It’s been an incredible ride.
I’ve been working nonstop for more than five decades – starting at age 8 delivering 100 papers, 365 days a year. At 15, I worked in the produce department at a discount grocery store where the working conditions weren’t great, but I married this amazing girl from the snack bar.
After college, I worked as a mechanical engineer on surgical lasers until I got the chance to do frontline technical support at
Novell . Twelve years later, I had helped create ZENworks, earned a VP title, and I accepted an offer from
Microsoft. Jump ahead another 18 years, and there were multiple billion-dollar businesses and entirely new classes of products wishing me well as I came back home to Utah to spend these last 5 years at
Qualtrics.
Each of those stops taught me something I couldn’t have learned anywhere else, but all those lessons are for another day and other posts.
The one thing that was true everywhere I went was the importance of the people around you - the people you work with (EX), and the people you serve (CX). There is no new product feature, no emerging technology, and no market-shifting innovation that can replace that basic fact. Everything, every time, comes down to the culture and the individuals who bring a vision to life.
Whether you are leading a company, a team, a home office, or just calibrating your own life, you have 3 foundational responsibilities:
— Stake out an enduring, data-driven, and differentiated vision.
— Build up the organizational structures that will accelerate you towards that vision.
— Put the right leaders in those structures and empower them to do their best work.
Then you work on culture.
Every major mistake I made in my career traces back to a miscalculation in one of the three bullets above.
I am the end product of literally thousands of people who have helped and influenced me over the last 50 years. Trying to list them all here would be impossible, but I’ll find a way to tell them in person every chance I get.
I promise you that there is no single character trait that will serve you better than to travel through this world with a heart full of gratitude.
The step into retirement is more exciting to me than any of the steps that have come before it.
Thank you for being part of my story.