Ron Liebowitz:
It's flagship program, the Master of Arts in International Economics and Finance. Other programs now include the Master of Business Administration, Master of Science in Finance, Master of Science in Business Analytics and PhD in International Economics and Finance. In addition to graduate degrees, the Brandeis International Business school is also home to the undergraduate business program, one of the most popular undergraduate majors at Brandeis. In 2008, Lou Perlmutter, Brandeis Class of 1956, and Barbara Perlmutter added even more luster to the International Business School, when they founded the Perlmutter Institute, with the mission to help prepare future global business leaders for what they will face in the real world, through the supportive research into the teaching of the impact of globalization on business leadership. The Institute acts as a bridge between the theoretical and technical knowledge that students mastering their academic studies, and the pragmatic skills needed for success in the business of financial worlds.
Ron Liebowitz:
I would like to express my appreciation to Lou and Barbara for the longstanding support of Brandeis University and for their vision in creating the Perlmutter Institute. Honoring Lou and Barbara's vision, the Perlmutter Award is given to a highly select group of individuals who have demonstrated exceptional leadership worldwide. It particularly honors those whose career in business, finance, government, and other related fields embody the values promoted by the Perlmutter Institute. I am proud to be here today to celebrate Aron Ain, as we honor him with this award. And now I'd like to invite Dean Katy Graddy to tell us more about Aron and his value-driven leadership work.
Kathryn Graddy:
Thank you, President Liebowitz, and thank you everyone for joining us. My name is Katy Graddy, I'm the Dean at Brandeis International Business School, and the Fred and Rita Richman Distinguished Professor in Economics. It is our distinct honor today to present the 2021 Perlmutter award for excellence in global business leadership to Aron Ain, the CEO and chairman of Ultimate Kronos Group. Before we share more about Aron's background and accomplishments, I'd like to thank the founders of the Perlmutter Institute for global business leadership, Louis and Barbara Perlmutter. The International Business School is proud to have the Perlmutter Institute as part of our centers and institutes. The center has helped us to be the rigorous experiential and global school that we are today. Aron Ain fiercely contends that there is a direct link between employee engagement, customer satisfaction and business success. And he has proof. When he became CEO of Kronos in 2005, Aaron and his team focused on employee engagement as a growth strategy.
Kathryn Graddy:
The result was impressive. As employee engagement scores skyrocketed, Kronos' revenue nearly tripled. In 2020, Kronos and Ultimate Software merged to become UKG and Aron was named CEO and chairman of the combined company with more than 13,000 employees and $3 billion in revenue. With 50,000 organizations using its software across 150+ countries, UKG is one of the largest Cloud companies in the world and the leading global provider of human capital management, payroll, HR service delivery, and workforce management solutions. A multi-year recipient of Glassdoor's top CEO award, Aron believes that anything is possible when people are inspired. That is the underlying philosophy behind his book, WorkInspired: How to Build an Organization Where Everyone Loves to Work, which we will all learn about in just a few short minutes. Aron ain truly cares about and trusts his people. I learned this firsthand from one of our graduates who works at Kronos and credits Aron with empowering her to advance her career while raising a young family.
Kathryn Graddy:
I read WorkInspired and its message has helped the international business school to thrive during the pandemic. Before we present our award and learn more about Aron's book, I would like to invite Dean David Weil of The Heller School for Social Policy and Management to say a few words.
David Weil:
Thank you, Katy. I had the good fortune to meet Aron in my early days as Dean of the Heller school. We were the two featured speakers at an event convened by the Jewish vocational services to discuss the challenges facing low wage immigrant workers. I was inspired by Aron's discussion of how he, as the CEO of then Kronos, now UKG, sought to directly address these issues in his local community and in all the places the company operated. A real man shy thought. After meeting him at that forum, I decided to read his book, WorkInspired. His book further inspired me and his description of translating high-minded principles into practice and how he and his colleagues at UKG selected, developed, trained and manage their workforce. As someone who ran the federal agency in charge of enforcing labor standards, I know how important and unusual the high road route he describes and has followed, is to both workers and businesses, as well as to the communities that they operate.
David Weil:
I real men, shy thought as I read it. Since getting to know him, I have also had the good fortune to discuss with Aron difficult issues facing the workforce today. I am consistently impressed by his open attitude and willingness to talk through difficult issues, including how to create more diverse and inclusive communities in organizations. Once again, Aron is a mensch who walks the talk, as he has demonstrated in his work and strengthening the bonds between his business and providing opportunities for work in Lowell where UKG is headquartered. Aron has also been an early and steady supporter of OGS, a unique program at Brandeis and based at Heller, that brings an equal number of Israeli and Palestinian young entrepreneurs to the campus each summer, for an intensive three months of co-developing ventures. The fellows in the OGS program are mentored by experienced people like Aron, as a means to the end of developing a new generation of leaders committed to addressing the deep divides in the region.
David Weil:
He has been a dedicated and insightful member of the OGS board under its original chair, Governor Deval Patrick, and now under Ambassador Nick Burns. Finally, anyone who has spent time with Aron knows he is a delightful, exuberant and optimistic person, as well as a very proud Zaida. I always leave my encounters with Aron in a buoyant mood thinking "What a mensch." we feel so fortunate to have them as part of the Heller and Brandeis communities. Congratulations, Aron for this well-deserved honor.
Kathryn Graddy:
Thank you, David. It is now my pleasure to bestow the 2021 Perlmutter award for excellence in global business leadership to Aron Ain. Most of you can see the award now. And I would just like to read that the award is inscribed as follows. It says, Brandeis University celebrates and honors Aaron J. Ain, CEO and chairman UKG, Ultimate Kronos Group for excellence in Global Business Leadership. Perlmutter Institute for Global Business Leadership, April 7th, 2021. Congratulations. I will now turn the program over to Aron Ain to say a few words, and then to Professor Aldo Musacchio, director of the Perlmutter Institute for Global Business Leadership, will lead us in a question and answer session. Thank you.
Aron Ain:
Thank you, Katy. Thank you. I got my award right here, so I'm really happy to hold it. Thank you. Nothing like doing this virtually, excited about it though. So thank you. Let me start by telling everyone how happy I am to be here. I want to thank my various friends and family and others who have joined this session to help both recognize Brandeis and recognize the work that we do at Kronos, and now UKG. It's an honor for me to receive this award from the Perlmutter family and the Perlmutter Institute. I want to specifically thank Lou and Barbara and tell you the inspiration you give to Brandeis and people like myself to do things that make a difference in the world, really give us a lot of wind behind our sails and a lot of energy to do that. And certainly I have to thank Brandeis, this is all possible because of Brandeis. Ron and Jessica from the president's office and Katy and David, all of my friends and I learned from you and I have this wonderful opportunity to spend time together in helping support Brandeis and all the students who are there.
Aron Ain:
Brandeis for me is really an amazing university that does so much for so many, with such a purpose and a soul. As someone who has a really high standard of what inspires me, Brandeis inspires me. And that's what gives me extra energy to say, thank you for receiving this honor and continue to work on behalf of the principles of the Perlmutter Institute and what Lou and Barbara and Brandeis amine and what they've established. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Aldo Musacchio:
Okay. I guess that's my cue, Aron?
Aron Ain:
I think so.
Aldo Musacchio:
Thank you so much. All right. Thank you. I want to congratulate you again, be the second or third person to congratulate you on it. I want to reinforce the message that the reason why you're the perfect recipient for this award is that Lou and Barbara Perlmutter consider a business education to be really an interdisciplinary affair. And I feel like when people read your book, it's very clear that someone who only thinks about business cannot really do what you've done, and you really have really this humanistic liberal arts sort of view of what the workplace should be and I enjoyed reading your book a lot and I felt like it really resounded with the values of the Institute. So thanks so much for accepting it.
Aron Ain:
Thank you Aldo.
Aldo Musacchio:
And I guess I wanted to just get the conversation going, we have about 150 people out there and some of them have sent me questions. And the first thing I wanted to say is, it's obviously amazing that you've done this in this huge corporation, right? It's really incredible. A lot of our students read your book and we're wondering, this is maybe looks too far away from them, maybe too distant for them. And I wanted to see if you can scale down a little bit some of the insights of your book for them. They're going to work in smaller organizations, they may start their own companies, what two or three things you think they can start putting into place now.
Aron Ain:
Thank you. It's a really good question and I want to thank the students for participating in reading the book. And I'm not sure if that was a reward or not, that they were asked to read the book, but I'm glad they did do that. Let me say a couple of things first. It wasn't on my bucket list to write a book about these practices that we have every day at Kronos and now UKG. It really is a reflection of people saying to me, "Aron, we do something really special here, we really should share it with others." So that's what led me to do that. Having said that, I believe that trust is the magic glue that holds together personal and professional relationships. I believe it makes everything possible when you trust each other. I think trust is a key ingredient of our success.
Aron Ain:
And I think it's something, Aldo, that you can do at a small startup, or you can do at a great big company. Everyone has opportunities to interact with other people, and we've all experienced in our personal and professional lives when we meet someone or we have someone who we can tell to trust us and how it liberates us and gives us energy to do more. And so I would tell all the students, that's something you can start practicing when you're students at Brandeis, that something you can practice when you're home with your families, that's something you can practice with your friends, and as you move into your professional careers. And it's important when you're small and it's even more important, I suppose, when you get bigger. So I think that's a key part. The other thing I'll say, these principles, I believe in around transparency and trust and collaboration and honesty, and always, always telling the truth, those are principles that always work.
Aron Ain:
They're within all of our grasp when we interact with other people. So there's principles that we follow, that I follow every day that are the core principles what I believe has made us successful, they are things that we should be doing all the time. So yeah, I think they're there for those students when they live in their world today and the near future.
Aldo Musacchio:
And it's very Brandeisian in a way. I feel like these recommendations are very Brandeis and they're in line with the culture at Brandeis so it fits very well with what we try to do at school and in the classes, et cetera. For me, an interesting, perhaps dichotomy or tension in the book is that you push this idea of trust, but at the same time, there has to be a lot of monitoring. And so where is the line between I trust you to do what you have to do, but I also am going to oversee you and make sure that you're doing it.
Aron Ain:
Yeah, it's a good question. A fair question. But I start all my relationships with people I work with by trusting them. They have to unearn my trust. I take an opposite approach of others, where someone has to earn my trust. When we hire them, or we give them responsibility, we hire them because we trust them and we give them things to do because we trust them. So I'm very comfortable starting my relationships with everyone by trusting them to get the work done. At the same time we have standards and people are accountable to that. And so we expect people to perform. Now, I also have a focus on not keeping score. And let me tell you what I mean by that. If we give someone something to do, or they give us a proposal and we approve it, if it doesn't work, that's okay. That's okay. I tell them all the time, if you're convinced something is a bad idea or not going the way we expect it, then stop doing it.
Aron Ain:
Let's stop throwing good resources at a bad idea. And if I'm keeping score about everything, then people will continue to work on that to absolutely positively prove it was a bad idea. And I don't want them to do that. But I still trust them even after that. Now, if someone keeps giving us ideas to do and we give them resources to do it and it never works out, then at some point I'm going to say, "Look, I still trust you, but I don't have confidence in you doing this in the same way anymore." So I comfortably hold people accountable and I trust them at the same time and they go together for me. There's really not a mixed message there at all.
Aldo Musacchio:
There is a question very related to what you're mentioning, but from Alex Park, one of our undergrad students, who's asking, with your philosophy of trust and working with people, how do you approach making hard decisions that will affect those who work with you?
Aron Ain:
Yeah. So hard decisions are hard. We have a training program that we developed in house called Courage to Lead and the Action Lord, I tell people and the leadership development program isn't to lead it's courage. Because it takes a lot of courage to be a great leader. Nobody likes to have difficult decisions with people about things that affect those people negatively. But we teach them, they have to do it, and we teach them that it's really hard to do. And we tell them that's why there's an emphasis on courage and we role play with them. And we give them the confidence to know that if they're feeling uneasy about it, that's okay, that's expected. It's hard but you still need to go do it. And as a leader, we have to have the courage to be leaders. And that means, lead. And that means be prepared and make those difficult decisions.
Aron Ain:
And when we teach them how to do it, you can make difficult decisions that even affect people negatively, but you can do it in a kind, a thoughtful a caring way, but you need to do it, and you need to do it directly, and you need to do it as soon as possible. I'll also say about it is, I always try to think about if I'm thinking somebody's not doing a good job, and if the shoe was on the other foot, when I want someone thinking that I was doing a bad job, but not telling me that I was doing a bad job. So I always say, if I would want someone to tell me, then I'm going to tell them. And that also gives me the impetus and the courage to go do that.
Aldo Musacchio:
Excellent. And since you're talking about how you train your own leaders to make these hard decisions, something that I found very interesting in the book is that, most of the time you're talking about something that is very humane, and something that comes from the heart in terms of how you want people to interact, how you want people to treat each other and to care for each other. And yet I noticed that there is a moment in which you talk about an algorithm that you use to predict whether someone's going to be a good leader and the algorithm uses Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, et cetera, et cetera. And so I felt at that moment that I was like, "Oh, I thought we were talking about touchy, feely stuff. And then now I suddenly feel like we're introducing robots to make decisions." Is this a tension or is this a natural fit in your view?
Aron Ain:
Oh, no, no. No robots where I work. We certainly use technology to help us analyze information, but all the inputs into that information are collected from humans, and all the positives and negatives that we deal with in dealing with each other as humans. And so some of those technology help us evaluate based on science and research, what kind of people work together most effectively? What are people's basic drives and needs, and then how to teach managers to work with people on their team to effectively bring out the best in each other. But it's all based on human input. And then right along with that, we believe, I believe that everyone deserves to have a great manager. I believe people join organizations because of the organization and they leave because of who they work for. Think about your own experiences when you've worked for someone who didn't trust you, or you didn't get along with, you said, "I just can't stay" here no matter how much you love the organization.
Aron Ain:
So we also use those tools to go and help us collect information on what makes a great manager in the eyes of the people who work for them. And we'll report those results back to those managers using again, science and information to give them that data so that they can continue to improve. And so, no, it's no robots, humans helping humans and just using a little bit of science and technology to make it a little bit better.
Aldo Musacchio:
Excellent. And obviously the question of the moment from our fellow professor Ben Gomes-Casseres is, how did you see the transition out of this pandemic in terms of work from home? He asked two questions, one is, are we going to the before model? Or is there going to be something new? And do you see new forms of collaboration among employees?
Aron Ain:
Yeah. It's a good question. So look, we have 13,000 people around the world working from home. Imagine that, 13,000 people working from home, from Australia, India, Europe, Latin America, North America, and we're getting our job done and we've learned to work in a new and a different way. And by the way, our business is doing well, and we've been able to protect the business and the balance sheets so we could protect our employees and their families and our customers, of course. Having said that, I'm ready for it to go back to the old way with a little bit more flexibility. And let me be more specific about that. We're planning to come back if things continue to improve in the US to start, although we're back in our offices in Australia and New Zealand and Singapore, but in the US where we have the vast majority of our people, June 30th.
Aron Ain:
And we're going to let our people know that in the coming days, so they can get prepared for that. With certain protocols and certain rules. Now, why is that? I believe, and we believe that we collaborate better. We innovate better. We ideate better. We have fun together better when we're together. So we already have 40% of our employees working remotely, either full or part-time because we trust each other. It's another benefit of trust we can do that. But for the 60% who were in offices before, we're going to be asking them to come back to our offices, and we're going to be asking them to do much of what we did before, but with more flexibility. More flexibility than maybe we did before. But it's going to be more like the old way than it is the current way.
Aldo Musacchio:
I mean, and it's important to mention that in a way you were doing flexibility before the pandemic.
Aron Ain:
Yeah. And you know what's interesting about that, that point is I've always believed that I care more about what people do than where they do it, or when they do it, it goes back again to trust. I care more about what they do, so if they can get their work done at home, I care what they get done not where they did it or when they did it. So I think it's why we've comfortably switched to that. But I still believe we, what I said before, innovate better, collaborate better, have more fun together around our culture. We have a great culture. It's one of the things that drives us. And it's one of the things we've lost a lot in the past year, is that magic culture we've had. We're still doing great with it, but it's not quite the way it was before.
Aldo Musacchio:
Since you mentioned the global scope of UKG, I wanted to ask you the chapters in which you talk about caring for each other, ran very close to me. I'm from Latin America, you talk about, "Look, make sure that you know everyone in the office, you know about their families, about their health," et cetera, et cetera, which is the normal procedure where I come from. But I can't imagine how you convince a global... people in different cultures to basically sign off and say, "Yeah, this is how I'm going to behave now," which may not be natural for them.
Aron Ain:
We lead by example. Who doesn't want to be cared for and communicated with actively and receive kindness, and, I don't know, love from each other and take care of each other. And so it's easier than you think it is once you start doing it. And I have great relationships with the people who work for us all over the world, Latin America, Asia, Europe, all over North America, and try to focus on the person and their family and tell them that that's most important. And I tell people all the time, Aldo, that if the most important thing in their life is working for UKG, they have their priorities mixed up. I tell them that's silly. The most important thing in their lives should be their families. Now, I want where they work to be important, but the most important thing, no, don't do that. And so if I say that enough, people know I'm serious about it.
Aron Ain:
And you'd be surprised how much they give back to the organization and each other and our customers, when they know that we trust them and we care about them and we're committed to being kind to them and we're committed to looking out for them.
Aldo Musacchio:
Yeah. Also like Katy Graddy, I have many former students who work for you and they left jobs in California, close to their families to stay there and simply because they love the place. Right? I think I get it. One of our undergrad students is asking that this idea of trust sounds good, but it's not easy to suddenly give trust to someone. And how much is it about selecting the right people let's say to get into this culture versus just giving trust to anyone?
Aron Ain:
Well, of course it has an impact on selecting the right person, but I've interviewed and hired thousands of people in my career, but I'm never positive when I hire someone if they're really as good as they seem. Yet I still start that relationship with them by trusting them. I still start that relationship with them where they have to unearn my trust. And sometimes it's really interesting. I'll see a situation where I'll watch a manager not trusting someone and I'll grab the manager on the side, I'll say, "Hey, what's going on with that?" "What do you mean?" I say, "Well, you don't seem to really trust them as much as I think you should." They say, "Well, they just started. They have to earn my trust." And I tell them, "But when you hired them, you must have thought you would trust them or else you wouldn't have hired them. I say, give it a chance." I have other situations where people come to me and they say, "Aron, could you help me with this?" I say, "Sure."
Aron Ain:
And they tell me a situation and I say, "I don't know, what do you think we should do?" And they start to explain it to me. And I say, "Okay, let's do that." And they go, "Really?" And I go, "Yeah, I trust you." And I watched them. They're uncomfortable. And sometimes I take a physical step closer to them, not actually in their personal space, but pretty close. And I say, "No, no, no. I trust you." And I watch him get even more uncomfortable. And it just shows me they're not used to it. But when we start doing it every day, oh my goodness, it's magic. What happens? People start saying, "I love it here because I can tell they trust me to get my work done. And they trust me to make important decisions." And so, no, I think you just go do it, go give it a try. I understand why it's hard It'll be more fun to do it.
Aldo Musacchio:
One of our colleagues, Carol Hustler, a professor at Brandeis International Business School asked like, can you elaborate further on why trust is so critical? What happens if you don't have this whole trust idea embedded in the organization?
Aron Ain:
It just liberates so many other things. So I'll give you a quick story. 2015, we had over 300 open positions at the company. By the way, today we have over 800 open positions, but three years ago, I mean, 2015, 300. And we were struggling to fill those positions. And I went to the recruiting team and said, "Hey guys, come on. We need to fill these positions. They're important positions." And they said, "Aron, it's really hard right now. The economy's doing well. There's a lot of competition." I said, "Okay, well give me some ideas of what we can do different." They said, "Let me think about that." They came back a couple of days later and they said, would you ever consider us having an open vacation policy?" I said, "I don't know, what's an open vacation policy?" They said, "People can take off as much time as they want and we don't keep track of it the same way."
Aron Ain:
And the first thing that went through my mind was, Oh my goodness. I'm going to be the only person here if we do that. But they said, "No, no, no. I talked to other companies and we put in, in January 2016, an open vacation policy where people can take as much time off. They can't all go at the same time, they have to get approval. So we have coverage." That year 2016 was the best year we ever had. Lowest turnover ever, highest employee engagement, best financial results. A big difference was we did this open vacation policy. How does it relate to this question? We could have done that if we did not trust each other. Impossible. But I trust again, I care about what you do more than where you do it and when you do it.
Aron Ain:
And we still today have that policy, guess what it did, it made our recruiting that much easier. We did it to change our recruiting profile, to differentiate ourselves against other companies that were having fixed vacation times. And so there you go, trust, all way back to trust.
Aldo Musacchio:
Yeah, no. And I love that chapter of the book because you can see also how the surveys basically change and how people reacted to this. My colleague also has something about institutional policies towards bullying. I don't know how much you guys think about that, or if that's just something that really you don't have to worry about once you have trust and care as the primary sort of ethos.
Aron Ain:
Bullying, like bullying at work, people bullying each other?
Aldo Musacchio:
Yeah.
Aron Ain:
Oh, that doesn't... we don't accept that. That's an unacceptable, that's a non-starter for us. You wouldn't be able to stay at our company if you did that, it's just impossible to do that.
Aldo Musacchio:
So zero tolerance basically is the policy?
Aron Ain:
Zero tolerance, zero tolerance. So zero tolerance for a lot of things, people who work with me know if you want to get on my bad side really quickly, don't tell the truth. Like if there's bad news, tell me the bad news, tell me the truth, but don't fib to me, it's hard enough, don't fib to me kind of thing. I have no tolerance for that. We're very focused on diversity these days, we want to be a leader, a leader in all aspects of diversity, all aspects of it. And we've done great historically in some areas and there's areas that we want to improve even more. We have no tolerance for examples of not being supportive and exhibiting behavior that shows we support diversity and in all of its important ways. By the way, it's not just that, we have better results because we're more diverse, that's a nice product. We're diverse because it's the right thing to do, it's the right way to lead our professional lives.
Aron Ain:
And so we're trying to teach our employees and hopefully they'll teach their family and teach our communities of the value of being diverse. We've been doing this for a long time and we've just scratched the surface, so we have no tolerance when you don't do that either.
Aldo Musacchio:
And David, while it's actually adding to this asking about like, can you tell us a little bit about your approach to diversity at UKG in terms of what we're seeing right now in the world, the situation we're living right now. Can you tell us a little bit about how you... what kind of policies you have, how do you see that diversity as an issue right now?
Aron Ain:
Yeah, so it's a complex multi-dimensional question as David knows, and I appreciate them asking me it. We've always had a focus on diversity, we have communities of interest at the company, whether it's around women issues, gender, race, ethnicity, age, you can go on and on in different areas. And we create programs and encourage allies to support those areas and do more. But what's happening today, which is a little bit different than two or three years ago, we were very internally focused on diversity historically. And today, particularly in the past year or so, we've become much more focused externally on diversity to be an example for other corporations, other organized businesses of what they can do in areas of diversity. I personally don't think that in parts of our society where we need to have leaders show more leadership in this area, they're doing as good of a job as they need to.
Aron Ain:
So I feel a calling to go help lead our organization to do this. So that might be in this specific form of pay equity. We've always been focused on pay equity so that we have no issues where there's gender pay imbalance. We did this survey a couple of years ago when Massachusetts required a gender pay compliance proof and we didn't just do it for our Massachusetts employees, we did it for all 5,000 global employees. And we didn't have to change one person's pay, it means we were right there, other CEOs went on and said, "We did that, we found out that we were paying women less than we should have." And they were given TV interviews as heroes. I was saying, "Why can't I get to go on TV and say, we didn't have to change anything. We did it right from the beginning."
Aron Ain:
So that's just one example. In the last three or four years, more than half of all of the people we've either hired or promoted to officers of the company, vice presidents, are women. And so in our technology business, the average number of women in those roles is 32%, here we are 50%. And so it's intentional, we can't do this without being intentional. Big focus right now on race, we take this very seriously. We've created a build program, a black leadership development program. We're just not counting on the educational institutions or other companies to prepare a generation of specifically blacks, to go assume important leadership roles. We're taking it upon ourselves to develop leadership programs in those areas, to teach our managers what it means to have difficult discussions about race specifically, or parts of diversity questions.
Aron Ain:
And So I can go on and on. We're just scratching the surface and deeply, deeply committed to it, again, not because we do better because we're more diverse, which we do. But because it's the right thing to do, I don't need any other reason that it's a right thing to do. And then everything else takes care of itself.
Aldo Musacchio:
Yeah. Well, thank you. That's a great answer. And related to this, one of our graduate students from Afghanistan he's asking... Thank you for being here. Congratulations. But then he's asking, how can we like our students, who are learning these fantastic things, become ambassadors and develop this kind of work culture in their home countries where maybe the common practice is very different.
Aron Ain:
Look, this is hard, again, courage to lead. It takes courage to be this great leader in different ways. And you're blessed that you have an opportunity to be at one of the finest universities in the world like Brandeis. It's not a throw away statement, and be part of the international school here and what it represents and you have to just listen and learn and then go back and have the courage to go put them in motion. One person, one woman, one man can make a huge difference, whether it's Afghanistan or Waltham, Massachusetts. And I encourage you to have the courage to go do that and influence people to see your way, and then lead by example. I get more done by leading by example than I do because of my role and my influence and my authority. So like communication when I'm walking in the hallways, when I can't wait to go back to my office, my cell phone's in my pocket, my head is up and I'm talking and communicating and catching up with people in the hallways as I'm on the move around. I'm paying attention, little things like that make a difference.
Aldo Musacchio:
Excellent. That was a fantastic answer. And we have... It's a little bit like a change of gears, but somebody's Mad V. Maslov who's in Moscow right now, and I guess in the middle of the night, he's asking us. Okay. So how does trust between employees impact the decisions made during conflicting situations? Does it make it easier to disarm or solve those kinds of a conflicting situations?
Aron Ain:
Yeah, I think it makes it much easier because people don't have hidden agendas that we don't know about. We encourage people to go and say what's on their mind, tell the truth, be transparent. And so then let's deal with fact, I have a concept that I live by which I call exposing reality. I can deal much better with a set of decisions if I know what the facts are. And so I encourage our people, let's expose the reality of what's really going on right now, not what we want it to be, not what we wish it would be, not what it's not, but what it is. And if we could do that, then we can solve problems quicker. And that requires trust to do that at times, and so, yeah, I think it's a key part of it. If we don't trust each other, then we're not going to expose reality. If we don't expose reality, we're going to go spend too much time trying to figure out what's really going on to make a decision.
Aldo Musacchio:
Here's a question that may be hard for you. It comes from Caroline Master. She's... how does one go about finding companies, organizations who value trust and the other attributes that we have been discussing?
Aron Ain:
I'm not positive how to do that. If I was going to start from scratch, I certainly go look at things like how organizations are ranked. And just last month we were... Forbes listed their top 500 places to work for through random surveys of employees, thousands, tens of thousands of employees. And they called up and said, we want to let you know, we're going to announce tomorrow the top 500 places to work for, and they say, you're going to get announced as number two. And I'm going, "Number two? You must be wrong. I'm in the middle of merger, in the middle of the pandemic, and there's no way we're number two." And they said, "Yup. Number two, that's how you were rated by both people who work at your company and people who have heard about your company." And so that's a good place to start. Also you can start by talking to people and listening to people and what do they know and do that.
Aron Ain:
And then we all develop better judgments as we go through our own life journey, so sometimes I would say, judge the people who you're talking to, but sometimes we don't always have good judgment, particularly when we're early in our career. I know I didn't. And so I think that's an imperfect way to do it. I would focus most on who your manager is, I go back to that basic principle. People join organizations because of the organization, they leave because of who they work for. Like when my kids were looking for jobs, I would tell them, go talk to other people who work for that manager, go on LinkedIn, go here. You got to find some people who work for that person and see what those people think about that specific manager who you're going to work for. So I think that's important as well, but I don't have a perfect answer to the question.
Aldo Musacchio:
No, that was a great answer. And Caroline Robinson thank you. And also she's a Brandeis undergrad Class of 1974. Wow. Okay, fantastic.
Aron Ain:
Thank you, Caroline.
Aldo Musacchio:
There is a question that we love to ask to guests when we have a student interacting with guests like yourself, which is one key question is, what do you wish someone like yourself had told you when you were a student? Right? That would have prevented a big mistake you made or something that you wish somebody had told you when you were at school that would have changed your life in a significant way.
Aron Ain:
People ask me that.
Aldo Musacchio:
Now you want to convey it to our students.
Aron Ain:
The answer is that if somebody had told me, I'm not sure I was prepared to accept it and receive it and react to it. Let me try to shift the question a little bit and say, what are things that you did earlier in your career that you learned that you wouldn't do again, if you know what you know now? One of the things was, I expected everyone to want to work as hard as I did and be as into it, as I was into it. Six, seven days a week and just always on and I learned after a while that not everybody wanted to be like me and that was okay. And they could still be great productive employees and wonderfully productive peers and coworkers. And so I probably aggravated some people when I was a young manager by getting frustrated that they weren't into it, like I was into it.
Aron Ain:
And I give the credit to this one young man who was roughly my age. I was like 24, and I had all these people working for me and he sat me down and he was my friend at that point. And he just said, "Aron, I don't want to be like you." And I went home and I thought about that and I said, "You got to do better Aron. You got to do better." So I will say this, that would encourage you. I think humility and being humble and understanding that you don't have a corner on the market of all the best ideas. And if you can let people who you work with make you a more effective peer and co-worker and manager and leader, you will be. So the sooner you start doing that, the sooner you're on a track to be more effective than you otherwise would've been.
Aldo Musacchio:
Fantastic. And you mentioned this idea of like, look for a manager, not for a job, maybe thinking about... Especially our students, they love to find good mentors and things like that. So one of our students is asking, I'm still working hard to find what I love, what advice would you give me? He's an MBA student.
Aron Ain:
The advice I would tell you to start with is, try to find a job in an industry or an organization or something that you really love to do. I'm not sure if I had to do it again, I'd be doing what I did, I don't think I thought about that. It's like when I was in college, I wish that I hadn't decided to just be a double major in economics and government. I wish I had decided to be a single major taking just a minimum amount of courses to complete that major and then took a diverse set of courses. And all these other things that I would probably never do in the rest of my life, just to go advance my knowledge. And so like when my kids went to school, I said, "Go and enjoy college, go take lots of things. Whether you think they're going to help you in the future or not just to expand your horizon in your world from that perspective." So, yeah, it's not a perfect answer to the question, but it helps how I think about that.
Aldo Musacchio:
Of course. I have to ask you a very close to home question, which is that, we're very fortunate to work with your sister and she's amazing at coaching. And then we hear you and then you have all this amazing advice, so is there something in your... is there something that runs in the family that made both of you prone to see people a different way and to think about the development of people in a different way? Because it's amazing that both of you have all these amazing perspectives and your sister brings this... Alice brings this to us at the business school everyday.
Aron Ain:
Well, look, my secret weapon is my sister. We're 13 months apart, I'm number four, she's number five. And she's been a great coach and teacher for me my whole life. And so I get too much credit, she probably deserves more of the credit than I do. And so we learn off of each other, but I think it goes back to, we're one of five kids, like I said, and two of five kids and we had fantastic parents and truly fantastic parents, remarkable parents. They taught us the value of taking care of each other, taking care of others who are less fortunate than us, making the world a better place. They led by example and it just rubbed off on us. But I think it's also in our soul a little bit from that perspective, I do what I do because it gives me joy.
Aron Ain:
I don't do what I do because I have to, Alice does what she does because it gives her joy, she doesn't do what she does because she has to. And so it makes it a lot easier when you do it that way. So great parents, great siblings, I still talk to every one of my siblings, like five days a week, no matter where I am in the world in one form or another. Texting, talking, communicating. When one of the two, two of the five might not be getting along, my mom would call me up because I tended to be more of a peacekeeper. And she'd say, "I need you to get in the middle and tell those two to cut it out." I'd say, "Mom, why do I have to do that? Tell them to get–." "Because I told you, I don't like this." So I call them up and say, "I'm not going to get in the middle of this with mom calling me up. You guys cut it out, like right now, cut it out." And so maybe that helps as well.
Aldo Musacchio:
Thank you for sharing this. And the one thing that is curious in your book is you talk about what you've done inside the company. And then you talk about how you try to send these to your customers, to your clients, right? To sort of export the culture. But I would think that was probably the hardest thing to do. How do you export what you do very well inside to your clients who may have completely different work culture?
Aron Ain:
You know it's a really, really great question. Thank you for asking that. I really try not to, until what happens is when I meet with potential clients like the biggest hospital group in New York, or one of the biggest international food and beverage organizations or a large car manufacturer. When I go present, why they should buy from us? One of the things I tell them is about our culture and a lot of things we were just talking about. And I tell them, I'm telling them this because we'll be a better partner because we have better people who work for us. We have people who are engaged, engaged people, better products, better service, better products, better service, better outcomes. So that's a reason why you should do business with us. Go ask the people who are the competitors, how they do this.
Aron Ain:
So then what happens is after the meeting or I present, the execs come up to me and they say, "Could you come and teach my company how to do that? Could you come give a talk about that?" And I always say, "We're a software company. I'm not a consulting company." They say, "No, no, we need to do the exact same thing." I say, "Well, I'm happy to do that, but you're sure you want to ask me to do that." And so I'm actually not trying to go promote and push our strategy and our philosophy and our culture on others. It just makes sense and they want to hear about it. It's one of the reasons why we wrote the book, because my people who I work with kept saying, Aron, you got to write this down.
Aldo Musacchio:
Yeah. And I feel like we've been talking about all this positive stuff and it would be unfair as a management instructor, let's say not to ask about mistakes, right? If you can maybe share with you something like a big mistake that maybe changed your management philosophy, and this is not from me, this actually also comes from someone in the audience, Michael.
Aron Ain:
Yeah. So a good question. Look, I've made so many mistakes. I could write a book that's twice as big as WorkInspired, on the number of mistakes I've made. But I try to learn from those mistakes and I try to not necessarily not do them again, I'm human, I'm imperfect. And so I'm going to continue to make mistakes, but I don't let it get in the way. Big mistakes, doing big multi multi-million dollar acquisitions that didn't work out, I remember when we did $150 million acquisition and we ended up selling it, I don't know, 10, 12 years later for $8 million. Just the remnants of what it was. But we also did another 70 acquisitions that ended up working out great and so... but that's a big mistake, but it's okay, it goes back to the saying, not keeping score.
Aron Ain:
I'm okay if I make mistakes, I'm okay if the people I work with make mistakes. I tell them, by the way, although we're going to be judged more on how we react to what happened in a negative way than what happened. So can we put all of our time and all of our energy behind fixing what happened as opposed to trying to keep score of why it happened exactly. There'll be plenty of time to do that, but let's fix the problem and move on, I don't want to hear about who's to blame or why this happened. Let's just fixed the problem. And so lots of mistakes and I'm okay with it. I'm okay. I'm human, imperfect.
Aldo Musacchio:
Yeah. We have only a few minutes, but there are a couple of questions that if you don't mind, we want to sneak in. One is, it's about when you started to think about the workplace in a different way, you probably were kind of a Renegade. And do you feel like everyone is moving closer to you or did you already feel when you started to make changes and you started to change how the philosophy inside Kronos back then that, that the world was moving in that direction?
Aron Ain:
You know, I'm in a little bit of a rut. I've been at the same company now for 42 years. So I actually don't know perfectly what happens in other places. I do know that I felt when I became CEO in 2005, that we perhaps weren't taken advantage of the power of our people enough. So it's just something I felt that I wanted us to do more effectively. We were a good place to work, but we weren't a great place to work. And I thought if we could be a great place to work, we could achieve things that were unimaginable, just not possible and so that's really what my focus was. Do I think organizations are moving more to this softer side of leadership? I do.
Aron Ain:
I think potential employees are smarter and more discerning and have tools to see where they can work and we want to hire the best people. Other organizations want to hire the best people. If you want to hire the best people, then you better be a great place to work and you better do all these things we talked about. Because the problem with hiring great people, is great people have choices. If you hire great people when you don't have an engaged environment, they're going to do what great people can do, they'll get another job. And so that's why we do it and that's how I feel about it. And I do think more organizations are happy to do it if particularly the really good ones.
Aldo Musacchio:
Yeah. And I feel since this is an award for excellence in global leadership, I feel like in a way you were ahead of your time in that respect. And-
Aron Ain:
I agree with that.
Aldo Musacchio:
...you see now CEOs of investment banks where you would never expect people talking about ESG and the value of people in the same way that you've been talking also. So I think it's very interesting from that perspective to see that the world is converging to your philosophy. And hopefully we'll see more of that. I think on the interest of time, I'm going to pass on the button to President Liebowitz, to close the ceremony. It's been a pleasure, really Aron having the conversation with you. It's exactly as I expected when I read the book. So thank you so much.
Aron Ain:
Thank you, Aldo. You're a remarkable conversationalist. So you give me energy having the chat with you and thanks for all the questions.
Aldo Musacchio:
It's a pleasure.
Ron Liebowitz:
I just want a second to thanks to Aldo for conducting that interview which just flew on by. And I also want to thank all the questions that came in. Thank the folks who sent all the questions and they were terrific. I don't know how many came from the students in Phillip's class, but we appreciate them very much. And Aron, congratulations one more time to you, it's well deserved. I mean, you've done a remarkable job at Kronos. Just remarkable to hear all that's been done. I can't imagine 13,000 employees and thinking about the multiple continents and how the day never sets... the sun never sets for you in thinking about the company, so kudos to you. And last but not least, I want to thank Lou and Barbara Perlmutter, again, for sponsoring this and starting the Institute that led to this conversation and to all of that's been done at the Business School in this area. So thank you, Lou. Thank you, Barbara. Thank you, Aldo. Thank you, Aron. And thank you everyone else who was here for this event. Thanks a lot.