Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan is prioritizing ‘profits and purpose’

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Brian Moynihan: Every decision we have to make as a leader, you have to think about who’s going to do it, not what the decision is, because decisions are relatively easy. So if you put all that together, I think you form your leadership style over time, but inherently, you have to have a nature that you’re willing to step in.

Diane Brady: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the people…

Kristin Stoller: … and trends…

Brady: …that are shaping the future of business. I’m Diane Brady.

Stoller: And I’m Kristin Stoller. 

Brady: And this week, we are speaking with one of the more enigmatic leaders I’ve ever met, Brian Moynihan of Bank of America.

Stoller: Yes, iconic brand, iconic bank. And Diane, you got to spend some time with him in Davos earlier this year, right?

Brady: I’ve spent periods of time with him over the years. Yes, Davos was particularly high profile because, of course, he was on stage with other CEOs when President Trump called him out, basically.

Stoller: Yeah for political debanking, and you were in the room right?

Brady: And in quintessential Brian Moynihan style, he just sat there and quietly, stoically, took it. Didn’t say a word. And I think that’s very much his style. He is not a headline grabber. He is somebody who talks when he has to, in terms of, you know, certainly speaking about the economy, the bank. I mean, he’s been in the role 15 years.

Stoller: Yeah, of course. People compare him to Jamie Dimon, that’s his peer. But he’s vastly, vastly different.

Brady: That’s right.

Stoller: And they’ve both been in their seats, for a very long time. But it must be hard.

Brady: Well, he lived through the banking crisis. I think that it’s the second-largest bank by assets. I do think part of what distinguishes Bank of America, for me, is it’s always had an excellent internship program, and it’s got what I see as very much an academy company culture in terms of developing leaders. So I’d say he’s very internally focused. Obviously, it’s a job that, by nature, has to be external. He happens to also live in Boston for a bank that’s based in Charlotte. That’s interesting.

Stoller: He clearly cares about education, not just in the internship program, but he’s the Chancellor of Brown University.

Brady: What a time to be chancellor. The least Ivy of the Ivies, as they say,

Stoller: But the most fun as someone who loves Providence and was just there exploring and having a great time. But the funding freeze must be tough on him, so I’m curious, how he would feel about it.

Brady: And the partisanship and obviously navigating geopolitics right now. You know, banks tend to be in the crosshairs. You know, when people get angry about money, they talk about fat cats and the banks, and it’s always a source of both stress and it’s always something that’s in the headlines. And I’m sure Brian will have a lot to say, but definitely somebody who is 15 years into the job, I think will have a lot to say about leadership. And honestly, Kristin, I’m just curious to see the world through his eyes.

Stoller: I am, too, and you and I met him at drinks last night. We were on the rooftop at the Bank of America building.

Brady: “Ask me anything, Diane.” That was his instructions. And indeed, we will.

Stoller: We will, absolutely. Well, looking forward to our conversation with Brian after the break.

Brady: We’re entering an era of innovation unlike any we’ve witnessed before. You all see it: The pace of technological change is staggering, and it’s challenging for any leader to keep up. We spoke with Jason Girzadas, the CEO of Deloitte US, which is the longtime sponsor of this podcast. Here’s his advice for leaders on how to navigate this new world.

Jason Girzadas: There’s probably nothing more important for CEOs, no matter what organization they’re leading, to really be thinking about technology’s impact on our workforce. It’s really a function of, how do you think about technology in concert with your workforce? We at Deloitte talk about it as the age of width, the age of technology with your workforce, and really embracing this idea of the codependency of technology and workforce. We’re also an environment of a very tight workforce where there’s a scarcity of top talent. That’s going to be the challenge for organizations, to demonstrate to top talent that they can grow and evolve the work that they do, working with leading technology in a very aligned way. Finally, it’s what top talent really wants in an organization, is to learn and grow and to be part of an organization that’s supportive of them actually embedding technology in their work.

Brady: Brian, thanks for joining us. And I have to say, being 15 years into this role, one of the questions that always comes to mind is, what advice would you give to yourself in year one that you think would be instructive?

Moynihan: Well, I think that’s a little bit different, because in year one, we were in the middle of coming out of financial crisis. So the advice I’d give….

Brady: …stay strong?

Moynihan: Stay strong. Keep calm. Carry on, all that stuff. But when you’re now to a different place, the advice would be different. So if I had been in that place when I started, it would be different advice. But I think, as you look back, I think the advice is always just to remember that it’s a team that’s going to make you successful, and make sure you focus on them. I think we did. I think we could even focus even more on it, and make sure you put the right people, make the right people decisions quickly, so you get a team that is focused on what’s to come next. What we went through. And I think I once asked Jack Welch about replacing people, and he said, “You got to switch people out right away.” And I said, “did you do that? “Because, of course not. But I tell everybody—he meant in terms of your management team. So I think we all look back and said, “Jeez, some of the stuff I did a year or two in, if I’d done earlier, I’d have been a different place.” So the advice I give myself is to move faster, and we move pretty fast, but you always have to take it from, as a person who studied history, from where you were, not where you look back [from], because it’s easy to second-guess, or to say something better and but the team was the key.

Stoller: Was there ever a moment that you considered quitting, stopping, walking away from the job?

Moynihan: No, not at all. I never did. Because what was fascinating when I took over, and we went through a search that was public, and who was going to get the job, and all that stuff just not what you should do and not what we’ll do for my successor, ultimately. We went through—we were being bandied about. I testified in Congress before I was CEO, during the search. I was told by the head of the House Investigation Committee [that] there’s no way you should be CEO of this company.

Stoller: Why?

Moynihan: Oh, because he didn’t think our company is any good, and I was any good. So that person, a couple years later, became a good colleague in a way, in this work we did with him in the mortgage crisis.

Brady: So you’re a forgiving man. That’s something we discovered here.

Moynihan: Well, forgiving might be too strong, but I don’t hold grudges, except as an Irish person for 100 years, but, you know, the reality is, I think, if you think about how we came through it now, the search and then taking over, you know, I think, never would I quit. Because when you looked and saw and could see the client base, the quality of the businesses we had, the opportunity we had to take, inherently a company was put together by acquisitions and turn it into an organic growth engine. And then you looked out, and we had 300,000 people around at the time, and their livelihoods depended on us getting this right, and 60 million clients and all that stuff too. But those people were their too. You’re looking at them every day, and you’re saying, you know, they’re depending on you to make the right decisions. And I just never thought, I would have thought that quitting was giving up at a time when we had so much we could do.

Stoller: You mentioned that you’re Irish. I know you grew up in a big family. Was it—you’re one of eight siblings? Is that correct?

Moynihan: Eight total kids.

Stoller: Eight total kids. What was it like to grow up in a family like that, and was there ever any expectation that you become CEO of Bank of America?

Moynihan: I mean, our family was, my dad was a scientist. My mother was very bright, but got married at 18, you know, went back to work…

Brady: As one does…

Moynihan: …at 55 years old, and started working again, and rose in the insurance industry as a salesperson. And so, you know, they were all different. There was much more science and much more computer scientists, biologists, some teachers, an architect was kind of closest thing to a non-scientist we had. And then I came along, and I always wanted to be a lawyer, because my grandfather was a lawyer, and so I went to law school. And I came up when F Lee Bailey was the show, Perry Mason was on TV, and you wanted to be a criminal lawyer, you wanted to defend people. Then I got to law school, and I ended up in corporate law, but that’s long story, but you know, you kind of grew up in that idea, so I never thought about business. Honestly, it was not my household, as my dad worked for DuPont, which is a big company, but he was a research scientist, and he spent his whole career researching plastics, and my mother went to work for an insurance company, but that was far after. I was not CEO yet, but I was deep into my business career, so I didn’t really have anybody to pattern myself after at home, not because they weren’t great people, it’s just they did different things.

Stoller: …made you want to take the switch into business from law?

Moynihan: Well, I was lucky. This is—Jim Collins has a concept of return on luck. And everybody gets lots of chances to be lucky. The question is, do you have a return on—I got lucky. I had a fellow named Terry Murray, ran a company called Fleet, and he went, I was working for a law firm and doing transactions for him when they were starting to roll up banking. And we did a very complex one called the Bank of New England, where Fleet bought the Bank of New England, and I helped work on that. And Terry, after that, said to the general counsel, bring him in. He said to the General Counsel, he was one of the brightest people I know. Frankly, he’s too smart to be a lawyer…

Brady: …sounds like one of those phrases like, “first thing we do is kill all the lawyers.” You don’t want that.

Moynihan: So Terry was a great guy. He’s still alive and does a great thing. I still talk to him once a while, but he, he brought me in, knowing I would never stay. I went in the legal department for like, 90 days, and I started on a project about re engineering the company. And this was when Chandrika Tandon, and if you’ve know Tandon Associates, she started to reengineer companies and champion books were out. And so I started with that, and I got lucky. I just made the decision, I was married and had one kid and a second one on the way. And, you know, my wife supported me. We just made the decision. I had never operated a business. I was a partner at a law firm. I was making some money, and I said, this looks like it’s interesting. And then the inverse, that is, I could look down the hallway in the law partnership and see myself every five years till 80 years old at 30.

Brady: Which gets a bit depressing, doesn’t it?

Moynihan: Depressing wouldn’t be the word. Constraining.

Brady: Constraining. Well, I mean, one of the things that—was there a moment where you realized that, that you’re good at this? That you would be a good leader? Having not started out or had role models where you thought—because there’s many types of CEOs and you’re not like some of your peers. I don’t turn around every two minutes and hear you commenting on random things in the environment. You lead very differently.

Moynihan: Yeah. I mean, I think if you participate in activities, sports or other things, you know, leadership and captains of teams and stuff like that. So, you know, leadership comes at you, and how you respond to it is is inherent and sort of inherent in people. And you can’t really teach people to lead, because what you do when you teach them to lead, you teach them away from the style that they are. And so our company, and how we run our company, is just to go out there and execute and just do the work and get it done. And that reflects all of the management team, not just myself, and how we think about it. We put the company above all else. We put the teammates above all else. We put the customer above all else. And we go out there and drive it. That you learned, you know, from being on, you know, sports teams or being part of a law firm where the partners, you know, had to make the decisions, and or being part of running a part of the company, and I think I’ve always—that’s one thing. The second thing is the approach I’ve always taken to leading this company is from out-in. I learned that from a teammate a long time ago who, you know, we were in some intellectual discussion, and she finally looked at the person, sort of laying out these grand ideas how we’re going to redo this business, and said, “what would it feel like if you actually had to do this?” And this woman had grown up as a teller all the way to run a private bank, so she knew what it felt like to start at the point of attack. And I listened to that, it suddenly hit me that every decision we have to make as a leader, you have to think about who’s going to do it, not what the decision is, because decisions are relatively easy. So if you put all that together, I think you form your leadership style over time, but inherently have to have a nature that you’re willing to step in and lead in a time of good times and bad times. And you know you’re willing to take that responsibility. And some people wear that responsibility like a comfortable sweater, and some people could never get into it.

Brady: Is it a comfortable sweater for you?

Moynihan: I would never—that’d be your judgment, or other people’s.

Brady: For those who are just listening, Brian’s here in a suit and tie. But that’s not, that’s not in any way an analogy.

Moynihan: It’s a comfortable sweater for me.

Brady: It’s a comfortable sweater for you. It’s one you wear a lot. But I do want to ask a bit, since we’re in tough times now, and you mentioned, of course, the financial crisis, where you’re going to Washington, I was in Davos—you’re very calm under pressure, is that the right way to put it? What do you think about in those moments where all eyes are on you? The world is not as we would have predicted it to be. What’s going through your mind?

Moynihan: One thing that you look for in people and you try to be, is an energy giver, not an energy taker. And so when you’re in a situation of pressure, how do you give people energy? Well, being calm and showing them a way to do something as a team and as a group—that enables you to make progress. A lot of nervous energy about, oh, woe is me, and the world’s not perfect, and somebody said something or this, you know, that’s—and a second: so one part about leadership is the calmness, and it’s interesting as we went through ups and downs over the years, you had people who would sort of equate you to people who were far more consequential, but in the calmness, you had to keep calm and carry on, all that stuff. The second, you have to stay informed, but you have to learn, and you have to be mindful that all people aren’t going to be as calm as you want. You’re looking for people who can be calm at a point of attack. Because at the end of the day, that’s what when you think about these broader organizations with 200,000, 300,000 teammates, 210,000 now, and they look to you, they don’t want to see persons going to panic. Now, you may have every nervous energy behind you. May wonder in the middle of night, what the heck is going on. But if you show that and you let it eat at you, you can’t give energy. And so when I look for leaders, and I hopefully live to this, when I look for leaders, I look for people who give energy. A woman named Anne Finucane worked with me and for me for a number of years. And she always, you know, would come up and say that person is just taking energy out of the room.

Brady: How do you give energy? Is it just—honestly, I mean, promise, we’ll get to the business environment, and you can wax eloquent on so much that’s happening there. But what, what are the—is it just a native personality thing? Or do you look for certain tactics people have in these situations?

Moynihan: It’s problem solving. It’s, let’s focus forward. Let’s keep, let’s keep figuring out what to do next. Let’s not whine or be constrained or think about what went wrong, and woe is me, or it’s not fair. Look, we had stuff happen to our company that, you know, over the years, litigation, this and that, you could always, you know, say it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right and it wasn’t but that didn’t do you any good. That wasn’t going to get you out of it. Yeah, that would maybe make you feel good, but—and so as people look at the situation, even in a calm situation, and, you know, the relative calm we’re now seeing, how do we grow the businesses? They’re looking and saying, I’ve got to go out and do this and become about how they execute and process and and discipline, as opposed to, let’s just go out and do a lot of activity and see if it sticks to the ribs. And so, you know, that’s that’s thing. And the things you can tell that come out in times of change, stress, whatever the words are, that you can see pretty quickly. So during the pandemic, I learned about people during the regional meltdown, you learn about people. You see how they behave when the blank hits the fan, and if they behave a way, they can keep going. If they behave a different way, you know that they’re going to have a harder and harder time leading less and less people who directly know them or directly depend on them, or directly influence. And that’s, that’s really—and then the second is to have perspective. So when people say all this is, you have tough times

Brady: Worst ever, and you’re like, wait a second.

Moynihan: Wait a second. You know, hey, that election in 1800 was pretty tough and our company was around then, they wrote a great play about it called Hamilton. People shot each other. People were brought up for insurrection, treason. And I said, so politics have been difficult. Our company’s been there. And so you have to have that perspective that the institution that we represent, and we’re here a nanosecond in the life cycle of this company or this world or this, you know, you know our job is to improve it. But if you panic and say, Oh, this is so different, and whine—that’s lack of leadership in my mind.

Stoller: I very much appreciate the theater reference there, Brian, because I’m a big theater fan, big Hamilton fan, and so I’m gonna throw another theater reference at you, which is, even though you’re such a calm person, I’m sure you’re in such a high-pressure job, you must get stage fright or nerves at some point. What do you do to calm those down. Is it meditation? Is it breath work? Well, how do you fix that?

Moynihan: Well, the funny thing is, you go back to your first year versus now, a lot of what I’ve done, you’ve done a lot. So I can remember, there’s, like, the first earnings call I had, you know, you’re up there, and all sudden, you’re gonna describe it. It’s complex and this, and you’re, you know. Now it’s the 63rd I think this quarter. So it’s—you kind of know what to say, what’s going to happen and how it’s going to play out. But there’s always surprises, and you always have to think about it from the perspective of the people that moment, because it’s not the same people. But you learn from your experience. I think the antidote to anything is preparation. And so, leave aside—I’m not a professional athlete, but you watch the great professional athletes and, when you watch them, what happens is, when times get tough, they slow the world down. And some do it by techniques. You can see the breathing techniques, but others just do it by just how they mentally focus and and I think you know,so it’s the same business there. Believe me, behind the scenes you can be worried about everything. You can think, “we screwed this up. What are we going to do?” But when you go to execute, you have to have the calmness of thought. And then when you’re on the stage, you knowm experience helps. That’s different. But it’s just, honestly, if you believe in what you’re saying, and you should only say what you believe in honestly, and if you’re confident in your message, you just, you deliver. And you know, but are you nervous every time? Yeah, because it’s, it’s your chance to have impact on something that you got to think about.

Stoller: Speaking of screwups, was there ever any time as a leader that you were totally wrong about something? And what happened or what changed your mind?

Moynihan: We’ve made decisions that had implications that we didn’t think—so, a long time ago, we put a fee about, that we’re trying to raise revenue, and they’d done stuff to limit fees. So we put in a $5 debit card. You go back and look at it, it’s famous. The President of the United States, it was Obama. President Obama, at the time, stood up in front of the line and said, you know, the press lines, and said, you know, these banks don’t have a right to make money. And it was all about us. I was going on Larry Kudlow live, like, 10 minutes later. So of course, Larry, boom, President Obama just said this. You’re like, “Okay, what do I do when the President United States says we don’t have a right to make money?” And he’s dead wrong. We have a right to make money. That’s what capitalism is. And they just didn’t like to—you know, so it was this kind of odd thing, and so, you know, but the decision didn’t play well. We’ve reversed. It taught us a lesson about really making decisions from the out-in versus not. So you have something like that. There’s other cases like that. They would not be as a momentous as, you know, a lot of the rest of the world says [unintelligible] but the obvious is, you know, when you got the President of the United States commenting on your consumer strategy…

Brady: …or your partisanship, then you’re like, Oh, I’ve seen this before. Just stay calm and carry on…

Moynihan: …but that’s, so there are a lot of decisions you wish you made differently, but you got to also be careful about—you got to learn from the decision you made that didn’t go the way you said. It’s not necessarily that it was a bad decision. People take risk and we make mistakes and we eat things and, but what you don’t want is an air of a lack of intensity, customer focus, knowledge stuff. If we make a bad business judgment, we get paid to make judgments. They’re not all going to be perfect. So your goal is to get people to understand that difference. So when somebody makes a mistake, as long as an air of commission. In other words, they did the work and did the work and did it and made us a pair of omission. They didn’t do the work and just, you know, [unintelligible]. That’s what drives you crazy. If they did all the work and they said, We’re going to do this, and they do it, it doesn’t quite work. Well, that’s, that’s we get paid for.

Brady: You know, one of the things that always strikes me about banking is, let’s take it from the consumer perspective, is, I think the average consumer holds their bank account for like, 19 years. I mean, it’s hard to dislodge us once you have us. You know, inertia is a powerful force, right? So does that feel like sort of the calm part of the business? And I’m just curious about the mix, because then you get, you mentioned the financial crisis. That was a time where all of a sudden we looked at banks and said, Wait a second, I thought these were low-risk institutions. How do you think about it now when we’re talking about deregulation and obviously technology having an impact.

Moynihan: So if you think about the financial crisis, the piece that gets a little lost in the dialogue is that you had banks, regulated banks, ourselves, JPMorgan, Citibank, and then you had a bunch of institutions, which are now banks, but weren’t then, that caused some of the press, and we weren’t perfect on our side either.

Brady: Primes with mold and max? I’m just kidding.

Moynihan: And so, you know. So the reality is, is is what came out of the financial crisis. The one good idea is, they pushed everybody under the tent and brought a set of capital rules. So the capital ratios, you know, on Lehman, of those institutions were brilliant under the threat. Now, we did some interesting things and caused stress and that. But, you know, but I think if you look at the thing, that’s the biggest thing that came out of the financial crisis: one is it took the arena of the people who are core to the economy to help drive financial services, etcetera, put them under the tent. We have gotten away from that a little bit. We let more stuff drift out since then. And so the danger I have now is they regulate by charter again, which we admitted was a mistake in 2005, 2006, and 2007, leading up to the financial crisis, we regulated by a securities firm is regulated by the SEC this even if we did the same activity. And so that we’ve got to make sure we don’t repeat the mistakes fast if you, if you take a deposit or make a loan your bank, and so put you under the same,

Brady: So we hand you a wand. What would you change right now? Because certainly, again, when I talk to bankers, the level of regulation at one point—just like multiple layers, multiple jurisdictions.

Moynihan: So what happens is, if you look back and say, all the rules, this one was developed because somebody didn’t like that, and somebody didn’t like that, and somebody didn’t like that, and somebody didn’t like that. If you add them all up, you say they don’t make sense and are in conflict with each other. There’s parts of Dodd-Frank that actually, literally, contradict other parts of it that had never been straightened out. So the question is, you know, 10 to 15 years later, the best things that came out is the stress testing. Because what that does is prove to society writ large, that we as institutions don’t have risk, that they can’t be tested by a third party every year. And that happens here and around the world, that it helps. The second thing that came out is the base cap rules, and so requiring us to have that, have they gone too far? Yeah, they need to swing back. But the base capital rules are fine. The third thing is sort of the liquidity regime, and the idea the FDIC protection isn’t there for the depositors, and frankly, it’s get everybody in FDIC protected accounts for the transaction accounts. That’s a good idea. And the fourth thing is that we pay for that, so there’s a much better understanding that the industry actually is self-insured with the government wrap in front of us. That then allows them to actually have a real dialogue about what we see they should do, as opposed to, we’re from the government, you’re betting our money. That dialogue is starting to flush through, because it was dead wrong before. Convenient, but dead wrong. The reality is, the FDIC is basically funded by the industry. Silicon Valley, First Republic, $2.8 billion we paid into that failure set. $2.8 billion and so, I’d like that we didn’t pay, but we paid $2.8 billion of our share of capital. So we have a high interest in getting this right. But those are the good things. What happened is the pendulum just kept swinging, and some of the stuff have adverse impacts or aren’t consistent. We’re saying just let us rationalize, by the way, we have the risk. In other words, when those banks go down, it’s us that has to pay for it. So, listen to us, and that’s where we hopefully can get a dialogue going with the current administration and get that back in the middle. It doesn’t do us any good to have it swing back and forth. Too hard to operate. You’re trying to do you know 10s of 1000s of business customers and millions of consumer customers, and 137 countries to business, 60 places you have people, you know, across the world. You want it to be as calm as it can be.

Stoller: What is your interaction with the current administration like? I think I read an article recently that you and your peers are really struggling to chat with the current administration. Is that the case, or how has it been?

Moynihan: We work with the administration, with the people that you know, relevant in our industry, so the [unintelligible] Secretary of the Treasury and Treasurers and the various economic things. Because when we talk to the administration, some about policies—so the Fed and the OCC and, you know, the FDIC and the Consumer Bureau and the people and the colleagues in Congress that work on it that we’re all talking to. You know, at the end of the day, the issues of the moment are a lot less about us, but they ask a lot of information about us. How do we think? You know, our teammates, especially in Canada’s Browning platinum research team will help provide advice on how tariff regime might work or not work. And so there’s a lot that goes on and our teammates in the treasury borrowing area, you know, talk to them about how the markets are doing. So we have a lot of teammates talking to them. But, you know, our, a lot of our interface to administration for regulation really comes through the regulators, not necessarily the centralized administration.

Brady: You know, when I talk to people about AI, it’s often, of course, we’re all in on AI. We’re doing agents, etc. But I was talking to somebody yesterday, CEO, he has a safe word for his staff and a different one for his kids, because he wants to know that when they get a phone call from him, it’s actually him. And I keep waiting for the fake earnings call where you know some arbitrage person comes in. How do you think about it from a security point of view? Because, again, the banking industry usually is more conservative to take on social media and the like, for many different reasons. How are you thinking about it?

Moynihan: So this is the time we tell them that we’re all avatars, right?

Brady: We’re all avatars.

Stoller: We’re all our digital selves, right Diane?

Brady: I was just interviewing my digital self, and she had no sense of humor and seemed a bit superficial, but other than that.

Moynihan: So you’re pointing out there are a lot of pieces involved, but I think—so if you go just to cybersecurity, and our colleague, Chris Fader and team under ditch and Craig Felick, who runs the infrastructure. And they work together. We spend a lot of money working the security, but it’s also how you decide to interface to the thing. So when the new large language models came out and people said, well, just bring them in and operate, the problem is they are, they’re curious people, so they’re going to suck all the information out of your system. And we could see right away that some of the stuff we saw in there, we guessed, was not intended to be in there. In other words, it was being pulled out when people put it on their computer. And so, instantaneously, a lot of the big banks, including ourselves, said…

Brady: …brought it in and took it out?

Moynihan: We won’t allow our teammates to load this down. And everybody thought we were neanderthals. What we knew was that exfiltration risk was high. So, there are examples where we are slower. Now that didn’t mean you couldn’t go on your personal phone and do whatever you want. But if you’re gonna be on a company device where your company information was stored, including information about customers, you couldn’t have the thing doing it until we could figure it out. Now we figured out how to let these models be cordoned off and run and things like that. The flip side of that is AI is the next level extension of all the techniques we’ve been using for automation and digitization and assisted intelligence, augmented intelligence, now artificial intelligence, and yet we have this thing called Erica. So we—put ourselves a decade ago, and I would talk to you about a model which was going to answer the questions for the customers, and you would look at me like you are the silliest person I’ve ever seen or heard. And by the way…

Stoller: You were ahead of the curve…

Moynihan: I was a little skeptical of it, too, I will say, that’s why I didn’t make a decision with it. So they went to Stanford. They did the language. It was natural language for banking, because if you ask what my balance was, you might get a yoga class invitation. You might get a this, you might get a picture…

Brady: …don’t want to hallucinate about my bank account…

Moynihan: …exactly, so when somebody wants to know what my balance is, they had every particular thing in their mind. So we went and built the natural language when we built the rules around it, then we trained it, and then it operates. Twenty million customers used it last quarter. So it’s not a thought process that actually operates. So we believe heavily that this is very interesting. And because that 200 million interactions last quarter in Erica would have been a personal one to one activity. So what do you do? We took Erica, then we put it—if you go into our flagscape, our intranet, and you want to have a break fix on your computer, you hit the little red dot button. It pops open. You say, I screwed up my password and I need to reset it. It does it all with you. And so you can see this application, we have high hopes. You have to be conservative, because you had to have your data right? Because if I make a decision, leave aside, if some kid writes a term paper and gets the facts wrong, that the kid probably gets hit…

Brady: …Human Services report, but I digress…

Moynihan: If I turn down your loan, that’s a life-changing experience. We have to make sure the decisions—and by the way, we don’t need additional regulation about AI. We are liable for that decision whether we made it by literally a person doing it, the current scoring methodology, AI, so we had to be careful that the data was perfect, the interface was good, and then the decision quality was high. And it’s unbelievable where these things are going and so now we use it in Erica. We use it in self-help and execution agents from the common parlance. We use it for coding. We use it in the legal department to help us decipher all these laws, rules and regulations that we have to pull in as they get published, and do it so we use it in a lot of places, and we have high hopes where it’s going, and we’re in early stages of the world using this, but it’s a powerful engine, and its reasoning ability is really kind of interesting. If you think of Einstein as a third grader, the entire information cycle, the world coming at him, and be able to process—to Einstein at 50 years old, with all that. I mean, that’s the travel this thing’s going on, it’s described to me, and it’s getting closer to that 50-year-old, not the third-grader or middle school person, and it keeps moving. It’s unbelievable what it can do.

Stoller: I was talking with your CTO about it last night, because I was asking about Erica, and I was thinking, I pay so much money for this financial advisor, and I’m sorry to my financial advisor if you’re listening to this, but I’m like, could the next generation of Erica give me financial advice and be an advisor? Do I need a human advisor anymore?

Brady: Your robo-advisor.

Stoller: Yeah, the next stage of robo-advisor.

Moynihan: We have 7 million people that did life plans so far, and more are doing it. It grows 15, 20% a year. And those are people [who] went in and loaded their own information into a model that says, you know, what do you want to save for education, kids’ education, second home, retirement. You pick your goals—that’s the life goals part—and it spits out a financial plan. And then you can turn around and execute that in what we call MEGI: Merrill Edge Guided Investing that will invest against that strategy based on your duration to those events, your risk tolerance, and report out, and it will automatically rebalance continuously for you. That product is $50 billion in assets under management and 7 million people who are using life plans. How that becomes more—what’s the right word—facile for the person to use is a quality of the dialog going up from when you first heard about ChatGPT two years ago…

Brady: I know. We’re all going to fall in love with our operating system. They’re so good.

Moynihan: …[unintelligible] what’s going on now, right. So that transformation of the interface and dialogue and the natural language ability process to keep up with the impromptu of it. Do you really want to—yeah, you want to save for college. Okay. What do you really mean by that, you know, and how…

Stoller: …if this is a bad idea or a good idea.

Moynihan: So, yeah, we do that. Now the reality is, is that a human is also important because the emotion and understanding, the nuance, and you said you wanted to do that, but did you really want to do that or this? And you know, that’s why financial advisors are very important. But the bridge between those two is we can make that advisor more efficient because they have more time to have that dialog with you, as opposed to, how do I resettle this portfolio?

Brady: That’ll be the singularity. You mentioned education. I’d be remiss not to ask—you know, you became chancellor of Brown, like all already you knew that college campuses were were swirling. This is, to me, the least Ivy of the Ivies. What has that been like for you at this particular juncture? Like you needed more drama in your life.

Moynihan: Well look, at the end day, I’m the chair of the board.

Brady: Yeah, yeah.

Moynihan: Chancellor is a fancy name for the chair of the board. I’ve been on the board for 15 years.

Brady: Yep, you have.

Moynihan: And I was on the President’s Council before that so, and, you know, I went there, my wife went there, two of my brothers went there, one of their wives went there, two of my kids went there, my nephew went there, two of my kids’ spouses went there. So I owe…

Stoller: Talk about your big family.

Moynihan: I owe the place, and I always say it. So, you know, I owe the place, the fact I came from Ohio, got there, learned so much, learned from the people at the school, the school itself. So it’s funny, but the key is, we have a great management. Chris Paxson’s a great president. She understands that she’s been at it 13 years. She just extended for two more years, so three more years in total. Hopefully we’ll extend beyond that, but that’s a separate discussion for her to think about. But she’s done a great job and runs a good place, along with the provost and the deans and stuff. And so they—it’s been an interesting time, and they’ve done a great job, and yet they’re subject to all the discussion that goes on out there. And I think, you know, we as a Board have to govern and not do. And so we have to help, bring our experience and wisdom, and I think they asked me to do it, and like anything else, when somebody asks you to take on a role, and if, you know, it’s a—it’s stuff I know about governance and how to run—you know, I was happy to do it because I owed the place.

Brady: Well, I always like what about Brown is the pass/fail system. Like it seems to encourage a love of learning, as opposed to a love of getting a particular grade.

Moynihan: The elements that were was the open curriculum. So you could take anything you wanted, and you could have lots of crazy interfaces of the kid that was a music and, you know, computer science…

Brady: Did you take any crazy courses?

Moynihan: I took a wide range. I was a history major, but I was also what they call organization, behavior, management, close to what you could have as a business major at Brown. They don’t—at that time they didn’t have it. But, you know, I think it was the open curriculum. The pass/fail is interesting because the few courses I took pass/fail I felt I had to study harder because you didn’t know where the break point was. So you’re always nervous if you got the no cookies, as we called no credit. That was like, damaging.

Stoller: My brother has made that mistake many a time on a pass/fail.

Moynihan: So it wasn’t like—you know, everybody said, “Well, you can coast and just get by.” You don’t know where that get by is, but the professors there: challenging and taught you a lot. And the colleagues I met: challenging, taught you a lot. And you know, it was an undergraduate place, so the curriculum things, it was still dominated by the undergraduate population, which makes a little unique. A lot of these colleges that there’s 7,000 undergraduates, round number and 3,000 graduates, very different. A lot of them are two or three times a graduate school size. And so it’s really dedicated. It has a great research plan, a great other stuff. It’s also dedicated undergraduate experience, which makes it kind of fun.

Stoller: With this funding freeze and all that’s been going on with the current administration, with Ivy Leagues, what would be your message to students on campus who may be really worried about this becoming a reality?

Moynihan: Let Chris and the team do the work to figure out where this all ends up. Look. Let me back up on the research side, because I’ve talked about it. Over the last decade, one of the other things I got involved with at the request of our former chair, and a guy named Chad Holliday, was this thing called the Council on Competitiveness. And what that consists of is the big research universities, the national labs, labor, and business. And it came up after Japan, Inc. was going to take over the world and all this stuff really just post-Reagan and how do we get America competitive? And I learned from them. I always had it in my mind, but I learned from them a lot about how critical the research to commercialization of research was to the American pathway. That is what we got to remember in here is that we have radar, because that was MIT. You know, the people at MIT discovered this, and then the war, Second World War, was able to be won. We have nuclear bomb because of—we brought scientists into our universities and brought them into the Manhattan Project. We had the computer because of the skill sets we had. Word processing because this. We have Polaroid because the people—you know, so all these—and we had the mRNA. So this idea investing research is a real investment future. That’s we have to figure out. The other stuff we have to figure out the ebb and flow of, you know, education process, and how people think about different people’s points of view. But we can’t forget that one of the competitive advantages we have in this country: It’s the only place where pure science can be commercialized at a rate that it just exceeds everybody. That’s why every brain in the world…

Brady: …Yeah, a magnet. You know, it’s—you think a lot about leadership. You strike me as a student of leadership. You mentioned Jim Collins earlier, and so before I—I want to explore that a little bit in the Bank of America context. I think you’ve actually done some incredible leadership for that on-ramp for the next generation, but who else do you look at? You mean, you mentioned Jack Welch. Are there other people you’ve looked at as great leaders who inspire you, or even, you know?

Moynihan: I think you have to think of the context. But if you think about in business, I look at all the CEOs out there that I see, whether it’s the BRT or the Business Council or whatever American [unintelligible] station CEO group, all these people. You look at those—and you’re always watching them and learning from them, and you can never forget that they’re one of the few people to go through what you go through and the trade offs, because the CEO has this unique thing that they make the trade offs. Everybody else runs a business, etc., etc., but the team at the top has to have the trade offs, and they have to have all the constituencies in mind and how you trade off between the customer, the shareholder, the teammate, the communities [unintelligible] and things like that. So I learned from them all. And so everybody says there’s a one or this one or that one, and the answer is, it’s composites. And so I’ve been lucky that I’ve had great mentors as bosses over the years, as the CEO boss. So Terry could execute like nobody else. Chad Gifford taught me more about the customer side of the business. And Ken Lewis taught me about scale, and, you know, so you learn from that, even Hugh McColl I’ve gotten to know, I learned a lot from him. And, you know, I face a different world. They all admit, look, what you face is wholly different than what we face. But the seeds are there, you know. And so you just have to take it. And even Jim, who we’ve done work with over the years, and had him, you know, one of the lessons I had with Jim early on was, I’m CEO for not very long.

Brady: Is this Mr. Good to Great?

Moynihan: Yeah, it’s Good to Great.

Brady: How the mighty fail.

Moynihan: How the mighty fail, or whatever it was. That book got published in like, just when I became CEO. And you open up in chapter one, you know what it says? Number one: Bank of America. I said, I’ve already failed. I haven’t even started. It was about the decade-ago Bank of America that had this technology competency that was not materialized on and then ended up merging with Nations Bank, which became Bank of America by name. And so it was kind of a funny moment. I literally cracked the book. I said, Oh god, I failed. I haven’t gotten it through the first year. But what he talks about is, you know, how do you sustain advantage? How do you stay in the—how leaders have been getting the right people on the bus? All these sort of straightforward questions I’d never—12 questions from… They’re just good reminders, but he cites other people who have done it. Not that he has some brain…

Brady: …And the failure being doing the right thing for too long is as much a risk as…

Moynihan: When does something become stale and how do you revitalize? So consumer banking from 2005 to 2015 to 2025: completely different strategies. Even though it sounds like, I go to that bank branch, it looks, you know, it’s maybe a little more modern than it was in 2005. Completely different strategies. 2005 you barely had mobile. 2025, a lion share of the activity goes through mobile, you know. And think about that. So you always have to be fresh. And that’s what we try to do as a team, is always bring outsiders into challenges. So on AI, we’ve had lots of outside people come in, and you know, everybody from professors to practitioners to vendors who want to sell us the product. So that’s the way you learn, too. And so you got to be curious to keep curious, and keep, you know—and you can’t be sanguine, because if you are, if somebody run you over, and that’s one of Jim’s lessons, basically.

Brady: Well in your own life…

Stoller: 15 years, that’s a long time. How do you keep yourself from or the job from getting stale and keep it exciting and make you want to go to work every day?

Moynihan: Look, you have to—you always focus on what these teammates can do for the clients and customers. So anytime you want to get reenergized about what we do, you go—I was in Nashville last week and you hear those customers talk about the difference they made to them at times when they needed the teammate to do something and what they did. You know, that’s what keeps you going. If you go out and see the teammates in a, you know, in a financial service center, and how excited they are to do the best thing for those customers, that’s—you have to remember why you’re here. And even in the depths of crisis, you know, when people talk about purpose and leading by purpose, you have to make a lot of money, and you have to make good returns, and you have to have the right—and you have to do it with purpose because at the end of the day, there are times when this can bounce around with the environment around you, and you got to put it back on course. But if you lose the purpose, you lose the [unintelligible]. The purpose also keeps you fresh because if we’re going to really serve a consumer, you know, imagine yourself 20 years ago, what we did for you, now 20 years later. You know, you have to have that constant curiosity to push yourself ahead. The minute you lose that you got to get out. And I’m lucky to be with people around me challenge me all the time about that, you know, in terms of what we should be doing, thinking about and you keep blending people together. And so while my hair may be getting grayer, you know, I feel that I’m getting more curious as I get older. Because, you know, it’s a broad world out there you got to understand.

Brady: You know, I want to ask about the moral responsibility of leaders. I’m looking at the pin on your jacket over there. First of all, what is that pin?

Moynihan: This is the Foundation to Combat Anti-Semitism, which is about anti-hate, that Robert Kraft started and [unintelligible] started, then October 7 it took on a different meaning. But, you know, basically Roberts put a lot of his time and effort, and he’s been a great client for years, and a friend for years, but we as a company wanted to support him, because we believe this message of, we have to combat hate, you have to induce dignity. So we worked with Tim Shriver, with a specialist on some of his dignity work. Our teammates, their summer teammates, are going through that training right now. We trained all our senior managers on it. And all this is just to have people realize that you can disagree, but you can’t hate each other. You can disagree, but you can’t—you got to treat people with dignity you disagree with. And Robert, you know, the real narrow purpose was to raise awareness of the amount of 2% of the population was getting 50% of the religious hate crimes or more, and it’s accelerated since then. That just is because of who they are. That is just so—now the reality is, Robert always knew it would broaden out into Black hate, Hispanic hate, Asian hate, after the pandemic. I mean, we had Asian teammates that were attacked on the streets and stuff, and so, you know, he knew it would go—it just went there faster because of all their relationships and stuff. And so we’ve been proud to support it. But that’s because that comes from our teammates saying we got to help a situation with each other, and that’s why we have 180,000 of our teammates in our resource groups. That’s why we have—and they work with each other.

Brady: You know, one of the challenges right now is seemingly innocuous statements can sometimes feel like brave acts. And I’m thinking of, you know, DEI financial inclusion, which I know has been one of the big focuses for Bank of America. I mean, how do you deal—talk about the climate right now and what you’re seeing, especially because you have such a broad swath of the population that you get to see as well?

Moynihan: It’s about opportunity. And so how do you create opportunity. Opportunity for people wouldn’t get access to an opportunity. That’s about getting people in our company or helping people outside our company, and then helping them recognize opportunity to make sure the obstacles don’t sit in front of them. And so you’re not guaranteeing anybody an outcome. What you’re guaranteeing is access to the opportunity in an ability for them to recognize an opportunity without changing themselves. That’s what we define inclusion as. I can be everything I want to be at Bank of America and be myself. That’s important. And how do we define that? We asked our teammates, how do you want to define this? And an assistant stood up and said, I think this is definitely—said fine, they want to hire consultants. I said, that’s a great definition. Let’s go with that. The opportunity is, are we opening up an aperture, are we’re getting people. So as we think about employment, a program, a very specific program we have is to help colleagues—kids in Title One high schools learn to code. Sophomore year, they learn to code. They come and work for the summer. Junior year, come and work for the summer. Senior year, they come to work for us or they go to college. But by going to those Title One high schools, you know you’re creating economic opportunity. And so that’s what people have to remember. A lot of this was geared to bring groups of people who weren’t given that opportunity. From 1969 till now, we’ve gone from 80 million people working in America to 160 million people working. Populations only got up 100 million people. Guess what happened? Women came in the workforce. An opportunity was presented. It went from 25% participation to where it is today. Those opportunity-creation moments are what we’re after. And I think if you think about that inside the company, it’s about how we hire a colleague, a teammate at 18 out of high school. They start at $50,000 a year. $7,500 in tuition reimbursement. Individual health care for $100 a month, family health care for 250 bucks a month. A complete 401(k) match up to 6% of whatever it is today, 2% mandatory contribution on top of that. An internal education system. That’s a heck of an opportunity. And how do you know it works? Every year I bring the teammates who celebrate 50, 55, 60, 65, and we’ve had 70-year teammates.

Brady: 70 years.

Moynihan: Working for our company.

Stoller: Wow.

Brady: So you can work to 88 then.

Stoller: I hope I’m not working for 70 years.

Moynihan: That woman has finally retired, but she was actually sorry, because she quit—she had a break in service. [Unintelligible] you had a break in service. She said, well, I got married. I said, Oh, you got married—we should know the rules of the company were at that point, if you got married, you had to leave the company because they had to make room for World War II veterans coming back.

Stoller: Oh my god.

Brady: Rosie the Riveter time.

Moynihan: So anyway, but when you see those teammates and they tell their stories. We have 15, 20, they will come into Charlotte, and there’s more, but the ones that come in, and they’ll tell their stories. It’s to your point—they couldn’t have started at 45 and had been here for 50 years. So they started at 18, and they might have worked part-time, and then they might have come full-time, and then they might have started off in the financial center, and then they might be a financial advisor now. They may have started off in the processing area, and now they’re running a group force, or they may have stayed in the same job. But it’s unbelievable. So you know—and by the way, when you listen to them: I was a first-generation person that came into the company, and my parents did, and I got a job here, and I did… So that opportunity, that’s how we define it, is, how do we—then we look outside our company, the programs we work [unintelligible] to provide the opportunity. So we work with groups of CEOs in Charlotte and Boston and Providence. How do we take the techniques that we think we’ve learned—and here in New York, too—you know, and have more companies take advantage of the knowledge we have because we don’t have the capacity to hire everybody. So if we can get other companies to hire those same coding kids from Title One high schools, in Charlotte, Ric Elias has a great program, Road to Hire, and if we get 15 employers doing—suddenly you got an interesting amount of kids coming out to get this opportunity. And we built a curriculum to teach high school kids how to work in a call center because in Charlotte we had all these people [who] had call center operation needs, and then we did it with the high school and the community college creating a curriculum. Every one of them got a job. So how do you create that opportunity? That’s what it’s all about. So leave aside how the words that move in and out, the court rulings and everything. If we create opportunity for people would otherwise not get, that’s a very good thing. And then we have to make sure, once they are in our company for sure, they have to be able to recognize that opportunity. And what they can’t do is say, I can’t progress because I’m something.

Stoller: Now, you’re talking to two New Yorkers. I’m also a New Englander, so I do have to ask, why did you decide to stay in Boston? Why not come here? Why?

Moynihan: Well, headquarters in Charlotte, so that’s where my office is, and it was really at the time, it’s a pretty simple equation. I had a senior in high school and a sophomore in high school. You weren’t going to move them and do what we had to do. And so I just—that was it. And then once you got past a certain point, you know, it’s life changes. I got two kids in New York now, so it’s a little different.

Brady: I want to, and as a student of history and certainly somebody who knows banking history pretty intimately, where are we at this stage in history? When you think about the—I mean, there’s so much discussion about what’s changing, all these different cycles that are coming together, of course, discussion about the debt, the dollar, AI, this confluence of things coming together. I’d love to just get your perspective in terms of what’s on your radar right now you’d put on ours,because there’s so much.

Moynihan: So I think that the issue that we’ve got to deal with that we haven’t dealt with over the last two decades probably is the idea of getting our eyes and stomach aligned, which is literally—we’re a household, the United States. We have to spend more in line with our earnings power. So we either got to increase our earnings power or we got to spend less, and we got to make that set of decisions. And there are lots of ways to do that. So in 2012–13, somewhere around there, you know, there was a commission that was formed out of Congress, and the president is Simpson-Bowles, and they came up with a series of recommendations. And the theory was, we’re going to take those recommendations, we’ll put it through as a package, and those recommendations [unintelligible] tested, you know, Social Security, a bunch of stuff over long periods of times that would change [unintelligible] never got done. So the outlines of what you need to do are there, but we got to figure out how to slow the rate of growth of debt to the size of the economy, to make sure we don’t go across certain thresholds. The way to do that is your operating budget, which is running a 25 or 30% operating difference. So we we have it—we spend $1, and we only have 70 cents to pay for it. That’s the kind of numbers we’re talking about. And you know, someday, that will be a real, real problem. Right now, it’s okay, and the operative word’s okay. But the United States been downgraded by all three major rating agencies, etc., etc., etc. So we got to get that. That is the number one long-term issue. That’s going to take a lot of—you have a little bit of revenue here, a little bit of expense savings here, a fine tuning here, an efficiency drive among how money is spent. In the military, you have people far more adept at this and understand it, about what we should build and what we shouldn’t build, and we have to be able to suffer the ramifications of that. It may mean less jobs in this area, in that area. And I think that’s the number one issue because at the end of the day we have the biggest economy. It actually grows. We have a population that actually grows. We have the ability to get capital and form and get your return on your idea, your investment. We have the ability to have winners and losers that most countries won’t tolerate, to have industries, you know, get downtrodden and…

Brady: Chapter 11’s a good thing.

Brian Moynihan: …and all those things and so all that’s great, the rule of law and all that stuff. The reality, though, is what we got to make sure is that we don’t squeeze out the ability to do all that because of federal state debt. But the citizens have to realize it’s, you know, it’s our money. It’s just, do we want to pay it now, or do we want our kids to pay it? And how do we start to help pay that down? And that can be two choices: less spending or more revenue. And, you know, look, that commission had a series of changes, and many people have had it, but the governors on that outcome are things like, you have to make sure that we take care of the people fall out from our capital. Our capitalistic system is the best in the world by a lot. Nobody’s close. But you have to—some people fall out. We have to be careful—what happens if a person can’t participate in that system at the level. That’s a given. The second given is we have to take care of the people who’ve gone through the system, [unintelligible] outside, and retired. We got to take care of that. Qe have a safe net. That’s a good thing. But absent those types of—and we have to be competitive on tax rates and things. We can’t just tax or wait to it, or else you create really strange behavior. You remember back in the time in the corporate tax act changes in the 17 was after a period of people moving stuff outside the country, because the tax rate differential had gotten 15,20, points. At some point you have to say to your shareholders: Why am I doing this in the U.S. to send elsewhere?

Brady: Why is everybody sitting in Luxembourg?

Moynihan: So those things, I think—so that’s the number one issue. Everything else can fall away to that, because you have ebbs and flows and markets ebb and flows and excesses. But we got to figure it out. Because right now we as a society—and this is not blaming on any administration, any set of government, anybody—none of us have been willing to say, we need to get this turned. And it’s not—this isn’t because, I think people better understand that this is a matter of all things in moderation, not we got to go off a cliff. And a lot of this was always expressed binary. You got to stop all this. You got to balance the budget tomorrow. None of that has to—you just have to work at it every day.

Stoller: So looking forward, what do you want your legacy to be, and how are you preparing for, and I will say, eventual succession?

Moynihan: Well, usually people ask me that question to try to throw me out. So look, at the end of the day, the transformation of the management team, it’s not me, it’s the whole team, and the whole 200,000-plus people, will be to take a company that was built on acquisitions, built on, you know, sort of consolidation, built on those principles, and turn it into an organic growth engine, and a customer-focused organic growth engine that produces great returns and great share of value, and does it the right way. And because it does it the right way, it has a perpetual motion machine behind it. We’ve demonstrated that, you know, we’ve made more money than all but four companies. So the last 10,15, years, one of the few companies that made that much money every year. And so we got to be profits and purpose, and the legacy is that it works at scale. And that then says American capitalism works, Bank of America helps people recognize the benefits of that, and we can do it at scale, in a capability that then shows we can do this. You can actually make great returns for shareholders and do well for your teammates. So you can have great returns for shareholders and do well for your customer. You can have great returns for your shareholders and do well for the communities you serve. That’s a—it’s not a legacy for me. It’s a legacy of how our company operates. What we’ve had to do is make this huge transition from doing it by acquisition to doing it by organic growth. You know, that’s what we do. But remember, this company is really old, and…

Brady: Have you seen Hamilton?

Moynihan: Many times.

Stoller: Many times. Did you see the original, with Lin?

Moynihan: Yes.

Stoller: Of course you did.

Moynihan: We took out the theater a few times…

Brady: Yeah, I’m sure you did.

Stoller: Wow, that’s incredible.

Brady: If you need to brand-build us—anything we haven’t asked that we should have?

Moynihan: That’s a dangerous question. You guys are the professionals. I only have to answer…

Brady: No, that’s not true. You know better than us, some of the nuggets to share. Thanks for joining us.

Moynihan: Thank you for having me.

Brady: Thank you so much, Brian.

Brady: Leadership Next is produced and edited by Ceylan Ersoy.

Stoller: Our executive producer is Lydia Randall.

Brady: Our head of video and audio is Adam Banicki.

Stoller: Our theme is by Jason Snell.

Brady: Leadership Next is a production of Fortune Media. I’m Diane Brady.

Stoller: And I’m Kristin Stoller.

Brady: See you next time.

Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune‘s editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcasters and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel. Nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.