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Why do talented leaders fail in one role and thrive in the next? Jason Baumgarten has led hundreds of Board, CEO and c-suite transitions at Spencer Stuart. He covers CEO succession, how boards hire a CEO, and shares leadership research alongside candid opinions about leadership and governance. His guests include CEOs, Board Directors, Researchers, Authors and unique executives who share their own observations about leadership but also their own lessons and life stories. Jason covers everything from the impact of technology and AI on leaders to the personal toll and stress of leadership. Every episode brings new lessons, fresh perspectives and a glimpse into a leader’s story.
Jason Baumgarten 00:00
I'm Jason Baumgarten and you're listening to Fit Happens, the podcast where top leaders, investors and board directors share the stories, surprises and hard earned lessons behind finding the right fit. Let's get into it. Welcome to Fit Happens with Jason Baumgarten. I'm delighted to have an amazing guest with us this episode. Krishna Iyer, the head of software engineering at BNSF, a Berkshire Hathaway company. And we'll talk a lot about the interesting journey that you've had to get there. And I thought I'd start with a quick Fit Happens thought experiment. You spent two decades near the top of the tech world. You helped make Office 365 real back when the cloud was a buzzword. You moved to Amazon to AWS, and you're literally building the developer tools for the generative AI era, the frontier of tech. And then you decide to go work for a 177-year-old freight railroad with 32,000 miles of track. So you got to trains and this is an awesome moment of Fit Happening. So a lot of people say this is a career detour, but I think Krishna will help all of you understand that it's the opposite. And the reason why is the entire thesis of the show. Because being good at things is not the same as being in the right place at the right time. And with AI, the impact on industries like freight are going to be life changing. So Krishna, tell us a little bit about that decision. We'll start like at the most recent decision, but what brought you there?
Krishna Iyer 01:34
Jason, first of all, thanks for having me here. It's super exciting to chat with you. I love the title of this podcast. Fit Happens is so real, super favorite topic of mine. So maybe I'll step back a little bit to give the context of this. I grew up in India, small town, then started doing my engineering, mechanical first, and then started getting into computers and then did my Master's in math and then I came to the US. This was 24 years ago, I'm dating myself, UT Austin, and did the Master's in Operations Research, which is about optimization problems. So I did things like neural networks and table search when it was not the hardest thing to do in the world. You do it in a box under your desk and you're doing it with matrix multiplication the hard way. And then after my master's, I was going to go either to FedEx Memphis as a risk optimization person or to Microsoft as an optimizing software person. I kind of think of my life as things happen in decades. I go deep in a space and things happen in decades. My first decade really was about 10 years of education, undergrad, master's, came to the US, did my second master's and really got my foundation pieces right. Then the next 10 years was full on into Microsoft, building engineering products, being a good engineer, being a good engineering leader, building enterprise software at scale. Learned a lot at Microsoft. And then I was shifting my thing to say, hey, the biggest thing about Amazon was leadership principles that attracted me, and it happened to be the same town where I am, in Seattle. I live in the greater Seattle area. And so I was like, let me go look at consumer tech, go to Kindle. I've always been into books and reading. And so I joined Kindle to figure out how to scale reading of books and shopping experience and everything. So 10 years of Amazon, last three, four years, fully into AI in AWS and seeing that shift happen, which is fascinating. So Amazon is a fascinating place to learn to scale. But as it was deep into AI and looking at what's happening, it's fascinating what is happening in the world right now. Intelligence, it's debatable whether people call it intelligence or not, and some people say it's just prediction and intelligence, but intelligence of any form was the holy grail that was never there before. Everything else was there, right? And for the first time, we have intelligence scaling exponentially. And I saw that firsthand sitting in AWS in the AI space. And for me, the analogy was: this is actually bigger than mobile and apps and internet. I look at this more like electricity. There was a world before electricity, there was a world after electricity, and intelligence is going to be everywhere. Then I step back and say, so what do we want to do in the next 10 years? It's a decade and I was getting itchy and saying, what do I want to do in the next 10 years? So if I play the electricity analogy, you can either be the power plant, which is you can actually go to Anthropic or OpenAI or DeepMind or one of these frontier model places, or you can be distributing power, which is transmission lines, which is like AWS or GCP or Azure, where you're essentially scaling, diffusing intelligence, building transmission lines. Or you can be the one using all this to actually change the world, right? Who benefited most with electricity plugged into every house and every office, right? The people who built appliances, the fridges, and maybe the people who actually build the Coca-Cola or things that go inside the fridge that change people's experiences. So when I look at what is happening, intelligence was scaling exponentially, but applying that to durable businesses in the world that the world cannot live without is the place where transformation is ripe and needed. So when I looked at that, and I'm always, I'm a long-term fan of Warren and Charlie, long-term shareholder of Berkshire. And so in 2010, Warren goes by the railroad and everybody's going into phones and mobile and stuff. And when I looked at what is happening in BNSF and the transformation we're trying to do in a supply chain of how things move, I said, that's what I want to do. I want to actually do real meaningful transformation of all this. How do I bring that into that world?
Jason Baumgarten 05:57
You're tied with this. Fit Happens, and how do you look at fit and what do you want to do?
Krishna Iyer 06:06
I think for me personally, it has to be very meaningful. The impact has to be very meaningful. I mean, a question I ask myself is, what do you want to tell your grandkids about what you worked on, right? Books is one of the reasons why I worked on Kindle and books and helping people read. So for me, my personal value system and impact and what that matters a lot. So knowing truly what matters to you is a super important aspect of Fit Happens, I think. And it really is for different people. It's not the same story. You need to know what your value systems are.
Jason Baumgarten 06:36
And you know, you're still new at BNSF, but I also know you well enough to know you're going deep and becoming a railroader. What have you learned so far about the train business, or about trains, railroads, that the average person doesn't know, that you've been like, wow, I didn't know that, walking in the door?
Krishna Iyer 06:59
I think the biggest part of this is it's a foundational part of how things move in North America. And most of the things that we use are actually moving by rail. And when you cross 500 miles, rail is the cheapest and the most sustainable way to move things. So when you start putting that together and it's a backbone of the country of where things move, it's so foundational to what we are. So we take that very seriously. It's a foundational infrastructure of that. I think that's one thing that we don't realize outside, in about how big stuff moves.
Jason Baumgarten 07:28
And when you told the people in your world, particularly all these tech people you'd worked with over the years at Microsoft and Amazon, what was their reaction at first? What did they say?
Krishna Iyer 07:37
I generally keep it to myself in terms of how I think through things. I don't need 20 opinions before I think through things. Jerry Seinfeld says he keeps every new joke for 24 hours with himself before he asks any opinion, because he lets it marinate with himself first. It's your thing and you want to hold it for a little bit before opinions cloud that. When I talked about it, different people, it was all fundamentally the questions you asked, which is, okay, it did Microsoft, Amazon, AWS. Wow, what does this change? In some ways, everybody's trying to grapple with what is AI, what is changing, what is not changing, and trying to figure that out. And we live in a very interesting time, so to speak, in terms of careers, jobs, and other things. Maybe it's a curveball I threw at people, it got them curious to think through what it is. Huh, is the first reaction I got. Curious, trains are cool, and I think a lot of people probably had a little envy that they weren't doing something so foundational, once they got over the surprise.
Jason Baumgarten 08:43
One of the things I was thinking about is you've been in very different environments, from very traditional enterprise SaaS, infrastructure, consumer products, now railroads. What transferred across those, and then what did you have to reinvent for each of those chapters, or if there was a theme?
Krishna Iyer 09:02
I'm looking at myself as constantly reinventing and growing, which is the theme in general. I mean, when I started really my career at Microsoft, I was just trying to learn the craft, so to speak, how do you make really good software that is enterprise scale, and you need to be good at the craft that you're doing. So that was the primary focus, to say how do you do that. And then how do you scale out with a team and lead a team. So at Microsoft you learn a lot about enterprise scale, large-scale software, because it touches so many people and businesses depend on it at scale. So you learn quite a bit of those things. It's purely learning the craft and being really good at the craft and scaling that to run good engineering teams. I think one of the primary reasons I shifted to Amazon was to add things to my growth that I was missing, in the sense that Amazon is very single-threaded product mindset, leadership thinking, ownership. So you really operate your space like a product owner. You understand the leadership principles are really at conflict with each other by design, to actually say how do you break the trade-off of building right versus shipping fast, thinking long term versus bias for action. So those are all foundational things. And I moved to Kindle because I wanted to learn the consumer space, because I had 10 years of enterprise world, consumer world was richer at that point than the enterprise world. We had WhatsApp and Facebook and other things, and I was reading books on Kindle and all that, and still enterprise world was behind. So I was like, I want to learn consumer world and what does it mean to build truly scalable consumer products. So the Kindle, the shopping experience and the reading experience, and how do you do that at scale, helped me learn quite a bit of the consumer market. And how do you build that? How do you single-thread lead for some initiatives there, which is how do you create a new initiative, what does zero to one look like, how do you build architectures for the future, how do you make sure your architecture stands the test of time but how do you also start nimble and grow bigger, how do you try new ideas and do that. And then when I moved to AWS, it was infrastructure, how do you build infrastructure at scale, and how do you also do that in a world of AI where AI is changing so rapidly that we don't know how to build the infrastructure for that. So how do you build an infrastructure for a space that is changing exponentially rapidly. And now at BNSF and Berkshire, I think the key here is how do you bring a transformation to a base that is foundational, it's existed for centuries, and it's a place of builders, where the railroads built originally the infrastructure, why everything expanded and all that, and how do you bring that culture into building the tech foundation again. So I think the key piece in all this is, as the scope and context changes and the problem changes, you're doing two things at the same time: you're trying to use your strengths, you're discovering how you operate in new context and new scope and what skills you need to add, and you're also trying to see what you're going to double down on in terms of what you already know. I'm a big believer in this 10,000 hours thing. I don't believe in every year moving to some place. And you really look at my career, there's only two places I worked before, since Microsoft and Amazon, really, because you ought to be deep enough in a problem to actually solve the problem. And that's how I'm wired a little bit, I like to be deep on the problem, because it'll probably take you six months or a year to actually really understand the problem, and then to move the needle probably takes another couple of years at least. So that's one of the things I realized over these changes, it fits my thinking and personality to be deeper on problems and longer duration. Plus, I connect dots quite a bit. I'm good at connecting dots that are different, and I read all kinds of random things, different things, and they all come together to help, which is very interesting. So then how do you leverage the connecting-the-dots mindset in domains? But for me, the most important thing is the problem has to be worth solving. If it's not worth solving, then I'm not going to wake up and put my freshest thinking into that problem.
Jason Baumgarten 13:18
And I know it's not quite a year, but has there been a moment so far at BNSF where an instinct that was like an obvious instinct in your tech background was suddenly wrong, and you sort of realized in the moment, wait a minute, I'm thinking about this in a way that I need to shift?
Krishna Iyer 13:33
Yeah, I think, you're always unlearning and relearning new things. We are in transformation right now, where we are forming a very good set of engineers and teams, and we are working super close with the business and how we are trying to do that. I think the biggest thing is you truly have to understand what it means to be a supply chain, logistics, shipper, railroader, to actually understand what the nuances of the business are and what is needle-moving. So you know what you can build, you know the tech you can build, you know the things you can build. So what you want to resist is trying to come with a solution quickly if you don't understand the problem. But the way to do that is small iterations, iterate quickly and iterate with the business together. So it's a balance between not having too strong opinions too soon, but iteratively forming opinions that are actually durable. So some of the opinions are: this is how it should be built, this is the stack, it should be built this way, this is what we need to build. So sometimes we might end up overbuilding for an architecture. We have to be careful about not overbuilding as we truly understand the problems and stuff, which is true everywhere, wherever you go, you have to think through it. In some ways tech is a strength for me, but I need to truly understand the domain of the business, the market, and the go-to-market, and all that, before you start building, which is one of the things you learn. I think Amazon teaches you that very well, in terms of go-to-market being more important than what you build, to a large degree. If you look at the PRFAQ and all that process, start with the end in mind. What are you shipping? Whose problem are you solving? Cloud code is there for everybody, and you can start building everything, it's so tempting to keep building. If you were to step back a little bit and say, what are you building, what problem are you solving, that's probably the more important question.
Jason Baumgarten 15:25
Now, you wrote something a while ago, that failing at the right customer-focused goal beats succeeding at the wrong one. And I always like that, because this notion that it's okay to fail, you learn from failure, but you have to have the right goal, you have to have the right idea behind it. Otherwise success isn't actually successful.
Krishna Iyer 15:44
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I have a strong belief in iteration, but I also don't want to go to the wrong place faster. If you don't know where you're going, the first step is to just pull over and think through, where am I trying to go, instead of just driving around on multiple roads and all that. Just pull over and say, okay, I'm trying to go to Portland from Seattle. In general, you need to have a directional thing. Then you can say, you know what, should I take the freeway, should I take the side road, should I take a detour. But if you don't know you need to go to Portland, then there's a time to actually stop, know when to pause and know when to go faster. But iteration is a way to find out if you're not sure.
Jason Baumgarten 16:20
To get practical for a moment, because you've been very thoughtful each time you've moved in your career, as you said, you're a 10-year guy, not a one-year guy. I feel like sometimes people I talk to, their skill in life is moving, not doing. And you did something very purposeful when you decided to look at, you know, traditional industries, thinking about how AI would deploy. What advice would you have for somebody who feels they're capable but a bit stuck, and they're good at things, what would you give them advice on, in terms of a concrete move to take or something to do to get them unstuck, to get them thinking about a change, that was helpful for you?
Krishna Iyer 16:53
I think it's a process. The first step is a process, don't try to get to a solution immediately. Write the five to ten things that matter to you. In terms of a job, it could be, I need X amount of money minimum to actually do, because I have commitments and stuff. It should be location, saying I need it to be here, or remote, or whatever that is. It could be some level of title and all that, because for some people it's important to have a title. It could be the people I work with, or the code base, or the problem I'm solving, or it's a domain I'm in. So write down really what matters to you, okay? Because part of it is, we actually think we know what we want, but we're not sure. The problem is that the world has so many choices now, it's a good and a bad thing. For the right people there are a lot of choices. What I say is everybody's above average on something. You find out what you're way above average on, and as long as you're very good at that craft, then there'll always be demand on that thing.
Jason Baumgarten 17:56
Totally true. You know, the choice thing is interesting. I was reflecting, I had a really good friend and classmate in grad school, and he was very torn about his career, and he had lots of incredible options coming out of grad school. And he called his dad for career advice. And this goes to your point, we have a lot of choice, not always good choice, but a lot more choice. And he says, dad, I'm debating between doing this and doing that, but what do you think I'll love? Very existential question. And his father said, son, I think you're missing the point. He's like, oh, he's waiting for this profound insight from his dad. And his dad said, your job is to be like an oxen in the field, at sunrise, put the yoke on and plow the field, and at sunset pull the yoke off and recharge for the next day of plowing the field. And my friend said, I think I want a little more from my life than being an oxen in the field. I think for other generations there was so little choice in what they did, whether it was because you were of a gender that you had three career options, or you were in a country where there was no mobility, or you were stuck, tracked in school in a certain way. And so I think that this idea that now you can go on LinkedIn and be a self-professional, claimed expert in anything, is pretty incredible, right? I always see these people like, I'm a leadership expert. I'm like, oh, what do you know about leadership? Everyone always asks me, how do you become a CEO? I said, it's really easy, buy a van, get a magnetic sign put on the side of the van, you're the company and the CEO. Back to your point, what is the real list you're aiming for. And one interesting tidbit from science is, it turns out if you write that list down, you list your 5 or your 10, and then you force yourself to double it, it'll surface more latent interests or more latent needs. And often people find that that doubling is a really powerful mechanism to get to the thing that actually really matters to them, or that they really want to solve for. So that can be a fun, simple trick for anyone listening.
Krishna Iyer 19:43
Yeah, I like that. And one of the interview questions I ask people always is, tell me when the best work in your life happened. When did you do your best work ever, and what in that setting made it the best work ever? I just want to know the person, when did they produce the best thing in the world, right, that they're so proud of. It could be invention, it could be scaling. I just want to know what setting, and their eyes are wide open, you know, that one time where I was, we had the perfect team, we built this perfect thing, we failed, but it was so happy, fun failing, and I just had fun that I spent 10 hours, 12 hours, and I didn't even get tired working. So, we're all going to work hard, I mean you have to put the hours in, you have to do that. But trying to recreate more of that setting around you and create a setting for the people around you brings the best out of everybody. So I think trying to go back to when did I have the most fun, what's my life's work, and when did I produce the best work, and what was that, fun, maybe you made a lot of money, maybe you got promoted a lot, which is great, then it shows that that's the thing that matters to you more. That's great, it's good to know that promotions and money matter to you, then optimize for that, that's a good thing because that's what you want. Or it's like invention matters to me, or enabling people under me matters to me, then it's okay, you're a people leader, you're a people enabler, great, then you should find something that enables people. Or being able to call my mom and talk about my work and she uses my product, that made a big deal for me, okay, then maybe find something that is consumer-focused, that is usable for people. So you start asking those questions, you know, what do you want to do. And the next part of this is you have to talk to a lot of people to see what's out there. It's not like you interview once and take the first job and say should I take this or not, you need to really understand what is out there. And one way to do that is actually to talk to a lot of people to know what does it mean.
Jason Baumgarten 21:37
Well, and I think you're getting at this question of not just in the interview process, but actually as a leader, as a manager, really figuring out, when are your people in flow, when are your people at their best, and how do you recreate those conditions? We know you can't do it all the time, right? We're not made to be in flow all the time. And it's those conditions of being just stretched enough, having an ambitious enough goal, having the right motivations. But when it's happening, the minute you said that, I think everyone listening has this moment of like, yeah, yeah, the time when we did this. And some people go back to their sports days or their academic days, they have these chapters of their lives. And sometimes it's long periods of, you know, projects that lasted weeks, months, years. Sometimes it's like a day, they had that one game, or that one project, or the one thing. And I think for everyone, thinking about what drove that state of flow, and to really reflect on how do you get in it more, and if you are a manager, how do you get your team in it, and if you're an employee, how do you actually take some action to say to your manager, hey, I'm at my best when I'm being thrown really ambiguous problems, or I'm at my best when I'm trying to have huge impact and I don't feel like I'm having impact, so how do we fix that? I think a lot of people become victims, and they start saying, oh, my boss is terrible, my company's terrible, I'm bored, I'm whatever. It's like, okay, how do you fix that? If you know what drives that state of flow, it's much easier to go seeking that out where you're in.
Krishna Iyer 23:08
When I was in consulting, there was a period where the firm said, oh, we're going to make everybody have their own experience, as an internal PR thing, it didn't work very well, everyone was sort of sarcastic. But I look back on it and I'm like, it was actually incredibly thoughtful mindset shift, which was getting all these fairly young people who are fresh out of school, undergrad or grad school, and saying, hey, you're an owner, you're an owner in your journey, what do you want this to be? I think we were all too young and naive to really embrace it sincerely, or we just didn't believe in the sincerity. But I look back and I think that's what more managers should be doing, to say, hey, if I've got a great motivated employee, how do I get them at their best, how do I push them to be in that state of flow? Absolutely, I mean, you're pulling back to my old days mentally. When you talk about that, one of the first things I learned at Microsoft is a wonderful training. It's a super simple exercise that you do as a manager, which is any new employee, I ask three things: what's your heart, tree, and star? Heart is, tell me what you're passionate about, I'm passionate about back end, I'm passionate about front end, I'm passionate about UX, I'm passionate about blah. Great. Tree is, what does growth look like to you, what is your tree? For some people it's more impact, for some people it's like I need to be in conferences presenting, I need to be writing public papers, for some people I want to get promoted, I want more scope, I want more money, good, what's your growth. And then what, star, what does recognition look like to you, how do you want to be recognized? I had one guy, super strong engineer, who told me once, said, Krishna, if you ever recognize just me in a group, all hands, without my team, I will quit the next day. That's great to know, because for him being recognized with the team matters more, for some people it's, I need an email from my VP or blah blah blah to say this is great. So heart, tree, star, now I can do this in two minutes with anybody, which is, what is your heart, what's your tree, what's your star. And tactically, talk to the team about zones of energy, every day there should be at least four or five hours where you're at your best, producing your best output. You don't need to be on Slack and Teams and answering Outlook and email and all that and calling meetings, so you know yourself. Some people are morning people, afternoon people, I think 90 minutes is a good window. So I generally say find three windows of 90 minutes in the day where you produce your best work and do the most important work there. It could be 90 minutes in the morning, 90 minutes before lunch, 90 minutes a little bit early evening, or some people are night owls. But three 90-minute windows is a good litmus test to just tune out everything and produce the best at work. This is creating those flows and zones of energy. But it also gets tactical as well as long term, when you look at a new job to take or career, is a setting overall going to encourage my flow, and then tactically, am I setting myself every day finding that zone. And then, if the problem is passionate enough, invention comes and you just have fun, you work hard, but you love doing it.
Jason Baumgarten 26:19
Yeah, it's such an important thing. And I think people sometimes, that example of tactical time-blocking is such a good one. If you read up on time-management experts and productivity experts, one of the things I'll say is, one, block work, not meetings, which some people do, some people don't. I'm always amazed when people are like, I have all this work to do, I'm like, oh, when are you going to do it? I don't know, sometime. Actually put it on your calendar, make it an event, get good at figuring out the time estimation. And then, deep work goes with deep work, non-deep work goes with non-deep work. And you know, this point you made, if you need 90 minutes to get in the zone, if you start getting interrupted, and you may know this, years and years ago I stumbled across this research that every time you get interrupted, I think I'm remembering this correctly, that it was 13 minutes for your brain to reset and get focused again. And guess who did the research? Who? Microsoft. And I was like, the original creator of the ping, you've got mail, on your desktop was the one who did the research in Microsoft Research years ago. And so this idea of, if you're in an environment which is hectic and crazy, turn off all those distractions so you can get into your zone, you can get into your deep work. It sounds so trivial, but for some people that can be the thing they never find fit, because they're never getting into the deep work, and that's what drives them to the impact or to the thing they really want to get done. So I think reminding everybody that it's not always these big existential thoughts, it's sometimes as simple as, do you have your three 90-minute blocks to get your work done?
Krishna Iyer 27:39
I'm sure there's thousands of time-management advisors around and all that, but I think for me this is two things here. One is, the only thing that is equal to everybody in the world is time, everybody gets only 24 hours, nobody gets, hey, this person is doing some extra work, let's give him 25 hours. And you have to find the system that works for you, there is no golden system, everybody should do calendar this way, zero-inbox this that, you just have to figure out what works for you. Knowing that you are living in a world that is always looking to distract, always one more thing to do, one more movie to watch, one more, social media FOMO is real. Every time you're doing something, you feel like you should be in 10 other places or do 10 other things or look at 10 other social media posts, have you read this article, have you looked at this, have you looked at that. I think everybody has to find a balance of when to catch up and when to just produce something, do some work and stuff, right. So it's super challenging, it's a constant thing, you just have to be constantly working on it, nobody's conquered it, I'm not saying anyway I've conquered it or anything. But it's just, for me, if I'm not doing deep work, if I'm not reading any day, it's not meaningful to me. So I realized that quite a bit, so I wake up early, and 4:30 to 7 is my time, I'm not answering to anybody, not picking up any calls, I'm not doing it, I'm just doing some deep work. So for me that zone is important. So you need to figure out what works for you, and also be willing to change a little bit, I used to be a night person, then I changed into a morning person. Be flexible.
Jason Baumgarten 29:18
Well, it turns out we spend about 90,000 hours at work. And so when you think about that 90,000, if you can really dig in to be impactful and align with what gives you that flow and that positive energy. And some people don't have choice, right, some people are stuck in places that, for financial reasons or other reasons, they feel very trapped. And one of the things I really try and convey is, you know, even in the most dire of circumstances, there's a way to reframe and to try and find meaning in what you're doing, and to find the fit for you. And so if you can do that one thing that changes your environment, at least do that one thing, at least take that one step forward. And if you're a manager listening, so important to really think about this idea. You know, in fact, Peter Drucker used to say, I think I've said this a few times on the show, but he used to do these seminars, and he'd ask everybody, how many of you have deadwood in your organizations? And everyone kind of proudly raised their hands. And he would say, well, how many of them were that when you hired them? And everyone would sheepishly lower their hands. And it's this idea that, when we hire people, we believe in the best, we believe we're hiring the best person for the role we're hiring them for. And if, as a manager, that person isn't a good fit anymore, it's on you to help them figure out what's next, even if it means leaving the organization. The worst thing you can do is sort of let somebody suffer in a job where they're miserable but too afraid to leave. And I think we all have a responsibility to help people discover what it is that they're great at, and then find a place where they can apply that. Everybody's different, though, as you said.
Krishna Iyer 30:52
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a couple of things come to my mind in terms of how I look at this. It's a Boy Scout's story, leave it better than how you found it. So we worked together, we broke in a flat hierarchy, I learned from my reports as much as they learn from me. And let's say we work for three, four, five years together, are we better off after we work together, are we all becoming better in different angles, making each other better? That's one angle, I think. The other thing is, you talked about 90,000 hours, I have an analogy I tell the team a little bit: a week is a good timeframe for me. What you produce in a week is very important. So one analogy I say is, let's say you start working in your 20s, a typical work life, you work for 40, 50 years. Let's say if each week is a coin, you have like 2,000 coins in a bag. You're walking around life with 2,000 coins in a bag. Every week a coin drops, and you can't pick it up again. Initially, you feel like you have a lot of coins, and a few coins drop and it's okay. But over time, you start feeling like the bag is getting lighter and lighter, and I'm like, what am I doing with all these coins? So every week is a coin that you're dropping that you cannot pick up. So what are you doing with that one coin this week? If you start putting that, it's like, I want to produce something meaningful in a week, and it's a tangible piece of output, and you feel good about it. You refresh on the weekend or whatever, you read something else, you do something, you take care of your health, take care of family, whatever, you can have a balance, you don't need to work 7 days, 15 hours to produce meaningful output. But a week is a good time for.
Jason Baumgarten 33:19
Yeah, I think that idea of time is scarce, everyone has the same amount. We're all in this idea of, like, it seems abundant when you're young, and as you get older it feels more scarce and special. I love that addition of, it's not just about work. I think when we're young, you always think about productivity as, like, what did I get done at work. Now I think about, hey, was I healthy this week. Somebody said, well, if you retired, what would you do? And I said, I could spend, like, 50% of my time just taking care of myself. It turns out it is a lot of work, and we all neglect it. We forget that we used to just wander all day, we didn't need to go to the gym or to the trainer, we wandered, you know, hours and hours a day. So that idea of having that coin drop, and not having regrets, but also not getting stuck on it, if it was a bad week and you didn't get stuff done, I was leaving a hotel the other day, and somebody had literally taken a coin and put it in the asphalt when it was wet, and I watched, like, four or five people bend down to try and pick it up. And that's kind of like your coins, at some point, you really can't pick them up, so you got to move on. And, you know, professional tennis players, they did a lot of research on what makes an amazing tennis player, and it turns out one of the things is, it wasn't just how they played, it was how they reset. So if they had a bad point, they could immediately reset and get their head back in the game. And I think a lot of people say, oh, I had a terrible week, I ate badly, I didn't go to the gym, I wasn't productive at work, I didn't get something done, great, put it aside. That coin's gone, go to the next coin.
Krishna Iyer 35:51
Yeah, I think one saying that comes to my mind is, everything in moderation, including moderation. Occasionally, don't moderate.
Jason Baumgarten 35:58
Yes. Before we get to our speed round, I want to talk about one thing, which is fit isn't only professional, and whether it's as a parent, as a son, as a spouse, I'd love to go to parenting if you're willing to, which is, what has parenting taught you about fit that would have taken a lot longer to learn through work?
Krishna Iyer 36:18
Something about fit, as a parent, it's so eye-opening. And every day in parenting is like you're learning more about yourself than about your kids, to a large degree, because they become mirrors and reflect you to a large degree. And so sometimes you like the reflection, sometimes you're not sure if the reflection is right, but you end up saying it's the original image that is the problem, not the reflection. So the word that comes to my mind is wonder. Kids have wonder always. My second one asked me, like, four years ago, he was like four or five, he said, daddy, what do you want to be when you grow up? I paused, because, have I done growing up, do I have any more aspirations? He was like, oh, everybody asks me what do I want to be when I grow up, I want to ask my dad what does he want to be when he grows up. I said, yeah, I'm in my 40s. And that question hit me so much, because it was like, the best is ahead is the thing I believe in, you're constantly growing and learning and stuff. Those are things that you learn from the kids, seeing kids grow. I mean, the joke is, you're pre-training the kids, it's like pre-training the LLMs a little bit. Your training set, you're testing different training sets, you really don't know what's going on inside the LLM, you're giving different inputs and trying different outputs every day with the kids. So you're really doing pre-training runs for 18 years with your children.
Jason Baumgarten 37:39
I love that question of, you know, the wonder of what are you going to do when you grow up, you know, are we done growing up? I hope there are many horizons for many of us. And it's funny, somebody said to me the other day, you know, humans are obsessed right now with learning how the LLMs are thinking, and the LLMs are obsessed learning how the humans are thinking. So it's very true. Well, all right, let's do our speed round, it's always fun, I always learn something new about everybody. A book that has had a huge impact on you in the last five years, and I know you're an avid reader, so if you've got to list two or three, you get a pass.
Krishna Iyer 38:11
There's a book called Deep Work, which is very good, it's about why we need to do deep work right now. I touched on this in the podcast a little bit earlier today about the need for deep work. Big fan of Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie's Almanack, mental models and all that, those two are the ones that come to my mind as things I go back to. I like The Alchemist a lot, when you want something, the world will conspire to give it to you, kind of thing. So yeah, I tend to go back to that every year or so a little bit. So I prefer older books, I don't read the latest New York Times bestseller thing, the books that have stood the test of time is where I tend to go to in general.
Jason Baumgarten 38:52
Hal Newport's a great writer, and Deep Work is such a good book, I'm glad you brought that up. And Poor Charlie's Almanack, and so much of the writings that Buffett and Munger have had over the years, even if not books, just their annual letters, everything else, it's really an incredible source of enduring wisdom.
Krishna Iyer 39:07
20 years of reading Munger and Buffett, I end up now at Berkshire. I think about it, the attraction over time is, what do you want to surround yourself with in terms of value systems and how it is, which is fascinating.
Jason Baumgarten 39:17
Well, I am committed, I told you, one of my regrets was not making the annual meeting all these years, and so next year I'm coming, hopefully they keep it going for a while. One of the quotes that Cal Newport had in Deep Work was that you have to develop the habit of letting small bad things happen, because if you don't, the big life-changing things never will. It's these profound ideas around, like, living, letting things soak in, letting things take their time. Leadership advice that is commonplace that you think is actually pretty terrible?
Krishna Iyer 39:44
I think probably the thing that comes to my mind is, leadership is all about delegation, just delegate everything, don't micromanage. Delegate is such terrible advice, in multiple ways. How do you lead a team if you don't know what they're dealing with? So enough detail so that you actually understand what's going on, on the ground, then you figure out what decisions you can delegate, when are you available for them, when they're not ready. And situational leadership comes to my mind. So there's too much of this "delegate everything, you're micromanaging," it's more about situational leadership, and when they need the help, you need to be there. Sometimes you need to be on the ground with them to solve something new, and when you want to be hands-off, you want to be hands-off. One of the things we all struggle with is, we lead bigger teams, more complex teams, more functions, you always have that thing where you just don't know that well, or you don't have a lot of depth relative to the people working for you. We all had that moment where somebody comes to you for advice and you realize you're not as good or as knowledgeable about the thing as they are.
Jason Baumgarten 40:56
As you've scaled and you've seen so many different kinds of team environments, do you have a way of balancing that micromanagement with also, hey, this person who's working for me is now so much deeper in it than I am, what have you used to calibrate that over time?
Krishna Iyer 41:04
You just have to be super curious about what is happening in your teams. I think you need to be in a learner mindset to a large degree, because what I tell my teams is, in a different roll of the dice, I'd be reporting to my directs, it just happens to be this roll of the dice where they're reporting to me, but in many angles they're actually better than me. So we are a flat hierarchy, we're all actually balancing each other out and figuring out. So I'm constantly saying, I actually don't know what you're doing, I actually don't know what this is, tell me. And when you start doing that, everybody's okay to say that, they're all actually in a place where they can say, I don't need to be always the right person, make the right calls, because sometimes I'm not sure, sometimes I say I'm actually worried whether there's a one-way door or a two-way door, what's the call. So when you create that culture a little bit, you don't have to worry about telling the team clearly, saying, I'm brainstorming at this point, or I'm actually decisive and this is a decision I want, so that they differentiate, when I'm in brainstorming mode versus learning mode versus, you know, there's some extra dots I'm connecting and this is where we should go, we should disagree and commit on this thing and go. So being able to separate that out is important. For the first six months working with anybody, you're actually discovering each other's strengths and each other's drawbacks, you're really trying to form a team, you need to figure out how to work together. I say Lionel Messis make a bad team, you don't want a team full of Lionel Messis, because they're all going to be standing around and nobody's going to be defending, they're going to be doing spurts of brilliance, but you need other roles.
Jason Baumgarten 42:57
Best career advice you've ever gotten?
Krishna Iyer 42:59
So simple, the advice was, do the right thing. So here's what it is: I was early on as an engineering leader at Microsoft, and somebody I respect a lot, I went to them with, what should I decide on this, and all that, and I wanted them to make the decision. I'm like, I'm teeing the problem up, listen to me for 15 minutes, and then they just say, do the right thing. What do you mean, what do you mean, do the right thing, Krishna, just do the right thing. And I was head-scratching for half an hour, got my coffee, went out for a walk and said, what does he mean, it's like I thought he's going to give me the answer. Then I emailed saying, this is what I'm going to do, no response for a week. And then two weeks later it turned out to be reasonably the right decision. And then I realized, okay, it's just, training wheels are off. So that's one piece of advice. The other advice, this is very apt to Fit Happens, I was trying to debate between two choices, should I stay at Microsoft or should I go to Amazon. Somebody I respected a lot at Microsoft, I talked to them, saying, these are the two choices I have, what do I do. And I think the question they asked was: five years from now, there are two versions of Krishna available. One version is Krishna who's 15 years at Microsoft, growing more. Another version is Krishna who went to Amazon, did a few things and learned, whatever. Which version of Krishna do you want to be? Which version of Krishna do you want to hire? That made it super easy for me to move to Amazon. Maybe it's not the best advice from a Microsoft person to give to a Microsoft person, but, three years from now, five years from now, what version of yourself do you want to see? It's a great device to help us get out of the moment and think ahead.
Jason Baumgarten 44:47
Okay, so the 25-year-old you, you go back in time, you get that one pass, and all you can do is go back to the 25-year-old you, and one line of advice, what do you slip in at that time moment?
Krishna Iyer 45:00
Just let the game play. You're too restless, you're trying to do too many things, just soak it in a little bit more, let the game play out a little bit more, the right things will line up. Don't try to overrush on things, don't worry too much, don't try to do too many things at the same time.
Jason Baumgarten 45:21
One skill that you think is going to be obsolete in an AI-driven world, could be a skill or could be a way of thinking or something else, but what do you think will be obsolete?
Krishna Iyer 45:29
It's a fascinating question, with AI proliferating everywhere, and I'm sure we'll all be wrong, anyone predicting AI will be wrong, but it's fun to predict. I think for me the biggest thing is, I'm probably at the peak of my intellectual humility right now. What I mean by that is, whatever priors we know about software and tech and all that, you give me something to build, I'll tell you, this takes four people, four months to build, pretty easily before. Now I'm rethinking, saying, how long does it take, what are the priors, what's the right way to build it. We are in a world where exponentially, like, 7, 8 different technologies are playing together, that's going to hit everything. So it's going to be harder and harder for folks who are more and more rigid in their mindset, in whatever they're doing, this is how it has been, this is how it has to be. And so it's not a nice-to-have, it's a need-to-have, a growth mindset and the rethink mindset and a re-evaluate mindset, and form your own opinions but be willing to change tomorrow morning when something new releases. More flexible in mindset and more willingness to learn new things and adapt is a must-have, it's not a nice-to-have anymore. It used to be like a superpower for people who are flexible, and others were okay. I think the need is intellectual humility, willingness to learn, willingness to rethink, re-examine, is paramount for any profession, I think.
Jason Baumgarten 47:20
Well, on that note, you know, freight is one of those original OG technologies, and as we were talking, for a lot of listeners who don't realize that you can run a ton of freight, literally a ton, hundreds of miles on a single gallon of diesel, and in this world of net-new technologies, thinking about what you're trying to do to find even new ways to make that more accessible, more efficient, you know, put even more freight, more efficiently on those thousands and thousands of miles of rails. I think at a time where we're all thinking about very digital applications of AI, like cool websites, digital avatars, to think about the impact that you're going to have transforming this amazing organization, under some really visionary leadership under Berkshire Hathaway, I think is an amazing moment. And hopefully people will stay and watch the journey and plug into where BNSF is going, and hopefully it'll keep us all on the train ride so we can see where you go. And thanks so much for joining Fit Happens, and for telling a little bit of storytelling of how you got to be working in the railroads and what we can all learn from the journey.
Krishna Iyer 48:59
Jason, thank you so much for doing this. We live in such a fascinating time right now with everything happening, and what you write and what you talk about in this podcast is so important, because, where do we humans fit in this new world is a very broad question, where do we individuals fit, what is the purpose, what are we producing, what do I do, and all that is becoming more fundamental questions now. And so I'm a huge fan of the podcast, huge fan of all the things that you do, and looking forward to learning together always. So thanks for having me.
Jason Baumgarten 49:36
Thanks for doing this. Absolutely. Take care.