Loree:

I am so excited to be here talking with you today.

 

Mike:

I know this is gonna be fun. I’m looking forward to it.

 

Loree:

Awesome.

 

Mike:

I love getting these like little weekly doses of Loree on my podcast it’s wonderful. Very cool.

 

Loree:

Thank you. Yeah. Well, I mean, I was really excited to talk with you too, just because you’ve had such an interesting path. You know, it’s such an interesting experience since we finished up together at Business School. Surprisingly, you did not go off into the role to show business and write, you know, more wonderful musicals, but instead…

 

Mike:

Yeah, yeah. Give it some time, Loree.

 

Loree:

Good. Oh, good. I’m glad to hear that because the world needs your humor. So instead, you went to Pepsi and even before that, like, I just would love to hear about your own leadership journey. And, you know, how did you end up in business school? What got you to that point?

 

Mike:

Yeah. So I think there’s a recurring theme of being like a lifelong, undeclared major. And I went to the University of Chicago, in part because there’s a core curriculum. So you don’t have to really make any major, like life decisions for a few years. And there’s not a whole lot of practical majors, then roll that over into consulting next, which is another place to be an undeclared major. So that’s what like led me to Wharton and meeting you. And like all of our friends, as I knew I needed more of like a full distance education. But as someone who knew me well during those years knew as I had no idea like what I wanted to do after business school, I must have interviewed for 100 different jobs, the second year of business school. And what I learned was what I loved about consulting was the pace and the challenge and the problem solving and the collaboration with the clients.

 

In the summer between first and second year of school, I worked at Nabisco in brand management, and fell in love the brand management part, I did really love like working on products that are part of people’s lives. So I, you know, got this sort of fortunate experience. I found that at Pepsi, where I worked for nine years after Business School, because I was able to combine like working on these products that were part of people’s lives every day that were really fun. With, you know, the pace and the challenge and the problem solving and looking back I also think I was super lucky to find a group of really good people all through the company; especially on the planning team, this woman Jane Nielsen, who really built the team. I think in retrospect, she’s one of those people who’s had a huge impact on me and my career. Yeah, just her model of she basically found good business people who happen to be good at math, but not a lot of what have I said we were finance people. So that sort of like, you know, let me continue to be a bit of an undeclared major, Pepsi and worked on a bunch of different fun stuff. Some of it worked really well. There were blue sodas that didn’t really sell very well. They were kind of disaster. So you suffer from these things. And then I like slowly drifted more towards you know, like a finance career path over the time that I was there. So when I left Pepsi and went to Panera, I really felt like Panera was my first you know, at that point was a long time in my career was my first true finance job, which sounds weird to say. But that was really the way it kind of evolved over time.

 

Loree:

Yeah, and then I mean, you were the CFO of Panera. That’s pretty cool.

 

Mike:

Yeah, it was fun. I really enjoyed it because I got there in 2010 to Panera and, you know, to me, I loved like what the company stood for and the community; that was a really cool experience. And I love the business as a customer, and I think that’s a huge thing. I think any business you’re in, but especially if you’re in these consumer businesses, it really helps to have a passion for what the company does. Yeah, really understand it because you have to look through it through the eyes of your customers, the eyes of your associates, the eyes of your different partners and vendors and all the different stakeholders. And if it’s something you don’t find interesting, you’re just gonna have a hard time working at it. And that kind of gets back to this like undeclared major thing… because I think I look back and you know that the good summary of it was something I didn’t really know at the time, but the GM president of the Toronto Raptors, I heard this interview with him, and he talked about this idea that his career path was that he was more passionate than he was ambitious. And he just kind of followed these things that he was passionate about. And I was like, Oh, that’s a great line, I’m gonna steal that and give him credit. But that really like as someone who’s been this sort of lifelong undeclared major, that really, in retrospect explains a lot of what happened in my career. And then when the opportunities presented themselves, I worked my ass off, and I took advantage of them. And I tried to do the right thing for the business.

 

Loree:

Yeah, nice. I heard someone describe it sometimes as a portfolio career, like, you know, you try different things, and you kind of figure out what you like to do. And it doesn’t mean you have to do it forever. You don’t have to stay in the one thing forever, but you can try different things along the way.

 

Mike:

Yeah, I like that. You also build a lot of skills along the way. Always realize you’re building them because I look back on some of the roles or the projects that honestly, in the moment I hated… kind of miserable. But with a little distance, I learned a lot. You don’t realize you’re learning in the moment. You’re just miserable. But in retrospect, you learn a lot. Yeah, you’re going through it. So that helps in a portfolio as well, you pick up a lot.

 

Loree:

I think that’s so important, like the skills aspect of it, like, certain skills can be applied in a multitude of roles, in a multitude of industries. It’s really more about the abilities versus the experience necessarily. So, the things that you’ve done and the skills that you’re good at, and are strong at, how do you bring those to bear in a role?

 

Mike:

So yeah, but I don’t know if you had this experience as you built teams… But for me, I think when I started to recruit people, and build teams, and try to figure out the talent, sometimes the component skills were there. So like the metaskill, let’s say, of being a really good forecaster, you may not have been there, but if someone could work Excel, if they could, like, deal with all the data, if they understand how to build a model that are set, think about a forecast. I didn’t need someone who had done a forecast before, because let’s face it, a 23-year-old may not have done a financial forecast before, but if they had the core skills there, then you knew you could sort of help them build it together, because you had gone through the experience yourself. Did you see that same kind of thing as you hired people?

 

Loree:

Yeah, I know it totally. And I think, you know, thinking back to teams that I hired, I would typically look more for enthusiasm and core skills, like people who really were into whatever the you know, company was doing whatever the job was. And then and also a learning mentality, like a growth mindset. I loved asking people, you know, tell me about something that you’ve learned recently or you know, something that you’ve taught yourself or tell me about a time that things didn’t work out how you’ve liked and what did you learn from that? Like, I really tried to hire people who are comfortable with that and want to grow and want to learn you know, like the flip side it sounds like I hired people who like to fail. But that wasn’t really good. It was more like people who were who were willing to try risks and learn from them and you know, constantly be looking for ways to do things better.

 

Mike:

Yeah, I think the book, Grit, is both like the best things think they need to tell you, they’re gritty and like show me how you’re actually gritty but you know, do what you’re saying a combination of enthusiasm, persistence, and resilience. Yeah, get people with a core skill set really far like in life and in their career. And if you can identify those things, they’re hard to interview for sometimes, right? You have to get really drill into people and get examples. And if you can find them like those people tend to do just great work for you.

 

Loree:

Okay, so you and I both love movies. And we talked so much about movies when we were in business school and writing Follies and probably way over-quoted many movies. Do you have any thoughts about your favorite leadership movies or examples of good leadership in movies?

 

Mike:

Yeah, so I loved when you brought this up in one of the other podcasts with a guest, General Krulak right. Yeah, it was interesting that you both… he certainly gravitated towards real-life figures like real people portrayed in movies. So I’m going to turn the tables on you a minute and ask a question. Okay. So I kind of split up in my head between like a real life figure and a fictional character. So for me for real I figure we just watched Miracle again the other night, the one about 1981 ice hockey team.

 

Loree:

Oh, yeah.

 

Mike:

And her brother is like, ah, Kurt Russell plays her Brooks and, you know, first of all, Kurt Russell totally underrated. But he’s so good as Brooks. And part of what I love about what Brooks does that team was. He says at one point in the movie, he’s like, I don’t need the best players, I need the right players. And yeah, hard to break down in the movie, this difference between like the Minnesota kids and the Boston kids and get them to kind of play together. And there’s this famous scene in the movie, where he’s just like gassing them, like after a game, and they’re skating, and they’re skating, and they’re skating. And finally, someone answers the question the right way and says he doesn’t play for Minnesota or Boston, or whoever he plays for the United States of America. Yeah, it’s like that Memorial. Yes. Like, that’s what I really want. But you know, what a team so so my real person would be Brooks in Miracle. So who would yours be? Your real movie character? Or movie person based on a real person?

 

Loree:

Oh, that’s a tough one. Well, it’s funny because I love the movie 12 O’Clock High. You know, 12 O’Clock High is I think it’s such a great movie, but it’s a very unique situation, right? And it’s actually kind of funny, because now, when you think about leaders, most people want leaders like Colonel Davenport, who was the, you know, the empathetic, you know, more taking care of the guys kind of leader but you know, almost too much and definitely too much. He was too familiar with his aviators. And then Frank savage comes in, and he is like, total command and control. But they needed that because, you know, they’re like, losing airplanes. And it’s a war. You know, it’s not, it’s not like, Oh, you know, we’ve got our q1, okay, ours, we need to meet, you know, it’s like, No shit, people are dying. And so it’s a different kind of situation. And I do like that example. Because, you know, it’s situational. And he, he was what the situation needed, he needed to come in and really tighten things up. It’s just funny, though, because I think a lot of people, you know, think about that movie, and they think about General Savage as being like, your stereotypical military leader. And I think in times like that, yes, you need that, but I also feel like I’m trying to think of, I liked Gladiator. You know, Russell Crowe knew everyone’s names, you know, like that type of leader who really cares about their people, but also has strategies willing to lead from the front. But the other thing that is interesting is that, like, when I think about all these leadership movies, well, first of all, so many of them are either military or sports teams. And 99% of them are about men, and male leaders, like, you know, give me a movie with a female leader. That is a leadership example, like maybe normal Ray, you know, and that’s like, caught, what, 40 years ago? Yes, a long time ago, more common in fiction movies, because my answer to the fictional character would be Princess Leia.