ROB CHESTNUT

>> Speaker C: Rob Chestnut, thank you for joining me today on the Master Move podcast. Rob, you have a long, distinguished career in many roles, the majority of them, around the legal profession, with household names like our government, ebay, Airbnb. And in the later part of your career, you really focused in on ethics. And in 2020 you published a book called Intentional Integrity How Smart Companies Can Lead an Ethical Revolution. I want to talk to you all about that career journey, and what wound up being your passion. But I thought it’d be an interesting place to start with you telling me a little bit about your first job.

>> Rob Chestnut: As a young child, I was industrious. I had to earn my own spending money. We didn’t have a lot, so, I was a worker. I cut grass, raked leaves, I worked at. We had a restaurant in my neighborhood, and, I started out there as a dishwasher. When I was 13 years old, I’d ride my bike to the restaurant and they would pay me. I’d get paid out of the cash register. there were no Social Security or anything like that. 13 bucks, a night. I might get an extra buck or two if they had a good, if it was a good weekend and I’d get a free meal. I did a ton of those types of jobs when I was young and great learning experiences, man. It gives you, I think, a good appreciation, for hard work. And when I go to restaurants, I have a good appreciation for what people are going through who work there. So it’s all a journey. And it all, I think helps, make you who you are. And for me, it was about a dozen jobs before I graduated.

>> Speaker C: From high school, I guess after college, all those jobs wound up being in the legal field.

>> Rob Chestnut: Yeah, I was a disc jockey in college. I actually got paid and, helped work my way through college as a.

>> Speaker C: Well, no, no wonder you sound so great.

>> Rob Chestnut: Yes, I’ve got the pipes for it.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Rob Chestnut: But everything, everything after I graduated from college was, was more, was law related.

>> Speaker C: You know, like I mentioned earlier, in the end, the, the focus winds up being on ethics and, and really a question of integrity.

Rob Bell: What does it mean to have intentional integrity in a company

Rob, how would you define integrity? And in particular, you know, your, your term, intentional integrity.

>> Rob Chestnut: Well, it’s not an easy word to define. and by the way, I think my career, even though I really didn’t focus on ethics and integrity, specifically until the very end of my career, sort of a common thread. Look, I was a federal prosecutor for the first 10 years of my legal career. I started and ran trust and safety for ebay around all the rules around what you could sell online and following all the laws and the like. And I was a general counsel. So I’d like to think there’s a thread of it. but I started focusing on and thinking about what it really meant. And integrity is different for each of us. I’m not going to tell someone, that a certain action of theirs lacks integrity a lot, because I think it depends upon your background, your culture, your religion, your parents and the like. M2 good people can disagree on the same thing. I do think that there has to be some base, though, where we all agree that acting with integrity can’t just be all about yourself. It can’t all be around money. It can’t involve lying, cheating or stealing. and I also think that, it’s important. You can’t confuse integrity with perfection. We all make mistakes. We all do things that get us off base. But what’s important from an integrity perspective is that we have a North Star, a personal North Star, and personal values that guide our actions. And we have to also have an element of self awareness to understand when we get off the rails and when we head off in a direction that’s not consistent with our values, we have to have an element of self awareness where we can honestly say, you know what, I screwed up, I made a mistake, and be able to recommit back to that North Star.

>> Speaker C: It seems like it should be obvious, but it seems like a lot of times larger companies have maybe lost touch with their mission, or maybe startups haven’t taken the time to define what those values are.

>> Rob Chestnut: Both true. I talk to A lot of, entrepreneurs and I often get the question, well, Rob, when do we need to start thinking about that, that integrity slash values slash purpose stuff? And my answer is right from the very beginning. You take a classic company like Hewlett Packard. Hewlett, and Packard were both thinking about this and writing down their basic values when they were in a garage and just starting out the company. Brian Chesky’s talking about the mission of the company and the purpose right from the very beginning. So I think the first mistake that a lot of people make is, well, I don’t need to worry about that yet. I’ll worry about that when I’m bigger. And the problem is when you’re bigger, a lot of things get baked. You’ve already hired a number of people, you’ve already headed off in certain directions, and it’s not an easy thing to change. so I do think that you should be thinking about it early on, right from the beginning. The bigger mistake that I see more often though is you’ve got a mission. Somebody sat down one day and did a nice job writing something really beautiful, and there it sits on the corporate intranet, and no one reads it, no one thinks about it. It, I think a purpose has to really be alive inside of a company. And by alive I mean it has to be, your guiding, principle for all the important decisions that you make. Because, look, it is complicated. Integrity, can be gray. you’ll be challenged with a lot of issues where, you know, maybe the answer isn’t too clear. And the one thing that ought to be the, thing that doesn’t change, the one thing that unites everybody in a company, the one thing that galvanizes people and inspires, that’s your purpose. And that’s the sort of thing I think that needs to be kept alive in a company every day. And you see that in so many successful companies where they’ve done a really good job of keeping that alive.

>> Speaker C: you give great examples of the companies where you’ve been. But in the book you also give examples of Walmart and its commitment to everyday low prices and how it’s kind of debatable whether they take it to an extreme, but they’re really interesting policies they’ve put in place to remind everybody every day that commitment to low prices. Right.

>> Rob Chestnut: Great companies are almost cult like in their zeal around their mission. It’s like everybody, everybody’s buying in. Everyone’s actions need to be consistent with that mission. And like what you’re referring to is like, you know, Walmart, when it comes to accepting gifts, their employees can’t accept any gifts from many third parties. And it’s carried to such an extreme that, I’ve been in meetings with people from Walmart where you offer them a bottle of water and they pull a dollar out of their pocket. And the thinking behind this at Walmart is any gift that an employee gets is ultimately going to cost, come back in the cost of goods because obviously you’ve got to pay for it somehow. It increases the cost of goods. Increasing the cost of goods is of course the opposite of the mission. So Walmart has, they teach their employees that that’s the way everybody operates. And it seems like a small thing, but it actually, by focusing on it, it’s a great reminder of why you’re there when you’re working for Walmart, it keeps you focused on the mission.

>> Speaker C: In the book, you describe your time at Airbnb and the issues around integrity and ethics that and some of the daily legal, ethical issues that would kind of pop up. And it just seemed like a bingo hopper of different things. And it becomes obvious that there are lots of different constituents in a company like Airbnb. I mean, they’re the employees, they’re the guests, they’re the hosts, they’re the neighbors of the hosts. There’s the company’s brand, the shareholders.

Milton Friedman says everything a company does has to be for the shareholder

Can you talk a little bit about this concept of having a stakeholder focus versus having a shareholder focus?

>> Rob Chestnut: You know, Milton Friedman’s famous for, you know, his theory that everything a company does has to be for the shareholder. And unfortunately, and look, you can argue that Milton Friedman was just wrong or that Milton Friedman has been misinterpreted, but he’s certainly been interpreted, as doing things that are only good for the. What is short term, what’s going to affect the stock price today or this quarter? And if you are always just thinking about the today’s shareholder and this month’s share price, you’re going to do things that hurt the company in the long run and of course, ironically hurt people who are holding your shares for the long run. If, though, you know, there’s a great book called Built to Last by Jim Collins where he studied the great companies, the companies that return you, know, terrific returns for shareholders over decades. Right. And what you see over and over again in these companies is, they don’t focus on just the shareholder. What they’ve learned is that, if you respect your employees, you treat your suppliers and Partners with respect. if you put your customers front and center and if you think about the communities where you operate, what happens is in the long run your shareholders benefit. You actually outperform the market and you beat your competitors. And we see that over and over again. I mean, look at Walmart. You know, there is Walmart. I think it may be the most philanthropic company in the world that, yet they’re also one of the top performers. I love Costco. and I love Costco. It’s not the rotisserie chicken, it’s their values. And if you look at the values you walk, by the way, you can walk into the Costco warehouse, look at the values, they got them on the wall so that everybody remembers them. You know, the number one is follow, obey the law. Number one right out of the gate, right? It recognizes Costco’s fundamental obligation to follow the law and respect government. the other ones include things like, prioritize the customer, put the customer front and center, respect your suppliers, right? They actually talk about the suppliers as one of their, their principal values, you know, the quality of the goods that they sell. Now, could Costco come, improve this quarter’s financial performance by increasing the price of the rotisserie chicken a little bit? maybe by paying their employees less because they’re famous for paying their employees well above market. Sure, they could, but what they’ve learned is that in the long run, that leads you down a bad path and ultimately isn’t good for your long term shareholders. So this idea of stakeholder capitalism is by treating, everyone in your ecosystem well and with respect, you will ultimately benefit your shareholder. Right? But if all of your decisions are only made with the bottom line profit, in mind, for each individual decision, you’ll ultimately leave your company down a wrong path and hurt your shareholders.

>> Speaker C: I once ran a small financial services firm that financed major automobile repairs. And it was a business model that had me talking to legal counsel every day. And it soon became apparent to me that a lawyer’s job is to tell you whether or not something is legal. But, their job’s not to tell you whether or not something is right or wrong. And just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. And ah, I’m just wondering, did you ever find it challenging wading into this gray area, or did you see it as an opportunity to make rules on a micro level that could prevent bigger fires?

>> Rob Chestnut: Well, I would talk to CEOs, my CEOs about this a lot and I a CEO. My CEO at Chegg, Dan Rosenswein, he used to love, looking at me in a meeting and say, all right, Rob, I want you to have your legal hat on right now. I want you to tell me, is this legal? And I’d tell him, and then he’d say, all right, Rob, you can take off your legal hat now. You’re an executive, at the company. what should we do? Right. And there were certainly times where with my legal hat on, I’d say, you know what? This is legal. And I take the legal hat off and I look and say, you know something, we shouldn’t do this. And, for me, that’s actually the joy, and art of practicing law and being a general counsel. It’s being able to recognize the difference. There’s a difference between, compliance and integrity. Compliance, you’re doing it because the law says you gotta do it. Integrity, you’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do. And having the judgment to recognize the difference between the two and be able to advise on it is, part of what makes it a great profession.

Edelman: Sometimes managers had to choose integrity even when it was difficult

>> Speaker C: Well, in the book you go through, what you call six C’s critical steps to foster integrity in the workplace. And number one on the list is, el Jefe, the chief, the CEO. It’s obvious in your book the respect you have for Meg Whitman and Brian Chesky, and the examples that you give are really illuminating. And it’s apparent that integrity starts at the top. Sometimes those two managers had to choose integrity even when it was difficult or expensive.

>> Rob Chestnut: If you think integrity is expensive, though, try, not following integrity, because I think in the long run, I’ll give you an example. At Airbnb, we had an issue around discrimination on the platform where, it was alleged that certain hosts were declining guests of color just based on the color of their skin. Right. And, the number of complaints online grew. we started looking internally and saw that there was data that supported some of the claims, that there was a statistical difference. And then the lawsuit started coming in. So I go off and I do my lawyer thing first. I got my lawyer hat on, I go off and do the legal research. Is it illegal for someone running an Airbnb, just a small short term rental site, is that even illegal? do federal housing laws, estate housing laws, bar that kind of bias? and secondly, is Airbnb legally responsible? We’ve got non discrimination in our terms of service. You know, careful good lawyering put that in. Does that mean we’re immune, because we don’t condone it and we actually forbid it. So I go off and do all my legal research. I go into a meeting with Brian and I look at Brian and I. And I start going through the law with him. Brian holds up his hand and looks at me and says, stop. I don’t care. I say, whoa, wait a minute. What do you mean you don’t care? And Brian said, look, Rob, our mission is to get people out from behind their computers, going to a place in the world they haven’t been before and meeting people who are different than they are. Our mission is to connect people. So if this sort of thing is going on on our website, we’re failing as a company. And I don’t care what the financials say. That’s powerful stuff, right? And, that goes back to that idea of taking your mission, your values and putting that front and center. So Brian said, look, we’re going to fix this because we have to. You go off and deal with the legal stuff. And he embarked on, an effort as a large team. One of the things that we did, for example, was we put up a little interstitial screen. When somebody came to the website, our policy around non discrimination was put right in front of them. And then a button, I agree, I disagree. So we asked Brian. It’s like, well, you know, most people, I’m sure, will hit, I agree, they’ll agree with non discrimination. But what if somebody says, I disagree? Brian said, well, they’re gone. Say, well, what do you mean, Brian? They’re off the site. That’s it. they won’t work in our community. So we lost, I remember we lost 2% of our users in a space of about 10 days. And there are financial consequences to losing losers like that. But again, the company has done very well financially. And I think part of it is because they’re willing to take a stand on something like that and they’re willing to live with their purpose. And I think if the company had not taken a stand and waffled and taken a legal view, well, the law doesn’t really apply to us. I think in the long run it would have hurt the company financially. And so a great example, I think, of lead with your values. you know, you get to decide what your values are. Right. I think someone could have run a website like Airbnb, but said, you know what? We believe in the sanctity of the home. The host ought to be able to decide whatever guests they want to have in the home. That’s their decision. Right. And I might disagree with it, but that still could be someone’s at the heart of someone’s purpose and they can run their website that way.

>> Speaker C: It’s obvious that that 2% that went away, that’s 2% that could have been a much larger percentage liability for the company in the grander scheme. A lot of this is tied to the term trust. Your customer’s ability to trust you, the employee’s ability to feel like they are in a trusted environment where management has their back. In the book, you even refer to a study by Edelman around trust. It’s an important piece of the puzzle.

>> Rob Chestnut: If you’re in business, you’re in the trust business because trust is at the foundation of all human relationships. So you need to be thinking, if you’re in business about, do you have a relationship of trust with your customers? Do you have a relationship of trust with your employees? Do you have a relationship with trust with your business partners and your suppliers? And what about the government? So you know, Craig, what happens too often in business is everybody gets focused on numbers. I like numbers. Numbers are great. They can inform decisions and help you make better decisions. But there’s a tendency among business leaders to ignore things that are hard to count, right. Because in numbers there’s certainly it’s objective, right? And so I know that if I’m focusing on numbers, I can take comfort in that objectivity. But sometimes, that can be at the expense of things like trust or your long term brand or culture or leadership. Things that matter but are hard to count. there’s a great Albert Einstein quote. Not everything that can be counted counts. not everything that counts can be counted. M. So one, thing I think great leaders do is they recognize this. And while they certainly use numbers and are informed by numbers, they also recognize that there are a lot of important things that are difficult to count. But, focus still needs to be put on them. And I think trust is right there is one of the top ones.

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You wrote a book about being a chief ethics officer in Silicon Valley

Now back to our conversation.

>> Speaker C: In the book, you went through kind of a laundry list of some of the pitfalls that you in the role of a chief ethics officer might have to deal with. Whether that’s unwanted romantic advances in the workplace, the drunken executive at a holiday party, or heaven forbid, during the workday, conflicts of interest, bribes, trade secrets, fraud. You know, it seemed like, you know, one of the ones that is just kind of ringing so true, you know, in the time, in these last four or five years since you wrote the book, is about the sexual harassment. And you know, in the book you mentioned your wife Jillian, and how she would answer These kind of SOS911 type of texts from female executives there in Silicon Valley who found themselves in a bad place. in terms of harassment, in just the sheer number of those texts, it’s just really alarming. Is that indicative of Silicon Valley or is it, you know, is it that bad everywhere?

>> Rob Chestnut: I think it’s that bad everywhere. It’s unfortunately, you know, what I’ve found is that, the more power someone has, the more, I think, vulnerable they are to ethical lapses. there’s a, I think in the military, they call it the Bathsheba principle. success, actually can create in people’s minds and in their psyche this idea that they’ve always been successful and that they’re going to continue to be successful and nothing, bad is going to happen to them and that they have, substantial power. And, you know, so I think the higher, the more successful someone is, the higher up they move up the ladder in any world, in any type of business world, I think the more prone they are to engage in bad behavior. It takes, I think, a special focus on integrity, personal integrity. And it takes a focus on your own values, to keep yourself on the right path. When everybody tells you you’re great and you’re riding high and everybody’s looking up to you and you’ve enjoy success after success.

>> Speaker C: In that period of time since your book came out, and your book came out in 2020, at the time it was coming out, we were in the middle of a pandemic. We were kind of square in the middle of a firestorm of MeToo. but since then there have been other issues that are kind of at hand that maybe we don’t talk about fully in the book. And I thought maybe we could kind of touch on some of those.

There’s been progress on diversity, equity and inclusion in business

>> Rob Chestnut: Sure.

>> Speaker C: And maybe the first one is what we’ve seen as progress or an attempt at progress on the front of diversity, equity and inclusion in the last four years.

>> Rob Chestnut: Well you certainly see pendulums in everything in life. And I think after George Floyd the pendulum swung a particular direction and I think a lot of companies race to do what they felt was the right thing and a lot of them do diversity really well. I’ll describe what I mean by that. there’s a lot of great data that demonstrates that diverse organizations are more creative and they have more successful outcomes, they make better decisions and it makes a lot of sense. Look, if you’ve got five people in a room and they’ve all got the same background, the same experience, they’re probably a lot more likely to agree on something and you’re not going to get different ideas. whereas if you’ve got different backgrounds and cultures, it may more fully represent your customers and you may come up with ah, a new approach. and I think that there are some companies that took diversity as quotas. We have to hire a certain number of someone of this race or this gender and the like. They weren’t necessarily committed to the idea that this is going to lead to a better business outcome, a better outcome for our customers. M. But it was more of a box to check. And I think there’s been an increasing recognition of that kind of latter approach, in business. not only does it have potential legal challenges to it, but it also isn’t really effective from a business perspective. So I think where I think the world is moving is more of a recognition that there are lots of different kinds of diversity. Some of it it’s hard to measure. So we may use things like the color of skin or gender as almost proxies for these different approaches. but I think an increased recognition there are different types of diversity. and if you’re going to commit as a company to a diverse culture, you can’t look at it like a quota system and the like. And like checking a box, you’ve got to really look at it as there’s real business value here. and therefore we’re doing this because it’s the right thing for our business, not because we feel like we’ve got to look good or check a box.

>> Speaker C: That hiring of a VP of inclusion. It can’t be just the poster in the break room. It really needs to. It needs to be grassroots. And you talk a lot about how for the integrity to be real, for the culture to be real, communication is key, and people need to see it and talk about it from the ground up.

>> Craig Gould: Right.

>> Rob Chestnut: It has to be owned by everybody. If the only people talking about it are HR and legal, then it’s, I think, not going to meaningfully move the needle in your company. I really like an approach where people throughout the company feel like they’ve got a voice and an ownership in how the company is going to address these issues. I think, it’s more authentic, and more likely to be successful that way, as opposed to being sort of preached to by HR and legal about this sort of thing.

Craig says you want a culture where people aren’t afraid to speak up

>> Speaker C: Do you advocate for a more of a flat business architecture where there are fewer. There are fewer hierarchies? I mean, I’ve heard you tell a story before about, the IT guy who felt like he had the autonomy to come, to you personally and say, you know, I noticed you didn’t lock your screen when you went to the restroom. Can you talk a little bit about creating an atmosphere where people feel like they can have that conversation with a superior?

>> Rob Chestnut: Yeah, I don’t think of it in the terms of, like, a flat org chart and the like. The way I think about it more is you want a culture where people aren’t afraid to speak up. And look, we all read about whistleblowers. I’ve talked to a number of whistleblowers. One thing they’ve got in common is that none of them wanted to be a whistleblower. No one grows up saying, I want to be a whistleblower. in each case, they felt compelled to become whistleblowers because they saw something going wrong inside of a company, and no one listened, no one cared. And, I think in today’s world, Craig, there are no secrets. If there’s a problem inside of your company, in the old days, nobody might talk about it because everybody was planning on staying at the company for 30 years and getting their pension and their gold watch. And there were only three news stations. And if none of those three news stations covered it, everybody’s in the clear. Today, we are all our own news station. We all carry around our camera crew with us wherever we go. It’s called cell phone. We’re, all putting out our newspaper every day. It’s called our social media post. If employees don’t like something, they’re, only going to be at the company two or three years anyway. they will go onto Slack, they will go onto their social media, they will print out company documents and take them to Congress. So I think you have to be aware when you’re running a business that, bad stuff’s not going to get swept under the rug the way it did in the old days. And so therefore, what you want to do is you want to create a culture where people are comfortable to speak up and talk about things they see so that you can address it internally before they become public. Whistleblowers take down your brand and create major regulatory legal challenges and all the embarrassment. You want people to raise their hand, speak up, you want to listen, and if you feel like what they’re saying is right, you want to take action on it before it becomes a major liability for your company.

Craig Moffett: Trend in CEO tenures skewing down

>> Speaker C: Something I’ve been thinking about and reading more about lately has been, the trend in CEO tenures, that’s skewing down. We’re getting down to an average that’s somewhere in the 3.5 to 4 year range on CEOs. The folks you worked for were pretty long term. Brian’s been at Airbnb for quite a while now. It just seems like these shorter tenures could create something of a lame duck effect in trying to deal with a culture. What do you think?

>> Rob Chestnut: Yeah, you know, it’s certainly hard to have a consistent culture when your CEO is changing every three years. And often the tone is set from the top.

>> Speaker C: Craig?

>> Rob Chestnut: I think it’s really a reflection. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier. shareholder. If you’re only focusing on shareholders, what, are you going to do? Well, if you’re. Because they’re a shareholder, there are people that are day trading your stock. They, want results now. They don’t care about what your stock price is in three to five years. They want your stock price to be as high as it possibly can today so that they can sell and make money. So that puts pressure on CEOs to perform immediately and do things that are going to pop that stock price quickly. And if they don’t respond to those pressures, they’re pushed out. I like companies that hire CEOs from within so that there’s a consistency of culture again. one of the things I admire about Costco, you’ll see they typically hire their leaders from within. I like cultures that are run by founders. Brian Chesky, always told me he was going to be CEO of Airbnb forever. He wasn’t going to leave. That was what he was born to do and what he wants to do. And because he as a founder has control over the company, he can make that happen. but, and there are advantages to that in that you look, there’s a tone, there’s a culture. He doesn’t have to be as responsive to short term pressures. He can manage the company for the long run. And that’s why I like Airbnb as a company, because I think I know that Brian, if Brian were faced with a choice, if he could take a particular action that would pop the stock price 10 points, but it wouldn’t be consistent with the mission and long term value. Brian, wouldn’t do it. That’s not what he’s after. He’s managing to a mission, not to a number. And I think companies that can do that can keep CEOs longer, they can transition from within and maintain consistency in the culture. And I think again, if you talk about this idea of shareholder capitalism and you have to do what’s right for the shareholder, my first question to you is, which shareholder? The shareholder that bought your stock yesterday, that’s selling it tomorrow, or the shareholder that bought your stock last year and will be a shareholder for 10 years? You’re managing to a very different constituencies there.

Rob Bell: Managing your superstars can be a challenge

>> Speaker C: Rob, there was a section in your book that I found really interesting where you spoke about this particular type of employee that is somewhat common in Silicon valley called the 10Xer. And it reminds me, before we started recording, we were talking about the unfortunate fact that I’m a Dallas Cowboys fan. And that segment reminded me of a story where Jimmy, Johnson was a hard nosed head, football coach and he supposedly had a, rule that if you were late for a meeting, then you wouldn’t play the first half of that week’s game. And somebody questioned, well, wait a minute, what if Michael Irvin shows up late from meeting? Are you really going to hold them out of the game for the first half? He’s like, well, of course not. But you know, if you, if you’re late for a meeting, you’re going to be held out. And you know, I find a lot of commonality with this premise, of the 10x employee. Can you kind of describe that in kind of the really slippery slope that it’s a really difficult problem to answer.

>> Rob Chestnut: In many ways, managing your superstars a challenge because again, going back to what I said earlier, the People who are really successful stars, what often happens is that these people develop a sense of invincibility, a sense of entitlement, right? So they’re more likely to violate rules. And therefore if they violate a rule and there are no consequences for them, then you have no credibility with that rule. Right? So it’s, it’s actually damaging to have a rule that you’re not willing to enforce against your star. So you think about that. I mean that, you don’t have to, you know, there may be rules that you don’t need to have. And you’re better off not having a rule than having a rule that’s only enforced against the average employee or the below average employee. It’ll kill your culture. What I try to do with this, when I was working, what I would do is I’d have the rule and then I would go proactively talk to the 10Xer. I’d go proactively have a conversation with a superstar and say, hey, I want you to be even more successful. You are a superstar to this company. You are so important to us culturally. you might not be aware of studies that show that you’re actually more likely to end up, in trouble and have your career derailed because of your, because you’re so successful. And I need you to be a leader. I need you to recognize that it would be very easy for you to fudge these rules and to have that sense of entitlement, that’s going to hurt the big team in the long run. And ultimately it’s going to hurt you and it’s not going to reflect well on you. I, you know, the company needs you to be a step up and be a leader. And I just want to make sure we’re all aligned. And I think if you have a positive conversation and sort of show them how, being a leader in this regard is ultimately good for them and their brand and their career. Hopefully you can prevent some of those, some of those problems. or, you know, frankly, you might be better off without the 10xer, because a 10xer that isn’t going to follow any of the rules and is going to be a, ah, constant pain in your side and undermine your culture. that 10 extra might be a divider and ultimately bring you down. but you do everything you can you to recognize that, you need that person. And if you can make them successful and help them as they make them a leader and make them understand how everyone’s watching them and everyone Is, using them as a cue to how they should act, you might be able to get them to step up and be a great leader for you.

Companies are asking for regulation around artificial intelligence

>> Speaker C: So one last topic that, you know, I feel like is. Has come up in the last five years. I mean, it’s, you know, I’m sure you could see this one coming is, AI, you know, ethics. Ethics around the development, ethics around the use, ethics around whether or not there should be guardrails in regulation. What is the right thing? What would the leader with integrity, how would they navigate what is ahead of us in terms of artificial intelligence?

>> Rob Chestnut: What’s fascinating about AI is that leaders, of companies are actually asking for regulation. I think they are recognizing that this is so powerful, that we need some guardrails, and we need guardrails so that I think some of the larger companies, like Microsoft, for example, want to be responsible partners here and responsible leaders, but they don’t want to be put at a competitive disadvantage and they also don’t want to see. They recognize that a large failure in the area of AI could lead to crippling regulation. So what, what you really want is you want responsible companies to work with government to come up with appropriate regulation up front. and I think that’s. We may see that. You know, we haven’t seen a lot of that historically. What we’ve historically seen is companies racing out way ahead of regulation, a lot of abuse and problems, and then government taking years or even longer to catch up, usually starting with Europe catching up first, and then individual states and then the federal government. I think that cycle is speeding up quite a bit. And I think companies are beginning to recognize that working with government to craft, good regulation for something that is as powerful as AI is the responsible thing to do and will ultimately be good for the business in the long run.

You mentioned pay. Historically, we’ve been very secretive about pay

>> Speaker C: What else am I missing? Is it pay transparency? What else has been top of mind, the last couple of years? Or what do you see on the horizon as being issues that managers at the top of the organization are having to deal with or going to have to deal with?

>> Rob Chestnut: Yeah, well, we covered AI, I think areas around pay, have also been. You mentioned pay.

>> Speaker C: Pay.

>> Rob Chestnut: Ah, transparency. Historically, we’ve always been very secretive about pay. My mom used to tell me, don’t tell anybody how much you make. in today’s world though, there’s increasing, pressure, around pay transparency just because of recognition of the inequalities of the past due to gender and race and the like. managing through that world where, increasingly everybody starts to learn what everyone else is making. How do you pay based upon ability? How do you pay your best employees more, in a world where everyone knows what everyone else is making, I think it’s another big challenge of leadership.

>> Speaker C: Rob. If people wanted to keep track of you in a good way, if they wanted to follow along, if they wanted to follow along on your journey, where’s the best place for folks to follow? I mean, your website or is there a social that you, that you use?

>> Rob Chestnut: So I’ve got a Link, a, LinkedIn, account. People can follow me on LinkedIn. I usually post articles and thoughts about integrity in business every week. I have a website, intentionalintegrity.com and folks feel free to reach out to me there. I do a lot of speaking at conferences and I do, work with companies at leadership off sites and the like to help them sort of think through the various issues relating to integrity in their business.

>> Speaker C: Rob, I really enjoyed reading the book. it’s very relevant to just about any company. And Rob, I really appreciate your time today. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.

>> Rob Chestnut: Well, it’s a great podcast. You’re very unusually well prepared and the questions I thought were excellent. So thank you for having me on. I enjoyed it, I appreciate it.

This has been Master Move. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the podcast

>> Craig Gould: This has been Master Move. I’m Craig Gould and I’ve been your host. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an interview with another inspiring leader. And if you’re looking for more exclusive content and behind the scenes insights, check out MasterMove IE for additional resources, premium articles, premium episodes and more. I’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s conversation conversation. So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or drop me a line at craigasterastermove IO until next time. Remember, leadership isn’t just about making decisions. It’s about making moves that matter. Master Move.