Take Care of Yourself

We're living at a time of just incredible changes, not just with the pandemic itself, but all of the technological changes, the digital transformation. What do you do to maintain a positive attitude in the face of so much accelerating change?

Well, as I said earlier, I'm kind of naturally an eternal optimist. I think when you're leading a company and you're constantly seeing all the adversity that you face, if the leader is not emerging out of those situations with some level of optimism, I don't know how you would expect the rest of the employees to do that. So part of it I feel is a little bit in the job description, part of it is just my natural style to be that way. The one thing that I do find really challenging and that challenges me, I would say physically and emotionally and therefore intellectually is the mere time sync that one can spend. Now, since Zoom meetings or Teams meetings, whatever they are, can happen at any hour of the day back-to-back-to-back, you're getting off one meeting onto the other. I mean, I pull up my little device that tells me how many steps I had that day, and some days by noon it's 100, because I've been in meetings all morning, and that is just not healthy. And we know that. So I have started to have to be very purposeful at carving out an hour to go for a walk. Now it's nice to be working from home and to be able to throw my shoes on, head out the door, and go for an hour walk, come back and hop back on meetings.

But I think that's where I have had the biggest challenge is a little bit more of the work-life balance. It's funny, because early on I think there -- maybe these are traditional maybe types of leaders worrying about will people get work done working from home. I'm sure there are situations where people are not as efficient and not as productive as they could be. But I think in many cases, I know this to be true for myself and for many of the other people that I talked to about this, the opposite is true. And that is we work across multiple time zones. If I'm on the East Coast working, it's like you can get up at six o'clock to start your European meetings. San Francisco's closing down at 9 or 10 o'clock at night your time, and if you don't watch it, you've just spent 12-14 hour days working. There has to be balance, physical balance and emotional. So that I think is really an important challenge people have to be disciplined around.