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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.
- The bigger a company gets,
the further its leaders
get from the front line from the customer.
It's just what scale does.
Growth separates leaders from the folks
that make and sell their products,
from the folks that buy their products,
from the players on the field,
from the truth.
Daniel Servitje has spent
27 years fighting this.
His enemy is not growth.
We'd all want his track record.
It's distance.
I'm Jimmy Allen and this
is Founder's Mentality:
The CEO Sessions.
Daniel is the executive
chairman of Grupo Bimbo,
the world's largest baking company.
80 years old, 39 countries,
nine times the size it
was when he became CEO.
And he was on a bread truck yesterday.
'Cause this conversation is about
how you fight distance at scale
across decades, across cultures,
how you move fast when it matters,
and stay patient when it counts,
and how you set the tone of a business.
Not from the boardroom,
but from the bakery floor.
- I went on a hot summer in southern Spain
to visit one of our bakeries.
We had acquired a company
like 18 months ago
from a lady that was an entrepreneur
that developed a business on gluten free.
And when I saw her, she
had fire in her eyes.
She basically was telling me
all the nice things about the company,
all the energy that she
had felt in the company,
and the good intentions
and the human quality of her leaders.
But she also basically said,
"I don't want to be prudent.
I want to tell you how things are."
She mentioned all the
frustration with our processes,
with our CapEx process,
with the long meetings
and the number of people
getting involved in making decisions.
And I ended up in the tour
filming her with my phone
and asking her questions about
how she developed the products,
the connection that she had
with the heavy consumers
that she was working with
on those developments.
And it was very inspiring
to see someone so
refreshing in the company.
- And just internally,
do you take these voices of the founders
and use them yourself to
change behaviors of your team?
- Very much so.
We have some big events in the company.
And the biggest of all occurs
in the fall of every year.
And we bring people from the 39 countries
in which we have presence from all areas,
but more importantly from
the marketing and sales areas
and the top management team.
And a year ago I was
hearing all those things
from different entrepreneurs,
or our own people telling me
how we were not moving as fast
as we used to or we need to.
So I ended up bringing all those voices
and asking our teams to
revisit our way of growing,
because we have been growing.
And as you grow, you get more complex,
you get more focused on meeting budgets,
on reviewing things in detail,
on how you are gonna assess risks.
But at the end of the day,
you slow down the company,
you miss opportunities,
you see competitors gaining
ground on many fronts.
And I said, it's on us.
It's on the company to see
things with a new light
and question yourselves.
- And in this trade fair,
what were the two things people took away
of how do you keep the
entrepreneurial spirit
in a large successful company?
What were the actions
everybody walked away with?
- I would say that they were surprised
that I was so firm in my understanding
that this was a breaking
point in the company.
I had been the CEO of
the company for 27 years.
I had been able to grow
the company nine times
from where I receive it.
And I was no longer the CEO,
I was the executive chair,
but I had a little bit more space
to see how things were going.
One was that, and the other one was like,
yes, let's do it.
You are right.
Because we're all seeing the same thing,
but we were not
comfortable in moving ahead
and breaking the glass to start a new
on changing processes from expedite
on many things that were
basically the norm at that time.
You know, I mean, and
it's taking time thing.
Big corporations don't move swiftly
one day from the other.
But I see that the pace
is moving now in the right direction.
- I think there's a myth
that as you become CEO
and become huge and big
and everybody views you
that CEOs walk around with big thoughts,
thinking big things.
And yet, every time I talk to you,
you're always talking
about the little things,
the specific things.
Why do you do that?
- I do strategy in the field.
I don't do strategy in the boardrooms.
When you get in discussions
and you just talk about generalities,
you don't sense where are the issues.
But when you get deep inside
what makes things work
in the bakeries or in the sales centers
or in the marketplace,
then you understand
what works and what not.
And it's very specific.
So I usually try to get
deep into the small things
so that then from there
you get the big ideas.
And it is the same as with Maria.
Maria, she developed the products
with a very small set of heavy users,
and she understood their
needs very closely.
And from there she had a lot of confidence
on the things that
worked for their products
to be superior to others.
- Think about what it takes
for that conference moment to happen.
First, I mean, how many
leaders would do that?
Stand up in front of 39 countries
and hold the mirror up?
And not to their
predecessor, to themselves,
to the company they built.
And second, how many leaders
understand the huge power of small things?
Letting Maria speak her truth.
That only works in a culture
where people aren't
afraid to tell the truth.
That only works in a
culture that listens first
to the voice of the frontline,
the voice of the customer.
And that's the culture
Daniel has been building.
Not from the top down,
from the field up,
from small thing.
When he became CEO,
Bimbo was basically a
Mexican company, that's it.
But winning on home turf is one thing.
Playing internationally is
a different game entirely.
- What I always say is, if
you want to go international,
you have to make sure that
you have a strong foot
in your own market.
If it's a weak foundation,
international won't solve anything,
only get you into more problems.
But that was not our case.
The business was strong
in Mexico and we decided
that we could have an
international opportunity.
But the biggest lesson of all
is that if you don't have
a long-term perspective
while going international, don't do it,
because it took us many decades
to achieve the global
leadership of our industry.
If you don't have the support of the board
for this long-term commitment,
maybe just go for smaller things.
- Often I think people forget
how long it takes to
develop your first position,
but your Mexico position
took years to develop
and then you wanna go into the US
or go to another market
and expect success overnight.
And it takes just as long to develop
that second market as
your first and the third.
But most people don't have the boards
with the patience to be
able to let it happen.
And I think that's one of the
magical things you guys have
is public company long-term patience.
- That, to me, was the most
important differentiation
between us and many other players.
The long-term perspective
and the consistency of the board
to continue to invest even
if there were no results
or even where there were bad results
for that specific country.
And I would say that the third one,
which is probably less common,
it's a very deep understanding
on the original founders of the company
that the business priority was first
and the shareholders came second.
In terms of the uses of the profits,
the reinvestment in acquisitions,
CapEx has always been the
first priority in the company.
And the percentage of the dividend
is much smaller than what
goes back into the business.
So that allow us basically
to compound our growth
and to sustain the competitive issues
that we have in the different markets.
- As you went international,
the classic case,
and I can imagine this
especially for the kind
of culture you had,
is how much do we export our culture
and impose it on each of our acquisitions,
each of our markets,
and how much do we allow
our culture to change
based on the new company?
And I'd just love to hear
what your experience,
'cause it's such a classic
issue for founders.
- This is a great question, Jimmy,
and one that we suffered
through the times,
especially when we moved
from Mexico to the US,
that was like a culture clash.
I would say that we have
a very special philosophy.
We aim to be a sustainable,
meaning a long-term surviving company,
highly productive and fully humane.
So in a sense, the highly productive
is very much into what most
large companies understand,
but fully humane was like,
what are you talking about?
And we had a very good atmosphere
in our company in Mexico.
And when we tried to translate
that into the different cultures,
it worked well, mostly in Latin America.
In the US, we had
trouble at the beginning,
but then we also have had the opportunity
to understand what the companies
that we were acquiring,
what were their values.
And we have in the past been incorporating
the most important components like safety
that were not strong or diversity
that also have been very
important in the past years.
Now we have a very well
accepted global culture.
And when we acquired companies,
for example, we acquired
a couple of companies
in Eastern Europe, in Romania and Serbia.
And I was truly impressed
by how easy the culture was accepted
and cherished by associates there.
So as time has passed,
these culture has been, and
our values have been embraced
because are now very much
global values, you know,
and we have become a
much more open company
than what we were before.
- You mentioned that there
was a fourth generation member
going to a boot camp.
Do you have boot camps?
Do you have opportunities
where people really do get together
to get a complete
immersion in your culture
and how you operate?
- Yeah, we have five different courses.
The most basic one,
which is a two-day seminar
for every leader in the company,
she might be a president of a country
or a sanitation supervisor in a bakery,
the same seminar applies.
There might be some chats that are global,
like for example, me giving
a chat of an hour or the CEO.
But the main thing is that the seminar
is given by the leaders of the company,
because what we want
is that the culture
gets seen in real time.
If the leaders speak about
something is not that they're
just seeing this thing
printed in the wall,
it's that the leaders act
and lead with the integrity,
with the values of the company.
Because the culture is what the leader
does with their teams,
not what is written.
It's what you see in
the day-to-day actions
with your leader.
- Culture isn't what's in the handbook
or on the walls.
It's what everybody does every day.
When folks aren't watching,
it's where the leader is.
It's what happens with
distance as you grow.
The strongest cultures
tend to be the most hostile
to external influence.
If strong cultures acquire a new company,
they demand that that company changes.
Yet, Bimbo is different.
It's a strong culture that is reshaped
through international expansion.
Each acquisition brought something back
safety from the US,
openness from Eastern Europe.
And it makes sense if
you lead from the field,
then the field shapes everything.
New field, new changes.
But hold on, we've seen this movie,
growth creates complexity.
Each new market, each new acquisition
comes with its systems,
its processes, its ways of working.
And all that complexity
brings energy vampires
and those vampires, well, they fly around
sucking the life out of entrepreneurs.
Eventually the Marias
stop speaking their truth
and start leaving.
The question is this:
how do you keep the
entrepreneurial instinct alive
while expanding across
dozens of new markets
and growing 900%?
A company that keeps its entrepreneurship
is willing to fail,
willing to make mistakes,
willing to take a risk.
Oftentimes the frustration I
hear of very senior founders
is they have more risk taking appetite
than a lot of their people.
And I just love to hear,
how do you, you know,
A, is that a problem you're seeing?
And B, if so,
- Yes.
- How do you try to keep the culture
of risk taking going as you go forward?
- Yes, definitely.
As we grew, not in my time,
but in my uncle, my father's time,
we moved from, I would
say a very lax culture
in budgeting.
And in my case, coming from Stanford,
I became more attuned to
all the professional manners
in which big companies had to be run.
So we ended up developing
as many other companies
a more efficient budgeting process,
a more efficient planning
process in the company.
But as we did it,
and I'm feeling this right now,
we basically probably moved
into the wrong side of the equation
in trying to be very specific on budgets
and on trying to put a lot of carrots
in front of achieving those budgets
and on being very
stringent on the processes
for authorizing CapEx or whatever.
And by doing that, you basically stalled
the speed in which you move
to tackle the opportunities.
And the company has been
forever geared towards growth.
But when you put all these
things together in place,
you get people leading with
that intent in their mind.
We're gonna get to meet the budget,
or we are gonna check all the boxes
to be okay with the processes.
But then you're not seeing
what's happening in the real life
because you're more concerned
about all this internal stuff.
And then you as a leader,
as a founder or a founder's mentality,
inspiration even if you didn't found it,
you have to break the processes
and say, "Enough is enough."
We have to change this
because we're not seeing
what's happening in the real life.
Because we're much focused on
what is need for us or why,
what is needed
for basically achieving the status quo
of the official rules.
So yes, the founders have to be,
or the CEOs have to be the
ones who basically allow people
to move outside of those boundaries.
You cannot go to the other extreme,
but you have to always ask the leaders
to check if they're in
the right place or not.
- It's such an amazing case study.
I mean, so when we talk about it,
you know, every great founding
team, the original team,
when the company was small,
did two different things.
One is they did run the business
and they put in some basic routines,
otherwise trucks can't
deliver bread on time.
They mostly kept building
new things, new solutions.
So the idea that we could
both run the business
and build new businesses was natural.
But as you said, systems
get a little bit lax.
So then you begin to bring in systems.
Where does systems come from?
You said it perfectly.
Stanford Business School,
Harvard Business School.
Those systems are built
for the delivery side,
for the run the business.
So they get put in place
and then they lock the company
into the existing business.
And big opportunities go by
because those systems treat new businesses
almost like a hobby.
Come on, hit your budget, do your things,
but that new stuff is gonna distract you.
And so then what you have to do is, okay,
I've gotta keep the
systems to run the business
and now add the systems
to change the business.
How do I bring back a
sense of entrepreneurship?
Because you don't wanna break the systems
that make sure that the trucks arrive
on time with hot bread.
What do you do to now
bring back the systems
of business building the risk taking?
- I would say that the
best way we have found,
and I would say it's a very
well defined systematic
form of one with the same
team running the business,
is to ask them
to have what we call a
full potential initiative
in the business.
So we learned this from when
we had to do a big turnaround
in one of our business in Brazil.
We were bleeding.
We were not able to basically
to perform in any matter.
So we brought a team, we
got help from the outside.
And the same team
that was running the
business came with ideas.
We developed a very strong program
on how to transform the
company while running it.
And now each business has
this dual responsibility
to present the results
on their regular quarterly numbers.
And also, to have a team
dedicated on exploiting the opportunities
for having a full potential business
that respond to their issues, their needs.
- And I imagine a lot of what you feel
your job as a leader
is to give those full
potential opportunities
the same voice because you're
the voice of patient capital.
Daniel, "I'm in it for the long run,"
where oftentimes the local guys
feel all the pressure
of impatient capital.
So do you have to kind
of go in and say, "Guys,
we need to take our time on this one."
- And it's a constant
discussion between the teams,
more so on the CapEx front.
Because when you invest in
CapEx, especially for growth,
you're not necessarily gonna fill the line
in the next year or so,
but you have to make the decisions because
otherwise you open the space,
other players to take that capacity.
In my role today,
that's where I play a little bit more.
I'm constantly discussing with
our CEO about these issues.
But you have to get
into these discussions,
otherwise, you miss the long-term success
for the short-term benefit.
- You know, I often talk
that one of the roles
of Founder's Mentality
is to speed things up
and to try to bring a sense of urgency.
But you're actually saying sometimes
the role of Founder's Mentality
is to almost slow things down and say,
"Guys, don't feel the pressure
of the quarterly return.
Let's really go after this
because what's the
consequences of not doing it?"
And it's the future of our business.
- And I would say
that if you ask people about me,
they complain that I am always
pushing them to act fast.
But I would say that we're a company
that's more patient with capital
than what I see in other places,
because we understand that
things will take their time
and it is gonna be okay.
You're making the right
decisions for the long haul.
You need to survive in the short term,
but you need to make sure
that the direction of the company
is the right one for the long haul.
- There's a paradox at the
heart of scaling any business.
You need systems to run the business
reliably, efficiently, every day.
Trucks have to arrive on time,
bread has to be fresh,
and this demands playbooks
and flawless execution.
But you also need systems
to change the business.
New products, new markets,
new ways of competing.
There's no playbook.
You need to test and learn
your way to new solutions.
Trial and error.
Building new businesses
takes entrepreneurship,
not flawless execution of known routines.
In fact, the first set of
systems fights the second.
And most companies, as they grow,
well, they rely more and
more on the playbooks
and lose the art of business building.
Daniel's answer, do both.
Same team, dual responsibility.
Run the business and
change it simultaneously.
But there's something
underneath even that,
which I think is the real insight
from this conversation.
Speed can be a competitive weapon,
but so too can patience.
And Daniel knows when
and where to do both.
In the market, he pushes for speed.
Faster reactions, faster
learning, faster decisions.
But when it comes to capital,
expansion, long-term bets,
he slows down, not
because he lacks urgency,
because he thinks in decades
fast where it matters,
patient where it counts.
Daniel has toggled between
these two time horizons
for three decades now.
Daniel, I was in Madrid at
the IES School of Founders,
and we are talking about this issue
and the dilemma that founders face
where you have probably given that talk.
10,000 times, your half
hour of what it means
to be a leader at Bimbo.
And yet, if you're a successful
fast-growing company,
50% of your people may
have never heard it once.
And you need to constantly be saying
with the same energy as
the first time you did it,
what it means to be part of the company?
Where the hell does your
energy come from to do that?
- Yesterday, the team I was
touring the market with,
we tried to bring people
from different areas
and there was the head
of one of our bakeries
in the operations
and we tried to expose them
not to be in the boundaries
of the four walls,
but also to connect with
what's happening in the market.
And I was just talking about
all the things that I
saw as opportunities.
And she said to me, "Daniel,
how many hours do you sleep every night?"
(both laugh)
And I said, "Recently, not many."
Because I'm still very energized
about the company.
How do I get this energy?
I think I get it because I get
excited about opportunities
and really trying to understand
always what's in the next corner of life.
And I'm very enthusiastic
and thrilled about artificial intelligence
is gonna change the world
and how it's gonna change our businesses
because it's changing them right now.
And either you embrace it with fear
or you embrace it with curiosity
and then try to move it from there, no.
- How do you make sure
your people have the same energy you do?
- I think you have to bring
the right people to the team
and they have to have fun in the things
that you're doing.
Our business is rather simple, complex
because it's a fresh product.
We have to execute super well,
otherwise it's gonna be a mess.
But I have fun
and I see our teams in the marketing areas
or in the sales teams,
in the operations that
they do have a lot of fun.
And if you have an environment
in which you treat people as
you would like to be treated,
if they see this as a place
where they can have a chance to grow
because the company
reinvests in your future,
if the teams like engage
as they do in outside work,
then the energy is there.
You don't need to push for energy.
Yes, the leaders showcases
energy and it helps,
but I see it all levels of
the company and it does.
It's not because of me,
it's because of the culture
that the culture really
supports the people
and the people get engaged
in what they're doing.
And you don't have to
inject any energy on that
because it's there.
- I love that answer.
And it's interesting when
you were talking about
the reaction of some of the entrepreneurs
to the growing bureaucracy.
One of the tests I think
is so important for functional
people at the center
is where do you get your energy?
Do you get your energy from your power
or do you get your energy
by serving the Marias of the world
and seeing her win?
And that single question,
when you get bureaucrats
that get their energy
from their own power,
you're doomed as a company.
When you get functional people
that care about serving
the Marias of the world,
you can grow forever.
- Yeah, and I think that personally,
I push people to do
more and challenge them,
but I allow them to have
fun and to poke on me
and then to do their own things.
And to really, they're the ones
who are gonna have
basically all the trophies
from whatever they do, no.
And it's us.
We are there for serving the company.
- I love that image.
They're the ones that are
gonna have the trophies.
Our job is to serve them.
Simple question that's
bloody hard to answer.
Where does the energy come from?
And here I think Daniel
is kind of like a fish
being asked to describe water.
His entire organization is built on energy
and it's hard for him to
explain where it comes from.
Like a fish in water, it's just there.
But it's so clear
that energy comes first
from whom he recruits.
He wants a field mentality.
You have to get your energy
from a loaf of bread
baked and delivered well
to a hungry consumer.
You have to get energy from a Maria
welcoming her truth, not fighting it.
And it's clear that energy comes
from the culture he's
maintained from the founders,
that he's nurtured and
strengthened with acquisitions.
It's a culture that
celebrates the frontline,
treating people as they wanna be treated,
investing in their future.
And I know it also comes from
ridding the organizations
of things that destroy energy.
A bureaucrat who finds more
joy in their big office
than the small things
that delight customers.
A leader more comfortable in a boardroom
than in a bakery.
And that's the real insight
from this conversation.
Culture is what we do.
It's how we show up every day.
It's our curiosity.
It's our humility.
It's not what we write on walls,
it's what we learn from the bakeries.
The right culture energizes.
And energize people make sure we deliver
everything our customers need.
And it starts from the top.
Well, as long as the
top stays in the field.
Everything from today's episode
and every episode is at
bain.com/founders-mentality
and we'll be back in two weeks.
Until then, stay curious.
Next time on Founder's Mentality:
The CEO sessions.
- There's probably only about five people
at Khan Academy even had access to it
at that point.
I knew this was going
to change everything.
This was gonna change society.
I'm not sure if ever again in my life.
Am I going to get a preview like that
where I wasn't clear
if the president of the United States
knew that this was going to come.
So it really felt like
I was making contact
with an alien life form.
It felt like this changes
everything and I had to go all in
and help the team make that change.