. really is so are you going to be the person who is upset about the why something is different or the world has changed or it's evolved or are you going to be the person that's going to aggressively and willingly adapt to the to the environment we find ourselves and then that's a critical point as you grow as a leader and it feels to me bob like this is a key key trait that you possess i agree with you

that the world is constantly changing it's a one constant you can count on and you have to be adaptable and agile. One of the things that's, I think, core to good strategy is the willingness and the ability to define reality. Not the world as you want it to be, not the comfortable world that you're in, but the world as it really is and how it's moving in the future. And that that requires new responses, new attitudes, new growth. And a friend of mine from years ago. A guy by the name of Max DePre wrote a book called The Art of Leadership. And it's one on my book list that I put in the addendum of the book, one of the faker dozens of books that influence me. And Max said, there's two jobs of a CEO. One is to say thank you,

and the second is to define reality. Define reality sounds easy, and it comes off the tongue quickly. But it is a real task, and that's a part of the art of leadership, is the ability to have your finger enough on what's going on with a consumer. the technology, the zeitgeist of the moment, to be able to define reality and be in to set plans in relation to what that reality is. It feels like the Stockdale paradox, right? The ability to understand the stark reality in which you face yourself in, but at the same time, have a positive mindset that things we're going to get through this, that I'm going to survive, I'm going to live, right? Jim Collins writes a lot about the stock there.

their paradox and good to great. It feels like that's also a part of you. Absolutely. And I would have to say one of the reasons I was so confident, the reason I was able to talk my way back into the board meeting when I was fired was basically my belief that we really had fixed it. And more importantly, the team that I had around me, we were together for almost 20 years. And they were extraordinary team, the senior management of the company, as well as the franchisees. I had had confidence in the team and I was comforted. There was no problem I didn't think we could get our way through together. I would imagine you built massive trust with a team like that.

If you stick together for that long. And there's always a crisis popping up and we find ourselves in a crisis now. And so I think it's really good timing for your book to be out. What are some of the keys to building trust in a crisis? Probably no different than building trust on a day-to-day basis. To me, that's one of the most important elements in all relationships. Trust exists in all successful relationships. And trust generally doesn't exist on those that are unsuccessful.

It just doesn't exist. So it's a critical element, and it takes time. Trust given too quickly, you're naive, trust withheld too long, you become a cynic. You run the risk of becoming a cynic. And in my world, and I actually learned this from a former finance minister from Chile, who was a linguist called Fernando Flores, he had provided me with four elements of how I could determine that I was being trustworthy myself and how I could determine trust in others.

And it was four elements that I would look at. The first is sincerity. And this holds true, by the way, with customers as well as members of staff, you have to build trusting relationships and your family and all elements of life. Trust is essential. So the four elements that Fernando provided me were, one, sincerity. Your public and private conversations are the same. Very important.

Second is competence. Competence is not the same as never making a. mistake. You know, Ted Williams was the best hitter in baseball. He batted 400. I would love to say that I was, you know, didn't make mistakes. As a CEO, I made lots of mistakes. But the fact is that competence is the ability to consistently deliver up to the standards of the job. And in my case, I made promises to stockholders and promises to my team that we would deliver certain kinds of returns and satisfactions to customers, certain standards of profitability consistently. We were able to keep that promise over long haul. So if I were an airline pilot, I take off from

Boston and I want to get to Detroit. There's going to be bad weather. I'm going to have to make mid-course correction. But ultimately, I have to get my crew safely on the ground at the other end. That's competence. The third is reliability. Reliability is that throughout time and all elements of life, we make promises. And the ability to consistently deliver on those promises determines your reliability. Customer relies upon that. Your employees rely upon that. And if you promise that you're going to make fair wages,

that you're going to create an environment where you really make a difference in people's lives, where people have an opportunity to get ahead, where you really are valued, that's something that you have to continue on. Now, the world is stochastic. Stuff happens. Things occur in the world where you can't keep your promise.

That day there was a storm, a pandemic, something happens. So the notion on reliability is that you identify that, you understand it, you'll go back to the persons or persons that you made the promise to, and you try to create a new offer and a new set of conditions of satisfaction. The last is probably even one of the most important, and that's care, that you treat people not in a transactional sense, that you're interested in what you can do for me, but did you really care for the person's identity, for their well-being, even if it comes to, unfortunately the time when you might have to part company with someone. Because oftentimes if there isn't a fit,

they're oftentimes better off in another environment. But you treat them with dignity and with respect and concern for them as human beings. And I think when you combine those four elements of sincerity, competence, reliability, and care that you have over a period of time, you develop a reputation of someone who can be trusted, who's authentic.

And I had that feeling of my team. I had that feeling when I proposed to the board that we had fixed the problem, that we knew what we had done wrong. And if you gave us another quarter, I think you would see that we have done that. And that's what they did. And in fact, that was what happened. And we never looked back after that. So I totally agree with you.

Trust is of the heart of all human relationships. I'm going to take a left turn for one question, one question only. Bob, you are vibrant, full of energy, tons of knowledge and wisdom. What do you do on a daily basis to stay show sharp? Seriously. Basically, it starts with passion and things. How what are you? I've used the planning process that we used in the company to define, you know, what my

purpose is, what my mission is, what my objectives are, which four or five sort of strategic levers I am going to pull to bridge scarce resources to the achievement of those goals and objectives and the tactics that support it. So I find whether you're running a business or you're designing your own life, the processes that were used in business worked for me. So I'm now on my third act. And my first act was basically 35 years of running a business. My second act was as an I-Junk professor and as a board member, counseling other CEOs as best I could, passing along in a generative way, whatever experience I had to offer. Now that those times are gone, my next act is basically spending time with my grandchildren,

my family, my own health, making sure that it's up to par. I do Pilates. I'm active. I train five days a week when my back doesn't hurt. And now, you know, basically spending time trying to convey whatever value I can beat to society to make a difference by virtue of this book. And I'm planning. I have a friend here on Martha's Vineyard, whose name is Rosabeth Moss Canter,

who just wrote a book called Think Outside the Building. And I read her book, and in it, she challenges retired executives who have a Rolodex, who have enough, thank God, finances to be able to keep adding to their repertoire in terms of helping society. You know, when I first picked up the book, I did it because she was my friend. But after I said, my God, she's maybe talking about me. I still have some gas in the tank, and there's an old idea I had in 1968 when I was in the chairs to run the International Franchise Association. and become chairman of that trade association for all of franchising.

And 68, the same kind of problems we were having with racial justice were occurring. And I had an idea about how to put together a bunch of compatible franchise businesses to go into underserved neighborhoods, minority-owned franchises to provide business opportunities for people, employment for people within the community, and ability for the customers themselves, the community to have access to goods and services. They don't have to leave their neighborhoods to get that we're now being burnt down. And I didn't have the skill at the time to be able to put that into effect. I'd gone to the SBA Commissioner Howard Samuels in Washington time.

He loved the idea. But I sort of ran it to some roadblocks. Trust wasn't right at the time between people in the community to make that a reality. So as I'm looking toward the time when book and book promotion is over, my next act, I think, will be to dust that idea off and go back in it again. So if there is a fountain of youth, it really is to have something generous. to be able to do to add value to people's lives to keep going. I don't think I'd accomplish a lot sitting on the couch alone. So I don't know if that answers your question. No, most definitely.

I guess any time I see someone who's, you know, there's three buckets of people in my life, people who are ahead of me, people who are beside me and people who are behind me. And I'm trying to fill those buckets with people in all three categories. And you're certainly one of those people who's ahead. And whenever I come across someone who's ahead, I just want to know, what they're doing. I know when I know how they're doing it, especially so are you, are you 82, 82 years old. 82 years old with with with with this amazing energy and zest and passion for life. I want to do that. I want to be like I want I want I want that to be me someday. I'm sure there are a lot of listeners who want that to be them where they feel like I got a ton of gas in the tank.

I'm going to still help a ton of people over the next few decades and do really good work. but it's about like when I see that and hear that and feel that, I just want to know what their daily actions are. So that's why have a dream. Love it. Say more. Say more. Never lose your dream.

You know, the most valuable people, thinking of people have are their dreams. And if you have positive dreams, it's a little bit like mood. And mood to me comes and goes. So the goal of my life is not happiness. Happiness to me is a mood.

And a mood is nothing more than an entourage. of the future, which means you can design your moods if you really realize that. And the real answer to life to me is satisfaction, peace, and fulfillment. Those three things are my goals. And in order for me to achieve those, those are all out of directed. They're not within me. They're within my ability to help others, to add value to society. That's worthwhile.

That gets you up in the morning, get you out. And that's what drives me. and I've always had a dream. What was your, has your dream evolved or has your dream been the same? I've had three lives about to have a fourth and each of them is a different dream. The first dream was business success and providing customers with great products that were usually available elsewhere. You know, coffee was at the center of our menu. We were just coffee and donuts.

We wanted to make the best in the world. You know, millions of people start their day and fill the sort of natural biarrhythm. they have for a little pick-me-ups throughout the day, we provide that. We put a smile on their, on their face and a lift in their step. It's now the advertising campaign that current management has is fabulous. America runs on Duncan. That is true. And that really is important. People say, what the heck is just coffee and donuts? Well, that's an important part of people's lives. And if we can do that better than anybody else in the world, we are valuable. Our franchise is a terrific value. You know, basically we created a system and invited people in whose families are better off as a

result of ownership of their business than they would be without us. And in fact, today is the business transformed from its early mom and pop days, it's now become a vehicle for real wealth creation. There are some franchise owners that are pillars of communities that are worth tens of millions of dollars as Duncan owned a franchise owners. That's incredibly satisfying. And the careers that got started from people that joined us, grew with us, people that left us and went on to bigger and better jobs is another sense of immense satisfaction. And so that was the first era. The second was generative. My students at Bamsin in the graduate school, when I was online with them, the thrill that they got some benefit out of learning from my mistakes was of tremendous sustenance to me,

and for which I was forever grateful. And some of the new associations. When I left Duncan, after 35 years, I served on the board of some other companies, one of which Sonic for 25 years almost, my relationship with Cliff Hudson, the CEO of that company, and the staff, I found a new home and a new place to be able to help and to be of value and try to be generative as much as I could. And now writing this book, hopefully, and also traveling with my grandchildren. You know, and that's part of my current life now, and one of the levers that I'm pulling, as well as taking care of myself in terms of exercise and energy and my significant another and I travel with a grandchild to a place of their choosing, not with their brothers and sisters,

not with their parents, but just them. We get to know each other. They get to know me. I get to know them. And I'm now involved in their lives and incredibly proud of all of them. My sons and daughter and my grandsons and granddaughter, all of whom are part of a family I am thrilled to have and grateful for. How involved are you with the leaders at Duncan currently? They have been incredibly warm and supportive. I'm this week going to be doing a podcast with Dave Hoffman, who is the current CEO of Duncan.

They're kind. They're respectful in awe of the way they have taken the foundation that we had built and have gone from strength to strength. They and the franchise owners are doing a fabulous job. I couldn't be proud of it. There's no better testimony to the work that we'd put in. No better legacy for us. Past generations of leaders is to see what they've done.

They're incredible. And I'm really very thankful for them. They have shown a tremendous amount of support to me, to the book, to the lessons, and I'm forever grateful. A couple more things I want to cover from the book before we go, Bob. You've written about and talked about the four primary functions of a leader. This podcast is called The Learning Leader Show. We focus on becoming more.

effective leaders. What are the four primary functions of a leader? It's to synthesize over a time period, but particularly from the period that you and I covered, Ryan, that critical moment in the early 70s of learning. And, you know, the world just comes at you so quickly. Every day, there are hundreds of things coming in over the transit. And partly from my business school training and partly from my experience as I, as I led the company, I really synthesized that if, If the CEO isn't shepherd of strategy, and if you don't get the strategy right, and if you don't get the organization right, the right people and the right job to be able to effectuate and implement that strategy, you, man, don't get those spot on. There's almost nothing else that you can do that will create success and carry the day. So those are the first two most important things. Those are the things that go in my calendar first. Those are the things I bring to the board. Those are the things that I shape with my operating committee. Those are the things that most influenced me. As I went along, though, I realized that I had another important function.

And that was communication, the third element of what I consider to be essential. And communication is the ability to really align all constituencies behind the strategy behind. What you see is the purpose for the business, what place you fill in the marketplace and why you're important, why society needs you. And oftentimes you think, well, I said it once or I said it twice or I said it three times and people should have gotten it. But that's not the case. People are busy with their own wives.

They've got families. They've got budgets to meet. They've got sickness in the family. So the traveling to the stores and the traveling with district managers gave us all a firsthand opportunity, a one-on-one to see if our management by objective system was working and whether or not people really understood the mission. We also had a meeting at the beginning of every planning cycle, every late summer, where we brought a whole team together. And we went through what our mission, what our objectives were, what the strategic levers we've going to pull.

We had big outings. We socialize with each other. But that is all opportunities for continuing communication. And you have to utilize it over and over and over and over again. I can't stress that enough. And the last function is really the world, as I said before, is stochastic. Things happen that can threaten the very existence of business. I could point to four things in my 35 years, any one of which could have spelled the end of the business.

Could have absolutely brought it to its end. It's changing the contract in fundamental ways, a class action lawsuit that could have spelled the end of the business, a hostile takeover, moving internationally. And I find in times of crisis, that all four of those elements are in play. just more intensely. And so my experience in crisis was find a team, a small team of experts who are best qualified inside the company, outside the company, franchise owners. Anybody could be anybody who really has some understanding can provide an ability to

be able to identify what the issue is and the appropriate response. Leave the rest of the team alone to execute the business on a day-to-day basis. The donuts have to get served. The coffee has to get served. We have to be on the front line. We have to watch the last three years. three feet of the sale, critically important to thrill customers continuously, irrespective of the crisis that's going on at headquarters or elsewhere or in the country. And that was an important

element and make the team, you know, give them 100% responsibility, free them up from all their other duties, let them work on the crisis. And generally, because the crisis is so existential to the existence of the business, oftentimes, all the time, the CEO has to be involved. And the second thing that I put a lot of emphasis on was communications. Everybody gets concerned, even if they're not dealing with a solution of the crisis on a day-to-day basis. Their livelihoods, their future, their work, it's important to them. They're care and concern. And that gets back to trust. You know, you've got to care for how people are responding and you've got to bring them along transparently. Authenticity is the coin of the realm. People will be evaluating you as leader.

They watch your body language. They watch your facial expressions. They know if you're real, if you're authentic, if you really care about them, and if you really are on the path of grabbing a hold of the crisis and resolving it. So those would be some of the things that I found about crisis. In addition to that, you know, planning is important. I serve on lots of boards. And I would tell you, frankly, that in every one of these board environments, I sit on one meeting a year is always directed to risk analysis. So in our case, it could have been someone hacking our computer system, getting access to our data on our customers. That's a crisis of trust. It could be a health scare. Some, God forbid, get sick. It could be weather and a major storm. And I find that being prepared,

identifying who that team is going to be, how they're going to respond, what we're going to do, thinking that out in advance was of immense help. I can't imagine that something as large as the United States government didn't do the same thing. In fact, listening to Susan Rice talked about the Obama administration, they were prepared with what they would respond to in terms of both a pandemic or terrorist attack or some national weather disaster. And I think that's essential to remember pre-preparation, pretty important to get your arms on what can happen that can go wrong. It's called risk assessment. Every enterprise faces it, and every enterprise has to be prepared for it.

And some of it works better when you're prepared in advance. Bob, you've mentioned people so much throughout the course of our conversation, your team, the people around you, franchise owners, others. When you are looking to hire someone for a leadership role, what are some of the key attributes of those people to say, yes, I want them on my team? or no, they're not going to work here. What are some of those must have qualities in a person to be a part of your team?

There are three, and I think this applies in all job selection, and any selection of people. The three things that I would look at. First is to be really crisp and thorough about defining the assignment. What you want that person to do. What is it that the company requires that needs that job filled to do it? And sometimes in that job, the assignment will change. And sometimes you have to change people because the assignment changes.

But the better you define the assignment, the more likely you are for success. The second element that I look for is complementarity. No one is good at all things. Gallup provided us with a method and a philosophy that I subscribe to is that it's very hard to remediate weaknesses. It's far better building on someone's strengths. and I believe that to my core. I myself have some strengths and I also have some severe weaknesses.

Important, I understand those and make sure that the team is in a and the systems and the processes are in place to provide complementarity within the team. And that I look for in terms of some people have expertise that I will never have and I've spent a lifetime and they're smarter and better at it than I am.

That's not a big admission of failure. That's just smart and surrounding yourself with great smart people and listening to them and appreciating them and rewarding them and sharing with them and keeping them. And the last thing is sort of fit. They've got to fit the culture. Our culture was teamwork and aspiration. We really would not put up with backbiting. I had a COO for years, a close friend. And the business wouldn't have been the same without them. And the whole team, the top 10 or 15 teammates, the business just wouldn't have been the same without them.

I'm eternally grateful for the role they played. There was mutual respect. We had different educational backgrounds, different life stories, different. But everybody had a mutual respect. And as I said, I think before, and even almost a love for each other. And we protected and looked out for each other. We weren't competing against each other. and we were aspirational.

We love to win. We were competitive. So someone has to really want to win. They have to be passionate about it. That was part of our culture. We loved to win. Once we achieved one set of objectives, we set another set of lofty goals, and we were often running in a direction that forced us to change and to be agile.

You have to like that kind of environment. You have to really want to win. And that was another part of our culture. So those are the things I look for. fulfilling the assignment and being real crisp about the assignment, complementarity and cultural fit. And if you hit all three of those, I think, you know, you'll be a winner.

But you also have to be adaptable because all those things change. Bob, when you think back to when you started at Duncan with 10 million in sales, would you ever imagine the year 2020, there's a thing called TikTok and one of the most followed TikTokers in the world named Charlie D'Amilio has a Duncan card and drinks a Duncan drink on a regular basis in her videos, thus getting 12-year-old girls to tell their parents, we're not going to Starbucks, we're going to Duncan. Could you ever imagine that being our real life?

Yes. And I joined TikTok because of Charlie because I want to follow Charlie. Oh my God. This happens to be all the time with our. I respect. You ask me how I feel about the management of the company and how adaptable it is. Here's this company that's. doing its 70th anniversary.

That's smart enough. I think they were looking at... Brilliant move, by the way. Brilliant. I mean... They had a couple of choices in terms of how they'd stay relevant. And Charlie is a terrific spokesperson for the brand.

And I am on TikTok because I follow Charlie. And yes. Yeah, I would hope that they would be that responsive and that much in touch with the zeitgeist of the moment. And I give them big kudos for that. And it warms me. That actually leads me a question because I listened to the Business Wars podcast.

It's great. And there's a Duncan versus Starbucks on there. And one of the parts of it, they talked about the fact that you expand beyond just normal coffee into some of the different types of drinks and ice coffees and things that like more into kind of my realm of things that I enjoy. And I've heard when I was talking. to your team that you've got some cool and entertaining stories about some of the ideation and creation of that. Maybe you could share one of them as before we part on maybe a cool story of you guys branching beyond just the coffee and donuts. It's a modest adaptation to most

minds, but it was very significant to us at the time in the mid-70s with all the problems that we were encountering with the wrong strategy. and gas lines because of the oil embargo, odd and even days you had it filled gas, it lines out at Nixon's wage and price controls. I mean, I set the stage for a tumultuous, terrible time in our country's history. I got a call from a franchise owner.

And Hartford, I got a friend of mine, a young man who taught me how to make donuts when we were both teenagers together in the third store in the chain called Native Mass. And his name was Bob Demer. He owned two stores in Hartford. He said, you know, you got to come down.

Edna, my wife, has created this whole new thing with donut holes. Years ago, around Halloween, we would take the middle parts of the, as you cut a cake donut, you would take out the middle holes and fry them off and put them in little cellophane bags and hang them on potato chip clips. And we only did it like a week or two because we thought it might be a good trick-or-treat item, and it was of no significance. He said, Edna has developed a new cutter, so she doesn't just pick up the holes. She cuts it one-fifth the size of a regular donut.

She fills them. She sends them in some of them and puts apple inside. She puts jelly in some and she puts powder sugar on the other. She's got all of those variety, and she has piled them high in the front showcase, the one that we would call our fancy case. And that's all she put in there. And our business is up 20%. People are clamoring for the product.

You've got to come down and see it. So Tom Schwartz, the CEO of the company, myself, and a guy been in Bob Camer's chair, who's had a marketing at them, we got in a car. And the next day, we went down to Hartford, and lo and behold, it's exactly as he described it. And we immediately said, this is a winner. And we went back to an ad agency, not our agency of record, but an agency we had used earlier in the hamburger business that we had then exited, called Hill Holiday, which went on to become a huge company. But at the time, it was very small.

And Steve Cosmopoulos was their creative director, a very creative guy. And he says, you know, that's a great idea. Let's call him Penny Poppers. And we said, gee, it's Dunkin' Donuts, D, D, D, D. penny poppers, PP. We thought we'd have a while. But here it's wage and price controls. Inflation is rampant.

We can't keep it at a penny. So he came back with another idea. He said, you know, every year on CBS, they run the Wizard of Oz for kids. And in there, there are a whole group of people. It's a classic. Everybody knows it. They're called munchkins. Why don't we call it munchkins?

The little people after little people. And we said, that's a great idea. And Archie Southgate, who was one of our directors, and went on to become the head of ropes and grepice, such as Boston Law firm, reached out to Jack's cookie company that owned the name Munchkins. They said, we're not doing anything with it.

And Archie negotiated a deal where for a dollar a year, we got the rights to Munchkins. We packaged them and barrels and boxes. And we introduced it in the early 70s, and it was an instant hit. Our business, despite the gas wars, despite all the problems people are having, despite some of the internal issues

that we were wrestling with and getting our arms around to run the business, the year we introduced Munchkins, same store sales, which is the big benchmark in our industry, the QSR Quick Service restaurant industry, went up 12%, one of the record years on history. And that came from an idea

from a franchise owner, Edna Demerie, for whom we will always be grateful. It just shows, though, to have an open mind and empower people that you work with to be original, to come up with ideas, to not have an ego to be like, well, it has to be my idea. I think that's a lesson I would pull from that is that the ideas could come from anyone. And if you set up a culture where people feel empowered, like you're going to listen, like you care, you come out with humility, that that's how an idea like that is

fostered and created is because of that mentality. I totally agree. Love it. Bob, this is so good. I'm very grateful for your wisdom and how much you care and how much you put into this. The book's titled Around the Corner to Around the World. A dozen lessons I learned running Dunkin' Donuts. So cool. Where would you send my listeners and viewers to learn more about you online? Well, I mean, Wikipedia me personally, but I really would encourage people to go to the site around the corner to around the world. There you can find out a lot about the book and also how you can best order it. And I hope everybody enjoys reading it. I believe it really can add value. And I hope it does. That's my hope. And I want to thank you for the invitation. I enjoyed the time

together. I love the conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I treasure it. And appreciate how much of a giver you are. So thank you, Bob. And I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. Welcome it. Thank you. All right, Bob. Bye-bye. All right, I'm going to close this one out, responding to a question I received via email from one of you, a loyal listener. Here we go.

First, I love your podcast. It has provided me with so much help and inspiration in the two years I've been listening to it. It's my go-to leadership podcast. Wow, thanks so much. I have a question, which I'd love for you to answer on your show. I would prefer this to be a non-lawful. All right. I've recently resigned from a great job in a large corporation that was full of safety, security, and opportunity for something a lot smaller and riskier, but where I really feel I will grow a lot more quickly as a person and as a leader. Okay.

The problem is, since resigning, I feel a sense of loss, like turning away from a family and like I've given something away. I'm sure the new thing will be great. The culture looks amazing and the opportunity is exciting. But do you have any words of advice to help someone who has that feeling of loss as you move away from something that looked after you so well? I was with them for a decade. Thanks again for all you do. Okay. Really good question.

I would imagine others are also dealing with this or have dealt with this in the past. So one, it is very normal to feel. feel this sense of loss. You spent a decade of your life there. I would imagine you've built great relationships with your colleagues and coworkers and they've probably become friendships. I certainly hope you've done work you're proud of. I'm guessing you have. And you've probably grown a lot over the course of the past 10 years. So it is very normal to feel this way. second i would shift your mindset to being grateful that you're able to leave on good terms as that is not always the case at least i assume you're leaving on good terms it sounds like it and one of

the reasons why that's so important is my third point is the fact that there are no rules that state you can't remain in contact with the people you've built relationships with at your old company I do this. This is something that helps me tremendously. I worked at LexisNexis and I worked at Elsevier Clinical Solutions. Those are really the only two jobs I've had prior to doing what I do now as the leader of Brickstein-Myers Leadership Advisory Practice where I host this podcast and give keynotes and facilitate leadership circles and work with leadership teams within corporations. But having regular correspondence and dialogue with men, many of my former colleagues helps me a great deal.

The emails, the Zoom calls, the phone calls, the regular texting correspondence with many of the people that I'd worked with in the past. When I look back on my years at LexisNexis, I mean, that's where my career got started. That's where I met my wife. That's where a number of the people in my wedding party were colleagues and coworkers from Lexis Nexus. I've built a lot of great friendships that I've maintained since I've left.

When I was at Elsevier, I was running a North American sales for clinical solutions, and it warms my heart so much to have regular dialogue and email correspondence with a number of the people I worked with, and I was only there for one year. But that correspondence is very helpful. So I would push you to maintain that. level of dialogue with your former colleagues, it will help you a great deal. And then, and then fourth, the part that I think is exciting is the fact that you've made this move for a reason. Work to compartmentalize that in your mind. So on one side, you have those fond memories of the past,

the growth, the people, the great work you've done. But then on the other side, you have, this excitement for the future and I don't know about you but for me life is about growth it's about momentum it's about forward progress and it feels like you're doing this right now and that is exciting so be grateful for what you had in the past maintain those relationships and then get excited about what you were about to do in the future and I think that could help you out. Thank you for the great question.

And once again, thank you, the loyal listeners of this show, for continuing to spread the word one person at a time. Hey, you should listen to the Learning Leaders Show. I think it could help you out. And because you continue to do this, you give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much.

Talk to this soon. Can't wait.