Bearcats Mean Business podcast

Grant Freking: (00:00)
What does real world success in business actually look like? Welcome the Bearcats Mean Business, the official podcast of the University of Cincinnati's Carl H. Lindner College of Business, where inspiring career stories, honest lessons, and fresh business perspectives from the people building impact in the real world. Come together, tune in for inspiration, practical business insights, and forward-looking thought leadership on how ambition turns into action. And now for today's episode,

Marianne Lewis: (00:31)
Doug Conant, it's, it's such a pleasure to have you here at Lindner. I appreciate you on many levels, and now today we, I'm thrilled to be able to share some of your learnings and inspiration with others. So thank you again for being here.

Doug Conant: (00:44)
Oh, I feel blessed to be here on a beautiful day in the spring. Beautiful day. Can't beat it,

Marianne Lewis: (00:49)
Especially on a campus. Yeah. It just all comes alive. It's so vibrant. Um, you know, I, I'd love to, to dive in with, into some of your CEO and Chairman lessons because you've, you've certainly had quite a few. I think the challenge is to winnow it down, and I'd love you to share, you know, one or more of your most vital or likely toughest leadership decisions. Um, because as you and I have talked about before, from balancing responsibilities to shareholders versus employees or money and mission, and in your turnarounds of Nabisco Campbell Soup as Avon chairman, uh, give, give us something that gives us a sense of, you know, what is a really tough leadership decision and how do you work through it

Doug Conant: (01:32)
In 25 words or less. There you go. Be a piece of cake easy. Uh, no, uh, you know, it's funny. Things become more clear as you start to step away from fighting through the day to day. And it's funny because I'm very reflective these days. Mm-hmm . On March 15th of this year, I celebrated my golden anniversary of 50 years as a corporate leader. Uh, on March 15th, 1976, I started my career in brand management at General Mills, right. After getting my MBA from the Kellogg School. It wasn't even called the Kellogg School, then. It was the Graduate School of Management Science at Northwestern. And, uh, and so I've had 50 years of, 52 weeks a year of navigating the choppy seas of the corporate world. Mm-hmm . Uh, 52 years worth of challenges every day and having, what are we gonna do on Monday conversations? And I've had the privilege of working with now 52 people who have worked for me, who have gone on to be CEOs.

Doug Conant: (02:40)
So that's extraordinary. You know, the experience, uh, has been, it's been an amazing ride considering I started at, out at the very bottom. I've had 28 bosses in my career. I've been, and they had 28 bosses. So basically I had 56 bosses and, uh, I had about 20 roles in my first 25 years. And, and two roles, basically my last two or three, my last 25 mm-hmm . But the lessons I'm gonna share with you today, yeah. They applied to when I started, when I was in the middle of the journey and when I ended the journey. So these will come from a former chairman, CEO, but there are life lessons that apply to every step along the way. And the f there, there are are two of them. Uh, one is that it's all about people. Mm-hmm . You have to bring a people first mentality to the work.

Doug Conant: (03:48)
Uh, there's a, there's a quote, which I won't get right, from a Rabbi Hillel the elder, uh, before Christ, uh, who basically said, uh, uh, treat others as you would like to be treated. And all the rest is just rhetoric, , everything. El And, and he's, and he said that about the Torah. Everything else in the Torah is just rhetoric. You treat people properly and okay. And everything else is just rhetoric. And I found over 50 years in all of my roles with all of my bosses, that it's true in the corporate world, and it's true in life, uh, in the fullness of time. If you wanna have enduring impact with people, uh, you need to treat them as you would wanna be treated. You need to honor them and respect them. You can win in the short term if you wanna be a bully. We've seen mm-hmm .

Doug Conant: (04:57)
Evidence of that in, in the political world these days. But there's no evidence in all of human history that that is a sustainable proposition. And there's su certainly no evidence in the corporate world. My 50 years is 20% of the, his in the, in the corporate world is 20% of the history of the country. It's about 50% of the history of the corporate world as we migrated from a, an agrarian society mm-hmm . To an industrial society. And through it all, I think people first is the one thing that resonates with me, the lesson I've learned, and it's never let me down. Not as an assistant product manager, a product manager, a marketing director, a vice president in sales, in strategy, in marketing, a general manager. It's never let me down. So that's the first piece. The second piece, and it's pretty straightforward, is that leading is hard.

Doug Conant: (06:05)
And, uh, it's not just one thing. But if I had to boil it down to one thing in terms of how you lead, and it builds off this people first mentality, it's that you have to be tough-minded on standards and kindhearted with people, not one or the other. Both. You have to bring an abundance mentality to the work. Because look, the reality is if you're not getting the job done as expected, you won't have the job very long. And so as a CEO, you have maybe three years the first year it's the other guy's fault. The second year it's our fault. We're learning the third year. You own it. And so you've gotta be performing Yeah. In a way that promises to your bosses and whoever you're reporting to your shareholders, the the promises that it's gonna be better tomorrow than it is today. And then you gotta demonstrate that time and again.

Doug Conant: (07:00)
Mm-hmm . And so you've gotta be very performance oriented. But I've also learned that going back to the people first mentality, if you don't put people first there, when you're not in the room, they won't necessarily champion the agenda that you've created with them. And so they have to champion it because they want it. And the way they do that is, uh, the way you bring them into the effort in a fulsome way is by being kind. You know, uh, I have a favorite saying, uh, Conan O'Brien, who just hosted the award ceremony. Uh, he has a great saying that I, I wrote a piece about, about 10 years ago, and his saying is, work hard, be kind, and amazing things will happen. And you know what, in my career, I've worked hard. I've been kind all along the way, I've been tough-minded on standards of performance and amazing things have happened, not just for me, but for all the people that have been, been on the journey with not perfect, but it's, it's largely, it's worked nicely. Yeah.

Marianne Lewis: (08:04)
Oh, I, I mean, you and I have talked about that one before. You know, I, I studied paradox and competing demands, and I remember a conversation with you probably a year ago where I talked about one of the challenges I'm seeing increasingly with executives and rising leaders is between tough and kind. And you gave me the tough-minded, kind-hearted and, and ex examples of that. And I want you to know it stuck with me deeply. I think it's a very powerful lesson. You know, another, not, maybe not so much a lesson, but kind of a motto that I've heard you say that I'd love you to talk a little bit more about, is something I've seen from the Conant leadership website to other places, is your line to win in the marketplace, you must first win in the workplace. I, I'd love to hear how and when did you come to this conclusion, and if there's more that we should understand about that motto.

Doug Conant: (08:54)
Well, we can unpack it a little bit. Yeah. That's, but it grows out of my belief and my experience and my study. It's not just my experience. I'm talking about, I've been a student of leadership for 50 years too. You really have, and I've taught it. I was chair of the Kellogg Executive Leadership Institute for five years. I'm, so, I'm deeply steeped in this leadership conversation, both as a practitioner and as as a student. Uh, in my experience, it grows out of, and all the studies indicate this, that you have to, if you want people to champion your agenda, they have to genuinely believe that you're appreciating their agenda. Mm-hmm . It just won't work any other way. So if you're not paying attention to their agenda, you can't count on them as an enterprise to be champion yours. So you gotta put first things first.

Doug Conant: (09:47)
And you can't, you just can't win. I just have seen no, no evidence that you can win in the marketplace in an enduring way unless you've got the enterprise with you and working the same process that you are. Uh, and as long as I found that, as long as I focused on creating the right environment for my team, and I challenged them to perform at a certain level, we worked on that, and then I supported them, uh, we did well mm-hmm . And the only times where when I was shortsighted and had a deal with an emergency and didn't make the best decision, we struggled. And I put that more on me than I do on them, because if I had created the right conditions for it, they would've found a way through. Mm-hmm . But I had to deal with something that demanded an expedient reaction.

Doug Conant: (10:41)
I didn't manage it probably as well as I could have. And, uh, so I think that's the key. You gotta win in the market, in the workplace before you can ever expect to win in the marketplace. Absolutely. I think it's even more true now than when I was starting, because now, uh, you're more dependent on those frontline workers to do the job because, uh, in the last two decades, the organization hierarchies have collapsed, and managers are now managing three times as many people. Right. And all, also, the jobs have changed. Mm-hmm . It used to be, when I started, if I didn't know what to do, I would go ask my boss, how do I do this? They can't go ask their boss now. They get sent to the help desk or ask a coworker, you know, well, then what are you doing, boss? Uh, and so if you want them to be more autonomous, which they have to be mm-hmm .

Doug Conant: (11:36)
You really much more self-managed, you, you, you really better be creating a culture where they think you've got their back. They shouldn't only think it, they should know it. Right. And there should be evidence of it. So it's even more important now than it was before, because I, even if I wanted to do your job, I couldn't do it for you. Mm-hmm . So I'm counting on you. And if I'm that dependent on you, I, I need to recognize that and recognize that I need to be helpful to you if you are to be fully helpful to the enterprise. Yeah.

Marianne Lewis: (12:11)
I, I, I think that's powerful learning. Um, you, you and I are, are both, uh, disciples in varied ways of, uh, Warren Bennis. And one of my favorite, and I have a lot of favorites I suppose, but of, of his insights is, is about the power of crucible moments that you, you really find yourself particularly as a leader, um, being honed in the hardest times. And one that has stuck out in conversations I've had with you. You certainly write about it in, in your book. Um, the blueprint is that you're quite pub public about having been fired from a director level role early in your career. I, I'd love you to share a little bit about what you learned from that very clear crucible moment.

Doug Conant: (12:55)
Well, uh, you're gonna make me relive that again, . Um, I, I, once I wrote about it, it seems to come up a lot. And when it happened, when I lost my job back in the 19, early 1980s, and, uh, I had moved to Boston from my home from where I had started my career in Minneapolis, still working for General Mills, uh, the first company I worked for. And, uh, they, uh, and I was in the Parker Brothers toy and game company, which was a blast. I was director of marketing for toys and games. Uh, but they went through some difficult times. That industry tends to grow and shrink based on the latest hit. And we were drifting into the electronic game age out of the traditional board game age. So we were scrambling to make it all work. Ultimately, they downsized and they decided they didn't need me.

Doug Conant: (13:55)
And, uh, they let me go. Uh, I went into work one day. Uh, the assistant said, uh, so and so would like to see you in his office on the executive floor. I went up to the executive floor. He couldn't look at me. He said, Doug, your position's been eliminated. You need to be out of here by noon. Ouch. And so and so will escort you down. And there wasn't even a, I've worked for the company for 10 years. It wasn't even a hatch. It was so awkward for him. Oh, I mean, I, I I understand that. I've had to let people go too. Yeah. Uh, but you need, there's a better way. Mm-hmm . But I, under, I understood it and I went home, but I was, uh, furious. And, uh, I went home to my wife, the two, my our two small children and my one very large mortgage feeling every bit the victim there.

Doug Conant: (14:47)
And I ended up working with an outplacement counselor who really helped me sort through how to deal with a crucible moment. And that was a crucible moment. I was outta work for nearly a year. Uh, uh, and, uh, uh, basically he basically said, you know, Doug, if you're really stuck, the way to get out of this is to go in and to be reflective on the things, what matters most to you. You know, there's this quote by, uh, a former beatnik, uh, Ambrose Red Moon who passed away in 1996. And he, he basically talked about courage as, uh, it's, uh, it's easy to, in order to manifest courage, it's not, it's the, in order to manifest courage, it's not about, uh, there has to be something more important that motivates you. And so he was basically saying, Doug, what's important to you? Yeah. You know, you're afraid you're outta work what's important and what matters most to you, which goes back to some Stephen Covey language that you and I've talked about in the past.

Doug Conant: (16:16)
And Warren Bennett's language. And so what I learned in that process was I had to get anchored on what mattered most to me. 'cause I wasn't showing much courage. I was on my heels. I was worried about supporting my family. I like anybody mm-hmm . And, but I wasn't coming across, and I'm an introvert. I wasn't coming across as somebody, you just wanna jump through hoops to hire. Right. And, uh, I was sort of shell-shocked. And, and he's, so, he, he basically made me hand write my life story on 50 pages, both sides. And he wanted handwritten. He thought there was more to it than that. And actually, there was, uh, and I said, I don't have time to write all this stuff. I gotta get a job. He said, on the other hand, this is the perfect time. 'cause you don't have a job. Let's do the work.

Doug Conant: (17:09)
I want it in two weeks. So I spent two weeks writing basically my life story. And we talked about it afterwards. He said, well, what did you learn? I, I said, well, I come from an amazing family history. Uh, my forefathers pioneered this country. They dealt with a lot more challenging things than I have in front of me. And they found their way through. I come from pretty hardy stock. I need to lift my game. I need to be more intentional about what I'm doing. I need to take charge of this thing. And so I did, and I started acting with purpose. I started acting more intentionally. Uh, I started to manifest the courage of my convictions, which was a big deal because I wasn't showing courage before. But that was because I didn't know my convictions. Mm-hmm . I , it's hard to show the courage of your convictions if you don't know what your convictions are. Yeah. And so I, I learned from that experience that I needed to bring courage to the work. And I couldn't be courageous until I was incredibly well anchored in who I was and what I wanted to do, knowing that it might change mm-hmm . But at least I needed to be really well grounded. And, uh, and that was the big lesson learned there. And I think that's true for all of us today. I mean, gosh, uh, it's only gotten more chaotic

Marianne Lewis: (18:35)
For

Doug Conant: (18:35)
Sure in the workplace and in the, in the country, in the culture. And the more things swirl around you, the more well anchored you need to be in order to deal with it all. That's right. And the one thing you can't do is succumb to that. You've got, in order to get out of this, you gotta go in mm-hmm

Marianne Lewis: (18:55)
. Well, and, and you know, I I, I wanna stress that you and I've talked as well, that you, your book where you really write more about this power of reflection and how to put it into practice. Your book called The Blueprint, um, has some wonderful methods of reflection. And I, I took it seriously myself and, and used your approach. And over, I guess it was a four day period, when was it, Doug? A couple years ago. Yeah. When my family was away, and I just had quiet for four days. And it is powerful to really go in, in that way. And, and I know it might, it's, you make me laugh when you say, you know, oh, you're gonna make me relive that horrible experience again, being fired. But I also think it's, it's incredibly important, especially when we have opportunities to talk when I have, and you have opportunities to talk to rising leaders or students as they're starting. They have to understand that you were them. Yeah. Once upon a time, you don't just come out.

Doug Conant: (19:53)
Oh, they're far ahead of where I was. . I mean, I was pretty pathetic for a whole host of reasons. But, uh, you know, I have learned that if you, if you get anchored on, you know, Stephen Covey used to say, Doug, you just gotta re you gotta remember, you gotta keep the main thing the main thing. Yeah. And he would say, what's your main thing? Yeah. And, uh, sounds so trite, but it wasn't.

Marianne Lewis: (20:19)
Oh, it's so hard to get, boil it down to

Doug Conant: (20:21)
It. You know, we have these life experiences that are teaching us what the main thing is. But I, in my case, I was just putting all those in the parking lot, and I was moving on with my life, and I wasn't really learning from them. I was just dealing with the new boss, the new situation, trying to react and navigate. And what I learned is the main thing was in my parking lot. I just needed to go in there and explore it, just like you needed to do for those four days. We did. And it's amazing because you, we know what impactful leadership looks like. We've experienced it with people. Mm-hmm . Our parents, our grandparents, our aunt, uncle, teacher, professor. Very rarely a boss. Sadly. Sadly. And, uh, and so we know what good leadership looks like. We just need to channel that experience into the way we show up for people in a way that's aligned with the person We wanna be the best version of ourselves. Yeah.

Marianne Lewis: (21:19)
I, I I, I, I could not agree more, you know, one of, one of the practices, I wanna drive, dive into something quite specific, but it, it's such a good example of what you're talking about, really putting it into action, um, revolves around really the power of gratitude because you, you became well known during your period at Campbell's, which was quite a turnaround for writing over 30,000 thank you notes. Um, I have a stack of thank you notes on my desk right now at the moment. And when I look every time I have the opportunity to write them, I think of you in that moment. Why did this recognition, these thank yous like this, become so important to you? And how has that practice developed?

Doug Conant: (22:01)
Well, this is all connected. Yeah. It is.

Marianne Lewis: (22:04)
If you connect, their themes are quite clear.

Doug Conant: (22:06)
Keep people first winning in the workplace. If you wanna win in the marketplace in an enduring way, and, and having an abundance mentality that talks about being tough-minded on standards and kindhearted with people. Uh, what I have found in 50 years of doing this stuff is that organizations, I don't care if they're academic, uh, non-profit government or commercial enterprises, organizations get really good at critical thinking. Mm-hmm . We find what's wrong, and then we commit to fixing all the broken parts. And that becomes, uh, the mindset of the enterprise. If you're not careful, we look for what's wrong. I can find a busted number on a spreadsheet, forget the fact that 87 numbers look right. I'll find the broken one and say, what are we doing with this one? And, uh, and I've discovered that every organization I've been part of, I've been at Nabisco and Campbell, they were two of the most broken organizations in the, in the food industry space in, in the last century of the large food companies. And, uh, for different reasons, but even then, eight outta 10 things were being done. Right. But nobody was talking about 'em. And even Gallup, Gallup survey, they do the, they're the preeminent, uh, employee engagement survey people. Mm-hmm .

Doug Conant: (23:37)
Headquartered in Washington dc They have their famous Q 12 survey and, uh, of the 12 questions that really give good indication of, uh, uh, of, uh, an employee who's fully engaged in the work. Okay. They boiled it down from hundreds of questions, thousands to hundreds to 12. One of the 12 questions is, I've received praise from my boss once this week. Just once, not a million times. Right. And all these people are doing at least one thing. Right. I guarantee it. And, uh, and I learned that after I started doing this, but I had this situation where we were gonna have to make some massive changes to the enterprise. And I realized, go back to Stephen Covey. His model helps explain this, that if you're gonna make, inevitably you have to make tough choices, but you, his model of the emotional bank account for an organization is mission critical here.

Doug Conant: (24:40)
Uh, you have to have so much equity with the, with the population that if you make a withdrawal and you make a tough decision, you're still in the black. Most organizations that are under pressure go way in the red, and then they try and rebuild it. Witness what's happening with the federal government employees right now. Mm-hmm . We're so far in the red. Yeah. It's gonna take decades to rebuild that infrastructure in a, in a, in a way that will serve the American people. That's another conversation. But I realize, well, what can I do? You know, because part of this is, you have, you can talk about this all you want, but you sort of have to live into it. You have to pull a Gandhi, you have to be the change you wanna see in the world. And I realized, well, I'm commuting two and a half hours to work from my home in New Jersey, and I got a two and a half hour drive home.

Doug Conant: (25:32)
I have somebody that drives me, thank God. But, uh, uh, on the way home, my assistant would pull all the information that had gone on in the company off our one portal. I'm old. So this was, we had one portal, and it all got printed out for me. I didn't, you know, and, uh, and I would read it all the way home, and I would pull things out of all the successes. I was overwhelmed at how much good stuff was going on. I knew all the bad stuff. And I, I, I pulled out 20 or 30 of these, and then on the way into work the next day, I would hand write thank you notes to 10 to 20, sometimes 30 people. Uh, and, uh, just saying thanks for the good work. I was very careful to reinforce the standards. Thanks for hitting your target.

Doug Conant: (26:23)
Mm-hmm . On time ahead of above budget, or thanks for, uh, helping us launch this program, uh, with this customer in a way that helps us put our best foot forward. It was all very focused on supporting the strategy and celebrating their contribution. And I would do 10 to 20 a day. And then when I retired, this is when this started to become known, not until I retired in 2010, 2011, uh, Forbes or Fortune, I don't know, which was interviewing me. And they said, we hear you write a lot of notes. And I said, I do. I 10 to 20 a day every day, six days a week for over a decade. And they said, well, how many is that? I don't know. And so we got out my desk calculator, my calculator in my drawer, and we did the math. And the math was that I had written at least 30,000 notes to, uh, to our, to our employees.

Doug Conant: (27:25)
I'd written other notes to, it wasn't, this is all about the entire value creation process. So I'd written notes to customers, I'd written out to suppliers mm-hmm . Consumers. I, I wrote a lot of notes, but I was in the car a lot so I could do it. And, uh, I got good at ri handwriting in the car. It's a bumpy ride sometimes . But I was very, I'm picturing you in the vaccine. I was very, I was very good at it as, but, and, uh, we figured out I'd written 30,000 notes, and we, we only had 25,000 employees. So everywhere in the world, people had a handwritten note for me, posted in their cubicle saying, thanks for the good work. Uh, you, you hit the target. You supported the strategy, and you're helping us move our company forward. And so, uh, and we were in, that's beautiful.

Doug Conant: (28:17)
We were in 38 countries. We were marketed on 125 countries. Wherever you would go, even an accounting center or a plant, they would have all these notes posted on the bulletin board. And it, what became interesting was, and this is why you have to model the behavior. All my, the people that worked directly for me started coming to me. All of our people are getting notes from you. Are you expecting us to write notes? And I said, no, I really didn't think that, but I didn't think this fully through. I do think we have to show up for them and celebrate what's working, but it has to be authentic. Going back to the Warren Venice Yeah. Absolutely. Importance. He placed on being authentic. I said, you need to find a way to authentically, in a way that works for you. Celebrate what's working while we're tearing apart what's not working.

Doug Conant: (29:07)
Right. Because we gotta tear apart what's not what, but 80% of this is working, and we gotta keep that going. And so all of a sudden, uh, some people who really didn't wanna write notes were wandering around. They managed by wandering around talking, they were intercepting people. And they became known for managing by wandering around some others who didn't wanna wander around, started having special time in their staff meetings and in their group meetings to celebrate contributions of significance. Uhhuh, they all found different ways, their way to do it. Mm-hmm . But I gotta believe if I hadn't shown up that way and hadn't started, these notes weren't popping up everywhere, it, it wouldn't have happened. Mm-hmm. I don't see any, in fact, I don't know of any other company that's a Fortune 500 company that was going that deep on the gratitude piece. And it worked. People, we, they were with us. Yeah.

Marianne Lewis: (30:05)
And you were doing hard things at the time,

Doug Conant: (30:07)
So, oh, well, you were building as, as we've talked before, I'm pretty sure we had to let go in the first three years. We let go 300 of our 350 top leaders, 300 out of 3 56 outta seven. Oh my goodness. Uh, we gave them three years to get it right. We said, here's what we wanna do, and here's how we're gonna do it. And we're gonna, we're gonna lead by honoring and respecting our workforce, and we're gonna audit this every year with Gallup survey. Mm-hmm . And the first year, I'm not even gonna look at the results. That's gonna be your baseline. The next two years we're gonna be looking at it, and you gotta be making progress at getting the employees engaged in the work mm-hmm . And, uh, and earning their respect. And if this isn't what you wanna do, you should choose to go somewhere else.

Doug Conant: (30:58)
And so, probably of the 300 we that left, probably 150 to 200 left on their own. Okay. Over the three years mm-hmm . But we let go a hundred to 150. Uh, we said, if we can find you a, a role where you're not a manager, but you're a individual contributor, that would be great. We'll try and find you a home and we'll help you find another job. But we gotta get this right. Going back to an earlier conversation that we just had, I had three years, my perspective mm-hmm . By year three, we had to be hitting stride. And that means you gotta start acting in year one. Yeah. But

Marianne Lewis: (31:36)
I love that you had that time horizon.

Doug Conant: (31:39)
Yeah. And so they had time to process it. Absolutely. Most of them didn't think I meant it, and most of them didn't think that I would last that long. So, uh, but ultimately, we promoted 150 people who had the eye of the tiger inside mm-hmm . And we had kept 50. So we ended up having to hire about 150 from outside, uh, all over the god's Green Earth. The, we were, we started recruiting the, the Young Turks, the people from the best consumer products companies who were stifled. They were stuck in bureaucracy. And they, they were ready to do more, but they couldn't break. They had to wait five years. Mm-hmm . And, uh, I was one of those at one point in time. And, uh, we found, you know, we got the right talent. That's right. And talent is all about character, competence and chemistry, your ability to work with teams. Uh, if we found the right people, we could change the world. And we did.

Marianne Lewis: (32:41)
You really did. Mm-hmm . It's remarkable. Um, Doug, let's, let's talk a little bit about, uh, the way you and I have been working together. I mean, we came to know each other through the Warren Benice Leadership Institute. You're, you're not an alum. Um, I don't think you've spent a lot of time in Cincinnati where you've probably spent some, but could you talk a little bit about what drew you to partner with the Warren Ben Leadership Institute? And, because I think it gives us a little bit more into, to your own values, um, but also your relationship with Warren.

Doug Conant: (33:12)
Yeah. Uh, there are two people that had a profound influence on my leader. Oh. There were a lot of people, but two people who were probably the top two that had a profound influence on my leadership life. And they were two men. There weren't really women role models then in the corporate world, certainly, and, uh, are on the fringe of the corporate world, even in academics, men, not too much talking about, I mean, women talking about leadership to, to men. Uh, so I was drawn to two people and, uh, Stephen Covey and Warren Benni. Mm-hmm .

Marianne Lewis: (33:54)
Impressive both.

Doug Conant: (33:55)
Yeah. They were to me. And they still, to me, I, and I'm gonna talk briefly about Steven, but I'll get to Warren very quickly. Uh, I was, uh, actually still working at Parker Brothers. This is eighties. Uh, and my wife and I were on a tr taking a trip after the birth of our second son. We, he was probably two. We hadn't been away, just the two of us forever. And we were going to actually down to the world Monopoly Championships at the Breakers Hotel. I was still in charge of marketing. And, uh, and I bought a book. I would always buy a hardcover book at the airport and read it on my trip. That was something I did. Now you just have a Kindle or whatever, . But, uh, and I bought this book, and we were sitting in first class, which was like a real tree, and they were serving mimosas or whatever, uh, bloody Mary's.

Doug Conant: (34:55)
And my, my wife had one. And I, she said, well, aren't you gonna get one? I said, no, this book looks interesting. I'm gonna read it. I started reading it. I read it all the way down there. I totally ignored her. And, uh, maybe not totally, but I was not fully present with her. And this is our big time apart, uh, away. But I was so absorbed by this book. And then I, we got to the Breakers hotel, they took us up to our room, they opened the doors. It was facing the ocean, the waves crashing on the rocks, and it was fantastic. And, uh, we weren't used to this kind of treatment. This was like a second honeymoon, I guess. And, uh, and I sat down and, and in the living area, and started trying to finish my chapter before I did anything else.

Doug Conant: (35:48)
And she said, what is wrong with you, ? You know, uh, this is our first time. What's going on? And I said, I can't help, but this guy is brilliant. And she said, well, why do you think he's so brilliant? I said, because he thinks just like I do, . And what Stephen Covey had done, and what Warren did for me was they gave words to what I thought and how I felt. Mm-hmm . They helped me find what Bill George would call True North. Uh, they were talking my language, uh, was it that movie with Renee Zeiger, uh, and Tom Cruise, he's like an agent. Uh, and anyway, at one point he comes to win her heart again. And she says, you had me at Hello. And, uh, and Steven and Warren had me that way. Nobody else did. Nobody else like that. And then, so I was a mentee of Stevens for years.

Doug Conant: (36:49)
Steven m Mr. His son is one of my good friends. Uh, uh, his daughter who finished his last book, Cynthia, is the whole family's a good friend. They're good friends. But then I was getting into writing, uh, uh, I was still a CEO. And, uh, I, I was friends with Bill George, and he recommended I talk to Warren about, I said, I have a book in mind. I wanna get it published. And he said, you oughta reach out to Warren mm-hmm . And so I reached out to Warren. He was living in Santa Santa Monica at the time. I said, I'd, you know, I'd like to meet you. And man, we just hit it off. I, I flew out to Santa Monica. Uh, there was a hotel where we would have breakfast called the Viceroy Hotel, and we would just sit and talk. And he always had a graduate assistant with him, because at this stage, he was older.

Doug Conant: (37:44)
He needed a driver. So I only knew him the last maybe eight years of his life. But I felt just same way I felt about Steven. I felt like he was a kindred spirit. Mm-hmm . And he had seen so much more than I had. I could learn a lot from him. And, uh, so, uh, we became friends. I ended when he passed, I ended up writing a little bit about him that got pretty good traction in social media. And, uh, and my first book was published under his group in his portfolio books with, uh, with the Wiley Publishing Company. And, uh, he wrote a little forward to it. Uh, and we stayed good friends until the very end. Uh, and what was fun for me is I had read all his material before I met him. Uh, I, I, I'm a voracious student of leadership, and I had read, uh, you know, some of the mm-hmm.

Doug Conant: (38:48)
I had read virtually all of his work mm-hmm . And, and, and the, and the one that I liked the best, because I read it at the right time. It's not the one anybody talks about, which one. But I was at Nabisco at the time, dealing with KKR in a, in a leverage buyout situation. And the book he wrote that really hit me hardest was a book titled Leading ca Leading People's, like, herding cats. And I was herding a lot of cats, and I didn't have any idea how I was gonna get through this. And he got it. And so that was the one book that I, I, I remember them having the greatest impact on me, although I've read all of 'em, and I've done his workbook. And, uh, and this was before I met him. So by the time I met him, I was sort of starstruck.

Doug Conant: (39:39)
Mm-hmm . But then we just became good friends. That's so nice. And, uh, uh, uh, you know, it's a just a sh like a lot of things. It's a shame we couldn't have had more time together. It was, uh, I think we both appreciated, and I love working with you and getting to know his daughter, Kate Venni mm-hmm . I see so much of him in her. And, uh, so that's what drew me to the Warren Venice Leadership Institute. Uh, I think it's vital, because I think the answer is we need more people like Warren mm-hmm . And, uh, in today's world, as the world gets more stress, you know, we know all the research says it's a, what do they call it now? A Bonnie world? Bonnie, it, it used to be a VUCA world. Warren. Warren creates, in 1986, Warren and Bur Nani created the VUCA concept.

Doug Conant: (40:36)
Mm-hmm . Foal, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Mm-hmm . That's Bonnie. But every generation seems to need a new word, so they can, you know, well, we have our own word. Sure. We do. And the current word that is, is Bonnie BANI, brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible. Ooh, I have not heard that. And, uh, it must be true. It's in Google , and, uh, no, it, and it, when you study it, it actually makes sense. But all the research says of those four, brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible, the thing that's most pronounced now is anxiety. Uhhuh . People are so anxious with the world outside, they're getting paralyzed. And, uh, this anxiety is being perpetrated in a way that is not focused on winning in the workplace. Mm-hmm . It's not focused on being kindhearted. And as that gets into short supply, I think the law of economics says, as it gets into short supply, it's gonna be more in demand, more valuable mm-hmm . And it's gonna become more valuable. And, you know, absolutely. My friends think I'm crazy, but I think we're, if you wanna skate to where the puck's going, skate to a place that's talking kind hearted. Mm-hmm . Tough on standards have to be Yeah.

Marianne Lewis: (41:57)
Both. No, it's such a beautiful paradox. Yes.

Doug Conant: (41:59)
Both. But you, you, but you skate to where the puck's going, and it's going to be turning the corner. It already is. I think so towards kind hearted mm-hmm . And so that, that's where Warren and I sort of connected and it became personal. And one last thing, I I obviously, I can talk forever about this stuff, but the other thing I've learned is the more personal you make it, the more well anchored you become. Like, I knew Warren. Right. I knew what he meant and where he was coming from, because I talked to him about it. I can't do that with people over Zoom. Mm-hmm. I couldn't be leading teams over Zoom the same connection. Now, I might have to, I might have to. Right. But I would have to find a hybrid model. And I think everybody will to make it, if you wanna differentiate yourself, make it more personal, find a way to get to know people at a deeper level. Yeah. And the more intentional you are about that, whether it's writing, in my case, writing thank you notes, or, which was good in my era Yeah. Or whatever you choose to do, it's finding a way to make it more personal. And as I learned from Warren, the more I time I spent with him, the more personal it became, and the more well grounded I became. Mm-hmm.

Marianne Lewis: (43:21)
Mm-hmm .

Doug Conant: (43:22)
So,

Marianne Lewis: (43:24)
You know, it it, for, for our last question, I, I'd really love to hear what both worries and or encourages you about how companies build leaders today. I think it's that, that's the kind of insight we need, both for our students, but also for the rising leaders that we work with. What's working, what's not working with how companies are developing leaders?

Doug Conant: (43:47)
Well, I think,

Doug Conant: (43:53)
I think, I think they have to focus on creating high engagement cultures. Mm-hmm . It's not how a manager's developing a leader. Uh, that's part of it. But there's gotta be a culture that is tough-minded on standards and kindhearted with people that is living and breathing. And, and then the managers have to help the rising leaders develop, develop the skills to operate in that world. Uh, and they have to pull a Gandhi. They have to be the change that the enterprise is talk, talking about. And, uh, it's not about, and what happens is, we, we get into the short term and performance feedback, and you gotta work on your time management skills. So we're gonna send you to time management school, or, you know, your, your strategic thinking needs a little work. So we're gonna send you to a strategic thinking program. Uh, or, you know, you've gotta work on your empathy.

Doug Conant: (45:04)
You know, you're, you're, you gotta work on some of those people's skills. So we're gonna get you a coach. Uh, we start dealing with the symptoms of this issues, but not with the root cause, which is a culture that's not adequate for leading people in a Bonny world. Mm-hmm . And, uh, so I think we have to, and one other piece of that, the reason I wrote the blueprint book, um, so we're dealing with all the skills, but their foundations are so flimsy that the skills just don't get traction. They don't know who they are. They don't know what their convictions are. As soon as they get challenged, they run the other way. Uh, they're anxious. Uh, they, and so what I started doing when I was a CEO at Campbell, I started teaching high potential people. I had a two year program where we, we said, we're gonna help you figure out who you are, and then we're gonna help you connect that to our expectations.

Doug Conant: (46:12)
Yeah. And sadly, most people don't know who they are. . Yeah. Take some work and, oh, I didn't, uh, I mean, it's not, I didn't mm-hmm. I had to lose a job. And then I was blessed to be with a, a real gifted outplacement guy. But most people don't have that kind of blessing in the face of a crucible moment. But these people are facing crucible moments every day. Right. Right. And, uh, the culture needs to be helping them figure out, how are you gonna sort through this? How are you doing? Let's help you get settled, and then let's work on your time management skills. But the answer is not go to time management school. No. You're skipping this big step. No, and, and last thought, all the good leaders I know are really well anchored. They know who they are. They know, uh, what their purpose is in life.

Doug Conant: (47:07)
They know their values. I mean, I just, Jim Collins just publishing his, probably his last book. I just got it. Two. Oh, good. I was gonna say I haven't seen it. No, you wouldn't. It's not out yet. I'm gonna, uh, but he sent me a copy and, uh, and it's all about how important it is to be anchored yourself and develop your own leadership journey, which is what the blueprint was about, which he endorsed when I wrote that book and the Cynthia Covey book, that was it. It, it was, uh, living Life and Crescendo, why Your most important Work is always ahead of You. Uh, but you've gotta be anchored in this with who you are, so you know what your important work is. That's right. So you can be working on it. And, uh, so this this notion of, uh, my language, if you wanna get unstuck, if you wanna get out of this, you gotta go in. Mm-hmm . Is, is the essence of the challenge.

Marianne Lewis: (48:13)
Thank you, Doug. I mean, speaking of kindred spirits, I always so value being with you and appreciate

Doug Conant: (48:19)
All Oh, you say that to all

Marianne Lewis: (48:19)
The guys. I know

Doug Conant: (48:21)
Better come on Marianne. But I appreciate it.

Marianne Lewis: (48:25)
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for being here.

Grant Freking: (48:26)
Thank you for listening to this episode of Bearcats Mean Business. If today's episode sparked a new idea, challenged your thinking or helped you see your path a little more clearly, be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share the episode with someone in your network. Thanks for being part of the conversation. And remember, real world success begins here at Lindner.

Grant Freking: (00:00)
What does real world success in business actually look like? Welcome the Bearcats Mean Business, the official podcast of the University of Cincinnati's Carl H. Lindner College of Business, where inspiring career stories, honest lessons, and fresh business perspectives from the people building impact in the real world. Come together, tune in for inspiration, practical business insights, and forward-looking thought leadership on how ambition turns into action. And now for today's episode,

Marianne Lewis: (00:31)
I'm here with Jude Schramm. Thank you Jude, so much for joining us today. It's great to meet today. It's fantastic. Um, Jude, you, you're currently Chief Information Officer at Fifth Third Bank and one of our most valued strategic partners, um, both as at fifth third, and you as a liaison as well as on our, um, business advisory council and a Treasure Cincinnati community leader. I just, I call that out because I think it's just really important for all of our listeners, particularly our students, to understand the role model you are coming from here as a student. Mm-hmm . To CIO now. So I just, I wanna thank you for your inspiration. Oh, ahead of time. Great.

Jude Schramm: (01:08)
Yeah. No thanks. Appreciate that.

Marianne Lewis: (01:10)
You know, I do think yours is a remarkable journey from, you know, a uc student to CIO mm-hmm . But no one's career path is what you expect Right. At the time. It's, they're windy, they're surprising, uh, when you look back mm-hmm . Which is always a better viewpoint, you know, looking backwards and forwards. Were there some particular pivotal early experiences and if maybe even if you picked one that helped shape where you are now and how

Jude Schramm: (01:35)
Yeah, for sure. Um, first of all, thanks for letting me be here. I do appreciate getting a chance to come up and hang out on campus and spend time with you. So I do appreciate that. Um, you know, my career, to your point, everybody career is different. And one of the thing I will say is, you know, way back when I was here ages and ages ago, and the stone ages of really the technology timeframe, I didn't even know that I knew to hope to be in the, luckily the position I'm in today. I mean, I, I never really had a vision to become a CIO or a vision to become a business leader. Um, maybe even until I even got into the role of CIO I always just wanted to gravitate to solving problems, learning continuously about my profession and how to be good at what I do, which eventually went from being good at as a technologist to good as a leader.

Jude Schramm: (02:26)
Um, but there were a couple pivotal moments that I, um, you know, I I, I do cite sometimes when I'm talking to people about career. One in particular for me was, you know, I was probably a mid-level manager at General Electric when I was there and on my way to, to more senior leadership positions. And in a culture like that, a lot of times your success was looked at also, not just your professional, like how you show up, but there is a lot to the org hierarchy. Who do you lead? How big is your organization? Where do you fit inside that hierarchy? And probably two roles before my CIO job, um, is when the iPhone came out. Oh. And the gentleman who was leading the, uh, services division for, for the aviation business here had said, Hey, I'm gonna go spend $30 million just r and d to figure out what this thing can do.

Jude Schramm: (03:22)
'cause I think these are gonna be really big for business. And he told my boss at the time, I'd like to have somebody come lead this for me. And so we were talking about it at a staff meeting and I raised my hand and said, I, I wanna do it. And she said, no, you don't. This is a individual contributor. Go experiment, figure stuff out. It's not gonna help you get to your next level. I don't think you want to do that. And I had to literally argue back and forth with her for almost a week. I said, I don't care about those things. I just want to be a part of this thing. 'cause I think it's important. And so I did, I took a job with no direct reports, a job where I had no real responsibility other than to figure this thing out for the company.

Jude Schramm: (04:05)
Um, and I had a lot of people that were my peers who were like, why are you taking yourself off of the leadership track? And I'm like, I don't, like, I didn't have a good answer for them. Mm-hmm . But that thing led to my next two roles, um, that were leading kind of digital for the business. And then for the larger GE corporation trying to establish the digital business for General Electric, which ultimately was my role before I was CIO there at, at Aerospace. And so, like, the lesson from that for me was like, you can't get stuck in the hierarchy in a career path. You gotta be willing to go and put yourself in different positions and in different places that may not look normal to everybody. But I followed something that meant a lot to me. It was the continuing education of my belief and where technology was going, and it worked out pretty well for me. So that, that was a probably a big pivotal moment for me in my career making that decision. Oh. But

Marianne Lewis: (04:52)
I love that story, Jude, because I mean, it was, you know, you get these questions of why are you getting off the leadership track and it actually propelled you. I mean, you jumped upward on that track, but you don't know that when you're making that call. No.

Jude Schramm: (05:04)
And I didn't make it for that reason. I had no real, even at that point, I had no real aspiration to be like a CIO, if you will. I just wanna keep learning and, and, and growing and challenging. I think that allows me to have a skill to contribute to the company and to keep, I guess, justifying my right to just be at the company, period. Forget the level or the mm-hmm . Title.

Marianne Lewis: (05:21)
You know, I think it leads to that. That's a, a pilot type project. I've now known you long enough to know that you've led multiple big digital transformations. Yeah. Right. Thinking about full scale systems and others. Right? Now, I know you think all the time about generative AI every day, but man, how do you even start, Jude? I mean, you're at a Fortune 500 Yeah. Company leading a digital transformation. What do you begin

Jude Schramm: (05:47)
On something like that? You know, it's a good question, especially with ai. 'cause it is very different from, if you think about the generation of like the businesses on the internet and e-commerce. Yeah. Or you think about the move to cloud from traditional on premises, major enterprise systems, those all required a whole different kind of, not just skillset, but an understanding of traditional IT enterprise stuff. Mm-hmm . And they had to roll out and deploy in ways that it felt more like a traditional IT thing. AI, to your point, is very different because it's one of the first times a majorly disruptive technology is coming into the, the business and the normal personal lifestyles of people with really no forward requirement for a bunch of advanced technology migration to a new thing. It just is there. Right. And so, you know, for me that it is a bit of a different journey with AI than the others.

Jude Schramm: (06:43)
Because one of the things that I started doing three years ago was just spending a large amount of time understanding, like at its foundation how AI happens from a technology perspective. And we have a great leader at Fifth Third that we, we have, um, who's been here for, you know, it was it, he'd been here for a while, left and then came back to, to do this with me. And it's spending hours and hours and hours with him and just doing research and, and, and experimentation on my own personal time Okay. With all these technologies to learn it. Because I think you have to have some level of understanding of how it works before you can, thinking about how would you then start to apply it into a company or into the business, which is now where we are is like, how do we apply this and apply this at scale? Um, but it took a lot of personal time up front. That makes sense. Like I told my team, I was spending probably almost the same amount of time learning and experiment with AI as I was doing my day job for probably the better part of a year, you know, or so before we started to even put it into actual the people's hands at the company.

Marianne Lewis: (07:44)
I so appreciate the way you just explained that, because when I think of digital transformations, I think of the examples you gave prior, like moving to cloud or others. Yeah. You, you can almost picture a Gantt chart and a project management like, you know, kind of this, this flow. Yeah. It's this amorphous thing. Ai Yes. And it's here. And, and your level of experimentation, I don't know, it even brings me back to your example of the phone. Yeah, yeah. Right. The iPhone is, we don't even know what it could or should do

Jude Schramm: (08:11)
Yet. No. And, and, and it's changing so fast what we think it can do today. It's the first technology that there's been a cycle for me personally, where like, it's going so fast. The things that we want to do with it, by the time we actually get to the point being able to do something, the underlying capabilities have dramatically changed. And we find ourselves continuously pivoting. Our strategy adapt. Whereas like the overarching strategy hasn't changed. But the how is different six months ago from today is completely different with how we're looking to apply it.

Marianne Lewis: (08:41)
Much more ready, fire, aim. Yeah. Right.

Jude Schramm: (08:44)
And

Marianne Lewis: (08:45)
100% then adapt as you go. Yeah. Well, which makes me think about security mm-hmm . Because it's such an issue and everybody's talking about it. Yep. I, I wanna take it into a particular area. 'cause I, I know you well, I've so valued you as an advisor and you're a man of principle mm-hmm . I, I'd love to know how your own values and principles play into the way you think about cybersecurity. Yeah. Because especially as you're moving so fast. Yeah,

Jude Schramm: (09:08)
That's a, that's a great question.

Marianne Lewis: (09:09)
You've gotta have a high level.

Jude Schramm: (09:10)
It is. And the, the way that I think about it is when, when we look at either the existing ways we're trying to protect customers right? Or protect our employees, um, AI or not, right? We really try to put that at the forefront of every decision we make when we're putting technology out into our environments for people to use. Right. And so, AI's no different. And for me it, it's gotta start with that foundational principle of like, I can get a lot of stuff out there, but if I do it ahead of knowing how we're gonna protect the people that are gonna use it mm-hmm . Then it's creating an unnecessary risk that people don't even know they're being exposed to. And so we do spend a lot of time, like when we are putting AI in, you know, we're probably by all measures with most other banks, we're doing pretty good.

Jude Schramm: (09:53)
We're probably deploying AI at the pace of the trillionaire banks and that kind of stuff. Mm-hmm . But what a lot of people don't probably know is that we're one of the few banks that the first year while I was experimenting personally, me and our head of AI and some other people, what we were also building was our governance framework for how do you deploy simultaneously ai. Yeah. So to parallel, we had a policy written before we ever put one thing in the environment. We had, um, a framework for how we are trying to assess and evaluate ai. In fact, um, we have two patents that were awarded to us at the end of last year around generative ai. And both of them are really patents around the way we're protecting the AI from getting either jailbroken or compromised. And so we are, we are constantly thinking about how do we protect the customers? How do we protect the employees? Um, so that when we do put it out there, we already have a good sense of what that means. And even today, our cybersecurity teams are doing a ton of experimentation with how do we detect AI in the environment, especially bad AI that we don't know or don't want in there. And so we're, we're, we're doing a ton of investment in that relative to the overall IT spend on ai. It, it's a, it's a big piece of it. It

Marianne Lewis: (11:00)
Has to be. Yeah. I I I, I won't say the company, but I had a, a, a another, um, strategic partner here recently saying that they were hit about 7,000 times a day. Yeah. Does that sound like a crazy number to you? Does it

Jude Schramm: (11:12)
Sound about way? No, we get, we get hit tens of thousands of times a day with attempts to, to break in easily.

Marianne Lewis: (11:17)
Yeah. I don't think people quite realize when, when you say cybersecurity is that level of, of risk, it's nonstop. It's huge.

Jude Schramm: (11:23)
It's nonstop.

Marianne Lewis: (11:24)
And the fact that you were ahead of it and thinking so early is I think just something for us all to think about further. You know, you've, you've now, this is your second time as A-C-C-I-O. Yes. Right? You were, you were a ge uh, then this was pre GE Aerospace, but it was in the aerospace space.

Jude Schramm: (11:41)
It was aviation at the time. It was aviation as part of the bigger GE company pirate of them breaking it out.

Marianne Lewis: (11:46)
Is the role changing for you? Yeah. I mean, not just in the institutions being different, the organizations, but

Jude Schramm: (11:52)
Just Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, if you go way back to when I wasn't the CIO and I remember interacting with the first CIO, like at that kind of a senior level, um, there was definitely much more of a sense of your job is to run the IT department. Right? Okay. In in, what I mean by that is, I don't know that the CIO 20 years ago was sitting around the business leadership table. They reported into the CFO or to somebody else, run the infrastructure and Yeah. And they were responsible for running the infrastructure mm-hmm . Making sure that, you know, always jokingly say the ones and zeros and the spinning discs were always up and running and moving and working. You know, the, one of the great things about working at, at Aerospace when I was there, when in the, in the old form of the company was, it was about an era where the CIO was becoming a business leader as well.

Jude Schramm: (12:38)
And you were expected not just to know the technology, but know how it was really delivering value to the company, whether it be in the efficiency side of simplifying and automating internal processes to delivering and enabling revenue generation, which is, you know, I think there was a lot of articles over the last number of years about the CIO is a business leader in da, which is all great. I think, I think today even just, you know, if you think about the journey we're talking about with AI mm-hmm . I think that the CIO is those things, and also a throwback to some of the understanding of like, I'm expected to help the entire company understand how to make the best use of AI to make their jobs more effective, more efficient, whether again, it's to add more scale, to take more streamlining or to help contribute to revenue.

Jude Schramm: (13:25)
And it's a perfect blend of the two because, you know, if you, again, I don't know, I, I assume that you guys have wrote out like something like copilot here at mm-hmm . At uc, everybody can use it. Nobody really knows how it works. Right. Right. They know how to use it and they don't need to know how it works necessarily, but somebody does. And I think there's a big expectation, at least at Fifth Third, that I'm able to both be a understanding of the business side of, of our company and the technology side in a way that those two things are almost an explicit, explicitly tied Yeah. To value whether that value is on revenue or on expense mm-hmm . And so it's a big evolution to the point that, you know, I, because you we'll probably talk about this a lot, about like, what is the future of AI looking for jobs?

Jude Schramm: (14:13)
Mm-hmm . And dah, dah dah da da. Like, it makes me almost an HR person at that point too, because I get asked that question, what is gonna happen to jobs if AI comes in? And like, you can't really not, you can't really ask hr. They don't know. Like they don't know how the technology can or should disrupt the company. But it's my job to know that and figure that out and feed that back into the rest of the company to make it part of our strategy. So you start to take on different roles as a CIO now because of the way that the technology's changing the landscape.

Marianne Lewis: (14:43)
I appreciate the way you, you just described that, Jude, because I mean, I can think back in history of these periods where, say manufacturing went from making the widgets to being strategic, or HR went from just run the, the, the policies to being strategic. And Yeah. And I can absolutely see that with the information side, but it's also not just strategic to the CEO or the board, you're saying, I mean, it's the team mm-hmm . And helping all the team be Yeah. A multiplier effect.

Jude Schramm: (15:11)
That's right. That's right. I mean, you gotta enable them all, but to enable them all, you have to have a perspective and some level of, um, understanding of what they're trying to do as a leader and their function, right? Mm-hmm. And that's, that's important.

Marianne Lewis: (15:23)
It's changing fast though, and you're at the table, you're, you're key to the vision around the technology side, particularly in this case for ai. How, how do you stay abreast in with something changing that fast? Yeah. You personally, but also for the vision. So I feel like there's a learning element, but there's a Yep. An organizational element too. Yeah.

Jude Schramm: (15:43)
Um, it's a good question. I mean, I think, I think there's, there's a, there's a whole lot kind of in there. We could, we could probably even unpack. But some of it is, is back to good old human relationships. Like, um, in, in, in our environment, I sit on the same floor as all my peers. We, the head of legal, the head of hr, the head of risk, the head of, you know, da da da, the lines of business and that kind of stuff. And so we spend a lot of time together. Mm. And so I get a chance to understand their view on the rest of the company and what they're trying to drive. I know their priorities. We plan together, we do strategy together. Um, we spend time together. And so I, I, I get to be a part of the inner circle that's creating the environment for fifth Third.

Jude Schramm: (16:28)
Mm-hmm . And so what I then get to do is help them think through how my role and my function can help their goals. And to your point that very quickly is turning into AI is a way to help them do things. And so a lot of times it's, it's thinking through what are you trying to do and is there a way to do it differently than the way you're doing it? And can AI help? That's usually the way the conversation starts. And part of my job is to know enough to help, because what I don't wanna do is pretend like, yes. 'cause one of the things I I see a lot, and you probably do too, is AI's gonna take every problem, solve it. Mm-hmm . Like not true as you know. Um, but if you're not paying, if you're not day to day in it like I'm supposed to be and you're in one of these other, other leadership roles, you probably aren't sure when AI could or should help.

Jude Schramm: (17:14)
And if it can and at what pacing or timing. And that's part of my job is to help make that clear to my, my, my partners in the business. Like, AI can work great here and now because it's ready, as we talked earlier from a mm-hmm . Hardening and scaling. I can protect it, I can, I can do whatever. This is a great place where we could try it in your given area, um, or put it in in your area and have to able to go, it's not ready in yours because the risk is, is not there where the technology isn't mature, mature enough and that kind of stuff. And that's part of my, I think my value contribution right? Is, is making sure that we have those dialogues before they get too excited. 'cause invariably, a lot of people come to them and say, I was at this conference and I saw this.

Jude Schramm: (17:57)
I think they do, and it's gonna save our lives. Mm-hmm. And it's like, me, probably not. Right? And so it, it, it's helping to myth bust a lot of the energy that comes upward to them from their teams. But I think I've built the rapport with all my peers that like, they know, Hey, let me go talk to Jude before we get too excited about this thing. Yeah. So a lot of the company does that with my organization too. It's like, Hey, we see this thing, can it help? It's like, let's, let's bring it back to the governance process and let's have a real conversation about what you're trying to do.

Marianne Lewis: (18:22)
Oh, that's so helpful. Well, I, and it makes me think as well about some of the partnering that we've been doing with the Center for Business Analytics, which we've actually just rebranded as the Center for Business Analytics and ai, because we have been doing so much work. That's great. Um, particularly with strategic partners like Fifth Third, one of the things that, that I've learned with you through you in, in this partnership is the power of use cases. Yes. Because if not, AI is this amorphous thing. Yes. That you're right. People think is a cure all, and we need examples. And I think, and I'm, I'm, I'd love to hear you share a little bit about how the partnership with the center has been helpful for you. Because I certainly know one of the ways it's been very helpful for us is to see it in practice. Yep. Yep. And then to be part of the journey at Fifth Third, both from projects, but also in training. Yep. That's right. I think it's a virtuous cycle.

Jude Schramm: (19:16)
It is. And, and as you know, this is something that we spend some intentional time on. So I know, you know, for me, one of the great things about the partnership between us and the Center for Business Analytics and ai, I got that right, right. You did. Is, you know, and I remember this just, I think it was just last fall, we did a project together where teams were coming down to Fifth Third Center, uh, to work with our data engineering and analytics teams on a business problem. Mm-hmm . Right. And I think that does a lot of things for both of us, by the way. We do too. So one is, um, the forward look to that to me is always the experience that the students get to see how business works. The reverse benefit is we get a chance to interact with university students in a real world environment.

Jude Schramm: (20:00)
And that is always a good feeder for things like co-op programs and internships and post-grad, you know, career opportunities. Because we get to all create an ecosystem where we're collaborating over a problem and people get to almost experience each other and say like, is this a good fit both ways for people. Like, Hey, we really like this student man, we should talk to him about post career. Does he have plans or kind of things where the students can be like, wow, I really either had a good experience or didn't. And maybe this is for me, maybe it isn't. But I think the point is, um, we're bringing real world business problems to the university with an opportunity to say practical application. Mm-hmm . Can we work together to solve it? The university gets to say these are real world business problems that are happening that we can be preparing our students for. And it's just a win-win. And, and, you know, you and I are gonna talk, I think, you know, we have a business analytics meeting next week. We advisory

Marianne Lewis: (20:52)
Meeting, we do advisor

Jude Schramm: (20:52)
Board where I wanted to talk to you about like, putting that on steroids in the coming year where we can get a cycle that's maybe happening up on campus as opposed to students coming down. Oh, fantastic. Both ways. Like can we create a scalable version of that that's got maybe a half dozen problems we're trying to solve coming together through university to put a real ecosystem around this. Um, because I think it's important that as we, as we work together, we keep kind of scaling that up because the other thing it brings for us is it, it's also gives some of my teams a chance to go work in an environment where it feels more innovative. Mm-hmm . Like, not that banking's not exciting, don't get me wrong. It's exciting, but sometimes when you're solving problems and you're solving it in the context of your teams, you, you don't get that sense of excitement and innovation.

Jude Schramm: (21:37)
And I can't tell you how many times people working on the projects with the students, when I'm talking to them, they're like, God, it's like work. It's like being back in school again. Or it's like having this chance to kind of think outside the box because we're working with these students and it's a different dynamic for my teams. That feels refreshing. Right. And so it's a cultural boost to them as well. And so there's just all these benefits of this, the companies get in the university, I think gets as well that do too, starts to form the community between the university and the businesses that we all get and strive for and work hard at anyways. Right. And so what better way to do it than real life problem solving. Right.

Marianne Lewis: (22:12)
Agreed. And whether it's an 18, 19 or here in Lynn, I mean I Yep. I I do I think there's the power of connection, but also space. Yeah. And hundred. And how do, do we make the most of those a hundred? I love that idea, Jude. That's good. I mean, it's not gonna surprise you I think every day also about ai. Yeah. And I'm thinking about it from the education side. I know we're gonna talk about this at the advisory board, but, um, it's vital. We, we need to align our, the education side to the, the business demands. Yes. I would love to hear you share a little bit about what you think we should be doing to make sure that alignment is happening. Yeah,

Jude Schramm: (22:47)
That's a great question. And because I do have a senior in high school coming here next year mm-hmm . I think about this a lot personally and then also professionally. Like what, what's

Marianne Lewis: (22:55)
That? What would you wanna see happening for him?

Jude Schramm: (22:57)
You know, I think, I think there's a couple things. One is I really hope that this myth that gets created sometimes how we don't need higher education anymore. 'cause people can self-serve in companies. It is just gets blown away somehow. 'cause I think it's completely wrong, um, for a number of reasons. It isn't just the education, which I think is fantastic. So context, when Isaac, my son and I were talking about degrees, he was even like, what do I do? What's AI gonna do? What do I even go into? And I said, you know, I said, when I think about it, um, you know, a finance degree is irreplaceable because it truly teaches you business. And I don't think I appreciated that till I got to fifth third because being in a bank, which is all about money and numbers and finances, um, you really have to, to understand the way that we make business decisions to help that drive anything else that you do. And so he's going to, he's, he's gotta accept it into the finance and he's gonna double that with business analytics.

Marianne Lewis: (23:56)
It's a great combination.

Jude Schramm: (23:57)
Right. And so I think those combinations are great for, to, as you said, because you kind of get the best of both worlds of what I think the future's gonna hold. When you go beyond that, when you ask about the education, I think beyond just the normal way that, that you see it as a great job preparing kids from a true classroom experience and from a co-op and and work experience. Mm-hmm . I think there's an element that I see in some of the, the, the, the, the early career folks that really will benefit in the future from things like really understanding. And I, I think I even talked about this, about structured problem, thinking about one of the things that I got when I was here, uh, was really learning how to solve problems. 'cause I think there's things AI is not gonna be able to, it's not gonna handle relationships. Wasn't

Marianne Lewis: (24:38)
An economics class or something you told me

Jude Schramm: (24:40)
About. It was, it was, it was actually a summer macroeconomic class that I had. It was like seven 30 in the,

Marianne Lewis: (24:45)
I love that you remember that summer? That's so good.

Jude Schramm: (24:47)
You never forget it. Right. . And so, and so, you know, that idea of really understanding how to problem solve mm-hmm . In, in a logical, structured way. Because the one thing I do worry about AI is like, I don't want it to start to get the belief that people don't need to learn how to think and problem solve. That's true. Like, it's gonna be great for a lot of things and maybe someday it'll replace us all. And I'm just a hopeful guy, but I hope not. And I don't, I don't believe it will. Um, I think humans are way more resilient than that. And I think we won't let it happen. Um, but I think being able to come out and know how to problem solve and do structured thinking to know how to interact with people, like, you know, I could go in my soapbox about where the social media economy has created so much isolation mm-hmm .

Jude Schramm: (25:31)
That I see it show up because we are a in-person culture. We don't do a lot of remote work. We have people in the office. 'cause I believe any company, it's cultural. It's definition of culture and how it actually, um, creates path for people to have career pathing needs people to interact mm-hmm . And I think, you know, whether it's the co-op program or just the way that you, we evolve the way that we, you know, have kids doing a lot of interaction to do, not just isolated problem solving, but problem solving in groups really is a big benefit. 'cause you come out of college and nine times outta 10, you're not solving problems by yourself. You're doing it in different settings with different people and trying to solve different problems that you're not an expert in. But it's the collective that matters. And I think that's what education is going to continue to evolve to, is how do we create more, uh, opportunities in the education system, in the university environment to mirror what that looks like out in the business world or should look like in the business world for, you know, a long time.

Jude Schramm: (26:29)
And how has AI become a part of solving this problems and part of those groups, right? Mm-hmm .

Marianne Lewis: (26:33)
No, uh, very, very much so I, I appreciate hearing that, hearing that. And, and we're gonna have a great conversation in a couple weeks through that board meeting. I, so you said, you know, one, one of the concerns is, oh, you know, people are gonna be gone out of all of these processes. Yeah. I'll give you a different one that I hear too often and, and I know keeps people up at night, is that, uh, it's going to eliminate entry level positions. Yep. But boy, those are incredibly important positions for the latter. Totally agree. So I wonder how you think about that at fifth third about, I mean, maybe it's gonna change, or may we think about other ways to Yeah. To develop people for whatever is the appropriate realm. Yep.

Jude Schramm: (27:09)
Yep. I, um, I, I don't think that's gonna happen at scale mm-hmm . And so I think there's a nuance to this question that, that probably merits a little bit of like talking about, here's the way I wanna think about it. I think we are in the hype cycle phase of ai, right? Mm-hmm . And

Marianne Lewis: (27:26)
The.com bubble,

Jude Schramm: (27:28)
I can remember in the.com bubble, I can remember in whatever phase you wanna get at this technology is gonna take over and we're not gonna need people anymore. Mm-hmm . And what happens, some jobs get displaced, but there's always typically newer and more version, more of newer jobs that get created mm-hmm . And so I think, you know, maybe back to our previous question, the university will definitely be staying on top of how are jobs evolving and changing? What new careers are being created with ai? What careers are being disrupted? I don't think it's just about entry level, it's all the way through the, the, the companies. But I think in, in today's world, like in 2026, like really right now, in February, March of 26, we're just in the hype where everybody's saying that it's all gone. We're all gonna go, like you and I have been through this mm-hmm .

Jude Schramm: (28:15)
Right? There will be stability, there will be stabilization. Like I kind of said earlier, um, humans are really good at not at creating self extinction. Right. Last I checked. And so, you know, there is a lot of recognition that I know in conversations I'm at, not just in fifth Third, but at other places where I'm talking about ai, a lot of the recognition of like, I can't eliminate all these people. Like at the end of the day, I'll give you a really good example. My head of engineering and I were talking, 'cause he's like, Hey, a year from now, and he mentioned this in a, in a like, let's talk about this way, the way this is going. I could probably run all of engineering. I have a thousand engineers I can remember run all of engineering with five people, right. And we're going, and I go May maybe, and, and we both like, this is him and I coming to the same conclusion, which is, and when those five people retire, who's gonna re who's gonna replace them?

Jude Schramm: (29:05)
And we were both look and we're like, well, I guess we can't, we can't do that. Right? We don't wanna do that either, but we can't. And so then it's like, okay, so how do we come back, call, you know, everybody get back to normal? What is the right way to think about defining the organization so that we have people coming in at early career that have career pathing up to those roles and there's enough of them that you can have the traditional hierarchy of people having careers at every level that are meaningful mm-hmm . And they continue to drive a career path upward. And so we are in a phase of trying to understand like, what does the future look like? Because there's, and I mean mean this in a serious way. There's just talk about there's gonna be agents that are gonna be part of an org hierarchy at some point mm-hmm .

Jude Schramm: (29:47)
Right. Non-human engineers that are sitting in an org chart. Maybe not for real, but kind of when you think about it, right. But part of what I'm getting at, we're really trying to think about will there be disruption? Yes. Do I know where that will be? I don't. I also know there will be new opportunities for new job creation and new types of jobs. And it's kind of my job as the CIO back to some to help figure out what that's gonna look like. Right. Because I don't wanna sit here and say, yeah, there won't be this or there won't be. I, I don't know. But I will tell you that sitting here today, every company I talk to of any real size will tell you we don't want AI to eliminate people. We want AI to allow us to help people do more. It's about scale. As opo a scale of what we can do versus doing more with non-human. That's not anybody's current like mega plan, if you will.

Marianne Lewis: (30:38)
I'm glad you're hearing that too. Yeah. The other one I've, I, I so appreciated it in a, at a different meeting, someone said, your ultimate job needs to be teaching students how to learn faster. Yes. And that was a really good takeaway for me. That's great. Because I do think that's the power of co-op. It's it's is about the learning process Yep. But also being really intentional about it. And we have the power or value of experience and wisdom, whatever age, whatever you wanna call it, that we've seen cycles come and go. That's right. It doesn't mean we're gonna be complacent, it just means we have some confidence that we'll learn how to adapt. That's right. I think these younger students, we need to help them.

Jude Schramm: (31:15)
I agree a hundred percent. It, it's, it's gonna be, that part of it will be different, right. Because this, to your point, the speed with which it's changing is greater, faster, whatever word you wanna use mm-hmm . Than any cycle we've ever been through. That's right. But at the other side of that, it's something, I was talking to one of my AI product owners yesterday. There still has to be the trust factor that matters. And what I mean by that is one of the core tenets of our AI that we put out there is, uh, is what the industry kind of first is human in the loop. Meaning before anything we go from an AI agent to you as a customer for third, there's some human that's making a decision. Should you get that or not? Yeah. Right. Um, or at some point the customer will be the human in the loop and decide, do I want that or not?

Jude Schramm: (32:01)
But the reason why I bring that up is, is like there's gotta be humans involved because I don't think anybody's ready to turn over the way that a customer's moving money in my world or a way that we're making decision on should you get a loan by an AI agent with no human being a part of that decision. Right. That's, that's not a concept that anybody's ready for. And I think to get from here to being able to trust something like that happening is a long way away. Because you aren't gonna trust it as a customer. My regulators aren't gonna trust it. Who makes sure I'm doing my job to, to to protect you, right? Mm-hmm . And then I'm not gonna trust it because God forbid an an AI agent give you something or do something that I have no knowledge or control over because I just destroyed your trust in fifth Third.

Marianne Lewis: (32:46)
Yeah.

Jude Schramm: (32:46)
Those things are what's going to gate some of the pace of AI disruption. Mm-hmm . And the frenetic conversations about all this stuff is gonna have that filter on it for a long time.

Marianne Lewis: (32:59)
I, I completely agree. Well, and when I'm thinking about, I am gonna go back to the students of, of today, whether it's undergrad, grad, professional students, you, you already called out kind of some of the challenges from post pandemic and AI that have actually, interestingly, the more technological we become, the more we need human skills. Yeah. Yes. Human capabilities. Totally. I wonder if you have some parting thoughts for advice on those human capabilities that we need to be making sure we are also leaning into. Whew.

Jude Schramm: (33:32)
Man, that's a big one.

Marianne Lewis: (33:33)
That is a big one.

Jude Schramm: (33:35)
Um, geez, Louise.

Marianne Lewis: (33:39)
Well, I mean, well, well you're thinking about it. 'cause we can, I mean, I love your point about the teamwork and the collaboration communication. I, I get really worried about the level of isolation. I agree.

Jude Schramm: (33:49)
And that's why I'm like thinking, boy, I can take this a lot of different places. I know I'm with you. Um, do, do you, uh, read or follow anything around like, stuff that, like Professor Scott Galloway?

Marianne Lewis: (33:59)
Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Jude Schramm: (34:01)
So like, that's where my brain goes because I'm listening to the podcast with and Simon Sinek right now. And that's a good one. It is a real good one. If you've, if it's this week's one from Simon Sinek is him and, uh, professor Galloway. Right. So, um, like that's where my brain goes. And it's like, but that's probably not, you know, the way to take it for this one. Um, you know, I do, I, I, uh, you know, I think, you know, back to your point, I, I think that the human element's gonna become more critical. And I think for that socialization has to be important to our students these days. Like at the end of the day, it's very easy to put yourself in isolation. It's not hard because I think we've even lost a little bit of the understanding what isolation means. 'cause I think sometimes people look at the filter through Instagram or TikTok or whatever is, I'm not isolated. I'm in this community that's digital and I may not be talking to you in person, but I'm not alone. And I fundamentally don't believe that that's true. Mm-hmm . Right. I think that as a human, we were built for connection. Right. We were built to have interaction physically face-to-face mm-hmm . Right. And I think in a business context that's equally as important and always has been. We just didn't always know how important it was because we didn't realize it wasn't there because it was there. Right. And of your point that we

Marianne Lewis: (35:19)
Took it for granted.

Jude Schramm: (35:19)
We took it for granted and the pandemic set us into a different model. Um, and then the social media, uh, craze has made it even more isolating and easier to stay isolated. And, you know, one of the things that, that I think is important, and we see this at Fifth Third where we tell people we want you here is that peop we, we just do better as a company when people are problem solving together. Mm-hmm . People are people, people work better, people perform better. I think the, the balance between work and home is easier to separate because we saw that early in the pandemic. I think you probably did too, where people were working from home. Like, I don't know how to stop working 'cause I have no physical, no boundaries. Yeah. My commute used to suck, but it gave me a chance to go from work to home.

Jude Schramm: (36:09)
Mm-hmm . And then a lot of people lost that. Yeah. And then in the, in the company, we saw people that worked remote, they didn't understand the culture. 'cause they'd be like, how do I get promoted to fifth third? I'm like, nobody even knows who you are. Right. So I had, I had one-on-one meetings with a lot of early career people mm-hmm . Um, in 20 21, 22, 23. Because that was the question. I I don't know how to make connection. Yes. And I don't know how to get promoted. And the reality was they told them, you, you can't do that from home office easily 'cause nobody knows who you are and you don't know how we work. And so as we got people back into the office, the biggest beneficiary of that and the group that in our own employee surveys we found was clamoring to come back in, was the early professional.

Jude Schramm: (36:54)
And they came back first and then the middle career people who probably were less incentivized 'cause they're like, eh, I don't care about career, I'm in mine. And we were like, no, no, no. You are the people, the generation that's helping these people know who fifth third is. Mm-hmm . And bringing them together gets us back into a cultural state of the company grows and the company's better because we're here. Mm-hmm . And I think that applies to everything that we do. It applies to coming to class, it applies to the projects that get done here. It applies to your co-ops and your interns. Like I hope that society has the breakaway back from social media isolation back to people going to Uncle Woody's and hanging. I'm sure they do. Don't get me wrong, . Sure. I'm sure they do. But I just think we have to keep reinforcing the benefits of society being together. Um, and we have to keep using that as a way to get people out and functioning and getting away from the isolationism. Right. Because that's gonna be really critical for a healthy society. Is technologists always gonna find a way to make us more isolated if we wanna allow it. Mm-hmm . And we gotta find a way to not do that. Yeah.

Marianne Lewis: (38:01)
To counter

Jude Schramm: (38:02)
It. I dunno if that answered your question with this.

Marianne Lewis: (38:03)
Oh, it very much did Jude. I, I, I so appreciate it. I wanna just say, you know, thank you again, thank you for your inspiration, your role model, uh, also as an advisor and a strategic partner with Fifth Third, I mean, we are learning together in a very fast moving world. We are about the power of technology and very much the power of human. Well thank you. Or humanity. Yeah. So thank you.

Jude Schramm: (38:24)
Well, and can I just say thanks Pat 'cause Sure. You know, as you know, you, the University of Cincinnati is our number one partner down at, at fifth Third, and we had a thing down in the, we did that was three earlier. Was that late last year? God talk. Yes.

Marianne Lewis: (38:35)
With all the alumni. Third,

Jude Schramm: (38:36)
We brought everybody back. There are hundreds of people down there. And, um, you know, this university's been instrumental and you, and honestly you personally, and then Lindner is a, is the business college, um, have been critical to the growth of Fifth Third and to the culture that's been created. So we love partnering with you guys and, and I look forward to continuing to do that. So thank you guys and thank you personally, Marianne.

Marianne Lewis: (38:56)
Absolutely. Jude. Yeah. Thank you. Onward. Absolutely. And go Bearcats. Yes,

Jude Schramm: (38:59)
Go Bearcats.

Grant Freking: (39:00)
Thank you for listening to this episode of Bearcats Mean Business. If today's episode sparked a new idea, challenge your thinking or helped you see your path a little more clearly, be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share the episode with someone in your network. Thanks for being part of the conversation. And remember, real world success begins here at Lindner.

Grant Freking: (00:00)
What does real world success in business actually look like? Welcome the Bearcats Mean business, the official podcast of the University of Cincinnati's, Carl h Lindner College of Business, where inspiring career stories, honest lessons, and fresh business perspectives from the people building impact in the real world, come together, tune in for inspiration, practical business insights, and forward-looking thought leadership on how ambition turns into action. And now for today's episode. All right. So Dustin, thank you for being here. You are the CEO of two companies, ranger Steel and Craft force. How do you have the bandwidth to head two companies and is there a relationship between the two organizations?

Dustin Grutza: (00:43)
There is a relationship that makes it a lot easier to have the bandwidth, thankfully, but, um, you know, managing time that, that is the biggest thing that I have to, uh, factor in, helped. I can imagine. I've, yeah, I've helped from a lot of my team members in doing so, and have a lot of leaders that I have in positions that can take care of what they need to do. So a big part of that is not just, um, there's, there is my time management, but my time management and, um, delegating the right things, having the right team members on board so that it's not all on me at all. I, I would never say that being a CEO, if you do not have a good team, you're not gonna have a good company. And, uh, I totally, I'm thankful for the team that I do have and all the work that they're able to do because without 'em it would not happen.

Grant Freking: (01:28)
Ranger is something that was founded by your parents, correct?

Dustin Grutza: (01:31)
Yes, it was actually, we are in our 30th year, so 30 years going strong. I'd say I kind of took over about 10 years ago as far as, uh, really I came to the business 15, but okay. About 10 years ago, really started taking it over and pushing things and then, um, got named CEO last year. And so, uh, we're trying to really take things to the next level.

Grant Freking: (01:51)
What role has that played in your own separate entrepreneurial journey, which we'll kind of get to your other individual contributions and companies, but what is role has like kind of growing up in the family business played in that?

Dustin Grutza: (02:01)
I think it's played, played a large role. You know, when seeing my parents start their business, kind of go from my mom working in a daycare, um, yeah, having about 40 kids and owning a daycare, working at nights, doing bookkeeping. As my dad was starting a company, him and a couple other guys and some trucks, um, pushing things on the heavy industrial side, you know, trying to kind of live that American dream. To now we have like 24 trucks and, you know, Freightliners and Cranes and all the different stuff. And kind of seeing that growth as I was, uh, I think they started when I was, what, 10 years old? Yeah. So seeing that, um, change not just, um, the work that they're putting into it, working day and night, but also, uh, how that impacted, uh, what they're able to do outside of work and, uh, be involved in different things. So I think seeing that, and then I was naturally kind of brought into leadership roles my whole life, uh, especially when you're young athletics, right? As a point point guard or I was a quarterback, I just kind of fell into these like leadership roles. So it only felt right. I think that in my stepping stones as working and moving through things that, that was, I was bound to become , A CEO or in some sort of a leadership role in my life. Yeah, there's

Grant Freking: (03:14)
Like a tone of fulfillment. I can sense in your voice. Were you inspired by your parents in, in kind of witnessing this?

Dustin Grutza: (03:20)
A thousand percent. I mean, they are workers like . My dad, like if they're going on vacation to go sit on a beach, they're gonna sit on the beach for a little bit, but they're gonna be walking, they're gonna be doing stuff. Yeah. My dad's looking for work. He loves farming, you know, he is got, he's still involved very heavily at Ranger, but loves to do something else all the time. It's the same with my mom. And so seeing that attitude, that mentality, that work ethic, uh, through my life, I mean, I think it helped instill the grit in me in the same way. And, uh, when I was playing sports here at uc, it was kind of the same thing. You know, I wasn't the biggest guy, I wasn't the fastest guy. Um, but I was starting and pushing in, in a leadership role the whole time because of that. You know, it's like you want it and go work for it.

Grant Freking: (04:03)
Right. How do you compare and contrast the running the two companies as, as we've talked about, ranger as a family business that you grew up with and in craft force with something that you founded years ago. So how do you compare and contrast the two?

Dustin Grutza: (04:17)
Um, very different and, um, many ways. Okay. I'll start by talking about like my own company, right? So in starting at craft force and starting my own thing, um, I am able to instill a lot of the practices or leadership qualities, uh, that I think are the most important in how we communicate and how we do a lot of our, our work, right? So by doing that, I have more influence, and I wouldn't say control it, but have I am able to build it from the ground up. With my parents' business, they didn't have a lot of that background. They were grinding and pushing and growing and also in a different time. And so that company grew and was expanding, but I think there was less of that. Let's set up the structure. Let's make sure we have the right pieces in place so that we can grow more.

Dustin Grutza: (05:03)
It was more like grow and figure it out in a lot of ways. And so, which is great, and that's how you do, that's how you do businesses. Um, but, um, I think with that, uh, coming into a family business, I think a lot of people who have family businesses can kind of relate as you are growing or trying to make, uh, changes that might be for the better. It's a little more difficult because you need to get everybody on board, right? And, um, as you're doing that and changing a way we're creatures of habit, uh, you know, creatures of routine making those changes are a little bit more difficult, uh, midway through. So, um, that's been some of the challenges, but also a way that I think I've seen successes of certain things of craft force and certain things that we've tried that haven't worked. But by having that smaller company that've started from the beginning that we've kind of built this around, I've been able to instill some of those practices into Ranger, which has helped it, uh, as it's been really growing over the past few years.

Grant Freking: (06:01)
Let's, let's wind the clock back even a little bit more. Why did you wanna get your business education at Lindner and the University of Cincinnati?

Dustin Grutza: (06:09)
Uh, you know, this is a great school. Uh, uh, university of Cincinnati was close to home. Um, a lot of choosing Cincinnati had to do with sports at that time, right? Um, so I was coming here and actually the engineering school had a big part too. I was looking at how, how do I find a degree that kind of combines business and engineering. Okay. And, um, I thought at first I was just gonna get my mechanical engineering degree and then get a MBA afterwards. I was kind of the, the game plan. But, um, as you get going, you realize if you're gonna be a full-time, uh, athlete and play quarterback, you may not have time for co-ops and other, uh, pieces of that puzzle, uh, related to the engineering side. But on the business side, I could do a lot of, uh, the other programs and kind you could co-op at different times or summer or work for other entities.

Dustin Grutza: (06:54)
So it worked out as a better option. They had a, a combined degree for me and, uh, but choosing, choosing University of Cincinnati had to do with, um, it's great school. Um, loved the city of Cincinnati. It was close to home. Parents would be able to come watch me play and do all those different things. But the school itself had all the pluses and I saw the ways that the co-op program brought out, uh, just enabled you to get in touch with the city and help the city grow. And I think that's still the case. So many people who go through the co-op program, they find their university or their find, they find their, their landing, um, position or, or company, I should say, their career through that co-op program and continue it from there.

Grant Freking: (07:38)
Right. We touched on leadership a little bit earlier, um, and I want to revisit that. You mentioned being the quarterback and point guard growing up, and you were the quarterback of the football team here at uc. How did being the quarterback influence your views on leadership and culture and team building and any, is, how much of that is translatable to what you do now?

Dustin Grutza: (08:00)
Uh, all, all of it. I mean, in every way. I, I think, I think sports, um, transfers into business very easily, um, because of coaches and pushing things and, and how, uh, you have to have leaders within, especially in football leaders within each division, right? You have a linebacker, uh, core. You have safeties and defensive backs. You have offensive line, you have quarterbacks, receivers, you have these different segments, but you need a leader within each one of those. And then you need a leader for the whole offense and leader for the whole defense and a leader on the field for the whole team, you know, the captains, and then you need the coach. You have your coaches who are the leaders. And so you have to have that same structure in business. In order to be really successful, you need leaders at all areas. So like when I, looking at the construction business, you have leaders in, obviously your executive, your finance, your operations off the operations.

Dustin Grutza: (08:53)
You may have different divisions that someone needs to be leading those divisions, right? And then all the way to the job that you're doing, uh, you get down to a four man crew pushing a job. Maybe they're building a building, right? You need someone leading that crew helping make sure everything's going the right way. And so that continuation of leadership and having the same message and the same values, um, you see that through football and that transfers right into business. So I think there is a great collaboration there. Yeah. And so I learned all that through football, I feel like. And so as I went into the workforce, it was like, oh, this all makes so much sense.

Grant Freking: (09:26)
And now that you've ascended to leadership positions in two companies, how do you determine the leaders that are under you? Do they reveal themselves or do you have, do push people? How does that work for you?

Dustin Grutza: (09:38)
Usually they're, they reveal themselves. Okay. They come asking for more, and not just like more money or anything like that. They finish something and they're looking, they have more time. They wanna do more. They have ideas that they bring forward. They start showing themselves as leaders within what they're doing and the group that they're working in. And others go to them for answers, um, and start working with them. And they just kind of, many times they show themselves. But as you're recruiting those types of people, or you're recruiting people in, um, lots of times that's what you're looking for. You're, you're looking for the intangibles of who they are, how they are, uh, more so than their experience. And, oh, I worked on these jobs and I have this, you might find someone who didn't work on at all at a position who has ended up going to run that division because they're willing to learn and they're work hard, and they have what it takes in so many other ways. They just needed some experience at what that is.

Grant Freking: (10:30)
Yeah. Just needed the opportunity. Right? Yeah. You've co-founded several companies since you earned your undergraduate and MBA degrees from Lindner. What voids were you seeking to fill with those startups, and what did you learn from those experiences?

Dustin Grutza: (10:42)
I think at the time I didn't think, uh, ranger was going to be like the landing spot for me. I think family business, I, I knew I, I could go in and help them, help them grow, but I thought, you know, there might be something else that I want to kind of build and put my name to. And, um, those other companies, I had ideas coming out. I did the entrepreneurial, uh, integrals here at College of Business then. And so I was very, I don't know, enamored by the startup world, what it can be. And as I started pushing those different companies, um, I always say fail early. Fail fast. You know, push everything as hard as you can early on. And if it's gonna fail and you see that it's gonna fail, then, then know that that's, that's not the right direction. Either pivot within that company or say, that was fun. That was great effort learned a lot. 'cause that, that's the biggest thing from each of those, uh, companies that I may have partnered into or we started, um, that didn't end up, you know, making it, I learned so much that was applicable to our other companies. Um,

Grant Freking: (11:47)
Yeah. How did, let's push on that further. What are, what are some of the, you know, things when, when you're sitting at your office today and something comes up or whatever, it's some sort of situation like, oh, I remember this from the startup days. What, what are some of the sort of, the examples of that you can think of?

Dustin Grutza: (12:01)
I think one big one would be relationships. Okay. Um, so as you were talking about building, building teams and doing all those different things, that's very important. But, um, sometimes you look at like, what's the core of a business? I take craft force, right? It's staffing in the trades. That's what we do. We find, uh, the best skilled trade workers, um, and we place them on jobs all across the country. And then, you know, that stems up to engineers and to laborers. But that's kind of our main focus. Well, we try to replace it with an app, think, uh, LinkedIn, um, think of those types of apps that are, uh, going to have communication through a network, but we wanted people to be able to hire through it as well. More like indeed, I would say,

Grant Freking: (12:41)
Yeah, create that link.

Dustin Grutza: (12:43)
So we tried to do all this where tech would be us and replace us, but what we found out is like, we're all human, you know? And so certain parts of what we wanna do, deal with and work for work in business has to do with the relationships that we can have. And so we found out that the people, especially who work in the trades, want those relationships. They want someone to help them act as almost like an agent if you were thinking of acting or, you know, the arts, like they're working all day so they don't have time to work on their next job. So they need someone to act in that way and have their best interest and understand what they really want. And so by trying to do that with tech, it didn't fill the void. It, it actually created, um, it made our business much more difficult.

Dustin Grutza: (13:28)
And what we learned, we ended up trashing that whole tech side. We thought that was gonna be our, our leg out. That was gonna be our, you know, multimillion dollar idea. We're gonna a differentiator. Yeah, we're gonna, this, we're gonna be the first in the trades to do this. Other trade companies have tried to do it has not worked either because it's a relationship, um, industry that is very much focused on, uh, on that side of things. So, uh, we learned from that and what our core competency, competency was as a company. So now, as far as how we do staffing and everything else, it's all about relationships. Everything we do, recruiting our clients, everything is all about relationships. And, and so we stay boutique because of that, because we know it's more important for us to have really strong relationships with our clients and the recruiting that we do. All of our different, our workforce versus, um, we don't need those relationships. We're just gonna let tech do it, and we're gonna have win by having the masses.

Grant Freking: (14:21)
Right. Well, speaking of relationships and engagement, you've become involved with uc and Lindner as an alum. Let's begin with your time with the Center for Entrepreneurship, for example, speaking like, uh, just the most recent example that I know of, you were involved with uc Startup Weekend. Yeah. Tell me about that and what other, what other things you're involved with, I guess the Entrepreneurship Center. We'll start there.

Dustin Grutza: (14:43)
Yeah. Um, 1819 Hub, um, we have some great relationships over there. Uh, Kate and some of the crew have kind of really brought us in to, uh, do more and more and, um, love to go over there and speak when I have the chance. But, uh, startup Weekend recently, they brought me in to be kind of a final judge, which was fun, you know, being the shark in the room. But, uh, honestly, the gr I learned just as much doing that because I got to hear what I'd say the youth, you know, I guess I'm getting old now, but, uh, uh, everyone here at the university sees as the greatest problems and what, what in our world that they need to solve, that they're trying to solve with apps or whatever it may be, right? The businesses that they see we need in our world in order to handle those, those problems. And so for me, understanding what problems they see versus what I might've thought was completely different. So I learned so much about that. And then also got to see how applications of, um, putting decks together, market research, how ai, uh, connects to all this. Now I got to see how the students are able to do that in different ways. And, um, it was, like I said, it was a learning experience on my side, but also great to see how far along the students are going through this university.

Grant Freking: (16:03)
So what are, what were some of your more specific takeaways in, in dealing with students? What are they coming to you for advice for? I guess maybe specifically as a business owner?

Dustin Grutza: (16:12)
Uh, I think they are coming for the leadership. Um, how, how have I been able to build what I have? Um, how do you continue that success and then the network, you know, I think when I spoke a few different times to them or had off conversations, a lot of it was talking about how, how do you get to where you're at and what steps do I need to take? And so I talk a lot about networking, how great Cincinnati is for that. Uh, you have business leaders all over the community who are willing to go have breakfast with you, who are willing to help, uh, who actually care. So you have that, that side of, um, you know, that Midwest, um, niceness approach that Yeah, they're approachable. Yeah. Yeah. That you can actually get a, I get advisors, have mentors, do all the different things that, um, is way more difficult if you're in the Bay or, you know, New York City or something like that.

Dustin Grutza: (17:03)
So I also learned from the businesses that they're trying to build, it was all about relationships. So everyone seems to want to have more phone down personal relationships, which for me, in my business is like exactly what we do as I was talking before. Yeah. So I was able to touch base on that, and I think it connected really well with me. Yeah. You know, that connection of, Hey, we need more time with our phones down. We need to have personal relationships with people, and how do we get there? And I think, I think the youth of, you know, of our world are trying to figure that out right now because they're so tied to their phones.

Grant Freking: (17:44)
Right. What are some of the other involvement you've had, uh, I guess maybe more recently or in the past with, um, Lindner or uc? I think you, you, I know you've been touch involved with athletics too in the past.

Dustin Grutza: (17:54)
Yeah. Uh, I do a lot with athletic athletics. Actually, I'm the head of our, you know, director of our alumni for the football side. Um, I meet with a lot of the team there with athletic department, but on the lender side, I've, uh, stayed in touch with the entrepreneurship, um, team a lot. So like Chuck Matthews. Yep. And I, I'll go speak at some of his classes. I talk with him fairly often. So, um, definitely stay connected through that entrepreneurship side because of all that I do there. All right.

Grant Freking: (18:23)
Let's close with this. Instead of me being a 37-year-old individual, now, I'm, now, I'm 18, what's two maybe bits of advice you'd you'd give to me as if I'm like a bright-eyed, bushy tailed freshman walking through these buildings to sort of like, calm my anxieties and, and kind of help me get on my path to success here at Lindner?

Dustin Grutza: (18:42)
I, I would, I would tell you that everyone has that fear of going up and saying hi first. Mm-hmm. And asking for something and asking for help or talking to someone even, you know, just that first initial contact, right? Sometimes you're nervous and you're like, the part of the hole. Should I do that? Should I, should I stay at this event? Should I do certain things? Yeah. Once you're past that, it's, it's good, but everybody has it. So like saying hi to someone, maybe they're wanting to say hi to you, but they're nervous too, right? But in, in doing that, I say also reaching out to people who you may want to be mentors and all those things. They may want to be a mentor. They may be looking for those opportunities and care, but not know how to do it. So as an 18-year-old, go reach out to as many people as you can. Go, go to breakfasts, go to networking events, go talk to everyone, especially those who you aspire to be like and who you look up to, because they will help you along the way, and that will help shape you and build the confidence that you need to have the success that you're gonna have in your life.

Grant Freking: (19:41)
Thank you for listening to this episode of Bearcats Mean Business. If today's episode sparked a new idea, challenge your thinking or helped you see your path a little more clearly, be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share the episode with someone in your network. Thanks for being part of the conversation. And remember, real world success begins here at Lindner.