Always Learning, with Gary Kusin (Leadership, Improvement, Mentorship, Software)

This episode features Gary Kusin, a seasoned leader discussing continuous learning and leadership in the business world, drawing from his vast experience.

1. Leadership requires continuous learning and adaptability, even for seasoned executives.
2. Alignment and accountability are crucial for organizational success.
3. Mentorship is a powerful tool for personal and professional development, but it must be approached with care.
4. Recognizing and addressing workplace toxicity is essential for maintaining a healthy work environment.
5. Respect and integrity should be the foundation of all professional interactions.

1: Introduction to Gary Kusin

Gary Kusin discusses his background, the importance of doing things we don't like for growth, and sets the stage for a deep dive into leadership and mentorship.

• Gary Kusin: "We do the stuff we like for free. We get paid to do the stuff we don't like."

2: Leadership and Continuous Improvement

Kusin emphasizes the importance of alignment and accountability in leadership, drawing on his experiences at Kinko's and TPG.

• Gary Kusin: "It's critically important in any company for everyone to understand what we are trying to do here."

3: Mentorship and Its Impacts

The role and impact of mentorship are discussed, highlighting Kusin's approach to mentoring over a thousand individuals and the potential pitfalls in corporate mentoring environments.

• Gary Kusin: "Mentoring is a way for me to mentor more broadly."

4: Overcoming Toxicity in the Workplace

Kusin shares his strategies for recognizing and changing toxic work environments, stressing the importance of difficult conversations.

• Gary Kusin: "Not on my watch, not on TPG's investment, we're not going to do things that way."

1. Seek Alignment in Your Work: Ensure that your role and responsibilities are clearly aligned with the organization's goals.
2. Embrace Accountability: Take ownership of your tasks and understand that responsibility comes with authority.
3. Find a Mentor: Engage with mentors who can provide genuine, unbiased advice and insights into your career and life decisions.
4. Foster Respect in Interactions: Cultivate a workplace environment where respect and integrity are at the forefront of all interactions.
5. Address Toxicity Proactively: Be prepared to have difficult conversations to address and remedy toxic elements in your workplace.

Gary Kusin, co-founder of GameStop, Laura Mercier Cosmetics, and former President and CEO of Kinko’s, unveils his new book Always Learning: Lessons on Leveling Up from GameStop to Laura Mercier and Beyond, and shares insights on alignment and accountability, respect, honesty, and integrity, continuous change, tackling toxicity, good reasons vs real reasons, only getting paid for the stuff you DON’T like, launching what would become GameStop, the delicate and sometimes dark nature of mentorship, the 4 most mission-critical things to look for when hiring, and not necessarily being driven to win, but refusing to lose.

People

Gary Kusin

Companies

GameStop, Kinko's, TPG

Books

"Always Learning" by Gary Kusin

Guest Name(s):

Gary Kusin

Content Warnings:

None

Gary Kusin
Fired her yet? No, I haven't. Would you like me to go ahead and do that for you? Gee, you know, if you have no problem doing it, super. I'll do it.

He spins around in his desk. He picks up an old desk phone. He dials HR. He said, would you please send me Gary's next paycheck? Turned around, I was like, what?

He said, gary, we do the stuff we like for free. We get paid to do this stuff we don't like. Top leaders, meaningful conversation, actionable advice, bulldoze complacency. Ignite inspiration. Create impact.

Produced by the southwestern family of companies, this is the action catalyst. Are you interested in advertising? With the action catalyst, our listeners could be hearing about your brand right here, right now. For details, shoot us an email@infopheactioncatalyst.com. Today's guest is Gary Cusen.

Gary was the co founder of Babbages, now GameStop, and also served as the president and CEO of Kinkos, ushering in its acquisition by FedEx. Now, in his book, always Learning, Gary shares pivotal moments, valuable lessons and leadership principles for everyone, from the aspiring entrepreneur to the seasoned CEO.

Well, hey, Gary, it's super nice to meet you. Nice to meet you also. I'm at your mercy. Well, thank you. You may come to regret that, but in the meantime, thank you.

So I'm super curious. I'm going to just jump right in out of the gates. In your book, always learning. You know, I think that's such an interesting perspective because folks often would look at your background and go, what does he possibly have left to learn? Tell me a little bit about where the idea behind the book came from.

Walk me through some of that. Sure. Be glad to. So after I sold Kinkos to FedEx and after the two years that I integrated it into FedEx, reporting to Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, I was trying to decide what I wanted to do next, and I started getting a lot of pressure because of the way the kinkos turnaround happened and a lot of things about that from a lot of interesting quarters, saying, you have to write a book. This would be a very big book.

Gary Kusin
And I said, you know, I'm not. I have never been good about talking about myself, but I'm a big introvert and I would just as soon not be in the limelight. And I so really kind of pushed back, but they were really pushing pretty hard. I told everyone, no, thank you. I am looking forward to my anonymity.

And that's it. And I let it go. Fast forward to the last year had our 11th grandchildren, and our view of the world is quite different. Both my wife and me, we decided while we. While we still could, we wanted to write a memoir.

That's where I started. And through a lot of friends who were authors and a lot of people, I ended up meeting with some publishers. I mean, I went through the whole drill, and I found a spectacular editor that I really wanted to work with. And I started pounding away on a memoir, gave it to Maria, and she came back to me. And she's a highly experienced person in the book industry, real book pro.

And part of my belief and my talk track about my life is essentially, I'm the luckiest SLB in the history of the world. I have fallen up in everything that's ever happened to me. Good, pure luck. Well, Maria pushed back. I read intention on every page, and I have a hard time reconciling the intention that I see that you have written in your own words about your own life with your thought that you have just been lucky and fallen up.

She said, I don't believe that. I would like you to rethink how you have thought about your life. Luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparedness. That stuck with me and my book took on a very different, intentional look and frankly, morphed into more about my business. I'm a mentor.

That's the one thing that came out of my whole career that I loved the most. And there are reasons I track through all of those in the book, but I've had over a thousand mentoring sessions last 20 years. And so this book is a way for me to mentor more broadly. Let me my podcast the same thing. All I'm trying to do is level people's playing fields who might not have had the advantages I've had in my career, because that is my joy.

It's my love. I spoke a month ago, and I wrote about this recently on LinkedIn. But I spent an hour with the 8th grade of a charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota, who were all somali refugees. And one little boy had his hand up.

And I said yes because I was asking for questions. And he said, when did things get better for you? Now think about that question. It stopped me dead in my tracks. And I was able to just talk to this young man about things that I did at his age.

What I learned and what I felt was a way forward for anybody who is trying to figure out how to better themselves. It filled me up. That interaction with that young man was what I. That's what I live for. There is so much I want to unpack.

So let me circle back to these leadership principles. Respect, alignment, accountability. What else? Well, I actually do. Alignment and accountability is one and two for me.

Gary Kusin
It's critically important in any company for everyone to understand what are we trying to do here, here. And to understand, here's the mission. There's the flag on a distant hill. That's the flag we need to take. We're going to take it.

And then why they're so linked is you can't give responsibility without authority. And so many companies do that, that they tell someone, you've got to get this done. And then when you start to do it, someone else tells, you can't do that. That's a misalignment. It'll destroy everything.

So alignment, and then have a culture that does distribute authority, they can move into respect for others, and that means that. And at TPG, where I did a nice stint as a senior advisor, they had a sign in their lobby that said no assets allowed. That's, you know, I think that's pretty straightforward, and you figure out what that is, and the honesty and integrity is a requirement, but there are a lot of people out there who like to cut corners, and I'm never a part of that. And the last one is continuous improvement. But my co founder at GameStop, and I've been talking about the book, obviously, and he really thinks I should rethink that and I am to make a continuous change, because we could have been accused at GameStop of being excellent with continuous improvement because we were.

But we should have been thinking change because we came in at the dawn of a new industry. We were the first software store in the world when our first store opened. And the things we did to start were right at the start. But ten years later, every one of our kind of pillars of our business needed to be reevaluated, every single one of them. And all we were trying to do would be better, smarter, faster, and what we were doing and continue to succeed, but we were missing the very large and important aspects of change.

Absolutely. Next thing I want to touch on is this idea of toxicity. How and when do you recognize it? How do you change it? Just talk me through some of that.

Gary Kusin
The key question you're asking there is, how do you change it? And I will get to that in a minute. It is pretty obvious to see when there is a culture that people talk down to people in an organization, or they yell or they scream or they belittle people, there is no reward and recognition. There is an expectation that people might work all hours, be available all hours and those kinds of things, and not then not want to pay. People keep all the money for themselves, you know, all that kind of stuff.

How do I change that? In one case, I left. In life, there are good reasons, and there are real reasons. I ended up having a good reason, and I'm not going to get into it any more than that. In one particular company I was involved with, I had a good reason for leaving, but it wasn't the real reason, and the real reason was I couldn't stand the tone at the top.

And unfortunately, I'm at the top also, so that I was getting guilt by association, and I decided I didn't want to go into hand to hand combat with the other top leadership. So it was easier for me because I wasn't at all concerned about being able to find something to do, because that's never been a problem for me. And I decided I can create a new situation for myself, and I had a good reason. Everybody believed it. That's great, but it's tough.

That's one thing people know about me. And when I was at TPG, again as a senior advisor for 13 years, and that means I helped assess companies to see whether we should buy or not those that we bought. If I wanted to join the board, I could. I could be lead director, I could be tech chairman. I could be whatever I wanted to be.

But in those situations, I was very clear. Very quickly, quickly, if I saw toxicity at the top, I had very difficult conversations with CEO's, presidents, and other people, and I have no problem doing that. I just close the door and I sit down and I say, I'm about to have a very difficult conversation with you. And when you say, I'm about to have a difficult conversation with you to someone, they kind of sit up, go, oh, something's coming, I need to. And they focus, and you get a very different kind of focus when you start a conversation like that.

And I would tell them, not on my watch, not on TPGs investment, we're not going to do things that way. And you need to understand that. And if you have an issue with that, Lynn, let's talk about how to gracefully get you out. And I had no problem having those difficult conversations because I'm having people who are inherently difficult, who have been part of the toxicity, who seem to not understand what their presence is like, how they're being received by other people. So I've had those guys.

I had much of those conversations. Again, the wisdom that just comes from that. So many people from a leadership perspective talk about the difficulty of difficult conversations and you just gave beautiful language. Hey, we're just going to have a difficult conversation. Yeah.

And I'll give you another lesson I learned along the way that helped me with that. Actually, that lesson came from Jack Welch. And I asked him, I was having quarterly business reviews with him and I asked him. I was very curious. I had assembled an entirely new management team and twelve months later I'd replaced half of them.

And I said, I feel very guilty about that, Jack. And so give me something to think about. As I think about, am I a failure at recognizing talent? What did I do wrong or what did I do right? I learned from him.

First of all, he said 50% is completely average. He said, I'm not going to tell you good job, but I'm not going to tell you a bad job because when you're rebuilding a senior team from the ground up in a turnaround situation, you won't know if you lose half of them. That's, that's average. He said, now, the second time around, since you now understand the business much more closely and the replacement kind of people, they should have different characteristics. So I learned about that.

But the best one I ever got was first time I ever fired anybody. It was one of those things that has stuck with me forever. So I started a new job in Sacramento for a different department store that I'd started in the department store in San Francisco. They owned another division in Sacramento. They offered me a big promotion to go there.

My boss in the new situation, when I sat down, he said, look, I've been here for three months longer than you, and I've identified the areas that are weak, make changes, and I see these few people as needed. We probably need to change them out. Figure out what you think and let me know. So one of them, I came to him, said, you are right. Yeah, I need to fire her.

She's clearly not going to be the person to get us the next level. He said, great. I couldn't bring myself to fire. I was 26, she was much older, she had a family. I just couldn't.

I didn't know how to do it. I mean, I just didn't know how to do it. And every week at my weekly meeting, he would say, hey, gary, have you fired her yet? No, I haven't. Finally, six weeks later, after asking me half a dozen times, he said, you know what, I've done this for a long time.

I'm obviously more experienced than you. This is not my first rodeo. I'm the one that identified her. Would you like me to go ahead and do that for you? And no, no, I'll do it.

I promise you, Marvin, I'll do it. He said, well, I have no problem doing it. So I said, well, gee, you know, if you have no problem doing it, maybe, yeah, if you do that, that'd be great. He said, super, I'll do it. He spins around in his desk.

He picks up an old desk phone. He dials HR. He said, would you please send me Gary's next paycheck? Thanks. And he turned around.

I was like, what? He said, gary, we do the stuff we like for free. We get paid to do the stuff we don't like. And he said, that's something. You're like, I'm not going to like it, but I'm going to get paid for it.

And if you're not going to do it, I want your pay. I said, I'll do it right away. And that served me well then, and it served me well in conversations since then when I've had those same issues. Cause nobody like your first time you terminate someone, it's a nightmare. You're up all night, you're throwing up.

It's just horrible. And so sometimes you need a little pep talk. And that was the one I got, and it stood me in good stead ever since. Oh, wow. And I think, too, one of the things I appreciate that I heard from you is just the humanity of it.

If there wasn't that human element, firing people would be easy. But to your point, she was older. She had a family. Older than you, you know, had a family. And here you are, up at night and, but not forgetting the humidity side of it, super important, okay?

So if I'm hearing correct, so you start out kind of on one path in your career. When did you know you really had this entrepreneurial bug? I didn't know. I think it's safe to say I had no idea. I'm not sure I could spell entrepreneur, but what I'm sure of is when I graduated business school, my first desire was to figure out how to make sure my now wife would marry me if I asked her to marry me.

Gary Kusin
And I had mentioned to her, if you could live anywhere in the. She's in a law school down in Texas. If you could live anywhere you wanted to live in the US, where would that be? And she didn't take long to say San Francisco. So I went back to graduate school and I wandered into the placement office.

I said, well, what do we have in San Francisco? And it was two big department store chains. And since I grown up my family in the retail furniture business, I said, yeah, okay, I'll do that. And that's what I did. But once I got into the department store business and I started to understand it and I started to go into our stores and malls, I was realizing that specialty stores were popping up in the malls that were stealing our lunch at department stores.

You know, stores like the gap. All of a sudden, there went our denim business, you know, Lane Bright, they're when our large size business, I could run right jewelry. There were sales there when our jewelry business and I started developing a point of view about department stores that were so fragmented, with different names. On any city you go to, the major department stores had a different name, even though they were owned by the same large company. So I started lobbying.

I started with two things. One, we're getting our lunch taken, and if you can't see it, here's the data. And there was data that just, we were growing at 10%. Well, that was great. But the specialty stores were growing 40, 50% a year, and it was crazy.

It was just very obvious what was going on. And I developed a point of view that said in any category of consumer goods that reaches measurable size, measurable size being a billion dollars back at that time. So a specialty channel will emerge that will end up being an important, if not dominant channel of distribution inside that segment, and I could prove it with data. So I went on this big tear inside of federated department stores, telling anyone who'd listen, guys were a dinosaur heading into the swamp. And we don't have to be.

If we had a national name, we could compete with the limited by being called Macy's coast to coast, or pick a name. But everywhere we could develop the programs, we could do everything to compete. Well, when my business school buddy would play poker every week and we were on the same little section there, he had just been moved to the Silicon Valley to start working with video game publishers, and he was coming through Dallas and some business, and we were dear friends. So he came over for dinner and we sat at the kitchen table and he showed me all the data about the coming video game and computers in the home, all the penetration curves going back to the first record players, to the first black and white tvs, to the first alarm clocks. The penetration curves were the same.

And he said, there is no way video game machines and the software that goes on them is not going to become an enormous sector there was not a single video game store in the world. So he's pushing on an open door with me because I have been preaching to anyone who had listened that in any category of consumer products that reaches measurable size, the specialty store channel will be an important if not dominant channel of distribution. And I told them all that. I explained, Jim, this is really interesting, let me tell you why. And by the time we were through, it's like, well Jim, you got to quit your job at banking, I have to quit my job at federated department stores and we got to do this.

And he's like, really? And I'm like yeah, really. I go home, my wife said what? I said hey wait, if Jim does, because Jim was top of the class in our business school, if Jim thinks it's a good idea, that's our insurance policy. Jim was of course going and tell his buddies accusing being a retailer, he thinks it's a good thing.

So we both quit our jobs and the rest is history. And so we opened, when we opened our first store as the first software store in the history of the world, we had so much fun for the next twelve years until I jumped to start the cosmetics company and we had gone public and we just bought our biggest competitor and it felt like the right time. And somewhere in there, towards the end of babbages, I realized I could do something else. And I just enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of coming up with what's the hypothesis or what's the investment thesis if you're in private equity coming at something very rationally. And I had been meeting because I still had a little bit of department store blood in my bags.

I'd been meeting kind of quarterly with the CEO of Neiman Marcus back then, who was here in Dallas, who lived down the street from me. And I'd ask him anything new and he would always say, nope, nothing new, nothing new. But all of a sudden one, one time at lunch he said, let me tell you about this company called Mac Cosmetics. And I had cosmetics responsibility. And when he's talking to me, my brain started working.

Oh my gosh. And I, and I had a whole idea about what it might mean. And that's when I figured out I'm probably more of an entrepreneur myself, credit for being. And that's where we went from there. That is awesome.

That is one of the coolest stories. Oh my gosh, I'm gonna shift gears ever so slightly. You talk about, you know, a thousand hours in mentorship conversation and that's you mentoring others, correct? Yes. I probably needed it for myself, but I was too doubly no better.

Oh, you're doing just fine. I think so talk me through both sides of that. When do you recommend that somebody starts looking at a mentor? What do you look for in a mentor? How do you know they're the right person?

What are the expectations to get out of that? And then we'll go to the flip side about where you focus, et cetera. Super. Well, I think it's important to know that. And I will tell you, as I got into mentoring, it was very organic.

Gary Kusin
It was people I had worked with. It was family members. It was people who knew me, who called me and said, I've got this thing going on and I need some advice. And that's how it started as opposed to I never have mentored someone that's, we're going to meet once a quarter, we're going to go to Starbucks. We're going to do that.

That's not me. The last few years is the pace of this has picked up and I've started realizing actually the dangers of some mentoring. I am becoming more of a student of mentoring. And I'll just tell you, I have some real issues with the use of the word mentoring. And corporations who, as part of their leadership and development, organizationally set up mentoring relationships.

Now, I'm in favor of all that because it sounds good and it should be part of any leadership development. But there is a very large risk. I know from the other side of the table, as a CEO of companies that had 25,000 more employees, I have seen what bad things can happen if you use the word mentor. And let me just. These are not exact numbers, but I'm going to say somewhere between a third and 40% of the times that I have gotten a call from someone in a corporate setting who really needed to talk with something about me.

At least a third to 40% of them had to do with hostile environment, had to do with illegal goings on. And so let me tell you why I immediately get very upset about that. Now, imagine if you are a mentor and I am your mentee, and I tell you, I don't know what to do with this, but my friend and my peer is having an affair with my boss. Now, let's just say in that situation, you are dear friends with that boss and you can't believe what you just heard. Now, you are in trouble because you have a duty as a senior officer of a big corporation to report to HR if there's malfeasance, hostile environment, anything like that.

Well, if it's a third to 40% of every mentoring situation, it's my belief that companies should not use the word mentor mentee. It suggests a confidentiality, which is not true. It can't be true in a corporate environment, but it suggests things that can't be delivered. And especially if you and my heart goes out to young people in a career trying to build a career for themselves who maybe they stumbled into a relationship with someone higher up in the company or who knows? I've seen every permutation of this you can do.

But. So I'm an advocate using the word coach. And this isn't just semantics. Because if you asked 100 people what it means to be a mentor and 100 people what it means to be a coach, you're going to get a very narrowed scope for a coach. There's something very specific.

They've got a very specific skill set and they can teach that. So maybe there's a work group in an area, in the it area that's coding and doesn't quite. They got to work through things. Well, their coach should have been there before. So they can sit down and tell people, okay, in this situation, here's what you do, and you can multiply that by every functional area of a company, because a coach has a very narrow purview.

And as a potential mentee, I don't have to tell you if you're my coach about something about there. Someone just got a kickback in my work group and they're gonna. And they're gonna open a restaurant. I mean, I've seen that one too. So I worry a lot.

A lot of the people in the corporate environments who have ended up on my doorstep, I wasn't their first doorstep. They realized in their mentoring session, uh oh, you know, red flag goes up and they, I can't, I can't have this conversation, but I need to have it because I don't know what to do. And that's where they end up on my doorstep. And that's why I have this thing about mentoring is not so wonderful if it's not really thought out upfront and what could go wrong, all those issues. Jill and I, who's my co host on our podcast, is about mentoring.

And in fact it's eavesdropping on mentoring sessions we're having with people so the listener can hear honest, God, real mentoring session. We are talking about having CEO, and we both know a bunch of them CEO's of really interesting companies on to talk with them about leadership and development on their watch. How do they think about it, throw out this hot sports opinion I have about venturing being risky and get feedback, because maybe I'm wrong. You know, maybe there. Maybe there are ways that they do it that is safer.

But I never paid attention because I wasn't out there advertising myself as a mentor. I was just getting inbounds. And the more inbounds I got, the more I got, and it grew. And the next thing I know, the people that I talked to three years ago call and say, hey, you helped me three years ago. I got a bigger situation now.

And next thing you know, I've been mentoring some people for 15 years, but only episodic and only if it's something that they didn't see coming and that really, it's an issue. This has been super cool. I so appreciate your time as we kind of start thinking about wrapping up anything else we haven't touched on that you want to make sure that we do. No. I've read your website, and I've listened into some of the things you put up on YouTube, and it's, I'm so glad you guys do this.

I mean, I think this is. I think what y'all are doing is awesome. There is something that I feel close to when I hire people. You talk about helping people get better and intensity and all that, and how do you get the energy up to do what needs to be done? We put a big accent on this when I, in companies I'm involved in on hiring.

What do you look for? And because I think so much of this can be, if you are interviewing against that as a skill set, you stand a better chance of having people come into the company that are emotionally set up for what you want to do. For instance, in a. In a turnaround situation like, like we had at Kinko's, we interviewed for kind of four things as mission critical and that we have to have a point of view. After you spend an hour with a potential new person in the company, you got to have a point of view about these things.

One is energy level. Did they feel like they had energy? Do they feel like they're going to bring it every day to work? Intellectual curiosity. Okay.

Do they, do they ask interesting questions? Do they wonder about things three? And this is really important. I'll tell you why. This is my most high aspiration.

If I'm interviewing someone and I say, what is your. What's your end of the rainbow job? And they, if they say something like, your job, I want your job, it's like, boom, you're hired because I need someone with really high aspirations. And then the fourth, which sounds a little weird, but I found it to really be true. If I talk to someone and I don't feel like they're driven to win, that's fine, as long as I do feel that they will refuse to lose.

And those are two very different thoughts, because sometimes people who are hyper competitive and they got a win win win, well, maybe they're too much. Maybe too much glasses don't get broken. But if someone refuses to lose, that's a different thing. That's when they're. When they're in the middle of the night and they're thinking about something, they nope, I'm not going to let this happen.

And when I mentioned the high aspiration, the most, probably the most proud thing, and I'll leave it at this, that I've had in my business career, 13 people on my turnaround team at Kinko's are CEO's. And that, to me, is an incredible tribute to them because they get. They were all of these. They refused to lose. At a minimum, they had high aspirations, they were intellectually curious, and they made stuff happen.

High energy. It works. That's incredible, man. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I really appreciate your time and availability today.

This has been, for lack of a better word, energizing, but also very insightful. So thank you, Gary. You bet. Thanks for having me.

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