Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Cox CEO Alex Taylor

I recently interviewed Cox CEO Alex Taylor on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today is the leader of one of the largest private companies in America. Alex Taylor is the CEO of Cox Enterprises, where he leads a conglomerate that generated $22 billion in annual revenue and consists of 50,000 employees and a number of prominent media,  communications, and automotive businesses, including Cox Communications, Kelley Blue Book, and Autotrader. Alex, thank you for joining us. 

Alex: Pleasure to be here. Thank you. 

Adam: Alex, your great-grandfather founded Cox Enterprises in 1898 and you joined the company a few years after graduating from college. You initially cut your teeth as a reporter for the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel in Colorado. 

Alex: That's right. 

Adam: Can you take listeners back to your early days? What experiences and lessons were most instrumental to shaping your worldview and to shaping the trajectory of your success?

Alex: Well, I graduated from Vanderbilt. And it was a time in the mid-90s, when the Dot-com boom was happening, and everybody was going off to become a banker in New York. I think 80% of my friends at Vanderbilt went to New York to become bankers. And I was considering whether or not I wanted to do that. It didn't seem like my type of thing. People were sleeping in offices, then it's like your first year as a banker was just ‘you live there.’ And I've always been more of a, ‘I wanted to get out and do something.’ I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I love being outdoors. I had this idea of starting a fly rod company. I was going to build bamboo fly rods and all that. And then I read the book on how to get bamboo from China and how to manufacture it and all that. And it dawned on me that that's a really hard thing to do. It’s going to take a really long time, and I'm probably not going to be able to beat the people that have been doing it for 100 years. Maybe I should come up with another idea. And I decided I would spend six months writing a book about my favorite thing on earth, which is fly fishing. So I traveled around the world with some photographers from South Africa and did National Geo stuff. And we did a book called The Longest Cast and got that published. And then afterwards, I knew that I was buying time because ultimately, it dawned on me that I would be probably working in our family business at some point. And so I wanted to just get this travel and this entrepreneurial bug out of my ear. And so I went and did that project. And then when I came back, I came to see Jim Kennedy, who's the chairman of the company, and a fellow family member said, ‘I think the reason I have the ability to make decisions and have the freedom to do the things I want to do in life is because of this company, and we have wealth and money. And it's obvious, but it just sort of dawned on me recently that it's an amazing thing. And I should be really grateful. And I feel like I should be a part of it and give back and I don't know what to do. But I hope you'll help me.’ And so he said that he was thinking about putting me in one of our Dot-com businesses that there were plenty of back then. But then he said, ‘Actually, I think we're going to have you be a newspaper reporter. And the reason is that being a newspaper reporter is the best training you can have for business because it teaches you the most important skill as an executive, which is how to ask the right question.’ And so I went out to Colorado and became a newspaper reporter and learned a little bit about how to use fewer words to talk. You have two ears and one mouth for a reason. And you should use them proportionately and listen and ask questions. And I still to this day, when I'm in a leadership meeting, I'm always thinking ‘what is the right question to be asking.’ Now, that was sort of one of my earliest lessons from newspapering, which was a wonderful time in my life.

Adam: Alex, you touched on a number of themes that are essential to great leadership, a number of themes that we talked about consistently on this podcast. Great leaders ask great questions. Great leaders are great listeners. You mentioned that you weren't really sure what you wanted to do early on in your career. You thought that at some point, you're going to go and work at the family business. What did you do? You turned to a member of your family who it sounds like you consider to be a mentor. Can you talk about the role mentorship has played in your career and what are your best tips on the topic of mentorship?

Alex: Well, everybody, I think, that has been successful and gotten to a successful place in life can look back and point to the people that have championed their career and believed in them, and help them when they needed it. And there've been a lot of people in my life that have been there for me at various points, but the one person who's been there, from the moment I started work here till now has been Jim. And he's a believer in tough love. So he doesn't cuddle up with you and say things in a nice way. He just says them very directly. And he's very honest. And he'll say things like, ‘nice presentation, but it was kind of all about you’ or something. It can be kind of, like, insulting or whatever. But it's over time you realize that he's teaching you his lessons in life. And his lessons are that he has this saying that ‘the best time to kill a whale is when it spouts.’ And so making a big deal out of yourself, creating a spectacle of yourself, is actually bad for your company, for your family, for business. It shouldn't be about you. The person that's leading the company, me or him, should be the one that takes the accountability for things when they go wrong, or when accountability is needed. But the victories and the successes should be part of the team and the culture you're building. And so that's always been a big piece of what he's tried to instill in me. And then just accountability. We're all very lucky to be a part of this family. We're very lucky to be on the receiving end of so much of it. It isn't free. It requires hard work. And if you don't earn it, you won't get it. So he's wanted me to start at the bottom and work my way up. And I had eight or nine jobs from when I started to when I got into senior leadership. And I always had great respect for being out in the field and being at the bottom of the totem pole.

Adam: What were the most important skills that you developed as you were rising in your career, as you're going through each of those jobs, that you utilize today as the leader of one of the largest companies in America?

Alex: I think that it’s asking a good question. I'm always asking myself that. ‘What should I be asking right now’ is more important than ‘what should I be telling people.’ The idea of the Jack Welch-style CEO that charts the path and makes it happen and does it himself and surrounds himself with alpha personalities is different now than I think creating a culture and a stable of high-performance people where you bring out the best in them. And it's not about you, it's about bringing out the best in others is what I've learned. When I was young, I thought I knew everything. And everything made total sense to me. And I had a lot of opinions about things that I didn't have a lot of experience with. And one of the things newspapering taught me, in addition to asking questions, is that things are always more complicated than they appear. And so not jumping to conclusions, and listening to the people around you who do know what they're talking about. And trying to make sense of it. That way is better than just thinking everything and hammering your point home. In my position, every little thing I say has so much impact on the organization. And so I try to remind myself, I don't know everything. Whatever situation I'm being confronted with is more complicated than it appears and take it as a learning experience.  These last couple of years, be it pandemics and healthcare mandates on vaccines to come into the workplace, racism and social change and all that, I mean, these are things that just have not been a big part of my life. And I've had to ask a lot of questions and listen and try to learn on the fly, as I think all of us have. And so I just think, reminding yourself you don't know it all is an important part of leadership, and then trusting smart people around all the time.

Adam: Alex, as you describe your leadership style, you're really hitting on two themes, which are essential. Number one, humility. Number two, surrounding yourself with the right people. What do you look for in the people who you surround yourself with? 

Alex: It's a couple of things. But the most important thing is trust. I put a lot of trust in the people I work with. When my senior team, I have a small senior team, but when my senior team comes to me, and they all recommend something, I'd have to be really passionate to overrule that. I'm going to trust them because I trust them as human beings. I trust them in the decisions they make in life. I trust them with billions of assets and thousands of people. And so surround yourself with honest people that you like. I also value hard work more than genius. We've had lots of people that have worked out here in this company and lots of people who haven't. For some of the people who haven't, it was for no lack of intelligence. They were brilliant business people with tremendous backgrounds. They just had a certain inability to work on a team. They wanted everything to come straight through me or straight through Jim. And they didn't want to worry about the financial aspects or the HR aspects or who's this going to impact. They just, they had a plan, they wanted to go do it and you're like, ‘You really can't do that here. You have to sort of socialize this with other interested parties.’ And we don't want it to be a bureaucracy. where you can't get something done without dragging 10 people on with you, but we also don't want it to be a place where we don't check in on the people that are going to have a problem with us down the road. We like to kind of do that on the front end. And then the benefit of that is you have an army of people that work for you and that will make things happen, but you have to act as a team. We talk a lot about matrix management. But it's just more efficient when you're running a big company. You have connections across silos. But it's often hard to get product development: you have software engineering, you have sales, and marketing, who owns the product? So if you're selling Autotrader.com, and it has a president that oversees all those functions. Well, what if you have Autotrader.com, and you have Kelley Blue Book, and you have Retail 360 and you've got Manheim Auto Auctions and the customers buying those products are all the same? Do you want sales, the Head of Sales from each of those products, to go be pestering the customer? Do you want one Head of Sales to have a global conversation? And does that mean that that person is in charge of product development? Not necessarily. But that doesn't mean they have no say in it. People have to view themselves as part of a matrix that works on a team effectively, because these companies get so big, and they have so many functions. No one person can own everything. You have to work together. So the ability to team well, the ability to have hard work and honesty and a good moral compass, the type of person you want to sit with and have a beer with at the end of the day are just things that I work for. And you can never replace a track record. You can interview someone all you want, but the most important thing is, what have they done in their life? Because that's a pretty good predictor of what you're going to find going forward.

Adam: Find people who work hard. Find people who are team-oriented. Find people who you want to hang out with outside of work. Yeah, great parameters.

Alex: Yeah, life gets so serious these days. A sense of humor is important. I mean, it's just people that–  you can get really down when you're trying to tackle some of these things that are coming at us these days. And it's someone that can just put it in perspective and have a little fun, just it makes it all more enjoyable. Absolutely.

Adam: The first thing you said, you look for people who you trust. How do you find people who you can trust? How do you evaluate that? And as a leader, how do you build trust?

Alex: I find trust in people that I've worked with over time. So every one of my senior team has been with the company for that; none of them were brought in from the outside to join my team. Dallas Clement has been with us for 37 years. Sandy Schwartz has been with us 42. They came up in the business. Other people like Mark Greatrex joined the company, I don't want to get this wrong, 10 or 15 years ago. Karen Bennett joined the company from Turner 10 or 15 years ago. They've come up, I've watched them over the years interact with people, tackle different assignments, all that and I know how they do things and how they treat people. When you're hiring someone into a big job, a lot of what I think about is you're inflicting this person on thousands of people. And are you inflicting something good on them? Or inflicting something bad? Would I want to work for that person? Is this a downer or an upper? I look for people that are uppers that would inspire me, that I believe in, that I’m drawn to, that I feel comfortable being honest with, that kind of thing. So you learn by working with people over time. That's how I gained trust. It would be hard for me –  I've been burned so many times bringing people in from the outside into important roles and finding out they're just like it's all about them. They don't like fitting in. They don't like working within the team. And getting out of that situation is so painful.

Adam: How do you build trust? One day at a time, through your track record, through your living it, doing it. 

Alex: Right. 

Adam: Alex, how can anyone become a better leader?

Alex: I think, be open to feedback. So no matter what assignment you're tackling, or what job you're in, do it for a while, but then take an open and honest assessment of how people are receiving you. Leadership is not a popularity contest. So you don't want to get like ‘we like him’ or ‘we don't like him.’ You want to get a ‘here's what works, here's what doesn't for me,’ and you want to be able to ask that question in a way that's non-threatening. You don't want to try to figure out who gave you what feedback, you just want to have a mechanism of getting feedback. Because people don't criticize their boss because the boss is in charge of your salary, your future, your life, your family really in some ways. And so they want to have a good relationship with you. But you need to be open to feedback. If they're on your team and you trust them, you should be able to get feedback from them. I think reading and studying history and understanding perspective and ‘how does the time we're in add up to other times, is this particularly bad, particularly good all things considered? Are we okay? Are we in a crisis moment? How might this shake out based on how it has shaken out in the past?’ I've been reading all about different social movements, French Revolution, English revolution, the American Revolution, just to put like big times of change in perspective. And so I think reading and listening is important.

Adam: All comes back to that. Great leaders are great listeners. You can say it 10 times, you can say it 10,000 times.

Alex: But there are people who break the mold, like Steve Jobs broke every mold in the book. It was his vision, his instruction. He would tell people what to do. And if they said they couldn't do it, he would tell them to warp their mindset or whatever and make it happen. And it's situation-dependent, I think, in our business. Our purpose here is to take something that was created by your predecessors, your ancestors, really, and turn it over to the next generation. And so we want to leave it in a better place for the next generation of employees of my, my actual family, and of the world, the people that are coming down the road. So it's a long-term play. And I just find that mavericks might have a good run, but they tend to burn out. They don't leave a lot behind. The secret to a multi-generational family business is playing the long game. And I think that's a lot about remembering, it's not about you, it's about the broader family. It's about the culture and the values and the morals that you stand for. And try to build that culture and surround yourself with people that reinforce it rather than make it about themselves. So some people can make it about themselves. And they have done it successfully. But it doesn't –  I don't think that we can.

Adam: Yeah, Alex, I could not agree with you more. I actually did an interview with a guy by the name of Mitch Kapor and Mitch is one of the pioneers of the Internet. All-time great technology entrepreneur, all-time great technology investor, was a contemporary with Bill Gates, was a contemporary with Steve Jobs, knew Steve Jobs as well as anyone. And one of the things we spoke about in our conversation is the fact that so many people say, ‘Well, Steve Jobs did it this way so I should do it this way.’ And the point that Mitch made, which is a point that I think each and every one of us should take to heart is, just because Steve Jobs was able to do that and succeed doesn't mean that you're going to be able to do that and succeed. So much of Steve Jobs' success was despite many of the things that he did. You're talking about someone who had incredible genius, who was extraordinary in aspects of his life that allowed him to attain greatness, despite doing things as a leader that the rest of us can never get away with. 

Alex: Yeah. 

Adam: And that really speaks to your point.

Alex: Yeah, I agree.

Adam: So much of what we've been talking about speaks to the importance of culture. And I know this is a big area of focus for you. Cox is consistently recognized in all the major media lists that list excellence in corporate culture. In your experience, what are the keys to building a winning organizational culture? 

Alex: Well, I think you have to have some sense of what it is you're trying to create, or in our case, reinforce. The culture was here before I got here, and it'll be here after I'm gone, hopefully. When I was coming into my leadership role, we did a project with the journalistic skills of what questions you asked who, what, when, where, why, and how. And we started with ‘why.’ Why are we here? There's actually an author out there, Simon Sinek, who did a famous TED Talk called Start with Why. And then he wrote a book about it, and we got to meet him, had him come in, talk about it. We actually had a bit of a project, I got 20 or 30 People from different places in the organization, different divisions and different ranks of senior people, people on the frontline, and everybody in between, but people who had been around here for a while, asked them, ‘Why do you stay with Cox? You don't have to. There's a lot of opportunities out there. But what is it that makes this place special?’ And they said they feel like they're making a difference. They feel like somebody upstairs cares. They feel like they're a part of something. It's not just about making money for somebody else. They feel like ‘I'm making a difference in the world.’ And so we came around to the ‘why’ of why we're here is because we think we're leaving things in better shape for the next generation. And we believe that and we feel cared for and all that and that ties into the values that my great-grandfather left behind. In his will, he said the working people of this company have gotten me through many an emergency, and I asked my children and my trustees to always recognize that debt. And so you think about that word debt like employees aren't something that you squeeze for productivity. You try to make the company productive but people work hard for you and in the old-fashioned sense of the word, you pay them for that. But I think pay and benefits and the way you communicate, the way you treat people, is part of your culture. In fact, the definition of culture, to me, is how we treat people around here. And it's really the most important thing when people say ‘what keeps you up at night,’ it's all the changes going on in society, remote work, splitting up, leaving campus, trying to get people to come back, is our culture going to survive all this? And we do have a strong one. And I know that will survive in some way, shape, or form. I just don't want to miss that in-person, high-touch experiences we have of being together, because that's kind of what life is all about is experiences that we have together. It's not experiences we have on Zoom. I don't tell my kids I love them on Zoom unless I have to, because I'm not with them. But it's better in person.

Adam: Any tips on how to successfully lead in this virtual hybrid landscape? What have you been able to do? And what can anyone listening do?

Alex: Well, we don't have a mandate. We did have a vaccine mandate because we thought that was an issue of health and ultimately life and death. But we don't have a mandate about ‘You have to be in the office on these days,’ that just feels very controlling to me. And I've seen the case studies of others who have said, ‘We're going to work remote from here on out.’ And then they come back and say, ‘Actually, you have to be here on four of the five days or three of the five days of the week, or whatever.’ And it goes horribly because people have gotten used to taking care of their kids, getting them to school, commutes, and all that stuff. But I like people to look at being together as the default. Knowing that we are flexible in our approach and that if your daughter has a ballet recital like my daughter does frequently, it's okay to go to that. You don't have to clock out and be pinged in your HR report. It's okay to live your life, go to doctor's appointments, take care of your kids. But seek to be together with people. Don't just call it in on Zoom, because you can call it on Zoom when you need to. We also invest a lot in our campus. So we're trying to make it a place where you want to be. You don't have to come here every day. But it's a pretty cool place. We got good food, we have live events, we have speakers that come in, we're renovating the floors so that they're more of a hotel experience where you don't have dark long hallways where everybody's got an office. You've got more communal areas where people can socialize and have fun. So invest in the places you want people to be, which is what we're doing: a major renovation of our corporate headquarters now to try to create that place.

Adam: Alex, as you talk about leading in today's landscape, leading in a hybrid setting, building a winning organizational culture, first and foremost, it comes down to having leadership that cares. You use that word multiple times: cares. How you treat people fundamentally impacts everything. People decide whether they're going to show up. And whether that means showing up physically, showing up virtually, showing up with full energy, with full effort or quiet quitting. How you show up really comes down to how much you care and how much of those around you care. That's the buzzword. That's the magic word. And great leaders love people, fundamentally love people. Alex, through all my interviews with hundreds of America's top leaders, I put together a list of the key characteristics of the most successful leaders and right on that list: love of people. If you don't love people, there are plenty of things you can be successful in life, but you're not going to be a successful leader. You have to love people. And if you love people, that's ultimately what it's all about. And the rest of this stuff comes so much more easily.

Alex: Yeah. I always think, why are we here? And if it were just simply to make money and that was the only purpose, frankly, the best thing we could do is probably sell the company or become a public company and sell the stock off. Bankers come to us with those ideas all the time. ‘You guys can make a killing but you're worth so and so billions of dollars.’ But then what? So then we all just sort of go our own way and we don't have something that unites us as a family. We don't have that glue that we always had. We say goodbye to the past, we say goodbye to our legacy. And we say goodbye to the things that got us here. And I would rather have this company, which is an instrument of impacting the world around us. We impacted in a lot of ways. I think about running good businesses, meaning don't be an example of just blind greed and selfishness, be an example of being a contributor to society. Run a good business that has an impact around you. I think about, we can run businesses that clean up the world. So Cox Conserves is our big effort to run our businesses better. Don't use gas-guzzling cars, use more efficient vehicles. Try to figure out ways to get the set-top boxes to turn off at night to get the energy load on the grid down. Invest in controlled environment agriculture, because it impacts the world less than traditional forms of agriculture do, and then in terms of dealing with people, look back on your career and say, ‘I made a lot of people's lives better. They came to work here and they got training. They became better leaders. They became better people.’ And every little thing you say to an employee that works there, they take that home with them to their spouse. If you treat someone like crap, they're going to go home in a bad mood. And that's going to impact their relationship. It'll impact the way they are with their children, their children will take that to school and impact their friends. It's just a huge ripple effect of how you treat people. And so I just think you don't have to be blind to realities and accountability. And you can be tough and demanding. But that doesn't mean you're disrespectful. We're all part of a big family. We're all trying to do things, everybody makes mistakes. Let's get through it all together, and treat people well in the meantime. At the end of my career, I'd like to look back and say, if you were at Cox during my time there, it was a good experience, and they treated us right.

Adam: I think anyone who's listening to you right now can take what you said, and ask themselves that same question. What impact am I making? What impact am I making today? What impact am I making with my career? What impact am I making with my life? Am I making a positive impact in the lives of others today? Am I making as great a positive impact as I can? What do I need to do to get to that place? These are the questions that we need to ask ourselves regularly. And if we're doing that, we're going to get there. We're gonna get to the place that we need to be. Alex, you've enjoyed enormous success over the course of your career. You lead one of America's most successful private companies. What failures stand out as most significant to you? What did you learn from them? And what advice do you have for anyone listening on how to navigate the failures that they face in their lives and in their careers?

Alex: When I think of things that I've screwed up, it's certain hires that I've made, people that I thought would be a great addition to the team and they weren't. Looking back, I mean, we had panels, we looked into their background, we got recommendations, all that stuff. But it just, it reminds you that even the best people can suddenly change as soon as they get into certain situations and reveal a side of their personality that they didn't before. Extracting people from a powerful position after they're there is much more difficult than spending extra time to get a better fit. I think to some of our investments that we've made, investments that were just catastrophic failures for whatever reason, but I remember how optimistic we were when we went into them. And the pitch we got, and all the reasons that we thought this would work out. And that in retrospect, it was so obvious that this was going south prior to when we knew, but you'll learn a lot of lessons from that. I think one of the things I've learned is that when you come across someone who is really overly confident in their long-term success, be a little concerned because I don't know that they're fully grasping the difficulty of what they're doing. But every time something hadn’t worked out on the front end, we were looking at somebody with a major personality and a major pitch, and total confidence in success. And it's very intoxicating to be around someone like that because you love confidence. You love vision, and you want to do it, but you’ve got to dig into their ‘why are they so confident’ and often there's missing pieces there.

Adam: Live life with a healthy level of skepticism.

Alex: Yeah, and learn from your mistakes. You know, when you get knocked down when you screw up, just try to look back, do a post-mortem. What did I learn from that? I can't take nothing away from that experience. What should I take away from all that?

Adam: Yeah, yeah. Don't be cynical, but be introspective.

Alex: If you're not screwing up, you're not taking risks. There's a quote of Winston Churchill that says, ‘If you don't have any enemies, it's because you're not engaging in life.’ He says, ‘If you have enemies, good. That means you've done something meaningful in your life.’ But pushback and failures and all that kind of stuff are an important part of succeeding. And you just have to know it’s going to happen. Learn from it.

Adam: Absolutely. Alex, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

Alex: Work hard. Don't try to skimp by. I mean, the basics are do the right thing and work hard, but I would also, my advice to you and anybody wanting advice on how to be successful is find something that makes you happy. Nobody wants to be around someone who's unhappy. It is just toxic. It is miserable. And it's not going to lead to success. And it's not sustainable. So find something that makes you happy. If your dad tells you to become a doctor and you just don't want to because you want to become a painter, or whatever, I would recommend becoming a painter. Follow your heart into what makes you happy and what you enjoy. And then work very hard at it. Try to just be honest with yourself about what makes you happy, work really hard at it and good things will happen to you.

Adam: Alex, thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Alex: Absolutely, thank you.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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