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Fit Happens asks the question most leadership conversations avoid: why do talented people fail in the wrong roles — and thrive in the right ones? Hosted by Jason Baumgarten, an executive search specialist with decades of experience placing CEOs and building boards, each episode blends cutting-edge research with candid conversations with the leaders who've lived it. Because fit isn't luck. It's a science.
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.
Jason Baumgarten 00:17
Welcome back to Fit Happens, the show where some things fit, some things don't, and what happens when we confuse performance for belonging. Today we're here with Jim Citrin, one of my dear friends and colleagues here at Spencer Stuart, one of the OGs in the CEO search world. Jim has been at it for a long time and is one of my great mentors and friends, and I can't wait to get into this topic of fit and leadership, and maybe we'll offer some good career advice along the way. Jim, welcome to the show.
Jim Citrin 00:48
Great to be here, Jason. This is so fun. And for me to see you, from intern from Vassar College all the way to the very top of the CEO and board world in technology and around the world, is like one of my greatest thrills.
Jason Baumgarten 01:04
Well, it's fun to be back on the video again. One of the things I want to start with is just a little bit of who you are and how you came into this funny profession that we're both in, because to some degrees, you're a great example of finding fit. You found this amazing career that you've been flourishing in for so many decades and it was kind of a circuitous path. And so maybe we'll start with your background, how you got here, what you do today, but also some recognition along the way of what you realized about yourself and what you love doing.
Jim Citrin 01:33
Fantastic. Well, I definitely learned about fit both through research and a lot of the work we're doing here at Spencer Stuart, but also through my own circuitous career path. And it's been so fun and so gratifying to find something that is such a great fit for me and for you and for us, and how we then can apply it to our clients and candidates around the world. I came out of, like you, went to Wall Street for three years at Morgan Stanley, came out of Harvard Business School, which was awesome, and actually had a bad fit going into private wealth management. Goldman Sachs. I love Goldman, but I didn't really like the stock market. I didn't really like the culture of just all about investing in money. And I went to McKinsey and loved that. And that was great fit, learning and writing and working with clients. And then so for Spencer Stuart, all these years, it's been such a great fit. One of the things I learned early, early on, even when I was at McKinsey, was how not only fit, but leadership matters. And that always struck me from a kid all the way to now. One single person, whether it's at a small team level, at a division level, at a company level, at a country, the leader sets the tone for everybody. And I personally believe that individuals leading organizations can have a massive effect. And we are really privileged to be in the role to help individuals find great leadership positions and organizations find the right leaders. And when it works, it's magic.
Jason Baumgarten 03:13
So, Jim, you've been at this a while. What's something about leadership that you used to believe that you've totally flipped on? Either because the circumstances of the world have changed or new information's come to light and you maybe would think about it a little differently.
Jim Citrin 03:29
One thing, Jason, is that everybody has kind of a picture in their minds of what a leader is supposed to look like and how they're supposed to communicate. And what I've learned is that there can be all styles of leaders. You can have an incredibly introverted, shy, nerdy person who happens to have the brains and the values to inspire people quietly. You can also have the most charismatic, outgoing person who can attract people to follow them. But if they're either not the right strategy or if they have the wrong values, they can bring organizations over a cliff. So I think that there are eternal values of leadership and they have to do with thought leadership and setting direction in the context of where the world is and where their organization is, and then having the value set and the integrity and I'll say the people leadership. But that can have every different style. And with those two constants, thought leadership and people leadership, then it can take every shape and form. That's been a big unlock for me over these last recent years.
Jason Baumgarten 04:42
And Jim, we both have spent a lot of our time, we both love media and technology and obviously work across lots of industries. But one of the things in those sectors in particular is there's a lot of well known super successful founders. And a lot of those founders are people that our clients would never hire. They would never look at a resume and say, wow, you are an unemployed college student, we should hire you, or we should put you in charge of this big division. When you think about the self made path to CEO versus the curated path to CEO, what do you think the founders get right and what do you think the corporate discipline boards get right? There's always some magic in the middle. But what have you learned from sort of seeing both sides of that?
Jim Citrin 05:25
That's such a fun question. And I know you personally have done a lot of research on founders, founder scaling, succeeding founders. That's a really big challenge. It's pretty rare to have the founder who can scale all the way up. I'll tell you a funny story. Right when you were started this a long time ago, I was doing a search for the CEO of barnesandnoble.com. This was the late 90s. And literally, so Len Riggio, who sadly passed away, but a legend in the book retailing in the book industry. So this was 97 or 98 and Amazon was just like coming on then. Barnes and Noble was the BMOC and we were talking about Jeff Bezos. And Len Riggio basically looked down his nose and said, I wouldn't hire him to come in to run barnesandnoble.com, we need someone really big. I never forgot that comment. And then look at Amazon. Jeff is one of those rare, incredible founders who was able to scale himself and as a result scale the organization. You know, again, you and I have had the privilege of working with Mark Zuckerberg from the time he literally was a college dropout and early days in Facebook, and meeting with him in a hoodie. And there was something about him that I'll never forget where he just asked the best questions. In our first meeting, if you remember, we had like two and a half hours and he just started from the broadest questions down at the end of it to the most genius questions. So the idea of asking questions and learning, I think is the big unlock for founders growing and scaling. It's really hard. But founders are their own unique case. We can have a whole episode on that. And you know, you and I both mentor founders trying to scale, or organizations trying to take the magic of a founder but have a professional succeed them. When it comes to the question at hand of fit, I've been thinking in preparation for this of something that I did studying this question. And I have an amazing kind of example of an AB test to illustrate the point that fit really matters.
Jason Baumgarten 07:47
Say more.
Jim Citrin 07:48
Okay, well, let me back up. So when I was at McKinsey, one of the things we learned there was to use research and intellectual capital as a way to serve clients, but also to learn and to add value and differentiate ourselves from the competition. I did a book, as you might remember, years ago on the best CEOs in America and what we could learn from them and kind of case studies of all of them. But then a few years later, I did a book on CEO succession, and I was making the point there that we know, and you've written about in Harvard Business Review and all that, that the same person could be a superstar in one context and a failure in another context. And the big point is that fit matters. And as a way to demonstrate that, I did a study of one individual who was a massive success in one context, a failure in a different context, doing the same thing, and then a massive success again. And this goes way back to the early 2000s, and it goes back to the founder point. So there was a wonderful man in the consumer industry named Bill Perez. Bill Perez was the CEO of the huge global consumer products company SC Johnson. And he did a great job at SC Johnson by product development and had all sorts of best practices in Salesforce management and account management and all that. Back in the day, Nike, founded by Phil Knight, who I'm sure everybody watching and listening knows, one of the most iconic and legendary founders in history. He was looking for a professional CEO to come in, and they believed they needed to use market research, account management, Salesforce management. And so they hired Bill Perez, who, by the way, was a marathoner. And so it was like the idea was that, okay, a sports guy. And he came into Nike and he did everything he was asked to do. Instead of product development, coming up with products, they did market research. What did consumers want? They created account teams, and they did all sorts of things that the organization in Beaverton rebelled. And basically that culture, like a lot of innovative companies, were like, we don't need consumers to tell us what we should create. We need our designers to tell consumers what they should desire. And so the organization kind of went around him back to Phil Knight, and he got ousted in about, whatever, 14 months or 13 months, very turbulent stint. So usually that's the end of the story. But just to confirm this, Wrigley, which was then a private company, and chewing gum, Wrigley said, you know what? Bill Perez, he really had a lot of the right stuff, and it was just not the right fit. We're going to hire him. So he got hired. Not many CEOs who get blown out after 13 months get another chance at CEO, but he did, and he went into Wrigley. And what did he do? Market research to drive product development, account management, Salesforce management. And it was a massive success. And then they ended up selling the company for billions of dollars to Mars. And so to me, that Bill Perez example is like the perfect AB test of fit is everything. Same person, same playbook. Different results because of different context. And ever since, can we here at Spencer Stuart and on the research you've done, it really is about judging fit. Because you can have someone who's not even the most logical candidate for a CEO role, but if the fit's right and kind of the core aspects of where they would take the company, right, that can be a huge success.
Jason Baumgarten 11:41
Yeah. I always think back to, you know, even when we recruited Gerstner at IBM, you know, such an outside in, surprising outcome. And if you look at that today, I think most boards wouldn't take that kind of risk. But actually when you peel it back, it was a perfect fit. Because what he was excellent at was unpacking and making these really complicated turnarounds. What is the essence of the one thing that needs to get done? He wasn't an expert in technology or consumer products or what have you. He had an expertise that transcended that, but it was what that situation required. And I think sometimes it's easier for a board to say, we just need somebody who knows our space or knows our industry. But to your Nike example, what you might have needed was the real element might have been, how do you create change in a very entrenched environment. That could have been the unlock for Nike as opposed to, he could have had all the right ideas, but the secret, the superpower he needed, he didn't have.
Jim Citrin 12:40
It's a great point, because if you actually look at what is needed and you keep that coupled with the fit, you can actually become much more creative if you're a board or if you're an individual thinking about those two things. I'll give you another example. We've done a study here at Spencer Stuart where a lot of times the most successful external placements as CEOs are actually not as linear or logical as many people would expect. And the reason is that direction with fit and values. So here's a great example, and you'll remember this, this again goes back a ways. But in 2012, we were doing the CEO search for the New York Times Company. At the time, the New York Times had about 700,000 subscribers, including the paper and digital. And everybody knew even back then that physical newspapers were really going down and not going to be the future. It was going to be all about digital. In the media industry, particularly in the journalism industry, at a place like the New York Times, there's a separation between the newsroom and the business side. And in the case of the Times, the CEO actually didn't control the newsroom. The newsroom reported to the publisher. And so knowing they needed to do digital transformation and knowing that there was the separation of journalism and business, the spec, if you remember back, was we need a Silicon Valley product executive to lead digital transformation. But who did we end up recruiting? We recruited a journalist who happened to be a video, not a print, and happened to be a Brit. Mark Thompson, who just had come out of the BBC as Director General. And when we proposed him to the board of the New York Times, they were like, guys, that doesn't make any sense. He's a journalist, he's a video person, he's not a. And we said, but no, what he did in transforming the BBC was creating back then something called, still to this day in the UK, the BBC iPlayer, which essentially was catch up TV or like Netflix, and on an entrepreneurial budget leading massive cultural change. And he had the insight that in a place like the BBC or the New York Times, cultural change needed to happen from the newsroom out, not from the business side in. And so they ended up taking what they thought was a risk on Mark, and it turned out to be one of the most incredible creative placements of all time. And then his successor, who we also helped recruit as an internal promote, Meredith Levien, one of the amazing CEOs in America today. Today the Times is 15 billion of market cap, up from about 5 or 600 million. 15 million digital subscribers, probably on their way to 50, up from 6 or 700,000. And it's because they had a strategy of investing in the journalism and then taking the journalism, which is so worthwhile, and using that to really reignite subscriptions and then taking the money from the subscriptions to create a digital platform, this brilliant ecosystem that they created. Again, so it's a great point about culture fit and values and driving transformation.
Jason Baumgarten 16:04
And I think one of the things you and I see all day long is that increasingly motivation fit. You know, does somebody, are they motivated, do they want to do the job? These jobs are getting harder. I think there's more scrutiny, there's more public attention, there's more micro attention, there's more transparency. And not that I want to say, oh, you know, woe is me, I'm a CEO of a big company. But it is, we see the insides of how gut wrenching decisions are, how it can rip apart families and health. And the impacts of these jobs are very real. And so I think that also understanding the motivation, why does somebody want to do this? What is the thing that's going to get them up every day to tackle it, can also be a really important element that I think some people take for granted. They assume that if you're getting paid a lot, you'll be motivated.
Jim Citrin 16:52
It is so true. It's the biggest change in the CEO world today, here in 2026, versus five years ago, is how difficult the job is. And it's very different than it was. The whole public platform of it, the stakeholder management, the pressure of every move scrutinized. I have friends, and you do too, who are CEOs. They literally have to have serious security for themselves and their families. And it feels really encroaching. And a lot of these individuals who reach that level have been very successful financially. So they're like, you know what? Life's too short. In fact, many of the listeners or the audience for this podcast might be surprised that most CEO appointments are first time CEOs. At least in the United States, 80% of all the CEO appointments are internally promoted. It's varied between 75% and 85% over the last 25 years, but roughly 80% are internal promotes. So they are by definition first timers. But what people are more surprised about is that, mostly, even those externally recruited, only 20% of the external recruit CEOs are experienced. And the reason for that is partially, if they've been successful as a CEO, either they've aged out or, more likely, they're saying, like, I've ticked that box and I don't want to do that again. I'd rather do something different, serve on boards, mentor, invest, whatever, or they weren't successful the first time. And unlike Bill Perez, who got a great second chance, many don't get a second chance. But a lot of the motivation, a lot of the work we're doing with clients right now is like, people are really being thoughtful about how they want to spend their time and do they want to put themselves in that line of fire. Still, these jobs, the way we really go at it, is about motivation. What is the impact you want to have? What is the environment you want to be working in? Who do you want to be interacting with on a day to day basis? But that impact is really the place where the right motivation comes more than making the millions of dollars.
Jason Baumgarten 19:05
Yeah, 100%. I do think a number of years back you wrote a book about the patterns of extraordinary careers. And one of the things I really remember about that book was the permission paradox. And you talked a lot about this problem of, yep, everyone will say you need this experience. We see this all the time. Boards come to say you need to have been a CEO to be a CEO. And yet most of our job is finding that latent talent, that person who's a little bit undiscovered. And frankly, almost every great CEO wasn't a CEO before they had their first time. Right? Satya Nadella, you know, whoever. And I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about, what do you think people should take away from that if they want to be a CEO and they're not getting the opportunity? How should they think about what matters most in making that leap from a functional leader or a divisional leader to being taken credibly as a CEO candidate?
Jim Citrin 20:02
I'm so glad you remember that. The permission paradox, it's one of the signature things we came up with. And it's a conundrum. Whether it's an aspiring CEO or whether it's a college grad getting that first job, it's the same issue, which is you can't get the job without the experience, but you can't get the experience without the job. So how do you break that? And in that Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers, everyone who's made it to the top has found a way over time to get from one level to the next, to the next by breaking that permission paradox. And essentially there's the same principle for CEO as it is for someone early in their career, which is essentially to take the role and break it into its component parts and find opportunities to have experience in the component parts. And so when you're being considered for that, you say, well, no, I haven't been a CEO, but what are the roles of the CEO? It's to set strategy, it's to build the team, it's to deal with investors. And when I was head of strategy, I did this. When I was in a divisional role, I did this. When I did that. And so you create that narrative where you kind of solve the problem for the hiring person. Most of the hiring, whether it's boards or managers hiring entry level, most have an assumption which you and I have basically disproven. But people still have this assumption that in order to do something, you have to have done it in the past. We need this experience, but that's not necessarily the truth. But you need to then recognize that you need a way to overcome that objection. And so overcoming that permission paradox. So for the close to be CEOs in the audience, serving, saying the obvious, but serving on an external board is really the best thing, coupled with profit and loss or P&L experience. But in addition, finding a way to have an enterprise wide perspective on that. So if you're a functional leader, sometimes, you know, they'll just be focused on this area of the organization. Or even if you're a divisional leader, oh, you only are a student of your own thing. So for a board hiring a CEO, they're looking for someone to take the holistic picture, which is why sometimes CFOs are selected as CEOs, because that's one function where they're looking at the whole organization. They're representing it to shareholders. But CFOs actually are only like 12 or 14% of CEOs by that background, and they actually work well in only a couple of industries and not so well in other industries. But I digress. That permission paradox is a really good one to think about, acknowledge. And anyone, if they're thoughtful about it, can actually overcome that to get to the next level.
Jason Baumgarten 22:55
Well, I always think about it because we originally met because of a career paradox, which is I wanted to go work at McKinsey. We were at Vassar, both alums at Vassar, and they wouldn't hire from Vassar. And so I sought out alums who had gone to McKinsey later. That's how we met. That's how I ended up at Spencer Stuart. And then of course I took my long, long sabbatical to go work for McKinsey after Stanford. But I had to go and get an MBA from Stanford to get a job at McKinsey, which I always look back and say they could have had me five years earlier. Meanwhile.
Jim Citrin 23:26
And you got into Stanford in a way, at the time, you were such a unique candidate. They had like every consultant or every investment banker, every GE person, line of army leaders. But they didn't have anyone who was a leadership student who was working at a firm like Spencer Stuart. And in your particular case, creating new businesses. By the way, for the audience, you need to hear this about Jason. Jason had the idea in the late 90s and the early 2000s. Not only the idea, but created the business model and had the patents for something that we were creating. We had this notion to create a marketplace of leaders to match the leaders with jobs. That would be the way to move the whole talent industry forward. And he literally, out of his brain and through research and prototyping and having tech, came up with something that we called the Spencer Stuart Talent Network. And it was patented and it was this job casting. It was brilliant. And after the dot com crash we couldn't continue to fund it. So we let the patents lapse. Eventually LinkedIn took a lot of that technology, the patents, and it became LinkedIn. So Jason, really, I know everybody thinks of the founders of LinkedIn, but really, Jason had the brains to come up with that back 25 plus years ago.
Jason Baumgarten 24:54
Well, it was a good lesson for me of culture and realizing that if you're not in an entrepreneurial culture, you need to be in one to have that kind of success. And I'll never forget when the founders of LinkedIn presented their new idea of the startup to us at Stanford, I ran out and called our general counsel and said, did you ever file those final patents? And he goes, no, we saved the money. And I was like, oh my God. But it was, great ideas find a way. I mean, this is the amazing thing about living through the dot com bubble and the mobility friends and now AI, is that you see these patterns come and go. And something that's DoorDash now was Kozmo back in the day in New York City. Joe Park and the team came up with the kernel of the same idea. Pets.com and Chewy. And so you see these parallels play out. And what's wonderful about it is that when the idea is right, eventually the market finds a time. And for many of us, that's what's super powerful.
Jason Baumgarten 25:47
Jim, you also did some work on what happens when you're taking that job for the first time and you get that leadership remit, whether it's your first one as a manager or you're a CEO. And you wrote a lot of things that were super helpful in terms of how people can approach that through a plan. And through planning, you also had a section in that book around the traps people have. And there's one that I always think about. You called it the Emperor's New Clothes, but it's getting separated from the truth. And one of the things I see with so many leaders is that their circle of influence gets smaller and smaller as they get more senior. And it goes back a little bit to your comment of some of the great leaders, some of the great founders, they keep learning and they keep changing how they approach things because they're always getting exposed to new information, new people, and they have that curiosity. And on the flip side, a lot of leaders get more and more isolated and less and less curious because, well, they know it all. They're super successful. That idea of letting yourself get isolated from the truth, what do you think, especially today in a flatter world where information is pervasive and it's less siloed, and even for a board member, knowing you don't have to get the report on culture, you can go online and see the reviews. What do you think leaders in general can do to be less isolated from the truth?
Jim Citrin 27:11
It is one of the great traps. The more senior you get, people genuinely treat you differently. You've got power. Even if you try to be a normal, down to earth person, people do tend to tell you what they think you want to hear because they believe it's in their self interest to do it. It's a phenomenon in business and government and all these things throughout history. So it's really incumbent on the leader to try and create the ability to get good information. And I think there's two parts to that. One is they do have to, as you say, the curiosity. They need to understand that this is a priority, that they can't just sit in their proverbial corner office and get reports. Not that anybody does that anymore. But they really have to work hard to break down the barriers. They've got to make it okay to get divergent opinions. They do have to have diverse sets of perspectives and multiple inputs. There are peer groups. I mean, it's almost trite at this point. Oh, the CEO job is lonely. And it kind of is. But it's really important for CEOs to have some cohorts. Some of the best CEOs that we both know, they kind of take a page from YPO and they create their own little private forums with five or six peer CEOs, including some of the literally most renowned CEOs in the world. They have four or five friends, they get together for dinner quarterly and all of that. There are also other organizations like the Business Council, which is different than the Business Roundtable, which is about 200 of the most preeminent CEOs and they have a Chatham House rule, so they really have it confidential and people can open up and be in that learning mode. I think everybody talks about, not everyone is privileged to have kids, but people who are senior executives, they absolutely, all of them we know, that they talk about, well, my 24 year old daughter did this, or they learn from their kids or their kids' friends, but whatever. The strategy is to really be open to that and to create the conditions that people give you good information. That is really important.
Jason Baumgarten 29:33
It's so well said, and it's so insidious. I mean, I think so many times we can watch it because, you know, people open up to us, they're very transparent. They bring us into their lives, they bring us into their fears, they bring us into their hopes. And it sounds corny, but it's really true. We become truly intimate confidants. And then we watch as they get into these jobs and pull away and close ranks and, you know, really start to, some can get almost paranoid about, you know, the source of the information, is somebody trying to, you know, manipulate me. It's just, it's so sad when you watch somebody not get the real truth about what's going on when you know that it would save them from a critical mistake.
Jim Citrin 30:12
Such a good point. Because, see, individuals who literally are disconnected from reality, and everybody in the organization knows, and they're like, they don't get it, and it's just really bad. And they think they get it, but they don't. I mean, I always remember some of the food businesses, they'd say, we work the fryers, or we have the day in the life. I think the other thing I've seen is some executives, because they'll put their hands in the business occasionally, feel like they have their pulse. But the other thing I've seen is that sometimes they're getting a very unique slice of that world and they're over biasing. It's like the customer of one problem, where it's like, they're like, well, if we fix this, it'll be really important. It's like, well, that was important to you. But there's 95% of the organization or 100% of your customers that couldn't care less. But for them it's the most important thing. And we see that in all kinds of leadership roles.
Jason Baumgarten 31:02
To switch gears, you and I worked on a book at another very similar time in the late 90s. It was very unsuccessful because we published it into the dot com abyss. But we interviewed 12 companies and got to know them deeply around dealing with uncertainty. And there were six success factors. And I went back and I reread the book recently and I want to share the six factors. You've got the minds over there because it is so funny. How, I want you to be an objective grader. I'll read the six and I want you to tell me if you think they're still for the AI uncertainty world that we're in. How good are the six? Go for speed. Create a learning organization. Obsess about the customer. Reward risk taking and failure. Absorb uncertainty. And master deal making and partnering skills. How do we do those?
Jim Citrin 31:57
Sound pretty good to me, actually.
Jason Baumgarten 32:00
And that was, you know, for those listening, that was almost 30 years ago.
Jim Citrin 32:04
Well, 25 years ago. It's so interesting because we did that first book called Lessons from the Top, where we interviewed, we selected the 50 top CEOs in America. And that list is still very strong. And it was Bill Gates and Lou Gerstner. It was all sorts of, Michael Dell, it was great, great people. And we came up with the six leadership attributes of that, some of which we've already talked about. But then, if you remember, in the dot com boom, it was the magazine Strategy and Business came to you and me and said, how would you update the Lessons from the Top leadership for the dot com era? And we went to those 12 companies, we interviewed them. Some were hugely successful, some were really, Apple and Starbucks and had their digital transformation, and a bunch didn't work. But we came up with those attributes. I don't know if you remember this, but the pub date of that book was Tuesday, September 11, 2001. 9/11. That was the date the book was coming out. So it was kind of doomed on that. And then the crash happened. But those attributes, they sound pretty good to me right now. What do you think?
Jason Baumgarten 33:17
When I read them, I thought, well, we did okay with that. It's a little bit of a testament to zooming out and not getting hung up on what one company is doing or one founder is doing, or one trend, but zooming out and looking across and going back to fit. I think one of the things, I don't know if you remember this, I used to do this a lot. I would take a resume of a famous executive and take their last job off and put a little fictional name on. And when somebody was saying, you know, I want to hire Jeff Bezos, or I want to hire, you know, the Mark Zuckerberg, I'd say, oh, well, let me show you Bob, you know, let me show you Jim. And I'd show them, you know, a crafted resume that was that person up until the very last thing they did that was super successful. And I'd say, what do you think about Jim's background? They'd say, Jim looks like a loser. Why would we want to hire Jim? I said, because his real name is Jeff Bezos. And they'd go like, oh my God, you're kidding. And, you know, not just with the founders, but often with their top teams.
Jim Citrin 34:13
Because, right, that, I forgot you do that. So ingenious. Because we make the point, we're in the business of uncovering great potential who can take their great experience and values and leadership and brains, motivation, fit, and then take it to the next level. But to a lot of people, when they're hiring, they have these absolute assumptions. And unless you do something creative like that, they literally can't get over what they believe.
Jason Baumgarten 34:42
Yeah. And you'd see these people just sort of go, that can't be true. And then they research online, pull the bio up and go, huh? Wow. That person who was really successful at Amazon rose to fame as a middle manager at an industrial company before they got selected. And it causes that second layer question of going back to fit. What is the thing that that person really had that made them successful? And we see this most in these transitions in technology or in business innovation, whether it's in a tech center business or another one where there is no one with the experience. When the Internet bubble happened, there was no one with Internet experience. Right now, there's really no one with AI experience. They're three, four, five, six years ahead. Everybody's changing their resumes. And so part of it is saying, okay, what is underneath that? That you need somebody to be great at simplifying complex problems, rallying people around a cause, understanding what really creates value, whatever that intrinsic skill is. That's one layer deeper than the surface layer of, you know, they know something about, you know, marketplaces. Well, how'd you find a marketplace exec before the first marketplace?
Jason Baumgarten 35:49
So I always love that you also, and I'm skipping around all of Jim's books, if you haven't picked up on Lessons from the Top, the GOAT book, one of the things you wrote about was a defining background and something really formative. Life events that people had, something that really dented them, often in, I don't want to say traumatic ways, but often in, like, very hard ways. And one of the things we've both dealt with is that clients don't really like failure, right? Clients, selection committees, whether it's a CEO or board or investor. When you say Jim was a great driver, except for that one really bad train wreck, like, all right, let's move on from Jim, right? And one of the things, that notion of a defining life moment pulled on, was this idea that often the things that create amazing success stories are quite dismal and painful failures. I remember one CEO recently telling me about his very first startup, and he hit a point where he couldn't make payroll. And he had hundreds of people depending on him. And he was really young. And he said, I was literally in the fetal position in my little studio apartment just bawling because I didn't know what to do. And I said, what did you do? And he said, I called my dad. And I just cried. And I said, well, what'd you do next? And he walked me through how he sort of dealt with this incredibly traumatic experience. And he did eventually figure out how to make payroll. But you could feel the pain in that experience. And he said, that made me never want to miss payroll. It made me never want to get in that situation again. And it was such a good moment. And I thought to myself, boy, if that had happened 10 years later, he never would have gotten that next big job, because people would have said, too much failure for me to take the risk. And again, I know I'm pulling on this idea of early formative life experiences, but I think you and I have both seen people who have the big chip on the shoulder, becomes the thing that makes them so successful, or the thing that's a train wreck in one person's eyes becomes the amazing learning experience. How would you counsel not the person in that experience, but the person on the other side? What would you tell them, how to differentiate between the good failure and the bad failure?
Jim Citrin 38:03
There's actually a brand new book on this called From Mistakes to Meaning by our friends Michael Lindenmuth and Josh Steiner. And they really diagnose big setbacks and how to recover from them. But in terms of advising organizations, it's to try and, A, be open minded and just say there are some kinds of failures or setbacks that, you know, would make the person disqualified. But if they did it, and if, based on intent or their actions, or if they, like we said, people got the market timing wrong. If it's an ethical thing, that's one thing. If it's a judgment thing or timing thing, that's another thing. The big thing, and everyone listening and watching this knows this, it's about, okay, what happened, why did it happen, what did you learn from it, and what will you do differently next time? That's the absolute formula. The challenge though is, as you said, that people who are in hiring positions, and especially boards who are making decisions about CEOs, and especially if they're thinking about outsiders, there's so much pressure to be risk averse. Why? Because they're subject to shareholder lawsuits. They're subject to activists coming in and seeing a vulnerability, and their reputations are on the line. They also use kind of either projected share price, what will the market say? But what we know is that sometimes that's actually not a really sustainable way to make a judgment. And that oftentimes there's actually an inverse correlation between the stock price performance when someone is hired as a CEO and actually long term performance. But again, helping hiring organizations think about the formative experiences, going back to that principle, because no one will dispute that difficult challenges early on helped create what the individual is today. Back to that point of the question. We at Spencer Stuart have always been taught to interview in multiple ways. But one of the threads of a Spencer Stuart interview is to really go back in time and understanding the context of growing up and the life stories. And were you the firstborn of four? Were you the only child? Were you the third born? I'm a big believer, by the way, in birth order theory and the impact that, as a middle child, by the way, that that has on people's personality. But really understanding what happened and why, and how did that shape the next part of people's lives.
Jason Baumgarten 40:45
It's such a good reminder. And I think that what I always try and get people to realize is that that formative thing can happen early, in which case it's a wonderful gift and people tend to not bias to the fact that it was a failure, to your point, or it can happen later in a career or in life. And that doesn't take away the value of it. And often it's just really hard to say, boy, somebody had a failure. Let's get somebody who's had no failures. And I've yet to meet a really successful CEO who, when you get them privately, doesn't have a really gut wrenching failure story. They just don't tell it very often.
Jason Baumgarten 41:20
Jim, before I get to the speed round, is there a question you want to ask yourself? You are the king of questions. So I was curious if there was something you were hoping I would have asked that I didn't, that you want to ask yourself.
Jim Citrin 41:32
Here's a question I'm asking myself almost every day. You know, we've worked on books together and research and all that. I'm writing a new book on life after CEO and life after. And I've been a student of how people are continuing to grow and learn and transform even as they've been a hugely successful executive. And part of that is driven by my own personal interest. I've been doing this here at Spencer Stuart for three decades. And I love it. And I want to keep going.
Jason Baumgarten 42:02
Amazing, as you're just 40.
Jim Citrin 42:03
Exactly. Yeah. I started at 10. So the big question is how to stay curious, how to stay motivated, how to stay learning, how to stay adding value as we go forward. And I'm a big believer in role modeling. And so that's why I've been interviewing. I've interviewed 150 CEOs who have retired and gone on, and some who've been ousted, and how they've been trying to recover from that, difficult things. So that's one thing I've been focused on right now. And I'm just doing it from a point of self interest of, I want to keep doing this for years and learn and grow and contribute and have an impact on Spencer Stuart, on our clients and on the leaders out in the world.
Jason Baumgarten 42:48
Well, it's amazing research and having been on the journey with you, I'm so excited to hear what you come up with. I would also say, I think for so many people when they leave that role, part of the challenge is finding fit in the world, and that all of their meaning can often be wrapped up in the job and in the title and in the role. And in fact, so much of it's about reframing how we fit and what fit means to us. So I'm thrilled, and we'll have to have you back on when you're ready to go.
Jim Citrin 43:17
100%. Love to.
Jason Baumgarten 43:18
So. All right, we're going to do a speed round of questions. So the first is a book you've read somewhat recently that has had a big impact on you.
Jim Citrin 43:28
I'm reading a book on the history of New York told through maps. It's fascinating because we just bought an apartment in New York, but.
Jason Baumgarten 43:33
Oh, okay.
Jim Citrin 43:37
Here's the book recently, just finished, Atomic Habits. I'm a big person about creating conditions for continuous improvement. And that idea of this book, the Atomic Habits, it's a brilliant title and it's a really powerful premise of small changes implemented over time having dramatic impact.
Jason Baumgarten 43:59
That's a great book. I love James Clear's work. I also put a plug in for Fogg's book on habits, Tiny Habits, because it's almost like reading them both is super powerful. But what a wonderful book. What's the name of the book about New York, for anyone who you eased interest?
Jim Citrin 44:11
The History of New York through Maps. I got it for my birthday from my kids. You know, they know I love maps. So it's actually fascinating to see how during the Dutch settlement and the Revolutionary War and how, you know, it started. Anyway, it's absolutely fascinating.
Jason Baumgarten 44:26
Going back to the habits and your work, you know, one of the things that Clear does such a good job of is differentiating between goals and systems. How goals are great for, like, hey, I want to achieve this goal, but what helps you get there is the system. And I remember that he makes this distinction between, you know, goals are good for setting a direction and pointing you in how you're going to win, but the system is what allows you to keep playing. And, you know, when you think about these CEOs that you're interviewing, so many of them have great goals. I want to be a CEO. But they may lack the personal systems that then allow them to keep playing a game of life as opposed to a game of becoming a CEO. So maybe you can pull those together a little bit. Okay. Common leadership advice that we hear all the time that you think is truly terrible advice.
Jim Citrin 45:20
I think we go back to kind of communications that people are told now in a social media era and all this, that you have to be charismatic and you have to rally the troops. And the flip side of that is authenticity. Authenticity sells. Authenticity is authentic. So it's great if you're like the rah rah leader, but if you're not, don't try and be inauthentic.
Jason Baumgarten 45:53
Yeah, it's great advice. I certainly hear that all the time. And then I know so many CEOs who are quiet introverts or kind of not great speakers. And we see it. We have candidates we've worked with over the years that don't get the top job because the way they interface with people is a little weird. But you do the interviews and you're like, oh, my God, people will follow this person anywhere, and yet they just can't get the job. Looking back to a younger you, you can pick the time frame. One bit of advice you'd give yourself.
Jim Citrin 46:21
Fit is everything. I learned that the hard way. I've made it, one job in my little history, and it was great on paper, but the people fit was just like, it didn't work. And I was like, I had no friends there. I didn't have people who I looked up to and admired. You'll never make a bad decision going with people who you like and respect. You'll always make a bad decision if you go for prestige or go for money or go for something, but it's a bad fit.
Jason Baumgarten 46:48
Actually pretty apropos for this whole topic of your podcast, but that's literally the piece of advice I give to myself.
Jim Citrin 46:56
That's good.
Jason Baumgarten 46:56
All right, last question. When we think about fit, one of the things I often refer to is this famous notion of flow. Losing yourself in a sense of time, being in the moment, doing your best work. Is there an activity or hobby people don't know about, perhaps, where you are totally in the flow?
Jim Citrin 47:14
I do something every single day. I think you know this. I've been doing it since 2014 called the 7 Minute Workout. I've not missed a day since November of 2014. It's a little app on the phone. 7 minutes and 50 seconds. It's my little vacation from life because I'm just focused on that and I come out refreshed every morning, no matter what. Even a 5am pickup, I've got that gum. But I'm a huge believer in flow, having been a college athlete and marathoner. Today, that idea of applying that, that sense of momentum and focus and time, takes on a different meaning. So it's a great one.
Jason Baumgarten 47:54
Well, Jim, thanks for being on the show. I'm sure we'll do this again. And thanks for all the words of wisdom. And for those listening, you know where to download and find us.
Jim Citrin 48:04
Fabulous. Thank you, Jason. So fun, and I so admire you. And you know I love you very much, and I'm so proud of you.
Jason Baumgarten 48:11
Thank you. Thanks, Jim. Cheers.