Occidental’s Vicki Hollub on what future CEOs need to know before moving into the C-suite

Murray, McGirt, and Hollub’s conversation took place in front of a live audience hosted by Deloitte US in Dallas. The crowd was filled with people who had been identified by their companies as potential future CEOs.

The episode also marks a partial changing of the co-host team that has led Leadership Next conversations since the show’s launch. McGirt is stepping away from her co-host duties to focus on some new editorial roles with Fortune. Murray’s new co-host will be announced in an upcoming episode.

Listen to the episode or read the full transcript below. 

Transcript

Alan Murray: Leadership Next is powered by the folks at Deloitte, who, like me, are super focused on how CEOs can lead in the context of disruption and evolving societal expectations.

Ellen McGirt: We’ve got guests today. We have live energy in the room. I’m so excited.

Murray: Whoo! Make some noise folks.

[Clapping] 

I don’t know if we know how to do this with guests. Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I’m Alan Murray, and I’m here with my everything, everywhere, all at once co-host, Ellen McGirt.

McGirt: Alan, you are an Oscar winner to me every day. So thank you for that beautiful introduction, and as our listeners probably caught there at the top, we actually recorded today’s interview in front of a live audience.

Murray: A live audience. Yeah, it was really awesome. We flew to Dallas, Texas, where Deloitte, our podcast partner, was hosting a group of leaders from a bunch of different industries who’ve been identified by their companies as future CEOs. And as you know, Ellen, every week on this podcast, we have CEOs tell us what it takes to do their jobs and how that’s changing, the skills they need, the issues on their plate—all dramatically different than they were just a few years ago. So being able to talk about that in front of that group that was experiencing those very challenges themselves was pretty cool.

McGirt: It really was, and it was a wonderful vibe in the room, so welcoming, and it actually made me wish we had a Leadership Next–Next-type podcast, because it was such a chance to take a pulse on what was top of mind for people who are on that spot in the bench on their way into the top spot. And naturally, of course, the guest who joined us was perfect to talk about all of that. We spoke to Vicki Hollub, who’s the CEO of Occidental Petroleum. Oxy is number 135 on the Fortune 500 and Vicki’s run the company since 2016. And Alan I know our focus here is stakeholder capitalism, but I have to point out that last year, Occidental Petroleum was the best performing stock in the S&P 500 and I’m sure that makes shareholders very very happy.

Murray: I’m sure made them very happy but, Ellen, I also just enjoyed this conversation so much. Vicki Hollub. I don’t know what the right adjective is. She’s an unassuming CEO. She is almost an accidental CEO. She told us during the interview that she really never imagined she was going to get the job until just about a year before she did it. But so impressive. Her story is so impressive and obviously, her results are so impressive. 

But Ellen, let me say first, before we dive into this, we need to share some very important and some very sad news with our listeners. And listeners, brace yourselves but Ellen is stepping away from being a regular co-host on Leadership Next. I’m going to do everything I can to get you back here as frequently as possible, Ellen, but I think it’s important people know you’re taking a break. 

McGirt: It is sort of sad, but I’m healthy and happy. I’m just taking on some new editorial roles at Fortune and I’m working on some pretty cool things. So I want you to think of me, Alan, as always your forever sidekick, but also as an always available leadership correspondent going forward. So I’m looking forward to how the show evolves and how I can contribute.

Murray: We will definitely definitely make use of that. Want to continue these conversations, and I’ve got to keep practicing my superlatives.

McGirt: And co-host or not, if I’m having a tough day, you know, I’m going to call you up and you can introduce me the way that you’ve done. It’s always been a great boost and of course, since I know exactly where you work. I will be knocking on your door.

Murray: I will always be ready for the phone call.

McGirt: Well, thank you for that, and thank you to all the listeners out there. I love being a part of your lives. I’m not going far. But let’s get back to Occidental Petroleum. Without further ado, here’s our amazing, everything, everywhere, all at once conversation with CEO Vicki Hollub.

Murray: I’d like to start by asking you the big question. You and I’ve talked about this before, but there are a lot of people in this world—and there are a fair number of people who listen to this podcast—who seem to believe that you can’t be an oil company CEO determined to maximize returns for your shareholders and be seriously concerned about climate change at the same time. You can’t do both. They’re mutually exclusive. So how do you do it?

Vicki Hollub: Well, first of all, I care a lot about climate change, because I live on Galveston Island, and I see what hurricanes do to my friends who own businesses on the island. My daughter has a bed and breakfast, and that’s her livelihood. The increasing ferocity of the storms in Galveston are damaging a lot of people. And you look at what’s happening in California. It’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking what’s happening all around the world. So, climate does matter to me. And I do believe that you can be a CEO of an oil and gas company and do something to address it. But I will say that we at Oxy are uniquely positioned to be able to do this, because one of the things I think it’s hard for any business ever to do is to be something that you’re not. And so I think you always need to do things that help you leverage your core competence. And if you can do something that leverages your core competence, it may not be sustainable. But we are leveraging our core competence in the way that we’ve developed a strategy to mitigate and, ultimately by 2050, neutralize our carbon footprint—and not only do it for ourselves, but to help others do it as well. And ultimately, I guess we’re going to talk about the technologies to do that. But the important message is that you have to look at your business and figure out a way to become carbon neutral. That’s whether you’re an oil and gas company, or any kind of service company, if you’re a retail, whatever you are. In fact we’ve had Airbus who signed a contract with us to offset their emissions, so that can become carbon neutral, ultimately. And we’ve had the Houston Astros, we’ve had the Houston Texans, both sign deals with us to neutralize their travel.

McGirt: Vicki, since you became CEO in 2016, there have been a lot of deals signed—and I’m going to throw to Alan in just a minute to walk through some of the nuts and bolts on what you’ve been up to in those years. But I thought we could have a foundational look at the complexities of energy transition, because I think this is where it gets hard for people to understand what your core competency is. The idea of a carbon-neutral fuel, what does that look like? And some of the technologies and innovations that research and development on how to more effectively get take carbon out of the air, out of the world and out of our lives.

Hollub: When people talk about the climate transition, what they initially think about is all we need to do is build more wind and sola, and not use oil or natural natural gas to create electricity and use EVs instead of internal combustion engines. The problem with that thought is that that electricity generates today only 27% of the greenhouse gases. So if you built enough solar and wind to offset all the electricity generated in the world, you’ve only taken care of 27% the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere. Secondly, if we continue down the path of building electric vehicles, then that 27% may get higher and you might have to offset more of that. So that would be also kind of challenging, but you could do that with wind and solar ultimately. The reality is that there are so many products that are made from oil and gas derivatives, that it would be almost impossible to find a different way to build those products and to make those products over the next 20, 30, 40 years to have some alternative way of making those, like the IV bags in the hospitals, the IV tubes. Everything what we’re sitting on here, this, your iPhones, the cars you drive, everything. The TVs you watch. We used to have a commercial, and then more people have done it recently I think in different ways, but we used to have a commercial that shows the guy watching football sitting on his sofa and then the if you take away everything that’s in that room with him that was made from oil and gas, he ends up sitting on the floor and the game is gone and now he’s got no chips. The chips are spilled everywhere because there’s no plastic bowl to hold them. So we have a challenge. And it’s not that there aren’t people willing to step up to this challenge. But the challenge is going to take longer, and it’s going to take trillions of dollars.

Murray: So you believe the answer is to—part of the answer—and there’s no silver bullet here. There are many pieces. But part of the answer is to be able to create petroleum without adding CO2 to the environment. Talk about your plan.

Hollub: What we have is we have come across a technology that was developed by Carbon Engineering, a company out of Canada. And what it does is it has the capability to extract CO2 out of the atmosphere. And then it’s what we do with that CO2 that’s so important. First of all, for those that don’t know, there’s about 50% more CO2 in the atmosphere today than there was in pre-industrial times. So the storms we’re seeing today is caused by that level of CO2 that we have in the atmosphere. If you could shut down emissions from every facility that emits CO2 in the world, we would still need to take CO2 out of the atmosphere. So we’re a company that’s building what’s going to be the largest direct air capture facility in the world. Right now, there’s a company that has just built their largest. It’s extracting 4,000 tons per year out of the atmosphere. Ours, our first one will extract 500,000 tons and the next, the ones that we build after that will extract 1 million tons out of the atmosphere of CO2. So the reason we’re uniquely positioned to do this and that it leverages our core competence is for 50 years we’ve been using CO2 in oil reservoirs to create more production out of those reservoirs. So I’ll come back to that later. But that’s one important thing. But the other thing that’s important to know is that we have a chemicals business that is helpful and has synergies with what we want to do. The fluid that is going to be required that will help us to get that CO2 out of the air, when the air is is pulled through a contact tower, and the fluid in that contact tower will be potassium hydroxide, which we at Oxy are the largest marketer of in the United States second largest in the world. So that’s a synergy. The material that goes in that contact tower will be PVC, and we are a large manufacturer of PVC. And we’re going to put it in the Permian where we have pipelines and reservoirs to put the CO2 into. So that’s why we have the synergies, we have the capability, we have the experience, we have knowledge, we have the reservoirs that are already approved by EPA to do this. So we’re a company that can make this happen.

Murray: I just want to ask you to repeat something you said when we were talking in the greenroom because it’s such a mind blowing statistic. You said the Permian Basin has enough room to store all the CO2 emissions from 28 years. 

Hollub: From the United States for 28 years. So just in the Permian, we could store 28 years of emissions from the United States. Tremendous capacity. The reservoirs in the Permian almost have the same pore space as the big reservoir in Saudi Arabia. It’s huge and it’s very it’s really important to our world.

[Music starts]

Murray: I’m here with Joe Ucuzoglu, the CEO of Deloitte and the sponsor of this podcast for all of its season. Thank you for that, Joe. 

Joe Ucuzoglu: Pleasure to be here, Alan. 

Murray: Joe, we’ve had this rising talk about a notion of stakeholder capitalism, that businesses have a responsibility not just to their shareholders, but to their employees, to the communities they operate in, to the natural environment. Is all of that talk real and will it last—particularly when times get tough?

Ucuzoglu: I see a pretty durable shift, Alan, with a lot of momentum here. CEOs are prioritizing sustainability. They’re prioritizing purpose. They’re prioritizing trust. You certainly see some noise. On one end, there’s some skepticism as to whether this is virtue signaling. On the other end, there’s some lingering debate about whether this broader focus on stakeholders detracts from shareholder returns. If you cut through all the noise, what we’re seeing is actually a huge convergence of interests. This is core to sustaining a vibrant capitalist system. If you take a long-term view, the only way that you’re going to deliver sustainable shareholder returns is to take really good care of all those constituents that you referenced.

Murray: And is it working, Joe?

Ucuzoglu: Well, business was at the heart of leading society through the pandemic. Business is at the heart of addressing the climate challenge. We’re seeing massive momentum with very tangible commitments and tangible actions towards decarbonizing the economy. So yes, I think the evidence is ample.

Murray: Joe, thank you. 

Ucuzoglu: Alan, it’s a real pleasure.

[Music ends]

McGirt: I alluded earlier earlier to many of the deals and many of the things that you’ve been working on and it has been just a remarkable few years. There’s things that happened to all of us, the Ukraine and pandemic and then there was an ambitious deal that you set up for you to get to the finish line on it. It was the Anadarko deal. It strikes me as one of the most misunderstood or just not understood case studies in ambitious growth, certainly in any sector, but definitely in yours. Can you tell us a little bit about that, please?

Hollub: Yes. I don’t know how many people in here know about it. But for our industry, we were buying a company that was pretty close to our size. And so in terms of market cap, so we were at the time that we launched our attempt to acquire Anadarko, we were a company that was around a $50 billion company, and we were offering $38 billion to buy Anadarko. And to bring on their debt, which was 12 billion at the time, so that got us to about 50 billion. They had all midstream business at about 7 billion in debt. So this was about close to a $55 billion deal for a $50 billion market cap company. So it was big. 

[Laughter from audience]

We’ve been working it for a couple of years. Just when we thought we were over the hump and about to make the deal happen, I was driving from Galveston to my office on a Friday morning and heard on CNBC, that the deal had been done and it had been done with one of our competitors.

Murray: You can’t say but I can. It was Chevron.

Hollub: So then I go okay, what do we do now? And so I left. I went to my office. Went down and saw my BD guy and we were we were very disappointed…

Murray: You’re kind of competitive too. 

Hollub: Just a little bit. My problem is I grew up in the state of Alabama and my parents were huge Alabama football. Bear Bryant and that whole thing. You cannot go through that experience…Bear Brian was at Alabama the whole time, from the time I was born to the time I graduated from college, Bear Bryant was the coach of the University of Alabama. How could I not be competitive?

Murray: So you were channeling Bear Bryant at this moment?

Hollub: He would have been a little more savvy about this whole thing, I’m sure. We thought all right, we’re done here because it’s a done deal. And so then I drive over and it’s an interesting that happened. I hadn’t thought about the connection here. But I had to go out of the office for a meeting and the meeting I went to was for the American Heart Association’s meeting that for the group that sponsors the Bear Bryant Coach of the Year award. I was chairing it that year. This meeting and I’m I’m sitting there and my phone kept buzzing and buzzing and buzzing and buzzing and and I thought it must be an accident, something’s happened in one of our field operations. So I picked up the phone and I turned it around and it says “Breaking news: Occidental was the other bidder for Anadarko.” So somebody leaked that that we had been the other bidder and when they did our stock started dropping like a rock. And so I thought this is not good for us and and so went back and debated it, looked back over all the numbers and the deal just made so much more sense for us and what we wanted to do with it than it did with was what our competitors’ core competence was and what they wanted to do with it. And so, we made the decision that we would then make an offer and our first stock offer was not accepted. Anadarko made it quite clear that unless we brought significant cash they were not going to accept our offer. 

So I started looking for ways to raise cash. I can tell you I was sitting in my my husband’s man cave—I have my own my own part of the house—but I happened to be sitting in his man cave, when I get an email from Patrick Pouyanné from Total, who said Vicki, in the email, and I’m glad he sent me an email because I could only understand about two thirds of what he says. He’s got a heavy French accent. So I was trying to read it in the way he was saying. He said, Vicki, if you have if you’re contemplating any additional moves around this deal, just know that we’re interested in in some of the Africa assets. I thought, hmmm, a source of cash. I then got on a plane headed to to Paris to meet with him on a Friday night to talk about what he would do. Then on Saturday, I had had another event in the industry that I went to and won’t tell you the rest of that story. But I was there when the CEO of a major bank, it was a friend of mine, called and he said Vicki, if you need additional cash, call Warren Buffett and he gave me his number. And so I’m thinking…

Murray: Did you roll your eyes a little bit?

Hollub: Yeah, I’m thinking that he’s not going to answer his phone, I’m going to leave a message. And he was [going to be] like, Who is this crazy person calling me on a Saturday morning? And so he answered the phone, which was very surprising. So we set a meeting for the next day. I got the additional funds that I needed from from Mr. Buffett and the rest of it is history. We made the offer. 

Murray: You’re not going to tell us about meeting Warren Buffett? 

Hollub: The fact that he answered the phone shocked me and I asked for the meeting for 10 o’clock the next morning and he said sure. I’ll meet you at 10 in the morning. He said call me when you land so I called him when I landed in Omaha. Got to his door and he was sitting there with a with a sweater on and opening the door for me, no security. And so I thought, first of all, he’s very trusting individual. And so went in and then had to have the conversation and made the deal.

McGirt: One of the things that we talked about—and Alan you follow this much more closely than I did at the time—was the general rough and tumble nastiness of that time. And a general lack of respect.

Murray: That’s what I was going to say. I think you were consistently underestimated from…how long had you been CEO?

Hollub: I had been CEO less than three years. 

Murray: You have been consistently underestimated. People didn’t think you could win the battle for Andarko. When you won it, people said, oh she overpaid. It’s not worth it. On your carbon capture effort you’ve been dissed not just by environmentalists but by your fellow CEOs in the oil industry. And yet last year, you posted the largest return to shareholders of any company in the S&P 500. I’m just curious why you think you’ve been so consistently underestimated.

Hollub: To me, it was a little bit surprising that to me that people said we overpaid because we really only offered, we did offer 5 billion more than our competition, but we knew we weren’t going to keep Mozambique. The big difference in that was Mozambique and the synergies. Mozambique we got for $4 billion from Total for Mozambique and we knew we were going to sell it immediately. We closed on Mozambique one month after we closed Anadarko. So that was 4 billion of the difference. The other difference was we had assumed that we would get and we, again we’d work this for over two years, we knew the assets. We assumed that we get 2 billion of synergies. They had assumed that they would get 1 billion and synergies. We got our 2 billion in synergies less than six months after the close of the deal. 

Murray: But you’re sort of avoiding our question.

McGirt: I taught her how to do that.

Murray: Why do you think you’ve been underestimated?

Hollub: I really don’t know. Some of my friends have said they believe it was a gender thing.

Murray: There are not a lot of women in the oil industry. 

Hollub: I think it could very well have been just a sign of the times, the way first of all our industry was out of favor. And secondly, some people thought it was hostile to do a deal when somebody else had already done a deal but I felt like they were hostile because we’d been working it and talking to their CEO to the Anadarko CEO for two years. So I didn’t feel like we were making the hostile move. I felt like we were going after something that we knew would be transformational for our company. Because what it’s done for us now is we used to have 50% of the value of our company used to be international. Now 80% of the value of our company is here in the domestic US. And so, geopolitically, we’re in a much better situation than we were before.

McGirt: You are the only woman who runs a major US oil and gas oil company. And there are maybe what 10 15, not even 20% of women leadership ranks in the entire industry. You are a rare figure on the scene. So I’m curious looking back on your history, was there a moment when you knew that was clear that you were on the bench?

Hollub: That time didn’t come until 2015 and it was in 2015 that our board had made the decision that Steve Chazen would retire in a year and they needed a CEO to take his place. They thought to look externally and and ended up looking externally but also considering two internal candidates. And I was one of them and Steve Chazen himself told me on a Friday afternoon. I was living in Bakersfield for a time for our company. I’d lived in several places for our company. Bakersfield was one of the more challenging ones. Russia, Ecuador and Venezuela were also a little challenging but driving back and forth eery Friday to meet with Steve. One Friday he just threw it out there. He said that, by the way, you know you’re going to be one of the candidates to take the CEO role. At that time I was running our California operations and had come up through operations and the company. I had never aspired to be CEO. I loved what I did. I’m an engineer. I love engineering. I love operations. And I never thought I’d be a candidate to be CEO.

Murray: What did you say when he said that?

Hollub: I thought he was joking. I laughed. He didn’t laugh but he had a dry sense of humor. I thought maybe you know, it’s it’s one of those jokes and sometimes he laughed at his jokes and sometimes he didn’t. I thought it was a joke. Actually, when I got in the car to go back to Bakersfield I called one of our other executives and told him what had happened, He said, Vicki, you are a candidate.

McGirt: So now you’re in the position to think about who should be in leadership and you’re also in a position to think about who has not been considered before from underrepresented or whoever you think, however you measure that. How are you thinking about the future and making sure that the leadership in the industry is as diverse as it can possibly be?

Hollub: I’m a part of a woman’s group in Houston called Women in Energy and what we’re trying to do is build the networking within our industry, women that are in the industry, to try to help people help move them along and give them some of the advice and help that that we could have benefited from sooner. And so we’re trying to move people up that way. I’m trying internally within our own organization to start the process of helping people prepare for roles because what’s happening with women in our industry and some other diverse groups is that women in particular, they do fine until they get about mid career, which is about the time that they’re starting families and then you see the stat drop dramatically of how when they go out and they maybe want to take a little time with their new family. And they come back, then they don’t start back at the place where they would have otherwise been, which is something we in our industry have to figure out how to fix. One way to fix that is to try to some way keep them engaged in the process. And so if we can have women that aren’t quitting but women that are on a sabbatical, who are still engaged with what’s happening with our company, and in some sort of role where they’re not losing those years of experience.

Murray: And this is the issue that everybody in this room is is is dealing with. These are all people who have been selected by their companies as potential CEOs and are trying to think about how the hell do you prepare for the enormity of that job? How did you prepare yourself?

Hollub: Within that year, I would say the CEO that I was replacing was was also a great mentor to me. He took me around to to what is the most challenging part of my job is dealing with the investment community. So he took me around to…

Murray: I’ve thought you were going to  say the most fun part of your job.

Hollub: It’s challenging for me because, it’s even challenging today because I have to remember what we’ve disclosed. And it’s just challenging. I would say that when he was taking me around to help me help show me how he did it and how it works, I thought this is never going to work for me because he was a very funny guy and dry humor and investors loved him absolutely adored him. And so I didn’t work well with them because I’m trying to use the southern football analogies in Boston in New York. And then finally he told me after a couple of meetings where the the analogies fell flat. He said they don’t get it.

Murray: They don’t follow Alabama. They weren’t fans of Bear Bryant. 

Hollub: Oh, I’ll stop using that. But really it was hard for me to to learn how to communicate with investors, and how to be transparent without violating SEC rules and things like that. So just the language, just the communication was challenging. Earnings calls are probably the most difficult thing I do. Because I do enjoy talking to our shareholders sitting one on one with them, but to do it on an earnings call with analysts, all that is challenging. So I think that that part is important. What we do now, is our CEO candidates, we run them through the investor group and investor relations group. So we’re not going to have a person take the CEO role that has not been in that investor relations group, and has actually had to work with the analysts and work with the shareholders. It’s critically important. And so any candidate for us will have to have done that. I think it does two things. It not only helps you with the communications and understand them understand their models and all of that, but it makes you learn the minutiae of the company, all the details, you’ve got to know the details and you’ve got to know what’s important to them, and how to communicate it so that then it makes it all the rest of it a lot easier for you. So that’s, that’s probably one of the biggest things. The other thing is how to work with with boards and in the fact that no matter what the experience level of your board is, they are your board and you have to treat them with the respect and the knowledge. Their most important role is to pick the right CEO and then to ensure that the CEO is sticking to the strategy or, or whatever strategy they’ve approved. You’ve got to make sure that if you come to a point when you’re thinking that the strategy should be something different, better, you had better be well prepared to communicate it as soon as you can.

McGirt: Well, to your point, there’s almost nobody that we’ve talked to over the last few years of the podcast who was ever prepared for the kinds of social stance that they would have to take, for example. It just wasn’t in the common lexicon, it just wasn’t in the DNA of anybody’s organization. Now you were worrying, you mentioned childcare and families. We’re talking about employee mental health. The CEO today and leaders today have to really be fluent in all of these human languages. How did you prepare for that? What stands do you take and how do you listen to your employees?

Hollub: The most shocking thing to me is again, when I took over in 2016, today is a lot different than 2016. Because when, when the George Floyd murder occurred, I had not ever gotten an email from any of our employees asking me to take a stand on anything external. Prior to that, well, I’d get emails and text messages from all parts of the organization, people who know they can communicate to me and that I’m fine with that. I want that communication. So from all levels of the organization, from the guys that are out pumping the wells in Midland to our PhDs that are doing research and either, you know, the the part of the business that was subsurface or low carbon. So I get a lot of information, but never had I gotten an email asking me to take a stand on that. So we did take a stand on that, and we took a stand when the senseless attacks on on the Asian community started, in a big way. I think it was the Atlanta incidents when we came out against that. So we don’t take political stands about everything. But we do take stands when it’s a violation of human rights. And now we’ve got even more issues to deal with as the world continues to change and and legislation and changing around women’s rights.

Murray: Women’s rights, you’re talking about the right to abortion. Have you taken a position?

Hollub: I will say publicly women should have the right to choose.

Murray: The question is what’s the company’s role in supporting you on that?

Hollub: Yeah, and to me, there’s such a fine line sometimes, and it’s because we represent our owners, our shareholders. There, you just have to be really careful how you cross that line and where you might be edging up to that line. It’s by far the most difficult thought process than to go through that and to figure out how and when you do you really lend your voice?

Murray: If you’re okay with it, I’d like to end by going back to the climate challenge, because you’ve thought about this a lot. You know a lot about it. You’ve approached it with your engineers’ mindset. Do you think Net Zero 2050 is a realistic goal?

Hollub: I think it’s a realistic goal for our company, because of what we’re doing. So that direct air capture facility will enable us to extract enough CO2 out of the atmosphere to cover the carbon that we use to to get oil and gas out of the ground, which includes not just what we operate with, the electricity we use, but also offset the carbon that’s used by the volume of production that we produce.

Murray: By your customers. 

Hollub: Yes. 

Murray: It’s the scope. You can offset the airplane that’s using your fuel.

Hollub: That’s right. And it’s because of that direct air capture and and other carbon capture that we can do that.

Murray: But you need to convince the other oil companies to do the same.  That’s what you’re saying. If we’re going to make 2050, all your colleagues…

Hollub: …and the rest of the world has to be supportive of us doing it. So it’s important to take the time to understand it and support us doing it. Because if you’ll support us doing it, then we can together help change the world.

McGirt: I just heard the start of a great campaign. That’s the next big swing right. That’s it right there.

Murray: Leadership Next is edited by Alexis Haut. It’s written by me, Alan Murray, along with my amazing colleagues Ellen McGirt, Alexis Haut, and Megan Arnold. Our theme is by Jason Snell. Our executive producer is Megan Arnold. Leadership Next is a production of Fortune Media. Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune‘s editorial team.

The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel. Nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.