Life of Significance - Hubert Joly

This transcript has been slightly edited for clarity

Sanyin Siang: Do you want to live a life of significance? The choice is yours. In this Duke University series on building and leading a life of significance, we will show you how to do just that.

Hi, I'm Sanyin Siang, the executive director for the Center on Leadership and Ethics, and I’m your host for the series. 

Our guest is Hubert Joly, one of the greatest CEOs of this century. He is the retired chairman and CEO of Best Buy. He turned around Best Buy in 2012 when everyone thought the demise of the company was in sight. And he did so because of his heart—he brings heart into leadership. 

Hubert is also a wonderful friend in addition to being a devoted father, grandfather, husband, and family man. Those are some of the secrets to his success.

He is also the author of The Heart of Business. 

So, Hubert, let's start off with the question we ask everyone. What does it mean to lead a life of significance (as opposed to a life of importance)?

Hubert Joly: Twenty years ago, I was at the top of my first mountain—to quote David Brooks. I had been a partner at McKinsey and Company. I’d been the president of EDS France. I was on the executive team of Vivendi Universal, a major multinational media and entertainment company. So, by many measures, I was successful. 

And yet I felt emptiness. There was nothing there. There was no meaning. It was interesting work, sure. We bought assets, sold assets. There was interesting stuff, but it was emptiness. And so that led me to want to reexamine my life. I was fortunate to be able to do the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. I was revisiting my life—figuring out what gives me energy, what drained me, and trying to discern my calling in life. 

I’m at Harvard now, where I’m involved in the new CEO program, a short workshop for new CEOs. One of the things we ask them to do is write their retirement speeches. We ask them to write about how they want to be remembered.

My wonderful wife, Hortense le Gentil, who Sanyin knows and is also an executive coach, goes a step further with her clients and asks them to write their eulogies. 

The core of both of these practices is this question: How do you want to be remembered? 

So, to return to your question of significance—of meaning, of purpose, which is the word I use—it took me decades to define it. Today, I define it as trying to make a positive difference on people around me, and to use my platform to make a positive difference in the world. So, Sanyin, I start with the people around me. There are only two days a year when you cannot do anything. Those days are yesterday and tomorrow. So I focus on today—the people around me in the moment. That gives me significance.

In 2012, shortly after I joined Best Buy, I wrote an op ed in the Star Tribune, which is the newspaper in Minneapolis. The headline was “I am not the CEO of Best Buy.” I’ll skip the longer story of what led me to write it, but the gist was that the job was not going to be my identity. It was not going to be my purpose. So the good news was that when I stepped down and passed the baton to the amazing Corie Berry, my wonderful successor, I was still me. I was more defined by my purpose than by my job.

And when I decided to step down from my role at Best Buy, I made three decisions. 

One: I was not moving down to Florida to play golf with aging white men. Why? Because they don't play golf. So that would be stupid.  

Two: I was not going to be a CEO anymore. Been there, done that. 

Three: I wanted the next 10, 15, 20, 25 years to matter. Using my platform to make a positive difference was all about using my voice and my energy to orient the foundation of business and capitalism around purpose and humanity. That’s what drives me today.

Sanyin Siang: That is so beautiful. When we think about our end, it gives us clarity around the here and now. Every great strategy starts with an end game.

Let’s connect the dots a little bit. You speak so much about purpose and distinguishing between identity and platform. We often conflate the two. You also talked about “noble purpose” in your book—and inclusivity. How does having a purpose create a sense of belonging for others.

Hubert Joly: I added the adjective “noble” in front of purpose because my son raised a good point. He said, “Dad, there can be terrible purposes, so you need to define what kind of purpose it is.” I said, “Thank you, Sam.” That led me to be more articulate about purposes—their scope and intention. There are individual purposes. There are company purposes.

I make a connection between those two purposes, by the way. For me, a company is a human organization, made of individuals working together in pursuit of a goal. Then we have to slow down and ask, “What is the goal?”

I learned a lesson from a client 30 years ago when I was at McKinsey. He told me that the purpose of a company was not to make money. (Bear in mind, that was way before Larry Fink, who said, “Profit is an imperative. You need to make money.”) Profit is an outcome, but it’s not the goal. So why is it not the goal, then? one has to ask. Why do we work? 

Okay, so a moment of reflection: Of course, in some faiths and spiritualities, work is seen as a curse or a punishment because someone sinned in paradise. Though, a rabbi later told me that man actually worked in paradise, too, because we were given this garden to embellish and so forth. But in Mosaic faiths, there’s a tradition of work being a curse, a punishment. In fact, in French, the word for work is travail, which comes from the Latin word tribulum. What is a tribulum? It’s an instrument of torture.

Another version of work is: work is something we do so that we can do something else that’s more fun. So, you live for what’s outside of work.

And of course, there’s another version of work, which is to see work as part of our quest for meaning, significance, part of our fulfillment as human beings. Or, as the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran would say, “Work is love made visible.” And if you think that life is all about human relationships, then the word from human relationships is love, of course.

Then if you go back to the purpose of a company. If the company is a human organization made of individuals working together, of course it has something to do with contributing to the common good. The common good is another word for “noble purpose.”

And so, in business, how would we define a noble purpose? Because it’s not about philanthropy. It’s about business. One of the ways I’ve thought about it is that some people refer to the Japanese concept of ikigai, the intersection of what the world needs, what the humans I’m trying to serve need, what we are uniquely good at, what we are passionate about, and how we can make money.

At Best Buy, once we were done saving the company and the turnaround was over, we thought about our purpose, and we said we’re actually not a consumer electronics retailer. We are a company that’s in the business of enriching lives through technology, addressing key human needs. That was a unique way to exist in the world that was very different from Amazon or Walmart or Target or Costco or Apple, and it vastly expanded our addressable market and it was inspiring to all of us.

But how do we make our noble purpose a reality? One of the key ingredients has to do with truly enabling genuine human connections. One of the associates in one of our stores once told me his life changed the day a manager recognized him and took an interest in him and his development. He felt he was on fire. The subject of diversity and inclusion for me, starts with each individual. 

Sanyin Siang: Hubert, what advice would you share when you're entering an organization and you may not have that positional power? How can you apply the heart of business when you are starting off rather than when you have that position of power? 

Hubert Joly: My book is written for every leader at every level. This is not a book for CEOs. If I had wanted to convey a message to CEOs, it would have been easy. I would have gone to the Business Council, which is the top 200 CEOs in the country. I'm a member. I was vice chair. I would have given a speech and been done with it.

This book was for everyone else. Every one of us is a leader in some capacity—at a minimum, we are leaders of our lives, the captains of our souls, and so forth. And leadership starts from within. It’s a journey in trying to define who we are, who we want to be, and how we want to show up.

People pay attention to how you show up. If you’re a leader of a team of two or three or five hundred people, it’s exactly the same. And if you’re a team member, it’s the same. And it matters just as much on Zoom as it does in-person. We can show up to Zoom grumpy and serious and drain the energy of the group or we can create energy.

Sanyin Siang: What are your practices or habits that help you keep track of your noble purpose and not let it get lost in the daily grind of putting out fires and checking off tasks? How do you keep your noble purpose front and center? 

Hubert Joly: We can all agree that the last 12-15 months were challenging times for every one of us—and it still is. My first piece of advice for keeping your noble purpose is: if you can’t go outside, you have to go inside. Spend time with yourself and decide to be reflective. This was crucial for many businesses during the early stages of the pandemic. When my successor Corie began leading a retail business during the pandemic, she outlined three priorities. She said the safety of our employees and customers is the first priority. The second priority was going to be delaying—for as long as humanly possible—furloughing anybody until government programs come into play and we’ve had time to explain to employees how they can take advantage of these programs. Third: we’re going to make sure we come out as strong as possible—given the circumstances. Note that nowhere in there was hitting quarterly earnings the priority. What defines Corie is her stewardship—she wanted to leave things better than she found them but understood the task at hand because she took the time to reflect.

So, to keep your noble purpose in the forefront, take the time to write down your principles. Communicate those with your team. It’s not about perfection, but about adhering to your principles.

Sanyin Siang: So much of this past year has been rethinking what matters, how we matter, and, having this more expansive view of seeing who matters. Your wisdom strikes to the heart of that.

Shifting gears a bit: Do you have a personal leadership brand? What are the values close to your heart and the future you aspire to create? 

Hubert Joly: A personal leadership brand? Yes. Although there’s probably a brand defined by me, and a brand defined by others. If you were to ask the employees at Best Buy, I think what would probably strike them is the energy and the hope I brought to the organization and the humanity. They don’t remember me because I was smart. They remember me because we worked together, and we created this delightfully surprising outcome. 

If I were to defend my brand myself, I would call it “purposeful leadership.” In fact, I’ve endowed a chair at my alma mater in France, HEC Paris, on purposeful leadership, which has really helped the school pivot towards that direction.

At some point in my journey at Best Buy, the team encouraged me to make our leadership expectations more explicit. I defined our leadership expectation around five “be’s”—I call them the five “Be’s” of leadership.

The first Be is Be Purposeful so be clear about your own purpose. Be curious about the purpose of people around you and how you can connect that to the purpose of the organization.

The second Be is to Be Clear About Your Role as a Leader. For me, it’s not about being the smartest person in the room and impressing everybody; it’s about creating an environment where everyone can blossom. We can unleash human magic if we focus on creating the right environment.

The third Be is Be Clear About Who You Serve. I told the officers at Best Buy that if they believe they’re here to serve themselves or their bosses or the CEO of the company, that’s okay, but they can’t work here. Serve others.

The fourth Be is Be a Values-Based Leader. Integrity is foundational.

And the fifth Be is Be Authentic. This means: Be vulnerable. Stop believing or pretending you’re perfect and stop expecting perfection from everyone else.

Sanyin Siang: I appreciate that these are such actionable items. And the idea of authenticity and perfection—those are such important topics nowadays. Authenticity and vulnerability redefine perfection.

One last question. After navigating Best Buy through such extreme change, what tips or suggestions do you have to gain momentum for accepting the changes or wanting to drive change? Change is hard for people.

Hubert Joly: Here’s a story. When Best Buy was just starting, there was a point at which we were working on the strategy for the second phase of the business. The team was saying that the second phase wasn’t clear enough. I thought it was clearer than the first phase, which we called “Blue Renew.” But they said that it wasn’t clearer; the first phase was clearer. So, we adjusted course. We had to adjust to keep moving forward. This is what I call the bicycle theory. Have you tried riding a bicycle at standstill? It falls over. You have to keep moving forward to stay on the bike.

So I found that to turn around and adjust our course of action, we had to keep moving. I started at the company on September 4th. On November 1st, we presented a plan to Wall Street. The plan was directional and allowed us to get going and progress until we picked up momentum. It doesn’t matter the speed of progress. It’s only progress that matters. Then you can build confidence in the right direction. If there are problems, you can solve them and keep accelerating the progress. 

The worst thing that can happen is waiting six months to come up with a perfect plan and growing stagnant. Just starting and getting going creates energy. Imagine a world of possibilities. I love Ben Zander and his book The Art of Possibility. Think about the future and your dreams and get going.

Sanyin Siang: That is so beautiful. Put your purpose and meaning front and center and create energy around it. That’s wonderful. Thank you, Hubert.