Going Faster Together: The Case for CEO Collaboration

So we are talking about partnerships, but I feel like we should start with the fact that you two know each other, right? So personal relationships are very important. How did you meet? Funny story, for those introverts in the audience, when I go to these conferences, ones like the, only the ones with both genders, it tends to be a lot for me sometimes. And so building connection, making connection with somebody and going from there is a trick that I've learned. It's in my playbook. And so I was at a business roundtable, and I thought I recognized Janet, who had just taken over from the prior CEO, her amazing accomplishment. I kind of wanted to meet her, and I also kind of wanted to have somebody to be connected to in the audience. So I sat down next to her, and I said, will you be my best friend? And I was happy to oblige. there you go and you said yes yeah didn't say yeah no you weirdo go away no she was pretty kind and uh we kind of traveled through the event together and that's a trick by the way that i highly recommend well i i'm curious about the importance of that and you are both working together because one of the things that i think is really interesting the more i talk to ceos right now they talk about ecosystem i know it's something you've talked about a lot give me a sense as to how the fact that you know each other you like each other has that had any impact either on the nature or the depth of what you're doing together maybe also talk about what you're doing together i'm going to go to you yeah do you like i feel like i should say what do you like most about case but we'll get to that part so first of all i think that um that first meeting had a big impression on me. And I know that, you know, having experienced that, again, I was sitting at breakfast by myself. I didn't even know where to put my name tag or what to do at the business roundtable. Right. She said, you know, Janet, just, you know, everybody rushes in to put their name tag somewhere early. So, you know, let's go. I'll show you how it's done. So you need a friend like that. But also it left such an impression on me that in the last two years, I frankly have tried to pay that forward. And so when there's new CEOs, of which there are many, really just trying to reach out and say, hey, I've just been through this. Let me tell you what I've learned. Let me tell you what I wish I knew before. And I think that's really important. But you talk about partnerships. I think that's important as well. And we might just go off script. You can do whatever you want. I'm just here to listen. I'll just sit back. But what I love is we are doing business together. Some really interesting things that we're proud of. Our team loves working with Lumen. But I remember we talked after a pretty significant RFP that we were working on. And the team came in and they evaluate all the service providers and on your sector experience, on your domain knowledge and everything else. And I remember you told me that at the top it said like top to top relationship and it was marked red. And you came in and you crossed it off and you said green and you said I know Janet. Does red mean that you don't know each other? They didn't know that we knew each other. No, that there was no connection. And I was like, what makes you think that? And they said, well, we don't have anybody at the company who knows anybody over there. And I said I'll text Janet and find out if that's true yeah and they were like what I love about that story is that the team had to compete on their knowledge but at the end of the day when you're going through a significant transformation I'm sure right it matters that you have a relationship that you're trusted when you're going through something significant and that does matter because again hopefully things always go right but in a situation where it might not you want to be able to pick up the phone to someone who got your back and command all the resources that you need and that you feel that you have that relationship and you don't need that in every single bit of work that we're doing but in the most transformative i think it's really important has it changed actually let me start with another question which is let's say that you were sitting down and then janet had left i'm going to dakota johnson in your in your place and she's like um no sit over there hi Jamie hi Satya I don't want to know you like what if you didn't what if you didn't like each other does it matter because you all we have to do partnerships with people we like no people we don't like yeah doesn't matter at all so so it does look let's be clear I was looking for connection so that I could um have a better day okay um but it wasn't essential to what I was there to do or what I got out of the day other than edification of making a new connection. I'm a capital allocator. I allocate human and financial resources. And there's no way on earth I'm ever going to have enough of either. So I partner for expertise because if I were to build a team that could specialize and master every aspect of building the enterprise network for AI, I'd run out of money pretty quickly but when I import talent or expertise or I outsource capabilities it's a part of building you know the ecosystem that's part partnership that's you know part direct ownership of an operation that's you know part connection and so it's important liking each other isn't nearly as important as respecting and trusting each other's capabilities and and so we you're lucky enough to have both but to be clear EY won that deal and exactly because you were red but i think that's also i think it's interesting to be clear we marked them red so let's talk about what's changed right because we've always partnered what's different now because i feel like we're talking about it differently now and you mentioned a playbook obviously it's contextual but let's talk about the playbooks you both have in terms of how you think these ecosystems are emerging in a way that will help people so i'll start and look i think that the level of complexity that companies are dealing with is at an all-time high and it's not showing any signs of slowing and partnerships are going to be really critical to reach your ambitions your growth and everything else and so i even look at our own business we just released our earnings But 25 percent of our revenues is through our alliance and our ecosystem partners, just to give you a sense of scale. And we're 57- Female Speaker 1 Is that more than it was? Female Speaker 2 Yeah, it was. It's up. It's up significantly. And that's at a $57 billion company that we are and that we just reported. And I think that's where, you know, as I think a leader, you have to be really comfortable with, what are you good at? What do you need to partner with to gain that expertise? And recognize that that is not a sum of the money that is not a sign of weakness, it's actually a sign of strength and you know those that figure that out and figure out how to combine those capabilities with confidence are the ones that they're going to reach their ambition sooner and further and grow faster and then I look at the capabilities we talk a little bit about that too but then if you can have the trust invest together have shared KPIs that takes the you know the relationship even further and I'll tell you a little story we had a client that was moving into a new market with us and they had never had employees in that market and they were partnering with us it was a co-sourcing model and basically they said we don't have a brand in this geography your brand is our brand and that is really where trust comes into play and that's a really you know critical time to have a trusted partner in that expansion one of the things that's always interesting in any ecosystem is the power dynamic there's money there's people right you have what four hundred thousand seven thousand twenty thousand twenty thousand so you're both equally amazing company you have a leaner company and so does that in a different space how does that impact um the peer-to-peer relationship or do you feel like you partner differently since you're very different firm so it's a it's a good I mean, we lean on external capabilities, and the size of the company actually isn't nearly as important as our belief system in the potential outcome that they can deliver. So, if you're going to do, you know, the kind of financial outsourcing that we were doing, this is a premier brand and famous for delivering great outcomes in that space. They obviously were top of the list to begin with, and then they won. By the way, we're doing some other really cool things together in terms of decommissioning, legacy telecom mining for copper and things like that where we need to build a factory EY also won that work but you asked a really important question what's changed and Diane I think it's it's actually really important to talk about this notion of the boardroom and the conference room and the cube that I grew up in we were rewarded for being right we had to know our stuff we had to be the best we had to come in with a strong opinion we had to have all the facts we to have mastery and that is just not possible in today's market i don't care what market you're in you have to build the machine to get it right and the orientation around getting it right is like here's my hypothesis i'm going to put the best athletes on the field inside and outside the company i'm going to look for signals and i'm going to course correct constantly because it used to be that the you know we fixed everything to the annual calendar budgets and sales targets and comp plans and bonuses and all that kind of stuff you can't do that anymore it literally is down to you know we can't cycle through more than like a quarter or a month at a time but i'm getting signals every day and we're pivoting every day my job is to get it right and to allocate the capital accordingly and you have to have a bench of partners that you can go to to deliver those outcomes can you do a bit of a deep dive as to a particularly creative partnership that you've had what you've been able to do together that you might have attempted on your own but is now possible especially something that maybe is rooted circa 2026 that would not have happened six or seven years ago the ones that we've done together yeah or whatever if you have a better partnership then we'll just tell we don't have a but it's okay no i i think for me when this is a funny story that we're just talking about before when we were talking about how to really drive capital you know creation for lumen and having our team and you wouldn't think of ey as helping harvest copper right and i think that's a perfect example where we had our strategy people and then we had to be an ecosystem orchestrator on your behalf because we're not actually taking it out of the ground but we have relationships and could bring that ecosystem together in order to drive the results that Kate and team wanted to have it was funny you know i when we were we were awarded the work i said to her i said like i want to come and i want to harvest you know copper and she's like, well, Janet, you're going to have to trade in your shoes for, you know, steel-toed boots and a hard hat. But I think those are the stories. We haven't done it yet, but when we're done, we'll do that. But I think it's really important also. I'm taking her. I got this. You got that? We're going? Come with us? All right. But our team is so proud of the work that they're doing because it's, again, playing a critical role in their success, doing things that haven't been really drive change, and I think that's something that they are very, very tied to personally. Yeah, and so if you think about it, it seems like a mundane example, but I never thought when I came to take this, you know, company to the next level that I was going to be pulling copper, you know, out of the ground and off of telephone poles and sending it up market and trying to, you know, play the capital markets to really understand when the best and trying to, you know, play the capital markets to really understand when the best time to sell these things is and how to do the valuation, how to carry it, you know, from place to place. It's an extremely complex and arduous process from start to finish, and we want to do it with factory-like precision. And so, it's about assembling that whole supply chain and having a partner that's really good at helping coach you through that, right? Well, the very nature of EY's partnership, right? It's kind of the essence of the professional services model. And when I think about where we are right now, we talk about the AI era, and obviously a lot of people are doing more, you know, on the West Coast, the geopolitics. We haven't talked as much about that today, but, you know, your global firms and the world has changed. What advice do you have? We talked a bit about Playbook earlier, but what have you adapted and changed, just given the fact that so much is unpredictable and obviously you want resilience. but any thoughts on that in terms of advice or what you think you have to do differently? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I allocate time for is outbound calling and spelunking. Spelunking? Yeah, I do spelunking. What is that? Inside the company. You know who knows the answer to almost everything? The people. And not the ones that report to you necessarily and not necessarily the ones that report to them. But when you go and you dive deep and you do random calls. Random phone calls. Random calls of kindness. This must be a joke call. from the CEO I've had people call the offices and say somebody's using Kate steams and trying to call me but you know what when you can convince them to pick it up and it's actually me on the other end and then you have the greatest conversations because they're spur-of-the-moment spontaneous true and and you get great answers that's inside but I do the same outside I have advisors you know across a bunch of different spaces I have a leadership coach a business coach and then I have a bunch of advisors and all the different spaces that we play in. And it's that signal collection that's incredibly important because I don't necessarily think that there's any one source that you're going to get all the answers from. I think it's about collecting and synthesizing and then forming a hypothesis and then being able to pivot. Well, and that's a good place to end. Look, we have four minutes. We have all the time in the world. But when you think about the personal ecosystem, neither of you, you know, you're both CEOs of incredible companies. How much do you think partnership has been a factor in where you are today? And again, there's a lot of people in this audience who are both ambitious externally in their roles, but they're personally ambitious for what this looks like, too. Any thoughts you have? Look, I think you, to Kate's point, you can't do this alone, right? You need to be able to surround yourself with people that complement you as a leader, and that can be both internally and externally. I think that's very important. You also have to spend a lot of time educating yourself. And when I came into the role, I talked to people like Kate and other CEOs about, you know, where do you allocate your time? And I think more and more leaders are allocating their time to, you know, really hands-on learning, especially with the technology. I think that's critically important. What are you doing differently now than two years ago? So I'm spending a lot of time with the tech firms, to be honest with you. And that's where, you know, where are they going to complement where do we want to use them on a specific platform or ours we have to make choices we have to make choices about what are we going to do here in the United States versus in Europe and Asia I think those are things that could be really important you talked about you know our organization of 400,000 people my job is sometimes to make it feel smaller to our clients based on sector location expertise but also I love the operating model that we have because we can be global for the largest clients that require us to be global and then today we can be local where things are better localized and right now i think the role of the multinational is to be able to flex that muscle when you need to be global and when you need to be i'd be remiss not to ask each of you to say one word about each other description whatever i'm going to start with you warmth warm i would say authentic oh that's so nice i love that okay now let's have some closing thoughts we're talking about power partnerships and sort of where we go from here especially look around the corner a little bit i'm going to start with you what thoughts you have in terms of advice or even what's on your radar right now that you're thinking about in terms of what you might do differently i think it's you know everybody has to insert themselves into the game in terms of ai and it's everything from innovation to regulation to safety to you know deployment and return on on use cases and everything and i think there's a lot of sideline and armchair quarterbacking and I I think I'd really like to see everybody get a little bit closer to you know the actual design use deployment and understanding of where we are I think it's I think it's critical before I answer I have to put a plug in for Kate's blog on LinkedIn Daring Diaries because she says a lot of what needs to be said among leaders today so I'm putting a plug in for that and I I read it religiously. Do you want to plug anything at first? Okay, it's fine. I'm a big customer, so yeah, everything at first. But just on the question, I do feel like as leaders, we have a responsibility to bring our workforce along. And if you look back two years to today, the conversation about workforce has been changing. It's not doom and gloom. It's all about upskilling and opportunity. And I think, no offense, but there's lots of narratives that are out there on the workforce, and I think we have a responsibility to our people to upskill them, but bring them along and speak very honestly about what the future holds. And so that would be something I want to leave you with. And I do think you guys celebrate people in a very special way. So please join me in thanking our terrific guests, friends, allies, partners. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks, Diane.