The first of the six people I'm going to tell you about is Tom Tierney. Tom Tierney illustrates the skills of envision your legacy, weave disparate strands, and see new ways of doing things. So as you'll see for each of the six people there are three skills that their story illustrates. One be real skill, one be whole skill, and one be innovative skill. So I'm going to share with you small parts of their history that illustrate these skills. Then I'll talk in some detail about how their story does indeed illustrate these skills. And then the part where you come in more actively is when I tell you about exercises that you can do for each and every one of these skills to strengthen them, if these are the ones that you want to focus on. And I hope they are. All right, so let's learn about Tom Tierney. You can find Tom Tierney some dark December morning on a Saturday no doubt, every year taking some time to spend the day. Starting before the crack of dawn, writing about his life. He is a journaler and has been for most of his adult life. And he'll take a day, at the end of the year and simply write about what has transpired over that year. Has he been true to his values? Where does he want to go in the next year, and in the years ahead? What are my priorities? Are the questions that he's asking himself yet again. Now he's someone who's now in his 60s, but he's been doing this his whole adult life. He is a disciplined leader who has continued to grow through the process of reflection. One of the journal entries from back in the 80s when he was managing the San Francisco office of Bain & Company. Included notes about forming what he then called a "Make a Difference" company. It didn't have a particular name but it was an idea. And that was the beginning of what about 15 years later became Bridgespan, the not-for-profit organization kind of spun off from Bain that he began in 1999 with a couple of other people. Which provides strategic consulting to the social sector. An organization that pretty much established, certainly helped to create that whole category. But the idea for it, came from his writing, reflecting. What matters to me? What do I want to create? What do I want to leave behind? What do I want to build that's going to have a lasting impact? If you go back to his early days in California where he was raised, his father worked at the Colgate-Palmolive company. His mom was very active in supporting schools. She did not work outside the home but did a lot in the community, including helping high school girls who were in need. Working class family, he was very conscious that they didn't have the material things that people in the higher income classes had. But what he learned from his parents, particularly his father, was that it's not what you have that matters, it's who you are. It's what you do. So he went to the University of California at Davis. [COUGH] Started out thinking that he was going to be studying engineering. It turns out he wasn't very good at science classes, so he turned to economics. But then drove a bus after college, which is kind of similar to me. My first job after college was driving a taxi in New York City. And perhaps during office hours, or on our [LAUGH] discussion boards, I'll tell you a little bit more about that. But back to Tom, he ended up going through a friend's father who worked at a Bechtel company. And he ended up getting hired and sent to Algeria to work there, which was his first trip away from home. And out of this country aside from I guess a trip he'd taken down to Tijuana with his family. And it was a whole new world there, for him, he was completely out of place. He decided after a couple years doing that, that he thought he should go to business school. Got rejected from Stanford, but got into Harvard Business School as he says, because he was the only applicant from Algeria that year. [LAUGH] So, he got there and apparently he felt more out of place at the Harvard Business School than he did in Algeria because of the culture of that social environment. But he learned, although he still felt kind of strange being called Mr. Tierney. And I think the white socks that wore with his suits looked a little strange to some of his classmates. But he learned, in fact, when he got to Bain, which is where he went after business school. He had a wardrobe coach, somebody to help him look more the part because he didn't fit socially, although he was a really hard worker, clearly very smart. And had found a milieu for his talents, where he could advance. Because it was very much a meritocracy in the early days of that company, and so he ascended rapidly. And learned quickly how to be successful in that environment but it was never about just work for him as he learned from his parents. He wanted the people around him to be not only great at their jobs, but he wanted them to be fulfilled in their lives, beyond their work. That was something that was always important to him. And he tried to bring that to life in the San Francisco office where he became the head pretty quickly, and at a young age. I think he was the fastest to partner in the company's history, at least until that time. He got married in 1984, had his first child in 1987 and really was taking off professionally, but still not the most ideal manager. In fact, one day one of the people working in the office came in and said, Tom I need to talk to you. There's something about your leadership style that you should know. And he said, what is it? And she said, you're a steamroller, Tom. Steamroller? He wasn't sure, is that a good thing or [LAUGH]? This is a big machine that flattens things, flattens people. Is that what you mean? Yeah, you get a head of steam and you just [SOUND] roll over people. And that's something that you might want to try to adjust. Well he was really shaken by that, and as he told me he then put a little picture of a steamroller on his calendar every day. And every day that he didn't act like a steamroller, or people, and he started asking for feedback, he crossed off the steamroller off his calendar. So okay, here is another day where I'm not being a steamroller. That young partner was Meg Whitman, who then turned out to be the CEO of Hewlett-Packard and has had many other significant leadership achievements. So that was one of the people that Tom mentored. Another, was John Donahoe who was the CEO of eBay when I talked to him about Tom, and what Tom meant to him. Donahoe was about to quit the Bain company, when his wife had a great opportunity that required that he do less travel. He had to be at home more for his kids, Donahoe needed to be home for his kids to support his wife's career. And so he went to Tom and said I've got to quit, and in turn he said no, we'll just find you local clients. Of course they had none that fit. And two weeks later they had a local client that Donahoe could then work with so that he could indeed stay local and fulfill his needs for his family. Tom talks about how important it is to create magnets for the things that you need to pull yourself to. Because they're not going to pull you to them without your consciously doing that. Like time for yourself, time for your family, time for your community. Really organizing boundaries of time that are set aside for exercise, has always been important to him. He's in really good shape. He's in his 60s and it's because he takes care of himself. It doesn't happen by magic. He did not work on weekends. He told me that he could count on one hand the number of weekends that he's worked throughout his professional career. This is a guy who was the CEO of a major consulting company for eight years. And everybody I spoke to confirmed this. So he did that and was incredibly successful in that role. And when he did travel, he tracked every single day. In fact, early on when his kids were really young, he was traveling a lot. And he was away for a couple of weeks and came back and his wife Karen said to him, look this isn't working. You've gotta cut down, and so he did. And he made a commitment to doing that and he started tracking every single travel day. And made himself a budget, an annual budget of the number of days that he could go, and when he hit the budget he stopped. So he took that feedback in, he understood what was important. And when he had to go, he made sure to stay connected with his family by writing notes to them, leaving notes for each one of them. And helping in any way he could to still be in their minds, in their lives and present psychologically, even if he wasn't present physically. But it was always a struggle, never easy. And required a lot of conscious and deliberate attention to what really matters, and where am I going to devote my attention. Where am I going, and how do I get there in a way that allows me to be the person I want to be, and commit to the different roles in my life, as a father, as a community member? He started early on working with United Way as a community service initiative, early on in his professional life. And started to build out a portfolio of organizations that he was working with while he was growing in his profession. Because he's one who believes that the model of Learn, Earn, and then Serve when you retire. So you learn when you're young, you earn in your peak years as an adult, and then when you slow down at the end that's when you serve. He believes that that serial model of Learn, Earn, Serve is not the right model. And that there are ways of building in learning and earning and serving at every stage in life. And it really makes a lot of sense. It doesn't mean that you're going to be full time devoted to community action through your work or through other initiatives, when you're at the peak of your earning. But it does mean that you can involve the idea of service whether it's through your work or through some other activity all along the way. And similarly of course just like you are doing right here, you can be learning all along the way and we know that's a valuable thing. So he lived that way and he also helped other people to see that that was a value. And some of those experiences serving as a citizen and in the community helped him in his professional life. And it helped him to think about how to cultivate the idea of Bridgespan which he would ultimately give birth to later on in his life. He also ran into people who he enlisted as mentors, including the great John Gardner who, we don't have time here for me to go into detail about, but somebody worth studying. Google about his life and career, John Gardner who was counsel to a number of US Presidents. And Gardner asked Tierney, If you had just ten years to go, what would you do? Which was a question I guess he'd not asked himself. And that really helped to clarify for him, simple question, but it really put into focus what is my legacy? What do I want to leave with? I've heard Tom talked about the stages of life as breaking them down to a week. So if you think of Sunday through Saturday what day of the week are you in your life? I'm like on Thursday. So I got Friday and Saturday in front of me. And it's an interesting way to think because, once again, it's a way of contextualizing, bounding your full life span and it gets you to focus on what matters to you. So, here he is 45 years old, and he calls his partners in after helping to lead a major turnaround at Bain. There's more to the story that you can read about, but the main point that I want to bring your attention to is. He's sitting atop a global consulting firm making all kinds of money, having all kinds of impact and he calls his partners to say, I'm leaving. And of course a number of them thought that there was something wrong, that he was sick or he got bad news from the doctor and he had to quit because he was going to die, or he was going to become debilitated. But no, his reason was that he was going to start this new enterprise, from the ground. At his peak, he left. And that's because he became clearer and clearer about what he really wanted to do, that "make a difference" company. Since the founding and successful growth of Bridgespan. The next phase was to get into managing philanthropy and being an advisor and a strategic thinker about how to be a smart philanthropist. And so he wrote a wonderful book called Give Smart which is all about how you get better results for the community, for society. Through intelligent philanthropic giving that uses some of the same principles that Bain and Bridgespan used but applying those to philanthropic endeavors. And as he conceives of it, it's another way to think about impact legacy. It's an exciting prospect for him to think about. If I can help other people give in a way that has bigger impact, that's a way for me to multiply my impact in making the world better for people in need. And that's what he's all about.
