#304: Ron Johnson, Creator of the Apple Store – A great customer experience is an act of love

25:13David Novak:I really believe that. And it doesn't mean that people can't throw out challenges, but there's a difference between throwing out a challenge, but you believe in the mission, and being a cynic or being a skeptic, which just can take the oxygen out of innovation. Hello, friends. I hope you're loving this conversation. Be sure to stay tuned to the very end of the episode. As always, David and I are going to debrief some of the concepts that he talks about with this week's guest. So stay tuned to the very end, and I will see you soon. You know, when I was CEO of Young Brands, you know, we were really looking at how do we really improve our brand.

25:54So we asked you to come in and talk to us, Ron, about how you built the retail experience at Apple, because we were trying to do it in our own way. And I remember you saying back then that the best ideas start with the customer, not the company. You know, walk me through how you design and experience from a customer point of view.

26:22David Novak:So the way we did that at Apple is we had a very clear mission, which was we are going to enrich lives, which was the secular way of saying we're going to love our customers. And that means that we are going to do everything we could to make a person's life better. Now, that happened at a high level, like designing the store. You know, you locate stores where they live their lives. They don't have to drive 10 miles to get there. They can go 10 feet out of their way. All these things you do. But at an individual level, you know, if you tell the employee, and we did this at Apple, who's on the floor, that your job is to approach every customer with a warm welcome, to probe politely to understand why do they come in the store?

27:09David Novak:What are they hoping to accomplish? And then to close the gap between what they want to accomplish and where they are. And that's to present a solution that could change their life, right? And when the employees did that, and we had a million customers a day coming in, I would tell people, don't be in a hurry, treat one customer great at a time, close the gap. And then as the ideas that were in common started to bubble up, we would implement those rapidly across all of our stores. But it was truly, the ideas came from an interaction between an employee trying to serve a customer and trying to close that gap.

27:54David Novak:And so that's how great companies, I think, deliver customer service. It is bottoms up. And it's from empowering employees to make the decision on behalf of the customer to do the right thing. How do you go about delegating yourself? You mentioned how Jobs delegated with you. How do you think about delegation as a leader? I mean, when do you delegate? I mean, And when do you cross that line to where, hey, I really trust you. And now I'm going to let go. You've got to soar with your strengths, right? So like Steve, my strength was my intuition. It was design, physical design of stores. It was cultural maintenance, you know, connecting with people, all that stuff.

28:50David Novak:And so I would hire people like a great CFO. And I would let the CFO handle all the financial stuff and come to me as needed. But that wasn't my job. Now, I had great reporting and I have pretty close to a photographic memory. So I could look at a sales report every day and look at Fiverr and stores and remember what they did. Literally, how did that store do? I knew it's comp for yesterday. I just remember that kind of stuff. But I delegated the areas that I wasn't particularly good at. You know, I could imagine the genius part, but I let someone figure out how to train geniuses and get the parts in stock and make sure we could deliver next day repairs.

29:32David Novak:But I didn't get involved with the details of that. But I sure spent time picking real estate, designing stores. I met every store leader before they came because that was a big part of the culture. So to me, it comes down to how you decide to build your team to allow you to soar with your strengths and let others do the work that isn't something you're naturally excited about or great at. You know what I mean? And then when I'm working with the people I'm now creating together, because I think most acts of creation come through conversations with teams. And so I spent most of my day in conversation with our design teams, our store leader teams, the people serving customers, all that stuff.

30:20What did you look for in the leaders that you hired for the stores? What was the most important thing that you thought they had to have?

30:28David Novak:They had to have a lot of people. Very simple. You know, if you work in a store, it's really hard work. and you need to have someone who just wants to be on the floor. They want to be out there in the middle of the action where the customer's meeting the employees. And if the genius card gets backed up, they want to hop behind the bar and try to help people get through that thing. How'd you find that, Ron? How'd you find that trait of, you know, it just seems intuitively obvious. Yeah, you want somebody to love the business, love the customer, but how did you get at the core of someone to understand that they would provide that love.

31:11David Novak:You know, I don't know. That's what I talked about in the interview. And I didn't have to ask them. I asked for examples, you know, how do you spend your day? Tell me about something great you've done in your life. And through those conversations, I was looking for, you know, clues as to what, that they could honor that. But I think that's pretty easy to determine in an interview. But I didn't have a formulaic list of questions I'd ask. People would come in and I'd want to hear them talk about themselves. Because I wanted to hear, you know, what's the most significant thing you've done in your career?

31:50David Novak:When did you change the company you work for? I want to get them talking about something meaningful they've done. Who are the best employees on your team? What did you love about them? You know, all those kind of questions. And they would just randomly flow for an hour. And at the end, I kind of get a sense of if this person would be a great leader for Apple. But I didn't have like a checklist of questions when I interviewed or a standard approach. Because I really believe the best conversations have no agenda. You know, it's two people. And through the conversation, things get revealed because they are open.

32:32David Novak:It's like our conversation here. You and I didn't talk about what we're going to talk about. Who knows where it goes? But I think it'll be more interesting that way, and it will reveal things that people will connect with. And that's also true for an interview to me. You know, you've said that excellence is the price of admission. That was one of the quotes that I picked up from you. And that's a great objective to have, no question about it. Ben, but you had to, you know, you had to instill this across thousands of employees. So how, as you as a leader that have all these employees or team members that get up every day working on the greatness of Apple, how did you instill that value?

33:18David Novak:Everything I did was to celebrate excellence, excellence in great stores, great locations, great customer experiences. You know, I would read all of our NPS. Anybody customer wrote a note that had more than, you know, 50 characters or something I get sent to me. And if it was great, I had a system that I could just type an email and go right to the employee who delivered that experience. And they would then share those with their friends and their colleagues. And I just spent all my time celebrating excellence. and I modeled it, I think, through the decisions I made, but it became just part of the culture.

34:04David Novak:And wherever I went, it seemed like we had excellence. I mean, it's crazy, but we had that. And even to this day, you know, like one of the things I always did is I interviewed every store leader before they joined Apple. And then I asked the leader, I want you to interview every employee before they begin to work in the store. Because I want them to know you well. And when someone interviews for a job, it's a real memorable moment. I'm sure you remember all your interviews early in your career when you wanted a job. And if I interviewed everyone who led a store, and everyone who was going to work in the store, and they spent an hour.

34:53David Novak:Every employee in the store knew somebody who had spent an hour with me in my office. So they were one degree of separation from knowing me. And that kept us really small. How many stores did you have when you left? Right, just under 400. We were back to open our 400 store. We had 60 ,000 employees. So 60 ,000 employees. You make it sound like, oh, I just go around. I talk to everybody. But you have 60 ,000 people there. Yeah, but they feel. But it's amazing how. How did you? Was there any? I know you hate big company-itis and all that kind of stuff. No, I do. I do videos. I send out videos to the team.

35:35David Novak:I'd send out notes. I'd visit stores a lot. But it is shocking how people all felt like they knew me. A perfect example, I was in the south of France. Recently, I had to run to an Apple store. And it was a store at Cap Trois Mille, Cap 3000, a little shopping mall outside of Nice by the airport. And we opened that store in 2010, I believe it was, when I was still there. and in that store that day, I talked to, and this is just last week, 15 employees who remembered and could tell a story about working with me 15 years ago. I mean, think about that. And they remembered and they talked about lessons and things.

36:22David Novak:You know, it's amazing that there are people working in a retail store 15 years later, but they love their job, but they still remembered me after all those years. But I think there are leaders who are like that. You know, I think Sam Walton was one of those guys. You know, you look at the impact he had on Walmart's culture. They had a lot more stores than we had at Apple. But he bled that, you know, and maybe Phil Knight had that impact at Nike and Howard Schultz at Starbucks. Some people who really love the customer, it shows up so much that it just gets down there and you got to trust that it will.

37:03David Novak:So I don't really have a good answer of how it got there, but I know that's how people felt. When you walk into an Apple store today, what do you see there that you just kind of have a quiet smile and say, hey, I really know the story behind this and it really wasn't that easy to do. You know, what do you see? Is there a particular thing in there that you kind of smile and say, hey, it's here because, you know, not everybody thought it was a great idea at the time, but maybe I did. Well, one is the store design, even though they're, I think, nicer materials, whatever. It's essentially exactly what we designed years ago.

37:37David Novak:So it feels fresh, but it's been 25 years and the same idea, products on display, easy to touch, loaded with all the apps, packed with employees, interesting people, well-trained, dressed casually in a t-shirt, very approachable, you know, and then the back half of the store filled with people getting help, genius bars, training, personal setup. You know, I just see connections between people, employees, and customers with a lot of smiles, you know, and that's what turns me on. It's not the physical design, it's the interaction between the customer and the employee. And I just love these packed stores with people engaged, you know, and people thought it would be really hard to create a service culture that would be transformative.

38:36David Novak:And I think we did that pretty well. We created a place to belong. And I honestly, I think the teams did it. All the people I hired, the store leaders, the training teams, the HR teams. It wasn't me. I just set the vision. But it's continued. And that's pretty exciting. You know, you had all the success at Apple, and then you were recruited to go be the CEO of JCPenney, which you mentioned a few minutes ago. Tell us about that experience and what you learned. It was an unfortunate thing because I turned 50. I kind of looked at my career in decades. I'd spent a decade at Target, a little over a decade at Apple.

39:19David Novak:And as much fun as I was having my work, I'd become a hobby at Apple. We had such a good team. Every store we opened, one was better than the next. They were flourishing. And I kind of wanted to do something really challenging again. And a couple of guys had made a big investment in JCPenney and were looking, they had the ability to add a board member. So they called me to become a board member. I said, that sounds fun. And then two months later, the CEO had a car accident and he was a little older, a really nice guy named Mike Ullman, who's since passed away. But the board thought, well, maybe we should try to see if Ron will be the CEO because they were worried about a succession plan.

40:01David Novak:And I just thought that would be really fun to try to do. I had grown up two miles from the first enclosed shopping mall in the world at Southdale Center in suburban Minneapolis. I had grown up at Mervin's competing with Penny's. Penny's had a great history. The department store had been struggling pretty massively in the U.S. Wouldn't it be fun to go try to see if you can't turn around at a department store? I created things at Target and at Apple. Now I'll try to make something great again. And I decided to do that. Then unfortunately, right before I was being announced, Steve called me in and he supported my going.

40:43David Novak:But he said, Ron, I got to tell you, unfortunately, this is for you only, but I've only got six months to live. And I'd love you to stay here with me if you could. Is there any way you can delay your going to Pennies for six months? and I said of course and so I had to call up we had the announcement coming in two or three days and so I had to delay coming um but during that time you know I was leaving Apple I spent a lot of time trying to imagine what we would do at JCPenney and I got to know the teams I'd spend a week a month with the team there as I did that I started getting nervous because the team didn't seem to want to change.

41:24David Novak:And I'd been told by the board they want to change. And so I put together a plan for what I wanted to do. And I went to the board in September. I was going to start in November. And I said, hey, you know, I'm nervous the team doesn't want to change. And, you know, I don't want to come unless we're all in. And I laid out a vision for what I wanted to do. And I felt because I didn't want to come if the board wasn't on board. And they got real excited about it. And they said, no, no, this is what we have to do, blah, blah, blah. I said, okay. And so then I started in November and I went to the board and I said, you know, if you're going to make a change in a retail organization, the time to do it is February because that's when Christmas is done.

42:07David Novak:You change all the merchandise. It's just the right time to make a change. So we have a choice. We do it this year or a year from now. And the board said, what do we got to lose? Let's go now. and I should have said we had a lot to lose but what that what happened there is because we were going to change so much literally three months after I started there was no time for me to really build that vision with the team all I could do was say here's what Ron wants to do here's what we're going to do and quite frankly the team didn't buy into it they didn't understand it. And I don't blame them. It takes time for a mature organization to make change.

42:50David Novak:But we moved way too fast. And it turned out it was too fast for board members. Once we made the change, they're going to, whoa, I didn't realize it was going to be this much. We're not going to run a sale. We've done 99 % of our merchandise at 60 % off and everything's at full price. And I said, well, now it's 60 % off every day. But, you know, board didn't understand it. Customers didn't. Investors didn't. And it became a hugely, you might remember, a very visible business transformation. I thought a little company like JCPenney and Retail would be so different than Apple that I'd be working under the radar.

43:30David Novak:It became a big business story at that time, I believe. Oh, yeah. It was a huge, huge business story. And, you know, everybody thought, you know, initially the genius comes in from Apple. You're going to transform it. You moved very quickly. You know, it's sort of like success has many fathers, failure only a bastard. Well, you quickly ended up on the other end of the equation. Yeah, you definitely. It was an abject failure in business at that point in time, you know. But, you know, I have to ask you, you know, you built Apple, you know, from basically nothing to 400 stores by the time you left.

44:07You go to JCPenney, huge, huge organization. You know, you know, there's big differences when you're growing something from the beginning versus you go into an established organization. You know, what did you pick up there? What would you really do differently?

44:22David Novak:I wouldn't change the vision at all. I would have, you know, listened and adapted it, but the vision was not the problem. It was all the implementation. And if I had gone there and said to the board, the first year, I am going to reduce our costs, get our profit formula right, get the right team to execute a transformation of the order of magnitude we're going to go through. We're going to take a year to prepare ourselves for this. and that would have given me the time really ahead of the apple to build my team and roll out the first stores right and so i really think the speed at which we move caused all the problems once you made the move everything got complicated investors whatever but if i had you know found the right people to lead the transformation got our cost structure right and then rolled out things at a different pace, for example.

45:28David Novak:You know, I think we would have done really well. Now, it might not have become America's favorite story language, but I think Penny's would have performed exceptionally better than it did. And so I would just totally transform the people, how I approach people, because I wanted to just, I believe that I could convince people it was the right thing to do. I had to change some people and I would have taken the time to get the organization to feel like was our store and not Ron's store. You know, our store, not the tech guy's store. I was kind of acting like the savior they didn't want. And I had to become the leader that would inspire them.

46:11And I did not take the time to do that.

46:14David Novak:And so I really failed. I appreciate that, honestly. But there's tremendous learning from that. And, you know, I got to ask you this one, you know, because it's like everything you'd touch prior, you basically hit a home run on. I mean, you know, it seemed like that. Well, you know, you look back, I mean, look what, look what you did. Incredible. You are a legend in retail. You're like a Mickey Drexler who I know was on the Apple board and I did a podcast with. And, you know, Steve Jobs went to him and put him on the board because he wanted to learn retail. He brought you in because you were the retail guru, you know.

46:52So everything you touched had been a home run. What was it like for you psychologically to strike out? Because it happens to us all. I mean, I'm the father of Crystal Pepsi, for God's sakes, you know? There you go. That's a good one.

47:07David Novak:No, it was so hard. And honestly, I wasn't ready for it. Unfortunately, my best friend in life, my father, my brother's also very close, passed away while I was at Penny's. Steve had passed away. I really felt on my own. And as you know, being a CEO, you know, you're responsible for everything. And it can be very lonely. And I went from living this life of filled with success and positivity to being alone down in Texas in a hotel, just getting everything I would read was, why is this guy doing this? Who is this idiot? It was really hard. And quite frankly, I wish I had done some things different to support myself.

48:01David Novak:I wish I had spent more time with some people I brought in to, hey, here's what I'm struggling with. But eventually, I walked away. I went to the board and said, look, it's been a year. if you want to go back, I'm not going to stay in your way. I'm not, you know, this has been a difficult year for all of us. And if you want to make a U-turn, the sooner you do it, the better. I don't think it's going to work out very well. And I'm happy to stay on, but we got to be all in. But if you want to make a change, go ahead. And then month after month for three months, I could tell by their questions. I said, look, if you don't want to do this, find somebody else.

48:37David Novak:But I am not going to throw us back into that promotional mess. that created the problem at the beginning. And so eventually I resigned and left after three efforts to do that. And I was really glad when I left, but looking back, you know, what happened was what I expected. The stock went down 50 % under Mike when he came back. It went down 50 % again when Marvin did. And now it's basically open. So Simon doesn't have to let everyone out of their co-tenancy clauses. So pennies exist because the malls it's in, they're required to keep it open or people can leave and the leases all go away. So I feel badly that I really probably caused the demise of pennies because of the not sticking it out, if you will.

49:31But it's tough. I want to shift gears here and I want to take you back a lot further. And what's a story around from your childhood that shaped the kind of leader you've become?

49:42David Novak:Well, I think the big one was, it's good. We've been through the World Cup, and I was a pretty good athlete. And in ninth grade, I decided to quit football and play soccer. And soccer was a new sport, you know, for a lot of people. And most of the great athletes were playing football anyway. So I joined the soccer team. My junior year, I started, I got pulled up my sophomore year. Junior year, I was picked to be captain. We only won two games that year, but my high school was known for state championships and basketball and football and hockey and baseball, but we'd never done anything in soccer.

50:24David Novak:And I wanted to play on a championship team. And so I called a meeting once I became captain at the end of my junior year, and 100 kids showed up. And I said, you know, here's my dream. Next year, we are going to the state championship. That means we've got to be one of the four best teams in the state. But realistically, even though we've only got two returning starters, and we only won two games, if we commit, we can do this. because the reality, there aren't many people that are very good at soccer. And if we, and so I said, we're going to start every night in the winter in our field house.

51:02David Novak:We're going to kick the ball around and play small games. When the snow melts, we can go to camps, we can join summer leagues. And we're going to go to the state tournament. And, you know, I kind of set a big, bold vision. and lo and behold, when it got time for the state tournament, we tied our first game. We're the number one team in the state of Minnesota going into the state tournament. And we lost in overtime in the semifinals, won the consolation game. But for me, it just proves that if you set a big goal and have a strategy, you can do anything you want. And, you know, all my career, I think that's looking back.

51:42I just wanted to have that experience of trying to do something really big and hard again.

51:47David Novak:And it was really fun. Yeah, you learned how to dream big pretty early, I would say. I learned how to dream big early. And I became an optimist for a lifetime, you know. But that was the story, you know. How'd you get into retail in the first place? I know you, you know. Yeah, I was at, I had worked at, I went to Harvard Business School and I worked at Salomon Brothers in the summer. I looked at all the investment banks. I got an offer from Goldman's M &A Group. But I went through, I took out all the cases. We had 400 cases my first year. And I said, you know, the CEOs I admire, they've done what they've done for a lifetime.

52:27David Novak:So what would I enjoy? And I made a pile of industries I wouldn't like and things I would. And everything I liked was retail or consumer marketing. And then I said, well, what if I went into retail? I like being in stores. The reality is it's a young person's business. Back when I graduated from business school, that was when Mickey had just taken over as CEO of The Gap. He was transforming it. Specialty stores were happening. I said, what if I went and tried to become a world-class retailer? And so I took a job out of Harvard Business School, one third of the golden salary, unloading trucks in a Mervin store in Southern California.

53:08David Novak:And I just started learning retail. And that's how I got into it. And it worked out okay. And now you've gone back and put your career journey down on paper in this new book called Shop Different. What's something you've learned about yourself, Ron, just recalling all these stories that, what have you learned about yourself that surprised yourself? Well, here's what surprised me the most. My dad was a business guy involved with my career, but the person who impacted my career the most was my mom. And I didn't realize that. I think a lot of us don't take time until you write a book to really understand the decisions you made at the pivotal points in your life, what inspired those?

54:02David Novak:And for me, it was my childhood. It was the home I grew up in. It was my mom who was the best servant I've ever met. I mean, she literally wanted to make sure she had a, when a birthday, someone had a birthday, a friend of hers, she would write the card, not put it in the mailbox because the PO, PO, the mail postal service could screw up. She would get up in the morning, hear the car start. She would drive to their house six in the morning, put it in the mailbox to make sure it was there that day. You know, she would, when I was captain of the soccer team, every night before a game, she had the 30 odd players over to her house for spaghetti.

54:47David Novak:We'd have a pasta dinner at four o 'clock before seven o 'clock games. She would serve people till she passed out being tired. And she was just an exceptionally kind person. And my whole life, I just liked being kind to people. I liked serving people. And where'd that come from? Where did the Apple dream to love our customers? It came from my childhood. It's where I grew up. And I never really understood that. It wasn't like a business strategy I learned at Harvard. It was creating a place people would belong. I look back and that's what my childhood felt like. My home was a place to belong. You know, this has been so much fun, Ron, and I want to have some more with my lightning round of questions.

55:32Are you ready for this? Yep. The three words that best describe you? Optimistic, kind, positive. If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be?

55:43David Novak:Oh, I'd love to be Lionel Messi. Your biggest pet peeve? Negativity. Your all-time favorite Apple product. My iPhone. Favorite Steve Jobs quote. The journey is the reward. Your dream foursome in golf, dead or alive. Steph Curry. Hi, Scotty Scheffler. I'd love to play with my brother-in-law. He's my favorite one to play golf with. We play all the time. And he would love playing with Scotty and stuff. What's something you've been curious about lately that has nothing to do with work? Boating. I always wanted to have a boat. I bought a boat and I've been learning to navigate the sea. I have a boat down and I keep it in the Mediterranean.

56:28And it's really challenging to figure out, you know, everything you have to do when you do boating.

56:34David Novak:And I find it really fun to be on the boat, but I love learning new things. And that's been great. The one thing you do just for you? Carve out free time, you know, to make sure I have enough time for myself. Besides your family and friends, what's your most prized possession? My memories. If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear? I don't turn on the radio. What's one of your daily rituals, something that you'd never miss? Exercise. That's great. We're out of the lightning round. Just a few more questions. We'll wrap this up here, Ron. What do you see now as your unfinished business?

57:08It's writing the book.

57:09David Novak:It's giving back. I look back in my life. I read a few books, In Search of Excellence, Principle-Centered Leadership by Stephen Covey, Marianne Williamson's book. And I get an idea, one idea, and they changed how I led. And I just felt like with the experience I had primarily at Apple and some of the other, that if I wrote a book and shared what I was thinking about and lessons of working with Steve, they might help young leaders. And so that's my priority. And so I'm spending a lot of time on these podcasts like this. I look forward to speaking, writing the book. It's kind of giving back through sharing some of the beliefs and experiences I've had.

57:56Fantastic. And last question here. What's one piece of advice you'd give to anyone who wants to be a better leader?

58:03David Novak:Choose kindness. You know, people are really naturally hard on themselves. You know, we need to encourage people. And that's about being kind and being available to help them be the best that they can be. Well, Ron, I want to thank you for helping all the listeners here be the best that they can be by sharing your insights and your learnings. And, you know, wish you a lot of success with your new book, Shop Different. And, you know, I'm sure there'll be a lot of people touched by your memories and your insights. So thank you very much. Yeah, I really enjoyed our conversation. Have a great day.

58:49David Novak:David, it's not very often that you get behind the scenes stories about what it was like to work for Steve Jobs. I mean, what a career Ron Johnson has had. Those stories were wild. Well, you know, he's had success on so many fronts. And, you know, Target was enormously successful. And because of that, he was the guy behind their design approach that really, you know, helped turn that business around. You know, Steve Jobs wanted to meet him and talk to him because he had this vision for the Apple store. And he felt that Ron was the guy who could make it happen. And it was a great decision because those two guys together created the Apple store that we all know and love today.

59:34David Novak:It was so interesting hearing him talk about the fact that much of what they built 25 years ago is still the same today. And it feels so new and fresh anytime you go into an Apple store. But it's just it was their vision from the very beginning. And that's just, you know, the sign of people who really understand design and how humans interact and have a big vision. David, I'm excited to break down some of the key themes that you and Ron discussed in this episode. And the first one is this concept of big vision and how it really only works if people come with you. Ron obviously had a big vision for Target.

1:00:11David Novak:He had a big vision for Apple Retail. What he didn't do well is take people with him at JCPenney. So break that idea down for me and why you think he was successful where he did take people with him and why he wasn't so successful when he did it. Yeah, well, I think that you can dream it up, but you got to do it up. In fact, you know, I've written a country song about that. And you have to not only have the dream, but you got to have the ability to execute. You know, I think in Apple, he was brought in to build the Apple store from scratch and create the concept that we all know and love today.

1:00:46and he was able to take people with him. He interviewed every store manager. You know, he literally, you know, was into the people very, very deeply and communicated to them what the Apple vision was and how they could really support it and drive it and made them all feel important because they were the key to bringing the vision that he and Steve Jobs had to life. And he built a heck of a business, so much so that he was recruited by J.C. Penney to become the CEO there. And there he kind of came in as the guru, the guy who knew how to turn around retail brands, the king of marketing and the king of consumer thinking behind a retail brand.

1:01:38and you know he had this vision which to this day I think he'd go to his grave saying it was the right right vision but he didn't take the time to take people with him so that they could know why he was doing what he was doing and why it was the way forward why it would really drive the success and as a result he was the savior that nobody really wanted it at JCPenney because they didn't understand the why. And he's the, I really loved his honesty because he talked about how he would have taken the time to make sure he had people on the bus, motivated and excited about where they're headed versus just going in there and making change so quickly.

1:02:21So, you know, I think the real lesson here is that you got to take people with you, you know, whether you have a startup like he did at Apple, where he was able to take people from the ground floor to where they have so many stores today with this imprint behind it. And it's particularly important for when you go into a new organization where there's so many traditions and so many thoughts about what works and what doesn't work, that you take the time to let everybody know that you've heard them and then come out with your vision and do it in a way that you take people with you. So I think this was a great conversation for every leader to really understand the importance of taking people with you.

1:03:08Because nothing big ever happens unless you take people with you.

1:03:12David Novak:Why do you think, David, that so many leaders fall victim to that trap of not taking people with them? Is it because it just takes time and they're in such a hurry and so many things are on their plate? Or what do you see as the reason most people don't? I think people are in a hurry to get done what they think needs to be done right. And, you know, and, you know, that they just want to get going. But let me tell you something. One thing I've learned and I talk about all the time is if you skip a level, you pay. If you don't get people engaged and then you don't get people that work for them engaged and you skip a level anywhere along the line in a big corporation where people understand why you're getting done, it will ultimately slow you down.

1:03:55So your desire to go fast, you know, actually many times will slow you down and sometimes you will fail. I mean, his example is JCPenney. You know, my example would be Crystal Pepsi. Both might have been the right approach, the right idea, could have been home runs if you'd been executed well with people behind them, but both ended up being failures because we didn't take people with us.

1:04:21David Novak:I want to know from your perspective, David, like Steve did in his role at Apple, specifically with Ron, he became a leader that people really wanted to work for. So how do you become the type of leader that people really want to work for and work with? Number one, you have to have a dream. You have to have that big dream. You have to have that vision that people want to get behind and be a part of. Like I always say, people don't go to work every day to be a part of something mediocre. They want to be a part of greatness. So you have to sell the dream. Then you have to let people know that you believe in them, that you believe in them and you're going to help them achieve their goals and you're going to do everything you can to develop them as a leader.

1:05:07And once people know you care about them, they will care about you. And, and, you know, I, I, I really believe that, you know, those are the two big things that, that, that will, will get people wanting to, to work for you. Now, the other things that he talked about was the fact that he was very great at the delegation, but, you know, he had a process for delegating. Steve Jobs didn't delegate until he knew how you thought, and he believed in you. And that's why he had these 8 p.m. meetings with Ron where they talked about, you know, how they thought about the business. And once he knew they were aligned, then he started to delegate, okay?

1:05:52But he didn't hand over the keys the day he walked the door. Trust me on that. So, you know, the great leaders will delegate once they know you've demonstrated you have the capability to run your business and run it well. So the other thing is, is that Steve Jobs would change his mind. You know, I mean, they were heading one way with the retail store and they went another way. And he, because why? He wanted to be a part of greatness. He came back to his dream. And the other thing is that, you know, he didn't squash people's ideas. He added to them, you know, so he made whatever ideas he had better.

1:06:35And I guess the last thing I would say in terms of why people want to work for you is you recognize the heck out of them when they do great things. You know, if you see greatness, you tell them. That's really, really important. And I think it's proven to work. And people crave recognition. And they want coaching from their boss and they want appreciation from their boss. If you can do that, you're home free.

1:07:00David Novak:I love it, David. The final theme that I want to get your opinion and perspective on is this idea of the soft skills. So throughout this whole conversation, I heard Ron say things like kindness, and we lead with love, and we look for people to hire who love people. And it's not often that we hear that kind of language in an interview with a high-powered executive and leader like Ron Johnson. So I know you always say it is that soft stuff that drives the hard results. But break that down a little bit. I mean, what do leaders really need to be doing to incorporate more of that soft stuff into their leadership and into their culture?

1:07:38I think what you do is you've got to recognize that you don't have to be a hard ass to be a great leader. You know, that people are going to follow you because you're human, that you have the characteristics and the empathy that makes you a good human being. And you're not afraid to really talk about those characteristics. And in Ron's case, he talks about kindness and love. Yeah. And they sound like really soft, fuzzy things for a hard-charging business person to have. But the reality is that it's the human stuff. It's the soft stuff that really differentiates you as a leader and helps you get the hard results.

1:08:15Now, that's particularly true and critically true. When you have vision and when you have capability and you have knowledge and you have creativity, You combine that with the soft stuff, man, you're going to have great, great success. And I think in this particular conversation, we saw that Ron had great soft stuff to get hard results when he was at Apple because people saw his love and they saw his kindness. I think when he went to J.C. Penney, you know, it's a case history where he didn't take the time to show the kindness and the love and get everybody behind him so that he could truly drive the massive change that they needed to make.

1:09:00And there's no question they they needed to make massive change. And it just didn't happen for the reasons that he articulated. So it was a great, great conversation, Kula. And I particularly loved the contrast between dramatic success and then just abject failure. And I think every leader goes through that in their career.

1:09:22David Novak:David, as we wrap this episode, what do you want folks to walk away really thinking about and trying to implement into their leadership this week? Well, I think the three things we've really talked about here are important. Number one, big vision only works if you take people with you. So you got to take people with you and they got to understand why you're heading in the direction that you're heading. And many times in that process, it's going to become a better direction because you get great insights from the people you have the privilege of leading. Number two, you want to be a leader that people want to work for, you know?

1:09:53So have a big dream and share it and let people know how much you really will care about them. And the third thing is that the soft stuff really does get hard results. Never, ever forget it.

1:10:05David Novak:Well, David, Thank you so much for another excellent episode of How Leaders Lead. Thank you, Ron Johnson, for joining us and sharing your insights with our listeners. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in to another episode of How Leaders Lead. Come back next Thursday and we will see you soon.