How to create a ‘transcendent’ career

Suzy Welch: All we do all day is manage our conflicts, our values conflicts. And so I built an algorithm and that was not on my bingo card, writing an algorithm at age 60, having been a writer my whole life.

Jeff Berman: Suzy Welch is an incredible writer and quite a prolific one. After a stint as editor of Harvard Business Review, she went on to author several bestselling books to help you reach new heights in your career. Some she wrote solo and others she co-authored with her late husband, the iconic General Electric CEO, Jack Welch. Suzy’s latest project started as a class at NYU and has spawned a new book and podcast by the same name, “Becoming You”.

WELCH: In their early semesters. I would say to people when they’d come into class, “If you think this class is touchy-feely and woo-woo and it’s going to be easy, please give your seat to somebody on the wait list because this is going to be a very hard class.” The way we help people is we say to them, “The economy has never been more uncertain.” I think it really is this pace of change and the pace of uncertainty and the lack of visibility for the future life is very heightened. So what can you know? You can know yourself.

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This is Masters of Scale. I’m Jeff Berman, your host. My guest this week is Suzy Welch. She’s the bestselling author of a new book based on her popular NYU class by the same name, “Becoming You”. It’s a method, a practical framework for defining your values and figuring out how to live in a way that aligns with them. Suzy is a force of nature in the very best way. She’s one of those people who you know want to spend more time around within seconds of their merely entering the room, and she shares so much wisdom in our conversation. I’m so glad we get to share it with you. Suzy, welcome to Masters of Scale.

WELCH: Thank you for having me.

Copy LinkThe new book: “Becoming You: A Proven Method for Crafting the Authentic Life You Want and Need”

BERMAN: I’m super excited that you’re here, especially with your new book out. Will you tell us a little bit about the new book?

WELCH: The book is called “Becoming You: A Proven Method for Crafting the Authentic Life You Want and Need”, and it’s based on a class that I teach at NYU Stern that is somewhat of the same name, but a slightly different, more academic sounding name. And it’s about a methodology that I wish had existed, not just when I was in business school, but at many different points in my life when I took a boneheaded detour. And it’s a methodology for figuring out three big data sets, your values, which no one knows by the way, your aptitudes, which people have a slightly better bead on, but not great, and your economically viable interests. These are three huge and important data sets, which we almost never mine. So it walks you through that process and then it asks you to take a look at what’s at the intersection of those through this process that’s in the book. And we call that your area of transcendence, which is a fancy and more academic way of saying your purpose.

And I started teaching this class as an experiment when I was coming out of a period of my life, after I lost my husband, when I was not sure what I was going to do with my life anymore. I didn’t realize it at the time. It was a little doctor, heal thyself kind of thing going on. But I had been in this space of writing and thinking about career formation for decades. And I had this idea for this methodology, and then I thought, well, maybe I’ll create a class out of it. I went down and I saw the dean at Stern and I proposed it to him.

He said, “Let’s try it as a little experiment.” We thought there’d be 18 kids in the first class, but if you take a class and you name it “Becoming You” and the promise of the class is to help you figure out what to do with your life, and you offer to a bunch of kids who are in business school coming out of the pandemic, yeah. So that was not an experiment very long because people signed up and the wait list got very long and the class ended up meeting people where they needed it to. And so there was a little bit of noise, like I should write a book about it. And I was like, “No, no, no.” I honestly said, “No one reads books anymore.” And also I think writing a book is incredibly hard. No one finishes a book and says, “Ooh, that was much easier than I thought.”

BERMAN: Let’s go do it again.

WELCH: Oh, fun. Everybody says it’s like torture. And then one day I was walking into the woods with my daughter Eve, who’s a very woo-woo hippie who’s always telling me to follow my bliss and work less. And I was saying to her, “Everybody wants me to write the book.” And I thought, I went to her for sympathy. She’s 30. And instead she said, “You got to write this book, mom. People need it and it’s undemocratic for you to just keep it at NYU. It’s a good process. It really works. It changes people’s lives.” I was like, shoot. I said-

BERMAN: That’s probably not the word you said.

WELCH: But maybe not shoot. And I was like, “Oh, Eve, how could you forsake me?” And so I sat down and I wrote it.

BERMAN: Was the book actually your area of transcendence in this moment?

WELCH: Yes. Not the book, but the teaching.

BERMAN: The teaching.

WELCH: People ask me, “How will I know if I’m in my area of transcendence, my purpose?” And it’s a lot like love. You never say, “Am I in love?” Okay, rarely. But if you’re in love, you know you’re in love. There’s no feeling like it. And that’s when you’re living your purpose. You feel exquisitely alive. And I think there was one moment when I was teaching and I felt like I might levitate and I thought, oh, this is it. I am absolutely doing what I was born to do and the world would like me to be doing this as well. I mean, that’s part of it. I’m not part of the passion party. I don’t think you should just do your passion. I was practicing what I preached and it felt great.

BERMAN: Let’s just break down, if we can, the three vectors that lead into the area of transcendence. You say that most people don’t actually know their values.

WELCH: Yes.

Copy LinkWhy defining your values is harder than you think

BERMAN: How is that possible? Don’t we know what we stand for, don’t we know what we’re about?

WELCH: Why don’t you go ahead, and let’s do a little thought experiment here.

BERMAN: Okay, great.

WELCH: Go ahead, define value. What are values?

BERMAN: Great question.

WELCH: Keep going.

BERMAN: Values are what underlie the meaning in your life, right? What is meaningful to you?

WELCH: So name a value.

BERMAN: Integrity.

WELCH: Wrong.

BERMAN: Okay.

WELCH: Lovingly. Okay, that’s a virtue. Okay, so virtues are not values, and you can learn a lot of stuff in school. You can learn how to get the volume of a cylinder and you’re not ever taught what values are. Values are the deeply held beliefs that galvanize your actions and decisions. They are choices. Integrity is not a choice. Virtues, everybody should have more of them. They’re as old as literature. There’s old as humankind, fairness, integrity, kindness. These are all virtues. Please go have more of them. But actually, values are very specific to individuals and we each have a values profile now. So I did some research that prove that you are absolutely in the majority, and that only 17% of people could even begin to define values, and I was giving them very wide berth in this research, and only 7% could actually name their values and exclude virtues in the whole thing.

So this is a gigantic deficit in our education system, but let’s just talk about what values are. So values are these choices, and here’s a place where academia could have really helped the real world, and they didn’t because academics have been talking about what values are for 100 years and they just somehow, it has not crossed the fourth wall over to humankind. There are values inventories that exist and they exist along continuums. I, as an academic, took a look at all the values inventories, and I thought, I think these are not modern. I think they’re quite judge-y. And I wrote a new values inventory, which is out there in the academic literature called the Welch-Bristol Values Inventory. Let me give you some examples.

Let’s start with a value called scope. Scope is a value that reflects how big or small a life you want. Do you want to be Bianca Jagger on the back of a white stallion walking into Studio 54? Do you want to have an exciting life? You’ll take the chaos because you want a big life, you want a lot of learning. You want new experiences, you want new people, you want that all. You want to swallow the world. I have somebody, a student who described her high scope as wanting to touch everyone’s brains. Let’s take another value that’s not often spoken about beholderism. Okay? This is one of the oldest values that’s usually called aesthetics. I call it beholderism, easy to understand. And it’s a value that measures how much you care about how stuff looks, including yourself. Have you ever known somebody who really cares about how they look, how their house look, how their stuff looks, and their spouse is being driven crazy about it because they just don’t care how they look?

BERMAN: Is it how it looks or how it’s perceived by others?

WELCH: It can be either, but it’s that you care about how stuff looks. And it can be a proxy for wanting harmony or it can just be a proxy for looking good. I don’t care. I’m not in the field of values formation, how you came by your values. I only really care about what values you hold. But here’s the thing, you can have a value, really hold it dearly. Like take scope. I have very, very high scope, but you may not be expressing it. And so for every single person, there’s an authenticity gap between how much they hold a value and how much they’re actually expressing it. And I created an assessment tool for this called the Values Bridge, where you can actually go get your ranked.

I did this because I was losing my mind in the classroom how many times I stood up and spoke about this with my students, and then they would assess themselves on where they were with each value after me talking about it. Then what would happen was they’d stare at their values and they would think, oh, I don’t want people to know that about me. And they would manually adjust their values for perception. So for instance, there’s a value called family centrism, how much you’d like your family to be the organizing principle of your life.

And people would always see family centrism, or not everybody, would see it show up down at number 11 or 12, and they’d literally cross that out and move it up to number one because they felt some stink off of it. And so I had to change it to a behavioral test, where you answer questions. And it also ranks how much you have it and how much you’re expressing it. So when somebody is authentic, that authenticity gap is zero. They’re living their values fully, but very few people are. 1% of the population.

Copy LinkNavigating values in conflict and living by design

BERMAN: What happens when values are in conflict? Let’s just go with scope and family centrism, right?

WELCH: Absolutely.

BERMAN: You want big scope, but also family centrism is key and you got little kids, right?

WELCH: Yes. That’s a brilliant question in that they are inevitably and invariably in conflict. So one of the things that was frustrating to me about the other values assessment tools that existed was that they held that you couldn’t have values that were in conflict. You couldn’t have that. They would diminish one over the other. And my thought to myself was like, I don’t know if they ever lived in the real world. All we do all day is manage our conflicts, our values conflicts. And so I built an algorithm that measures the, and that was not on my bingo card, writing an algorithm at age 60, having been a writer my whole life, but I did it with the help of some great data scientists. But I would say that your values will be in conflict. My general answer is there’s two ways to deal with that.

Let’s take family centrism and let’s take achievement. That’s a value, it’s self-explanatory. It’s how much you want seen success, success that other people can see. You care a lot about winning. So it’s very hard for working parents, for instance, to hold family centrism and achievement in balance. And there’s two ways you can go about that. You can repress one of the values, for lack of a better word. You can say, I’m in 15 years of my life while my kids really, really need me, and I’m just going to put my achievement in a box for a while and I’m going to make certain career decisions.

You can’t really make a value go away. If you’ve got it, you’ve got it, but you can certainly sublimate it. And so you can do that. In some ways, that’s the easier route. You just make a decision and you do it. What most people do is they don’t realize it’s two values that are in conflict. They just think their life stinks and they just live a shit show every day. And you bounce around and you’re in default and you bing and you bang, and you’re like a pinball machine binging and banging between these two values. The other, and third better way to do it, I would say, is to live by design and say, “Okay, I have two values that are in conflict.” Okay, so there you’ve given some language to it, and I’m going to be very academic-y and nerdy here and just say, I’m going to invoke Wittgenstein, which forgive me all-

BERMAN: Our friend Ludwig.

WELCH: Right, just forgive me for this. And he said, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Okay, so what if you could put words to your values? So my family centrism and my achievement are in strong conflict, and I am going to carefully and deliberately and explicitly litigate it each day. I’m going to assess the conflicts, I’m going to manage them, and I’m going to try to keep them in balance as best I can. And I’m going to do that for the 15 years or 20 years where everybody needs me all at the same time, which is just biology. You have your kids in the same period that your job, you’re in this position to accelerate. And so you can manage it with a lot of intentionality. Usually we don’t do that. Usually we just get caught up in the storm and we swing around, but a lot of values do come into conflict with each other. What feels great is when your values are in harmony, and there are people who have managed to create lives like that, and I highly recommend it.

Copy LinkGenerational shifts and new perspectives on careers

BERMAN: I’m guessing there’s some difference between when you’re teaching this to young people who are students at NYU and the 40, 50, 60-year-olds-

WELCH: Yes.

BERMAN:  Who are coming in. What do you seeing there?

WELCH: Oh my God. All right, look, I taught it to MBAs and I loved teaching it to the MBAs, but I always thought, oh God, they’re young because they didn’t have the wisdom of their years. And they would say things to me like, “But why do achievement in family centrism have to be in conflict?” Or, “Why do affluence and the value for fun,” which is eudaimonia, self-care. “Why do affluence and eudaimonia have to be in conflict?” I would say, “I don’t know, ask God. I don’t know. Ask the universe. I am not here to solve this problem. I’m just here to report the facts that those two things are in conflict.”

So after a while, my bosses came around and said, “Would you please teach the undergraduates?” And I was like, “I’m very scared to teach this to 17 and 18 and 19-year-olds,” even though the kids at Stern Undergraduate are very, very smart, they just, they’re not ready. But I have to say that some of my favorite teaching is the 40s and 50s and 60-year-old people who have lived some life, have tested their values, have seen how trade-offs feel, and actually, in many ways, are more courageous because they’re like, okay, the clock is ticking and they tend to act on the findings of the process.

BERMAN: I’m curious also generationally, boomers for sure, Gen X to a large extent by and large careers are conveyor belts. You’re looking for that name brand you’re going to go work for, make as much money as possible, et cetera. And millennials and Gen Z are in a world that is less linear, I think you’ve talked about as a squiggly career path. Is generationally there a difference too for boomers and Gen X? Are they just getting their heads around the idea that they really can, they have permission to go do something wildly different?

WELCH: Everybody’s scared. That’s what I’m finding. Everyone’s scared. They’re afraid jobs are going away, and yet if they’re in “Becoming You”, they’re saying, “Help me understand what else there could be for me, besides the conveyor belts, because nobody knows where these conveyor belts are going anymore.”

BERMAN: Still ahead, more with author and professor Suzy Welch. 

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Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel. Suzy’s work, helping students find their authentic purpose resonates so deeply with me.

Copy LinkMatching your personality and aptitudes to fulfilling work

I really could have used a class like this back when I was in school. I went to law school and the groupthink there was clerkship for the right judge, onto the law firm where you’re going to make a lot of money. And I spent six weeks at a law firm, it was supposed to be seven weeks, one summer, and I can’t do this. This is out of integrity for me.

WELCH: Yes.

BERMAN: I don’t know what value misalignment it was, but it was-

WELCH: I’m telling you, that was all value stuff.

BERMAN: It was virtue misalignment, for sure. And I was one of two people in my class who didn’t know what we were doing when we graduated and ended up going to be a civil rights lawyer. And boy, it’s hard. It’s really hard. How do we do a better job helping people avoid the groupthink and get to that area of transcendence, get to their purpose.

WELCH: That’s why I created “Becoming You”. I’m the least woo-woo girl you’ve ever met. I mean, people would like me to be more woo-woo. I mean, in the early semesters, I would say to people when they’d come into class, “If you think this class is touchy-feely and woo-woo and it’s going to be easy, please give your seat to somebody on the wait list because this is going to be a very hard class.” The way we help people is we say to them, “The economy has never been more uncertain.” I think it really is this pace of change and the pace of uncertainty and the lack of visibility for the future is very heightened. So what can you know? You can know yourself.

We spend a lot of time on figuring out two different types of aptitudes, your cognitive aptitudes. Are you a generalist or a specialist? Guess what? It really matters. Are you a future-focuser or present-focuser? Guess what? It really matters. How do you process ideas? Are you a brainstormer or an idea contributor? I mean, this matters for what kind of work you should be doing. You should know that. But here’s the other piece of aptitudes, and this is a very unpopular notion with my students, is that your personality really matters. Okay, so hear me out, my students will come in and they’ll tell me they know their personalities. Most people say, “How could I not know my personality? I’m kind, I’m generous. I’m a good listener. I’m very compassionate.”

And I always say, “Well, I hope that’s true. Let’s find out how the world experiences you.” And we actually have to find out how the world experiences us. There’s only one way to do that. That’s with 360 feedback and there’s no shortcut to it, and we cannot not do that work. Once we know that, we can say, “Oh, I thought I was great with people. The world is telling me not so true. But really what the world is telling me is when it comes to getting things done, execution top five, 95, I’m unbelievably good. Maybe there’s a job for me where it plays to my dominant hand of my brain. I’m good at execution.”

So don’t go into a client-facing role, go into an execution role. I think we’ve got to get the data of how the world is experiencing us as we figure out our aptitudes. So as I said, that’s how we do it. We get a methodology where we collect a lot of data and then armed with this data, we say, “Okay, what work calls me intellectually and emotionally that will pay me according to what my values say about money,” because everybody’s got a different value about money, “And what’s at this intersection? That’s where I’m going.”

BERMAN: Suzy, you mentioned how scared people are. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the world, and that feels like it’s accelerating. That is AI, that is our political system, that is industries changing faster than they have in human history.

WELCH: That’s right.

BERMAN: The speed of change makes the Industrial Revolution look like turtle race. When you take these three factors, values, aptitude, what you’re good at and economic viability, is there an argument that people should compromise values right now for economic security?

Copy LinkHow values and virtues shape our decisions and workplaces

WELCH: You may have to. You compromise on virtues, and I don’t think you should ever compromise those, but on values, you can deal with expressing them less than you’d like just to have a job. There’s less stink off of it because take a value of beholderism, which is you care about how things look. There may be a period right now where you hunker down and do the best with the job you’ve got, even if it feels like it’s not authentically fulfilling your values. I get it. That’s a danger though.

It’s a danger because it starts getting very expedient to stay in that job. Then you leave that job, but you get the job that’s kind of like it, that’s just slightly better paying. And then next thing you know, you do have that talking heads moment. My God, what have I done? And so I don’t suggest you do it long-term, and that’s why I say speaking with trepidation here, but I get the true reality is that there’s rent and there’s kids and there’s car payments. But the more you layer up with those expenses, the less flexibility you have.

BERMAN: Yeah, I think you’ve used the term velvet coffin before-

WELCH: Yes.

BERMAN: Which I found really powerful because the visual of it is so strong.

WELCH: I know.

BERMAN: Getting into that velvet coffin is one thing. Getting buried in it is another.

WELCH: Lid closes. The lid closes.

BERMAN: Yeah. I’m curious because you’ve talked about virtues and values. How do you differentiate between the two?

WELCH: Okay, so virtues are generally agreed upon by society and our culture that they’re good and everyone should have more of them. There’s no debate that kindness is something everyone should have more of, integrity, fairness. There’re generally agreed upon societal virtues, and they’ve been pretty stable since the dawn of time. And I wouldn’t recommend people have a lot of choice around these things. These are, everyone agrees. They’re very culturally imposed, and I think they’re, when we think about right and wrong, virtues are right.

So values, I’m totally agnostic about values. I don’t care if you’re high scope or low scope. That’s your choice, you came to it however you came to it, whether it was parents, whether it was your culture, whether it was trauma, whether it was experience that you had. I don’t care if you’re higher or low scope, I respect your scope. Let’s talk about work centrism, okay? This is a value that people, judge, judge, judge. I met a woman at a conference. I was speaking about this and she said, “You know, my husband, he loves working. He works constantly. He works at GE. And if he could, if wasn’t scared of needles, he’d get the GE meatball tattooed on his ass.”

And I said, “You’re calling him a workaholic, but a holic is a disease, okay. Is he sick or does he just love work? Does he just have high work centrism and you have low work centrism? And that’s what the conversation you have to have, not that he’s sick and you’re well, because that’s very judge-y, isn’t it?” And she paused, she said, I think her exact words were, “You’re blowing my mind.” And I said, “Well, I’m really glad to be blowing your mind because a lot of people fight about this and what’s ending up is we’re judging each other’s values. Do you want to be judged for your values and stop judging people?” As I say all the time, if you’re not hurting anyone, your values are your values.

BERMAN: It strikes me also that virtues are fixed and values are dynamic.

Copy LinkBridging the values gap between generations in the workplace

WELCH: Well, I think that one of the great things that my research will be able to show me in five years is how dynamic values are. My empirical observation would be that most people’s values are pretty set by age 25. And what changes is how much we’re expressing them or repressing them. One of the reasons I developed my own values inventory was that I was noticing my students were presenting with having a top value of self-care, massive amounts of data now about what every generation’s values are, which is fascinating because I’d just done cut the data in a bunch of different ways and it takes a look at Gen Z’s values. And then I did some research, I did a survey of 1,500 hiring managers, and I asked, “What values do you hire for among Gen Z?” And I’m going to tell you, only 2% had the values they wanted.

BERMAN: Where’s the gap?

WELCH: Eudaimonia is the number one value for 65% of Gen Z, And in 1,500 hiring managers over the age of 40, exactly 0% said they wanted eudaimonia as a top value.

BERMAN: Yeah. I mean, it strikes me that Jeffrey Katzenberg is famous for saying, “If you don’t come in Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday.”

WELCH: I concur.

BERMAN: And my first couple of jobs were six and a half day a week jobs, 100 hour weeks were not out of the question. And certainly post-pandemic, we’re just in a wildly different world. When you talk with leaders in their 40s, 50s, 60s, who just came up in a different universe, how do you help them think about leading authentically, but also leading a workforce that is so values misaligned with them?

WELCH: I think they have to talk about the fact that their value is misaligned, because otherwise a lot of acrimony develops. So what happened after the pandemic is the corporate leaders were like, we’re going to deal with this by telling them that we care about their self-care and we’re going to put in wellbeing programs and we’re going to meet their needs, while they were secretly fuming inside and privately saying to each other, “They can’t make it to an 8:00 AM meeting? When I was their age, I was working at 6:00.” And now the job market has changed, and it’s a buyer’s market, and they’re starting to say the truth. I mean, look at Jamie Dimon saying, “Everybody in. And if you don’t want to come in, do not work here.” So I think the truth is starting to emerge, and Gen Z is not saying, “Okay, I’m going to change my values to your values.” They’re just going to be mad about it, and they are.

I mean, I was talking to a 25-year-old woman who does some freelance work for us the other day, and she said to me, “Can you please make an Instagram Reel about burnout? My friends and I are just so burnt out.” And I just looked at her. I said, “You’re 25,” and I said, “And you’re burnt out?” She goes, “Just so burnt out.” So I said, “You know, I don’t want to sound like an oldster, but when I was your age, I worked seven days a week nonstop and the word burnout never came into my mind. I love my work. This was what you did. You worked, we loved it. We all did it together. We would’ve worked more if we could have.” And then she said a very interesting thing, she said, “But you had hope.”

And I did have hope. We all did have hope. We believe that if you worked hard, you were rewarded for it. And so this is the disconnect, is that Gen Z thinks, yeah, I watched what happened to my parents’ career and I watched what happened to my older sister’s career and they worked very hard and they still got laid off. And so I think the problem is deep. It’s very deep and employers are not going to be able to give people hope because there will be layoffs and there will be, people will lose their jobs. They’ve got to give them some other kind of contract that makes sense to them, which is we’re going to train the living daylights out of you while you’re here, and if you play by our rules, we’ll send you off with a great resume so that you can go get your next job.

BERMAN: Yeah. Reid Hoffman has written and spoken about this idea of tours of duty, and this has been a really valuable, both recruiting tactic, but also a way, or strategy, but a way to make sure that there’s a real value exchange there and saying, “Look, come give us two years and here’s what we’re going to ask of you, but here’s what you’re going to get.” I’m curious if you think that’s one way to address it.

WELCH: I think it’s a wonderful way to address it, except for that very few people in Gen Z want to give what he’s asking for. Okay. So what he’s saying is, the concept in general is exactly right, and I think it’s probably the best solution. But the problem is that he’s asking for people to then display values that they don’t have, like achievement, work centrism, belonging. Belonging is value to be part of something bigger than yourself. Those values are not anywhere near the top of most Gen Z individuals. They have, their number one value is eudaimonia, their number two value is voice, which is creative self-expression, being authentic. The third value is a beautiful thing. We call it non sibi, not for oneself. It’s helping other people, but the values that even when you say, “Okay, here’s the deal we’re going to give you. Come for two years. You work hard, we’ll give you something to go out the door with.”

And what that is implicitly saying is, “Give us your achievement. Give us your work centrism and give us your belonging, really wanting to be a part of this.” And they’re going to say, yes, but guess what? Only 2% actually have those as values at all. And most of those values are down at seven, eight, nine. So I think what’s actually going to happen in corporate America largely is it’s going to be a cage match for those 2%. They’re going to come find them younger and younger. There are some Stern undergraduates who start getting offers in their freshman year, and I think that they’re doing this very intuitively. They’re finding those kids with that hunger that is such a positive trait to the oldsters, and they’re locking them up earlier.

BERMAN: Because they figured they’ll train them.

WELCH: Yes, that’s right.

BERMAN: They don’t care because they’ve got the thing that they’re looking for.

WELCH: That’s right. They’ve got the it factor. They’ve got the values.

Copy LinkThe impact of remote work on career growth and collaboration

BERMAN: Wow, I benefit from remote work. I can juggle multiple things in a day. I can get a lot done. I miss being in the office with people. I miss the social connection. My concern for people who are much earlier in their career than we are is they’re missing the interstitial time. They’re missing the walk to get a coffee after a meeting and then debriefing on the choices that were made in that room. They’re not being able to sit on the side of the room and watch the meeting happen. You referenced Jamie Dimon saying, “Get back in the office.” Certainly Silicon Valley, we’re seeing a push in that direction. How do you see this playing out? How do you see this evolving?

WELCH: I believe that great things happen when people are together in a room, and I run a company myself. It’s only 10 people, but when we are interviewing, and we’re growing right now, we say, “This is five days a week in the office. We’re all together.” And I often say in the interviews, I always say in the interviews, “We text on Saturdays,” okay. We’re building something. This is a startup. We couldn’t do it remotely. And we tried. There was such a great candidate, great candidate that we allowed her to work from home two days a week. She lived in New Jersey and it didn’t work because of our culture. It is the laughter. It is the subtle stuff. It is the bouncing of ideas off of each other. I do think that it will make the case for itself again. And there’s some work that could just very naturally be remote. Those jobs will be filled by people who want to be remote, but the companies that benefit from people talking to each other, and that’s the vast majority of companies, they’re going to slowly go back to it.

BERMAN: Is it also true that for people who work remotely, there’s going to just be a ceiling on their careers?

WELCH: Yes, I think so. I mean, I see it all the time. I think in general, you’ve got to be in the office if you want to be promoted. One time I was interviewed by a young reporter and I said, “Look, you’re never going to be the CEO of a corporate 500 company in your pajamas at home in the apartment.” So the headline was You’re Never Going to be CEO in Your Pajamas. But you would’ve thought that I said, “I advocate the harm of puppies.” People went completely crazy and people said things like, “You’re a dangerous person,” because I suggested that there was a lid to your career if you chose to work at home.

And it’s not the at-home part, and it’s not the pajamas part because pajamas are comfortable. And basically in Silicon Valley, isn’t that what everybody’s wearing to work anyway? But I would say that it’s the in-person, looking at someone’s eyes and showing them that they matter and the interactions. And I was on a business trip the other day and my entire team went over to somebody’s house, one of the members of teams, and they made dumplings together. I could have wept, I was so happy that they were being together. So I do, I don’t know, I hope I’m not being a dangerous person when I say this. I think if you have aspirations of achievement, you’re probably going to have to be in an office.

BERMAN: You have a certain kind of achievement, because Roy Bahat from Bloomberg Beta has talked about how we’re going to have a one-person billion-dollar company, and that person could be working from home in pajamas, fine …

WELCH: That’s fine.

BERMAN: But you’re not going to run-

WELCH: You’re not run a division of Hasbro-

BERMAN: That’s right.

WELCH: In your pajamas. Yeah.

Copy LinkTimeless lessons for leadership and building great teams

BERMAN: Yeah. I’m curious, as you’ve been on this journey with the book and the class, if you go back 25 years, you’re editor of Harvard Business Review at that time, what is in what you’re teaching right now that would’ve surprised you, shocked you, is different how you saw the world back then?

WELCH: Well, when I was at HBR, this thing called the internet came along and there was a big debate about how much it was going to affect the world. And I remember literally saying something so stupid, like I was talking to my team and I said something like, “How much could it change things?” It was like, a lot. Look, there are some truisms that never have changed about business, and that is it’s all about the people. People and cash flow. That’s never going to change in a business. That’s what I watch, and it’s what you’ve got to be watching, is nothing gets done without people, and you’ve got to have the right people on the bus, to quote Jim Collins.

That’s super hard. Hiring is incredibly hard. I teach hiring in my management class, and students are always like, “Oh, I’m going to be fine at hiring. I’m a people person.” And I was like, “If only it was that simple.” I mean, getting the right people and motivating them in a way that matters to them. These are things that will never change in business. Assembling a team that likes each other, but can challenge each other in a healthy way. Teaching people what radical candor is, saying something that somebody should hear from a place of love, these will always be with us, but everything else is different.

BERMAN: Yeah. Last question for you, Suzy. We’re having this conversation in June. It is graduation season. There are a lot of young people who are going off into their first full-time job. What’s one piece of non-obvious advice that you would offer them?

WELCH: Here it is. Smile with your eyes. Okay, let me explain. So I said this, I’m stealing from myself because I said this at the NYU graduation a few years ago, and there was this collective gasp when I said it because I was giving serious advice. And then I said, “Listen, here’s my last piece of advice. When you go off into the world, you’re told that it’s time for you to be a professional. And you go into work and you put up a barrier. I’m going to be professional now. I’m going to be serious. I’m going to not show my authentic self. I’m not going to be vulnerable. I’m going to be a grownup and grownups are like this. We are fancy people.”

“And in fact, if you look at anybody who’s a successful leader or successful at anything, they have taken down those walls. Okay, maybe not in 1950, but now. And they’re authentic. They’re real. Look, you want to be professional and you want to do the work, but show who you are. Don’t be as stiff. When you smile, don’t do this phony smile, laugh. Smile with your eyes. Put yourself into it. Be real. And this is not an excuse to be less professional. It’s urging to be more human. They’re not mutually exclusive. So show your humanity. You will be rewarded for it, much probably to your skepticism. You will be.”

BERMAN: What a lovely place to wrap. Thank you so much for being with us.

WELCH: Thank you for having me.

BERMAN: Thanks so much to Suzy Welch for joining us this week. No matter what stage you’re at in your career, Suzy’s framework for understanding your values and how much your life is aligned with them is a powerful tool. Her new book is “Becoming You”. We’ve put a link to both the book and the values quiz in the show notes. I’m Jeff Berman, thank you for listening.