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Before a strategy becomes a success story, it's a judgement call.
Now in its second season, Founder's Mentality: The CEO Sessions gets inside the decisions that defined some of the world's greatest leaders - a bet the market couldn't yet see, a crisis that put the organisation's purpose to the test, and the courage to keep showing up even when you don't have the answer.
How do you stay close to the frontline as the organisation scales?
What does AI mean for the thing you have spent years building?
How do you transform the company without breaking what makes it great?
Hosted by Jimmy Allen, Advisory Partner at Bain & Company, bestselling author and leader of Bain's Global CEO Forum, each episode is a candid, in-depth conversation with leaders from Mars, The Economist Group, Khan Academy, and more.
Each episode is built around one real story, one defining moment, and the lessons that come from living through it. Dense with insight and designed for leaders who listen with a pen in hand, the series explores the outer game of markets, technology and growth, and the inner game of energy, humility and courage, and what it takes to master both.
The question this season isn't just what the CEO should do.
It's who does the CEO need to become?
Join the Conversation:
https://www.bain.com/founders-mentality/
https://www.bain.com/insights/topics/ceo-agenda
Links:
Bain & Company LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/bain-and-company/)
Bain & Company X (https://x.com/BainandCompany)
Jimmy Allen LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-allen-3442b/)
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. Jimmy is a regular speaker at global business events, including the World Economic Forum, and serves on the Botswana Economic Advisory Council. Outside of consulting, Jimmy 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.
- I was made CEO of The Economist
and I picked up my
phone as we would all do
to all my friends.
And I said, "Would you like to come here?"
And they said, "Why?
It's a publishing business.
I mean, we love the brand,
but this is a mission to nowhere."
(dramatic music)
- A 180-year-old print publication,
a divided business and editorial team,
a failed transformation
project on arrival,
the future of the publishing
industry in doubt,
and a CEO who wasn't even a journalist.
For most leaders, that
sounds like a business
with a pretty questionable future,
but Lara Boro isn't most leaders.
(bright music)
I'm Jimmy Allen, and this
is Founder's Mentality:
The CEO Sessions.
Lara Boro is CEO of The Economist Group.
She spent her career building
and turning around information businesses.
Since 2019, she has
led The Economist Group
through an ambitious digital program
without breaking the
things that made it great.
That journey forced her to
ask the hardest question.
What actually is The Economist?
And it started, like many
things do, with a phone call.
(upbeat music)
- When I was called about
the job, my chairman,
who's fabulous Paul, said to me,
"Oh, and by the way, you'll
need to split your time
between the Strand and Canary Wharf."
I realized that actually
this business fundamentally
was divided in two physically, right?
That was a moment where
I really understood
the challenge ahead for me.
It was sort of a physical manifestation
of the cultural challenge, but
the real cost was to myself
and my time because I spent
my time on the Jubilee line
between the Strand and
Canary Wharf for nine
or 10 months until COVID struck.
- When the chairman described that to you,
was it with a little bit of
pride in that it, was that meant
to be a beautiful illustration
of the fierce independence
of the journalistic side?
- I don't think there was pride.
I do think the business saw
it as the inevitable result
of this thing we call
journalistic independence.
And in fact, one of the
early memories I have is
that wherever I went in those
buildings, people would refer
to the other teams as a they, not we.
In the world of print,
basically the editorial did their magic.
They would send a file
over to the other side,
which was the business, and the
business would distribute it
and commercialize it.
So it seemed perfectly
normal to those people that
the business and the editorial,
the heart and the body
of the business could
exist in different parts.
Whereas if you had, you
know, if you had sort
of caught up the past 20
years, it was very clear
to anybody who's going to
start a digital transformation
that those two parts of the body
had to live in one place.
- And tell me, just the heart
and body, I love the analogy.
What was the state of each
of them when you arrived?
So, when you came and you did the,
I'll try to keep the analogy going,
the diagnostics, what did you find?
- I think as a reader and a
massive fan of The Economist,
which is sort of why I
took the role, I could see
that the editorial was excellent, right?
But it was very clear to me,
because I'd sort of lived
a digital life for the sort
of 15 years prior, that they
weren't reaching new audiences.
They weren't using the fantastic richness
that you could deliver through digital.
And so there was a huge
disparity between the excellence
of the journalism and the business,
which in no way I would
describe as excellent, right?
It had done, to be fair to it,
some very good smart strategic moves,
but it hadn't understood that
digital isn't print online.
It's a whole different
way of thinking about
the business, monetization
models, the customer experience,
the intimacy you can create, the richness
of customer understanding you can generate
from digital models.
So it's sort of the body
was in survival mode
while the editorial was quite frustrated
because within the journalism,
there were very smart
and pretty avant-garde journalists,
who had tried things in the
past, mostly off platform
because the business wasn't
producing the platforms
to allow them to express all of that.
And so unlike some of
journalistic organizations
where the journalists
were resisting change,
the journalists couldn't wait to have
a partner in the business
who would be able
to enable their fantastic
journalism to shine.
- You were famously not a journalist
coming into a journalistic organization.
And my guess is that you had
frustrated parties on both sides,
but the side you're meant to understand
and represent would have all told you
that they were doing brilliant things.
This is the business side
and that there was
resistance on the other.
How did you know who to listen to about
where the problems were?
- I had done quite a bit of
diligence before I joined.
And one of the best
investments in the digital,
which I instigated, was to
insist that I spent a few hours
with Zanny after I had been offered a job
before I'd accepted it.
So re-thrashing things out.
Zanny, our editor-in-chief, is brilliant.
She's been at Economist for 15 years.
She tells you what she thinks
and she has very strong opinions.
And I wanted to understand
from her point of view
what she thought the issues
were both with editorial
and with commercial and how we were going
to define the problem together.
Because in the digital age,
even though we all
understand why journalism has
to be fiercely independent,
that does not mean that
the journalistic side
and the business side
should not work together.
They should only be independent
when we're making judgements
about what we write,
but in everything else,
we should be partners in crime.
The end of that session, Zanny and I
had come out in agreement
that the only way we can
guarantee editorial independence
forever is to run an excellent business.
We can't continue to grow the newsroom.
We can't continue to get the message out
if we don't have our own
sustainable profit pool,
so that we are independent
from billionaires
buying the outfit, which
is happening all around us.
(gentle music)
(upbeat music)
- When a leader arrives in
a business being disrupted,
there's a pretty common playbook.
It's designed to stop the
resistance of the old guard,
the masters of the craft.
They're too wedded to
the old ways of working,
too blind to the need for change.
The CEO job, overcome the resistance.
Well, that would've been
the wrong playbook here.
And Lara saw that immediately.
The masters of the craft, the journalists,
they weren't resisting.
Their job was to report
on business disruption
and they saw what was happening to others.
They were ahead of the business folks.
They wanted new formats,
new reach, new capabilities,
but constraint wasn't the front line.
It was the strategy of
the business team itself.
That reframe gave Lara the
one thing a new leader needs
above everything else.
Clarity on what to
protect, what to jettison
and what to fix.
Protect how The Economist does journalism.
Fix the digital strategy
starting with customer data.
- For a digital business,
we didn't have any data on our customers.
There was a failed big digital
CRM program that, you know,
was the first thing I had to
do was to write off 12 million
of investment, which for
this business was huge.
I very quickly understood
that if we had any chance in
the digital age, we needed
to understand what our readers
read, how they read it,
what they liked, what they didn't like.
And so the very first
piece was rewire our sort
of customer data, our CRM, all of our web
and app facing abilities
to understand what readers were doing.
This was a new muscle,
not just for the business,
but also for editorial.
We think we know what our readers want.
You know, most of what The
Economist created, it created
because it had very good
gut instinct, right?
But it's not the same
as having real life data
on 1.2 million customers.
And when we build that
muscle, it allowed us
to do many, many things.
One, it allowed us to build
a proper outside-in product
function, not reporting to editorial.
It was a joint report to Zanny and I,
but it really sat in the business.
With all of what that means,
in the first 18 months,
there was a big heavy
lift in the business.
A lot of people came and went,
but we built something
where we could finally see
what our readers were doing.
And that allowed us to
really think about product
and roadmap and all of this sort
of sacred cows we could now kill
because we could see that some
things we believed weren't
true, but many things
we believed were true.
But it also allowed us
to cut our marketing
budget eventually in half
because we could see where
we were wasting our money.
It was because we were able to
recycle those inefficiencies.
We basically were able to take most
of our stakeholders with us.
You know, I'm incredibly
lucky with our board actually,
and they were hugely supportive.
They were very open to large investments,
but I convinced them
that we didn't need them.
We could self-fund because there was
so much inefficiency in the business.
(pleasant music)
- It sounded like living the
digital life, you arrived
with at least partially a
playbook, which is that I've got
a highly dysfunctional organization
without a great track record.
We're gonna get one common data set,
which is the data set around the customer.
And then we're gonna
basically follow the money,
meaning we're gonna work out
what has the highest impact
either on cost or customer benefit.
We'll prioritize those things.
What was obviously also
going on at the time
is you were doing a fairly
massive churn on the business
side of getting the right team in place,
sitting down with stakeholders.
You talk about the write off.
I mean, the write off is a lot
of money for The Economist,
but it's also a lot of time.
You were writing off four years.
- Four years. Four years.
- And I would have thought
part of your digital playbook
that you brought was, we
don't have a lot of time
and you probably weren't that thrilled
about giving up four years of time.
- I wasn't and in fact, I was sort of told
during the interview process
that the digital project
wasn't going so well.
And it took me probably two
to three months to really get
to the bottom of that and to decide
that actually we were
better writing it off.
And in fact, we ended up
building a replacement
in 15 months, right?
And for a third of the cost.
It was a gutsy call,
but it was, it turned
out to be the right call
because that was the beginning
of getting the mojo back.
The business went from, here's the thing
that the board had been
lamenting for years
and it's been painful.
And there was broken
trust between the board
and the previous management
team around this project to,
wow, here's this thing we
never believed we can do.
We did it on time to budget. It works.
It gives us this data we
can do something with.
I think that was quite an important step.
And for the leadership
team, it was also the period
through which I decided who are
the people who could make it
to the next chapter and who
wasn't going to make it.
And when I started talking
about 12 to 15 months
to deliver the new project,
I could see the people
who were excited by it and
the ones who were terrified.
And the terrified ones, many
of them self-selected out.
- So you've just lost four years.
You're in the write-off business.
So I can imagine that having
gotten stakeholders on board,
this is so mission critical.
Why did you even use
the phrase self-funding?
- The sort of commercial
footing we're on was quite weak.
We're a 180-year-old business.
Our view is long-term
sustainable business, right?
So there's no exit.
There is no moment where permanent
sustainable growth is less of a pressure.
One of the options that we
did consider, of course,
is do we just try and
do all of this at once?
And do we think about suspending
dividends for a long time?
And two reasons we didn't do it.
One is that I think we'd have lost a lot
of shareholders along the way.
And this is not a business
like many businesses.
These are not anonymous shareholders.
These are children and grandchildren
of the original founding families.
They turn up to quarterly
shareholder calls.
They hold me to account.
And so as a CEO,
you really truly feel the responsibility
you have to the shareholders.
Two is having looked at the
business in the first 90 days,
it was clear to me that we
were wasting money, right?
Even if you have money and you
can get your generous board
and trust to give you money, you need
to have a return on it and you have
to be disciplined in how you do that.
The second part of the sort
of the forensic examination
of the body is we cannot
do everything at once.
It's physically impossible to
do the things we need to do.
And so timing and sequencing
is absolutely part of the strategy.
And I think, Jimmy, we don't
talk enough about timing,
the sort of when and strategy.
We talk about where to play
and how to win, but the when
and how we don't speak enough about.
And I'm a big believer
in the when and how.
You get the strategy right,
but the execution fails
because you got timing
and sequencing right.
It was clear that if we
could get real visibility
by building the first part
of the digital muscle,
which showed us what customers wanted,
we could half our marketing budget.
And so I was able to take
that spend, make sure
that it has an ROI that every one
of our channels was firing,
and take that to then fund the next piece
of the puzzle right?
And literally, we systematically went
around all the business
throughout the journey.
I think one of the tricks that we managed
to pull off is this sort of win,
win, win, win, win, win, win.
Little wins, no big statements,
no big New York Times like
here's the big transformation.
This is show and don't tell in action.
(pleasant music)
- Lara made a decision that
very few CEOs would make.
Four years of work, 12
million pounds written off
because she knew that
momentum mattered most.
The faster she could
get a win on the board,
the faster she could rebuild trust.
She went to the data first
and it showed her where the
money was going, what was wasted
and what was well spent.
And she discovered that she could
self-fund the transformation.
Not by asking for more,
but by redirecting what was already there.
Each win funded the next.
And nobody had to wait
for a 10-year return
on something they didn't believe in.
The momentum was built through
evidence, not promises.
Show people progress. Don't
tell them change is coming.
Following the money clarifies,
it creates a drumbeat of little
customer wins that inspire,
that build confidence.
But small incremental
steps can also complicate.
You run the danger of letting
a thousand flowers bloom
without a grand plan.
But Lara inherited an organization
that distrusted farmers
with grand plans.
There's an interesting
paradox in what you did.
On one hand, the business
needs to simplify
around a single consumer data
set, then follow the money.
The product can proliferate.
And I'm interested in that journey.
- Pace and simplification.
Those were the words
that I used all the time.
And in fact, I shut down
a number of businesses
and business lines and
I went back to the core,
this is what we do and only
have built out since we got
the core organized.
On the journalistic side,
I would say to you that
what journalists do is the same
because ultimately it's about reporting.
Original reporting, that's what we do.
How we do it has changed, right?
The art of distilling your
many ideas into a single
concise article is the
starting point for everything.
For being able to do a podcast
interview, for being able
to do a video, to be able to
write a short form version of
that, a longer form version
of that, an AI translation.
Everybody has to write for a living,
but not everybody has to
be doing video and audio.
And we have enough people
who want to do that.
And so it's been a pull
system, not a push system.
- The only thing I want to challenge is
as an Economist reader, my
hypothesis would have been
that a journalist that
could do original reporting
and write brilliantly was
the essence of the brand
and the highest form of the brand.
So whenever there were performance reviews
and internal discussions,
Jack would be the epitome.
Now Jack is now suddenly
seeing three other people
that may not be as good
in the written article
are shining in podcasts.
And more importantly,
The Economist byline,
which doesn't exist in the
print, that must create tension.
- I think you have to
understand the culture
of The Economist newsroom.
We pick them because they're
low ego people who are happy to
function below the limelight.
They get joy from producing fabulous
written format and video format.
But even the ones who are today
on the screen twice a week
aren't chasing big personalities
and leaving us for bigger contracts
with US players who pay more.
That is not what we attract here.
Where they shine is when they are bouncing
ideas off each other.
And there's no stack
ranking of journalists.
That might be the culture of the business.
That is not the culture of the newsroom.
And I think we're gonna
have to hold onto that.
- We're talking digital,
but we obviously have in
the mind the shadow of AI.
You said something that was so clear
when you defined the
core of The Economist.
It was original reporting
turned into a written article.
And was any time in the
journey was that challenge?
Because I could easily see
a very smart person saying,
"Lara, we're 180 years old.
That's the thing that's changing.
And why does it have to
be a written article?
Why isn't it any form of expression?"
So was that just automatic
and you never questioned it
or did you guys interrogate?
What business are we in?
- I think the question more is
how could the business become so clear?
And the most truthful answer is,
I think I'd always assumed it.
It isn't until we had to really
think about what AI meant
for us that we crystallized that.
In fact, somebody on
Zanny's team crystallized
it for us, Andrew did.
Sort of what are the
principles of The Economist
that we will hang onto no
matter what form we take shape?
And the way I like to tease
the business is when we are
an avatar on the moon, what will still be
economisty about us right?
And that document exists.
Hope we'll find that we were right,
that actually there are some
things AI will never be able
to do in original reporting.
And translating that into
really human led artisanal
interpretation is still within
the domain of humans only.
- What I always say about
The Economist is when I know
a lot about a topic,
I always learn something
from your articles.
I was in the middle in 1991
and 95 of Russian
privatization, knee deep in it.
And yet then when I
read the little article
on The Economist, I was
like, "That is so much better
perspective than me that's
in the middle of it."
It's not the written article.
It's the extraordinary ability to simplify
in non-jargon a situation.
- One of my favorite
things about this business
is the weekly editorial meeting
because you see that in real sense.
For every one of those
articles that we write,
there are hundreds of
conversations with people
around the world, mostly off
the record, some on the record.
And then that is distilled
and debated within the editorial meeting
with opposing perspectives
being brought together.
And the finished article
is the sort of result
of the hive mind of that debate.
And that I think is going to take a very,
very long time if ever, for any form
of artificial intelligence
to recreate that.
- Let me ask, was there
anything that came off the list?
Meaning that we thought
this was The Economist,
but we realized as an avatar on the moon,
we wouldn't need that?
Well, print. I think
print might've been wrong.
- Yeah. Well, so yeah. So
the channel is neutral.
So we're neutral.
And none of that says
anything about print,
which is why the avatar on the moon is
a useful reference point.
There's nothing in our
principles that talks at all
about the output mode.
It talks about the raw
ingredients and the process
and what we generate.
After that, it's fairly neutral.
I mean, it could be a
podcast, it could be a video,
it can be an AI briefing,
but the essence of it will be
what we just described right?
The expression of The
Economist will proliferate.
There will be many versions,
including AI versions soon,
but the culture of the
newsroom has to stay the same
or we will lose something.
- There's a pattern here.
Often the boldest, most
successful transformations
end up focused on the most
narrow specific questions.
What business are we in?
Who are we when we're at our greatest?
Of course, the team faced
existential questions.
What does it mean to be a
publisher in a digital world,
in a world of AI?
But that's context. It's
not where the team focused.
Here the question was this,
what is The Economist?
A publication, a podcast,
a digital platform?
Or was it something deeper?
And the team's answer is that
the channel's not the core.
What matters is original
reporting, human judgment,
intellectual rigor,
and the ability to distill
complexity into insight.
These principles cannot change.
How customers access the journalism
that results from these
principles can change daily.
In hindsight, this was a master stroke.
It's far easier to align
your people around a purpose,
a mission than it is a digital
strategy or an AI strategy,
because we all want to be
clear on what isn't changing
before we can consider what must change.
Because we all want to know
the longer term direction
before we commit to the short term
and the ever-changing actions
that will get us there.
Once Lara and her team defined
what The Economist actually
was, decisions became easier.
Priorities became clearer.
And perhaps most
importantly, people could see
what they were being
asked to build and why.
The transformation plan
didn't create the clarity.
The clarity came first.
And this lesson applies to
all of us, especially now
in a world of turbulence,
in a world of AI.
- When you look at this in a
case study point, you forget
that there's a reality of
landing somewhere which is no
longer fashionable, right?
You know, I was made CEO of The Economist
and I picked up my phone,
as we would all do,
to all my friends.
And I'd worked in some pretty cool places.
And I knew these people
would work with me.
And I said, "Would you like to come here?"
And they said, "Why? You know,
it's a publishing business.
I mean, we love the brand, but
this is a mission to nowhere.
You're running the division of a FTSE 100,
and that's going places.
Why didn't you exit in private equity?"
Just though, okay, you
know, I get it, right?
But I can see that we can fix this.
And so the people I really
had to convince first,
the people who I needed to do
the first leg of the project.
So I brought them with me, right?
And that was the mechanism I used
to convince both the business, myself
and the beginning of the network
that this was going to work.
And lo and behold, today,
the phone rings all the time
about whether people wanted
to work at The Economist.
- You started this
interview with this image
of life on the tube.
You were gonna be stuck moving
between the journalistic side
and the business side, forever separated.
Tell us what happened when you
finally brought them together.
- A floor became free at The Adelphi,
which is an amazing building.
It is truly beautiful. And I jumped on it.
Had I not built enough credibility
with the board, I don't know whether,
I probably wouldn't have
been able to sell this
to the board in my first day,
but month 18, having delivered
this big transformation.
And so we arrived at COVID
when the world was reopening.
And you remember those moments.
Like you were so excited to be back.
And to be back in the same
building as all these colleagues,
the effect was huge.
But, I remember that the oldest, i.e.
the most longest-serving,
member on my team at that point
who hadn't left yet, he'd
been in the business 29 years,
said to me, "Your biggest legacy will be
that you are the person
who brought us together."
- You very famously,
and every time I talk to
you, you always say the same,
which is no one arrives at their
current position on their own.
And I'm just curious, who did you turn
to for help and advice?
How did you navigate all this?
Were there mentors, coaches along the way?
- Yes and look, and I think I feel really
strongly about that.
And as I coach and mentor people,
I always remind them of that.
We didn't all start here.
We ended up here by one,
luck, a lot of hard work,
and then some great
people who believed in us
and were willing to sort of lean in.
And I have been very
fortunate throughout my career
to have people who believed in me.
One of the things I have in my
head is this sort of a number
of leaders I really respected
and like a strap line that
something I remember from them.
And I'll just give you a couple.
So Marjorie Scardino, who
started at The Economist
and I worked for at Pearson,
got up on stage famously,
said one day would people err
on the side of generosity.
And she didn't mean money.
She meant how you treat them
and how you think about them.
And that one of my favorite CEOs
who gave me my first CEO
jobs, David Gilbertson,
he basically famously said,
"You have to be better at
standing things up than
breaking them down," right?
Because the analyst in
me breaks things down.
And he was trying to
teach me that you have
to be a person in the
room who stands ideas up.
- There's a term we should
coin for what Lara did,
The Grand Reframe,
because there could have been a very
different version of this story.
The bold leader arrives
from the outside, declares
that the old ways are
broken, sets a new direction,
wages war on the resistance.
And here, I imagine it would
have led to the loss not only
of journalists with talent,
but probably of 180-year-old company.
Lara threw out that playbook.
Instead, she asked,
"What business are we in?
What are we at our greatest?"
And with that, they clarified
what they had to protect,
what they had to jettison,
what they had to fix.
And then by answering
what would never change,
they could crystallize
what would still make them economisty,
even when they were avatars on the moon.
Follow the money. Sequence the wins.
Self-fund the transformation.
Change what needs changing.
But paradoxically in a
story of transformation,
this is also a story of preservation.
Rediscover what makes The Economist
so special and nurture it.
The journalist, journalism,
the quest for facts,
for balance, the desire for truth.
In a broken world, that
feels like a great legacy.
And that's Lara Boro.
And that's what standing
things up looks like.
(upbeat music)
Everything from today's episode
and every episode is at
bain.com/founders-mentality.
And we'll be back in
two weeks. Stay curious.
Next time on Founder's
Mentality: The CEO Sessions.
- We were all summoned
to go to a graveyard
with tombstones everywhere.
And it said, "Blockbuster, a kind friend
of yours born this year, dead that year.
Eastman Kodak, inventor
of digital photography,
died this year."
And it basically said to us,
"If we don't open up and don't change,
somebody could beat us."
(bright music)