Serving Your Country

You've worked globally with all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds. What does building a diverse team mean to you?

To me, it's about diversity of thought and coming from different angles, diversity of thought is the catalyst for genius. I've seen it over and over and over again in every single company that I've been a part of building, and certainly in terms of running economic diplomacy for the United States.

When you say it's a catalyst for genius, what do you mean by that? And how does diversity of thought provide that leverage or that catalyst as you say?

Yeah. Well, one of the team building exercise I always do when we're initially forming a team or a company is, you know, like the old Arctic survival game, and what it proves is it always proves that group think gets a much better answer than the expert. So when you have that group think and you have diverse backgrounds, you poke things from different angles. One of the team rules in companies we built was no idea is a bad idea. They would put the onus on CEOs, because it's always fun to mock our CEO, which would be me, because at the end of the day, it's about making a safe environment. And if there's a crazy idea, there's just no way in heck that's going to make any sense. It may trigger a thought for somebody else. I experienced this at the State Department. By the time something ends up on your desk, if you're a leader and you have a really strong team, by the mere definition, the answer to that problem is there's only a probability of success. Because if it was a flat out answer, your EVP of sales or your assistant secretary, whatever, would have solved that. So then what do you do? And so for me, it's first of all put together the smartest specialists that you can, number one. Number two, make sure it's diverse. And then number three, make sure that they check their ego at the door and focus on the problem and have them go around. And then at the end of the night, when you got to make that final decision, you've heard all those opinions, you can sleep at night and you know you're probably going to have the best probability of success in terms of solving that issue or solving that problem.