>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and it's ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to Las Vegas, as thCUBE continues our coverage here of Dell Technologies World 2018. So glad to have you along here for our Day Three coverage. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls. It's now a pleasure to welcome David Comroe with us. David is the Senior Director of Client Technology Services at the Wharton School of Business, at the University of Pennsylvania. David, thanks for being with us. >> No problem. Glad to be here. >> Thank for sharing your time with us. First off let's just talk about, about the scope of your work. Again, you take care of all the obviously IT needs for the largest business school faculty in the world. Right? No pressure on you there. But talk about day to day, those responsibilities. >> As you mentioned my title is Senior Director for Client Technology Services. I'm essentially responsible for providing the support and services to four very distinct user groups that we happen to have at a university. That's of course our wonderful faculty, our staff that make everything happen, our incredible students, and of course our alumni group, which is about 100,000 people strong at this point. Just Wharton alums that are again, very important. Give back to the school. Provide mentorship and job opportunities for our graduates. Again very distinct needs for each of those four groups. We provide a high quality, and all the buzzwords. You know, secure, safe, efficient, highly available services to these groups. That's kind of what I do all day. >> One of the cool things, I love acronyms. Not that this industry doesn't have a few, as you know Stu. But WHOOPPEE. I absolutely love making whoopie. But not what you might think. But walk us through that and what it stands for, and what you did in it. It really was groundbreaking. >> You're putting me on the spot with this one. So WHOOPPEE is the Wharton, let's see if I can get this, Online Ordinal Peer Performance Evaluation Engine. One of our incredible faculty, Pete Fader, came up with this idea. It's no secret that grading is kind of bad. Faculty grading students. There's all kinds of challenges. >> It's tedious. >> Well it's tedious. There's inherit biases when you're, the larger the class. And when you have to grade 80 papers, or 100 papers or 200 papers. It's really hard to keep consistency across when your grading paper one through paper 100 through paper 200. Plus when you start divvying up the work between TA's and different faculty teaching the same class. Again fraught with bias. A number of people, again Pet Fader's idea, to come up with basically an algorithm that helps the grading process. And basically what happens is, is students are grading themselves. What we'll do is we'll give them five papers or five projects to grade. And they don't actually grade. All they have to do is rank it. You know, this is the best one. This is number one. This is the worst one. This is number five. And then there's this magic behind the scenes that that runs in our local infrastructure, in our cloud infrastructure. That basically runs an algorithm. And that algorithm is the secret sauce that some of our statistical geniuses at the Wharton school, of which we have many, came up with. And it has all kinds of cool features. You can say, well this batch of five papers might be harder. I might have the five best papers in the class. That's not fair. They still have to rank one the worst. You know, five. You can't say these two are the best. And this one's third. You actually, the students have to read the paper, and just rank it. I like this one the best. I like second, third, fourth, fifth. The algorithm takes into account difficulty of batches of papers. You could literally have the five best or the five worst papers in the class. And that's still going to provide meaningful data to the algorithm. So when you have 50, 100, 500 batches of five. They all start to figure it out. And the algorithm will actually figure out what the best paper is in the class. And what the maybe again at the Wharton. But not so great, greatest paper in the class. >> But not the worst. Just not so great. Again cause our students are brilliant. It basically goes on the fact that if you do a quality paper. If the algorithm says you're the best. Your weight means more than someone who might not have done such a good job on the paper. And you're considered a better grader. And it's weighted towards the better graders. There's all kinds of really cool stuff in there that we think is going to change... Get rid of some of that bias that I spoke about before. And help provide. And the data we've seen is, frankly the students like doing it. They don't like the additional work involved with it. We're seeing some empirical evidence, and some in person interviews. That they're learning more. They're reading five other student's papers. They're getting five other perspectives. They're saying, hey I didn't think about that. Or even, hey they're all wrong here. My paper was much better than theirs. But again that doesn't necessarily matter when we start running the ranks. And we're getting much better, much better grading, which is hard to quantify, but the folks that are on the academic team that are doing that, have some really great data. With the data. Yup, mm-hm. >> David, one of the themes we keep hearing in this show is about transformation. Is change happening? You're talking about IT, how it's working with the business more and more. Bring us inside university life in general and specifically. You work with one of the ancient eight. How does cutting edge technology fit in with - >> That's really interesting. I do have a couple thoughts on that. My boss has a picture in his office, of a Penn classroom from I think it's like 1908 or 1910. And there's literally a bunch of students sitting around. There's a faculty member standing up. And there's a candle-powered projector, which I didn't know is a thing but it's in the picture, projecting an image onto the wall. From over 100 years ago. What's different about our classrooms today? Everything's the same, except the projector's now in LED. Or a L3D projector. We still got people sitting around the room, standing up. I think what we're seeing now in probably the previous ten years from now and to the next ten years is education's probably going to change more in those 20 years than it has in 2,000 years since Socrates was standing around with a stone tablet or whatever they were doing. Things like globalization, online courses, the MOOC space, where Wharton is huge in the MOOC space. Wharton online programs. Where students can take, not even students, anybody! If you're in China or Africa or South America. You can take an introduction to Wharton, introduction to marketing class from a Wharton professor for free. I mean we're a business school. We sell some of that content as well. But you can get verified certificates. We're seeing a lot of stuff change. The students today expect more. We can get into, we won't though, we can get into the whole millennial issue and short attention span and all that kind of stuff. Students today expect their faculty to be technology savvy. They expect content to be online. They expect to use devices. The expect to use... We got tablets, and laptops and phones. They want to be able to consume this content on multiple devices. We're seeing significant transformations in education. Which is, hasn't necessarily changed much in 2,000 years. Or even 200 years, right? So there's that. Speaking specifically about Wharton, one of the things I really thought is interesting, is I've been there 13 years now. When I first started working there, I'm going to make some generalizations here, a lot of our student wanted to go work in iBanking. They wanted to go work for the big banks. They wanted to go work for Goldman Sachs and things like that. In the last five, seven, ten years ago. They wanted to create their own company. Start up their own company. Be entrepreneurial. Have their app. Have their their big idea. Start the next whatever dot com. And be successful that way. Now in the last two or three, four years. We're seeing a lot of our students analytics. We're putting analytics with everything. Companies, businesses, organizations, no matter what you are, we have huge amounts of data available. How can we make meaningful decisions based on that data? Our dean. I guess I can't call him our new dean. He's been there three or four years at this point. Really wants to position Wharton as the analytics school. Every company in the world is trying to hire these kinds of people. There just frankly aren't enough of them out there. The thing we're trying to teach our students is, or one of the many things, is how to analyze data. How to make meaningful decisions based on that data. And of course when you have more data, you need more storage. You need more infrastructure. You need more processing. All the stuff that you know, Dell and Nutanix are providing us, with their hyper convergence infrastructure. Their cloud offerings. Whether private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud. All that kind of stuff is... Positioning us as the analytics school requires a significant amount of technology on the backend. And again working with our trusted partners like Dell and Nutanix we can provide that seamlessly in the backend. They don't necessarily know, is it in our data center? Is it in the cloud? And they don't care. They shouldn't care. But as they're collecting huge amounts of data, running these reports, and creating it, and going back to creating these algorithms that do incredible things. And these secret sauces. We need the infrastructure to run that kind of stuff. That's I think one of the greatest things that Wharton Computing provides the Wharton School of Business, and their business, which is creating and disseminating knowledge. >> David, I think you've encapsulated something that I've been hearing from lot's of users over the last year or so. The vendors sometimes, it's private, it's hybrid, it's public. From the user standpoint it's like, no well we have a cloud strategy that we're working on. Can you bring us inside a little bit? How did you get to where you are today? How do you choose who you're partnering with? What leads to some of those decisions? >> I love the word partner. I hate the word vendor. One of the great things about working at Wharton is, is we get to have these awesome partners. I want someone... When we're going to make an IT spend, we want someone who cares about our business. We don't want somebody who just, will come in, give you a dog and pony show, write us a check. And when you want more stuff call us. We want folks that are going to provide the support. You know, pre-sales during installation. Post-sales when they're coming out with new features. We want them to be invested in what we do. I can truly say that Nutanix is a fantastic partner of ours. Dell-Nutanix are great partners. Dell is a great partner of Wharton and Penn as well. That's what we really look for, is someone who is willing to invest their time, their smart people. Tell us about the new features and functionality that are coming out. Call on us and say, hey how are thing going? It's not just the little things. But those little things really mean a lot to us as we're picking an IT partner. Because when you're working for the best business school in the world. Having the best students, the brightest faculty, the best, hardest working staff. We want to provide them a very, very high quality IT support. We need high quality partners. And not just vendors who care about the transaction. That's really the bottom line for us. When we're choosing our partners. >> When you were talking about analytics, and Wharton being the school of data analytics. What are your measuring sticks? In terms of what are you looking at? You're talking about four very separate groups of constituencies. What are you doing to evaluate your performance? And what's critical? >> I think it all comes down to, what do our business units think about us? We're a service organization. Almost all IT shops are. If the business units aren't successful, they don't need an IT department. If we're not providing them high quality IT services, we're not going to get the best faculty. We're not going to get the brightest students. We're not going to get the alumni engagement. They want to be wowed by their IT support. That's a big part of my job, is providing that quality of support. Helping train. Technology breaks, right? How do you deal with the problem? Nobody runs at rock solid 100% infrastructure. Murphy's Law always comes into play. Problems always happen. How do you deal with the cracks in the armor as they come off? I think that's what our business units want. I think we're fortunate that we're computing. Our team, our staff, our CIO. My colleagues, my peers, my team. Our team, right? They're very well thought of, hopefully, by our clients. And that's how we're measured is by their success. We want to help them, empower them to do their job at the highest level. We are playing in pretty rare air, when it comes to the faculty, staff, students and alumni, that we attract to Penn and Wharton. We want to keep doing that. One of the things I love best, and I tell our wonderful faculty when we meet with them, is don't tell me we did a great job. Here's what I want you to tell me. I want you to say, three years ago I was at, I'm not going to name drop schools, but I was at this school and I asked them to do this thing, that you said, sure, no problem to. And they couldn't do it, wouldn't do it, didn't have the ability, the infrastructure in place to do that. But you guys with a smile on your face just made it happen. Stuff like WHOOPPEE. Stuff like the analytics stuff. All the, tying it back to why we're here today, is our partners and our technology partners that help us provide scalable, flexible solutions. That's how we're measured. >> Higher learning. >> Higher learning, absolutely. >> David, thanks for being with us. >> No problem, it was great. >> David Comroe from the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. Back with more live coverage here from Dell Technologies World 2018. Right after this break. You're watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE we're in our Palo Alto studio, it's still 2020, we're still gettin' through the COVID crisis and we're still reaching out to our community really to talk to leaders who have lead through difficult times, led through transitions, and really go out to the experts and get some advice from people who have been around the block a few times, and I'm really, really excited to have one of my all time favorite business executives joining us, I haven't talked to him in years and years and almost decades, David Pottruck is joining us, he is formerly the CEO of Schwab, how he kind of made his name, now he's an author, he's teaching at the Wharton School, he's a New York Times best selling author and he's also the chairman of Red Eagle Ventures, David, great to see you. >> Thanks, Jeff, it's good to be with you today. >> Absolutely, so before we get in, just to check in, how are you doing, how are you gettin' through 2020, I can't believe we're already on the backside of this crazy year. >> Well, it's been a pretty challenging year as you know, and we've seen companies learn to operate in a virtual world. Zoom has been one of the huge beneficiaries, but technology companies in general, the whole FAANG group of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and such, they've all benefited from people getting more virtual, and one of the non profits I'm involved with sends out videos to schools on social and emotional learning and that's seen a big uptick. So, the world is changing, and changing in very substantial ways, and I don't think we'll ever go back to the way it was in total, we will go back to having face to face meetings, of course, but I do think that operating virtually and doing more things remotely, remote business meetings over zoom are going to be a fixed part of the future, >> Right, right. >> At least in my opinion. >> So, the reason I wanted to reach out to you is you've managed through some crazy transitions and some crazy disruptions back in the day and for a lot of the young people that don't remember, there was a time before we did everything online. There was a time where you had a broker and you called him on the phone and you paid a pretty big price based on a percentage of the transactions. You were at Schwab in the late 90s when this new thing called the internet came along, and these new things called internet only businesses to compete with you, I wonder if you can kind of take us back as you started to see some of these new kinds of threats, coming not necessarily from people that you recognize from up and down the street, but people who are coming over horizons that you've never ever seen before. And how did you start to get a feel for hmm, the landscapes a changin'. >> You know it's really funny to look back that there actually was a day when something called the internet didn't exist. And, there was no connectivity, there was no internet. We were, of course, at that time a telephone based brokerage firm, what used to be called discount brokers. We don't use that phrase very much anymore at Schwab, but, we were a telephone based discount broker, and the internet popped up and started becoming commercialized, and some online only brokerage firms popped up. And these firms didn't have call centers, they didn't have branch offices, if you wanted to do a trade you did it over your computer, online, and the pricing was dramatically less. To give you some idea, to buy 100 shares of IBM, Merrill Lynch would have charged you $250, for that one trade, Schwab would have charged you $80 and E-Trade would have charged you $25. So, we were much cheaper than Merrill Lynch, but E-Trade was much cheaper than us. So, we were, at the time, we were worried about is there enough security on the internet, can we do trades. We have a reputation to protect, a brand new company they don't have a reputation to protect, we have customer security, we have a reputation to protect. Well, we started doing online trades, and the way we did it was we gave all of our customers a 20% discount on our normal pricing, so instead of charging 80-something dollars, you paid something like $60. So, it was a nice discount, customers liked it, they were doing online trades, and we're seeing that is just taking off, it's getting huge, and we're getting great press, the analysts love it, Wall Street loves it, we're a public company and it's going great, but of course at the same time I'm getting, a basket full of letters and emails from our customers saying "why can't you do trades for $25 like E-Trade? Why are they able to do an online trade for $25 and you're charging $65? I thought you stood for value, I thought you guys wanted to be the best value for the money." So, I'm in this dilemma where Wall Street doesn't see these letters, they don't get reported, I see them, and there dozens and then hundreds, and then thousands. >> Wow. >> We had millions of customers, so to get a thousand letters or emails in a month that's very possible. And so I go to Chuck with this and I said you know, I think we need to make a change because no great company was built on the back of unhappy customers. >> Right, right. But you know, it's so funny, not funny, I'm sure it was a huge challenge in the moment, but you know, Clayton Christensen's another one of my favorite business leaders and why I like him so much, and rest in peace he passed earlier this year, is his very simple statement in "The Innovator's Dilemma" that smart people making sound business decisions based on their customer feedback will always miss discontinuous change. You were right in the middle of this thing and you had to get discontinuous change and it's funny, you've mentioned quite a bit in some of your other conversations about looking for faint signals, well this was not a faint signal, this was pretty much, sounds like came up and banged you over the head. So, how do you make and convince the rest of the people of the team that this is kind of a short-term pain but it's a long-term gain, really thinking about this long-term relationship with our customers, even though it's going to cost us on a per transaction basis in the short-term. >> Well, I had our financial staff run some models, and show me what would be the impact if we reduced our pricing from 60 something dollars a trade to $29 a trade, and the assumption of more and more trades moving to the internet. We also had a model into that the fact that people trade a little more when prices go down, costs go down cause I don't have the cost of someone answering the telephone, so there were some benefits, and I had to run the math to understand how long would it take us to go through the trough to get to the other side. A big important part of this is modeling the numbers. You don't just make this decision as a public company and just hope for the best >> Jeff: Right. >> You need to model it out, you need to run math and say how long will it take, what do we have to assume, what do we need to do, what costs do we need to cut, how are we going to protect ourselves as best as we can? And we knew that the math said that our profitability will go down 25% when we make this change of internet pricing, and we expected that Wall Street would be so upset, because they didn't see this coming, no analyst saw this coming cause they don't know about complaint letters I'm getting, so, analysts would be upset and the stock would go down 40%, going to your board and telling them you want approval for a 25% reduction in profits and a 40% reduction in your stock price is not what you want to do as a CEO, you don't want to go to your board with that and when they ask you, well how sure are you that we're going to climb out of this, you say it's going to take 18 months, what if it takes three years, you know, I was, I didn't see the choice we had, honestly, in my heart, you don't build a great company with an increasing number of unhappy customers. I didn't think we had a choice, and Clayton Christensen was one of the consultants that I used to help me think all this through because it was really hard to make this change, Jeff, because we were doing so well. >> Right. >> Ostensibly, we were killing it. >> Right, so it's interesting, I wonder if you could contrast it to what's happening say now with COVID, right, it was this, didn't sneak up on anyone, it was a really kind of a light switch moment in mid-March where suddenly everyone has to work from home, all your digital transformation initiatives are now put on fast forward, but we still have this situation where there's a variety of potential outcomes and timing that's really hard to gauge, so when you're thinking about managing through change within perfect information and you almost have kind of will we go back to normal, will we stay where we are or some spectrum in between, how do you help people think about how they should come up with contingency plans and think about managing through a number of options with imperfect information and really kind of no clear line, you said you had an 18 month ROI that the analytics point to, we're not really sure how long this thing is going to go and what it's going to look like when we get to the other side. >> Well, I think there's two issues there, one of them is how we get through this pandemic period. Until we get to, there's three things we need, we need inexpensive testing that is not done by a professional that we can do at home to see if we're safe. That's number one. Number two, we need a treatment that helps us get through this and get to the other side without dying, we need the fatality rate to even drop further. And number three we need a vaccine. So those are the three things that we need, that the world is working on all three of those, and my guess is that in the first half of 2021 we will have all three of those, we'll have all three of those and this will be a thing, basically, a thing of the past. >> Jeff: Right. >> So, but I don't think the world goes back, to exactly the way it was. People have learned they can have very effective meetings without everybody flying to Chicago, or New York, or Las Angeles, they can do it over Zoom, that doesn't mean meetings go away, but I think they're going to go down in numbers and more online things are going to happen. More people are going to be working from home at least part of the week. It's going to be different. >> Yeah. >> Those CEO's who sit in a somewhat of an ivory tower and get numbers fed to them from their financial staff, and they're not out talking to customers directly, people look at that as anecdotal information, I think it's more important than that, I think you need to see the passion behind the voice and the eyeballs of some of your best customers to understand what's going on with them, and a lot of CEO's don't actually do that. >> Right. You've made a really interesting comment in another interview that you did earlier, and you talked about the high gain questions. And one of the challenges of all CEO's is nobody wants to be the one that tells his CEO bad news, whether that be someone on your staff, whether that be some lower level person who's on the front lines and really knows there's some broken things, or whether it's a good customer as you said and kind of a social setting, how you doin', oh we love you, blah blah blah. But as a CEO you really have stressed that that is really some important hard to find, and hard to filter information up to the executive suite, so what were some of the tips and tricks you used to make sure that people either A. weren't afraid to tell you bad news, and B. that you could kind of go out and sniff it out a little bit more creatively than just kind of waiting for it to come through in the weekly reports. >> Well, obviously, you know, I think all kinds of executives get out and they talk to their customers on a regular basis, they're out and they're talking to them, the problem with those kind of discussions are no one wants to be disrespectful, people want to be nice in those meetings by and large, and you ask questions "how are we doing" "oh you guys are doing great", meanwhile the guy who tells you you're doing great is also looking at some newer technology that might replace you. (laughs) So that kind of question doesn't get you very far. So what we used to do, to be quite specific, is that we used to do a monthly luncheon where I had 12 of my mostly top executives but some people a level or two down, 12 Schwab people with 24 customers. And so they were tables of six, two of us, four customers, and we had a theme that we would talk through and the themes were always around things of, if you had to pick out three things we don't do well, what would they be? Give the customer permission to be comfortable being critical. What are the three things that you've heard about our customers, our competitors doing, that are better than us? What are the things that we need to change to make you even more delighted? You need to ask those kinds of high gain questions where there's no polite answer, the customer is permitted and given the opportunity to answer in a truthful and critical fashion. >> That's a great lesson, as you said give them permission and give them the format and the forum to say some of those things so that you get some of that information. Another great leadership principle that you shared many times, I want to dig into a little bit is kind of motivation verses inspiration. And that those are often confused, but very different concepts in the way that you lead people. I wonder if you can dig in a little bit on your philosophy on those two things. >> Sure, you know it's funny, those terms motivation and inspiration are used almost interchangeably as if they're the same thing. And they're not. Motivation is fundamental in business, and it's the exchange of behaviors for rewards. I was a psychology major in college, this was one of the things we learned about the exchange of behaviors for rewards and that's motivation. Inspiration on the other hand, is the effort to make people want to do something for, not for rewards that are tangible, but to be part of something great. We want you to be part of a movement, we want you to be part of something special, something that's going to change the world for the better and trying to get your employees to buy into this notion that we are on a mission and that mission is to make the world a somewhat better place, it doesn't mean we don't make money, of course we make money, but we're also out for more than a financial bottom line, we're out for a bottom line that's great for customers and maybe pretty great for employees as well. >> So it's interesting, cause you've seen 'em right, you've been in finance for ever, it's always about the shareholders, you've talked about the stock price a number of times in terms of a measure, but it seems more purposed led or purpose forward organizations now are more appealing to the younger generation, I think the search for a little bit more meaning in our day to day job and what that company is all about seems to have elevated over the last several years and taken a higher role in what they used to call triple line accounting, is it not only your shareholders who always are at the top of the list and have been traditionally, but your customers, your employee, and more and more your community and even the environment. Have you seen the swing towards, it's not just about shareholder value? >> Well, not on Wall Street. (laughs) I think, Wall Street is about money, and the people who go to work on Wall Street, and the way Wall Street operates, it's measured in dollars and cents and share price and profits and distributions to private equity partners and so forth, it's a numbers game and it is a profit game on Wall Street, we should be honest about that, it is what it is. >> Jeff: Sure. >> And, I have yet to see the Wall Street firm that is talking about triple bottom lines cause that just doesn't happen very much on Wall Street, it doesn't happen from my perspective, it almost doesn't happen at all. But there are other companies where they do talk about a more triple bottom line, and I think as a leader if you want to be that kind of company and you want to be that kind of leader you have to be comfortable talking about that, and not feel embarrassed by it, not feel that oh, that's too airy fairy, that's too goody two shoes. If you really believe that our goal is to have a triple bottom line, profitability, great for employees, and great for customers and the world at large, then as a leader you need to talk about that. You need to be willing to stand up and have those kinds of conversations and let yourself be challenged by perhaps the press, employees, shareholders, who think that that's not a good strategy. I believe that in many cases that's a great strategy because on a long-term basis you don't want every employee in your company, and all of your senior executives to basically be up for sale, that if a bigger job comes in with a bigger compensation, they're out the door. You're looking for loyalty, you're looking for buy in, for participation, for wanting to give every bit of themselves for the mission of the company. And as the CEO, if you want to take that path, you got to be willing to put yourself out there and talk about it and suffer the slings and arrows from those who don't believe that that's the best path for the company. >> Right, right. Well and that's another thing that you've talked about quite often, is really that the company feeds off the passion of the CEO, and the CEO has to have that passion because they're lookin', they're watchin', they're lookin' at your moves, they're lookin' at what you say, they're lookin' at your body language, they're lookin' at everything that you do. And I think within the context of these transitions and these difficult times, you have another great line that you've used a number of times, which is: "You need to have a perception of momentum." I love that line, so everyone needs to think that we're on the right path, we're not there yet, I feel it, he looks like he feels it, he looks like he's confident, so now I'm confident and I'm going to jump in and help be part of this change process. You've seen that time and time. >> Well, momentum is a tricky thing, you can have momentum and not have the perception of momentum. Because if you're doing a turn around, what often happens is in the early stages of the turn around, the numbers start to change but they're small, and you really haven't seen, it's not as steep. The turn around doesn't go steep, the turn around goes and builds slowly. And, what you need to be measuring in the beginning, are kind of the inputs and behaviors rather than the outputs, sales and profits. Those take longer. But you need to build belief, you need to build buy in, because it can take a long time before things start getting better and you don't want your best people to wonder whether this is the right move, should I be looking for another job, so, you have to build the perception of momentum even as you're building the reality of momentum. >> Right, right. So another thing we cover a lot of tech conferences, obviously, Cloud and AI, machine learning are hot things. But, you know, it always goes back to the big three. It's the technology, okay, but it's also people, and more importantly I think that gets left out is process. So, when you're thinking about, you know you're management is, and again, especially through a transition or a difficult time or some unknown and choppy waters, how do you think about those three, prioritizing those three and organizing those three between people, process and technology? >> Okay, well, you know always looking for technology that can be implemented to give you productivity, better customer service, you need to be monitoring what you're competitors are doing, and be looking out, sometimes at the bleeding edge, where you don't need to implement those kinds of changes right away, but you need to know where you want to go down the road, so you have some sense of that. As far as process goes, your processes are both a strength and a weakness because the strength of how well you run your processes today is also how hard they're going to be to change tomorrow. You know, companies are built for predictability, reliability, risk minimization, and all of your processes are built for those things. But those are also the things that are the opposite of big breakthrough changes. So you need to be thinking about, all right, are we strengthening our processes but also, if we have a change coming that's going to require a change of some of those processes, how is that going to get in our way and how are we going to get past that? >> Jeff: Right. >> I've left people for the last because to me that's the heart and soul of a successful executive. One person never gets everything done, it's all about the quality of your team. You've got to be a recruiter, you've got to be always on the look out for new talent that can help your company, and you've got to be thinking about how you're going to recruit that talent. You have to be a magnet for talent. When I sit on boards and I talk to the CEOs, I ask them, what are you doing to be a magnet for talent? What does that mean? What are you doing for great people to want to work for you? For you, and your company, what are you doing, how are you reinvesting in people, how are you putting time and energy in their professional development, in their growth? How are you getting to know them? How are you understanding their ambitions, their hopes and desires for the future? How much time and effort do you spend on that? And that's all part of having people not leave, everyone, in a way you can look at the world and think everyone is for sale. But you want people that are not for sale, that are committed to you and committed to the mission and in today's world where everything seems so fluid, I know my ideas about this probably seem very old and perhaps out of date, but I still believe in them with all my heart, that you want people that are committed to you and what we are accomplishing together. And you have to be reinforcing that with your words, and even more importantly with your actions. >> Yeah, I think it goes back to your inspiration, people are much more motivated by inspiration than just collecting a paycheck or getting a compensation back for what they're doing, which is a great segue to the last topic I wanted to cover with you, and I remember this, we had dinner, I think it was 1996 at the Wharton's Zweig Series, and you were such a phenomenal speaker, and I remember asking you the question and I remember your answer, and I've repeated it ad nauseam for the last 20 years. I said, "David, you're such a great speaker, why, how?" And you were so matter of fact in that you just said "hey, it's an important part of my job, I treat it as a skill, I hired a coach, I practiced like I would do any other skill", and why that's such a powerful story is you clearly are in a position of power, you could clearly have a crazy ego that got in the way of such a matter of fact accomplishment of these tasks and all the PR people I talk to and they hear this story "oh my gosh, we got to get him talking to my executives" because so many people let ego get in the way of what is really an important task for a CEO and a leader which is communication and you recognize that early on and really went after it to make sure that you were very good at this very important task. >> Well, what happened to me, I got lucky, I got lucky. When I got promoted to be the CEO of Schwab, I knew I was going to have to do a lot more public speaking and I already thought I was pretty good at being a public speaker, but I thought I needed to fine tune my messaging, I needed to get it better. So, I looked around and I got some referrals and I hired a guy that I thought was going to be a speech writer for me, that would help craft the message. And, we had our first meeting, and we're talking about an upcoming speech and he says to me things like, "Well, Dave, I want to know more about your life. Tell me how you grew up, tell me what you're proudest moments were, I want to learn about you." And I said to him, "Terry, I'm not looking for a biographer, I want a speech writer, I need a guy that can help me craft my message." And he said, "Well, Dave, that's not how I do things. I need to know who you are, I need to know what your passions are and where they come from so that we can give a message that has more than just words it has meaning, it has your passion built into it, that's what we need to do." And that's what Terry taught me, was that it's not just the words, it's also the passion, energy, and meaning and connection behind the words. And I want to mention one other thing that I think is very important. When people talk about being really good communicators, they often talk about speaking. They don't focus on listening. And listening is a tremendously important skill. So for example, you give a speech, you're the CEO or Senior Executive, you give a speech, do you stay there and do you do a Q+A session? The Q+A session can even be more important than the speech sometimes, because all the employees know that the speech is something that was pre-arranged, it's not on the cuff, it's something that's been thought about and prepared. But the questions and answers are authentic and in the moment. People are clamoring for authentic leadership. That Q+A session, where you're listening for the question and maybe the question behind the question. So you're not just trying to get through them as fast as you can, but you're trying to really answer and listen for the question and the question behind the question. And then answer those from the heart with passion, and that's how you will score the most points with your audience. >> That's great. And then who knows what comes from it, in getting ready for this I came across your blog post talking about Gopi Kallayil a mutual friend at Wharton who reached out to you after that same dinner, and you were happy enough, or you were kind enough to respond and grow a friendship and a relationship that again is lasted for decades. So that's such an important message to listen, as somebody said right, "God gave you two ears and one mouth should try to use them in that ratio." (laughs) Well David, thank you so much for taking some time, again I think these are really trying times in leadership, I think it's really an opportunity for great leaders to shine and those that don't there's really no place to hide. So I really appreciate you sharing your insight and taking a few minutes with us. >> Thanks, Jeff, I hope all the people that follow you and listen to your broadcasts learn something today and come away with some benefit from this time we've spent together. >> Undoubtedly, undoubtedly. Well, thanks again. All right, he's Dave Pottruck, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)