 Welcome to the panel discussion for David Lee's special visit to Purdue. I am Sang Kim, the Islandville head of the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering. And it's my pleasure to introduce the two co-moderators. We have Professor and Associate Dean Alina Alexenko from the schools of Aero and Chemical Engineering. And we also have, who really needs no introduction, I guess. And we also have Sam DeLotte, who is currently a senior studying computer engineering. Sam hails from Polano, Texas. He's president of the Purdue Student Engineering Foundation and has helped numerous high school students choose to study engineering at Purdue. He's also an ambassador for the College of Engineering and for ECE. He facilitates the Purdue Engineering Students Council and coordinates events for Purdue's engineering week in the spring. So with that, I'll hand the mic over to the moderators. Thank you so much, Dr. Kim. And we will now introduce our panelists. So we'll start with David Lee, who just gave a wonderful Purdue Engineering Frontiers lecture. So David Lee is a recently retired CEO and president of CMC Materials. He has had many leadership positions in CMC Materials in his career that spans, well, from 1997 or so, right? So almost right after he graduated from Purdue Chemical Engineering in 1995. And in addition to Purdue Chemical Engineering degree, Mr. Lee also has an MBA from Northwestern. And some of our other fellow professors and leaders in industry are here with us on the panel. So I'll introduce my being in this order. So Professor Joe Peckney, who has been on the faculty of Davidson School of Chemical Engineering for since 1990. So you might have intersected during David's time at Purdue. And in addition to faculty roles and innovating as a researcher at Purdue, Dr. Peckney is also a founder of a successful process analytics company since 1993. And he's also has been the founding director of Burton Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship. Another participant on our panel is Beth Menser, who is retired recently also from a distinguished career in industry as a vice president at ExxonMobil. And we are very happy that Beth now shares her time with students in the School of Chemical Engineering imparting wisdom on how to succeed in industry for the next generation of engineering leaders. And Beth has a degree in chemical engineering from Louisiana State and is serving as industrial career counselor at KME at Purdue. And then finally, our panelist today is Professor Linda Wang, who is one of the first, I believe, women professors at Purdue Engineering and definitely the first in chemical engineering. Professor Wang has a PhD in chemical engineering from University of Minnesota. She is internationally known for her research in chromatography and has led many innovations, including some that you're hearing in the news from time to time on some of the material innovations for some critical materials, including for batteries. So welcome to our panelist, and we'll start with some questions. Thanks, Alina. Yeah, let's go ahead and get started with just talking about some leadership topics as a whole. So how would you all define leadership? And feel free to walk us through an example of a time where maybe you were in a leadership role and you sort of had to go against conflict and what that looked like. Joe, if you want to start us off. Sure, I think leadership is a very creative endeavor. It depends on a few things. There are a few invariance, I would say. One is the people that you lead. And no matter who you are, even a CEO of a company has a boss, the stockholders, or the board. So you have to understand who you work for, you have to understand who you're leading, and you have to understand the organization and what constitutes success. And I think one of the invariance of leadership is making sure you take care of all those stakeholders. And you bring your creativity and vision to the task so that everybody's time is used in the best way. Their individual gifts are used the best way to serve the organization. I think Purdue has been blessed with many leaders that bring very different styles, but make sure they take care of those people that they're leading, the people they work for, and bring a vision that makes everybody more successful. Thank you. Bev, if you want to talk about your definition. Yes, my definition of leadership is pretty simple. I'd say it's leading a team of people to accomplish a goal. And I would ask after that has been completed, are the people willing to work for you again? How they were treated along the way. One leadership initiative that comes to mind was when we opened up ExxonMobil Research Guitar in Doha and really had to start from scratch, staffing a research center, deciding what research we would do there, working with the guitaries on facilities, contracts, agreements, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a lot of different issues involved, but then also wanting to start it with people skilled in areas, but then also grow the guitaries into filling the jobs in that research center. Thank you. David? Well, I think Joe and Beth covered really well leadership opportunities and examples. I have a very similar definition, which is as a leader, you need to create a compelling vision and then motivate, influence, and drive a team or organization to achieve those. And I would say you brought in this concept of conflict. So I still remember as I was starting as CEO of CMC Materials, one of the key areas that I thought was holding us back was we weren't growing our top line revenue. So we set some very ambitious goals to double our revenue over five years. That required a lot of tough change. But as Beth mentioned, you want to make sure you're using the gifts for the team that is working with you, and they want to make sure that he still wants to work with you afterwards, right? And so that was a tremendously fulfilling journey. But it requires a lot of change, a lot of commitment, and a lot of communication, all of our important ingredients of leadership. So it's about setting that vision and then finding ways to influence, incentivize, communicate, and drive an organization towards achieving it. Thank you, David. Linda? Yes, I think as Joe and Beth and Dave said, the leadership quality, in my mind, you must have the credibility to lead. In other words, you have to be an ethical person, to have good vision, and to be aware of other people's positions, and to have the communication skills, to bring them to your side. This reminds me a good story that I know about Dave. I remember the discussion. When Dave was moving to the Purdue dorm the first day, he met his roommate. The roommate's first comment to Dave was, just remember, your roommate, not your friend. They argued for weeks, and guess what? After a few weeks, they became the best buddies. So this shows that Dave has the leadership quality, which is aware of other people's positions, and to have the communication skills to convert your enemies into your best friend. And the evidence of the best friend was when he became the CEO of Capital Microelectronics. The day he got appointment, he called his roommate and shared a bottle of champagne. I thought that was a very, very lovely story. So I think you're seeing example of leaders here. First of all, he gave excellent talk, better than I can deliver, and so clear, and so convincing. And I loved the story that he used in chemical engineering. We call it dimensionless groups, so get benchmarks to use the football field as the planar surface of the semiconductors. And the defect has to be less than certain millimeters of grass on the football field. I thought that was a wonderful example. Thank you, Dave, for giving such a wonderful talk. So I think communication skills have the integrity, have the leadership, the ethical standards to have the credibility to lead people, to accomplish a goal. And that's really the quality. But I think it's in his character. You have to be a good person to inspire trust, to have good communication skills, to convince other people to your vision and your goals, and to lead the whole group of people to accomplish some wonderful things. And that's a sign of good leaders. So I'm so glad to have him here to show what a leader is. So I'm just very, very proud of Dave. Thanks, Professor Linda. And I had great teachers along the way, including Professor Wong. So thank you for those kind words. You're much better than the professors. So our next question was Joe on the side. What attributes of future leaders do you look for when recruiting people? OK, so the question is? Especially what attributes of future leaders do you look for when recruiting for, especially, entry-level positions? So leadership traits. What do we look for in leadership traits? OK, first of all, you look for somebody who is knowledgeable about what your organization does. I think, in my opinion, great leadership depends on understanding fundamentals about the organization. It's hard to be a leader in chemical engineering if you don't know what chemical engineering is. So I first look for strong fundamentals. Then you look for, getting back to people, will someone be humble and a servant leader? Not that they're shrinking violet. Not that they won't have conflict if they need it. But at root, are they a servant leader? Because people will follow servant leaders. People will follow humility if there's confidence behind it. And then I think it's very important to apply the golden rule. And so I look for leaders that will apply the golden rule. If they're leading, they'll imagine that they're following and they'll treat people the way they want to be treated. When you do that, you tend to get 110%, 120% out of people because they believe that you have their back. So I look for people that servant leaders humble, apply the golden rule, and competence and hard work, which our speaker today models and spades. Thank you, Beth. Excellent, excellent answer. Great attributes. I think I'm gonna kind of build on what Joe said and answered a different way, coming from the perspective of a recruiter. There are so many leadership opportunities on campus. All a recruiter has to do is look for a successful leader. And they'll tell you what they accomplish. They'll tell you how they did it, how they got along with their team, what goals they delivered. And so I just look for demonstrated leadership. So from our side, I'm gonna agree with our two previous panelists quite a bit. We actually did quite a bit of work on this at our company to see what were some of the common traits of successful executives entering our company. And the two traits that were most consistent and correlated with success were one, being humble. So back to Joe, your comment about are people willing to learn from others, open to learning and admit their mistakes. The other is something called being hungry. So are you at the point of your career where you're really eager to contribute to a team, hungry to contribute overall to the organizational goals and just hungry in general to learn more? So being humble and hungry turned out to be the number one, number two traits of successful leaders entering and thriving in our company. Wow, I don't have much to add. I think a good leader must have the character, the integrity and which can inspire trust. In addition to that, I think they have to be the three piece. That means being prepared, be professional and passionate about things. That's what I thought. Most of the leaders have those kind of characters. So two H and three P. So we can make a formula. We can make a chemical author with it. I just want to pick up on one of Linda's comments, if I might, the presentable aspect, I think being able to communicate and present yourself. I coach a lot of Asian, Asian American leaders and the question I get asked as well, why do I have to work on my presentation skills? And my comment back is, well, the requirement for you to be a leader in a multinational company is actually no different than anybody else. You have to, if you get to a certain level, you have to be able to hold your own in a boardroom or a management meeting. And so being presentable, being able to communicate what your goals are or what you're there to present, really, really important. Thank you all. To go off something that Bev brought up about students and demonstrated leadership, how do you think Purdue students can better prepare for leadership? I think more importantly, what can Purdue and the College of Engineering do to help in that? Bev, if you want to start, or Jill, you're more than welcome. Well, like I said, I think Purdue has amazing opportunities. I've just heard some outstanding leadership stories. Probably what Purdue could better help is just making sure that all students are aware of those opportunities. I see a lot of undergrad connection, maybe as much in grad school, of getting involved in campus activities and realizing that you don't have to be a leader in a technical area to demonstrate leadership. And then from the individual's perspective, if you're starting at the basics, I'd say, first of all, you have to learn to lead yourself. Take responsibility, set your own vision, prioritize, and then build that into leading others, how to work toward mutual benefit, how to listen and communicate well, how to create synergy out of opportunities. Thank you. Joe, do you have anything you'd like to add? Well, go ahead, I think you've got it. You've got to, you've got to find a way to get there. Okay, so I was just thinking about Dave. When I first saw him, I found him a be adorable student, a graduate student. And I think there's something in the characters, you must be a good person to be likable and to be good to others and kindness and communicative and understanding and just try to be a good person. I think that's, I saw Dave from adorable undergrad to emerge very quickly into a leader. I think that that's one of the things I observed is the basic character being kind and being communicative, understanding, be good to each other. So I think those are basic qualities of leaders. That's all I can think of at this point. I think at the undergraduate level, you want to have opportunities to lead. Leadership takes experience, it takes practice. You're dealing with people, okay? People aren't an equation. It takes a lot of practice to learn how to deal with different kinds of people, especially for an engineer, right? I always make sure I tell the joke to my class about what's an extroverted engineer. They look at your shoes instead of your own when you talk to someone. You have to remember when you're an engineer that there's the technical matter and you have to understand that and be good at it because people won't follow you if you don't understand what you're doing. But you also have to understand you're dealing with people and they're not an equation. You know, if somebody's parents are sick, you've got to be flexible and then they'll work harder for you when they can make it up. You've got to know when somebody's fooling you, you've got to learn to read people. If they're lying to you, you've got to learn, you can tell, you've got to learn how to do that. You know, you've got to practice being a leader. So what I would recommend for all students is to get in an organization, get an opportunity to lead. Go give speeches. If you learn how to talk in front of people, that makes you more comfortable leading people as well. So practice every chance you get to speak in public, okay? That'll help you enormously in a lot of different ways. I just add a few practical things for the students as well. One is if you're able to and are in the right position to do a co-op or an internship, fantastic opportunity to get your feet wet in terms of an actual corporate or industrial experience. That's, I think, really, really important. And then the one thing I would always say, I was with a group of students last night, student leaders for AICHE and other organizations, I would intentionally spend at least 10% of your time networking with people that are at a level that you aspire to be at, whether it is in speaking or in profession or just an area you want to accentuate about yourself. There's that saying that iron sharpens iron. You've got to have a network of people that are pushing you to be better, right? So I know I benefited from that, but you don't, that doesn't normally happen unless you are intentionally spending at least, I just make up the number 10% of your time trying to find those individuals that can really get you to that next level. There's a saying that when you work on something, a technical issue, this is difficult, okay? So, but there's a big, greater challenge is if you are controlling a budget, okay? To manage money. But the most difficult task is really managing people. So that's really the most challenging job is to lead. So I think, as a student, I think you need to be involved and trying to observe people like Dave and the other leaders and try to learn what are the keys to not only to manage the technical things or the budget, but managing people. I think that is the highest level of skills that one can gain, but that takes learning and takes observation, takes interest and takes, you know, you have to be motivated to do that. Thank you. Can you share a nugget of wisdom in managing, well, kind of that side of leadership? Managing people? Well, I'll say, you know, one is what I've learned over my time in corporate is you really have to prioritize behaviors and values over skills. And so what I found is I've worked with some really brilliant people over my time, but if they were not getting work done, working with others in a collaborative manner, we're better off without them in the organization. Of course, if they can be coached and developed and et cetera, but I think that cultural fit, the fit with values is probably the most important thing. Skill set is easy to see on a resume. So looking at cultural fit, behavioral fit, value fit, I think is really, really important. One other thing I'd say, it's a little hard for engineers is leadership is messy, okay? People get sick, they have bad days. You don't know what's going on in their life. Maybe something causes them to be a little bit cross, but it has nothing to do with you. You have to have a little bit of a thick skin and realize that leadership is messy, okay? Now having said that, in return for learning that messiness, leadership can be, I don't think there's anything else more rewarding when a team accomplishes something that you set out for and as a team you win. It's way, to me, it's way more important than money or anything else. So remember, leadership is messy because you're dealing with people and remember that if you're successful, there's nothing better. To, maybe if you want to add. I'll share a couple little tips that have helped me during my leadership career. And one was talking about where can you create the greatest synergy? Because you want that one plus one is greater than two. You want that creativity. You want that to flow. And the analogy was one of the places with the highest level of synergy is two people in a foxhole being shot at. Because they have a common goal to stay alive and they need each other to achieve that goal. And so how in the work world do we build foxholes? And bring people together like that? I haven't heard that one before, so thank you for sharing. To go off of what Joe said, talking about being successful in a team environment, talk about a time where you've experienced failure and kind of what you learned from that. I'll go first. I've got a lot of failures I could talk about. I would say one is as a early engineer, engineering gives you the skill set of problem solving. I started my career at a company called UOP who still employs a lot of chemical engineers. And I thought that was a terrific experience because I blew up a lot of stuff unintentionally and learned a lot. But I think it's really about learning from your mistakes and having the environment to be able to fail and learn from those failures and get better. I was really fortunate, especially early in my career whether it was with UOP or CMC, I had that opportunity, that freedom to experiment and fail. You can't fail all the time by the way. You have to be successful more than you fail, but having that opportunity environment to fail and learn from your failures was really, really helpful, especially early in my career. Thank you. In research, I think 99% of the initial phases are failures, 1% of success. So I think the most important thing is to learn from your failures and try to grow from that experience. But own your mistakes, if you make a mistake, really affect others. I think you should take responsibility and take responsibility for what the mistakes are. So, and be honest about the, to others, to your team members. I think the other people would appreciate that. I think you have to be very careful on how you define failure too, okay? A lot of times people define failure to be things that really aren't failures. There are more learning opportunities that if you treat it as a learning opportunity, it's not a failure at all. In fact, it's a basis for future success. We're a very perfectionist oriented society and life is messy. As long as we have the chemical engineers out there on there, there's entropy, okay? And you have to expend work to overcome entropy, okay? And so don't get overly, don't overly generalize what failure is, okay? Real failures are things like if you die, or somebody dies, okay? If you have a bad day and somebody was mean to you, that's not the basis of a failure, okay? So just, there are real failures in life. You can really fail, right? A company can go bankrupt, something that's really important to you, you can not achieve it, okay? But don't make everything a failure, okay? Just because it didn't go the way you wanted it to go. Getting a B in a class sometimes, one of the best classes I've ever had, I got a B in, right? And I learned a lot in that class, even though I didn't get an A. I didn't have too many Bs though, don't anybody think I did? Yeah. Joe made me think of an example that fits with what you said. We were trying to develop a new technology to separate carbon dioxide from natural gas as a solid phase. And it was a paradigm change for industry, challenging, expensive. And as we were promoting this project, doing the research, trying to get management support, my immediate boss said, I will never ever approve this. And it was like, oh, okay. So we went back to the drawing board, he said, you can keep working on it a little bit. And we realized, you know, there's improvements. Technically, we need their improvements in communications that we need and understanding cost benefits, you know, applicability. And ultimately from when we started to completion, ExxonMobil spent $500 million on a commercial demonstration plant. And we waited for my boss to retire, and then we took it up through the next guy with the new and improved plan. Well, so building on that reference to technical versus people side of leadership. Maybe can you share some specific, you know, what are the specific attributes for good technical leadership in a technology industry? Is there something that makes it different from any other kind? I would just say that those that are able to manage any team, there's a gift there that is learned and also I think is a really huge attribute. Those that are able to manage researchers, that's a whole different skill set because the innovation process and the brilliant minds that are required to fuel that often are also some of the more difficult folks to manage. So I think that some of the most brilliant leaders I've met manage teams of researchers. And I'm certainly, I wouldn't consider myself qualified to do that, it's a different skill set. I'm sure the panelists are much better qualified to speak on that. Well, when I think on this question, I think of the qualities of leadership as the same but what's different when you're managing or leading a technical subject or leading technical experts? And I think the technical subject matter and I became a strong advocate of if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. So you need that tangible goal and that, you know, key feedback mechanism to know when you've achieved your goal. And as Dave was referring to, technical experts can be very unique at times in their approaches. And I would say, you know, as a leader, I spent more time coaching, upline communication. You know, the technical work was brilliant but how to communicate that in a way that was, you know, well received was a challenge. Anything else you want to add, Jolyne? Well, it depends, you know, what you define as success. I mean, in academia, technical leadership is very different, I think, than in industry. In industry, you have a payroll to meet, you have stockholders to satisfy. So how you manage risk and how you manage success is very different. So you have to know how people keep score, right? And then you can manage risk. I would say if you're dealing with very highly technical subject matter where there's a lot of uncertainty, you want to basically manage risk by doing some things that you can succeed that are simple and then you swing for the park on some things. And so you have to have a portfolio of ambition when you're in a highly uncertain environment. If you're in a company, it's a little bit different. So I think you have to understand the rules of the environment you're operating in to know how to lead well in that environment. Thank you. I wish I ran a pen for this question, but what advice do you have for current students interested in leadership or currently involved in leadership? My advice is leadership, whether you're currently in a leadership role or aspire to be in a leadership role, you have to continue to keep improving yourself. So even today, and I mentioned at the beginning of my talk, my parents, who are, my dad will be 90 this year, my mom's in her 80s, they are lifelong learners, right? So as a leader, you have to continue improving yourself because if you expect the team that you're leading to improve and strive, they have to see you getting better too, right? Learning new skills, the world is always changing, so picking up new techniques, trying new things, you have to make that intentional choice that you are going to be a lifelong learner of leadership if that's what you aspire to be. So it is a very, I think it's an incomplete lifelong goal to continue to get better. Well, building on what Joe said, I think practice, practice, practice, and be open to failure and learn from that. I often ask students working on what to fund their resume, think of something really challenging or hard that you did. How did you learn? How did you do it? Or what are you most proud of? There are a couple of key skills that I find I talk about quite a bit. One is management of change, because we're always managing change. If it's working fine, you're not gonna be working on it, you're either fixing a problem or making it better. Influencing without authority is a lifelong skill, not just when you're the new hire, and you realize you have no authority, but you're always influencing broader, than those around you. And just being able to be effective with a wide range of people, being able to be sensitive, seek first to understand and then be understood, good listener, modifying your style, how to be effective regardless of who you're with, where you are in the world, and what situation you're in. There's one that I always talk about, and anybody who knows me will understand why I always talk about it, but I think a very important part of leadership is never buy into negativity. Even if you're in a losing proposition, if your team's getting beat 60 to nothing, don't give in to negativism, okay? If you have to lead, people like to follow positive. No matter what they say, no matter how they act, people respond to positive leadership, and they respond less to negative leadership, okay? Especially in the cultures that you're likely to operate in, you know, as an engineer. So however you do it, whatever personality you bring to a problem, try to buy into being more positive, especially if you have to lead people, okay? Lead people by positive example, it works. Very well said. I just want to add that if possible, try not to say or do unkind things to other people. I think that's a good golden rule of behavior. So I've observed, I've known Dave's father and parents for over 30 years, and what I observed was that they're always very kind, very calm, never said one unkind word to anybody, and always compassionate and helpful, and I think those are the good traits of being good leaders. I admire those people and adore those people. Thank you, and we'd like to open for questions from audiences. I mean, go talk, by the way, I enjoy that a lot. So I think it was one of the first questions you answered about you were talking about your company, and you said you were able to double revenue in five years. So I'm interested in that. For a manufacturing company, what did you do, okay, to double revenue in five years? I mean, for a manufacturing company, I'm just curious. What did you do? So we were, as I look back on that journey, we had always been a technical leader in the field of CMP, but we felt that there could be some things holding us back. One thing that we did is we reorganized the company to be more of a GM model for this, I'm sorry, we'll get into a little bit more specifics then, but we used to be very matrix, we went to a GM model because I like that clear accountability for things like revenue growth. So that was very helpful for us. We set very simple metrics about what we wanted to accomplish, and we over-communicated those to the organization. So we set a goal to grow at 8% every year, which gets you to roughly double. We grew much more than that, and we over-communicated that to the organization. And then the other thing that we did is that we really focused on our company culture. And this was a long-term investment. This wasn't next year we'll get a return. We started measuring our company culture, and then talking about the attributes that could be holding us back. One thing that we learned is we were a really risk-averse culture. And that's sometimes neither good or bad. If you're a bank, you want a really risk-averse culture. But as a technology company, operating in a risk-averse culture might have been holding back some of those R&D or commercial risks that could take us to another level. So we wanted to, as a leadership team, accentuate informed risk-taking as one attribute that might help us drive revenue growth. And in fact, over time, we were able to measure our culture, and culture's a measure of how things are done, regardless of whether I'm here or the management team is there. And we were really encouraged to see that risk-taking was really, really changed over the five or 10 years that we were measuring it. And I think that, as I look back, was one of the key things that allowed us to unlock our own talent as a company and grow our top-line revenue so significantly. We also caught a great wave in the semiconductor industry, so you have to be lucky as well. But I think those changes that we made also contributed to our success. Wonderful. You talked a lot about the important traits of leadership, golden rule, how to develop as a leader. One thing I'm very interested in, though, is you're continually improving, you touched on that before, and how, as a leader, can you best learn from other leaders? How can you collaborate on a level where you might not be the one in charge, but you're taking direction? Yeah, so for me, and I think it was Joe that mentioned, even as CEO, you have a boss. I think I had seven board members, so I had seven bosses, plus the shareholders, right? You always have a boss in this world, but I think besides that, I think if I put it to a practical level, today in the day and age that we live in, I find it incredibly accessible to hear and learn from some of the foremost leaders in the world. So one thing I did during the two-hour drive-up is made a bunch of phone calls, but listened to a bunch of my favorite podcasts on leadership, people that interview leaders and learn from leaders, that's free. That's amazing to me, that you can pick that up any time you want, as long as you make the time for it. Reading, obviously, is another opportunity to do that, but I think in this day and age, it's so accessible. You could take a master class. You surround yourself with the right network. Tons of opportunity to do that, even virtually. So I think it's all about having that motivation to look at what is available to me in my current situation and find things that fit into your schedule or your interest. Hello, sorry. Hello, I would like to ask how was your, how did the location, where you work have an effect on your experience? Right, so my location, I've lived in Asia for the last 15 years. I was 10 years or so in Shanghai and the last three or four in Singapore. A bit unique in that we're a US public company. For our business, it fit well and turned out later to be an unexpected benefit for us. And I'll talk about that in a little bit. But for me, I started as head of Asia, semiconductors as we saw today from the talk. There's a lot of production that happens in Asia and we had half our employee base in Asia. So for me, starting in Asia was really important. And when I had the opportunity to become CEO, my only request to the board was I was, I wanted to continue to be based in Asia. I would travel a ton, but I wanted to be based in Asia so I could be close to our customers, close to our team there. And that was the fastest growing part of our business. The unintended benefit that we found was because of that, and part of that's just the way I lead is, I'm not the one to make all the decisions. So I'm not in headquarters every day. We have a very dispersed leadership team. We didn't see the pandemic coming, but then everyone got locked down and we had to operate virtually. And I felt like unintended, but we had a benefit of operating that way sort of already so that people weren't waiting for me to make all the decisions. They were empowered to make the decisions for them and their team were ready. And we were already operating it as a dispersed team to begin with. So my location I think has been a benefit for us for me in my career, but obviously every situation is different. Extending that question to other panelists, do you want to chime in on the location? Yeah, I'm gonna have compliment what David said about location. And I'm gonna be a little contrarian because you as students have grown up, partly at Peer Purdue with the pandemic and we do a lot of things virtually and that's great. Our economy can still operate even during a pandemic, but since leadership depends on people, people depend on relationships. One aspect of location, if you want to be a great leader and you have a dispersed organization is you better be willing to travel. You better be willing to meet people in person. Virtual is fine once you know people, but if you try to do all your business virtually from one location, you're not gonna be very successful. You've got to be willing to travel if you have a dispersed organization. I bet you you're a frequent flyer big time. More that I care to admit. And I'll just double click on that for a second is I would not have been able to do that as if I was hired in as CEO and then just went virtual. I spent 15 years at headquarters and so I had those relationships, that credibility. So when I moved to Asia, those sort of went along with me. And then along the way, I travel a lot. So I was probably on a plane back to the US every month, much to the dismay of my family, but that was sort of the trade off of the location. Hi, thanks for the discussion so far. I guess this is kind of an extension to previous question I was asked about listening to leaders. How do you know from all of your experiences as leaders, how do you know when it's time to change? How do you know, say, when to take criticism from others, when to change your behaviors, your habits to better yourselves, better your groups? How do you approach that? That's a great question. I'll give it a try here. You should always be a good listener. Take criticism sounds a little harsh and always remembering that everything comes from that individual's perspective. Whoever may be giving you feedback. So there is a truth in there based on their perspective if you kind of think of it that way. And I always say feedback is a gift. Remember that because it's kind of hard to take a lot of times. But then when to change, I would say if you're thinking about you're in a certain job, when should you change? When you're not learning anymore, when you're just repeating what you've been doing over and over. So just that continual growth in learning I think is what brings a lot of magic to our career. One thing that helped me early in my career was on feedback is assume good intent. Assume good intent for people that are giving you feedback. And as Beth mentioned, try to find that kernel of that feedback that is valuable to you and help you get better about it. So that helped me early in my career. You want to change if you can every day. The world is moving very quickly. Their industry is driving it. Electronics are driving it. The double E's are driving it. So you have to be willing to change every day. And you have to make sure that the people around you feel safe telling you the truth. You're gonna find the truth out eventually. You should find that out as fast as you can. And the people around you have a different perspective. And they can be very valuable to helping you change and get better all the time. This is kind of a question for everyone, but David earlier you mentioned how you found in your, when you were kind of evaluating your company culture, was that you had a very risk averse culture. So I was wondering, what are sort of methods or avenues you would use to change the culture of an organization or company? Yeah, great. And it's a topic I have a lot of passion around. And as I think back again, one of the keys to our success. It takes time, right? So again, culture is, the way I define it is, how business is conducted without the rules and mission statements. It's actually how business is done, right? So how employees and how the team members think it's the right way to conduct business. And that's how we thought about the company culture. So how we want about it is, again, we're engineers at heart too. So we wanna measure everything, right? So we measured the culture on a series of seven attributes and then as a management team, we went away and said, okay, what are the attributes that could be hindering us? So risk aversion was one. And then we communicated to the entire organization, here's where we are today. And here's a few attributes that we would like to change about our company culture that we think could benefit our company performance, where we all aspire to go and it'll be great for all of us as shareholders of the company, right? And so that's where the journey started. And then we have to, as leaders, role model that behavior. So if we're trying to talk about informed risk-taking, well, we have to model that as a leadership team. Are we taking chances on how we do promotions or are we taking chances on intelligent acquisitions for the company? We've made several acquisitions over time. And then we communicated that in a way that was consistent with what we are trying to emphasize as a culture. And then we kept measuring, right? So we wanna measure and see what changes were made over time. And again, going back to the data, which was really quite encouraging, risk aversion was the number two highest attribute of our culture. By the end of my time as CEO, it was the bottom. As measured by our organization. So that means that you can actually intentionally change a culture over time. And we thought that was important to our overall performance too. But take communication, role modeling and reinforcement. And again, communication, ton of communication. Other thoughts on changing culture? That's a powerful example. I would just say what he said aligns exactly with my experiences in history. And there's a good kind of quotable quote. If you're gonna try to institute a change in an organization that's inconsistent with the culture, you will fail. Because the culture always wins. So you have to change the change or change the culture. Which you demonstrate so well. So I was thinking about like you're all very, well, I guess very comfortable in a leadership position at this point. But is there like a starting point or is there like a graduate process that makes you realize, oh, I really need to pick up leadership? Or was it like, oh, I just really like to forge good relations with people? How does that start and how does that grow? Great question. You have to be happy in what you do. I mean, first of all, you have to make a living, right? But you have to decide whether you want to be in a leadership position. And what kind of leadership position? Do you wanna do a technical leadership position? Do you wanna run a company? Yeah, you're going to get many opportunities in your life to lead. You have to decide when you want to lead. You don't always have to lead either. Sometimes you can be a good teammate, right? So I think first of all, as a student and as a young professional, you have to decide what can I be happy doing? What do I like? And then decide whether leadership is part of that, okay? You don't have to be the CEO of a company to be happy, right? You can be a tremendous contributor to the society, not being a formal leader. I always ask the question of my students, who's more important? You can pick your own historical figure, but is that historical figure more important than their mother, right? They both make contributions, right? The historical figure is famous, but their mother, they wouldn't be there without their mother, right? So not everybody has to be a formal leader. You can lead a lot of ways, right? My wife does an enormous amount of leadership, and she does formal leadership too, but she exerts an awful lot of leadership in our home, okay? Well, I think leadership is a lifelong task. You can lead your family, your teammate, your friends, your group, your community, your party, or your nation. So this is, there's no end or no beginning or end. I think we're always leading somebody. So I think we discuss all kinds of qualities to be a good leader. I think you heard from all this good advice. So my feeling is you start with yourself, to be a good person, to be fair, to be honest, and to be open, to have good communication skills, and to have credibility, you inspire trust. I think those are the fundamental qualities. Then you can lead a group of people, but it doesn't matter if it's a small group or a large group. I think you get a satisfaction of being helping other people. I think you can define your roles, your contributions, small-scale or large-scale, it's up to you, and you can be a leader anywhere at any time. I think there's no beginning or end. I think you should start maybe now, as early as possible, to think about what are you leading. You can be a leader in many aspects and different ways. I would just add, a couple of things that have helped me along the way in my leadership journey is finding a way to really be authentic, of understanding who you are is important because the way I lead is gonna be different than how Beth or Joe or Linda leads, but I feel like it's who I am, and people want to see that authenticity as a leader. It's like instant, you can feel that whether people are being authentic or not, and so over time, that's something that I learned is if I share more about myself, that will help people get to know me and help me feel more comfortable, too. So you might notice in the beginning of my talk, I shared a picture of my whole family as a way of being authentic to who I am and may make people feel a little bit more identifiable with me. Another thing I would say is I recognize very early on that I'm an introvert, surprise, surprise, as an engineer, right? So understanding you're an introvert but you still have interest in leadership is not incompatible, right? You just have to understand what makes you, classic test case of an introvert is, do you get energized by meeting a lot of new people or does it take your energy away or something like that? So I am very conscious of where I am in that spectrum, and so even though I'm an introvert, I love to learn and try to be a better leader. So being authentic and knowing who you are in that journey I think is important. I just toss out when you say where do you start? There's a blog I really like called Leadership Freak and it just comes out every day, couple hundred words and hits different topics we've all mentioned up here. And one of my favorite books I read was The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Certainly is an American culture Seven Habits I will say but learned a lot from that. There's one other thing I like to share that I call the leadership secret weapon and I'd love to hear what the other panelists say about the secret weapon but if you have to lead people in difficult situations, figure out a way to have meals with them, have a breakfast with them, a lunch with them, a dinner with them. People tend to be more comfortable sharing, people tend to feel you're more authentic, people tend to think you're more of a teammate if you're willing to eat with them. It's a human thing, okay? I think it goes back thousands or millions of years, okay? So one of the things that President Jiski once asked me, how should we reward you? I said, well pay me for every calorie I eat on behalf of Purdue. I love that, I love that. As part of Discovery Park, when we formed Discovery Park, I counted with my wife one time, I ate three million calories on behalf of Purdue. So I said, don't pay me my salary, just pay me a dollar for every calorie I eat for Purdue. And that was an important part of that leadership. I'd like to know what you guys. That's a great skill set. I would always advise that as well if you can share a meal with somebody. It's a great way to get to know people and you also could see how they treat others. So it's kind of one of my favorite litmus tests is going out to eat with somebody. I'm so surprised that Joe is so thin still. I'm about three hundred pounds. So thank you so much. Amazing conversation. Thank you to our panelists and thank you for really excellent questions. Thank you, Elina. Thank you, Elina. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.