April 29, 2025

Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Former Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler

Transcript of the Thirty Minute Mentors podcast interview with former Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler
Picture of Adam Mendler

Adam Mendler

I recently interviewed former Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today was the leader of the largest research-based pharmaceutical company in the world. Jeff Kindler was the CEO of Pfizer, which generates more than $60 billion in annual revenue and generated more than $60 billion in annual revenue while Jeff was the CEO. Jeff is currently the CEO of Centrexion Therapeutics. Jeff, thank you for joining us.

Jeff: Great to be here, Adam.

Adam: You grew up in New Jersey, and from a very early age, you wanted to follow in the footsteps of Perry Mason and become a trial lawyer. You did your undergrad at Tufts, you went to Harvard Law School, you clerked for Justice William Brennan, and you kicked off your career. As a lawyer, you worked as a litigator, ultimately became a partner at a highly prestigious law firm, Williams & Connolly. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

Jeff: Well, like everybody, I start by thinking about my childhood and my parents. And in my case, and I’ve come to appreciate this more and more as the years have gone by, I was very lucky. I had a certain duality in my parents. They had a lot in common. They both grew up in suburban New Jersey from middle-class Jewish families, but they also were very, very different people. My father – you might say he was a left-brain oriented person. He had a lot of ambition and drive. He liked business. He liked science, history. He happened to be a Republican. My mother, who happened to be a Democrat, was more of a right-brain type person. She was an amateur musician, an opera singer, a cellist, and a pianist. She loved music, which I do as well. And my mother, who I’m very thankful is still alive at 92 and very active and engaged. And if I had one word to describe my mother, it was kindness. My father could be a tough guy, he had a bit of a temper, which I unfortunately inherited sometimes, but they were very, very different people. And as I look back at my career in my life, I can see different times and different choices that I made where I was orienting toward one or the other. But what they both had in common and what I think has been the through line from the beginning and kind of everything I’ve ever done was they were lifelong learners. They were always reading, studying, learning new things. To this day, my mother at the age of 92 is taking up Italian lessons. My father always had a book in his hand. So I like to say I’ve been addicted to the learning curve. It’s both a strength and a weakness. The weakness is that I sometimes when I think I’ve plateaued out on learning, I get bored and need to move on. And that’s why I’ve had different jobs in my life. But it makes life exciting to always feel like you’re learning something and growing.

Adam: Jeff, I love that. And I love the way that you put it. Addicted to the learning curve. In my conversations with the most successful leaders, something that I’ve heard over and over and over and over again, the most successful leaders are not intent on walking into a room trying to demonstrate how much they know. They’re intent on walking into a room trying to learn more, trying to grow, trying to pick up as much information as possible. And I love that from an early age you recognized My mom is this way, my dad is that way. They’re very different people and that gives me an opportunity to learn even more because every person gives me the opportunity to learn, and I can pull this from my dad, this from my mom, and it can allow me to become all that much better.

Jeff: It’s so true, and it never ends. I’m learning something in business with every interaction that I have with anybody, but I’m also learning from my kids. I’ve got two kids in their 30s. They both have kids, and I learn from them. So that’s what gets me up in the morning. Today, I’m going to learn something new, and I’ve always enjoyed it. It has, as I said, led me to make some pretty dramatic career shifts along the way. It’s always been the one constant.

Adam: And you ultimately became the CEO of one of the largest companies in America, what were the keys to rising within your career and what can anyone do to rise within their career?

Jeff: If you don’t mind, I’ll talk about three specific turning points along the way and how they came about. As you mentioned, as a kid, I always wanted to be Perry Mason, and so I always thought I wanted to be a lawyer. When I got to college, though, I started getting involved with journalism. I was the editor of the college paper, and I really, really loved journalism. And I had a moment of truth, one of my first moments of truth, when I was getting ready to graduate. I really wanted to be a journalist at that point. I was ready to walk away from the law. My father really insisted, and I did what my father said in those days, that I apply to law school. And I got incredibly lucky, and I got into Harvard Law School. And my father basically said, if you get into Harvard Law School, you’ve got to go to Harvard Law School, full stop. So I did. And it was an interesting experience. I’m not going to say it was necessarily fun. Well, school’s kind of tough. But I met some fascinating people along the way. My boss on the law review was the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, lots of terrific people in law school. And it led me to a pretty good law career. As you mentioned, I had a Supreme Court clerkship. I went to Williams & Connolly, where I had some amazing clients, amazing cases, just a tremendous amount of fun, represented the National Enquirer, represented some attempted murder cases, defense contractor fraud, all kinds of stuff, did a lot of trials. learned a lot about that. And I’d like to say, and I think this is a good thing for people to think about in your first third of your career, developing some expertise, some domain expertise where you can have mastery of that area. Because eventually, as you move on in your career, you become more and more of a generalist. You have a broader and broader portfolio, but I think it’s good to have a foundation in that kind of expertise. So that was about gaining knowledge, professional skills, domain expertise, and so forth. The next big thing that happened is I got recruited to General Electric Company. And in those days, this is the 80s, I think a lot of people in law firms looked down their nose at people that were inside lawyers as people that maybe couldn’t make it in private big law firms. At least that was the mindset of a lot of people I worked with and knew. But a guy named Ben Heineman, who’s one of my heroes in my life and one of my mentors, worked for Jack Welch. Jack had given Ben the mandate to create a world-class inside law firm consisting of superstars in their various fields. And I got lucky enough to be made the head of litigation at GE. And that was an extraordinary experience, both working with Ben and with Jack. And I had a lot of big cases. And my great moment there was that I represented General Electric in a price-fixing conspiracy case in which GE was accused of fixing the prices of industrial diamonds with De Beers. And it was a case that Jack paid a lot of personal attention to and was very engaged. And I can tell you about my interactions with him, but I learned a tremendous amount from him. So now I sort of think of that, and by the way, none of this was planned. I’m giving you how all this looks in retrospect, but I was very opportunistic about things, and I just went with where I could learn the next phase of my life. But I would say, looking back at it, what I learned a lot from Jack and from others at GE was the importance of focus, decisiveness, speed, and maybe the single biggest difference between what I’ve been doing as a lawyer and what I saw business people doing was, the need to make decisions based on less than perfect information, something I wasn’t comfortable with. But making decisions – that is such a critical part of leadership. Oftentimes, you don’t have all the information you’d ideally like, but you need to make a decision. Jack, of course, was brilliant at that. The next turning point happened when I left GE because I had an opportunity to be a general counsel myself, and that sounded like a great opportunity for me. And I went to McDonald’s, of all places, a very different company. I moved out to Chicago, and I was there. And what was fun about McDonald’s is we used to talk about the fact that we had, at that time, something like 50 customers a day, which meant if there was a one in a million chance of something happening, it happened 50 times at a McDonald’s somewhere in the world. Some crazy thing, hot coffee cases, stuff in the playground, all kinds of interesting and fun stuff. But what was really a significant turning point in my life in that moment was that’s when I decided I really wanted to be a business person rather than a lawyer. And I think that was because I got to the place where I don’t want to claim I was the world’s greatest lawyer, but I was pretty good at it, and I developed a certain degree of mastery of it. And because in my life, I like to say I’m kind of addicted to the learning curve, I sometimes reach points in my career where I don’t want to say I’m bored exactly, but I feel like I want to try something completely different. And what I saw With business, obviously, and this was very clear when I was working for Jack Welch, when you’re at a firm like Williams & Connolly, which rightfully is very proud of what great lawyers they are, you tend to think the world revolves around lawyers. And what do you find out about in business, especially if you spend five minutes with somebody like Jack Welch, is maybe the world doesn’t exactly revolve around lawyers. So the opportunity to be in the action, and by this time having learned the value of making decisions, I wanted to make decisions as opposed to being an advisor. And the opportunity presented itself when McDonald’s decided to buy Boston Market, the well-known chicken franchise, which had gone into bankruptcy. And I was the lawyer on the deal. And I went to my boss and I said, they have 800 stores. There’s probably quite a few of them that we should close. There’s quite a few of them we could convert to McDonald’s, but there’s still a business here. There’s a good brand. I mean, to this day, people know the brand. I said, why don’t you let me run this business? I said, what’s the worst thing I can do? It’s already in bankruptcy. How badly can I mess it up? And he said, I’ll let you run the business, but on one condition, the condition is you have to stay full-time general counsel. So he let me do that. And to make a already long story a little bit shorter, we ended up buying a whole bunch of other companies. We found a company in Colorado that had Tex-Mex food and there were only 10 stores, but we thought it was really great. So we bought it. It’s a company you may have heard of called Chipotle. So we built that up. Another one called Pret-A-Manger. And the next thing I know I’m running close to a billion dollars of sales across four or five different of these different restaurant concepts. And at that point, I said, yeah, I’m done with law. I literally threw my law books away. I want to be a business person. And that led me to Pfizer. And from then on, I put law in the rearview mirror.

Adam: Jeff, so many great lessons there, starting off with focus early on in your career on developing domain expertise, and something that you didn’t say explicitly but was implied in everything you shared, demonstrating your value by doing high-quality work. You proved yourself to a lot of really important people who were ultimately willing to give you more and more and more important work. And follow opportunities. Your career isn’t a script that you are going to be able to act out. It looks a lot more like Curb Your Enthusiasm than any other TV show. So whatever opportunity that is in front of you, or maybe not directly in front of you, but you can access in some way, Jump on it, take it, and don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t be afraid to fall. Your story, your career is a great example of that.

Jeff: That’s really well said. Do you mind if I just add a couple of things on those two points?

Adam: Please.

Jeff: So on the first point, I spend a lot of time these days mentoring and coaching C-suite people and new CEOs. And a lot of the C-suite people, they always want to know, how do I become a CEO? And two of the things I suggest to them, three maybe, one is you have to pay your dues for the job you’re there to do. I call it the greens fees if you’re a golfer. If you’re the general counsel or you’re the chief financial officer or whatever you are, before you start thinking about the next job, make sure you’re doing this job spectacularly well because that’s what gives you the seat at the table. So when I’m sitting down at McDonald’s, for example, and same thing happened to me at Pfizer, I come in as general counsel. And in both cases, I ended up in the business. The first thing I have to do is really deliver on the reason I’m there to do. And a lot of people lose sight of that. And that’s where the domain expertise, the professionalism, the mastery is critically important because you don’t have any credibility unless you do that. But once you do that and you have some credibility, then you can start to find ways of adding value beyond that. And the advice I give people is try to think about the world from the point of view of the CEO. And I’m sure we’ll come back to this, Adam, later about how The CEO job is really a very different job and has to be thought about a lot differently. But if you’re not the CEO and you’re working for the CEO, everybody I know, everybody looks over at the CEO, I could do that better. What’s so hard about that? I shouldn’t be in that job. Ambitious people think that way. So once you do your job and you do your job well, The next thing to think about is what is the CEO worried about? Because the CEO isn’t necessarily worried about your area. In fact, they’re hoping that you take care of your area so they don’t have to worry about it. So what’s he or she worrying about that I can help them with? What’s a problem I can help them solve? And look for an opportunity like I did with Boston Market. to find a new way of contributing. And that’s the third part, which is look for opportunities. You can’t plan them. I never in a million years would have predicted that I ended up working at a hamburger company or a chicken franchise or a drug company for that matter. None of those things were in my plan or in my wheelhouse. But when the opportunities presented themselves, they look great and they look like something I might be able to do. And that’s why I did them.

Adam: Jeff, I love that advice. What is the CEO worried about? What is a problem that I could help the CEO solve? How can I make the CEO’s life easier? And if you’re not at a level within your company where you’re able to directly impact the CEO, how can I make my boss’s life easier? What’s a problem that my boss has? How can I help my boss? What value can I add today, tomorrow? There’s something you can do. And it really starts with asking yourself these questions and taking action.

Jeff: Yeah, I find sometimes people, and it’s natural, I mean, talented and accomplished people want to make sure their boss, whether it’s their immediate boss, the CEO, whoever it may be, they want to make sure that person knows what a great job they’re doing on the stuff they’re doing. And that’s not always the best way. And I’ll tell you a quick story about this. When I was CEO of Pfizer, I had a spectacularly talented and incredibly experienced head of manufacturing. Manufacturing is an area I don’t know anything about. I have no expertise. I can add zero value. From my point of view, I just want to know that we’re making the drugs safely and effectively, and they’re getting out the door to the people they need to get to. That’s all I need to know. I once had somebody from the manufacturing organization come into my office, hair on fire, emergency, sorry, I can’t make an appointment, I got to talk to you. Okay, what’s wrong? Oh, we have this terrible thing, the line at this plant went wrong, and there’s a flaw in the drug, and it could kill people, and it’s horrible. Oh, no. Okay, now he’s got my attention. Now I’m really nervous. Then he proceeded to take about a half an hour to tell me about what a great job they did and how they ended up fixing it. And there was no problem after all because they did such a wonderful job. That was like 45 minutes of my time, which is a lot for a CEO. And I thought, I think it’s great you did a great job. And it’s a great thing to talk about when it comes time to your performance review and your bonus, and the rest of it. But next time you come in here with a story like that, start with the end. So we had a problem, but we fixed it. That’s the two minute. Then I can decide whether I want to hear the 40 minutes of how that got solved. The point of the story is, yes, of course, you want your boss to know what a great job you’re doing, and you need to find ways of doing it. But if you put yourself in your boss’s perspective, if you put yourself in their shoes and how they’re thinking about things, Most of the time, they just want to know that you’ve got it handled and it’s under control. And if it’s not, what they can do to help address it. That gives them some peace of mind. Once you have that established and you have that credibility and they’re confident in what you’re doing, then you can think about what you can do to help them address other problems that are the focus of their attention.

Adam: Jeff, you shared a lot around how you were able to transition from being a highly successful lawyer to becoming a highly successful business executive. You are working at Pfizer. You have an established track record in business. How do you go from that place to becoming the CEO of Pfizer, one of the most coveted positions in corporate America? What were you able to do to get to that place? And what advice do you have for anyone listening to this conversation on how to position themselves to be able to attain whatever role they are trying to attain?

Jeff: By the time I was in contention to be the CEO of Pfizer, I had been working long enough that I had accumulated, I like to think, certain skills and attributes that were foundational. And I’ve already mentioned one, which was establishing domain expertise and professional mastery such that I had credibility with people. But I also learned a whole bunch of things along the way. When I was a lawyer, I learned a lot about how to analyze things, how to identify the pivotal question on which a problem turned. Because I was a litigator and a trial lawyer, I learned how to. become a fast learner. I remember a partner of mine at Williams & Connolly, we would go from doing a medical malpractice case in which, for the period of that case, we had to be the world’s expert on some narrow question of medicine or biology and know as much about it as the doctors, to doing a defense contractor. And he used to talk about the bathtub approach to knowledge. For the case, he would fill the bathtub with the knowledge he needed for that case, and then he would get it out so that he could make room for the next. In my law career, I learned those kinds of analytical skill sets. In my GE career, I learned about decision-making, speed, focusing on what matters. making decisions with less than perfect information, and of course, business itself, what the big drivers of business are, what shareholders need, and so forth, and had the privilege of learning that from one of the greatest practitioners of business management of the 20th century, Jack Welch. When I was at McDonald’s, another thing I learned that added to the toolkit, if you will, is now I’m working With a completely different type of people than I was at Williams & Connolly and to a large extent at GE, we’re talking about very sophisticated, highly educated, white collar type of people. Now I’m working in restaurants with hourly workers who have a completely different set of motivations and skills, and approaches to things. One of the things I admired about Jack, and by the way, Jack was not a perfect person. I could talk about some of the challenges about Jack. But one of the things I admired about him, because I saw it, he could go from a meeting where he was talking with investment bankers about the most sophisticated possible problems to the next minute on the factory floor talking to some worker and relating to them perfectly. So by the time I got to Pfizer, I like to think that I had these various attributes and experiences that maybe differentiated me a little bit from people that had spent their careers and lives in one particular area or even one particular company. I was lucky in that at the time that the board was considering making a change, there was a belief on the board’s part, which I shared, that the company needed some pretty dramatic change. I ended up being seen relative to some other people that were being considered for it, the change agent, the outsider, by virtue of the fact that I was exactly that. I’d only been at the company five years. I had not spent any time in pharma. We had a extremely unpleasant and ill-designed bake-off. I would not ever recommend people go about CEO succession in this way. It was actually quite ugly because they named three of us to be vice chair for, I don’t know, a year or however long it was, even though Our offices were literally next to each other. The company started falling into these three camps around the world. You would go to China, and the country manager of China would be on one person’s side, and the three of us were all running off and having secret meetings with our consultants, putting together our presentations for the board, and it all culminated in a two-day off-site session with the board in which we each had to present our vision for the company. And I was lucky enough to prevail, but it did some damage because as a result, the two people that didn’t prevail didn’t end up staying, which was unfortunate because they were both really great, talented people. And it was not a great process. But just to answer your question, that’s how it came to be. I think I was lucky. And I guess this is how one should think about opportunity is There’s a significant amount of luck in careers, but you want to be prepared for when that lucky opportunity presents itself. And I just was lucky in that everything I had done up to that point in my career and the different ways that I’ve described gave me a set of experiences and attributes and skills that seemed right for the moment.

Adam: Jeff, as you share the process that Pfizer undertook, that ultimately led to you getting hired as CEO. In a sense, it foreshadowed your experience as CEO, which was a bit of a rocky tenure. You had your successes, you had your failures, you had your highs, you had your lows. What did you learn from the failures and mistakes that you made during your time as CEO of Fuzzer?

Jeff: Well, first of all, Adam, that’s a great insight on your part to see the succession contest as foreshadowing the challenges that followed. So let me break this up into a couple of different parts. some related to Pfizer itself and some related to the nature of being a CEO. Pfizer itself was at that time facing really very, very significant challenges and problems related to products. We had Lipitor, our most significant product. It was probably 40 percent or so of our earnings, but it was going to go off patent and fall off a cliff. That’s the nature of a pharmaceutical business. but it’s a huge challenge when it happens. The business model was changing all around us. A lot of the ways in which pharma companies had done business historically were changing or under threat. We had the prospect of Obamacare, which ended up working out well for us because a bunch of us, and I was pretty much a part of this, got very involved in negotiating that in a way that turned out okay, but initially was kind of an existential threat to the industry. So there was a lot of challenges, but I’d say a lot of these challenges were a result of a culture that had been produced over time from a series of big acquisitions, which while integrated from a P&L point of view, a lot of duplication had been taken out and the rest, but the culture was not a fully integrated one and it was a challenging culture. So in that context, I was a young man in a hurry type. I knew that my mandate was for change and I wanted to make change. And I will say that the first several years were extraordinary. We got a tremendous amount of things done. huge deal to acquire Wyeth in the middle of the financial crisis, which was a very difficult thing to do. But it really fundamentally changed the company in ways that are still apparent today. I mean, just as one example, we weren’t in the vaccines business until then. And obviously, you know what happened with Pfizer and COVID as a result, we created an oncology business, we changed the whole profile of the company. So we made a lot of really terrific and positive changes. But I also think in retrospect, I tried to move too quickly on too many fronts, and my own impatience probably got in the way. And let me just say, this relates to what it means to be a CEO. And if I could just Go off on that for one second and come back to the main thing here. A CEO job, as I know you know, Adam, and as I know many of your guests have said, it’s really a qualitatively different job than anything else. You can be in the C-suite and have a really, really big job, and it’s still nothing like what being a CEO is like. It’s qualitatively different, not just quantitatively. And that’s because the multiplicity of stakeholders is just huge. It’s almost infinite, the number of different stakeholders. Governments, just federal, state, local, media, all kinds of different media, shareholders of all different types, employees of all different types. And all of the stakeholders, they have an agenda. They want something from the company, and oftentimes they want it from you. And you can, as the CEO, get overwhelmed by those stakeholder demands. And The pressure of the situation is exacerbated by the fact that you’re in the public eye. Everybody’s looking at you. And I will say, I’m willing to admit in retrospect that my innate impatience, my innate intensity, maybe some of the temper that I got from my father. These things emerge oftentimes when I was under pressure, my personal shortcomings, and that caused me to present myself in ways to people that I don’t think was particularly motivational to them. I wasn’t always able to absorb the pain of what the company was going through. I think CEOs or leaders in general, they often forget that the impact they have on other people is different by virtue of the built-in hierarchies. You know, I don’t like to think of myself as a hierarchical guy and I go into a meeting and I think about everybody is the same and we’re just there to solve a problem. But the reality is that I walk into a meeting and whether I like it or not, I’ve got a big hat on my head that says CEO and people relate to you differently as a result. That means that if you are in a bad mood or if you’re grouchy or if you lose your cool or if you’re too intense, that has a really bad impact on the people immediately around you and ultimately the organization. So you have to be much more mindful of that than I was. And I think in the end, it just got to the place where my temperament and my approach to things wasn’t suited for the circumstances of the company. And I regret that. And the irony I think of this is that I think you learn the most from your failures. I heard one of your guests say that it’s often a good idea to hire people who have had failures. I heard one of your guests say something like, you learn more on the way down than you learn on the way up. I am as a result of that experience and others that I’ve had, I have no doubt in my mind I’m a better leader, I’m a better person, I’m a better father and husband. But sometimes you get that kind of wisdom through tough experiences in the passage of time.

Adam: Jeff, I love that. And I appreciate everything you shared. And one of the things that you shared was as your time as CEO, you really struggled with the competing agendas. You struggled with the pressure that came with being a CEO, not to mention the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world. Given that experience, what advice do you have for anyone listening on how to manage competing agendas and how to manage the pressure that comes with it?

Jeff: Let me answer that in a couple of different parts. Part one, the more senior you become and the greater the number of responsibilities you have, the more your decisions require judgment. They are less and less black and white. Early in your career or when you’re relatively low on the pecking order, you’ll be confronting decisions that oftentimes have a right or wrong answer. They submit to a technical analysis that allows you to figure out what the right thing to do is. But when you are leading a big organization or a big part of an organization, the questions that come to you, or at least the questions that should come to you if you’re delegating appropriately, are the ones that don’t lend themselves to a black and white answer. If they do, somebody else should have made the decision before it got to you. which means either that you’re not delegating properly or you don’t have the right people. So your highest and best use at that point is your judgment. This is something I saw initially with Jack and learned over the years myself. And the more experience you have, the more pattern recognition becomes a crucial skill set. Because, you know, I’m a big history buff, and one of the beauties of reading history is you learn that there’s nothing new under the sun. Yes, the technology may be different, the scale may be different, it can come in somewhat different packaging, but fundamentally, the problems of human beings and business and leadership haven’t changed. So if you have more and more experience, you have more ability to say, okay, here’s a problem. I haven’t seen this exact problem before, but I’ve seen something close enough to it, or I’ve seen enough things close enough to it that I know how to think about it. I know what questions to ask. I know what people to seek guidance from. And the thing I did not do as CEO that I just strongly, I cannot emphasize enough how strongly I encourage people to do. is however good your judgment is and however good your experience set to draw upon may be, you can have a huge multiplier effect of that by having mentors and coaches who have been where you are and done what you did. Even if they’re just a sounding board to say, you know, I had a really awful day today. The investors are pissed at me or the media wrote a bad article about me or whatever it may be. Having somebody who’s been in your shoes to talk to about that is so critical because it’s a cliche, but it really is a lonely job. You can’t really be too open and vulnerable with your board, they’re your bosses. You can’t be too open and vulnerable with your colleagues, they’re your subordinates. And you don’t really have any peers inside the organization. So you’ve got to find somebody who helps you navigate those challenges and helps you exercise your judgment. And I think I would have been really well served by somebody who would say, that’s not important, don’t get too worked up about it, or that is something you need to spend more time on. And that leads me to the second big element of this, the first being judgment and the second being time. The single most important asset you have, I would argue maybe as a person, but certainly as a leader, and especially as the CEO of a company, is your time. It’s the finite resource that you can’t replenish, unlike anything else. And the CEO’s time is arguably a critical asset of the corporation. And what I think happens, especially to new CEOs, and it certainly happened to me, is if I go back to my comment about how many stakeholders there are, if you don’t control your own time and your own agenda, you will be completely overwhelmed by everybody else’s agenda. Because there’s an almost infinite number of people that want something from you or from the corporation. In good faith, they’re doing their jobs, but you can’t accommodate all of them. There just isn’t enough hours in the day. So I give CEOs that I counsel the following little exercise to go through. I say, first of all, determine what your CEO agenda is. Now, your CEO agenda is something different than your goals and objectives that you’re going to get a bonus on or the goals and objectives of the corporation. It’s what you, the CEO, really want to get accomplished in some time period, call it a year, three years, a quarter, whatever it may be. And the standards for what the CEO agenda is, needs to have two elements, in my opinion, or two criteria. One is, it’s got to really move the needle. It’s got to matter. It’s got to be something where if it happens, it changes the trajectory of the business or the enterprise, as the case may be, in a really important way. Otherwise, why is it worth your doing? Number one. And number two, it’s not delegable. Sure, you’re going to need help and support from other people, but it’s got to be the thing that only you can do. So in my case, there were probably two things that fell into that category. One was the negotiations over Obamacare. It was critical. It was material. It would have a dramatic impact on our success as a company. And at the end of the day, there were elements of it that couldn’t be delegated. The White House and the senators and so forth, they wanted to deal with the CEO. The other one that fell into that category was the acquisition of Y, the big transaction I mentioned. So impactful, non-delegable. Make a list of those things, make a list of 10 of them, and then cross out the bottom seven, because you’re never going to get 10 things done like that. And by the way, if there are 10 of them, they’re probably not important enough. So you’re lucky if you can identify two or three things on that CEO agenda that you really should be devoting your time to. Then the next thing to do, and this is really the critical part of the exercise, periodically, can be once a week, once a month, once a quarter, whatever period of time you choose. Either you or your assistant or artificial intelligence, go through your calendar and actually look, how did you actually spend your time? Nine times out of 10, when I ask people to go through this exercise, they’re shocked because they find out that of those three things that they said were their most important CEO agenda, they probably spent 10 percent of their time on that and they spent 90% of their time on something else. And that says either they had the wrong things on the agenda or they spent their time wrong. So get really rigorous, really disciplined about how you spend your time. And by the way, that includes ensuring that you do stakeholder management, but that you control and allocate how much time you do. But also, and this is something where I fell down big time, yourself, taking care of yourself, taking care of yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, in terms of your family. in terms of your opportunity to think. You’ve got to schedule time to do that, at least most people do. It’s too easy to just get caught up in the demands of being a CEO. So my advice in a nutshell is, improve your own judgment by virtue of the experiences that you’ve had, but then take advantage of the judgment of others so that you can make sure you’re making the right choices. Two, allocate your time in accordance with what you really think is important and not allow yourself to be overwhelmed by other people’s agendas.

Adam: Over the course of this conversation, you’ve shared your evolution as a leader. You’ve talked about leaders like Jack Welch who have directly impacted you, directly impacted your development as a leader. What do you believe are the essentials to effective leadership? And what can anyone do to become a better leader?

Jeff: Know what you’re good at, know what you’re not good at, and identify, with respect to the things you’re not good at, what your opportunity to get good at them is. I’m not going to ever be a professional basketball player, so why spend any time thinking about it? But I did figure out that maybe I could learn the pharmaceutical business, even though when I started, I knew nothing about it. So self-awareness, humility, and a clear understanding of what you can do well and what you can have the capability of doing well even if you don’t initially. Second, always be learning. Always be learning. Learn from everyone you encounter and learn from their mistakes and their failures as much as from their successes. Third, develop your pattern recognition. As I said, history repeats itself. There’s really not a lot new under the sun. The chances that you’re looking at a problem or dealing with a situation that no one has ever seen before is next to zero. If you don’t have a experience back to draw from and use to figure out how to address a new problem or a new difficulty, find somebody who does. Finally, address the loneliness of the position. It is lonely. And it’s not fair to burden your family or your friends with those challenges. It’s not appropriate or possible to burden your employees or your directors with those challenges. So, you need to find a friend, at least one friend, maybe more, who is there solely for you and who has been in your shoes such that they can truly empathize with the challenges you’re facing and can give you really good counsel about how to deal with them. So those would be my suggestions for anyone in any leadership position, but particularly at the top of a large organization.

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

Jeff: Never stop learning. Always learn from what other people are doing and have done. And as I said, learn from their mistakes and failures as much as their successes. And think about your career and think about what success really means. Success doesn’t necessarily mean getting the next promotion, the next run of ladder. Success means finding something that you have passion for, that you enjoy doing. and that you take pleasure in getting better at, so that you never hit the plateau on that learning curve I talk about. You find the next learning curve, the next mountain to climb, the next opportunity to do more and to do better, and never give up on that quest for improvement, self-knowledge, and growth.

Adam: Jeff, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being part of 30-Minute Mentors.

Jeff: Great to be with you, Adam. Thanks so much.

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Adam Mendler

Adam Mendler is a nationally recognized authority on leadership and is the creator and host of Thirty Minute Mentors, where he regularly elicits insights from America's top CEOs, founders, athletes, celebrities, and political and military leaders. Adam draws upon his unique background and lessons learned from time spent with America’s top leaders in delivering perspective-shifting insights as a keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. A Los Angeles native and lifelong Angels fan, Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders.

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