2019 Summit Highlights

Highlights from the summit

Highlights from the first Leadership in the Age of Personalization Executive Summit, held October 9, 2019, in Huntington Beach with City of Hope as host sponsor. Leaders from healthcare, business, sports, finance and education, joined by a millennial and a Gen Z voice, spent the day on one question: how to balance standardization and personalization in the way we lead.

A New Leadership Requirement

Annette Walker

Annette Walker started with the personalization we already take for granted, from Siri to a watch that tells us to breathe, and the friction of filling out the same form at every doctor's visit. Those expectations now follow people to work. Building City of Hope's $1 billion cancer center in Irvine, where 72 languages are spoken in the school district, she argued that the care we give customers belongs to employees too, even to loving the people we lead.

A Power Shift

Glenn Llopis

I opened the summit with Michelle Williams's Emmy speech, in which she credited bosses who never assumed they knew her needs better than she did. Then I told the story of my own last name, and the afternoon I spent with two linguists from Webster's to settle how it should be pronounced. My argument was simple. The business no longer defines the individual; the individual defines the business, and leaders still clinging to standardization are practicing substitution instead of evolution.

Wall Street Alert

Nik Modi

Nik Modi has spent 20 years analyzing consumer companies, and he turned the blame for short-term thinking back on the room. More than 80% of S&P 500 companies give quarterly guidance that no law requires, and his data showed the companies with no targets earned the best returns. He walked through a near future of DNA-based meals and drone delivery, warning that employees who live that way as consumers will expect the same at work within five years.

A Millennial Perspective on Personalization

Guilherme Oliveira

Guilherme Oliveira was born in 1991, when the world had about 5.4 billion people and roughly a million internet hosts. He described a generation more connected and lonelier than any before it, and his own years in a standardized corporate job in Brazil, where he was told to execute and adapt his thinking to expected results. He moved to the United States through a UC Irvine program, joined our team at GLLG, and finally felt heard as an individual.

People Analytics

Gustavo Canton

Gustavo Canton flew in from Paris to argue that companies know their customers far better than their own people. As vice president of people analytics at Schneider Electric, he showed how models can now predict whether one named employee will stay, and how much recognition matters: about five a year in the US, seven or more in China. With average tenure at Facebook near two years, he warned that HR programs often take longer to build than the talent stays.

Leading with Heart

Patricio Madrazo

I met Patricio Madrazo 27 years ago at a grocery store in San Miguel de Allende, and we built a food business together while disagreeing about almost everything. His father finally sat us down and said respect had to come before the business. Patricio, chairman of the San Miguel Group, spoke about his family's third-generation farm, where he grew up alongside the workers' children, and why leading by example and caring for those families came naturally.

The Cultural Demographic Shift

Glenn Llopis

Here I laid out what I call the cultural demographic shift: the point at which large cultural segments of the population reach numbers big enough to change how all of us act. The Census Bureau projects a majority minority nation by 2043, and millennials and Gen Z, the most diverse generations yet, are entering the workforce with no intention of assimilating. They want influence on their own terms, and leaders who truly see and know them.

The Future of Talent

Glenn Llopis

Money matters to the next generation, but a paycheck alone won't keep them committed. In this part of my keynote I told the story of three bricklayers and argued that the one laying bricks and the one building a wall deserve the same respect as the one who sees a cathedral, because each solves for something different: precision, resilience, vision. Knowing what each person solves for will soon matter more than titles, job descriptions or departments.

An Anthropologist Perspective

Scott Lacy

Scott Lacy, an anthropologist at Fairfield University, remembered envying a classmate's 64-pack of crayons and why more colors mattered. He drew a line between performative diversity, the checkbox kind, and cognitive diversity, people who actually think differently and make us uncomfortable. A hyperconnected world, he argued, is good for connection and bad for diversity. And he explained why letting go of standardization is so hard: each release feels like a small death, and we are wired to resist it.

The War for Talent

Kety Duron; Teri Fontenot; Mark Laret

Kety Duron, City of Hope's chief human resources officer, reminded the room that every one of our employees will get a call from a competitor, and the goal is a workplace where they don't take it. Her organization had grown its headcount 49% in five years. Teri Fontenot described a board that kept an empty seat for a patient, and Mark Laret of UCSF argued that in healthcare, inclusion is a survival strategy that starts with humility.

Individualized Wellbeing

Stephanie Neuvirth

Stephanie Neuvirth, then head of people and organization at Banfield Pet Hospital, described a workforce whose average associate was a 31-year-old woman, in a profession under real strain. Her wellbeing strategy has five parts, physical, mental, career, community and financial, combined differently for every person. It took 27 presentations to win a student debt benefit. At the time, 93% of the people in it were still with the company, and turnover had dropped by half.

Hey, You Can Be Yourself

Brielle Lubin

Recorded when Brielle Lubin was an eighth grader at Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles, this was the youngest voice of the day. She led two affinity clubs at her school and described how she works through disagreement: invite every opinion, even the rude ones, until people feel they contributed. Young people are told they're too young to know anything, she said. Tell them early they can be themselves, or they will learn to assimilate.

Courageous Leadership

Joe Alvarnas; Gyasi Chisley

Late in the day the conversation turned to courage. Joe Alvarnas said it grows from one of two places, immense creativity or deep desperation, and that the best leaders keep leaving their comfort zones. Gyasi Chisley warned that repetition makes habits permanent, good or bad. Then a woman who works in employee relations at a hospital system described setting aside her calendar to sit with an employee in crisis, and realizing that person needed her more than any meeting did.

Beyond Diversity

Jeff Pilof; Gustavo Canton; Tyjaun Lee

Jeff Pilof ran supply chain at CVS Health and stopped waiting on HR. His team built its own recruiting, development and internship programs, met resistance in year one, and by year three the company was asking how they did it. Tyjaun Lee, a community college campus president, told of a student who was the only brown face in a biology class of 400, and turned a common complaint around: the real question is whether we are prepared for our students.

Diversity, Tension and Evolution

Glenn Llopis

Diversity of thought sounds easy until you notice how quickly we drift toward people who think like us. That's why everyone at the summit had assigned seats. In this part of my keynote I argued that diversity of thought takes the courage to step away from like-mindedness, and that the healthy tension it creates is what lets organizations evolve, attract top talent and see the opportunities that standardization keeps hidden.

Technology vs People

Ronalee Zarate-Bayani; Jochen Koedijk

Two marketers took on brand and identity. Ronalee Zarate-Bayani, then CMO of the Los Angeles Rams, described rebuilding a team that had left its fans twice, with fan councils and Día de los Muertos shirts quietly left in players' lockers. Jochen Koedijk, CMO at ADT, admitted that a 145-year-old brand with 98% awareness still reads as grandpa's alarm system, rated his company a four out of ten on knowing its customers, and bet on technology over people.

Being Human is Tough

Joe Alvarnas

At dinner the night before the summit, Joe Alvarnas, a City of Hope physician, talked about the faces he never forgets: eight babies delivered, more than a thousand transplants, and many patients he pronounced dead. After each death he would close his office door and play Dark Side of the Moon before seeing the next patient. In 23 years, no patient ever asked him where to find a cheaper CT scan. Dignity, he argued, doesn't scale like a supply chain.

Standardization is Foundational

Teri Fontenot

Teri Fontenot, CEO emeritus of Woman's Hospital, refused to treat standardization as a dirty word. It is where you start, she said, because best practices and safe handoffs depend on it. But the people most affected by a decision belong in the room, which is how her hospital designed its replacement campus with patients, community leaders and frontline staff. Her warning to healthcare: don't let good reasons become excuses for not changing.

Beyond Compliance

Gyasi Chisley

Gyasi Chisley's mother chose a name that means wonderful and noble child in Swahili, and he has been called everything from Jay Z to Juicy. He now corrects people, because his name is who he is. As president of CTCA Hospitals and Clinics, he described healthcare's slow swing from treating population segments to treating individuals, and a home visit program he helped build that never reached the South Side of Chicago, where he grew up.

Augmenting Individual Ability

Tom Mihaljevic

Tom Mihaljevic, CEO of Cleveland Clinic, described a place where all 66,000 employees are called caregivers and no office door carries a title. People are valued for character and impact. Physicians work on one-year contracts and have always been rewarded for doing the right thing, never for doing more. When the clinic opened in Abu Dhabi, it onboarded 5,000 people from 82 countries in teams, for up to six weeks, and the culture traveled with them.

A Physician Story About Personalization

Jack Cox

As an intern at Travis Air Force Base, Jack Cox heard a patient with stage four breast cancer describe watching herself from the corner of the room, and rushed to report a psychotic break. His mentor sent him back to ask why she had come. She simply wanted help telling her family without frightening them. Jack used the story to challenge how healthcare defines value, and to argue that we rarely ask people what matters to them today.

People-oriented Business

Jack Cox; Tom Jackiewicz

Jack Cox pressed Tom Jackiewicz, CEO of Keck Medicine of USC, on how a hospital can standardize care and personalize it at once. Tom's answer was a surgical program that looks at each patient's exercise, diet and diabetes before an operation, and it cut opioid use by 60%. Europe had the evidence a decade earlier, he said, and at one academic center 85% of surgeons opted out. Keck spread it by starting with the willing.

Active Engagement

Jack Cox; Mark Laret

Mark Laret, CEO of UCSF Health, told Jack Cox that units holding daily huddles and rounds showed far higher engagement, and that engagement tracks with nearly every measure of quality, safety and financial performance. He pointed to Workday, whose founder puts employee engagement first. And he credited UCSF's own students for refusing to accept a system that patched up homeless patients and sent them back to Golden Gate Park.

Expanding the Mission

Jack Cox; Victor Crawford

Victor Crawford, who led the pharmaceutical segment of Cardinal Health, told Jack Cox that most of his 50,000 employees have been patients or know one. That shaped a B2B company's move closer to consumers, through tools such as a mobile app that reminds people to refill prescriptions. Even its values were rewritten to spell I AM. Drawing on years at Pepsi and Marriott, he named what every consumer wants: quality, convenience, variety and personalization.

Paradigms of Care

Joe Alvarnas

Joe Alvarnas keeps a 2012 cancer textbook on his desk as a reminder that following it today would be negligent. Medical knowledge once doubled every 50 years; by one estimate it now doubles in a matter of months. Treatment for multiple myeloma barely changed for 30 years, then three new drugs arrived in a single December. For a City of Hope physician, personalization is life or death, and the care is for patients and their families, never only the disease.

A Movement Begins

Glenn Llopis

I closed the summit right after Brielle's talk by telling the room that this was the beginning of a movement, and that a movement needs many people. I asked everyone to go back and reintroduce themselves by what they solve for. I shared a breakfast conversation with the chairman of The New York Times about writing for views versus writing for influence, and offered my own definition of courage: when you know your truth, it feels normal.