#254: Tom Hale, CEO of Oura – Be a balancing force

24:36You're not there just to take orders from anybody else. And if someone tries to tell you to take their order, you know, like, I need this, get this done. I need it done by Tuesday. You need to be able to tell them that that's not the right thing because we're doing something here. We're going to bring these 25 sites together onto a common platform. And that's our mission. And you need to be strong in that mission. You need to be the leaders of that mission. And I think in many ways it was a change in our technical culture, you know, the engineers and programmers who write the code. to think of themselves, not as people who, you know, were receiving people's instructions, but as the people who were given them.

25:09And that transformation, it took, it took a couple of years and it took a lot of coaxing and kind of, you know, getting people out of their comfort zone to kind of say, Hey, you know, and we used to call it, we had this phrase for it. We called it developer spine. You know, they had to learn that no one could push them around. And that in fact, that when it came down to the most important things, they had to be the drivers of that change. Yeah, developing your spine makes, you know, that's something we all have to learn. And then at SurveyMonkey, which is the world's most popular survey platform, you were, as I understand it, celebrating this big acquisition with Zendesk, and then it fell apart.

25:47What did it teach you about the role of a leader when plans suddenly change, when you go from exaltation to oh shit. Well, yeah. And that was, that was certainly actually a big one too. I think I kind of knew it actually the day that the, uh, that Zendesk was the acquiring company announced it. I kind of had this feeling in my gut that it was not going to go well. Um, I think that leaders have a, particularly a CEO. Um, I was not the CEO at the time, but, but, uh, but this is true of CEOs, maybe most true of it, that in some sense, when things are going great, right, the CEO has to be the one who says, hey, guys, things are going great.

26:28But like, you know, bad news could be right around the corner. And we got to be careful that we don't rest on our laurels or get overconfident. We've got to be thinking about, you know, where we're going next, we got to aim higher for the future, we got to watch out for these threats. And I think liking it to like being on a boat. Because if things are going great, everyone goes to one side of the boat, And it's like, things are going great. And the boat sort of kind of tips this way. And only the leader can go to the other side and kind of balance and say, hey, here's some ways that it's not going great or that it could go better.

26:56And conversely, and this is the example with SurveyMonkey and Zendesk, when people are all, you know, they're down in the mouth because they feel like everything's going poorly. They all go to that side of the boat and they're like, oh, my God, woe is me. We're doomed. The leader has to be the one who says, no, actually, there's light in this darkness. And if you follow me, we're going to make it. we're going to get to the other side. And I think that kind of maybe power and need and responsibility of a leader is to kind of be that counterbalance. Now, I believe in something called servant leadership, where the leader actually is in service of everybody, you know, everybody who works at the company.

27:34It's not, I'm going to tell you what to do and you need to do it this way. And I'm the expert and I'm the smartest one. It's like, how do I get the best out of you? How do I make you do your best work? And so you have to have both of those. You have to have this ability to balance the boat by saying things that people don't either see or agree or understand and lead them to a new place. But you also need to be able to say, hey, as a leader, I'm here to make you successful. And that's my goal. Hey, everyone. It's Kula from How Leaders Lead. And if you've watched our podcast for any number of episodes, you probably know that a common theme from all of the great leaders we interview is that they are active learners.

28:15They had this commitment to continuing to learn and grow so that they don't stay stagnant and so that they continue to see success in their leadership and in their life. This theme of active learning is so important, and it's what David's latest book, How Leaders Learn, is all about. It's all about helping you develop that skill of active learning so that you too can continue to see success in your leadership and in your life. The book is really entertaining. It pulls stories from some of our greatest podcast guests and pairs those stories with insights that you can incorporate into your leadership and into your life right away.

28:49Grab How Leaders Learn on Amazon or wherever books are sold. And I think you're really going to love it. You feel David's personality through the pages and through his storytelling. And it's a really powerful way to level up your leadership. What do you think, if you could pick one thing, what do you think is the most important thing a leader has to do with people to make them recognize that they can rise and they can achieve and be even more than what they are today? Well, it's a great question. And I think you're sort of in this business today a little bit. You're trying to find out what it is that motivates somebody.

29:28And if you can figure out what it is that motivates them, maybe conversely, what it is that demotivates them, you can help them understand what's possible. And you can ask them to do things that they didn't think they could do. I'll go back to the developer spying example. A lot of times, there wasn't any problem with the developers being leaders. They were perfectly capable of being leaders, but they just sort of had come to believe that in this company, they didn't have a vote. They didn't have a seat at the table. And so I had to say to them, listen, you guys, not only do you have a vote, but it's an important one.

29:59And you guys need to rise And like, you need to see that glass of water at the center of the table and say, hey, I'm going to take a sip of that. That glass is the glass of leadership. I'm going to grab it. I'm going to drink it. And then, you know, I'm going to be a leader too. And that idea of inspiring people to do something that they don't think they can do or maybe don't feel capable of doing. We have a way of talking about it at Aura. And I'll call it. This is a quote that I'll make from my colleague, Michael Chapp. He's the one who told me about it and I love it. He says, listen, you got to get outside of your comfort zone because when you get outside of your comfort zone, that's where the magic happens.

30:38And that's what the leadership has to do is to help you get outside of your comfort zone. You know, when you stepped into the role of CEO of Aura, how comfortable were you? I mean, you know, what brought you to Aura and why are you sitting at that desk today? Well, let me just say this. It was a big step. And maybe I was pretty far outside of my comfort zone. Maybe that's why that comment really resonates with me. You know, it was a complicated business. It was a new space. I was climbing a learning curve that was as steep as any as I've ever climbed. And I had a great reserve of passion and energy and love for the product.

31:18And the reason for that was because after the Zendesk Survey Monkey situation, you know, I'd lost sleep for the first time in my life. And I got this product and it changed my life. And so I was very personally motivated and very personally passionate about the potential for Aura. And that kind of came through, even though it was outside of my comfort zone, that passion carried me through the discomfort. And I think people saw that. I think that every employee, if you asked them today, if they were there when I got there, would they say, hey, was it obvious that Tom loved this product and believed that it was going to be incredible and that this company was going to be a once-in-a-generation company?

31:56And they would say, absolutely. Came right through, you know, shown through his eyes like some light. How did you how did you develop the the the know-how on the on the brand and the category that, you know, gave people a sense that you you really did know what needed to be done and that they would follow you? Because, you know, you've got, you know, before people follow you, they got to feel like you actually know what you're talking about. I mean, it's it's so true. If they don't trust you, they don't follow you. In fact, an old boss of mine used to say, how can you tell the leaders in the room, Tom?

32:31And I'd be like, I don't know, the one with the leadership qualities. And he said, no, no, no, the followers. That's how you know who the leaders are. And his point was that, you know, leaders aren't always at the top of the org chart, right? They're the ones that people follow. So how did I do it? I, you know, honestly, I think a couple of things. One is, look, you know, I'd been somebody who had been using wearables since the early 2000s. So I kind of, you know, I had some skills and some understanding, but I'd also had a really recent experience where I had lost sleep because of the stresses of COVID and because of the, you know, the unraveling of the SurveyMonkey acquisition and then had recovered sleep and knew exactly how powerful that could be for somebody, how transformative.

33:15I liken it to, you know, walking out of a black and white television set onto a 4K, you know, technicolor movie where like all of a sudden, you know, you realize what experience could be like. And that was transformative. And so people could see that. I think another dimension of it was I approached it with a tremendous amount of respect. one of the first things that I did was actually to travel to Finland where the majority of the technical staff was located at the time and I wanted to go within the first week because I wanted to show them that they had my respect and that I understood that they were the people who created the value in the company the algorithms the hardware the software the experience that or delivers and I got COVID that week and I was like I'm still coming I'm gonna come and they They were like, yeah, no, please don't come.

34:09You've got COVID. Please don't come. So I came, you know, whatever it was, like 10 days after. And I came and expressed my respect. And I think that made a huge impact on them. Because, you know, to know that the person who's been anointed as the leader of the company both understands them and wants to learn more about them and wants to respect them, I think it just went an incredibly long way. So when you took over in 2022, Aura had sold about a million rings. Now you've more than doubled that to two and a half million. What's the single biggest strategic decision that you made that really unlocked that growth?

34:47Yeah, I don't know that I could say that it was any single decision. There's never a silver bullet, which I think is a good leadership lesson. And, you know, it's any successful business is built through a lot of, you know, some big ideas, but a lot of small, important ideas that are executed well. But if I had to sort of pin it down to three, I think one would be the focus on women. One of the things that the oil ring can do quite well is measure your temperature. And that is a key to unlocking where you are in your cycle. We kind of realized this early on and it unlocked a bunch of applications for women.

35:25You know, one being the ability to predict the day that your period is going to arrive. Another is understanding when you're ovulating and therefore your fertility is at its peak. Or maybe better yet, and we do this with a partner called Natural Cycles, when you can have sex without worrying about getting pregnant. understanding how your body changes as you go through your cycle. These are all things that like, we're just not in the marketplace. And so we really nailed it for women. And, and that was a huge unlock for the business. Most people think of wearables as sort of a fitness tool. You know, how do I, how do I get fit?

36:05And at the time, no one was really solving for even the fitness needs of women specifically, you know, they had like, you know, a pink bracelet or something like that, you know, pink Fitbit, but it wasn't really specifically tuned to a woman's physiology. So that was one. The second was, um, retail. We, you know, you look at this device here, you know, you kind of see it, you know, it has the properties of jewelry, right? You know, it has a particular finish. It looks a certain way on your hand. You know, it has to sort of fit into your life as a piece of, of, of kit that you would wear on your body 24 seven.

36:39And And what we realized was that people wanted to see it. You know, we had been up until that point, just a purely D to C business where you could go to the website and you could see it, or maybe you could see it on a friend. And a lot of our sales came from referrals. But if you wanted to see it, try it on, look how it looks against your skin, you needed a way to do that. And retail really unlocked that. So we went big into retail. And this was a controversial decision at the time because we had been D to C up until that point, but we went deep with Target, Best Buy, Amazon to really unlock retail.

37:13And that was a big second factor. And then the third factor, and this is really interesting, and maybe most people may not even know this, but you can use what's called your health savings account or your flexible spending account, HSA or FSA funds to purchase an Oura Ring. And at the time, And buying a wearable, the kinds of wearables you could get were the sorts of things that you would get for a purely, you know, kind of medical context. You know, they were not more broadly written a health wearable. They were like things that you would get very specific to a particular health context. So when we got the HSA FSA kind of unlock, we turned that on.

37:53And all of a sudden we helped people realize that they could have access to this product and they could use these funds, which are effectively pre-tax funds. and apply them to something that was going to help their preventative health. And that was a huge unlock. That was remarkable. So those three things were big strategic elements that drove the business. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Tom Hale in just a moment. I'm sure you can see Tom is a deeply empathetic leader. And you know, people sometimes try to make empathy seem like something soft and fluffy. But Johnny Taylor at the Society of Human Resource Management has a different take.

38:31And I love it. He encourages leaders to treat empathy like a business imperative because it is one. People hear empathy and conflate it with sympathy. That's the number one problem. And sympathy is softer by definition, right? It's you, someone loses a parent or sibling or whatever, and you sympathize with them. versus empathizing, this whole concept of every day trying to experience life, not just through your eyes, but through the eyes of the person on the other side of the conversation. It's built into why I think we've had this real diversity problem in our organizations. It's because we can achieve diversity.

39:11We go hire people who are different. By definition, you get diversity. But then we're not looking at them through their diverse experiences and trying to do it through the lens of empathy. As a result, you're bringing them in and they're leaving very quickly. So it is now business imperative and a knowledge-based economy. David, you don't have the luxury of having people just come and leave. Bringing people into an environment that's not particularly empathetic when they can go get other jobs means you're going to lose them and thus lose the game. We did some research just recently at SHRM. 93 % of employees said they would leave a job that they like, okay, a job we're imperfectly fine to go work for a more empathetic organization.

39:53So if that doesn't make the case that this empathy is a business imperative and not just a feel good moral imperative, I don't know what does. Nine out of 10 of your employees are saying, listen, I'll go to the guy across the street in a place where I think people are more empathetic in their approach. Again, not to be confused with sympathy. It's empathy. Go back and listen to my entire conversation with Johnny, episode 52, here on How Leaders Lead. You're in a business where month after month, you have to earn your customer's trust so they renew your subscription. What's the most important things you do to keep people engaged and loyal?

40:33Look, I love subscription businesses for just that reason, which is that you kind of got to, you know, you got to earn your customer loyalty every month. You know, we were at the time just a monthly subscription. And if you're not delivering enough value, they're not going to retain. And if you're delivering plenty of value, but your price is too high, they're not going to retain. So a way to think about it is there's an equation in my head that's, you know, V over P, value over price. And in a subscription business, if your V over P ratio is right around one, meaning your value and your price are roughly equal, you're not going to retain people because they have to think about it.

41:11Oh, am I getting enough value this month? And think about like Netflix or something like that. We're like, oh, do I want to subscribe to this now or not? The thing is the V to P ratio for Netflix or Spotify or anything like that is huge. You get access to every song you might ever possibly want to hear for$9.99 a month. Wow, that's a great bargain. Going to totally retain on that. And so I really love subscription business models. And for Aura, what I realized and what maybe the company realized, there was a lot of anxiety about going to a subscription business model. So a little bit unusual in the world of hardware.

41:45Generally, you buy a piece of hardware and then you pay for it and then you get to use it as much as you want. You don't have to pay a monthly fee. And what we realized was that if what we're providing is a check engine light for your body, or we're providing you insights about your body that you don't know that you're not aware of, the value of that, the V is huge. And the price, you know, we charge$6 a month, the price is low. So if the V to P ratio is, you know, more than two or, you know, more than 10, you're going to retain customers. And so we were both, I think, a little apprehensive, but very, very positively surprised at the retention because that V to P ratio is so strong.

42:25You know, that makes so much sense. And then the other thing you said makes a lot of sense is people want to see the ring. They want to see what it looked like. And that retail really helped kick off your business. You know, so has there been a challenge in how you look at the design of the ring versus the capacity of the ring to deliver all the health monitor stuff that you wanted to do? Yeah, I think it's so interesting because there's this utility part of it. You know, it's the features, it's the benefits, it's the data. And in fact, I think utility is how technology marketing has been forever.

43:03It's like, oh, we've got the new 32 megabytes, you know, the next generation. It's all about the utility and the features and the feeds and the speeds. And I think what was really interesting for me about Aura was that it was also a design and maybe aesthetic decision that people were making and that they really liked the aesthetics of it. And so I'll give you the very concrete example, which is that we have different finishes for the ring. There's like black and silver, gold and what we call brushed silver, which is basically kind of a matte titanium. And then we have the premium finishes, you know, which include gold.

43:37And what we learned was that like people actually felt that seeing a different price point for those rings actually made sense to them. You know, they were happy to have an entry price point for black and silver and happy or maybe willing to pay a premium for gold and for brushed silver. So it was a really interesting learning to sort of understand that like there's a value in here that's not just the utility. It's does it fit in with my jewelry? I'm a gold jewelry person. I'm somebody who wants it to look a certain way. And that kind of – I almost want to call it fashion even though I don't think we would ever describe ourselves as a fashion company.

44:14But it really came to roost. And I learned this firsthand when we introduced a ring that we partnered with Gucci on. And this ring was amazing. It was a Gucci design and it was black and had sort of gold braid around the edge and the interlocking gold G and stuff like that. I mean, it looked like something that, you know, you might, if you were Caesar, you might wear to a gladiatorial combat in the Coliseum. You know, and it was like, it was a really amazing thing to look at. And when we were talking to the team at Gucci, we were trying to decide how to price it. And they said, oh, well, you should price it at a thousand euros.

44:52and I was like you're kidding me there's no way we can charge a thousand like the the utility we charged three hundred dollars for that utility and they're like no no no you don't understand you don't understand what you've got here it's amazing we priced at a thousand euros and we sold through you know in five weeks everything we'd built we had to go and do another manufacturing run and it's one of these things where like the value the intangible value of how it looked what it meant to own it, what it signified, the fact that it was Gucci, all these things really carried through into that value.

45:25There were intangibles in the V over P in that case. What's the single biggest behavior that you're really trying to drive and reinforce in OR? I know you have a number of core values, like most companies, but what's the thing that you think is the most important? Well, I think maybe the most important is trust. One of our values is earn trust. And maybe it's that relationship that a company has with, in our case, the ORA member, where we have to earn their trust, which means that we have to be right. If we make a prediction about you being sick in a couple of days or what we call your major symptoms are being flagged, which tells you that your body's been stressed in a certain way, you have to be right.

46:16Because if you do that a bunch of times and you're not right, then it's like, well, I don't trust this thing. It's not going to tell me anything. It's actually subtracting value from my life. So another way of thinking about trust is we have sort of a sacred duty to protect and to serve you as the ORRA member. Like we're here for you. We're not here for anybody else. We're not trying to sell you ads or sell you some other product. We are here to protect you and make you healthy. And that's such an important part of what we do. and it's such an important value. I think that we at the company, we've made it one of the core things that we do is that we earn your trust and that starts with getting it right, but it also continues with making sure that we're there only for you.

47:00We're not trying to sell you something else.

47:04We're trying to make sure you're living a long and healthy life. How do you assess somebody's ability to engender trust when you're interviewing them? God, it's such a great question. You know, I think authenticity, I think we've had roughly 100 ,000 human generations of humanity, where, you know, based on how someone is looking at you or talking to you or moving their body or expressions on their face, whether or not you believe them. I think we've developed some incredible kind of subroutines in our brains for determining, is this somebody who's going to try and help me or hurt me? Even back from the very early days of humanity where we were just lifting up from the savannas of Africa.

47:53So I think we have a lot of actually gut instincts that come to mind. People can see authenticity and they can sense it and they can also just as easily sense inauthenticity. So in many ways, for me, it's a sense. And if someone uses a lot of phrases like, well, to be honest, David, to be honest, you sort of have to be like, well, wait, are you saying you're not being honest the rest of the time? So I think some of it is just like, can you feel that trust coming off that person? Can you do that? Now, engendering trust is different. You have to be authentic, but you also have to have something that you want to build trust in.

48:29And so I do lean hard on people who have a commitment to the mission and commitment to the values and have a passion for it. Someone says to me, you know, I'm coin operated and I want more money. And I'm immediately like, OK, yeah, but this is what we do here. We're about making people healthier and live longer lives. That's what we're doing. I want someone who wants to join the company and wants to do that. You know, that's great stuff. And, you know, you mentioned that you're in a wearable category. That may not be the broadest definition of it. But, you know, in that category, you've got Apple, Samsung, Whoop.

49:02You know, how do you look at competition? And, you know, they're constantly innovating. You know, when you see competitors do something, you know, what gets on your radar screen? because you can follow them and try to match everything they do. How do you stay true to who you are, but still change? Yeah, it's such a great question. Obviously, you keep track of what everybody's doing. And I think we've got some things that are very special, you know, about the product that I think are, call it your defensive moat. You know, part of it is that it's a very comfortable thing to wear. You know, it doesn't light up in the middle of the night when you're trying to sleep.

49:42It doesn't do that. It has a very long battery life. It has, you know, it's the most accurate because when you measure from this side on the human body, it turns out this is a very accurate place to measure from. And if you think about, you know, when you go to the hospital, where do they put the sensor? Well, they put the sensor on the tip of your finger. They don't put on the back of your wrist. And the reason for that is that it's arterial blood flow that comes down your arm and it's, you know, it's the strongest right there. And the sensors are looking through, you know, two millimeters of uniform tissue, not, you know, a bunch of hair, bones, sinew, tattoos, sun discoloration, you know, that you might have on the outside of your, of your arm.

50:19your distal you know kind of um skin coloration is generally lighter no matter no matter if you're you know what what shade of color skin you have it's lighter on the inside so all these technologies around light so that that is really a fundamental kind of advantage but what you can't do is forget that like you have to serve your customer and your customer is different um some of our most of our competitors are really oriented around fitness and and fitness you know is is is a part of the health equation, but it's not all of it. And I'll give you an example. If you're somebody who's managing a chronic illness, and your fitness wearable says, hey, you know, you need to get your workout in, you're not straining yourself enough.

51:01It's kind of the wrong message for that person, right? Or if you're, you know, somebody who's had, heaven forbid, some kind of eating disorder, and it's like, hey, you've burst through your calorie target for the day, you need to stop eating, you know, all these things are triggering to people who maybe have a different orientation. So our strategy has been to really focus on health and maybe think about health very broadly and over a long period of time. It's not just about like, hey, what's your heart rate right now? It's like, how has your heart rate changed over the last six months? And what does that say?

51:34And what does that mean? And let's interpret that. Let's just not give you data. Let's give you an experience that interprets that and guides you in terms of healthy behaviors and guides you in terms of the things that might be going on with you. And that, you know, in some sense, what do they say? A tiger can't change its stripes. And that's a real advantage because, you know, if you've anchored yourself on one thing or another, it's very difficult to be something else because then you're like, well, we're not that thing anymore that you used to buy us for, we're something else. And that's tricky.

52:01It's tricky for any business. Yeah. You know, this has been so much fun, Tom, and I want to have some more with my lightning round of questions. So are you ready for these? Okay. Go for it. Okay. The three words that best describe you. curious, driven, and approachable. If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be? It would be Steve Jobs. What's your biggest pet peeve? I used to say, you cannot work at a company with me and have conference room cake. And do you know what I mean by conference room cake? They explain that. It's like when it's your birthday and they're like, hey, come into the conference room.

52:36We're going to have a birthday celebration for you. And they bring out conference room cake and it's like, happy birthday, David, but they spelled it with two V's or something like that. And you're just like, it's the most inauthentic thing. Like I really believe if you're going to celebrate something, like do it with like real gusto and real authenticity. And like, if you're going to have a birthday celebration, like don't do it in a conference room, like do something really legitimately authentic and fun. Who would play you in a movie? Nick Cage. What's your current streak of nights in bed by nine 30?

53:07Oh my God. I don't know if I can tell you that off the top of my head. I guess zero because I went to bed at 1015 last night, but I'm generally in bed by 930. So I'd say pretty good. What's the best part about living in San Francisco? Well, you know, San Francisco is just such a vibrant place. I mean, so much of the future is being invented here. I mean, just think about it. A couple of years ago, you know, self-driving cars started appearing on the streets and it was like, it was amazing. You're like, I can't believe it. I just saw a car go by. There's no one driving it. Now, of course, it's completely banal.

53:42You're just like, oh yeah, here's 30 Waymos queued up outside of this conference venue. Big deal. And the thing is, it's a miracle. These cars are driving around. So this idea that the future is being invented here, it's just not equally distributed. And that's the thing I love about San Francisco. The biggest lesson backgammon has taught you. The worm will turn. I played backgammon with my dad for a good portion of my life, and he was a very good backgammon player. And I think I'd lost my allowance to him more or less from a very young age, late until more or less his departure from this planet.

54:22and uh the reality is is that you can be the best player and over time you will win if you're a better player you will win but there will be moments when your opponent will roll three double sixes in a row and you will lose and it'll be heart crushing and that you have to be prepared for that because that's that's the world the world is a place where luck will turn against you at some point besides your family what's your most prized possession well um uh i would say i'm a big fan of books. I love to read and I have a big book collection and some of those books are special. They've been autographed by the author.

54:55So I'd say my book collection. If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear? St. Vincent is my favorite. She's a songwriter and a guitarist and a rocker and she is incredible. And if she's listening at all, St. Vincent, I love you and I would do anything to see. I've seen her probably five times this year. She's amazing. What's something about you few people would know? Well, I think most people don't know that I'm a really, really good backgammon player. So if you ever want to roll some dice, I'm always ready to play. That's great. And you're out of the lightning round. So good job there, Tom.

55:31You know, we've talked a lot about leadership, but how do you think about leading at home? Yeah, I mean, my kids are my greatest pride and joy. They're amazing. They're creative and surprising and challenging and wonderful and brilliant. And I think in many ways, I think the biggest thing that I had to realize was that they are very different from me. And I think this is true with every generation. So this is no great insight. But you have to let your kids find their way. And I think that is actually true of a team or of people that you're managing. And the story I would tell is that I was the youngest in my family.

56:14I had a younger sister, but there was a big gap between the older ones and us. And so I was kind of like the youngest for a long time. And, um, I was not really, I think maybe confident in my ability to care for people until I became a manager and realized that part of the job of being a manager is that you have to care and feed and guide and, and school and direct the people who work for you. And that that is a, it's a sacred, you know, kind of, uh, duty that you've undertaken as, as their, as their manager, let alone their leader, just, just, you know, a line manager with four or five reports.

56:50And I realized that like through that experience of becoming a manager and learning how to manage, that that was going to be some incredibly powerful tools for being a father. And in fact, you know, I became a father in my mid thirties, but I became a manager in my late twenties. And I think that, you know, those seven years of being a manager taught me a lot about what it means to be a good father. Now that'd be, I don't, I don't manage my kids, but you know what when they come to me and they're like freaking out or they're upset one of the things that they taught that i learned as a manager is you just keep calm calm everybody down just just receive it don't react you know keep your mouth shut listen don't talk and those are the same skills that i employ as a parent yeah fantastic and and looking ahead what do you see as your unfinished business good gosh unfinished business uh well let's see i probably should make my bed that's that's that's a that's something i didn't do this morning um but uh you know look i think i would love to have a big impact on um the health of people across the planet and i think you know the work that i'm doing at aura is some of the most meaningful work that i've had the opportunity to do in my entire life and i think i won't rest until we've made a huge, huge impact on, on, you know, tens of millions of people.

58:12And this doesn't mean we have to win to the exclusion that everybody else needs to lose. I don't think that's it. It's that I think wearables are going to be incredibly powerful for humanity because everyone, you know, has a supercomputer and everyone should have a device on their body, which is measuring their, their health and helping them, you know, understand it. And there should be some sort of machine intelligence that's looking over them to help them live the best, longest, healthiest life with their family and with their loved ones. And if you can do that, I think that's a pretty good reason to get out of bed in the morning.

58:42Last question. What's one piece of advice you'd give to anyone who wants to be a better leader? You know, I think sometimes people think that home and work, you know, can be the same thing. And they're not. You know, maybe during COVID, you know, you ended up sleeping at the office by working at home, you know? And so they're not the same thing, but they are two sides of the same coin. And so maybe the piece of advice I would give is that don't forget that everybody has a personal life and that people are complicated and that you need to think about the whole person, not just the person who shows up at work.

59:20You need to have some empathy and understanding for who someone is and where they are in their journey. And you gotta meet them where they are. And you gotta do that not just for your employees, but for your customers. And not just for your employees and your customers, but for your stakeholders and for your board and your investors. And you got to show up for everybody in the world in a way that has some empathy for them. Because if you do that, you're going to think of them as a whole person. And that's going to help you serve them better. That's going to help you make better products for them.

59:50That's going to help you make better decisions for them or with them. And it's going to make you, I think, a better person, the best person you can be. That's great, Tom. Tom, and you've offered so much insight in this conversation that we've had. And I want to thank you so much for your time. And I love your mission. And I love the success that you're having making the world a better place. So congratulations for all you're doing. And congratulations to the ORA team. Well, thank you, David. Appreciate you having me on the show today. And it was great chatting.

1:00:26in every leadership role there are these dynamic tensions you got to meet people where they are while also pushing them forward you've got to deliver on short-term results without losing sight of the long-term goals it's a balancing act but listening to tom you realize the balance in leadership doesn't just mean staying in the middle and hoping things even out. It's about sensing the tilt and knowing how and when to shift your weight. You're always reading the room, scanning ahead, and using your own force to keep all those dynamic tensions in check. So here's your challenge this week. Think back to that boat analogy that Tom shared.

1:01:09Is there a part of your business where it feels like everyone is rushed to one side of the ship? If so, what kind of rebalancing does your team need for you to do? Responding thoughtfully when everybody else is reacting is exactly what great leaders do and why their teams trust them to be at the helm. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders are a force of balance. Coming up next on how leaders lead, just in time for the start of the NFL season, And I'm talking with Clark Hunt, the chairman and CEO of the Kansas City Chiefs. And it is my football team.

1:01:48So be sure you subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss it. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How Leaders Lead, where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader that you can be.