Stephanie Maas: Well, hey, Gary, it's super nice to meet you.
Gary Kusin: Nice to meet you also, I'm at your mercy.
Stephanie Maas: Well, thank you, you may come to regret that. But
in the meantime, thank you. So I'm super curious. I'm gonna
just jump right in out of the gates in your book always
learning. You know, I think that's such an interesting
perspective. Because folks often would look at your background
and go, What does he possibly have left to learn? Tell me a
little bit about where the idea behind the book came from. Walk
me through some of that.
Gary Kusin: Be glad to. So after I sold Kinkos, to FedEx, and
after the two years that I integrated it into FedEx
reporting to Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, I was trying
to decide what I wanted to do next. And I started getting a
lot of pressure because of the way that Kinkos turnaround
happened and a lot of things about that from a lot of
interesting quarters saying you have to write a book, this would
be a very big book. And I said, you know, I'm not I have never
been good about talking about myself. But I'm a big introvert.
And I would just assume, not be in the limelight. And so it
really kind of pushed back, but they were really pushing pretty
hard. I told everyone, no, thank you, I am looking forward to my
anonymity. And that's it, and I let it go. Fast forward to the
last year, we had our 11th grandchild. And our view of the
world is quite different. Both my wife and me, we decided while
we while we still could, we wanted to write a memoir, that's
where I started. And through a lot of friends who are authors
and a lot of people, I ended up meeting with some publishers, I
mean, I went through the whole drill, and I found a spectacular
editor that I really wanted to work with. And I started
pounding away on a memoir, gave it to Maria, and she came back
to me and she's a highly experienced person in the book
industry real Book Pro, and part of my belief and my talk track
about my life is essentially I'm the luckiest sob in the history
world. I've fallen up everything that's ever happened to me good,
pure luck. Well, Maria pushed back, I read intention on every
page. And I have a hard time reconciling the intention that I
see that you have written in your own words about your own
life, with your thought that you have just been lucky. And
following up. She said, I don't believe that. And I would like
you to rethink how you have thought about your life. Luck is
what happens when opportunity meets preparedness that stuck
with me. And my book took on a very different, intentional
look, and frankly, morphed into more about my business. I'm a
mentor. That's the one thing that came out of my whole career
that I love the most. And there are reasons and I tracked
through all of those in the book. But I've had over 1000
mentoring sessions last 20 years. And so this book is a way
for me to mentor more broadly, let my my podcast the same
thing. All I'm trying to do is level people's playing fields
who might not have had the advantages I've had my career,
because that is my joy. It's my love out. I spoke a month ago,
and I wrote about this recently on LinkedIn. But I spent I spent
an hour with the eighth grade of a charter school in St. Paul,
Minnesota, who were all Somali refugees. And one little boy had
his hand up. And I said yes, because I was asking for
questions. And he said, When did things get better for you? Now
think about that question. It stopped me dead in my tracks.
And I was able to just talk to this young man about things that
I did at his age, what I learned and what I felt was a way
forward for anybody who is trying to figure out how to
better themselves. It filled me up that interaction with that
young man was what I'm that's what I live for.
Stephanie Maas: There is so much I want to unpack. So let me
circle back to these leadership principles. And respect
alignment, accountability. What else?
Gary Kusin: Well, I actually do alignment and accountability is
one and two. For me. It's critically important in any
company, for everyone to understand, what are we trying
to do hear, hear and to understand, here's the mission,
there's the flag on a distant hill. That's the flag we need to
take. We're going to take it and then why they're so linked is
you can't give responsibility without authority. And so many
companies do that. They they tell they tell someone, you've
got to get this done. And then when you start to do it, someone
else tells you can't do that. That's a misalignment, it'll
destroy everything. So alignment and then have a culture that
does too. distributed authority, then you can move into respect
for others. And that means that and it TPG were US did a nice
stint as a senior adviser, they had a sign in their lobby that
said, No, it's allowed. That's, you know, I think that's pretty
straightforward. And you can figure out what that is, in the
honest honesty and integrity is a requirement. But there are a
lot of people out there who like to cut corners. And I'm never a
part of that. And the last one is continuous improvement, but
my co founder at GameStop, and I've been talking about the
book, obviously, and he really thinks I should rethink that.
And I am to make a continuous change. Because we could have
been accused at GameStop. being excellent, with continuous
improvement because we work but we should have been thinking
change. Because we came in at the dawn of a new industry, we
were the first software store in the world, when our first store
open, and the things we did to start, were right at the start.
But 10 years later, every one of our kind of pillars of our
business needed to be reevaluated every single one of
them. And all we were trying to do would be better, smarter,
faster, and what we were doing and continued to succeed, but we
were missing the very large and important aspects of change.
Stephanie Maas: Next thing I want to touch on is this idea of
toxicity. How and when do you recognize it? How do you change
it? Just talk me through some of that.
Gary Kusin: The key question you're asking there is, how do
you change it, and I will get to that in a minute, it is pretty
obvious to see when there is a culture that people talk down to
people in an organization or they yell or they scream, or
they belittle people, there is no reward and recognition, there
is an expectation that people might work all hours be
available all hours in those kinds of things, and not then
not want to pay people keep all the money for themselves, you
know, all that kind of stuff. How do I change that, in one
case I left in life, there are good reasons. And there are real
reasons, I ended up having a good reason. And I'm not gonna
get into it any more than that. And one particular company I was
involved with had a good reason for leaving, but it wasn't the
real reason. And the real reason was, I couldn't stand the tone
at the top. And unfortunately, I'm at the top also. So that was
getting guilt by association. And I decided I didn't want to
go into hand to hand combat with the other top leadership. So it
was easier for me because I wasn't at all concerned about
being able to find something to do, because it's never been a
problem for me. And I decided I can create a new situation for
myself. And I had a good reason everybody believed it. And
that's great. But it's tough. That's one thing people know
about me. And when I was at TPG, again, as a Senior Advisor for
13 years in that meantime, helped assess companies to see
whether we should buy him or not those that we bought, if I
wanted to join the board, I could I could be lead director,
I could be exec Chairman, I could be whatever I want it to
be. But no situations, I was very clear very quickly. If I
saw toxicity at the top, I had very difficult conversations
with CEOs, presidents, and other BNI I have no problem doing
that. I just close the door and I sit down and I say I'm about
to have a very difficult conversation with you. And when
you say I'm about to have a difficult conversation with you
to someone, they kind of sit up, go up, something's come in, I
need to in a focus and you get a very different kind of focus
when you start a conversation like that. And I would tell him,
not on my watch, not on TP G's investment. We're not going to
do things that way. And you need to understand that. And if you
have an issue with that, let's talk about how to gracefully get
you out of here. And I had no problem having those difficult
conversations, because I'm having with people who are
inherently difficult, who have been part of the toxicity who
seem to not understand what their presence is like how
they're being received by other people. So I've had those times
I had much those conversations.
Stephanie Maas: Again, the wisdom that just comes from that
so many people from a leadership perspective, talk about the
difficulty of difficult conversations, and you just gave
beautiful language. Hey, we're just going to have a difficult conversation.
Gary Kusin: And I'll give you another lesson I learned along
the way that helped me with that. Actually, that lesson came
from Jack Welch. And I asked him, I was having quarterly
business reviews with him. And I asked him, I was very curious. I
had assembled an entirely new management team and 12 months
later, I'd replaced half of them. And I said, I feel very
guilty about that, Jack. And so give me give me something to
think about, as I think about am I a failure at recognizing
talent? What did I do wrong? Or what did I do right? And I
learned from him. First of all, he said 50% is completely
average. He said, I'm not gonna tell you good job, but I'm not
gonna tell you a bad job either. Because when you're rebuilding a
senior team from the ground up in a turnaround situation, you
won't know if you lose half of them. That's, that's average. He
said, Now, the second time around, since you now understand
the business much more closely and the replacement kind of
people, they should have different characteristics. I
learned about that. But the best one I ever got was first time I
ever fired anybody. It was one of those things that has stuck
with me forever. So I started a new job in Sacramento for a
different department store that I had started in a department
store in San Francisco, they and another division in Sacramento,
they offered me a big promotion to go there. My boss in the new
situation, when I sat down, he said, Look, I've been here for
three months longer than you and I've identified the areas that
are weak, we need to make changes. And I think these few
people as needed, we probably need to change them out. Figure
out what you think. And let me know so one of them. I came to
him said, You are right. I need to fire her. She's clearly not
going to be the person to get us the next level. He said, Great.
I couldn't bring myself to fire. She, you know, I was 26. She was
much older. She had a family. I just couldn't I didn't know how
to do it. I mean, I just didn't know how to do it. And every
week at my weekly meeting, he would say, Hey, Gary, have you
fired her yet? No, I haven't. Finally, six weeks later, after
asking me half a dozen times. He said, You know what? I've done
this for a long time. I'm obviously more experienced than
you. This is not my first rodeo. I'm the one that identified or
would you like me to go ahead and do that for you? And now I
know I'll do it. I promise you, Marvin, I'll do it. He said,
Well, I have no problem doing it. So I said, Well, gee, you
know, if you have no problem doing it, maybe yeah, if you do
that, that'd be great. He said, super. I'll do it. He spins
around in his desk. He picks up an old desk phone a dials HR. He
said, Would you please send me Gary's next paycheck? Thanks,
but and he turned around, I said, What? He said, Gary, we
do the stuff we like, for free, we get paid to do this stuff we
don't like. And he said, that's something you don't like, I'm
not gonna like it, but I won't get paid for it. If you're not
going to do it. I want your pay for doing that. I said, I'll do
it right away. And and that served me well then. And it
served me well in conversations. Since then, when I've had those
same issues, because nobody liked your first time you
terminate someone, it's a nightmare. Yet, you're up all
night, throwing up it just horrible. And so sometimes you
need a little pep talk. And that was the one I got. And it stood
me in good stead ever since.
Stephanie Maas: And I think to one of the things I appreciate
that I heard from you, it's just the humanity of it. If there
wasn't that human element, firing people wouldn't be easy.
But to your point, she was older, she had a family older
than you, you know how to family. And here you are up at
night, and but not forgetting the humanity side of it. It's
super important. Okay, so if I'm hearing correct, so you start
out kind of on one path in your career, when did you know you
really had this entrepreneurial bug?
Gary Kusin: I didn't know. I think it's safe to say I had no
idea. I'm not sure I could spell entrepreneur. But what I'm sure
of is when I graduated business school, my first desire was to
figure out how to make sure my now wife would marry me if asked
her to marry me. And I had mentioned to her if you could
live anywhere in the she's in law school down in Texas, if you
could live anywhere you wanted to live in the US, where would
that be? And she didn't take long to say San Francisco. So I
went back to graduate school and I wandered into the placement
officer. I said, Well, what do we have in San Francisco? And it
was two big department store chains. And since I've grown up
my family in the retail furniture business, I said,
Yeah, okay, I'll do that. And that's what I did. But once I
got into the department store business, and I started to
understand it in I started to go into our stores and malls. I was
realizing that specialty stores were popping up in the malls
that were stealing our lunch in department stores, you know,
stores like the gap. All of a sudden they went our denim
business, you know, Lane Bryant there when our large size
business, I could run right jewelry there, Zales there when
our jewelry business. And I started developing a point of
view about department stores that were so fragmented with
different names on in each city go to the major department
stores had a different name, even though they were owned by
the same large company. So I started lobbying. I started with
two things. One, we're getting our lunch taken. And if you
can't see it, here's the data. And there was data that just we
were growing at 10%. Well, that was great. But the specialty
stores were going 40 50% A year and it was crazy. It was just
very obvious what was going on. And I developed a point of view
that said in any category of consumer goods that reaches
measurable size, measurable size being a billion dollars back at
that time. I said a specialty channel will emerge that will
end up being an important if not dominant channel and
distribution inside that segment. And I could prove it
with data. So I went on this big tear inside of Federated
Department Stores, telling anyone who'd Listen, guys, we're
a dinosaur heading into the swamp. And we don't have to be,
if we had a national name, we could compete with the limited
by being called Macy's coast to coast or picking name. But
everywhere we could develop the programs, we could do everything
to compete. Well, when my business school buddy, we play
poker every week, and we were on the same little section there.
He had just been moved to the Silicon Valley to start working
with video game publishers. And he was coming through Dallas and
some business. And we were dear friends. So he came over for
dinner. And we sat at the kitchen table. And he showed me
all the data about the coming video game, and computers in the
home, all the penetration curves going back to the first record
players to the first black and white TVs to the first alarm
clocks, the penetration curves were the same. And he said there
is no way video game machines, and the software that goes on is
not going to become an enormous sector, there was not a single
video game store in the world. So he's pushing on an open door
with me because I have been preaching to anyone who had
listened. But in any category of consumer products that reaches
measurable size, the specialty store channel will be an
important if not dominant channel of distribution. And I
told him all that I explained, Jim, this is really interesting.
Let me tell you why. And by the time we were through, it's like,
Well, Jim, you got to quit your job at banking, I have to quit
my job at Federated Department Stores. And we got to do this.
And he's like, really, and I'm like, I go home. My wife said
what I said, Hey, wait, if Jim does it because Jim was talking
to the class and our business school, if Jim thinks it's a
good idea, that's our insurance policy. Jim was, of course go in
and tell if his buddies have kids. And being a retailer, he
thinks it's a good thing. So we both quit our jobs. And the rest
is history. And so we opened when we opened our first stores,
the first software store in the history of the world. We had so
much fun for the next 12 years until I jumped to start the
cosmetics company. And we had gone public and we just bought
our biggest competitor and it felt like the right time and
somewhere in there. Towards the end of Babbage's I realized I
could do something else. And I just enjoyed the intellectual
stimulation of coming up with what is the what's the
hypothesis? Or what's the investment thesis if you're in
private equity coming at something very rationally, and I
had been meeting because I still had a little bit of department
store blood in my veins had been meeting quarterly with the CEO
of Neiman Marcus back then who was here in Dallas, he lived
down the street from me. And I'd ask him anything new. And he
would always say nope, nothing new, nothing new. But all of a
sudden, one one time at lunch, he said, Let me tell you about
this company called MAC Cosmetics. And I had cosmetic
responsibility. And when he's talking to me, my brain started
working. Oh my gosh, and I and I had a whole idea about what it
might mean. And that's when I figured out I'm probably more of
an entrepreneur than I give myself credit for being and
that's where we went from there.
Stephanie Maas: That is awesome. That is one of the coolest
stories. Oh my gosh, we shift gears ever so slightly. You talk
about you know, 1000 hours in mentorship conversation. And
that's you mentoring others, correct?
Gary Kusin: Yes, I probably needed it for myself. But I was
too dumb to know better.
Stephanie Maas: You're doing just fine. I think so. Talk me
through both sides of that. When do you recommend that somebody
starts looking at a mentor? What do you look for in a mentor? How
do you know they're the right person? What are the
expectations to get out of that? And then we'll go to the flip
side about where you focus, etc.
Gary Kusin: Well, I think it's important to know that and I
will tell you as I got into mentoring, it was very organic,
is people I had worked with, who was family members, it was a it
was people who knew me, who called me and said I've got this
thing going on and I need some I need some advice. And that's how
it's kind of started as opposed to I never have mentored someone
that's we're going to meet once a quarter we're gonna go to
Starbucks, we're going to that's not me. But the last few years
is the pace of this has picked up and I've started realizing
actually the dangers of some mentoring. I am becoming more of
a student of mentoring. And they all just tell you I have some
real issues with the use of the word mentoring and corporations
who as part of their leadership and development,
organizationally, set up mentoring relationships now I'm
in favor We've all heard because it sounds good. And it should be
part of any leadership development. But there is a very
large risk. I know from the other side of the table as a CEO
of companies that had 25,000 or more employees, I have seen what
bad things can happen if you use the word mentor. And let me
just, these are not exact numbers. But I'm going to say
somewhere between a third and 40% of the times that I have
gotten a call from someone in a corporate setting, who really
needed to talk with something about me, at least a third to
40% of them had to do with hostile environment had to do
with the legal goings on. And so let me tell you why I
immediately get very upset about that. Now imagine if you are a
mentor, and I am your mentee. And I tell you, I don't know
what to do with this. But my friend and my peer is having an
affair with my boss. Now, let's just say in that situation, you
are dear friends with that boss, and you can't believe what you
just heard. Now you are in trouble because you have a duty
as a senior officer of a big corporation to report to HR if
there's malfeasance hostile environment, anything like that?
Well, if it's a third to 40% of every mentoring situation, it's
my belief that companies should not use the word mentor mentee,
it suggests a confidentiality it suggests, which is not true. It
can't be true in a corporate environment. But it suggests
things that can't be delivered. And especially if my heart goes
out to young people in a career trying to build a career for
themselves, who maybe they stumbled into relationship with
someone higher up in the company, or who knows, I've seen
every permutation of this you can do. But so I'm an advocate
of using the word coach. And and this isn't just semantics,
because if you asked 100 people what it means to be a mentor and
100 people what it means to be a coach, you're going to get a
very narrowed scope for a coach. There's something very specific,
they've got a very specific skill set. And they can teach
that. So maybe there's a workgroup in an in an area in
the IT area that's coding, and doesn't quite, you know, they
got to work through things. Well, their coach should have
been there before. So they can sit down and tell people, okay,
in this situation, here's what you did. And you can multiply
that by every functional area of a company because the coach has
a very narrow purview. And as a potential mentee, I don't have
to tell you, if you're my coach, about something about there,
someone just got a kickback in my work group, and they're
gonna, and they're gonna open a restaurant with it. I mean, I've
seen that one too. So I worry a lot. A lot of the people that in
the corporate environments who have ended up on my doorstep
wasn't their first doorstep. They realized in their mentoring
session, oh, you know, red flag goes up, and I can't, I can't
have this conversation. But I need to have it because I don't
know what to do. And that's where they end up on my
doorstep. And that's why I have this thing about mentoring is
not so wonderful. If it's not really thought out upfront. And
what could go wrong. All those issues, Jelena who's my co host
on INR. Our podcast is about mentoring. And in fact, it's
eavesdropping on mentoring sessions we're having with
people so the listener can hear honest God real mentoring
sessions, we are talking about having CEO and we both know a
bunch of them CEOs of really interesting companies on to talk
with them about leadership and development on their watch. How
do they think about it, throw out this hot sports opinion I
have about mentoring being risky, and get feedback, because
maybe I'm wrong. You know, maybe they're maybe there ways that
they do it. That is safer. But I'd never paid attention.
Because I wasn't out there advertising myself as a mentor.
I was just getting inbound. And the more inbounds I got, the
more I got and it grew. And then next thing I know the people
that I talked to three years ago call and say, Hey, you helped me
three years ago, I got a bigger situation now. And next thing
you know, I've been mentoring some people for 15 years, but
only episodic and only if it's something that they didn't see
coming and they really it's an issue.
Stephanie Maas: This has been super cool. I so appreciate your
time as we kind of start thinking about wrapping up
anything else we haven't touched on that you want to make sure
that we do?
Gary Kusin: No, I read your website. And I've listened in to
some of the things you put up on YouTube. And it's, I'm so glad
you guys do this. I mean, I think this is I think what y'all
are doing is awesome. There is something that I feel close to
when I hire people, you talk about helping people get better
and intensity and all that. And how do you get the energy up to
do what needs to be done? We put a big accent on this. When I've,
in companies I'm involved in on hiring, what do you look for?
And because I think so much of this can be if you are
interviewing against that as a skill set, you stand a better
chance of having people come into the company that are
emotionally set up for what you want to do. And for instance, in
a in a turnaround situation, like like we had at Kinkos, we
interviewed for kind of four things as mission critical and
that we have to have a point of view after you spend an hour
with a potential new person in the company, you got to have a
point of view about these things. One is energy level. Did
they feel like they had energy that I feel like they're gonna
bring it every day to work? intellectual curiosity? Okay,
did I? Did I ask interesting questions? Do they wonder about
things three, and this is really important, I'll tell you why
this is my most high aspiration. If I'm interviewing someone, and
I say, what is your, what's your end of the rainbow job. And
they, if they say something like your job, I want your job. It's
like, boom, you're hired, because I need someone with
really high aspirations. And then the fourth, which sounds a
little weird, but I found it to really be true. If I talk to
someone, and I don't feel like they're driven to win, that's
fine. As long as I do feel that they will refuse to lose. And
those are two very different thoughts. Because sometimes
people who are hyper competitive and they got a win, win, win,
win win, well, maybe they're too much, maybe too much glass is
gonna get broken. But if someone refuses to lose, that's a
different thing. That's when they're, when they're in the
middle of the night, and they're thinking about something they
are no, I'm not gonna let this happen. And when I mentioned the
highest aspiration, the most probably the most proud thing,
and I'll leave it at this that I've had in my business career.
13 people on my turnaround team at Kinkos are CEOs. And that, to
me is a incredible tribute to them. Because they were all of
these they refuse to lose at a minimum. They had high
aspirations. They were intellectually curious and they
made stuff happen. High energy, it works.
Stephanie Maas: That's incredible. And thank you so
much for sharing that and I really appreciate your time and
availability today. This has been for lack of a better word
energizing, but also very insightful. So thank you, Gary.
Gary Kusin: You bet. Thanks for having me.