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What does it take to lead - and live - when the world won’t sit still?
Hosted by executive advisor and bestselling author Jimmy Allen, Founder’s Mentality: The CEO Sessions is a leadership development podcast that goes beyond the boardroom.
Each episode features a conversation with a prominent CEO—from the likes of Audible, Walmart, and AWS—who reflects on the lessons that reshaped their business and their personal growth. But you won’t just hear from business leaders. Jimmy brings in artists, musicians, comedians, and other unconventional thinkers who explore the same lessons through a completely different lens.
These conversations surface aha moments from some of the world’s most influential leaders and thinkers. Intensely curious and open to new experiences and perspectives, they seek inspiration in unexpected places as they constantly reinvent their businesses and themselves.
In turn, you’ll walk away with a fresh take on how we all grow as individuals, what we are capable of building, and the legacy we leave behind.
So, whether you’re a CEO, a rising executive, or simply passionate about leadership, influence, and business at scale, this podcast will challenge and inspire you—one story at a time.
About the Host:
Jimmy Allen is an Advisory Partner at Bain & Company with over 35 years’ experience advising leading organizations. He’s the author of multiple best-selling books on growth and leadership and the host and founder of Bain’s Global CEO Community Forum. James is a regular speaker at global business events, including the World Economic Forum, and serves on the Botswana Economic Advisory Council. Outside of consulting, James started his own record label (Abubilla Music) in 2008 and supports Singing Wells, a project dedicated to preserving Kenyan village music.
Bain & Company:
Founder’s Mentality: The CEO Sessions is brought to you by Bain & Company, a global consultancy trusted by the world’s most influential business leaders. With decades of experience guiding organizations through growth, transformation, and leadership development, Bain’s executive insights offer what it takes to lead at scale.
Jimmy Allen: Our goal with the season has been to begin to answer a single question. How do we lead in an era of turbulence? We know we have to grow, but growth creates complexity and that complexity kills growth. We know we have to run the business and change the business, but most of our processes view change as a distraction. We know we have to win in turbulent markets, but we also have to win internally. Keep the focus on the insurgent mission. Stop the rise of the energy vampires. So now, let's bring it home. This is a special episode of "Founder's Mentality: The CEO Sessions." I'm your host, Jimmy Allen, and you know what? If you've been with us all season, this is your wrap up. One place where we'll pull together the most powerful insights from our CEOs. But hey, if you're new here, we think you're in the right place too. Think of this as a whistle stop tour of the big themes. And by the end, we hope you'll have plenty of reasons to dive back into the fuller episodes. All right, enough wind up. Let's get started. In our first two episodes, we went back to basics. Fall in love with your product and the people that make and sell it, and then your customers will follow. Aaron Powell leads Pizza Hut. It's one of the most recognized brands on the planet, thousands of restaurants across dozens of countries, and it's so easy for the business to fall into process and discussions of scale and supply chain. But Aaron argues that the real job of the leader starts with something far more personal. Fall back in love with your product.
Aaron Powell: As I joined the company, I spoke with everybody I could, and many of them had just convinced themselves that this was so challenging that we were in a knife fight in a totally commoditized category. But that's just not true. It's just not true. So people that would spend more time on spreadsheets would convince themselves, you know, look at price of pizza has not changed in 20 years. All this type of stuff that would make you, that's commodity, commodity, commodity. When it comes to pride in having great pizza, the best franchisees and their best team members were the ones that believed in it strongly. Pizza and the overall experience can be special. And my job was basically figuring out how to make it more special more often to more people.
Jimmy Allen: The danger is this, as organizations grow, managers start to think they're more important than the product and the frontline, they are the magic sauce. Hell, we don't even have to care about the product at all. We add the value, but it's a doom loop. If we treat the product as a commodity, we're gonna start treating frontline jobs as commodity jobs. And pretty soon, the only thing we're proud about is our PowerPoint slides and spreadsheets. But who the hell would wanna work for that company? Aaron's reminder is that the product love is what gives purpose to the work, pride to the front line, and clarity to the strategy. When leaders show they care deeply about the product, it cascades throughout the organization. People understand that their contribution matters, which leads us to Christina Zhu. As president and CEO of Walmart China. She's out there running one of the toughest, most competitive retail markets in the world. For her, the frontline is not just where the business happens, it's where the business learns. From customers, from competitors. Market shifts aren't learned about at headquarters. They're experienced every day in the act of keeping customer promises. Her job is to create and nurture what she calls joyful routines, but don't let that title fool you.
Christina Zhu: You know, joyful routine is not just about creating superficial sense of happiness, it's really about at the heart of it. It's really about that well-designed, human-centric, tech enabled processes that actually are the foundation for scaling excellence. And so, don't focus on the superficial sense of happiness and certainly don't prioritize joy at expense of routine, right? A real goal is actually creating environment where associates can experience the joy of winning and the joy of winning together. But crucially, winning is only possible when you actually have the right strategy. We shouldn't be even being talking about routines unless we're sure that we have the right strategy. I mean, otherwise we're just efficiently heading to the wrong direction.
Jimmy Allen: As Christina says, joyful routines are about celebrating the heroes of your company. Those that make and sell the product, the leader's job is to make those jobs good jobs. You know I don't think we talk enough about this. We love to talk about the value that CEOs create for shareholders, but when was the last time you read a newspaper article about the good jobs they created? So these two episodes are clear, the business should be simple. But in our episode with Don Katz, the founder of Audible, we focused on the growth paradox. Why is it that our very success growth brings with it the seeds of our destruction? Complexity. And Don says, it starts with this. As companies grow, leaders stop focusing on the product and the front line, and they start managing the managers. Layers get at it, conversations shift away from customers and towards reports and averages and processes. Here's Don.
Don Katz: I had one tenant and principle and that was literally no assholes were allowed. And it was a way of basically saying that the political gamesmanship of managerial realities was not appropriate to the collegial behavior, the comradery of trust, the truly visionary companies would lead. And I tried my best to do that. I probably failed to some extent by trusting that my ability to show different mirrors and lenses to people who were kind of about themselves and probably what you would call energy vampires, I wasn't as good at realizing some people just can't change. And then of course, you're managing also a board, you're managing the street, you're managing all sorts of constituencies. So you're right, complexity made it harder and harder. And that's why in 2017, I did write the people principles, which was really my best shot on how human nature is refracted through an organization that will succeed.
Jimmy Allen: What I learned from Don was this, great leaders keep returning to the why. The why moves you away from managers back to the product and the people who make and sell it. After all, that's how your company started. All great companies start as insurgents at war against their industry on behalf of underserved customer, but their growth leads to complexity, which distracts them from the original mission. Don solved this through people principles, not a slogan, but a thousand conversations. But once you've returned to first principles, how do you build again? What are the new rules for scaling that avoid the soul destroying complexity? How do we avoid the journey to struggling bureaucracy? How do we go from insurgent to scale insurgent? Well, in the next six episodes, our CEOs began to set out six new rules for scaling. The first rule was introduced by Nirav Tolia, he's the founder of Nextdoor. And he talks about a concept that we keep coming back to. You have to deliver and develop. Deliver is about flawless execution of known routines. Develop is about business building. Let's create new solutions in response to shifting technologies, competitors or customer needs. But here's the problem. Our professionals management systems are built for delivery and they view development as a distraction. And in the era of turbulence, those systems are gonna kill you
Nirav Tolia: In the beginning of a company, there's nothing to execute on if you don't have that innovation. And so, these two motions develop first and then deliver. They are much sequential. But then you're a public company and you're on this quarterly rhythm of delivering your results. And so, at that point it goes from develop leading to deliver, to needing to deliver all the time. But if you're doing a transformation, you also need to develop because clearly innovation is missing. What the street really cares about is develop. But what the street maybe doesn't understand is we will develop and we will release our new product this summer, but we've got to also learn and build the muscle on deliver, because as soon as we deliver that innovation, we gotta start executing. And so, this has been one of the core learnings for me as a refounder. Develop and deliver simultaneously versus develop and then deliver sequentially.
Jimmy Allen: Our next two CEOs then added two additional new rules for scaling. One around how to master delivery and the other about how to master development. We talked to Sunny Verghese. He gave us a masterclass on delivery. As co-founder and CEO of Olam, he built one of the largest agribusinesses on the planet and he faced a really tough question. How do you deliver when volatility has become the rule for his industry not the exception? His answer, repeatable models. They actually create stability in chaos. Innovation matters, but only if it becomes routine. Repeatable models give his teams confidence. They turn learning into muscle memory and let a business scale without reinventing the wheel. But actually, they also unlock something far greater.
Sunny Verghese: We have now said that after 36 years and becoming large and complex and a bit cumbersome and overly diversified, we need to simplify the portfolio. And we use the organizing principle of looking at the key structural long-term secular trends that is underpinning the global food and ag sector. But everything about the repeatable model, whether it was customer sharing or capability sharing, that criteria was still at the core of the logic that we used to tie these businesses together into one company. So that has now dramatically decomplexified our business. Sharply increased the focus, unleashed a new wave of entrepreneurial energy. And for the people, they feel that they're just starting because there is a long, bright, standalone independent prospects of these businesses. And therefore, they're very excited about all of that energy that's unleashed.
Jimmy Allen: As Sunny says, repeatable models don't kill entrepreneurs, they liberate them, Which brings us to Tanuja Randery, managing director for AWS in EMEA. Tanuja gives us a bootcamp on the other motion, develop. Her key focus, scaling, 'cause nobody scales like Amazon and AWS and Tanuja's job is helping other companies do the same. But how? Because we know when companies get big, they get bloated and engulfed by layers and layers of bureaucracy. Tanuja's answer, maintain a startup mentality. Instead of treating scaling as complexity, make it the core of every conversation, every decision, every strategy. It's just how we do business. To master develop, you need to identify and nurture your scaling community or what Tanuja calls builders.
Tanuja Randery: This place is for learners and builders, and you're gonna have a lot of fun and you know, create masterpieces. And so, that is probably the core of what we're looking for when we are hiring and when we are promoting is this curiosity. I think builders are very curious. They don't think they have the answer, they're just like, you know, someone who asks a lot of great questions. This idea of people who are just relentlessly asking about why constraints exist and how do you break them. You know, why can't we do it faster? You know, why would anyone expect that in four hours, not one hour? I think the other thing about builders that are also people who are willing to let go of something. So they actively seek to dis-confirm their belief. They're looking for people around them who are challenging them. And then I think the third is builders also are not just people who are thinking big and creating, they can actually land the planes.
Jimmy Allen: We're marching fast through these six new rules of scaling. One, master deliver and develop. Two, create repeatable models. Three, identify and nurture a community of scalers. Now, we're onto four. Simplify the rest. I love the idea of how simplicity is automatically linked with energy and flow. When we simplify an organization, our goal isn't just to cut costs. Our goal is to release the energy of our people. Our guest on episode seven, Stuart Gent, he's a partner at Bain Capital. But despite coming from the world of private equity, his insights might really surprise you. Long-term success does not come from fixating on outcomes. It comes from trusting the process. And that depends on three things. Simplicity, focus, and flow. And simplicity comes first. And it starts with asking yourself, what is the heart of this business? And what are we trying to achieve right now?
Stuart Gent: Organizations design themselves to optimize for a run, which makes sense 'cause you want to be efficient, you wanna be effective. The problem is if you then ask that same system to do something new, because there is no data on anything new. By definition, it's new. So you don't have history, you don't know what will work and what won't work. What tends to happen then is that the idea part gets treated as if it's a run issue. I use this sort of picture of a post-it note and an industrial shredder. And my point is the post-it note is the idea, it's delicate, it's just a little idea. But a lot of organizations take that idea and they just put it through this industrial shredder and it never survives. And it's not bad intent, it's just everyone does their job, but as if it's run. And actually what you need to do is really change your orientation to how do we keep this idea alive and recognize that idea isn't probably right, but it will lead you to something that could be very interesting.
Jimmy Allen: I love this idea. From focus comes flow. When leaders decide what matters most, energy starts to flow in an organization. Now, our fifth rule of scaling was introduced by David Haines, the group CEO of Flora. The question, how should CEOs spend their time and energy? David's answer, we must shift our orientation from horizontal to vertical. Horizontal is head office stuff, creating alignment across direct reports, managers talking to managers. Of course, it's necessary. After all, to create a strategy or an operating model demands some horizontal work, but it is never enough. Vertical connects the CEO directly to markets. We will win in Shanghai with product X through channel Y, against competitor Z. And we'll win and we'll celebrate or we'll lose and learn and try again. Vertical is about winning first and then figuring out how to scale. Too often, horizontal starts with scaling and we don't even have evidence that what we wanna scale is working. So what does David do to win?
David Haines: We tried to come up with this concept called moments of truth. What was the point that made us different, special, and better than the alternative, expressed in a consumer friendly way. So for example, we had cold water run around the outside so that you didn't scold yourself on the hot water on the inside. The moment of truth was called cool touch. And it was a concept that suddenly very simply gave the plumber, the architect, the designer a reason to recommend our products to the consumer. The consumer is always in the middle because what's business about, it's about selling more stuff to more people more often at the end of the day. And so, you as a CEO, I think it's very important that you stay on this vertical focus. And yes, of course, you've gotta run all the processes and deal with all the shareholder issues, the various stakeholder issues. Of course, that's part of the day job. But I think it's really dangerous for a CEO when he loses sight of what actually the company's trying to do.
Jimmy Allen: As a CEO, you can't win unless the heroes of your business win, the frontline. And it's why David always co-creates the company manifesto with them. A mission by the frontline for the frontline, a mission by the frontline for the frontline. Unless you listen to their voices and the voices of your customers, you're never gonna maintain relevance. And in a turbulent world, everyone is conspiring to make your brands, your products, your promises irrelevant. You lose that battle, you lose your customers and your employees. And this brings us to the last new rule of scaling. We talked to Pedro Arnt, CEO of dLocal and former CFO of MercadoLibre, Latin America's e-commerce giant. During his two decades at MercadoLibre, the company was growing at lightning speed. How? By focusing on what it takes to staying relevant with massive investments in culture.
Pedro Arnt: If you're going to be a successful scale up, I would say that almost for sure you have a very clearly defined culture and that culture is not static. Even as the requirements of your human capital and the type of personality you need to be successful changes, the culture immediately adapts and therefore, singles out those that aren't fitting in. The system generates an antibody and it becomes very easy for leadership, for the people organization to realize because everyone's speaking up and saying, I don't think he's holding up his end of the bargain.
Jimmy Allen: That's it, the six new rules of scaling. Master deliver and develop. For deliver, create repeatable models. For develop, nurture a community of builders, of scalers. Then simplify the rest, not to cut costs, but deliberate energy. Focus your leadership towards vertical action, connecting directly to the customer in the front line. And finally, stay relevant. With this in mind, we then sat down with the truly visionary founder, Marcos Galperin. He's the former CEO, now executive chairman of MercadoLibre. Under his leadership, the company scaled from an e-commerce startup to a hundred billion dollar powerhouse. Marcos has faced down rivals that very few entrepreneurs anywhere have had to. Yet MercadoLibre has not only survived, it's dominated. And for more than 25 years through wave after wave after wave of disruption, it has thrived. Of course, a million decisions contributed mainly success. But for Marcos, he narrows it down to three things, culture, competition, and a relentless fight to stay relevant.
Marcos Galperin: It's never, ever, ever about the money. So it's always about the objective, about the project and the project is so fascinating and it's growing and it's changing that it... Right now, it's as fascinating as it has ever been. I get the energy from there, but it's also certain kind of people that you need to try and attract. This culture of trying to act like an elite sports team is key in the sense that oftentimes, you keep some people because they have the culture, but maybe they're not performing. You know what? Sorry. Performances has to be there. Maybe if you have the culture, we'll find you a different position.
Jimmy Allen: Marcos above all just reminds us of this. The CEO job, it's about balance. Companies always tell two stories. There's the external one of market success, earnings, growth, and customer wins. And there's the internal one of culture, of the right systems of execution. We call this the outer and inner game. The outer game matters, scale, competition, markets, but the inner game decides, energy, resilience, culture. The CEOs who are thriving are the ones that are learning to play both these games every single day. And these new rules of scaling, guys, they are winning in the marketplace. Founder-led companies aren't winning by rejecting process. They're winning by creating processes built for a turbulent world. They're winning because they built processes to combat the complexity that comes from growth. In fact, they love the processes that run their company. Can you say the same? Well, I doubt it. Look, we've rushed through these new rules of scaling, but if you didn't catch everything, no fear, you'll find a summary on our website and many more stories to back them up. Hit the link in the show notes, but I wanna leave you now with this, businesses will always grow more complex, but the truly great CEOs are those who fight to make it simple again. The winners are winning because they've discovered these new rules of scaling. Have you?