Lessons Learned on the Road to the C-Suite with David Siegel, CEO of Meetup

Welcome to Masters of Business, a show that gives you real-world techniques, cutting-edge strategies, and extraordinary insights for managers and leaders who want to develop the business acumen needed to go faster and farther in their business careers. Now here’s the master himself, Steven Haines.

Steven Haines: Welcome back, everyone. As many of you know, I’ve created this show, Masters of Business, to guide business people on their journey to leadership success by leveraging the core constructs of business acumen. These constructs are laid down in something I call a business acumen canvas, that are available to you on the Business Acumen website, business-acumen.com. Remember this show is available on your standard podcast platforms as a Vidcast currently through YouTube and things like that. Anyway …So today I am extraordinarily grateful to have, as my guest, David Siegel, who is, as you can see on his T-shirt, or some of you can’t, he is the CEO of Meetup and has been in that role about a year. If you don’t know what Meetup is, I don’t understand what to say, but it is one of the most profound platforms that has evolved over the last couple of decades. He’s also been the CEO of Investopedia, another one of, because I’m a finance geek, one of my other favorite sites and platforms in the world. And he’s been president of Seeking Alpha and in a number of leadership roles. But what’s even more important is he just released a groundbreaking book called, Decide and Conquer: 44 Decisions That Will Make or Break All Leaders. I can’t even wait to start. So David, thank you so much for coming to the show.

David Siegel: Ah, super excited to be here. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to spend time with you and your audience. So thank you for the opportunity.

Steven Haines: Absolutely amazing. I think it’s going to be great. Anyway, so I can safely say that you have been around the block. And before-

David Siegel: That means I’m old, right? Is that how it works?

Steven Haines: I’m going to need my walker soon. But that said, and I do want to talk a little bit about the guts of the book, but I would love you to share some of your background and experience and how you got to where you are and even highlight some of those dimensions with respect to business acumen. So let’s hear what you got.

David Siegel: Okay, here we go. So I would say that probably the most atypical aspect of my background, Steven, is that I started off in human resources, which is not so common for someone to go from human resources to CEO, but it should be actually more common because what do human resources people focus on? They focus on hiring top talent. Pretty important for business acumens and masters of business success. They focus on managing people. They focus on retaining great people. They focus on motivating people.

So I had worked at DoubleClick, which in the late ’90s was the internet company to work at. In fact, over 100 CEOs have come from the early DoubleClick days, I kid you not. Yes. And I was an HR partner to a group, the Technology Group, and I kept giving advice to different managers to do certain things, not to do other things.

And at a certain point I’m like, “Man, these managers don’t know what they’re doing. I could be much better at it than what they’re doing.” So then I decided to go to business school. I went to Wharton for business school because I had to learn some –. And whenever everyone else in business school was partying and networking, I was saying, “I got to learn business because I don’t know anything.” Not to say HR people don’t, but I didn’t have enough of a deep business background.

And then I went through a series of different directors… I went to a pharmacy chain called Duane Reed where I built a business from the ground up. They did about 30 million dollars in revenue. Then I worked at 1-800-Flowers for about five years, and I ended up running mergers and acquisitions for the company and marketing across their 10, 15 different product lines, popcorn, cookies, chocolate, et cetera, flowers.

I became general manager of a business at Everyday Health, which is the second-largest web publisher focused on subscriptions and ad revenue. Then-president of Seeking Alpha. CEO of Investopedia, like you said, and then latest and greatest, Meetup, which is really the most important job for me because of the fact that Meetup is all about curing the loneliness epidemic. And the loneliness epidemic is real, 46% of people regularly feel lonely, and our mission is a noble mission, and it’s deeply meaningful to me, personally.

Steven Haines: First of all, it is an astounding career journey, and it sounds similar to mine because I started out as a finance guy, but I had all these other things I ended up through product and stuff like that. But one of the things that I have learned is how you learn, how a person assimilates. It’s almost like we’re practitioners, the way maybe a surgeon or a lawyer would be a practitioner. We have these bodies of knowledge, but we learn through these experiences. What are some of the most profound experiences that you’ve been able to learn from?

David Siegel: Yeah, see, that’s great. So I find that the greatest learning for me in my career has always happened through crises because when your back is against a wall and you need to really deal with difficult situation, and unfortunately I’ve had many crises in my career, dating all the way back, making it even to the DoubleClick days. So when I was at DoubleClick in the late ’90s, the company went from about a few hundred employees, went up to 1,000 employees within the year, tripling the number of employees in the internet bubble. And then I was also there when we had to go from 1,000 employees back down to about 300. The stock went from 15 up to 300 down to 10 in 12 months.

So in that type of environment, you’re on a massive change management scale. You’re going from acquiring … So one of the things I focused on was when you acquire a company, how do you decide how to structure that organization? How do you decide what products, people, and what products to go? You’re dealing with people in a very sensitive time period, and how do you handle change management processes? So that’s one example of something that really shaped me. When I was 24 years old, I had to fire 30 people in one day, for example, as a 24-year-old. And you learn a lot from how to deal with people and how to handle the “survivors,” quote, unquote, in those types of situations. And I think that really helped to shape me.

The other area that I personally have learned the most from in life is just mentors. In every job that I have had, I’ve had one or two people that took me under their wing, and I was very intentional about finding people that I respected a lot that I would ask to build relationships with. I built relationships to take me under their wing, to such an extent that I built such a close relationship. I was consulting DoubleClick, actually.

First, I worked in consulting, HR consulting, and the CEO of DoubleClick, a person named Kevin Ryan, at one point came to me and said, “David, we pay your consulting firm 200 dollars an hour. You probably make 40,000 dollars a year because you’re only a couple of years out of school. How about we double your salary and then we could pay half the amount to what we’re paying consulting for. You just do what you do, consulting here.”

Kevin Ryan is the same person that 20 years later I stayed in touch with him. As we’re talking about mentorship, he is the person that acquired Meetup out of WeWork when we were owned by WeWork just about two years ago. So those mentors have been people that have helped and advised me for, really, 20 plus years and who I call up and get feedback from all throughout the time. And I could go through other examples of different ways in which I’ve learned, but I would say crises and mentorship have been my top two.

Steven Haines: It’s all about the people when it really comes down to it. And I share some of that experience. I stumbled through the early parts of my career, and I didn’t fully get the idea that there are people who certainly know more because I don’t know a lot. And if I keep on falling down and skinning my knees, I better go find somebody to help me. And I recall finding those knowledgeable people who … First of all, I learned humility. You’re a young whippersnapper and you think you know more than you think you should know or whatever, but I think that’s amazing. Do you ever find that humility is an important part of leadership development?

David Siegel: It’s critical. I teach at Columbia. I was actually saying to my students last night, because we had a class last night, I said to them, “Oftentimes, the strongest people who have the greatest potential are the ones that admit the most mistakes and ask for the most help.” And the ability to admit mistakes demonstrates humility. The ability to ask for help, to say, “I don’t know how to do something,” demonstrates humility.

If you’re ego, and you’re pure ego, and all of your decisions are about yourself, it’s a great way to fail as a leader. The key is to be able to know that most people know a lot more about things, especially early in your career than you do. And your greatest skill set is going to be asking questions of people who actually have lots more experience than you do in order to figure out what you actually should do. And that’s a very important skill set to have, early, medium, and also senior level in your career. I don’t know as much as about anything, but every person who works for me … Head of marketing knows more about marketing than I do.

The Head of sales knows more about sales than I do. The Head of engineering knows more about engineering than I do. And as a senior person or a junior person, it’s about helping to ask the right questions, not about being didactic. And asking questions about learning and listening, and humility is critical to that.

Steven Haines: In one of my business acumen workshops, I talk about communication and collaboration, and I say the words, and I say, “Those are so overused, right? And they lose their meaning until you bring them into action, right?”

And I agree with you, this idea behind when you have a problem, you’re in a crisis mode, not to say, “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to go lead an army.” It’s how do you draw from other people’s expertise and figure out what a better path is to go? I mean, you can have some rights of the last refusal if you want, if you get to be in charge, right?

David Siegel: Always. I was just telling someone, they said, “When you became a professor at Columbia about seven years ago, how’d you figure out to write your curriculum? What’d you figure out to do?” So I said, “It was very easy. I just asked Columbia for the seven to 10 best professors that they have in this particular school that I teach in, and I asked for email addresses. I emailed all seven to 10 of them. I had a conversation with five of them, and I learned about what works and what doesn’t work in each of their classes and asked for the copies of their syllabus, and then incorporated different learnings from each of them, and that’s how I built the syllabus.”

It’s just about asking questions and then integrating information and having an opinion yourself. Always, you have to have an opinion yourself, but your opinion should be based on best practices and learnings that you get from other people. And maybe because prior to HR, or in HR, I started off with HR consulting, that’s really what a lot of consultants do. They’re able to ask the right questions of people that know more than they do and then integrate that information back to put together what makes sense.

Steven Haines: I never talked about this with you. I was a part-time instructor at Rutgers for 15 years, and I did almost the same thing. I had these whipper snappery ideas because I thought that some of the teachers I had, both as an undergraduate and a graduate, were sucky, and I said, “I know I can do better.” But how do you know what to do better on? And you have to ask. And that is something that I think is amazing.

I think that some people don’t. I think that when people feel, “I have to be able to solve the problem. My boss delegated this to me. I’ve got to go out and do this.” And sometimes I have found, even in my own experience as a leader, that even in delegating, sometimes people would say, “Yes, boss.” But I wasn’t convinced that they knew exactly what they wanted to do, and they wouldn’t even admit that they didn’t either have the experience to know-how. Have you ever encountered that?

David Siegel: All the time and I would say that it’s a combination of humility that you said upfront, but there’s also confidence that you need to have at the same time. Sometimes the people who lack self-esteem the most and are the least confident are the ones that are least comfortable asking for help and asking questions. So it takes a certain confidence level, actually, in yourself to be comfortable saying, “I don’t know how to do something,” because normally if someone lacks confidence, they say, “I don’t know how to do something,” they feel bad. But if you acknowledge the fact that you don’t, and it doesn’t necessarily reflect negatively on you, it becomes a much easier thing to do. So it’s actually that interesting duality of be confident, but be humble in how you actually decide to approach things.

Steven Haines: Sometimes I talk or I teach about informal networks inside of organizations. You have knowledge hubs, like who knows, who knows, who knows who. And I talk and I write about this idea behind you need to know how to navigate in an organization in order to build, whether it’s your business acumen, your leadership capability, or your credibility so that you can influence. Can you talk to that a little bit?

David Siegel: Yeah, sure. So I kept it really simple. I looked at who was the most senior person in a company, straight up. Who were all the executives in the company? And I tried to find ways in which I could add value and help them in some way, shape, or form. Not starting off with how they could help me, but what could I do to help them? And I would come up with different ideas or suggestions or whatever it is that they were doing. I would ask them if I could go to lunch with them. And it was just amazing. I had built a relationship, again, at 24 years old, young in my career, with the top 10, 15 people who were 10, 15 years of experience at this particular company. And I just did that over and over again in other companies.

And it wasn’t to kiss up to them. It was because I genuinely wanted to learn as much as possible to such an extent that when I graduated from business school, my dream job was to become an assistant to the CEO. And at Wharton, everyone wanted to be a consultant or wanted to be an investment banker, da da, da. I purposely then reached out to 50 different CEOs of companies, Ken Chenault from American Express, David Stern, who recently passed away, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association, the head of Duane Reade, a whole bunch of different companies, and I ended up having 10 different conversations with CEOs to try to convince them that I should be their assistant CEO, work on their board jacks, because again, I wanted that mentoring, I wanted that learning. I felt like, “If I want to be a CEO, the best way to do it is to be under the tutelage of a great CEO.”

Steven Haines: Yep. I interviewed a guy named George Oliver, who was the CEO of Tyco at the time. This was probably 10, 12 years ago. And I think he might even be at JCI now, but he talked about his first CEO job. He said he interviewed 100 different CEOs from various companies. He says, “I don’t know how to be a CEO.” Holy smokes.

David Siegel: Wow.

Steven Haines: And then he spent a bunch of years in GE and stuff like that.

David Siegel: Wow. That’s the real dude. That’s the real thing. I have to tell you this story because you’re going to appreciate it, so one of the CEOs that I met in the process of graduating from business school was the founder and CEO of 1-800-Flowers, Jim McCann. Three years later, a friend of mine calls me up and says, “David, did you see Wharton just did a job posting?” I’m like, “Oh, what is it?” They said, “Wharton, the job posting …” No, excuse me. 1-800-Flowers did a job posting on Wharton’s alumni database saying, “1-800-Flowers was looking for an assistant to the CEO.” So I’m like, “Wait, I talked him three years about that ago about that.”

I sent him an email, saying, “I don’t know if you remember me, but I was reaching out to become the assistant CEO. We had half an hour of conversation. You told me you weren’t interested.” He sends me an email back, and it says five words, “I was looking for you.” And then I spent five years working at 1-800-Flowers after that. So you just don’t know what’s going to happen from this kind of connection and relationship.
Steven Haines: That is sweet.

David Siegel: And now we just spoke last week, and I’m going to be on Jim McCann’s podcast. So very exciting?

Steven Haines: Are you?

David Siegel: Yeah.

Steven Haines: Oh, man. Well, first of all, you’re one of my new idols, because number one, I would love to teach at Columbia, number one. Number two is I want to know all these CEOs, too. And that’s really one of my goals here with this podcast is to really get as many in the room as possible. Wharton has that show on Sirius, right? They have the business show, which I saw-

David Siegel: I was actually on that show. Yeah.

Steven Haines: Were you really?
David Siegel: Yeah, I was on that show. They do a great job. They do great job.

Steven Haines: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Love that stuff. Anyway, so-
David Siegel: Now I have to tell you by Jack Welch story because he’s an amazing CEO.
Steven Haines: Oh, please do.

David Siegel: So when I was the CEO of Investopedia, Investopedia was owned by IAC. IAC is a really interesting company. Barry Diller is the chairman of IAC, and they own Home Advisor, Angie’s List, Match.com and Vimeo, and all these amazing properties. So Jack Welch was on the board of IAC, and we went for some boondoggle offsite with the CEOs of all the different companies. And I got an opportunity to spend half an hour talking to Jack Welch, the Jack Welch. Wow.

Jack Welch was listed, by the way, for those who don’t know, as the former CEO of General Electric. When he left the company, it was the highest market cap company in the world, in the world. And it was listed by Time Magazine as the manager of the century, of the entire 20th century, listed Jack Welch. So I said, “Okay, you’re the manager of the century. I know nothing.” He’s like, “Yes, you’re right. You know nothing.” Okay. We’re in agreement. “What is your number one piece of advice that you would give me to be an effective CEO?”

He said, “Okay, just got one more for you.” I’m like, “Great. What is it?” He said, “The one word I have is trust. If you build employee trust, you’ll have everything, and if you lose your employees’ trust, you have nothing. And the best way to build trust is with transparency. If you’re transparent about everything, you’re honest about the good, the bad, and the ugly, that’s the best advice I could give you.” So I’m like, “Okay.”

Steven Haines: So interesting. That whole Patrick Lencioni model and trust are at the bottom of the triangle. I always say it’s really easy to say the word. It’s really hard to know how to earn it so that you can gain access to other people, which is really good. But let me finish my agenda, so otherwise, we’ll be here till Thanksgiving, and that will be too long. But you talked a little bit about some of these building blocks of business acumen as having these interdisciplinary perspectives without having to do anybody else’s job. And you alluded to a little bit about this before. You have all these functional specialists. How do you capitalize on that and keep it integrated in your mind so that you can move the ship forward?

David Siegel: Yeah. So I’ve always had this. When I go to a wedding, I don’t eat the main course. I always do smorgasbord. What I mean by that is that I’ve always been a generalist by nature and believed that the interdisciplinary approach to solving a problem is always more interesting. So in college, I majored in philosophy, political science, and economics. And the reason for that was not just because I didn’t want to take a lot of courses in any one discipline, but was because I really believed if you look at any problem, the Civil War, the Civil War wasn’t just because of economics. It wasn’t just because of politics. It wasn’t just because of philosophy. If you look, it was because of the intersection between each of those different areas. And that’s how you solve a problem.

And I find in business the same thing, that if you have someone that grew up in sales their entire life, let’s say, and they see a problem, they’re like, “This is a sales problem. We just have to hire more salespeople.” You see someone with a product their entire life, “This is a product problem. We don’t have the right user experiences.” So my job is to look at a challenge that we have and say, “Okay, this is actually a problem between product, marketing, and content. All three of us are contributing to that. Not you, but for us.

How can we get in a room together and understand how each of us are playing a role to try to adjust this problem?” or “This solution will only succeed if we’re taking both an engineering and product and whatever, marketing, perspective to get it to succeed.” So I think my habit, shall we say, is to never think that something can be solved by just looking at it through one lens, but to really always look at the multiple lenses that need to come together to actually address an issue.

Steven Haines: This business acumen canvas I talked about earlier, it’s this multi-dimensional representation of what happened in business, both from outside perspectives, mindset, and core capabilities. And I think the essence of the model is almost seeing a painting, and that is you can step back and see things from a specific advantage point and then zoom in to areas that you can study further, come back and change your perspectives.

David Siegel: It sounds like a Seurat painting. Isn’t he the pointillist, impressionist painter?
Steven Haines: I think you’re right. You’re right. Anyway, even you were in HR, right? And I remember teaching HR when I was at Rutgers. That was one of my things, right? How you could be a specialist and a generalist. And I think today the better leaders are these exceptional generalists, or super generalists, who have zoomed in and zoomed out enough times to integrate and literally think their way forward with an army of people who are able to bring along. And I think that’s really critical.

David Siegel: In my book, I referenced David Epstein’s awesome, awesome book called Range, which speaks specifically to the power of the generalist over the specialist. It’s quite excellent.

Steven Haines: That’s amazing. I’m going to look at that. So now I do want to talk a little bit about the book. What was your motivation for writing it? Tell us some of the key learnings and a little bit about how people can access you.

David Siegel: Okay. So I had always wanted to write a book about leadership and business, and specifically, specifically around decisions making because I had read a quote a decade ago by Teddy Roosevelt, and the quote was the following: “The best decision are great decisions, the second-best decisions are bad decisions, and the worst decision is no decision.” And I had seen that so many people in business, but also in life, are held back by inertia. They’re held back and they don’t realize that not making a decision is, in fact, a decision in itself. And I saw a lot of unhappiness in careers and unhappiness in people’s personal lives.

And people have always said to me, “Wow, you’re a pretty happy guy. You’ve been successful.” And there are just different principles, shall we say, that I’ve always had around decision making that I’ll share with you now. Not all of them. Don’t worry, but a few of them.

But my problem was I didn’t want to write a standard boring textbooky business book. “Here are the 10 principles.” That’s boring. What I wanted to do is story-tell and have this crazy, insane roller coaster of a story. And fortunately, being part of WeWork, and Adam Neumann created that absolute crazy culture and crazy challenges that I’ve had to go through as part of that, and then trying to run Meetup when you couldn’t meet up in person, and we had to spend our entire business model, created so many challenges and stories from that, that the book … It didn’t write itself, but in a two-month time period, when the pandemic started, I just churned out 75,000 words because it was all in my head, very quickly. Yeah. So that’s how the book came up. And in terms of some of the core principles around decision-making, I’ll just share two or three with you.

Steven Haines: Please do.

David Siegel: The first I like to talk about is the criticality of disagreement when it comes to making smart decisions, and that when you have someone like Abraham Lincoln, who was known for his team of rivals, who brought people around him who had very different perspectives, and even what we’re talking about earlier, which is the importance of looking at things from different functional perspectives, what the result of that is that people will disagree. And through that disagreement, better decisions end up getting made. If you hire someone who is just like you and has the same background as you, has the same experience as you, and there isn’t going to be that disagreement, you’re going to make worse decisions. And that tension that you have in talking about a challenge, that’s healthy. You want to encourage that healthy tension.

Steven Haines: Even in the team of rivals construct, okay, there was a common goal, all right, which was, at the time, the abolition of slavery. So regardless of the four of them who had issues and different principles, they still agreed on one and were motivated by one thing. So I think, in corporate-speak, we talk about vision and goals and all that other stuff, which gets mushy as well, but this was concrete, right? And I think you can have a better consensus and get better goal achievement if you can do that, right?

David Siegel: Well said. It’s about identifying a specific goal as part of what decision you’re trying to solve, then coming at it with multiple different perspectives, and then really figuring out what the right one is. So one is the importance of disagreement towards an aligned goal in terms of the decision. Not disagree. Well, you can disagree towards the goal, and then hopefully that will lead to alignment, which is much better than passive aggressive behavior. We all know. That’s one.
The second is when making a decision, I don’t think people tend to prioritize enough the importance of what I call optionality in decision making. Meaning, that you could make a decision and it opens up a myriad of different options, or you could make a decision and it’s a trapdoor decision and it closes down a whole lot of those options. All too often, people don’t think about the importance of creating options for yourself as part of a potential decision, and the reason why those options are so darn important is that people oftentimes will say to me, or others, “Gosh, how’d you get so lucky? How’d you get so lucky?” Well, lucky things happen to people when they create an environment where they created options.

So for example, I got lucky in that Jim McCann from 1-800-Flowers, like we were referencing earlier, happened to have decided to post something, but was it lucky, or was it the fact that I spoke to 50 CEOs beforehand and I built 50 pseudo-relationships, and that ended up turning into something be because I thought about what option am I creating by being able to build these relationships and talk to people?

Steven Haines: Yeah. Can I comment on that one, too?
David Siegel: Yeah.

Steven Haines: First of all, we didn’t even rehearse this, everybody. So just FYI. This idea of prioritizing, okay? When I started the workshop, I’ll talk about, “What are the things that bother you the most?” and they say, “Well, I’m having trouble prioritizing,” which means they don’t understand what the problem is, and they don’t understand what the options are. And sometimes having some structure to optioning, you can list all your ideas or options down inside of a page, but then what? How do you rate and rank them? How do you parameterize, for instance, a score against some criterion, right? There are mechanics, I think, as well as a brain that goes behind this. Would you agree?

David Siegel: Process is really important. When people think, “Oh, the way to be a successful entrepreneur is to forget the process, forget bureaucracy. Let’s just throw a lot of ideas against a wall and see what sticks.” No, actually, through the process, you actually have better idea generation. Through the process, you have better prioritization, through the process, you have better execution. Those things are really important. The key is for the process not to get in the way of success and to be able to move quickly and learn quickly and roll things out fast, but the process is an enabler, not a disabler.

Steven Haines: I’d say the processes provide guardrails and that it allows you to be flexible and adapt in how you move forward. My expression is you have to decide your way forward.
David Siegel: Nice.
Steven Haines: This is why I resonate with what you wrote about. What’s your third point third one?

David Siegel: Third one, sure. I would just say that too oftentimes people look at the cult of the CEO and they see the Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, and they’re like, “Oh, the way to become a successful CEO and leader is to be an asshole, because look at all these assholes, they do great.”

What they don’t realize is that there are also thousands of assholes that have been fired from their jobs because no one wants to work with them and they don’t know how to interact with people who are humans. So my principle around decisions is when you make a decision, be kind. Not be nice, but be kind. There’s a big difference between being nice and being kind. It’s not nice to have to fire someone, but the kindest thing you might be able to do for someone is to fire them and say, “Hey, this isn’t necessarily the right company for you. Maybe there’s a different company you should work at.”
Is it nice to necessarily make someone feel uncomfortable by giving them constructive feedback? But it’s the kindest thing you could do. So understand that your job is to enable them to succeed, and sometimes that means that there’s a tension, and sometimes that’s healthy, and be kind in your decision because your reputation matters, but don’t necessarily go overboard and think that it’s all about being nice all the time.

Steven Haines: I think those are really amazing points. I could go on with you for hours, but you probably have a job to do. We all do, right? But I think the things that we have talked about, even in the serendipitous way, hopefully, people who are listening in or watching will pick up a few key points about what it means to both establish relationships, that people are so incredibly important, that collaboration is beyond the word, but it’s actually in the doing and what people see. People need evidence, and they see it in the behavior of our leaders. And if we can model some of those things, I think that will offer tremendous value for anybody in trying to grow their career. So that said .. Yeah? Good, right?

David Siegel: No, it’s great. I mean, the reality is it’s about what you do, not what you say. And a leader is always under the microscope, and it’s important to be aware of that, and acting appropriately and acting with conviction, and acting ethically is job number one and of a leader, and then after that, collaboration, prioritization, et cetera.

Steven Haines: There’s this thing about children learn … All the things about children learning, if they see this, they’re that way. But children learn what they see. And it’s not that children are the people who are staffed in companies, but people respond to what they see. It is our human programming, and sometimes we learn by exception. Sometimes we learn by example. It is better, I think, the example.

But the crisis is sometimes the exception that becomes an excellent teacher.

And so with that, I am going to drive us to a conclusion, and thank you with the utmost of gratitude for spending your time with us today and sharing things about you.

Again, David is the author of Decide and Conquer: 44 Decisions That Will Make or Break All Leaders. Pick up a copy. Tune into this. Tell your friends, and please tune in next time for another edition of Masters of Business. I’m Steven Haines. We’ll see you next time.

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