“The Moment I Stop Learning, I’m Retired”

Are there leadership areas where you feel you could still improve? And how are you continuing to sharpen your skills?

I never stop learning. The moment I stop learning, basically, I’m retired. Yeah, I think that…

And you’re not ready for that.

Yeah. But that’s my motto, my thinking, right? Every day, I have to learn. It’s not different than it was at the call center. I don’t know everything. I will never know everything. But I definitely can continue to learn from others, and learn valuable lessons that you ultimately can adopt and apply to your own principles.
I never studied to be one unique thing. In fact, my academic side of this is very limited, because ultimately, I had to work and I went to college and all that, but I learned by observing others. And that’s the one skill I think I continue to nurture, which is always observing, learning from others, how they do things.
For example, I’m an operator here, right? I’m the CEO of the company, and I’m part of my own board. At the same time, I’m part of the Anthem board, which is the second largest healthcare company in the United States, an insurance company. Anthem, which people could recognize sometime as Blue Shield Blue Cross.
But the reason why I love that engagement is because A, I get to contribute. There is a major industry in transformation, think about healthcare, right? 20% of the GDP of the United States, the most antiquated, probably, industry that we’ll see because we got to digitize healthcare, and make it more predictive and proactive.
But at the same time, I learn how things get done there from the governance perspective, and I observe how my peer, Gail, which is the CEO, does things and how committees operate there and I bring those into my own company, but also, I get to observe a different industry. So yeah, you’ve got to continue to sharpen your skills. Obviously, communication is key. And then ultimately, how you keep leading teams to transformations.