2025 Recap: CEOs discuss embracing AI, tracking wellness, and marketing for Gen Z | Leadership Next

0:00Why am I here? What is my purpose? What's the purpose of my company? And, you know, those were the best conversations for me, the ones where you really talk about what drives people personally, because that's the heart of authentic leadership. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the people and trends that are shaping the future of business. I'm Diane Brady. And I'm Kristen Stoller. Happy holidays, Kristen. This is our end of year wrap up of our fabulous year, Kristen, of talking to incredible leaders. Yes, we have talked to some excellent CEOs this season across a wide variety of industries.

0:38And we're going to talk about some of our favorite moments on and off camera. And excellent at what they do, but some, of course, are struggling in their businesses. A lot of conversations about how they personally prepare themselves to lead, how they're reorganizing their companies in an age of AI. and a little bit of a look around the corner, the tastes of the next generation to the hot products and really some of the products that don't even exist yet. Yeah, well, we'll dive in more after this break. Quantum computing has the potential to transform industries by solving optimization problems, boosting machine learning and sparking innovation in logistics, finance and materials science.

1:22Jason Garzadas, CEO of Deloitte US, is a longtime sponsor of this podcast and is here with us today. Hi, Jason. Thanks for joining us. Great to see you, Diane. So what is quantum computing and how do you see it transforming industries? Well, quantum computing has been a topic for some time in research circles, certainly closely watched by business. But it's fundamentally a different computing paradigm that uses the principles of physics instead of mathematics to drive the computing outcomes. It's been largely the domain of research, and it's becoming seen as being a more viable commercial computing methodology and approach.

2:04And I think the real uses will be ultimately around very complex optimization scenarios, further enhancements to scaling machine learning, and also very complicated simulations that could be relevant to a whole host of different business applications. Jason, what steps should leaders take to prepare for both its potential benefits as well as its potential risks? It's really about readiness planning right now and preparing an organization to understand the implications. So it's about understanding what skill sets would be required, what type of cybersecurity protocols would need to be in place, and begin to think about the types of use cases that would be very germane around optimization and simulation.

2:51Excellent advice. Thank you so much, Jason. Thanks, Jason. Okay, Kristen, I think let's start by having you hold up your hand. You've still got your aura ring on. I have let mine go, and I think that's kind of not emblematic of the year, but it's certainly we started very much with a deep dive into wellness. And I think one of the things I really enjoyed was talking to people in these high-pressure roles, kind of about the life hacks and their philosophy. And we started with a father-son, Ankur Jain, Naveen Jain. And Naveen's company is the microbiome company, all about wellness. And I think we've asked almost every CEO that's come in, what do you do after work?

3:37And I think is it everyone says, go to the gym, track my sleep. I run a couple times a week. I'm now a yogi. I do a lot of yoga. I do five, six days a week of yoga. The thing I enjoy more than anything in the world is rock climbing. I've always thought a fair amount of what I'm eating and a fair amount of sleep, exercise, sunlight. Nothing is just going to happen. You have to make it happen. And that could be for getting on the treadmill or the elliptical or lifting weights or going for a run. It could be spending time with your spouse. It could be spending time with your kids. I make a really big effort not just to do that, but my mom passed away a couple years ago.

4:14So I spent a lot of time with my dad, but also friends. And so, you know, I've gone to two live concerts in the last week. I went through a period of my life where I like stopped sleeping after being a championship sleeper for most of my life. And I will tell you something. When I stopped drinking coffee and alcohol, it was my cognitive functioning, my perception, my all these things like suddenly were like elevated. Sometimes you don't need an aura ring to tell you because, you know, right. You don't need to know you didn't get sleep last night or you ate late and you don't feel that great. But I think it's important to take care of yourself.

4:50It was surprising the number of people who really put wellness as their top priority. You know, some of them train like athletes. I think you have to be an athlete to be in this job, especially right now where time is compressed and you've got we're in an AI revolution. So what used to take, you know, 20 years will take two years. It's grueling. And so I do think there's this attention to health and an attention to leadership and how do we structure our companies. Yeah. AI, going back to that huge theme of this year, I don't think we had a conversation where we didn't talk about AI. But I also don't think anyone has it figured out, right?

5:28I think this is going to be the year where it's not just about cuts, but you're going to have to show the return on investment, how it's helping you to grow. I do think when you're talking to leaders, it's excitement is what people feel about AI. It's the excitement about how they can transform their businesses. Clearly, AI is changing the way business is done. And what I think is interesting is how do we prepare our workplace for that? We're very optimistic that this is going to be human acceleration technology. We're going to see higher quality experiences. We're going to see types of games, I believe, that no one's ever thought of.

6:08Whenever you have massive, massive amounts of data, AI is favorable. We have fresh AI in a restaurant right across the street. And so I've been using it and testing it out and seeing how it works. It's really fun. Wendy, she greets you when you drive up. She's hospitable. She always asks you if you want something else. It builds on your order. If you believe some of the optimistic estimates for the GDP growth and what it takes to get that 6 plus percent GDP growth, if we're in the bullish AI adoption scenario, there's going to be a lot of labor force disruption. Gen Z and Gen Alpha, I think, were also big topics that we talked about.

6:53We've had the CEO of Elf who talked about marketing and TikTok and how that's changed the beauty industry. Yep. Brooks Running talked about, you know, Gen Z's engaging and running earlier than any other generation. The other one I want to bring up is Robin Hood. Vlad at Robin Hood. Oh, Vlad, yes. Because we asked him right off the bat, you know, what was it like coming out of the GameStop craziness and meme stock madness? and what he's doing to now reinvent Robin Hood, I think we're going to still see in 2026 if his new strategy is working. Yeah, and look, they basically are taking more of a Charles Schwab approach, I think, than they are the meme stock approach.

7:31So how do you become part, basically, how do you institutionalize yourself so you're part of the fabric of the lives of these kids who came to you maybe to trade a meme stock, but you're hoping they'll stick around and now put their retirement savings with you as well. So I think the generational shift is huge and definitely changing tastes in food, changing tastes in makeup, changing tastes in how you work and how we sell to this new generation, a generation that frankly doesn't have as much faith in the traditional career path as I did. Back in 2019, I remember my CMO coming to me saying, hey, we have to be on TikTok because that's where Gen Z is.

8:13And I'm like, well, if that's where Gen Z is, absolutely. Now, what's TikTok? And so we approach each of these platforms with a great deal of humility and curiosity. What we're seeing with Gen Z is they started at age 11. Because think about it, in COVID, you're at home, your parents are going out for a run or walk. So you're going to join just to get out of the house. And so we have a wave of a generation coming that we're pretty excited about. And we're seeing it around the world. But still a lot of lawmakers for some time had in their head, this doesn't feel like work to me. This feels like some different thing.

8:46But really, state by state, little by little, a lot of people are starting to say this is the way millions of people are making money on their own terms and doing it in a way that really works for them. Part of the focus is we do always want to be relevant to the next generation because you don't want to get stuck as a generational company like our predecessors because eventually those people will not be around. I guess what struck me more, Kristen, was that the kind of foundational elements of leadership did not go away. You know, how you treat your people, having a vision and strategy. What is the job of leaders to have the vision and strategy for your company to pick the leadership team, to execute it, and then frankly, to get the conditions to ultimately replace yourself?

9:31Absolutely. And that leads me to, I think, our next big trend, which is comeback stories. Yes. We have heard so many different ones. Yahoo was my favorite. Jim Lanzone because he took this company that was known for email and has now built it into this big media organization. I thought that was really interesting. McLaren Racing, we had Zach Brown on talking about how he's taken this team now to be a top team in an F1. I've been to a couple of Formula One events this year. That is a rocket. It's a lot of CEO gatherings are taking place there. It's this cultural zeitgeist moment it's having because of Drive to Survive.

10:13So I think Formula One is going to be something that will actually be part of the conversation, not just for Zac Brown, but other companies, because people want experiences. They want just this kind of connection as human beings. The company, which had been such an early innovator, had a little bit lost its way. Just a little bit. It was trying to do a lot of things. It was losing some share. And it just lacked the focus and, frankly, wasn't growing profitably. In fact, it wasn't making any money at all. And so now you have this very interesting situation. You know, almost a billion dollars of free cash, a profitable company growing again, and one that customers are really kind of falling in love with again.

10:53And so we have a whole new campaign, actually. In fact, it just started today called CheckLift. and I want people to give us another try, check us out again. And what my hope is, is you're going to see, as I say, a comeback that just looks like it's for the ages. Ask Jeeves, that was my first turnaround. And I learned the hard way, why were we able to do that? And I think we almost 50X the stock from where we picked it up at the crash in 2001 to the peak of where we got to before we sold to IEC. And it was, we had a lot of traffic, but we had a product that had seen better days and, and, and a brand that had been through the ringer and a team that had been also through it because it was the first crash.

11:33So you had to rebuild all that. And once you got the basics right and you got the team rebuilt and you were actually executing on, on your basic value proposition, you know, then you could innovate. Netflix and Liberty turned our sport from an exclusive sport to an inclusive sport. It's always been an awesome sport. I've loved it forever, but people didn't necessarily understand or they couldn't feel engaged with it. And now in this modern day era where everything used to be about awareness, but now it's all about engagement. I think we figured out how to let people in the tent. What did happen this year was in talking to people like Brene Brown, you always got the sense that the world has changed.

12:16That how do we deal with the kind of nasty, brutish, short elements of being American right now? And that was something I think a lot of CEOs were thinking about. Continuing, you know, our negative quick train here is that Brene, I think, had one of my favorite quotes of the season, which is that people are not OK. Yeah. It's in this climate. It's really hard to be human is what she was saying. And I thought her candidness about that was great. And we started out with Richard Edelman and the Trust Barometer talking about the fact that business leaders have more trust right now than journalists, yes, but also than public officials.

12:52So people are looking to company leaders to kind of show us the way. Today, it seems like a particularly fertile environment for misinformation. And personality now has become more important than scientific expertise. I find so many similarities between being a racing driver and a CEO. So if you think about what a racing driver does, it's a lot of instinct. It's a lot of data. It's a lot of trusting your engineers. It's being a great listener. If we violate trust with our users, and I would say over time, that is something that probably as the different variations of Yahoo and different owners of Yahoo, it probably wavered a bit.

13:34But we knew that is the first thing. We have to be the trusted source for people. Our success through that time is really with those two things. How do we behave in a way that our communities can trust us? Our people totally trust us. Our customers trust us. how do you really know a leader? Well, you know, a leader when they have followers, right? When they have earned the respect and trust of the people that they are trying to lead. And so leadership in many ways is not about like what behaviors, you know, are the right behaviors. It's like, well, what works in the context for you to generate followership?

14:10So when you talk about the core of a leadership or, you know, leadership team, a core of any team, You're talking about self-awareness, metacognition, emotional granularity, mindfulness, and then one that I think is so lacking today that it's shocking, which is deep, complex understanding of systems theory. If you don't understand that the world that we're operating in today is built of systems inextricably connected to other systems, and that if you move one Lego piece an inch over here, you've got fallout over here, you're not going to be able to win. So I think if we reflect back on the year, Kristen, I'm struck, of course, by all the different themes we talked about.

15:00Obviously, AI. Right. We have comeback stories. We have Gen Z. But I think what strikes me is that there's kind of a foundational element to what a leader does. You know, you set the vision and strategy of your company. You hire the right team. You replace yourself. I mean, there's a sense of what does it mean to be a visionary leader right now? because we need visionary leadership. There's no question the world is changing very quickly. And I was struck by just the thoughtfulness of people starting with, why am I here? What is my purpose? What's the purpose of my company? And those were the best conversations for me, the ones where you really talk about what drives people personally because that's the heart of authentic leadership.

15:44And getting a glance inside a day in the life, their psyche, why they do what they do, what motivates them. Their workout routines, their life hacks. Exactly. I think I would love to see more of that in 2026. And I feel for all these leaders right now. Well, we're just human beings doing a job like the rest of us. And what a joy to be able to talk to the people on the front lines of business, the ones who are shaping it, I think, in a way that is for the good. Yeah. What a great season. And thank you all for listening. Thank you. Thank you.