Burberry & Apple’s Angela Ahrendts — How to unite a team

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1:44I realized that I had to do it my way. And they brought me in to do it my way. I was told very early on, we don't do videos. I'm like, excuse me, it's like a YouTube world. No videos, period. That's Angela Aarons, and she's telling a story from her first months as Apple's head of retail. It had been a couple of months, and somebody came up to me and said, we think you should send an email out to, you know, all 70 ,000 employees. And if you give it to us by Friday, we'll translate it into 36. I'm like, I like picture my three teens in these stores and they don't read email. And no, that's not going to work.

2:28I said, I'm going to do a video. We don't do videos. I'm going to do a video. We don't do videos. I said, I'm going to do a video and I don't want a studio and I don't want hair and makeup. We have a phone. I'm going to do it like my kids do YouTube videos. It's going to be three thoughts in three minutes or less. No editing, nothing. So Angela recorded her first video memo to Apple employees from her desk using an iPhone. And I just said, hi. You know, sorry I haven't reached out before, but we're going to do these videos. I'm going to talk to you once a week, three thoughts in three minutes or less, because I want you to be aware of what our plan is, where we're going.

3:12I want us to connect. I want you to trust me. I just was very open and honest. As Angela was speaking, something happened. One minute in, my phone rings. I looked down and it's my baby. It's my daughter. And I said, don't stop. I said, excuse me. I picked it up and I said, Angelina, mommy will call you back in like two minutes. Laid it down and just kept going. And so of course they want to edit it. Apple, It's got to be perfect. And I said, not in this world. It does not have to be perfect. They have to see that I am authentic. They also have to see that I put my kids first. And the next day, I must have gotten 500 emails, people thanking me for taking my daughter's call.

4:00Angela taking a quick phone call from her daughter. That set the stage for what she really wanted to communicate. I'm not a king or a queen or a dictator. I'm here to do my life's greatest work. Will you help me? Can we do it together? Angela knew she needed to connect with every employee in every store at a human level in order to transform the business. Even at an iconic company like Apple, the icon alone won't do the work for you. Whether your staff is 70 ,000 or only seven, a leader has to get everyone pulling in the same direction. That's why I believe it takes more than a logo to rally the troops.

4:47You need an elevated mission and everyday human contact to unite a team. You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it.

5:25This is Masters of Scale.

5:31I'm Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host. And I believe it takes more than a logo to rally the troops. You need an elevated mission and everyday human contact to unite a team. Quick, what do you think of when I say the words red, white, and blue?

5:56A lot of you, statistically speaking, probably said the United States.

6:06But we have a global audience here at Masters of Scale and 45 % of you may have named the United Kingdom

6:17Australia The Netherlands or one of the other 23 countries with red, white and blue flags A few of you may have even said Cardiff City Football Club. They're red, white, and blue, too. The colors themselves are meaningless without two things. The elevated messaging around what the flag represents and the people who stand beneath it. It's true of countries and companies, too. Which makes me think of the Apple Store. The walls are glass, of course, so you can see the gleaming products inside. and so you can see the team members dressed in their simple but iconic uniform. A Pacific blue shirt, recently updated from navy blue.

7:12Apple Store employee shirts often change with the season, prompting obsessive blog posts and sub-discussions about what the change symbolizes. And once a year, the entire store logo turns red for World AIDS Day. Every time the color changes, it delivers a single elegant message to the team. Something's different today, and we're all in it together. But rallying a team takes more than just a logo or a color. It takes real work, a lot of it, to imbue that color and that logo with meaning. I wanted to speak to Angela Ahrens about this. because few executives have shown a greater talent for uniting global teams.

8:00As CEO of the British luxury brand Burberry, she led an astounding turnaround after years of flat sales and brand dilution. Before that, as an executive vice president at Liz Claiborne, she handled dozens of successful acquisitions. But you may know her for her work with a different company. Of course, we're talking about Apple. As head of retail and online sales, Angela reimagined the Apple Store. From its inception, the Apple Store had almost mythic status as a mecca for Apple superfans. But as Apple grew more and more popular, Apple customers had grown too. The challenge maintained the iconic magic of Apple while managing crowds that now include just as many technological late bloomers as obsessive early adopters.

8:52To pull that off would require a new vision for one of the most successful retail operations of all time. But it also required everyday hands-on coordination among retail teams separated by languages, time zones, and geography. In this special two-part episode, we'll be talking with Angela about what it takes to turn a far-flung team into a mission-driven family. And our story starts in her family's hometown, a town with a population one-tenth the number of daily visitors to a single Apple flagship store. I grew up in a tiny, tiny town, New Palestine, Indiana. One of six kids, and I'm in the middle, if you can be in the middle of six.

9:39A couple of miles away, it was the largest orphanage in the state, and the school bus would go by it. And it hurt me, you know, looking out the window at holidays or going to ball games, my imagination would go crazy. And I felt so sad. I had such an amazing, tight-knit, loving family. And I always felt so sorry for all the individuals who had nobody. As Angela watched the orphanage from the window of her school bus, an idea struck her. Her tight-knit family wasn't the norm. It was the exception. And she started to notice all the things her parents did to unite the family. I learned from my parents, celebrate, just celebrate.

10:18My parents celebrated everything. You know, my dad was an only child. My mom grew up in an orphanage, ironically. And so they celebrated every holiday. So I learned the power of celebrating. What Angela came to realize was that celebrating every holiday as a family is a choice, one that united her family. In a family of eight, it's easy to let the little wins get lost in the shuffle. Every birthday party, every special dinner in honor of someone's straight A's, those are deliberate choices that commemorate success and reinforce, this is who we are as a family. This is what we value. It's a principle that would stay with Angela.

10:59Achievements deserve celebrating. And not just the big ones, but also the little wins along the way. Angela followed her older sister to Ball State University. She was drawn to fashion and thought she'd become a designer until she encountered a teacher who changed the course of her life. Very early on, I had a teacher that told me point blank that I actually wasn't that creative, but I had a very strong opinion on what everybody else was doing. So she said, we call you a merchant. And that actually was great for me year one because it helped guide me. And it was interesting because merchandising uses my right brain and marketing uses my left brain.

11:39But again, I didn't know all of this. I didn't understand who I was. I didn't understand back then that I was half right brain and half left brain. I didn't even know what it meant. This notion of being half left brain and half right brain is something Angela talks about a lot. This ability to toggle between the analytical and the creative is a guiding force in her professional career. But it took time to balance her logical and intuitive sides into a unified identity as a leader. That would only come after finding a series of role models with very different leadership styles who rallied their teams in different ways.

12:16There was Linda Wachner, CEO of the clothing manufacturer, Warnico. She kind of took me under her wings. And at a really, really young age, I'm in big meetings with CEOs, And she was about as left brain. She was a finance wizard. And I really felt like an idiot around her half the time. I would pull all-nighters to prepare for meetings so that I could understand what she was saying and keep up. Then there was Donna Karan. Angela spent half a decade as president of her firm. Donna Karan is the epitome of right brain. We're going to Corsacomo to the fabric shows. With Donna, you had to be on your product and your merchant game.

12:55And with Linda, you had to be on your business and strategic game. Each of these strong CEOs taught Angela how to lead with an elevated mission and to know her own strengths. Another leader, Paul Sharon, gave Angela the final piece of her leadership puzzle. Paul was chairman and CEO of the multi-billion dollar clothing label Liz Claiborne when Angela was executive vice president. I would watch him address huge groups and his charisma, and that was actually almost icing on the cake. More than anyone she'd worked for, Paul had the ability to connect, and not just from the stage. Paul would stop by my office 7, 8 o 'clock at night sometimes, and he'd lean in and he'd say, I have no idea what you do, but keep on doing it.

13:44It sounds like an offhand comment, but it's stuck in Angela's mind because it captures Paul's gift for connecting human to human. I actually see something else in that story. I see a leader who knows how to appreciate people who are different from him. And this is essential. For example, one thing I've learned about myself as a leader is that my strength is creative problem solving. I'm far less good at making the proverbial trains run on time. So as a leader, the best thing I can do is to elevate someone to leadership who complements my skills with theirs. Angela and Paul made a great team at Liz Claiborne.

14:27What we started to do was acquire businesses. So we would buy Juicy Couture and take it from, you know,$50 million and write a billion-dollar business plan. And I related to those creative founders. The finance guys would look at the numbers, but I believed in their vision and their products and what they were doing. I think Paul and even myself had this natural connection with these creatives. I think it was all of those acquisitions at Liz that really helped that corporation understand the brilliance of a founder, right? So many private equity, so many companies go in and they buy these companies and they think the founders are stupid because they don't talk the same language.

15:06They don't understand who they are. My job was to keep those founders in situ and protect them and let them dream, right? Angela is right, and I want to spend a moment on why. Angela looks at acquisitions as an exercise in team building. Acquisitions aren't always treated this way, but they should be. It's like making a hire. The point of an acquisition is to say, we love what you do. We think it's important. your mission will add to ours. It's really self-defeating to take on a new team only to tell them, forget what made you special, do it our way. It's on you to see how the acquisition contributes to your elevated mission and then unite this new team under it.

15:53And that turns out to be one of Angela's superpowers. And was there anything in particular you learned about how to do this kind of acquisition well? This might sound odd, but probably the foundation or the basis of any great relationship, be it business or personal, is looking somebody in the eyes and truly hearing them, right? Not thinking of the next question, not truly hearing them, feeling them, like human-to-human connecting with them and building this incredible trust. Angela understood the value in this human-to-human connection and leveraged it to build trust. With trust came smoother acquisitions and a more united team.

16:39It was this ability that caught the eye of the London legacy brand Burberry. After seven years at Liz Claiborne, she got the call. So then the call from Burberry comes in. What's your kind of first reaction to this, you know, kind of stayed, quiet, maybe even decaying, you know, kind of British brand that calls you and says, hey, we think you might be the right one for us? One, I was almost taken aback because I had had a conversation about a week earlier with – there was another woman. We were both EVPs at the company. She said, you know, you've been here for a while now and I fear that you're going to go someday.

17:20Like, you know, why would you ever leave here? Like, what would it take? And just off the top of my head, just very spontaneously, I said, I love luxury. It would be so intuitive to be in luxury someday. I would love to be in more of a direct-to-consumer business. And I would love to be so much more global because my businesses were very domestic. And I just threw that out there. And the cosmos works in really weird ways. So a week later, I get this phone call. And my immediate instincts are like, no, thank you. But as I thought about it, I thought, it is exactly what I had said. It was a serendipitous offer, but Angela turned it down.

18:00So I am loyal to a fault, and I refuse to break anybody's trust. We have a really great meeting that they call up later, and I'm like, I can't. Like, no, thank you. I just can't, right? Now I feel like I've cheated on my husband. Like, I can't. But the more calls Angela fielded about the position, the more intriguing it started to sound. Burberry, as a brand, had gone through a decade of oversaturation in the public eye. And that was a challenge Angela thought she could tackle. She talked it through with Burberry's lead designer, Christopher Bailey, a colleague from years past. I met with Christopher, and we had not reconnected since our Donna Karan days.

18:39There's about a 10-year age difference, but I had always admired and respected him, and he had been brought in about a year or so earlier. And so we really reconnected, and we actually put the strategy together on the back of a napkin. I mean, our minds were going 100 miles an hour, so that was an incredible sign that I'd never done this before. He had never done what we were dreaming of doing, but wow, to have a partner like that. Did either of you keep the napkin? We didn't, and I wish we would have. Angela didn't keep the napkin, but she did take the job as CEO of Burberry. This is Mike Nicholas, Capital One business customer and co-founder of Ansett Uncles, a plant-based restaurant and community space in Brooklyn, New York.

19:23And he's telling us how they started a product line. We already had a space in the community. The food was an extension of our lifestyle and our values. So we know we wanted to create something that was an offshoot to that. Our pepper sauce. That's my grandmother's recipe. That's like a liquid gold, right? If someone wants to approach us and ask us what do we do, we provide flavor. Growing a product line is no small investment, but Mike and his wife and co-founder Nicole were able to manage with the help of their Capital One business card. Working with Capital One business, we're able to leverage our limits and utilize those points, making sure we can continue the scale at the speed that we need it to go.

20:04To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards. Every company wants to grow, but anyone who's scaled knows the truth. Growth creates complexity, and complexity kills growth. Bureaucracy creeps in, culture frays, and suddenly the energy that built your business starts working against it. I'm Jeff Berman, host of Masters of Scale. And when you want unfiltered insight on fighting that drift, turn to Founders Mentality, the CEO Sessions, with executive advisor Jimmy Allen. Each episode, leaders from companies like Audible, Walmart China, and AWS reveal how they stayed fast, focused, and human, even at massive scale.

20:53Founders Mentality, the CEO Sessions, business should be simple. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. The business world moves fast, and you don't have time to wait for your AI to turn into ROI. Because any business can use AI. The real breakthrough is how you use it. IBM helps you turn AI into more than potential. It helps you turn it into smarter ways of working and ultimately scaling. Let's create smarter business, IBM. When we last left her, Angela was joyfully mapping Burberry's new mission on a napkin with designer Christopher Bailey. But when she first arrived at Burberry as CEO, she found herself in charge of 11 ,000 people who were not necessarily on board.

21:39The company was in turnaround, trying to reclaim and elevate a brand name that had gone plebeian. She and Christopher agreed they needed to rescue Burberry's signature pattern, A beige Scottish tartan run through with black and white intersecting stripes and a filament of red. Angela calls it the check. One of the first things we said was the check had been hijacked in England and had almost become ubiquitous. Even for the fashion challenged among you, it's very probable you've already encountered the Burberry check. The pattern itself dates back to the late 1910s, when Burberry would use it to line its overcoats.

22:22I even recall having one of these coats myself when I was a student at Oxford. But in recent years, it had spread to the masses. Not just through counterfeits, but through over-licensing of the pattern. The Burberry check was drifting from the luxury brand's 150-year-old roots. We had decided then that we really needed to clean it up, elevate it, make it more innovative. We had also decided that we would do everything in our power to reinforce the Britishness of the company. We felt that had been lost as it had gotten global over the years. And we sat there and he was like, you know, British models, British music, you know, the greeter at the store.

23:03We decided then on the trench coat, how we were going to just drive that and innovate that. That part of establishing an elevated mission is determining the one factor from which all other factors flow, a bit like an eigenvalue in math and engineering. In this case, the eigenvalue is Britishness. So Angela's job would be to tie every subsequent decision back to this one, from the models to the music playing in their stores. This kind of laser focus is key in a turnaround. But Angela knew they also needed something aspirational, something that elevates the work of each employee from the transactional to the purposeful.

23:47She added a critical new element to Burberry's brand, social impact. But the most important thing we said was we decided then we were going to create the Burberry Foundation because it was nothing like that. And we said, we will have known that we did a really great job if in the future when someone bought check, they knew that it was more important than just what they bought, that it had a deeper meaning. The Burberry Foundation took proceeds from every sale to support social causes. And with that, Angela found a guiding mission that could inspire the entire team, invigorate the brand, and invite the customer to buy in as well.

24:29Forget red, white, and blue. Unite under the beige and black. But once again, it's not enough to fly a Burberry tartan flag. You also need human face-to-face engagement with your team. And if the team-building mantras so far have felt a little warm and fuzzy for your taste, get ready. That's about to change. Because Angela still faced a tricky turnaround. She needed to get every employee on board with a new company vision. and that would take some face-to-face conversations. Maybe six months in, we had a huge offsite and we had 200 of the top executives from around the world we flew in and I'm a pretty good read of people.

25:10My right brain kicks in and I'm just watching and this is two or three days and at the very end I got up and I said, look, this is the strategy. This is what we're doing and I know some of you are skeptical and I know you've been here for a long time and I know the way you think you're doing it in Hong Kong or Korea is the best, but it's not. We won't win. We're not winning now, and you're not, right? And I said, so I am happy to meet with you after this meeting and give you the greatest retirement package, right? I'm not looking to hurt anybody. But you need to walk out of here 100 % believing in everything we're doing, or I don't want you on the team, and I will take care of you, right?

25:46But we can't afford it. We have no time. Yes. And did anyone take you up on that? Yeah, they did. And if they didn't, I could tell by the body language in the room. And I went back to them. Yes, and said, wait. And said, look, this is, you know, I know you're not on board. This isn't going to work. Angela's approach here is tough. And it's exactly right. Too many leaders avoid difficult conversations. And this puts their work in danger, especially in a turnaround. People want the vibrancy and clarity of adopting a new mission. People want to be clear on who you are as a company. and what you've been put here to do.

26:25If you don't get all your employees united and all in on the mission, the turnaround won't achieve liftoff. I tell everybody now that when you go into a new, and especially a turnaround, you have to have such a clear, bold vision. And you can't have, I call it cancer, you cannot have cancer eating away at different parts of the organization. You need everybody. You need that body just, you know, every part of it. functioning if you want high performance. And literally six months after that meeting, we started comping up double digits from that September onward. And then that gives them more confidence.