Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Former Medtronic CEO Bill George

I recently interviewed Bill George on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today was the CEO of the world's largest medical technology company. Bill George was the CEO of Medtronic, which grew from $1.1 billion to $60 billion in market cap, under Bill’s leadership. Bill is also the author of a number of books on leadership, including his newest book, a new edition of his best-seller, True North: Leading Authentically in Today's Workplace, Emerging Leader Edition. Bill, thank you for joining us.

Bill: Thank you very much, Adam, for having me. 

Adam: I’m excited to have you here. Bill, you grew up in Muskegon, Michigan, you studied engineering at Georgia Tech, and then got an MBA at Harvard Business School where you've been a professor for many years. Your first two jobs out of business school weren't in corporate America but were for the Assistant Secretary of Defense and for the Secretary of the Navy. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What were the key experiences and lessons that shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

Bill: Well, that's a great question. When I got out, I revisited go, I was intending to be in business. But I also recognize that the government was going to have a big impact on all of our companies, all of our organizations. And there are a lot of very brilliant people working in the Department of Defense under Robert McNamara, people like Cyrus Vance, who became Secretary of State and fall in this. And last of all, I had the privilege to work with a lot of these people for three years, including the Secretary of the Navy, Paul Ignatius, and it was a great learning experience. I was an individual contributor. But I was deeply involved in a lot of very important issues. A lot of us went there thinking that we could help our country during the Vietnam War. And we spent much of our time there trying to help us get out of that war because we realized the futility of it before it really became public. And so but I got tremendous, mad love being in Washington, I always, always go back. Although today it's become so politicized that there's not much room. I'm not really a politician. I would never run for political office. But I'm sad about that. But I think I loved my time, there was a great formative experience working with outstanding people.

Adam: My favorite book and a book that I recommend to everyone, recommend to listeners, recommend to the students that I teach, in the classes that I teach at UCLA, is the best and the brightest, and you're there, you lived it. What did you learn from being there? In that period and at that moment?

Bill: Well, I learned a lot from the people there. But one of the negative things I learned Adam, and I do think they were the best and brightest. But being bright is not sufficient, the brightest person does not make a great leader. Robert McNamara is one brilliant person I've met. I've sat alone in his office, and he's challenging me, and I'm 23-24 years old. Wow, tough. But he wasn't really engaged as a leader. He was a director, he was old school, if you go do it, and he tried to change things, but he never really got close to it. And if you take the Vietnam War, for instance, you never even went on the ground to Vietnam, you can have to maybe as far as why you were you got a briefing of flip charts from the generals. But he really didn't engage. And I think today a leader has to be out with his or her people. If you're not on the frontlines, if you're spending all your time in meetings, looking at statistics. McNamara was a statistician, that's all he looked at, our statistics. If you don't know the real issues, and the people, you're not gonna know what's going on. And I think the bigger your company gets, the more you're at risk of getting entrapped by data and meetings and not being on the ground and seeing what's really happening. I don't care if you're in medicine. With Medtronic, I saw 700 to 1000 procedures. When I was CEO of Medtronic,  I'd go up, I would meet the doctor at 6:30 or 7 in the morning, go into the operating room and his invitation and watch them do surgery. And that was a great learning experience. If you're in the retail business like my friend who buries only you better be out in the stores. In fact, Cubero is a great example I feature because BestBuy was in deep trouble when he went there. He didn't spend his time at the headquarters. He went out and spent the first week in the stores and he told me, “Bill, I learned everything I needed to know” and then weakened the stores. So just some examples, but I do think I did learn from the people. But it's not about being the brightest person around.

Adam: Listeners of this podcast are probably familiar with the Kubera story. He was a guest on this podcast and shared so many great examples and so many great lessons on the topic of leadership. I’m excited to dive into the topic extensively with you over the course of this half hour. You shared a couple of great tips right off the bat, the importance of getting your hands dirty, leading by example, not sitting in an ivory tower, but being out in the field being there. And understanding that the best way to learn is by being on the floor.

Bill: Absolutely. For me, it was going into the labs and talking. Saying, hey, what are you working on? Like I said, going into medical centers, going on your production line, or just going to the cafeteria and having lunch with a good production organization. It was the quality of our products. Oh, Mr. George, we have real concern to get equipment not allowing use for this, we need to learn more from doing that. I do worry about everyone being remote. Because I think we learned so much from these quick interactions we have in the hallway. It's the old cliche, but it's very true of managing by wandering around. And I think we all need to be out there. And I'm very concerned, we did a study out of MIT Harvard Business School of CEOs. It showed they're spending 68% of their time in meetings, mostly over their direct reports. And the average being less than an hour and a half. I mean, that's not the place you need to be, somebody else can run the numbers, you can find him on your computer, you need to be out with the people. And if you go back to the COVID example, who was it that saved us in COVID? It was all those frontline workers risking their lives or their stocking stores at a Target store, or working as a barista at Starbucks, or like my son, who's a surgeon at UCSF doing surgery. 

Adam: And Bill, you really underscored the importance of asking good questions. What are the right questions that leaders should ask: how do you get to the core of what's really going on? How do you get to the essence of what you need to know?

Bill: The closer you get to the frontline, the more you get honest answers to those questions. People want to tell you, you have arrived or the salesperson, they want to tell you what the challenges you face with your products. And people on the production line want to tell you about problems, they haven't produced quality products, or why they're great innovations at Medtronic, you're getting blocked by management, and they can't get them through a process. And I've talked to so many other companies, it's picking out those companies a lot more. So I think that's where the truth is, there does tend to be a little spin IRLP built. And if you recall, Wells Fargo had 3 million fictitious accounts, John Stump, the CEO, never went out to his branches. Or if he did, he went with an entourage of 10 people. I like the target example. And I was on the board. Brian Cornell just showed up at a store and kind of wandered around, seeing what's going on, talking to some customers. So if you don't want to do that, then you shouldn't be in the C suite, you shouldn't be in an executive role, because that's what leaders need to do. They're not just managers. And here's the problem. We've got business schools churning out millions of managers over the last 20 years, not nearly enough leaders. And that's where I'm hopeful that your generation of Gen Xers and Millennials and Gen Z will really step up and take charge of leadership. Now I think it's time.

Adam: How do you delineate leadership from management?

Bill: Well, I think management is doing all the right things. And it's the things we teach that process controls, financial control. Leadership is really a human endeavor, I had to learn this the hard way. It's about relationships. It's if you're a leader, we have a new model and my new book, The Emerging Leader, Edition of TrueNorth, that we talked about the coach model. I think you should be more like a coach. So many great leaders have played sports, they understand what I'm telling you about. First of all, you need an acronym, you need to care for your people. And you need to be wise enough to organize them around their greatest strengths and where they really want to be. And then you need to align them around their purpose and values and the company's purpose. And so we spent all of our time Medtronic doing it because we knew the frontline would deliver if they felt that alignment. And then I think you can challenge people well.  Great coaches always challenge people. How are you reaching your full potential? And then finally, can I help you do that? Or can I help you solve the problem? Should God let me do that? And that's what great coaches do. They do challenge. They're not soft and soft about this, but they allow people to reach their full potential, and then they require that they come together and play as a team. And if leaders do that, that's what's important. It's not just managing right.

Adam: And so much of your philosophy on leadership focuses on the concept of discovering your true north. Can you share with listeners how in your own personal experience, finding your true north has been essential to excelling as a leader and how anyone can find their true north?

Bill: I say in my new book, Adam, that the hardest person you'll ever have to lead is yourself. Why is that? Well, you've got to know who you are. Because if you don't, you're gonna get drawn into external gratification, money, fame, and power. But your true north is who you are at your essence. It shows beliefs you have, your most deeply held values, and the principles you lead by. And also where you find genuine fulfillment in your life. Why would you work in a job where you don't feel satisfaction and fulfillment, but when you know your true north, then you can help other people find theirs as well, and then come together as one team. That's very powerful, unified. I think it's in-between leading with your head, like all the people, I talked about the Oregon Department of Defense during Vietnam and leading with your heart. And as a very wise Buddhist monk, who died last year, said to me, “The longest journey you will ever take is the 18 inches from your head to your heart”. In your heart is where these qualities of caring, passion for your work, compassion for the customers you serve, and empathy for your employees are encouraged come together. And that's what real leaders have to do. But until you have done your own discovery of your true north of who you are, then only when you do that you prepare to go out and lead other people and help them and work with them.

Adam: I love it, before you can effectively lead others you need to be able to lead your own life. And it starts with self-awareness. Once you understand who you are, you can take that next step on the leadership journey. And it's never too early and it's never too late to get started. It's the most important journey that any of us can go on. And you ticked off some other integral characteristics of effective leadership, caring, empathy, courage. What do you believe are the key characteristics of a great leader? And what can anyone do to develop those characteristics to become the best leader possible?

Bill: You just said it well, it's self-awareness, and all those characteristics that come out of that caring, empathy, compassion, and courage. But let's go back to self-awareness. How do you gain self-awareness? I think you'd gain self-awareness by processing your life story. And you go back into those challenging times, which we call crucibles. When things didn't go your way. When I played college tennis, when I won, I thought I was better than I was. I lost, I found what I needed to learn and my weaknesses are exposed to what I had to work on. And so I think that's true of leaders too. So we have crucible difficult times we go through and they often become blockages and keep us from growing. And so we have to process those things. And then I recommend to all leaders two things to gain more self-awareness. One is to have some form of introspective practice. I've been meditating for 45 years even as a meditator. You can do mindfulness, you can go for a run, you can go for a long walk, talk to a close colleague, but something where you reflect on how I showed up today. What kind of leader was I?  I did a good job, I was helping people and was a good leader for my people. Was that fulfilling in what I was doing? See, I think we can get way too caught up in the 24/7 world we live in, and 1000 emails a day and a task list where I feel like I never get it done. There's always more. And I think you need to pull back from it. The second thing is just the opposite end of truth-tellers around you, who's going to tell you when you're going off track, none of these people at Medtronic can say, Bill, you think you did well today, but people are really upset with where you drove to a conclusion in that meeting or someone you hurt their feelings, you need to go back and talk to them. And having those truth-tellers around me was invaluable. You know, everything I've done, I never get a course. I never teach a course at Harvard, where I don't get direct evaluation. And some of it's painful, critical because you teach 90 people, people may be upset, you may have hurt someone's feelings, you may have brushed them off. And that's so helpful. But I think all great leaders want to get good evaluations. Some of them want to watch themselves teaching or speaking. But they need that feedback. So feedback is the breakfast of champions. So without feedback, you're not going to have self-awareness. I had blind spots. I only overcame my blind spots. I was gonna say I was so blind. I couldn't see my own blind spots, but having my wife Penny and my men's group that point these things out to me, they could then help me realize that and that's how you become fully self-actualized and feel like, wow, now I can go out there and, and I can really help people because I know who I am. A great example of that, Adam, is Satya Nadella at Microsoft who was a computer engineer who did a total transformation. Microsoft was in so much trouble under Steve Ballmer more than anyone knew and was going over the hill, kind of like IBM had back in the ‘80s. He came in and totally transformed the company. Their stock had moved in 14 years under Ballmer, it's now eight times, he's done a spectacular job, but he's a humanist. And he says, you've got to learn or not at all. That's what we saw earlier in our lives that no one else knows, you got to be a person who is constantly learning. So I think anyone who isn't learning whether your age or my age if we stop learning, we stopped growing. And that's kind of the end of it, you constantly learn. I never go into a class at Harvard. Well, I don't learn more from my students, and they learn from me.

Adam: So much great stuff there. But I want to highlight one line that you shared, which I absolutely love. My entire life, I thought that we were the breakfast of champions, but you learn something new every day. Feedback is the breakfast of champions. And you're right on the money. The best leaders are lifelong learners. Having that growth mindset is integral to being successful in anything and everything you do. And Bill, you emanate that. I want to go back to something that we were talking about a little bit earlier. What is your true north? And how did you discover it?

Bill: First of all, I had to learn the hard way. My father wanted me to lead a big corporation because he thought he'd failed and wanted me to make up for his failure. He cared a great deal about me. But nine and 10 telling me I could go lead Coca-Cola or Procter and Gamble, or IBM was kind of a heavy trip. I never chose to lead anything. And I finally ran for president of the senior class and lost by a margin of two to one. So it's pretty clear that kids in my high school didn't think I was much of a leader. So I went off to Georgia Tech, I ran for office six more times and lost all six. And so now I'm over seven feel like a real isn't the best thing ever happened to me. Some seniors at Georgia Tech took me aside and said, “Bill, no one's ever going to work with you, much less be led by you. Because you're moving so fast to get ahead. You don't take time for other people”. And you're 100%, right, it was like I was building a resume to impress you, rather than caring about other people. So I really spent a lot of time trying to put my own self-help development process, and really build relationships, which I did. And that helped me throughout my career, a tremendous amount. So my true north as I reflect on it, even back in high school, and particularly in college, I was mentoring, helping a lot of people become better leaders to figure out what their hopes and dreams are, and to help them do so. And I've been doing that my whole life. I've been doing the last 20 years in teaching, but I was clearly doing Medtronic. Look, I didn't know anything about medical technology and I didn't know a lot about base technology. But basically, what I brought up was, how do you build great organization leaders? We needed a lot more leaders. We grew very rapidly as a company, as you pointed out. And to keep up with that growth, we needed more leaders. And so my job was to mentor and guide those leaders, including criticizing some of my recalled presidents, Europe, my office was a fantastic executive. And I said, “Look, Barry, you're playing the political game here, and it doesn't work here. So you have to realize that's not the way we're going to play the game”. So I think it's okay to be critical or challenge people to ignore it, have them do better. And you realize, that's what happens when you have a great team, they'll play the game, and now you'll win.

Adam: How did you grow and scale Medtronic successfully? In your years as CEO, you mentioned your ability to mentor and grow and develop other great leaders. How did you do that? And what else did you do that all listeners can learn from?

Bill: We became humans, an innovation machine. Businessweek said that, but we focused on innovation and what I found I had to do was to support the innovators and the bustle, the organization bureaucracy. I don't like bureaucracy, I don't like layers. And so the only way we could organize was to finally add layers and I had to fight against that the whole time and be out there and really support when I heard good ideas to bring them back and throw them out and I'll let management kill them. And you find a big organization. It's a day killer. That's why a lot of people feel like their opportunities are being suppressed. And I'll say identify great young leaders that need more opportunities. And to give them those updates, see how they do not 100% work out. But hey, they did well. And it's amazing. Somebody gave me the opportunity to start a consumer microwave oven business in my days at Lipton, in my 20s, at 27 years old. And so I've always been on the lookout for young people that have talent, to open the door and give them the opportunity and that things be blocked by a big bureaucracy. And I think that's what's happened to many of our companies like General Electric, it's gone down, like what happened with Boeing, with the max, where I wrote a couple of cases, it was a huge bureaucracy. And so if you don't open the organization up, and you spend your time in meetings, I let other people run the meetings, I went out and spent 30% of my time with employees, 30% of my time with customers, and did a lot of mentoring as well and the other 30%.

Adam: How can anyone mentor and develop and train and grow better leaders?

Bill: Well, I think you've got to understand where they're coming from. And what is their true north? What do they resonate with? And you see the mistakes they're making. Like I had one leader working for me, every time he didn't make the numbers, he would always blame it on external circumstances. I finally said to him, “Look, you got to be honest about this. It's not working out, just say we made mistakes, we didn't do everything right. Take it on yourself”. I think a great leader, when things don't go well, you step in front of your team and say, I'll take responsibility for that. When they do go well, then you give the team the credit, and say they played a great game. And they did really well and got this new product out. And so I think it's a very nuanced kind of thing. But I think leaders have to be working with people not just sitting in numbers and not just sitting in meetings. And yeah, that's all important. But there are a lot of people who can get that done. A lot of executives can manage, not as many can lead as you would think.

Adam: But you really underscored an important point for listeners that all leaders should take to heart, take accountability, and share credit. No one wants to see the leader take credit, and push responsibility and accountability onto others. It's the worst thing that anyone can see. It's demoralizing. And you immediately say, that's not a person who I want to work for. That's not a person who I want to do anything for, right?

Bill: Right. The Baby Boomers don't understand why Millennials are leaving their companies. Because I've talked to them. They said all these kids, they call them kids. These are people 35-40 years old, they aren't exactly kids. They said they swap jobs all the time, or they don't want to work that hard. It's just not true. They misunderstand. So the reason we need to have new generation leaders take over are people that know how to work with people in the Gen X and Millennial generations. And to empower them. I'll guarantee you that a group of empowered people will outcompete a top-down power-based organization every time where everyone has to go to the boss for decisions. We want to push decisions on the lowest possible level, there's nothing worse than having decisions to get entrapped. In some bureaucracy, you've got to let the first line people know the most about quality or about how to sell, how to sell clothes in a men's clothing store. Whatever it is, let the first-line people decide.

Adam: I couldn't agree more with you more. You and I speak the same language. Great leaders empower those around them. When you look around and try to understand why people don't want to work at a particular organization. It's generally because they don't like the person they're working for. Not 100% of the time, but the majority of the time, they don't like their boss, their boss isn't someone who they want to show up every day and work for and if you like the person you're working for, there's a good chance that you're going to continue to work for their organization.

Bill: You got it. People don't leave companies, they leave bad managers. And what I don't understand is that I talk to CEOs about this all the time. I'm so very frustrated with this. I've been trying to deal with this for 20 years. Why do we tolerate toxic leaders or managers? They aren't even leaders. So why do we tolerate toxic managers that drive people out? Why don't we look before they get promoted at how their people feel about it? Look at a 360 review. Why don't we look at how many people did they develop that went to other parts of the organization? And one of the reasons David Solomon became CEO of Goldman Sachs - I was on the board - was because he had developed so many great leaders throughout the organization. That's what we should be looking at.

Adam: What do you think the answer to that question is? Why do you think this phenomenon occurs? And why can't so many smart people in corporate America break this toxic trend?

Bill: I hope we will. And I talked about that in my book, but I think, yes. I think they get caught up by charisma, by people that can do great PowerPoints and make a good impression. And they let them take credit for what other people are doing and let them play the game. Michael McCabe talked about that years ago. And I, I just don't, I don't think that's tolerable. But I think the younger leaders, the new leaders emerging are recognizing that they can't let that happen. And I think it's because so many senior leaders are isolated from their people. And they're strictly looking at the numbers. And they're not looking at the human-to-human side of leadership, and leadership as a human task. That's what Sachin Adela says, that's what you've got to do today. And if you don't have the human qualities, you're not going to be a good leader in any role, in any job, in any capacity. So I hope we will see elimination of that because it's hurting the business and the business people are going out of business. You can look at them. All these retailers going out of business, all the people getting in trouble, because they lack sight, or was Boeing listing their engineers when the Mac scratched? Have they listened to some executives saying it's a safe aircraft when the engineers know it wasn't? Where were they? Why are they not listening? And I think that's got to change.

Adam: One of the things that Hubert shared with me and shared with our audience when we spoke that really stuck with me was when he was talking about how he turned around Best Buy. And he said that the one thing that he had to do was ensure that no matter what got cut, the last thing he cut was human beings in his company, he would cut anything and everything before he would cut jobs. And having that mindset, having that sensitivity toward other people, is really what it takes to be a great leader, caring for others, appreciating that, at the end of the day. And yes, numbers are important when it comes to business. But nothing is more important than human beings. Without human beings, there is no such thing as business. There's no one to run your business. There's no one to buy from your business. There's nothing here. And that's what this is all about.

Bill: So Adam, I think you've said it very well. Because let me make this point, many of the Baby Boomers look at people as a cost. And I think people like you, and you bear to look at people as an asset. What do we value? I say people. PepsiCo, they've got 300,000 people, your value of this company, yes, you have nice brands, but the value of the company walks out the door when they go home every night. This is true of any business. It's all about the people. And unless you realize that and it really grates me when a leader like Carly Fiorina was destroying HP and she would lay off 20,000 people, and get paid a huge bonus. Yeah, a $5 million bonus for laying off people. Where's the value of the company? Look at how under Jeff ml GE value got depleted in the largest shareholder value loss in history. Okay, they lost the talent that had been built up, that Houstoun they are always in service everyone went through, not anymore. What a tragedy. That was because it didn't value people. They looked at people as a cost. Let's get rid of them. We can't have all that cost. Let's get rid of them. No. How do we make our people more empowered so they can do more for us?

Adam: What was the most difficult leadership moment in your career? And what do you learn from it?

Bill: Well, I've had a number of difficult moments. But I remember one in particular is about over a year, year and a half after I joined Medtronic. I was that CEO at the time I was pressed as Chief Operating Officer. I reorganized the company into what I thought was a great global operation and pointed the first president to Europe. And six months after I appointed him, and he was a great businessman, our General Counsel came into my office and said “Bill, can I call up our Chief Auditor?''. I said, “Sure”.  And they showed me that he'd been running a bribery fund on behalf of Italian doctors. Now he is with Medtronic. He came from a subsidiary in Canada about four years ago. But this went back 20 years. Called them over to come in from Belgium, where headquarters was determined. That was the easy part. The hardest part for me was going back to the board of directors and the top management, my colleagues on the exec committee, and saying I made a mistake. He didn't change. I didn't check out his values. And so I said then I'm never going to appoint somebody again without checking out their value, without finding out from their subordinates, the people that are with them, their peers. How did they come across? And so I was looking strictly at his business acumen and skills and managerial abilities and not looking at who the person saw he was. So I can say he didn't change. He was doing this all along. It was I who failed. And so sometimes you have to look yourself in the mirror and say, how did I cause this? It's easy to fire someone but it's much harder to acknowledge that you're the source of the problem.

Adam: And by acknowledging that you failed, by acknowledging that you made a mistake, it allowed you to become a better leader.

Bill: Yeah. And by the way, if the CEO doesn't admit his or her mistakes, no one else can. That was one of the issues. We had the best permanent at McNamara, no one could admit their mistakes, people are spending millions of dollars trying to cover up the mistakes. Let's just admit it. And so I say, look, I'm sorry I offended you, or I made a mistake, or that business really didn't work out. Now let's go correct it. Or we got a quality problem, how are we gonna fix it? And I say, if you can get people to openly transmit the problems they have, we can solve them. But it can't solve any problem I don't know about.

Adam: Bill, before we go, I want to ask you a few rapid-fire questions. What do you look for in the people who you hired? And what are your best tips on the topic of hiring?

Bill: When I'm hiring people, I look for people that lead with their heart as well as their head. And if their view is to show that, to open up, then I think they're the wrong person for the organization.

Adam: How can leaders build a winning organizational culture?

Bill: Well, the culture is a result of people aligning around a mission, and a set of values. And if you can align around mission and values as we did at Medtronic, people are then empowered to fulfill that and it has to align with their own goals and mission, and values in life. When they do that, an empowered organization is going to win, I assure you. It's like a sports team.

Adam: A topic that you cover in your book is a topic that many leaders today are grappling with. And that's how and when to speak out on hot-button public issues. How and when should leaders speak out on hot-button public issues?

Bill: Number one question CLS asked me today is when should I speak out? And you can't speak out about everything. And it's something Bob Chapek is learning. And you can't just be silent and not defend your own employees. So to me, you got to go back to your mission and values Dalian and the new CEO of Johnson and Johnson, you go back to the credo net, trying to get back to the mission. And if it reads out in your own mission of what's really important to you, as a company, then you have to speak out, you have to defend your employees. I live in Minneapolis where George Floyd was murdered any CEO in this town and they say headquarters down, we did that not only speak out on behalf of their Black employees but recognize that we had a lot more discrimination. And we're willing to acknowledge this area, and do something like put a program together. That was essential because they couldn't survive that with their employees because they would say I don't want to work here anymore. So I think that's critical is to realize it's got to come from a core place of mission and values.

Adam: So what can anyone listening do to become more successful, personally and professionally?

Bill: Well, that's why I wrote my book. No, seriously, there are a lot of exercises. I think you have to start with introspective practice to figure out who you are. And then there are ways you can develop yourself as a leader and make sure that you're in a place that is your sweet spot, which is playing to your strengths and a job you're motivated at, and then working with good people. Because if you're not working with people that inspire you, that you've really felt you can resonate with, it's gonna drag you down, it'll rub off on you. And so I think that's what a lot of younger people today are looking for. It took me a while to find that datum, to be honest. But that's what they can do. And then you're ready. When you do those things, then you're ready to go on to lead other people, not as an AI leader, but as a weak leader, you're a servant of the people that you work for and work for you. And if you recognize that and make that journey and have clarity about the organization's purpose, and you become a coach. I think as I talked about earlier, I think being the leader, as coach, as opposed to the manager as director, is the way to go.

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

Bill: Well, thank you for having me on it. You have a great program, you do a great job interviewing. Thank you. 

Adam: Thank you.


Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also 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. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, 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. 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.

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