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

Adam: Our guest today was the leader of one of the largest companies in the world, AT&T. Mike Armstrong spent 30 years working for IBM, before becoming the CEO of Hughes Electronics, and then the CEO of AT&T. Mike is also a three-time cancer survivor, and is the author of the book Cancer with Hope, Facing Illness, Embracing Life and Finding Purpose. Mike, thank you for joining us.

Mike: So good to be here.

Adam: Thank you. Mike, you grew up in Detroit during World War II, and you went to the University of Miami to play college football where you had some ups and downs, including an injury that ended your football career and forced you to leave college for a bit. Can you take listeners back to your early days, what lessons and experiences stand out as most instrumental in shaping your worldview and shaping the trajectory of your success?

Mike: Well, an experience very early in my life, there's a lot for the rest of my life, to define what I should understand, as well as how they should not break. And it really began when my parents got a new house, and I was almost six years old, and we moved. And so I enrolled myself in the new school. However, almost every day, when I started to come back from school and go home, again, about seven to 10 guys would form a circle around me, and one of them would step out, and just beat the hell out of me. I went back home, finally, after three or four of these, and I confessed to my mom. I really had to stand above it. And the only way I knew was the fight back. And when she said, “Mike, that's exactly what you have to do. And you have to fight back and fight back and fight back in order to stand above this kind of treatment and the reputation that you have with it”. So sure enough, the next day, I'm six years old, I'll never forget this. And sure enough, the gangs showed up, there were about eight or nine of them that day. And they formed a circle. They call them out to get some guy's name. And he takes one step or one and a half step forward, out of the circle, I quickly face him and run full speed and hit him with my knee in the midsection, and with my fist in the face. And down he goes. I jumped on him. And I really with one punch to his head kind of neutralized any interest he had in any further fight. So I simply got up and walked to the other students that were standing there. They opened the way interestingly enough, nobody wanted to fight me. And I walked home the next day. And for the next many hundreds of days. I never had a problem again.

Adam: Mike, I love it. And a key lesson there is the importance of standing up for yourself, the importance of not being afraid. I've interviewed a lot of America's most successful leaders and have interviewed many of the most successful CEOs in the country. This is the first interview that has kicked off with the story of a fight and a fight where the person I'm interviewing stood up to a group of bullies and I love it. That fight that you had was a key moment in your early days and thinking back, what were some other early lessons that helped you rise within your career when you broke into the workforce? You took an entry-level job at IBM and you became one of the most successful people in the company. You were one of the five most powerful people in the company. What were the keys to rising within your career and what advice do you have for anyone on how to rise within their career?

Mike: Sure. It is simply always working to do my best. Whatever the assignment, whatever the territory, whatever the market, I will do my best. Second, I always work to help others. Because it was just obvious to me if the people who are working with me shall have a timeline call on my team, but at times, there are people that come in from the outside that teach me more. But whatever my team was, I would work with them to help the outcome of our activities. Third, I was always available. And there's an attitude that you have when you're serving the marketplace. And it comes through really quickly. And the attitude is driven by a simple sentence. And that is that these people, these customers, are the most important people in my life. And I'll do anything and everything, and always respond to them, follow up with them, and make sure that they're satisfied. And in fact, have the best we can do.

Adam: Customer centricity, essential, no matter where you are, no matter what role or in your business, and clearly, key as you're rising in your career, key as you were leading as a CEO.

Mike: I really work consciously, energetically, and apply lines to three things that I thought were really important, if I'm, in fact, the customer. And so I was hopeful that not only did I have the right stuff, but that they understood it. And the first was trust your eye and in the marketplace, I've got a territory, and I've got customers. And what I want to build with those customers is, I am representing this company, I am representing these products, trust me, as I will never let you then. The second thing is friendship. You just can't treat these people that are called your customers with anything but respect, kindness and responsiveness. And it's friendship. Your customers have to feel it, and believe in it, and respect it. And then of course, the final thing is responsiveness itself. Because if there's something that they need, they want, they have to ask, they have to do, and you can be instrumental in that. You never want to let them down. You don't want them to always think that you're all theirs. And all they have to do is call and you would go to work, whatever the problem is with him. Trust was the key thing.

Adam: How can anyone build trust? What are the keys to developing trust?

Mike: Always show up. Always be honest in your responses, and always fulfill. 

Adam: I love it. What were the best lessons you learned from your time at AT&T. You led AT&T during the .com boom and bust during a time when market forces drove you and those around you to try to reinvent AT&T’s business model and you made a number of acquisitions. You ultimately merged AT&T’s cable business with Comcast, there were highs, there were lows, there were downs. What did you learn from that time period? What were your best takeaways?

Mike: Well, I learned that my customer was controlled, not by his management system, but by his ownership system. The fact that the accounts that I was calling on had the greatest amount of potential were the government accounts. They also had the greatest bureaucracy to work through. And so you had to operate with full knowledge and timeframes that you're dealing with people who live in the political world. They're not market driven. And thus, you've had to adapt to their constraints. While you want to make your objectives. I think that the best lessons learned came in part by the fortune of having customers. I had integrity, spontaneity and responsiveness and the fundamentals that I just live by. As you probably know me now, when I get a call, I assume nothing. I don't interrupt. I listen. I try to then structure what it is that we can do, whether we excuse me doing it, or it's us doing it together. But when I was with AT&T, I didn't realize how much the market system and passed them by. And basically, we had to work to get things done very closely together. Because there wasn't a market that was generating these things. There wasn't a rulebook that was opening these things. They were things that had to be executed in order to deliver the value add.

Adam: What do you consider the biggest mistake that you made as a leader? And what did you learn from it?

Mike: Yeah, the biggest mistake, I'd have to say that, once I figured out that this was a U.S. telecom company, that was an important part of the market. At this time, I was going to have to do my best in order to get things done in a timely way. Because I was on quota. I had annual objectives I had to make, I had commissions that if I didn't have might starve to death. And so I viewed my AT&T customer as a local business. And we went after those things we knew we could do ourselves to put in my company and his company or her company and get them done in the time horizons we needed. And I would say that was the biggest challenge is to keep that equation open and executing

Adam: When you were in your early ‘50s, you had just taken on the role of CEO of Hughes Electronics, you were diagnosed with a rare form of late-stage leukemia, and it looked like a death sentence. But you were able to enroll in a clinical trial of a new experimental drug that eliminated your cancer miraculously. But then 10 years later, you were diagnosed with prostate cancer. And you were given only a few more years to live, but you beat that cancer and you bounced back a second time. And those were two major life-threatening illnesses. And those were two illnesses among several that you've battled and battled back successfully. The book that you wrote, Cancer with Hope, Facing Illness, Embracing Life and Finding Purpose, focuses on the lessons you learn from those life-threatening illnesses. And the question I have for you is, how can anyone regardless of where they are in their life, regardless of what they're facing, find purpose and bounce back from whatever adversity they're facing?

Mike: The thing that's most important is attitude. It's how you live, it's what you do, the doctors you select, it's the medicines you absorb, it's your own well-being that you'd make sure rises to the occasion. When you have cancer there's not a switch out there. That if you find the switch, you're gonna get cured, you may try to shift to go through many different kinds of satisfaction and medicines and timeframes and patients. And doctor support is a difficult thing to deal with. Millions and millions of people have to deal with it. My best advice for how can you survive is that you dedicate yourself to the things that you know, are best to treat the cancer you have and you never let up and you never give in on

Adam: So much of your success, not only success is being able to survive and fight through your life-threatening illnesses. But your success in business, your success in life more broadly, can be attributed to having a winning mindset, being able to stay optimistic, stay positive.

Mike: Thank you very much for that kind comment. And of course, that's what I conclude, if I, in fact, wrap my life around what it takes to beat cancer. At the same time, I'm living a life that I'm proud to be involved in. Those are two respects and aspects. During these times to three different cancers I had my body, my mind, and my well-being. We're all dedicated to survival, number one, and elimination of cancer. Number two, if somebody all of a sudden says I did, diagnosed with cancer, and there's been no cancer in my family, and no cancer in my wife, and all of a sudden they've got a serious cancer. I think the first fundamental thing you've got to figure out is where and how can I get the best doctor for me, in order to fight this will be my partner and, and to know the right things to do and when to do them and how much to build them by. And so I was fortunate. And then I went to Hopkins, and used that logic, and I got the kind of doctors they didn't. They were a great difference in making me live today.

Adam: What do you believe are the key characteristics of a great leader? And what can anyone do to become a better leader? 

Mike: Number one is integrity. And number two is people. Number three is hard work. Number four is determination. And when someone shows me those four characteristics, I know, I've got an individual who's going to succeed and continue to incline. There's fundamentals of life that leadership absolutely demands. It demands a leader who has integrity, that demands a leader who has flexibility. Leadership is dependent on respect. No matter what business you're in, what customers you have, what products you want to sell, their shifts and fundamentals, you must earn, as well as communicate respect for the individual. In your dealings with your customer, you must bring added value to whatever set of challenges they have in their life and the job that you can help satisfy. And you have to deliver on the potential, whatever that is of your company, of your product, and of your well-being.

Adam: Was there a key leadership moment in your career? Was there a time that you look back on and you said, this was a defining moment, that helped make me a better leader?

Mike: I would say that that happened to me three times. I had three cancers, they were all serious. First cancer was upon me and move forward. Even though I had a serious unfolding of that cancer in my body, the second cancer already metastasized all over my body, and the third one and about 12 to 14 spots on my body. That metastasizes visa via cancer. And so using your head, your mind, your intelligence, your experiences, using all of those, in order to apply them to getting the best doctor who will get you the best procedure, who will administer the right kind of bills and SAVs and service stuff. That is not simple. Nor is it easy. People will probably talk a little bit about you behind your back. But most of them, if not all of them will be with you 100% to beat the cancer. 

Adam: And Mike, you share a really interesting point, which is that when we think about leadership, we think about leadership within the context of leading others. You have led the biggest companies in America, AT&T, a fortune 50 business. But in reality, leadership can be as simple as leading your own life. And in your case, the most consequential leadership experiences have been in leading yourself through these to three life-changing experiences that you're able to survive.

Mike: Each time I got cancer was a surprise to me. I had no prior training. I knew, however, that cancer was not always something that can be managed, but then it was contagious, and you could pass it on to other people. And so you had to step up educationally, to really, really understand what it is that's happening to your body. What the best doctors that you can find, are saying to do, and then following that script, following those prescriptions, swallowing those pills, and drinking those medicines, all has to be done with a dedication and a timeframe that's consistent with the outcome that you've been

Adam: One of your greatest successes as a leader took place before your time at AT&T, you were the CEO of Hughes Electronics, and you led the launch of Direct TV. What were the best lessons you learned from that experience?

Mike: Well, sometimes you're just lucky. That's not the way it generally happens. In our case, when we saw that we had the potential to take technology that was being developed, really, for the government, and really, for purposes of informing and teaching and conveying. And we decided that by gosh, it had all of the attributes of fine television, have, in fact, the first television and that we could have many channels, and not just one or two channels. And we just all came around that concept that we had something that was not in the market, all the TV could have multiple channels. And so you hired people to do the efforts of programming, of maintenance of service of sales, all the attributes of life, and business had to be applied with a certain amount of excellence. That's just what we did. In fact, we brought out a test system in one of the states. And we learned from the test system that there were several things that we didn't really hammered down as sharply as specifically as we should. And we delayed the announcement in the shipment until we did get those things down so that we could support our product appropriately. We were coming with a product that was not known to mankind, a commercial television set. We wanted it to be prolific. We wanted it to be well accepted. We wanted it to show content that was consistent with our values. And so all of the kinds of things that we've been talking about, we really wanted to embody under release, what we saw that some of those things were not ready for market. We were delayed. DirecTV ease announcement and rollout. And, in fact, we didn't come out and put it in 50 states right away, we came out and put it in a couple of states, and then expanded into other states. Until in the first year, we had it throughout America. And out it came. And it was just a tremendous success.

Adam: Mike, I'm gonna ask you one last question. What can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

Mike: Well, I think that the execution of your life is really a dependency, that you care about your life. And you're going to use the avenue of your employment, whether you're employed in government, employed in the services, you're employed in the marketplace. You want to use your wherewithal to bring value and to help others bring value from their perspective, their background, and their training. So that productivity is not something that you have to go to school for, it is something that you live by. That lets you know you're always going to have a tomorrow and the next day and then next thing and then next thing in order to deliver on it.

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

Mike: Thank you very much.


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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