When everything is on the line, belief separates elite leaders from everyone else.

I actually find pressure.

I enjoy it.

Board of pressure.

Public scrutiny.

Career defining moments.

When the pressure becomes public, permanent and personal, most leaders tighten up.

That's where they crack.

Usman Suga has lived pressure across worlds most leaders never touch.

He's one of the most accomplished players in US Cricket history.

Where performance is public and free, failure is unforgiving.

And Today he's the CEO over at Bluebeam, a platform used by 99% of top US contractors and nearly 4 million professionals worldwide.

Pressure is a privilege.

That means you're important, what you're doing matters.

That belief wasn't learned in a boardroom.

It was forged in one of the most hostile environments imaginable.

An away game with 20,000 people cheering against him.

When we ended up winning the game, the crowd was so hostile that there were riots.

In this episode, you'll discover how elite leaders mentally reframe pressure before it breaks them.

What to rely on when fear, emotion and chaos all hit at once.

And how top performers build discipline that actually holds under extreme stakes.

This is the belief that keeps elite leaders steady and focused.

When most leaders crack, it's time to lead the team.

Welcome back to Lead the Team.

I'm your host, Ben Fanning.

In this conversation that you're going to hear is meant to challenge, inspire and ripple out.

It's not just a podcast.

It's a positive movement to build better leaders.

And you can help by taking just 10 seconds to rate and follow on Apple, Spotify and YouTube and drop a quick review over on Apple.

This helps more bold leaders discover the show and keeps the mission alive.

Enjoy.

On the days when the board is pushing back and the tech may be failing and the pressure is on.

At a scale of 10, which of those past versions of yourself do you lean on to survive?

Today I rely quite a bit on my sports background as well to do so.

I've always believed that I'll make this quote more gender neutral.

It's big boys or big girls make big plays in big games.

And that's been the guiding principle is you got to perform under pressure and not crack under pressure to prove yourself.

So I actually find pressure to.

I enjoy it and the fact that it allows me to showcase that I can do or that the business can do better.

So that's something that I've learned through sports, that pressure is a privilege.

It's not pressure itself.

That means you're important, what you're doing matters and I take that as a privilege and that definitely comes from a place of sports and enjoying being, taking on situations that will help you win the games or the championships.

Oh man, I love that quote.

Pressure is a privilege, I believe, because we love that.

We love tennis in our household.

When players are leaving the US or going onto the court of the US Open, there's like that quote there, that, that reminder.

Because when you look at it as a privilege, it's like almost something like to embrace and look forward to and even expect, then run away from.

What do you do to remind yourself of that in these big moments?

Look, I think being able to appreciate that the situation you are in, a lot of people would love to be in that situation and being grateful about that, right?

Waking up every day and saying, okay, this is a job I love, this is a mission I enjoy and I'm passionate about helping my customers and my team members be better is definitely a privilege.

So it's an.

You have to internalize that.

And even when I played cricket, I knew it's a short lived career.

Even if I played for 10 years, it's finite timeframe.

And you are not gonna be the CEO or an athlete or whatever position you are in for the rest of your life.

So what is.

So you have to be grateful that that's how I've been thinking about every job, every opportunity I get.

There are frustrating days, I'm not gonna deny those.

But generally I've enjoyed and been grateful for every role I've had.

Even the smaller roles as I was growing in my career.

Let me jump in here for the listeners, y'.

All.

If you're not getting what Usman's telling about cricket, he is the Nolan Ryan of US cricket.

Like, if you don't understand, like, this is like Nolan Orion of being one of the most legendary pitchers you know of all time.

That's you and in cricket.

And I'm wondering if you'd be willing to take us into like the biggest game of your career.

The moment where everything you know was at stake and you had to dig deep and then maybe how that moment might translate and what you learn from that, you know, into the SE suite.

There's one game that stands out very clearly is this was in, in Nepal, Kathmandu, Nepal.

We were playing Nepal for the promotion games.

If we win, we get promoted.

If we lose, we get demoted or we stay in the same division.

So.

Wow.

So.

So the stakes were high.

Stakes were very high.

This is like the Ted Lasso moment where like you're going to get relegated.

Like the game you're Going to get relegated into the lower league if you can't.

Exactly.

I thought I was at the peak of my career, but I had a poor warmup game in Nepal and I was dropped for the whole tour.

So I did not play a single game.

Wow.

Whole tour and this.

Now the crunch game comes in.

Get an opportunity to play.

So there was a lot of personal emotions as well.

I believed I was at the top of my game and whether it was fair or unfair, So I felt very angry that I had not been given a chance.

The second was there was a bit I wanted to show that I was at the top of the game.

But on top of that, the third thing that happened, which we as an amateur or semi professional cricket players had not seen, 20,000 people showed up to watch the game.

So cricket in Nepal is a pretty big deal.

So not there.

And you're the away team.

The good news is 20,000 people came to watch.

The bad news is they're all cheering against you.

They're super hostile.

So to give you a sense of pressure's a privilege.

Yeah.

And the interesting thing there was when we ended up winning the game.

So I'll give the punchline first.

The crowd was so hostile that they started.

There were riots and they started throwing and US Embassy had to come in and all that.

Right.

So the crowd was very hostile.

We had never seen 20,000 people watching the game.

And then personally, a lot of personal emotions going on for me, being dropped and now giving the chance.

And then the game was super critical.

So all those things coming together made it a very.

And being in a team made it a very good setup for the showdown.

So going back to the pressure situation, you have to trust your training.

I believed at that time that I was at the top of my game and I trained.

I could have easily thought of, hey, hey.

This is a really one opportunity that I've got in this competition to play.

I could have taken a lot of pressure, but instead I believed in my training and I said, okay, this is what I did.

I believe I'm doing well and I. I'm in.

In the right zone.

So let me just repeat it.

And that's what I did.

And I thought that was one of my best performances, especially under pressure.

But that's.

That event stands out for me.

Yes.

And you took down Nepal.

Congratulations.

Yeah, I. I love that story.

And it does go to show.

I like that idea of trusting your training.

It's so easy to forget that, especially the higher you go, when the stakes are higher.

And that's why?

You see, you know, athletes get tight in those big moments because, like, it's like there's so much at stake.

You see it happen literally in every single sport.

And it's so great to have that, that train.

Like, like, I trust my training.

I have prepared, and I suspect it allows you to maybe more relax in the moment, even though you're, you're on edge to perform.

There's a certain relaxation that comes with that when it comes up for me and listening.

Okay, now you sort of unlocked this level of athletic performance.

And y', all, if you don't believe me, go look at ESPN and look up his name.

You'll see him doing his thing.

But now you've got thousands of people, and in a, in a, in a very fast growing company.

What are you doing with them?

Communicating with them to sort of share this insight in a way that they can apply.

Because a lot of them maybe aren't performing athletic endeavors at this level, maybe never have.

How are you going to get that performance from them?

I take a lot of my leadership and management principles from sports, and I think the same analogies, same principles apply.

One of the things, when I joined Bluebeam, I believe Bluebeam is an exceptional business.

It was doing fantastically well.

It was performing really well as well.

But my challenge to the team was how do we move from the minor leagues to the major leagues?

From being a niche software to be an industry leader, and that by itself was quite powerful.

Obviously, you have to put the roadmap just like any sports team.

If you want to win the super bowl or a competition, you have to do little things to get to the championship.

I think that's exactly the same.

Obviously, the plan looks very different in a software company, but what do the customers want?

And translating back to little things, we have to break it down for an individual to be able to understand that.

So a lot of work goes into breaking.

Yes, it's inspiring vision and a dream, but then breaking it down.

I see it's being no different from winning a championship, because that's the dream or that's a vision.

But then doing things daily in the gym, on the tracks, in the field, and in the preparation rooms to eventually get there.

So I'm a big believer in how you do small things is how you do everything, and that, that's something that translates really well.

And I push the team to, to do things small things really well, and that will eventually translate into big things.

Yeah, I love that.

It really ties back in the preparation because you could, you could have Taken that question, any direction about, hey, playing on the field, doing this during the game.

And you, you went right back to preparation.

Well, how do you get your team ready?

How do you get them?

How do you get them to play at all levels?

While it's all the preparation.

Yeah.

Trust your preparation and being in the planning and then casting division.

One of the interesting stories that we run across and taking this in a slightly different direction is that you cited seeing a moment that I think a lot of.

I think this was a big moment when IBM's Deep Blue be.

Kasparov.

And you cite that, I'm curious, like what?

Like you cite that moment specifically as a pivotal memory.

How old were you at the time?

How did you process that?

And what do you think that that moment triggered for you in terms of possibilities?

To me, I still vividly remember that I was walking out of my room into the living room and I saw the news on TV.

I believe I was in my late teens, 16, 17, something like that.

The news was just, I stopped when I watched and I was so excited.

And, and that's where my love for artificial intelligence started.

And that day, until now, I, I, I am embracing AGI.

I know it's going to come.

And yeah.

Something that, and describe what happened in that, in that, in that chess match that day, everybody.

So IBM Deep Blue beat the world's master chess player, Gary Kasparovich.

I believe he beat him five out of six times and, or clearly he was, he lost.

And he was by far the number one player at that time.

So that to be able to create a sliver of human intelligence through artificially was quite, quite exciting to watch.

And I could, it, it made my head spin in a way.

What else can computers do that can create human intelligence?

And obviously I was too young and by the way, I had very little interest in computer science at that time, so I couldn't.

You're probably playing cricket.

Yes, exactly.

I was playing cricket.

And maybe if this was not connected to sports, I might have, not really.

It might have not caught my attention, given it was connected to sports.

But that's where just as a sport, everybody.

Exactly.

So.

But the, that moment means a lot to me and that's the time where I also fell in love with IBM and I made a decision.

I want to work for IBM when I grow up.

And that's what I did.

So that exact moment had a big impact on me.

Yeah, you never know when those moments are going to come.

But man, was that iconic.

I'm assuming as a teenager that Purely excited you.

Like most teens, it didn't scare the, the, the absolute hell out of you.

Like it probably was the adults in the room.

Probably right.

And I don't know who else to talk to about it because my parents were not technologists.

It was a big deal for me and I don't think I spoke to anyone about it.

It just internalized in a positive way and was quite excited about it.

So between.

So you went to some great schools, between Harvard and Kellogg, a national sports career and building an absolute unicorn, having success with it.

Something usually breaks.

What is the tax you've had to pay the personal tax or professional tax for achieving this level of success?

And was there something that maybe you missed that like, man, I'll never be able to get that back.

Always had that clarity on three things I wanted to do at one time or my three priorities.

One was personal health, work and relationships or family.

Those are the three at this point.

When I was younger it was cricket, work and health.

And I always try to keep a balance and make trade offs between them.

I think what I could have done if I had accelerated, even done more on work or more on cricket or more on something, I might have missed something.

But I've lost a little bit across all three.

Always been within very conscious to say, okay, can I spend a bit more time with my family?

Probably yes, but I'm not spending less or below the threshold that I have done for fitness.

Can I do more for my health, can I do more?

Yes, but it's not below the threshold.

So I've lost a little bit across those three.

Can I do more in my career?

I could work more or do bigger things.

I can make more money probably.

So I've lost a little bit across three.

But one thing that I think I would have liked to do more is more service.

I have a strong public service or social impact board in me and that has taken a back seat, which I want to get back to at some point.

And I don't think I've done enough.

So I've lost a little bit of the tax.

You say in across the three priorities?

I have a little bit, but it's a very conscious trade offs.

What do you do to prioritize when all these things come together at once?

Great question.

Again, if it's a timing issue, let's say work peaks because of some M and A or some special project or some event, then you know you're consciously taking some trade offs for the time being.

But if it becomes sustained away from work, away from Family or can't work out.

One of the barometers I have is if I go to the gym and I'm not able to work out well, that's an indication for me that I'm stressed or something.

And the other barometer is the kids are your family or your parents would tell you you haven't called us in 10 days and then you realize, okay, there's something going on.

Right.

So those are good barometers for, for me to gauge those trade offs.

But if it's a time timing issue, then you say, okay, for the next two months I'm going to be busy with this M and A or this project or something so I won't be able to work out as hard but once I'm done, I'll get back to it.

Or, or these are the events for my kids family that I cannot miss and then I have to attend those.

And clearly articulating that to your worth colleagues, but it gets blurry as you said, right.

It's hard, but you have to make a conscious effort to do so.

Not that I'm doing a perfect job on this, but having that clarity on what the thresholds are and having some indicators that tell you that hey, you're going too far in one or the other direction helps a little bit.

Yeah, I like that so much.

And you really like.

I liked where you started with that.

You say, hey, look, you know, it's about trade offs and a lot of times leaders just try to do everything heads down, trying to go everywhere at one time without acknowledging there you have to make trade offs or otherwise you try to do everything at once and you don't do anything well.

And so by spending time here and there and really consciously designing that can help you have more success there.

And I thought it was interesting you didn't say, hey Ben, I set up guard rails for all these different things.

I'm trying to prioritize.

I'm looking for indicators when things are kind of are going, you know, sort of going or I, I think that's a great way to really pay attention.

So who's calling, who's not calling?

You know, how are you feeling in the gym?

And I think people really, you know, like, like they, they maybe have their workout scheduled and they go do the workout but maybe they're not really paying attention to how it's going.

And maybe instead of just being so dedicated with doing the workout, you don't get a good workout in, maybe that's an indicator that you spend a little more time resting first and prioritizing something else first so when you come back, you can get more bang for your buck.

I mean, I've worked out for an hour and not gotten as good a workout as I had in 20 minutes when I was really on fire, you know, really, really doing a good job.

Yeah.

So it's with the quality time there, too, thinking about your background, y', all, and I.

And there's so many different ways to look at his background.

You had so much success.

So in the early days, my impression is your success came from moving fast, breaking things, learning, scaling extremely quickly and making it happen.

And some people would call that Persona like the pirate.

Right.

Like the old Steve Jobs days, where he was like, he had to, like, erected the pirate flag.

Right.

And they were trying to come up with something really special.

Yeah.

You know, like the Skunk Works model and all that.

And now you're in a completely different place where you're, you know, running a big company.

You got this board, you've got, you know, all these things, and you're sort of in this admiral Persona where you're leading this big ship.

From your perspective, like, what are the voices in your head like, you still more that pirate vibe.

Like, I bet you can't ever really shut that out entirely.

Right.

Where you've got that.

But you got this other, bigger situation that you're driving.

What do you do to silence sort of the pirate thoughts when they come in, or change your.

Change your direction here?

Because I think a lot of leaders would say you're either one kind of leader or you're this other kind of leader.

You seem to be doing both very well and just.

And I'm really drawing out the question here, but what I'm trying to say is, how are you doing to lead in both worlds with such success?

Nobody has asked me that question before, so it's very insightful question and a personal internal conflict that I deal with quite often.

So kudos to you for picking that up and.

Well, thank you very much.

That's why I get paid the big bucks.

So having said that, I think that's.

I.

Three years ago or four years ago, I took some time off to go back to school to really internalize and understand what do I want and what am I good at and what.

I love that I walked out saying I like to innovate and disrupt at scale.

So that's a. I think it's.

It requires disruption and it requires scale.

And I'm quite.

I felt I was quite uniquely positioned to do that.

So what gets Me excited.

And what's great about Bluebeam and Nemechek is it gives me that platform to do so.

So I started my career in a, in a very strong Navy, which was IBM and then bcg, which are, you know, very strong navies, big navies as you were in your analogy.

And then I became a big Navy.

I mean it doesn't get a lot bigger than IBM.

Yeah.

And back in the early 2000s it was the D Army.

Right.

The Navy.

Right.

And then BCG is very structured.

And then I became an entrepreneur and Spark cognition is one.

But I also did a couple other startups.

But what I really enjoy is doing innovation at scale.

And that's that means how do we disrupt at scale?

We try to disrupt the industry.

And one of these inspirations I've gotten is from this book called Dreams and Details which is written by former SAP CEO is about how do you transform the business from a position of strength and that requires disrupting or taking a complete pivot from where you are to a new paradigm while you're doing really well.

And that's who I become.

I want to transform businesses, disrupting large businesses while they're in a position of strength.

And that's something that I really enjoy.

Which marries both the pirate like attitude with the admiral like skills.

And my effort is to build an ambidextrous organization which is which 90% of the focus is on building the regular stuff, shipping, serving customers day to day and then 10 to 20% of the organization bandwidth looking at how to disrupt.

So using that pirate mindset for part of the organization to find those opportunities.

And you will see in 2026, Bluebeam will bring to market some of the disruptive ideas, especially in artificial intelligence.

And that's been the focus of my tenure has been make sure we continue to deliver how we're delivering, what has made us successful, bring rigor, discipline, Navy like discipline to them, but while using 10 to 20% of our bandwidth to continue to be a pirate and then bring all of it together.

And that's something that I really enjoy and able to marry both my pilot like attitude with Admiral like training.

I love it.

Well, thank you for rolling with this analogy so well with Admiral and pirate thing.

Are you looking to increase sales, grow your brand and share your leadership message?

Then check out our business podcast program.

Each week more people listen to podcasts than have Netflix accounts and one third of the US population listens to podcasts regularly.

So your customers and teams or already listening to podcasts, it should be yours.

Discover Our five step profitable podcast framework and what results you can expect for your company by setting up a 20 minute call with my team@BenLeads.com schedule.

That's BenLeads.com schedule.

So my question is, living on a pirate ship is a lot different than living on a fancy Navy galleon, right?

So how are you?

Like, how are you?

What's different for how you lead the 80% of the company, 90% of the company.

That's sort of driving Blue Beam's overall vision.

And everyone knows it.

You've got strong market position versus how you're leading the pirate group.

And I'm really thinking about Apple.

You know, when Steve Jobs, like took the group literally outside of the company, created their own, erected their pirate flag over on this other building, truly come up with some of the greatest innovations in modern technology.

Lockheed Martin set up their Skunk works to really innovate because it's hard, because when you're in a position of strength, it's hard to have a mindset of the disruptor.

So how do you leave those groups differently?

Yeah, look, I think it's very tough.

But what I like about Bluebeam, that people at Bluebeam are very innovative.

The birth of Bluebeam was to disrupt the industry.

So the DNA, it used to be a startup 20 years ago and the founder of Nemechek is also a disruptor.

So the DNA of the company has that destruction in it.

So when you give them a platform to think disruptly, they have jumped on that opportunity.

And then my job as a leader is to find the blind spots where they can't see things and then bringing external help to help them see some of the blind spots.

But in general, I found Bluebeam to be a great place where if you challenge them to a bigger vision or a disruptive vision, they have adopted and said, okay, we'll come up with it.

And one thing that works in my favor is I might challenge the team in terms of the vision, but I'm not technically deep anymore or I'm from the construction industry to come up with an exact thing.

So I give the team enough autonomy by default because I don't have the expertise, let them decide what that disruptive vision looks like.

So they have that autonomy.

Just like the skunk works or being outside, but at the same time not divorcing them completely from the existing organization, where some of the learnings that happen outside of the organization can't come in and their antibodies fighting each other.

We are trying to build a little bit of the skunk Works with Bluebeam Labs within Bluebeam, not outside, but it's somewhat protected.

Give them the autonomy to try new things.

Also bringing a lot of startups from outside to widen our aperture, but still staying within, within the realm.

So if there is a good idea, it can easily be incorporated into the mainstream business.

All right, listen, I love that.

So let's, let's keep riding in the innovation disruption direction.

So for those of you, we haven't really talked about Bluebeam yet, but they, they, they dominate, right?

The, the digital world for architecture, engineering and construction industries, right?

This, this is big.

However, I have read, and you can, you can fact check me on this, that only 11% of those companies consider themselves to be fully digital.

In other words, these, these people working in these industries love good old paper and physical signatures.

So even if you're in there, right, they're not fully digitized.

You know, like a lot of industries are going in here.

So it's kind of an old school industry.

So how are you thinking about, you know, working with your people?

Because like one, you want to sell into these companies as most CEOs would, right, to grow your footprint, but if they don't buy in on digital wholeheartedly, you're just gonna sort of go up against this, this brick wall of belief that AI is dangerous.

AI is not gonna help us, it's gonna replace my job.

Like you're not just, it's not just a proof of your product.

You're up against a belief system in a lot of these ways.

So how are you going about as a leader talking to your teams about this and helping them work on belief systems, not just sales processes.

When the, as I mentioned, right when Bluebeam came into existence, we were disrupting digital or the paper workflows and how paper was done.

And fast forward 23 years, we have eliminated enough paper from the industry to cover Atlantic five times over.

Okay, yes, that's perspective.

While the digitization is still not to the level where it is in financial services or healthcare, digitization has taken off significantly thanks to Bluebeam and many other digital products as well.

But one of the things that made Bluebeam successful is a user centric innovation and philosophy.

So we took the industry with us and it was not, hey, this is a great idea and adopt it or leave it.

We were innovating at scale, at speed with the community, with the industry.

And this philosophy, meet the customers where they are and take them into the future has served us really well and we engaged the community.

What Bluebeam Superpower was and is that taking a requirement from an industry and turning, translating that into software that can be used by millions of users.

So customers would say, hey, what about this feature?

I can't do X or I can't do Y, and then say, okay, in software, if he did this.

And that principle doesn't change with AI, that underlying DNA of working with the community and, and understanding what problems they're trying to solve and what would be the business impact, and then working very closely in a virtuous loop to come up with new features.

And that's exactly what we're doing with AI.

What we have become as a DNA, what I call dual athlete.

So we are not just AI or digital experts.

We understand construction fairly well as well.

So we play both sports of construction and design as well as AI and tech.

And being able to do both allows us to have more credibility with our users to take them into the future.

So completely agree.

This is not just a sales process, by the way.

Bluebeam, 10 years, until 10 years ago, had a philosophy.

We didn't believe in sales.

We had no sales team.

And the idea was we want to work with the community, work with the users to build a product that sells itself.

And that philosophy has worked really well.

And I think it's not going to be any different for AI as well.

We're going to build something with the community, with the users that they want to use and they would like to use.

Yes, obviously we can't get 100% of the users to get behind something that's never going to happen, but if we can work with the majority of them to adopt AI, that would be a big win.

Yeah, I like that.

You're like, yeah, you think the value of our companies are software, but it's really how our people stand at the intersection of the technology and the industry.

And it's almost like you're like the translators between construction and tech.

If you asked our founding member, Don Jacob, who's now the Chief Innovation officer, he would say Bluebeam is a Rosetta Stone.

Rosetta stone, that's.

Yeah.

Which is which.

Which those people who were like, what is Rosetta Stone?

Right.

It's the ultimate language trans.

It's the oldest language translator tablets ever found.

Right.

That translated languages around the world.

And if you're the Rosetta Stone between those two, those three, I mean, that's a really important value add.

I love that.

Now, I've read that you, Bluebeam is, is saving people like 500 to A, A thousand hours of work time or something like that, or like like through their process improvements.

And the twist on this is when you use your systems in AI to save them all this time, are they just filling it is your expectation they're going to fill this with just more work?

Are they going to take off on Fridays?

I mean that's a lot of time.

And I'm curious from your perspective and your as a CEO with AI, is AI just making us, just letting us do more work or is there something almost like a higher human calling to what all can happen for us here?

It's a very deep question.

It is all of the above, right?

I think there are so many, especially in construction, there are so many low hanging fruit, so many manual things that shouldn't be done by human beings today.

It takes a lot of time to do simple paperwork so they can submit little things and correct errors.

And the goal of AI for us is to solve for those problems and alleviate the pain points for existing user base.

So that gives them some extra time and they can focus more on things that require more higher power skills and capabilities.

Look, there's a massive shortage of skilled labor in construction and that is hindering our customers to do more projects more effectively.

So I don't think people would be able to take Fridays off yet.

So I think that allows them to do the quality of the work goes up, the companies will be able to make more money and bid on more projects and have better outcomes.

So that's goal number one.

Goal number two is to be able to make a junior craftsman or woman to perform at a much higher level.

AI will allow us to do so, so it will accelerate the capabilities and that will also give us more, fewer mistakes, more effectiveness, not just about extra hours.

So that's another one.

Eventually when AI becomes so powerful that it does free up enough time, I think that's a question that we all have to think about is what would be the role of human beings in the society?

Do we have a higher calling?

Do we, do we do something different?

I think we are ways away from that type of society.

In my opinion that's probably not in our lifetimes, probably not even in our kids lifetime.

While AI is very powerful today, it's pretty nascent still.

And while we are hopeful for step changes in AI to get us to more powerful capabilities, there's still a long way to go before that happens.

But then I think to your point, I think that those questions that governments and as a society we have to think about how the human role changes.

But the good news is that society and civilizations have seen that when industrial revolution happened we had to go through similar changes and philosophical challenges.

So I'm pretty optimistic that as a society we'll come on top of it.

But that will be challenging and we'll have to rethink the way we do things today.

We're almost out of time here.

I've got a few rapid fires for you.

Sure.

What's the one truth about leadership that you've learned that you think many people would disagree with you on?

I don't know if people would disagree, but I think the toughest thing is not just inspiring people, but it's also disappointing them.

So I believe in empathetic leadership but that's the ability to understand people and how they're coming, doing their work, how they experience it.

And sometimes hard decisions are made and if you have too much empathy, it hurts.

So I think that's anytime you're pushing for a change there will be some disappointment.

And being clear and disappointing some people is a hard 1.

If 10 year old Usman saw you today, what do you think he'd be most proud of and what do you think he might be a little bit disappointed by?

I think about that question a lot.

So a 10 year old and an 80 year old of myself.

So I think, I think about that question quite a bit.

I think two things that I would be very proud of as a 10 year old I always had an ambition to get the best education I can and I think I have achieved that to the best of my ability.

And the second is I had belief as a kid.

I don't know why, but there were only two ways to contribute to society.

One was through technology and R and D. The second was through sports and the fact that I'm still in technology and innovation is definitely something that a 10 year old would be of myself would be quite happy with.

Something that I would be disappointed or partly disappointed.

I would have liked to play cricket for at a even more higher level as US cricket was not in the major leagues.

So that's one.

And the second is, as I mentioned, I'm late for service and in service and social impact something I would want to do.

So those would be slight disappointments but I think education and tech and innovation would be something I'm proud of.

Man, your self awareness is strong my friend and I feel like your ability to look at yourself as a leader is vital.

Right.

Being able to put that mirror up to yourself and help you grow and it sounds like it has propelled you through quite a growth journey and I cannot wait to see what's next for you as well as your team.

Man over thanks for joining us on Lead the Team, Usman man Thank you.

I'm grateful that I have a great team that's supporting me, and it's been a great journey and great talking to you as well.

So thank you for the opportunity.

I look forward to our future interactions.

Want to boost your productivity and decision making?

Get vital insights from each episode delivered directly to your inbox.

A great resource whether you've listened to the episode or not.

Go to benfanning.com insight.