0:00
[MUSIC] Meg, thank you for being here to day.
Search this video
0:06
>> Yeah, happy to be here.
0:08
>> I'm delighted at the chance to have this conversation.
0:11
I have a few questions here on your professional journey, your leadership philosophy and your personal life before we open it up to questions from the audience and Twitter.
0:21
As Jim Solano mentioned, you were being incredibly generous with your time at the GSB.
0:25
This is the fourth view from the top session that you are a part of, which might be some form of record. [LAUGH].
0:31
Since the last time you were here, view from, view from the top which was in 2011, the big decision that you made was to become the CEO of HP.
0:38
This was not an easy job, in fact, this is what Forbes magazine had to say about it.
0:44
Meg stepped into a mess, HP stock had tumbled 42% in the year before.
0:49
Arch rival Dell was gaining ground, and HP seemed powerless to stop it.
0:55
HP had squeezed out its four previous CEOs.
0:58
Vitman's immediate predecessor lasted just 11 months.
1:02
What made you decide to take on the role?
1:05
>> Yeah, so it's a good question. [LAUGH].
1:07
So I, as as Garth had me, mentioned I had lost the race for governor.
1:14
And one of things, so it's interesting, when you lose a political race, unlike anything else you do, the day you lose the next day, you have nothing to do. [LAUGH].
1:23
No meetings, nothing, you're sitting alone.
1:26
And none of your friends call you because they feel so badly for you. [LAUGH].
1:30
And so it was February and I was trying to figure out what I was gonna do next.
1:35
And it was one afternoon and I was sitting at home and my husband, who is a neurosurgeon here at Stanford entered the living room, entered our family room at 4:00 he got home early.
1:44
And I was sitting there watching Ellen DeGeneres. [LAUGH].
1:48
And my husband looked at me and said, oh, this is really not good. [LAUGH]. This is really not good. [LAUGH].
1:52
And like as if on cue, the next day Mark Andriessen called to see if I'd like to sit on the board of HP. And I thought, fabulous. This is great.
2:00
What, what could go wrong?
2:01
12 minutes from my house, incredibly well run company.
2:04
You know, I'll be on the tech committee. It'll be great fun.
2:08
Well, of course, you know, nine months later, the company was in a big challenge. And at first, I said no. >> Hm.
2:14
>> But was ultimately persuaded by the fact that companies like HP matter, in my view.
2:18
They matter to Silicon Valley.
2:19
I would argue they matter to California.
2:22
They matter to the United States.
2:23
And, and frankly, they matter globally.
2:25
We are an incredibly important corporate citizen across the world.
2:30
In other, for example, we're the second largest private employer in Costa Rica.
2:33
I think we're the third largest private employer in the Czech Republic.
2:37
So it matters what happens to this company.
2:39
And I thought, you know what, maybe I can make a small contribution to reviving HP, and it's place in Silicone Valley and in the tech world.
2:47
So, ultimately decided to take it on.
2:50
And, in some ways, the probably the biggest advantage I had was I was not a freshman CEO. >> Hm.
2:54
>> Had I been a freshman CEO, I think I might have been completely overwhelmed by what happened here.
3:01
But the good news is I'd been a CEO for ten years, I kind of new how things work.
3:05
I understood how Wall Street worked, and I think was more effective than I would have otherwise been if this was my first rodeo.
3:13
>> You've spoken about understanding what is going on right within and organization as you join it. >> Yes.
3:18
>> What was going right at HP? >> Yeah.
3:19
>> And what had to be fixed?
3:22
So I think this is a very good lesson for all of you.
3:24
When you find yourself in a new situation, particularly in a senior leadership role, and you're in a new organization, your instinct is to go fix what's wrong, right?
3:33
Make the list of all the things that need to be fixed, and go after them.
3:36
My advice, now having done this on a number of times, is go into an organization and figure out what that companies doing right, and do more of it.
3:44
You'll eventually get to your to do list, and to your fix it list.
3:48
But if you come in and just talk about what's going wrong, you will lose hearts and minds.
3:53
So to your point, I figured out immediately what the founder DNA was of HP.
3:58
And despite all the acquisitions, all the board drama, everything that had happened to this company.
4:03
The founder DNA from Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard shone through.
4:07
And first of all, it's an engineering innovation company.
4:10
That's who this company is.
4:12
And second, we're a partnering company.
4:14
The DNA of this company is very collaborative.
4:17
We sell through 150,000 bars.
4:20
And so, actually focusing back on collaboration, on our channel partners was part of the success of the turnaround and then finally, to my surprise, this company cares a lot about social responsibility.
4:34
And this was, Bill and Dave were all about the environment, were all about giving back to communities before this was even remotely fashionable.
4:42
No term called social responsibility.
4:45
But it's interesting, you can see it around the globe with HP people.
4:48
So we just went back to those three things.
4:51
Innovation, innovation, innovation, we focused it.
4:53
We increased R&D, and we let the engineers do their work, and we pivoted hard back to partners.
5:00
>> So what had to be fixed?
5:01
>> So there were a number of things [LAUGH] that had to be fixed.
5:04
First of all we had to win hearts and minds of HP people.
5:08
Because you mentioned it, four CEOs in the previous five years. >> Hm. >> Or six years.
5:14
And I, I will say that the work force was reasonably jaded, as you would be.
5:20
My first of all, hands meeting we survey everyone at HP on everything all the time, I think we're like Survey Monkey's largest customer. [LAUGH].
5:28
And the first survey was, you know, how do you think about the new CEO?
5:33
And the number one response was, she seems nice dot dot dot. [LAUGH].
5:39
Meaning, like, how long is this- >> Yeah.
5:41
>> Gonna last, and what is she gonna do?
5:42
So we had to win hearts and minds of people, and get them back on the boat and believing again in the future of HP, so that was job number one.
5:50
Number two is we had to align our cost structure with our revenue trajectory.
5:54
Revenues were falling at sort of 8 to 10%, and you cannot, you cannot let that happen without making a pretty significant change to the fundamental cost structure of the company.
6:06
And then third is we weren't keeping up with innovation.
6:08
And so, we have to actually focus innovation, get HP labs in gear again and attract talent and promote talent from within who could take us to the new, you know, to a new place from an innovation prospective.
6:21
So whether that was cloud, or security or big data, or the next generation of infrastructure, or our next generation of services.
6:29
We had to, we have to go about fixing this right away.
6:32
And frankly we have to unfreeze the frozen middle.
6:35
You know, the challenge when you come into these companies is you can usually get your senior executives, you either replace them or they get onboard.
6:41
The, the early folks, young career, they're all over it.
6:45
They're like, okay, this is what we wanna do.
6:47
It's what we call the frozen middle that you have to go figure out how you get them on board with the agenda that you are trying to achieve.
6:56
So those were some of the things.
6:59
Then we had a few issues like the EDFs write down the autonomy situation.
7:05
You know, there was 100 sort of, relatively, I would say neither of those were minor problem, but they were sort of tactical problems that had to be dealt with along with the strategic challenge of who was this company?
7:17
Because your might remember that right before I took over, the previous CEO had said, that maybe, kinda, sorta, we were thinking of spinning the PC business. >> Hm.
7:24
>> So that, of course, lead everyone in our community of buyers to ask the question, what is HP strategy?
7:30
So that is the other thing we had to sort out in the first couple of months.
7:34
>> And then how did you go about doing some of these things?
7:37
>> So, it was pretty challenging because many of you know my background in technology is more in consumer technology than it is in enterprise technology.
7:46
And HP for the most part is an enterprise company.
7:49
Even our printing and PC business, two-thirds of our printers and PCs are sold to business as opposed to consumers.
7:56
And so I had to learn the technology business from an enterprise perspective.
8:00
I needed to learn what we did.
8:02
I needed to get my arms around this vast company.
8:06
And so I tried a number of things.
8:08
First is, you know, assembled a group of sort of people I though could help.
8:12
Then I brought some people in from the outside, who understood the industry, like Scott McNally.
8:17
Then I sort of said okay well that's interesting now maybe I need some external consulting help.
8:23
And it was really a process over a couple of year period to figure out what this company did well.
8:30
And then how to achieve the objectives and, of course, the ultimate decision lay in creating the separation of two companies.
8:38
I think most of you know, we are separating Hewlett Packard in to two fortune 50 companies.
8:43
Can you imagine there where two fortune 50 companies embedded in HP.
8:48
HP Ink, which will be our printer and personal assistants business, is a $57 billion business.
8:54
And Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is our data center business, our server storage, networking converge, infrastructure, cloud, security, software as well as our enterprise services business is also a $57 billion company.
9:08
So that freeing of, to be more focused, to have a capital structure that it is right for the market opportunities that both these companies face, is gonna be a big enabler of, of the two strategies that we've know crafted for HP Ink and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
9:23
So, it's completely the right thing to do, but by the way, took a fair amount of courage to actually make that decision.
9:31
Because there are the law of unintended consequences, as you can imagine.
9:36
But we feel really good about it.
9:37
And so the separation occurs November 1st.
9:40
So, knock on wood, we'll get it all separated.
9:43
>> Yeah just going back a bit.
9:45
The last time you were here, you spoke about how early on, perhaps, you were not fully convinced about the eBay opportunity. >> Yeah.
9:51
>> What got you convinced that you had on your hands a winner? >> Yeah.
9:55
So, I think many people know the story.
9:58
So I was at Hasbro, running the preschool division, which was Barney, Arthur, Teletubbies, my personal favorite, Mr. Potato Head. [LAUGH].
10:06
And minding my own business, my husband was running the brain tumor program at Harvard's teaching hospital, the Mass General.
10:13
Which in the medical world is, everyone sort of aspires to the Mass General, the MGH, the acronym is, they like to say, man's greatest obstacle. [LAUGH].
10:22
I would argue there might be another one out on the West Coast. [LAUGH].
10:25
But in any case and I got a call from a headhunter about joining this no-name internet company called eBay, and I said no, I'm not moving my husband and two boys 3,000 miles across the country, we're not doing this.
10:37
And he called back three weeks later, and he said, Meg.
10:39
I'm begging you to come meet with the founder.
10:41
Um,and I didn't want to make the headhunter mad, I thought I certainly did not want this job, but I might want his next job.
10:48
So, I will put myself on a plane.
10:51
And so I came out and spent the day with Pierre Mediar and Jeff Skoll.
10:57
And at the end of the day I called my husband from San Francisco airport and I said hon, we should do this. >> Hm.
11:03
>> And the reason was what I saw in my long years in the consumer space, if you can see two things in a company, then you have liftoff.
11:13
Number one is, does that.
11:16
Consumer product or service enable you to do something you could not do before in a real and meaningful way.
11:24
So, in my Procter & Gamble days, whiter white, you know, fresher breath, cleaner teeth in a meaningful way.
11:31
But what I saw at eBay was, it enabled people to make connections and to trade without regard to time and distance.
11:40
So, for example, if you used to be a collector of civil war memorabilia, you could only do that in your town.
11:47
All of a sudden, you could collect across the country and across the globe.
11:51
It made an inefficient market efficient.
11:54
And there was price discovery through the auction format. So that's one thing.
11:58
So I saw right away real, meaningful things you could not do before.
12:03
And then, I figured out people had made personal connections.
12:07
They had an affinity for eBay.
12:09
People have met their best friends on eBay.
12:11
They had connected over a shared area of interest.
12:14
You could argue eBay was the first social networking company. >> Yeah.
12:17
>> Because there was a deep connection over a shared area of interest.
12:22
And collectors were the first to come to eBay.
12:24
And collectors, when you have a passion for something like glass, or teapots, or barbies, or whatever it happens to be, people think you're a little weird, right?
12:35
You know, not everyone understands the passion for tea cups.
12:38
But when you find other people who love tea cups, then you have this incredible connection.
12:43
And so I saw, real features and functionality and an emotional connection to the company and I said to my husband, I said, this thing is gonna be big.
12:51
I never dreamed it would be as big as it was but I said, this is what you look for in a career in consumer products and services.
12:58
>> A lot of us in the audience are moving from sort of non technology backgrounds into leaderships positions. >> Yeah. >> In technology.
13:05
Not unlike have you- >> Yeah. Perhaps fell into eBay. >> Yeah.
13:08
>> With not a lot of experience in technology business.
13:11
What advice would you have for us to try to do that?
13:15
>> So I think a couple things.
13:16
One is, business principles apply, regardless of the industry.
13:21
You know, I spend a fair amount of time with my CEO colleagues and we laugh, because business is business. [LAUGH].
13:27
Honestly, whether you are at Procter and Gamble.
13:29
At Twitter, at HP, at, you know, Wells-Fargo Bank, at Caterpillar Tractor, the principles are exactly the same.
13:37
What I will say, in technology, you need to be either, end up as a deep technologist, or you need to surround yourself with deep technologists.
13:46
Because there is an element of being able to see around corners, to be able to see what's next.
13:52
And so if you are not from a technology background and you're not an engineer, you need to find the people in your organization who will help you plot the technology path and the technology vision.
14:06
And so that's probably advice.
14:08
And then you just gotta ask the questions.
14:10
You know, you can not be embarrassed to ask a question about something.
14:16
And and, by the way, the technologists will see what you're made off.
14:21
They will, they will try to, to sort of ferret you out as a pretender.
14:25
And so, better not to be a pretender would be my advice.
14:30
I'll tell you a little story.
14:31
So, there was the CI, the CTO at eBay, really, very talented guy named Mike Wilson, who had written the second version of eBay, who was skippy on the boards that night, was sort of the community builder.
14:43
And he was not entirely, he was actually enthusiastic when I came but you might recall we had a very severe outage at eBay in June 10th at 5 o'clock in 1999.
14:53
I remember it like it was yesterday. [LAUGH].
14:55
Anyway, early on in my career before that at eBay I was trying figure out how much, because we had outages all the time, and I was trying to figure out how much capacity we had in the system.
15:06
And Mike didn't think about the question that way and didn't really want to answer the question in the way I was asking.
15:14
Cuz I was said, I reverted to my shoe company experience, so I said okay, if we had a shoe factory in South Korea, then people could tell me exactly how many shoes we could get through this factory.
15:24
And he goes, well I don't think about it that way.
15:26
So we had, sort of, this little tussle, and then I get an email, not too many days later, that starts off by, the title of the email was cookies.
15:35
Meg is probably wondering if we're a baking company. >> [LAUGH] Wow.
15:39
>> Okay, I was, like, fit to be tied. >> Hm.
15:41
>> And and so that's where you actually have to take a stand, you know, and so it was one of those, sort of, seminal moments in.
15:49
You know, where you have to basically push back and, and lead regardless of what their, you know, what the sort of the entrenched interests are, are trying to do.
15:58
And, and to Pierre Omidyar's credit.
16:00
He was a defender all the way through that and so it also helps if you've got a founder technologist who is actually helping sort of move this company into a, into a new area. >> Great.
16:12
Leading up to Ebay, was grad school, PMG, Bavon company, Disney and Hasbro.
16:18
As we think of our first jobs out of school, what advice do you have for us? >> Yeah.
16:22
So listen I think it's a little different graduating from business school today than it was in 1979.
16:29
When I graduated from business school, doesn't it seem like 100 years ago.
16:33
First of all, there was not the start-up culture that there is today in Silicon Valley, and in Austin, Texas and in Boston, Massachusetts.
16:41
I mean, I don't think anyone really seriously considered starting their own company out of Harvard Business School or joining a start-up.
16:47
It just wasn't, what you did.
16:49
It wasn't really in the menu of things and I think many of you will, will join a start up or start a company.
16:57
So, back then what we were thinking was get the very best training for a long career in business.
17:03
How do we lay pipe of things that we will need to know through a career.
17:08
And so, that's why I chose to go to, I was interested in marketing, so I decided to go to what I perceived is the very best company in marketing, and that was P&G.
17:14
Cause you have to remember, I had no work experience between undergraduate and graduate school.
17:21
So I was all about the training.
17:23
And I have to say you know, it's, it's really quite fun cuz I now sit on the P&G board.
17:27
You know, talk about coming full circle. >> Yeah.
17:29
>> But what I learned at P&G has stood me in good stead till this day.
17:33
Okay, so I was all about going to the best companies, to get the best training, to prepare for what I believed would be a long career.
17:40
You know today if I was doing it I don't know what I would do, I have to say my nine years at Bane was some of the best experience I'd ever had.
17:47
You know, I just learned everything about you know, cost competition, competitors you know, strategy.
17:55
I mean, again, everything that I learned at Bain those nine years I deployed at Ebay, and also frankly at HP because we had to figure out what our strategy was.
18:04
So, you know, I think you have to sort of live in the times in which you graduate.
18:09
It's a very different environment than it was and you know, listen, it's hard to, it's hard to know exactly what I do today cuz I don't see the opp, I mean I see the opportunities that you have, but it's that balance between showing up at a startup versus getting a little bit more laying a pipe that's gonna sit, set you up in good stead.
18:28
But the great thing about it is today, is there's no harm, no foul.
18:32
Okay, so you graduate from business school, you join a start up and it doesn't work.
18:35
It's inconvenient, but it's not the end of your life.
18:39
And you know when I joined eBay you know, I said, look, what's the worst thing that can happen?
18:44
It doesn't work out, and then I go get another job.
18:48
So, you know, I think you have to have the appropriate level of risk taking for your personal situation, for your personality, and for what the opportunities are.
18:57
>> This might be a good opportunity to perhaps [UNKNOWN] and talk a bit about your leadership philosophy. >> Yeah.
19:01
>> You have the reputation of someone who goes by the maxim, Run to the Fire,. >> Yes. >> Don't hide from it. >> Yes.
19:07
>> What were the key factors, when you were growing up, that contributed to who you are today?
19:15
>> So you mean, like, K through 12, kind of growing?
19:18
[LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] Pretty much.
19:18
>> So listen, I was probably that generation of women who was really at the, at the beginning edge of women going to business school and frankly, to law school and to medical school.
19:32
Yes, there were precursors to me, but we were the first generation that, that sort of arrived in real numbers.
19:40
And but real numbers is a relative thing.
19:42
My first year class at Procter and Gamble, had 100 grand assistants, of which, four were women.
19:49
And so my mother, I think was very instrumental in convincing my sister and I, and frankly my brother, that we could actually do anything we set our minds to.
19:59
And I'll tell you a little story, some of you may have heard it.
20:02
So my mother, during World War II really, wanted to you know, help with the war effort but there weren't a ton of opportunities for women.
20:10
So she decided to join the Red Cross.
20:12
And they said this class of women, we're gonna deploy you to, the, you know, the, the, the Pacific to New Guinea.
20:21
And so, she got on a troop ship from San Francisco to New Guinea with like, a 1000 women on a troop ship.
20:28
They get to New Guinea and the base commander greets this group of women and says, hey, we have a shortage of airplane mechanic and truck mechanics.
20:36
Which of you would like to volunteer.
20:38
Okay, my mother had never looked under the hood of anything, I promise you.
20:40
But she sort of looked around, said well, it looks like this is where the need is greatest.
20:46
And so she raised her hand, and the long and short of this is four years later she was a fully-certified airplane mechanic and a fully-certified truck mechanic.
20:52
And she brought that to us as kids, she said listen if I can figure out how to be an airplane mechanic, you can do anything you wanna do.
20:58
So I think it was that sort of encouragement and then I, I have to say team sports was a really formative experience for me, I played team sports from the time I was a little girl right through college and it was incredibly formative in terms of, I think how I lead.
21:14
So, the courage to take on anything was born very early.
21:21
And one would argue that, that courage is a really important character, I think in business.
21:27
You also have to be smart about it.
21:28
One could argue that the courage to run for governor was not probably the most informed set of courage so, you have to be, you have to be careful.
21:35
But I think risk taking was born early on, I mean going to HP was a risk, running for governor was a risk, frankly, going to eBay was a risk.
21:44
Some of them worked out, one of them didn't. >> [LAUGH].
21:48
>> Let's, let's talk about that event. What lead you to,. >> [LAUGH].
21:52
>> Let's talk about that. >> [LAUGH].
21:54
>> What led you to politics, and what did you learn when you didn't win? >> Yeah.
22:00
So let's see, how much time do we have? >> [LAUGH].
22:02
>> So what led me was that I'd always been interested in politics and had had a chance to work on my friend Mitt Romney's campaign.
22:08
So my boss at Bannon Company for ten years was Mitt.
22:11
And I guess he's coming here in three or four weeks. >> Yes. We are excited.
22:17
>> So I had watched him run for Senator, run for Governor, and then ultimately run for President.
22:22
And then when he lost the first race for presidency, I been quite involved with his campaign and I signed on to John McCain's campaign, as a business person.
22:29
And so I've been interested in politics.
22:31
And then I saw what challenges this state faced.
22:33
And it's hard to remember but in 2010 we had about $168 billion dollar deficit.
22:38
The school system had degraded here dramatically, still has, still is.
22:42
So in 1956 the public school system in California was number 1 rated in the country, is now number 49 out of 50 states.
22:50
All kinds of challenges around water that we see today, it was completely clear in 2010 that we had to take action around the infrastructure in water.
22:58
And so I thought, given my business background, given sort of the problem solving nature of what we're all trained to do, I actually thought that I could potentially be an example of the citizen democracy, which is you go do something and then go into business, go into politics and maybe go back.
23:13
So that's why I decided to do it. And what did I learn?
23:18
Okay, lesson number one, you should probably not run as a Republican in a state that is largely Democratic.
23:25
[LAUGH] Okay, you actually need to do the math and then believe the math.
23:30
[LAUGH] so that was sort of one problem [LAUGH].
23:37
For those of you who are outside of California it's, it's basically 60% Democrat, 40% Republican.
23:42
There's a huge chunk of independents, but the independents lean one way or the other.
23:46
So you sorta start with a challenge.
23:49
And then secondarily, there is something to be said for people who have spent their career in politics.
23:56
I'm not arguing it's the right thing, but just like I have spent my career in business and instinctively I know things by breathing, because I've done it for so long, when you're in politics there is instincts about that.
24:08
And I didn't have any of those instincts cuz I had never done it before.
24:11
And so, I think it's just important to recognize that experience does matter here.
24:16
And have you noticed the politicians rarely answer directly the question that they are asked?
24:22
[LAUGH] It is not because they're bad people, it's not because they don't know the answer to the question, it's because there's no percentage in answer those questions.
24:30
Because, one way or another you are gaining or losing votes.
24:34
And so there is a reason that politicians act the way they do.
24:38
As citizens, it sort of drives us crazy.
24:41
I made some cardinal errors, which is that I actually answered the question and so listen, it was a terrific experience it made me much tougher.
24:50
I have a very thick skin for the press.
24:54
You know, when I came to HP, this is a great story, there was a fair amount of criticism about me coming to HP, in fact there was one headline that I remember, which is Silicone Valley is hollowing with laughter, that Meg is the CEO of HP.
25:09
And the board, who had asked me to do this.
25:12
Was we had a board meeting that first day and so they're reading all this press and they're feeling a little bit badly for me.
25:18
And I'm reading the press and I said, okay, do not feel bad because this is the best press I have had in two and a half years.
25:24
[LAUGH] So it's all kind of relevant, it's all kind of.
25:30
You know, relevant to what you're frame of reference is.
25:33
[LAUGH] And I will say, we should be very grateful for people who run for office, cuz it is the hardest thing I have ever done.
25:39
It is 100 times harder than running HP.
25:41
On our worst days, running for governor was much, much more difficult.
25:47
So we should all celebrate our colleagues and people who are willing to put themselves forward.
25:52
Because there is nothing like having your name on the ballot.
25:55
You can't actually imagine it until you do it.
25:59
So lotta, lot of really, really good learnings. >> Thank you.
26:02
In stepping back a bit, how did you think about building a personal brand throughout your career?
26:09
Was that the conscious crafting forces, or it just happened by being authentic to who you are? How does that work?
26:14
>> Yeah, you know, I didn't think a lot about this.
26:16
I, I'm not sure when I graduated from business school there was this notion of a personal brand.
26:20
>> [LAUGH] >> I just kind of went and did the job that I was asked to do.
26:24
And I think I made a couple of decisions early, which is.
26:28
And at PNG one of my first assignments when I arrived as a newly minted Harvard MBA was to figure out how big the hole in the shampoo cap should be. >> What. >> And I'm thinking.
26:41
Okay, this is a shampoo company.
26:43
Don't they have people who do this?
26:44
>> [LAUGH] >> And this cannot be the first time that they are encountering [LAUGH] this question.
26:49
And I almost went to my brand manager and said okay, this is like, a really stupid assignment.
26:54
And how about we just skip the formalities here, and we get into something that is meaty.
26:59
I went home that night and decided better of it. [LAUGH].
27:01
And I, I actually flipped over, I said okay, I'm gonna do the very best job that has ever been done figuring out how big the hole in the shampoo cap should be. >> [LAUGH].
27:10
>> I did focus groups, I did quantitative testing and I wrote the best memo that has ever been written on this particular subject.
27:16
[LAUGH] And what it taught me was, that sometimes you just need to buckle down and do what you are being asked to do, particularly early on in your career, even though it seems idiotic.
27:27
And, what was really going on here is P&G was trying to teach us how to get things done at P&G. Right.
27:32
They did actually know the answer to the question, but they were trying to teach you about how things got done, about how to write memos.
27:38
About how quantitative analysis actually did yield, I mean, a lot of this is from due yield to analysis.
27:46
So, I think the personal brand was perhaps just, you know, actually doing the very best job I knew how to do in a, in over time, a, a reasonably authentic way.
27:57
Because you are, you guys are all who you are.
28:00
You know, you will grow and you will change over the next decade or two, but fundamentally you are who you are.
28:07
And you have to double down on those strengths.
28:10
There's a lot of consulting firms who will say how do you shore what his real weakness is?
28:14
My view is you do have to have some competency things that are not your core but actually what is your zone of genius?
28:20
What do you do really, really well?
28:23
And often that is what you like to do.
28:25
And so actually sort of that authentic knowing what you love to do, knowing what you're good at I would say was, it wasn't part of my personal brand cuz I didn't think about it that way.
28:35
But that's actually in some ways what I fell into.
28:38
>> I have a more personal question for you.
28:40
You are married to a very successful neurosurgeon.
28:43
You moved to Boston with your husband when he accepted a position at Massachusetts General.
28:49
Later your family moved to California when you became a CEO of eBay.
28:53
How do you balance two successful careers in a family? >> Yeah. So actually with. Lots of challenges.
29:01
[LAUGH] This has really been interesting, and quite a bit of fun.
29:04
But I will say in some ways, it would have been easier if I had been married to a sculptor.
29:11
[LAUGH] Because, that would have been a little bit more flexible.
29:15
And, actually, my husband and I laugh with each other, because no sooner did one of us get traction at a job, then the other one would have a brilliant idea about what they wanted to do.
29:22
>> [LAUGH] >> And we used to say we spent much of the first 25 years of being married sabotaging each other's careers.
29:28
[LAUGH] And so for example, I was at Disney and I loved every minute of my four years at Disney.
29:36
I might still be at Disney.
29:38
But at that time my husband got a chance to run the brain tumor center at Mass General, and he really wanted to do it.
29:43
And I really did not want to do it.
29:45
But sometimes in life you have to do things that you do not wanna do.
29:49
So we picked up and moved back to Boston.
29:52
And you know, you just kind of go with it.
29:55
And I have to give him credit.
29:57
Because when I got the job at eBay, I was pretty convinced that this is something that we should do. But it was not obvious.
30:04
And so I, so he said, I know.
30:07
Why don't you go out and see how it goes for six months.
30:10
I'm like no, no, no, no, no we're not doing that actually.
30:13
I need you to see if you can find a job.
30:15
So he called up two, the good news is there is only three thousand neurosurgeons in the whole country, so they actually know each other.
30:22
So he called up Gary Steinberg, who runs neurosurgery here at Stanford, and a colleague up at UCSF, and I know how this conversation went with Gary Steinberg, which was my wife wants to go to this no name internet company.
30:36
You don't have a job, do you?
30:36
And he, and, and this is where fate comes in.
30:37
What Gary said is, you know, I'm opening a search for the head of a brain tumor program today.
30:42
You can have it if you'd like.
30:45
So it never actually happens that way. >> [LAUGH].
30:51
>> So it's a little bit of luck and a little bit of courage.
30:53
And to my husband's credit, we had at that time, we had saved up about $400,000.
31:00
And what I did is, actually, took that money and invested it.
31:05
I actually bought my options out at eBay.
31:08
And I said to Griff, doesn't this seem like a little risky and he goes listen we have much bigger problems than this if this job does not work out. So you know.
31:17
[LAUGH] So he was completely game and and so we moved out here and we lived in Oak Creek Apartments, do you know Oak Creek Apartments?
31:24
And it's we had a two bedroom apartment.
31:25
And that second bedroom, do any of you know those apartments, the second bedroom is very small.
31:31
In fact the master bedroom closet is bigger than the second bedroom.
31:36
And our 13 year old lived in the master bedroom closet for a year cuz it was a bigger room.
31:40
[LAUGH] >> And so we had our 10 year old in the, in the second bedroom, and our teenage, our 13 year old in the master bedroom closet.
31:46
So you know, you just do stuff. And.
31:47
>> [LAUGH] >> You know, really, it's just been great fun.
31:49
I know a lot more about medicine than I ever would have.
31:51
He knows a lot more about business. And we just traded off.
31:58
And, you know, you can't ever look back and say, woulda, coulda, shoulda, you know.
32:02
You just kinda go, and you always have to remember, this is a question we ask each other, which is what is the worst think that can happen?
32:09
Okay, it's like not that bad, you get another job.
32:12
And and so that sort of sustained us.
32:15
But I have to say, I mean it's, it was wild.
32:18
There were many times where, it was just wild in terms of raising two teenagers, you know, two boys.
32:24
Trying to run, you know, a neurosurgery career, a business career.
32:28
I mean, it was, there were, there were, there are always trade-offs here.
32:31
And anyone who tells you that there are not trade-offs, is either super human or they're not telling you the truth. How, how do you.
32:37
>> And you can decide which one.
32:39
>> How do you decide when you have trade-offs?
32:41
>> Again, you try to do the most important thing.
32:45
So what I concluded early on in my career, was that it was very difficult to be the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect CEO, the perfect hostess, the perfect charity person. You cannot do this.
32:57
And I decided, you know, long ago that, I would really focus on my job and my family, and that I couldn't do a lot of these other things.
33:07
You know, my I said this many times, my house doesn't not look like Martha Stewart just left.
33:11
[LAUGH] I mean, it's, you know, everything's a trade-off.
33:14
If I could wear a uniform to work everyday, I would. I love Elizabeth Holmes.
33:19
Do you know Elizabeth Holmes? >> Yeah, she's.
33:20
>> She wears the exact same thing every single day.
33:22
I can completely relate to that.
33:24
You know, you've got ten black turtlenecks, ten black pants, ten black jackets, and you just change them out. It's, like, brilliant.
33:30
I wish I'd thought of it.
33:30
>> That's, that's, that's that's great fashion advice. [LAUGH].
33:34
>> [LAUGH] So, you know, something has to give here.
33:37
And and then we would just make the decisions, about what seemed to be the most important.
33:42
And we did make a rule that we tried one of us to be home every night for dinner, Monday through Thursday, and then we all tried to be home Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
33:50
And and we would only do things if the kids could come, on the weekends.
33:54
So, you know, you just make trade-offs, and you do the best you can, and there's, there's no perfect, there's no perfect way to do it, and I have many friends who were in my class at Harvard Business School, in my class at Princeton, who decided to stay home full-time.
34:07
And, you know, you, everyone has to make the decision that you need to make, that's right for you.
34:11
And there's no textbook, there's no manual, you just have to kind of figure it out as you go along.
34:16
So it's hard, it's hard, but great fun.
34:20
>> This would be a good time to open up the floor to questions.
34:22
From the office and Twitter.
34:24
We have two Mike's Ryan on this side and Michelle on the other.
34:28
If you have a question please raise your hand, and keep your hands raised so that they can spot you you can also Tweet your questions using, using hashtag GSBBFTT especially if you're up there and Caroline up front would ask those questions for you.
34:44
Let's actually start with a question from Twitter.
34:48
>> So Meg, you are often viewed as a trailblazer for women in leadership.
34:54
Is it more difficult to be a woman in business and technology, or a woman running for political office?
35:02
>> I would say woman running for political office.
35:05
It is very, very difficult and I'll, I'll tell you why and I, as you know I'm a Republican, but I happen to actually have a lot of regard for what Hillary Clinton has accomplished.
35:17
Because in business here's the really good news about business there are results. Okay?
35:24
Ever quarter, you're gaining or losing market share, you have a return on invested capital, your sales are growing.
35:29
There is a, there's something that you can anchor on.
35:32
In politics, when you're running, and frankly, even when you're a politician, the results are much less clear.
35:38
So, I think it's easier for women and minorities and everyone when there are results that you can point to.
35:45
So I have to hand it to the women who are in politics, because the results are not as clear.
35:50
And so therefore there can be the politics, there can be the journalism, or or the reporters of opinion.
35:56
You know, there's just, it's not as clear, and so I think that makes it much more difficult.
36:01
Because, actually, in some ways I serve at the pleasure of the Hewlett Packard board, and that board evaluates me based on the results.
36:09
You now I could have purple hair, and do whatever, but the results are the results.
36:14
And so that's why I think it's a bit more difficult as I, you know, sort of look at the landscape.
36:20
Which is why I think, you know, you've gotta, you've gotta actually hand it to a lot of these women in politics who've done really a remarkable job.
36:26
Whether it's, you know, members of Congress here like.
36:28
You know, Zoloft Grand, or, or others, they've really done a great job.
36:32
>> Do you have a question there? >> Hi.
36:34
This, I'm from a, MSX program.
36:36
Do you have chance to back to like ten years ago, what you had done differently in competition with Ali Baba and China? Thanks.
36:49
>> [LAUGH] So I have the scars on my back from two real challenges.
36:52
First let me start with Japan, because eBay is not number one in Japan, Yahoo auctions is number one in Japan.
36:59
And the reason is, is we had this very well publicized outage in, as I said, June of 1999.
37:06
And we were all set to launch in Japan, but then when the site crashed, we actually had to fix the United States and we were late launching to Japan.
37:14
And in many businesses, like eBay, like PayPal, I would argue, like Uber, like many of these are what's called network effects, that the more buyers you have, the more sellers you have.
37:23
And so, the first market, often gets those network effects.
37:27
And Yahoo beat us to Japan, because we had technology issues.
37:30
So if I had to do that over again I would nail these technology issues much faster than we did. The second is China.
37:37
And we bought a company in China called EachNet.
37:40
The good news for eBay was students like you, when everyone saw eBay's trajectory, a lot of Stanford Business School students and Harvard Business School students went home to their home country and started eBay lookalikes.
37:53
And actually as an aside, a very funny story was, down in Latin America, there was a Harvard Business School group pitted against a Stanford Business School group.
38:02
The Harvard Business School company was [FOREIGN] and the Stanford Business School student was Mercado Libre.
38:07
>> Hm >> And we went down to figure out who to partner with, cuz we had an asset in, that we'd acquired through an acquisition in Brazil or Argentina that we wanted to trade, for an equity stake in the company.
38:18
And the Harvard Business School student said, absolutely not, we got this nailed, we don't need you eBay. >> Hm.
38:24
>> The Stanford students were like, where do we sign?
38:26
And today as you know, at the Stanford Business School students just killed the Harvard Business School students, just over. Which was hurtful to me.
38:38
But [LAUGH] but anyway, the Stanford Business school students totally nailed it.
38:43
And so, then we bought a company called EachNet.
38:46
And we made one big mistake, which is we should have left the EachNet platform on their own platform in China.
38:54
Instead, what we did, is we put EachNet on to the global Ebay platform because it had worked everywhere.
39:01
It had worked in western Europe, it had worked all over, we bought all these baby eBays and basically migrated them to one common platform, which had a lot of advantages. One is, cost.
39:11
Second is speed to market, because when you roll buy it now, you can roll it to thirty countries as opposed to doing it incrementally.
39:18
But we made a mistake in China as we moved EachNet to the eBay platform. And China is different.
39:24
And about the same time, Alibaba ran into trouble because of the SAR virus, and so they focused on [UNKNOWN].
39:32
And they had a uniquely Chinese platform.
39:35
And, by the way, they didn't charge anything for years, and years, and years and years.
39:38
And they just out-executed us.
39:41
And so, you know, what I would have done, is actually left Bo Shao in charge, and owned the 30% of China that we ultimate, that we originally owned, and let him do his own thing.
39:53
So, that's really the lesson there.
39:55
And you know, we, we have a PayPal business there, but the China business is miniscule.
40:01
So, you know, what, if you look at Japan and China, two important markets, it's where we didn't, didn't strategically actually do the right thing.
40:09
But it was not obvious at the time, honestly, so. More power to Jack Mohr.
40:14
What a remarkable franchise he has built.
40:17
And it is really in some ways a combination, of course, of PayPal, of Ebay, of Amazon. I mean, it's, it's.
40:22
He's done a remarkable, remarkable job. >> What about Ron Diaz?
40:28
Hi when you spoke about turning things around at HP, you spoke about returning to the founders' DNA and focusing on innovation, what changes did you make to the company internally to really foster that innovation and be conducive-. >> Yeah.
40:41
>> To the employees taking charge.
40:44
So first of all, we laid out the strategy really, really quickly, and we basically said these are things we're gonna do well.
40:51
We're gonna make our to do list but we're gonna do these things really well.
40:53
So the first thing we did was actually increase R&D spending.
40:56
While we were reducing the cost structure of the company dramatic, I mean for those of you who don't know, we are down net 55,000 people at HP from the fall of, or January of 2012.
41:08
So while we were doing that, we're actually increasing our investment in R&D.
41:12
And that was hard to do, right?
41:14
Cuz you've gotta save so that you can invest in what actually matters.
41:17
So that was a really important thing.
41:19
The second was, reimagine the culture of this company.
41:23
So many of you probably know about the HP way, this was the original, sort of, calcification of what the culture was at HP, founded by Bill Hewitt and Dave Packard.
41:34
They were all over this HP way.
41:37
And, knew we had to reboot the culture, but we didn't wanna throw out what made this company great.
41:42
So we rebooted it, we called it the HP Way Now.
41:45
Because you can never go back.
41:47
You have to reinvent for the future, but we knew we had to take the threads of what had made this company great.
41:51
So we rolled that out across the entire company.
41:55
And the second thing is, we aligned the financial incentives, to the strategy.
42:00
As it turns out, and you all know this, but particularly at big companies people actually focus, on what they're being paid to do.
42:09
And you can wish it wasn't that way.
42:12
You can wish a lot of things, but one of the things we did is we compensated the top couple 100 people on cash flow, and we generated remarkable cash flow at this company.
42:22
In fact, the repair of the balance sheet, is sort of amazing. We went from about $11.
42:26
9 billion of net debt, on the operating company to $5.
42:29
9 billion of net cash in three years. >> Wow.
42:35
>> That allowed us to get on the front foot to be able to buy Aruba to be able to buy voltage, and you'll see us do a lot more acquisitions cuz we have the balance sheet to do it.
42:44
And so, had we not focused on cash flow and had we not paid the people who really had an influence on cash flow, cuz as you know, cash conversion cycle is, days sales outstanding, days payable, and inventory.
42:55
And it was just amazing to watch this battleship turn.
42:58
And frankly that's a lot of the reason that our stock went from $11.
42:58
62 or whatever the low was to close to 40 over Christmas.
43:06
Now we have a different challenge, which is foreign exchange.
43:08
Which is a, eh, a problem that every other big American company has, not just in our industry.
43:13
But you've just gotta focus on what are the most important things, and how do you eh, incentivize that. So I would say.
43:20
Increasing r and d spending, focusing r and d spending.
43:22
Celebrating the engineers, celebrating innovation, pivoting back to customers and the channels and then you know focusing on the things that will make the biggest difference from the financial perspective.
43:31
Because there's sort of an interesting fly wheel here.
43:34
Which if you can improve the results, remember back to what I said to the other woman about. Results actually matter.
43:44
If you can improve the results, that gets customers, employees and the street confidence, which enables you to sell more, which enables you to do better, which starts this positive fly wheel going which allows you to, and by the way, the sort of external view of how well you're doing is a thought process.
44:02
So going from $11 or $12 to close to $40.
44:05
MAde a big difference in sort of the, the [UNKNOWN].
44:09
We created $40 billion in market capital, okay?
44:12
So we created Twitter, Linked In.
44:14
I mean, we created one of these in the last three years here.
44:17
And that gave people a lot of confidence, including by the way, our partners and out customers.
44:23
>> Caroline, do we have a question from Twitter?
44:27
So, Meg, another question from Twitter.
44:30
You've talked about reviving innovation and suggested that many alumni and people in this audience join startups.
44:37
How can startups actually collaborate with HP effectively? >> Yeah.
44:41
So we just launched a program that we call Pathfinder.
44:45
Which is how do we reach out into the valley to find the new startups that are complimentary to why, where either HP Inc.
44:53
is going or Hewlett Packard Enterprise is going.
44:56
And how do we either create you know an investment opportunity that would be good for startups.
45:04
Or the thing that HP does really well is our go-to-market.
45:08
I mentioned we sell for 150 thousand varge, we're at a hundred and seventy countries, and we have a direct selling force that is actually second to none.
45:16
So what we're now trying to do is reach out into the valley, because we're here, and now we're healthy enough to do it.
45:23
To make sure that we've got.
45:24
The right relationships with the venture community and with start-ups.
45:28
So to the extent that there are start-ups that are enterprise focused, on the Hewlett Packard enterprise side or 3D printing focused on the, other side.
45:36
How do we make the investments, and then decide when it might be the right things to open or go-to market.
45:42
Now we can't go to market with lots and lots of startups.
45:45
You know, we've got a huge portfolio we've gotta sell.
45:48
But, every once in awhile, we can make a bet on a startup that enables them to be part of a solution that we sell, and allows the startup to take advantage of our go-to market.
45:56
So that's the way we're thinking about it.
45:59
And, for the first couple years, there's.
46:02
When you do a turnaround, there is pacing and sequencing.
46:06
There is only so much a company can do, even a company as big as HP.
46:10
If you do not focus on the small number of things that matter, you are not gonna turn your, your enterprise around.
46:18
And so, while this was something I wanted to do when I first got here.
46:22
It was literally all hands on deck on a small number of things, to make sure that, that we got the turn around underway.
46:28
So, those, that's, you know, that's how we're sorta hoping we're gonna tap into this ecosystem.
46:34
And ultimately, there, you know, we, as I said, we have got to acquire.
46:38
More innovation than we do today.
46:40
Listen organic innovation will always be number one, but we have to be more inquisitive, I think, as a technology company.
46:46
One of the greatest technology dislocations I've seen in my career.
46:50
>> Michelle can you take a question?
46:52
>> Meg thank you for your time.
46:54
My name is Christen, I'm a second year student here.
46:56
Earlier, you talked about, gave an example about how one can do to lose hearts and minds.
47:02
I was wondering, can we talk about how one can do to win hearts and minds. >> Yeah.
47:07
>> And specifically, do you think that approaches need to be different, when you are starting out your career, post-MBA, as a junior person versus someone in a senior position. Thank you.
47:17
>> So, it's a very good question.
47:19
So listen, I think how you win hearts and minds, and how you become a trusted colleague, is the same when you're the CEO as when you're a new person.
47:25
And that is, do what you say you're gonna do.
47:28
And one of the very first things that I said I was gonna do at HP was I was gonna figure out whether we should sell this PC group.
47:34
And we were gonna do it in 30 days. And I did.
47:38
And so there was, very early on, it was here's, set them up, knock them down.
47:43
And I, my advice to all of you is say what you're gonna do.
47:45
If you join a startup, or you join an established company, say what you mean, mean what you say, and get it done.
47:50
Without a lot of stuff [LAUGH].
47:53
And so that's the first thing.
47:55
The second is, and this I learnt from politics, when you are trying to win hearts and minds of a big company like HP, there's something I learned in politics and that is called symbolic value.
48:07
So you might remember when Jerry Brown won the election.
48:10
He did something actually that at first I thought was not very smart and then I thought it was genius.
48:15
You might recall, he decided to take away cell phones from about half the civil servants.
48:21
In the in the name of narrowing the budget gap in the state of California.
48:26
Okay, the intellectual, the left brain Meg said that is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.
48:31
The cell phone budget for the state of California is 0.
48:32
001% and will not make a difference.
48:37
But actually what he was communicating to the electorate is I'm on it.
48:41
And if you had asked a citizen in the State of California when he did that they would have said Jerry Brown is on this cost thing, he is taking cell phones away from the civil servants.
48:49
One could argue you should have unplugged the landlines, but, doesn't matter.
48:53
The point was he had a lot of symbolic value.
48:55
Watch politicians, so much of what they do is symbolic value.
48:58
The State of the Union Address, the guests that the President has in the gallery is all symbolic value. So I learned that.
49:06
So when I came to HP, I said what is the thing that we can do that will show the company that this is gonna be different?
49:12
And the very first thing we did is tore down the executive parking lot with the commando fence and the barbed wire around it.
49:18
And everyone walks in the front just like everyone else.
49:21
The second thing we did is I tore out all the wood paneled offices in the executive area of HP and we all sit in cubicles.
49:28
Just like every other cubicle world wide in HP and we never actually had to publicize this 330,000 HP people knew this within about 32 1/2 seconds.
49:39
And so, it's not substantial okay,ripping out the cubicle or ripping out the wood-paneled office didn't actually do anything.
49:47
It just showed the kind of company that we wanted to run.
49:51
And so those symbolic values, I think, are really, really important.
49:54
Now, it does not substitute for delivering the results, but you're trying to win hearts and minds fast.
50:00
You're trying to show that this is a different thing, and results take a lot to turn. Right?
50:04
So you've gotta sort of say, hey here's the kind of company that we want to be, and, celebrating some of the early innovation.
50:11
One of my, executives, when I got there, had actually gone out to HP Labs and said what do you got?
50:17
And we found some incredible things in HP labs we celebrated those and we brought them to market really fast so the other thing I would advise when you are running a company or or doing a turnaround its a early winds.
50:31
So when eBay brought PayPal, PayPal was not entirely thrilled to be bought by eBay back in the day.
50:38
And so what we did is we immediately integrated the PayPal functionality into the largest marketplace in the world.
50:44
And what happened of course is PayPal volume went through the roof.
50:48
And so the PayPal people said wow, this is furthering our mission.
50:52
This is making PayPal more successful.
50:54
Being part of eBay is making my job more fun, making the company more successful.
50:59
So that early win, is really, really important.
51:02
And we're, we're running that play again with Aruba.
51:04
So, how do we make sure that the Aruba team, who is actually quite thrilled to be part of HP, but how do we get early wins for Aruba?
51:11
How does the Aruba team feel?
51:12
And six months from now, wow, being part of HP was fantastic for us.
51:20
So, that's the kind of thing that you think about.
51:23
>> Like, I'm gonna be selfish, >> Yes.
51:24
>> And slip in a last question. >> Sure.
51:26
>> This question has become a more recent view from the top tradition.
51:27
And every applicant to Stanford GSB is asked to fill an answer for this question in their essays. So here is it.
51:32
What matters most to you, and why? >> Yeah, so listen. >> [LAUGH].
51:39
I bet there's a hundred answers to this question but in the end the thing that matters most to me, and if you think about it I'd bet matters most to you, which is your family and your extended network of friends.
51:52
In the end, that is super important.
51:56
So while we get wrapped around the axle, of doing whatever it is we're doing, it is really important to remember that that's what matters most.
52:05
I'll say the other thing is perspective.
52:08
And this has been one of the delights of being married to a neurosurgeon.
52:11
Okay, what we do in business is important, it's incredibly important, it's important to the employees of HP, to our vars.
52:18
But no one gets hurt at HP, no one dies.
52:22
And so remembering what's really important, is, I think, critical.
52:28
And I'll tell you a little story which I've told on a number of occasions.
52:31
So, one of my closest friends from Harvard Business School, who was in my section, had a great career in Los Angeles.
52:38
And has two children who are about the same age as my children.
52:41
And her 24-year-old went into the Green Berets.
52:44
And was killed in Afghanistan in June.
52:47
So when things seem pretty tough, remember your 24-year old did not get killed in Afghanistan.
52:54
So I think you just got to remember what actually matters here.
52:58
And it's great to be wrapped up in work, it is terrific, but in the end, that is the perspective of what is really really important here honestly.
53:07
And I will say when I lost the governors race, it was hard to have that perspective.
53:11
Because it's would have, could have, should have.
53:13
If I would have done this, if I could have done that, maybe it would have turned out differently.
53:17
In the end, nothing really bad happened.
53:20
I lost the governor's race.
53:21
And you, and you know, my family was intact, my husband was, I mean, you know, you just have to remember.
53:27
And then last, but no least, I would say your reputation.
53:31
You have to be known as high integrity, doing what you say, saying what you mean, because everything can go away.
53:38
And if you still have your integrity intact.
53:41
And so often at eBay, at HP, you know, I often ask, what is the right thing to do here?
53:47
And it's challenging, because the right thing to do is quite different in different cultures.
53:52
And I always used to say to our times, it may be different in different countries, but if your mother or your father or someone you love, your children, were reading the New York times and they knew what you were doing, would they be proud.
54:05
Or if they were sitting in the eve of the conference room, watching the decision-making process, would they be proud of you?
54:11
And that's the ultimate question, whether you're from Asia or from Latin America or from Europe, usually having that notion of what would your parents think transverses all those cultural norms about what's acceptable and what's not.
54:26
So, I think those are, those are the three things that I'd point to right away.
54:31
>> Thank, thank you so much for being here.
54:32
>> You're very welcome, thank you. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC]