75. What Makes Top Business Leaders Different From The Rest? Breaking It Down with Eric Chernik

Karthik Chidambaram: Hello, everyone. Welcome to a brand
new episode of Driven by DCKAP podcast. We're here in the Dallas, Texas
area, Field Support Office of Building Controls and Solutions. And we're
here with Building Controls CEO, Eric Chernik. Eric, thank you for joining
the Driven podcast and welcome.

Eric Chernik: My pleasure.

Karthik Chidambaram: So, Eric, great to have you join the
show. I'm really looking forward to the conversation today. And thanks for
the office tour as well. I really enjoyed that. Before we talk about
building controls. I just want to talk a little bit about your early years
growing up. I saw that you went to Stanford.

You did your bachelors there and you also went to Chicago University of
Chicago School of Business. So it looks like you were a very smart kid
growing up. Are you a smart kid growing up or tell us about your early
years.

Eric Chernik: I grew up in a family that moved around a lot
growing up. I grew up with a very well educated set of parents.

My mother was a PhD in clinical psychology. My father was a writer. So I got
raised by in a family where my father was home taking care of the kids and
my mother was out teaching and working. Travel and other cultures was a big
part of my upbringing. So learning how to communicate in foreign lands was a
big part of my upbringing.

Karthik Chidambaram: I'm sure that helped a lot as you
moved up your career chain. So right after college you went and started
working at Grainger. You were with Grainger for over 12 years, I think,
right? So you started with them around 1997 or so. And recently, as you
know, David Grainger just passed away. So was that the time where you just
joined and he left?

Or do you have any memories of him?

Eric Chernik: So I have, I can probably put my career into
three buckets. So I started as a consultant, a human resource, a people, a
compensation consultant before Granger. So I did that for my beginning of my
career was all about organizational behavior. How do you motivate people?

How do you organize work? How do you pay people? How do you recognize, how
do you create cultures in a workplace? I decided that after doing human
resources and human resource and human resources that I wanted to get a
little broader in my experience and it really. Build a general management
career. And I went back to business school at chicago and then my first job
out of business school was granger I was looking for companies that would
allow me to move around a company from wall to wall Not just be a finance
guy not just be a supply chain guy.

Not just be a customer service person But where what company would allow me
to learn? You know, wall to wall in the company and Granger was a great
place that you mentioned Dave Granger, who recently passed away at age 97.
His father started the business I think back in the 1940s and a great
reputation in the B2B distribution space.

And so it was a great place for me to learn about supply chain, about
marketing, about strategy. Really very customer focused. And so I had a
great 13 years of my career there. Where I started in a branch in Chicago,
and I was unloading boxes, and I was learning from the technical experts at
the counter, and that's where I really learned that in distribution, you
know, or retail, being close to the customer and understanding what their
needs are is really, really valuable.

My business school colleagues kind of laughed that I was working in a
warehouse after business school, but it was a great way for me to
understand. supply chain and availability of product and then the technical
aspects of some of the products that were more plumbing, electrical, HVAC,
whatever they were, to understand what customer kind of challenges that came
in the door.

And so it was a great experience, a good foundation of my, of my career in
distribution was at Grainger.

Karthik Chidambaram: But why did you choose distribution?
Like you said, you know, I mean you could have gone into finance, or you
could have gone into a ton of other things. Why did you choose distribution?

Eric Chernik: I think it was somewhat coincidental.

I mean, I really was looking for companies that would allow me to build a
general management career for myself. And I talked to companies like
Samsung, and Toys R Us, and RR Donnelly, and Grainger, and a few others. And
I just hit it off with the leadership team at Grainger. And they had a
leadership development program that was very focused on building cross
functional strength.

And so that, that kind of fell into B2B distribution.

Karthik Chidambaram: And right after Grainger what did you
end up doing?

Eric Chernik: So after Grainger, I spent some time at an
aviation supply and logistics company in Chicago called AAR. I moved down to
Texas for a private equity owned company in truck parts. Company called
Fleet Pride.

I spent some time at Lenox, which is a big heating and air conditioning
distribution and manufacturing and distribution company. And then I found
this industry there was a private equity company, Luther King, that asked me
to look at a division of, of one of their larger companies and figure out
what to do with it.

Should they invest in it? Should they sell it? Should they close it? And the
more and more I dug into this building automation space in the commercial
world, I thought there's a nice gem of a business here that we can grow up.
Through organic growth strategies, through some acquisitive growth
strategies, and here we are five years later and we've gone from three
locations to 25, from 35 employees to 225 employees, and we're having a
great time growing up this company and being an industry leader.

In this building automation space.

Karthik Chidambaram: Yeah, I was reading about that. So you
are Granger. Granger is obviously a large company and then here you're
building from ground up, right? Pretty much.

Eric Chernik: Yes.

Karthik Chidambaram: Like you said, you're going from 3 to
25 locations.

Eric Chernik: That's right.

Karthik Chidambaram: So how does that happen, right? So how
did the Granger experience or some of your other experiences help you
usually, right?

So when you work in a large company, this is my understanding, and I kind of
agree with it to a great extent as well that when you work in a large
company, there's not a lot of learning. Sometimes you're limited, you know,
so, but How do you apply those learnings or how did that evolve? Well,

Eric Chernik: I would say every chapter in my career,
there's been best practices and worst practices.

And so I'll go from some of the big companies where I've learned some really
good practices around how do you manage supply chain in distribution and
retail inventory availability and product availability is really important.
And so I learned some of those best practices at Grainger. I also learned,
you know, standing across the counter and a customer comes in with a motor
and the wires are dangling, you know, how do you problem solve?

How do you look up stuff? How do you lean on expertise from your colleagues?
Or from the internet or from the catalog. How do you problem solve, you
know, with a customer standing in front of you? I learn about marketing
techniques in terms of whether it's sales collateral or whether it's demand
generating marketing.

I've learned about e commerce from being in different parts of Grainger. So
all of these, you know, functions that I'm mentioning. You don't really know
it. You can't just read it in a book. You really have to live it and work on
a project and work cross functionally and figure out what the business case
is What's going to have a good return on investment?

What's going to have custom create customer delight? I mean our businesses
are all about customers And so how do we drive that customer experience to
be better that they choose my company instead of other companies to do
business with? What's gonna, okay, if I have a product on a shelf and they
need it today, that's one way to drive that customer experience.

If they come in with a problem and I help them solve it, that's another way
to drive customer experience. If I bundle this product with this product
with this product, that's another way to drive customer experience. If I
figure out a way for them to save time and money so they don't have to go to
five different supply houses on five different parts of town, or five
different phone calls, or five different invoices, if I can help them one
stop shop, I've added value to their customer experience.

And so, you can't just read it in a book and say you're an expert at it. So,
over 30 years in B2B distribution, I figured out, oh, I can use that, apply
what I learned at Grainger in this area. And I can use what I applied, you
know, what I learned at Lennox or Fleet Pride in this aspect. And so it's
really cobbling together all these, you know, practices and processes to
really help that customer want to do business with us and grow.

And that's what we've been successful, you know, at growing the last few
years. I've added some teammates to our team, leaders to our team, that can
bring some even new experiences. I'm a big believer in idea diversification.
And, you know, diversity of ideas. And you can only get that when you bring
in people from other industries, or other functions, or people that don't
think exactly like I think.

I don't profess to have all the answers. It's surrounding myself with really
good thinkers and strategists, and then learn from, like I said, I'll use
the word again, best practices. that they've had.

Karthik Chidambaram: Talking about idea diversification, I
really love that word. How do you do that, right? Because I think that's a
problem a lot of companies that's a challenge for a lot of companies, right?

Because it's usually top down and but then like you rightly said, ideas need
to come from everywhere. How do you do that? How do you do that?

Eric Chernik: I don't know if there's any magic answer to
that question. I, I think when we have staff meetings I throw out questions
to the group. I sometimes will give my opinion on something.

But I'll ask for their inputs and I'll ask the same question of six people
around the room and I want all six answers I don't want one answer because
this person is gonna learn from that person and I'm gonna learn from both of
them There you're sure there's probably a smartest guy in the room That
maybe has the best answer, but I bet you number two person, number three
person, number four person is going to add to that answer.

And so I oftentimes look for multiple answers for the same question and then
figure out how we summarize it or prioritize it or phase it in, you know,
whatever the solution might be.

Karthik Chidambaram: Yeah, that's a smart thing to do. One
thing I also try to do is let's say if somebody, let's say we are having a
meeting and somebody is not even talking to point at that person.

Hey. Mark, what do you think about this? And then, you know, he might say
something, you know, which is really cool.

Eric Chernik: Oh, you're absolutely right. Some people are
more introverted than extroverted and you have to pull out the introverted
and, you know, great answers from people if they're being quiet. I'm a huge
believer in employee engagement, whether it's my leadership team, whether
it's a whole company.

It's trying to figure out how do you, how do you get people engaged with
offering answers? Getting involved. If you really want customer engagement
and loyalty, you got to have employee engagement and loyalty. It goes back
to my, you remember before I said I was, you know, my education was in
organizational behavior.

That's what I studied in college. That's what I got my master's in. It was
all about how do you organize people? How do you motivate? How do you, you
know, create processes that are going to be conducive to employee engagement
culture? Gaining ideas from our employee population so that they can You
know, help us build our strategies.

It's not one person building a strategy. It's really our whole company
building the strategy and then how do we communicate that to our customers
back to the point around customer experience being so important.

Karthik Chidambaram: Yeah, I love it when you said that,
you know, it's not one person creating the strategy, right?

It's the whole company. You get the team involved and engaged. And you're
very, I mean, I was reading about this as well. I was also listening to some
of your other podcasts. You're very big on employee engagement and
leadership, right? A lot of your leadership focuses on that. How do you keep
people engaged, right?

I think that's how do you keep people engaged at Building Controls?

Eric Chernik: Well, I think there's a few different ways.
One is to share a lot of information. More transparency is better than less
transparency. So I like to share how the business is doing, how we're
growing, where we're learning good practices, where we're maybe struggling.

I share the good news and the bad news. So I think transparency and
information is very important. And people learn it in different ways. It
could be a town hall meeting. It could be a newsletter that they read. It
could be their boss sharing information with them. Any number of ways. I
think making sure work is organized in a, in a clear way that people know
what's expected of them.

Performance goals performance reviews, development plan. So people know what
they're, you know, kind of, you know, supposed to do or expected of them.
And the third area is probably it's more the personal side. How do you get
to know the people in your office? What do you talk about in addition to the
business work?

Do you, you know, showing the empathy and the care? For individuals. So
probably those three things. Communication, job, you know, definition and
and kind of empathy and care are three of the ways I see, you know you know,
engagement comes about.

Karthik Chidambaram: Yeah, transparency. And one thing I
also resonate a lot with what you said is not just sharing the good news,
but also share the bad news, right?

If something's not going right. Mm-hmm . It just share it with the team. I
think people resonate with that and they really appreciate it. So tell us
about building controls, right? I mean, probably I should have asked this
question a lot earlier, but tell us about building controls, right? So what
is that you guys do?

Eric Chernik: So we are a distributor of building
automation products that help commercial buildings run. So think about a,
the building you're sitting in or think about a school system or a hospital
or a, you know, a rocket ship company. They have to manage their heating and
air conditioning. They have to manage their lighting.

They have to manage their, maybe their security. How do all of these things
talk to each other? How do you coordinate? Multiple rooms or multiple
buildings on a campus that need to be consistent. In the old days,
everything was very manual. You went to the wall and you turned the dial and
you managed the temperature in that one room.

Over time, and more recently in the last 20, 30 years, you've been able to
automate and connect the controllers. You can connect the thermostats or
connect the lighting or connect, you know, whatever comfort parts of the
building. Into, into a smart product that is a control we call controller
that then manages all that rooftop equipment, manages a flow of air and
airflow, manages the lights and so forth.

And so that's that building automation world that we act as a distributor
for. We partner with key manufacturers. So take a Honeywell, or Johnson
Controls, or Siemens, or Schneider Electric. We take their products, and
then we teach our customers, who are contractors, about them. And those
contractors do work for these commercial buildings.

Karthik Chidambaram: So you spent a lot of time, I mean, I
was just reading a little more, right? You spent a lot of time in private
equity as well. And you advise private equity companies and you also talked
about employee engagement, right? Is it harder, you know, employee
engagement, is it harder when it comes to private equity companies or not
really?

Eric Chernik: So I think sometimes private equity gets a
bad reputation. There's all different kinds of private equity companies. For
the most part, there are investment companies that are figuring out how to
you know, return You know rewards to their invest, investments. How do they
reach, how do they, how do they get return on invest, on investments?

They build up companies. And building up companies is usually about growth.
You can't grow up a company shrinking to profitability. So how do you grow
up companies? How do you go from three locations to 25 locations? How do you
go from 35 employees to 225? It's figuring, and the private equity companies
are trusting.

They're CEOs, they're leadership teams of the different portfolio companies.
So they're providing expertise around mergers and acquisitions. They might
be providing expertise around certain functional areas. So if I have a
challenge with e commerce, I may be able to look at the, the, my brother and
sister companies.

For expertise around e commerce and I can learn from my, you know, my
colleagues. So private equity is more of a board of directors. It's more of
a funding mechanism than it is. They're not running the business.

Karthik Chidambaram: And you talked about acquisitions,
right? So you were just three locations and then you grew and a lot of it
happened through acquisitions as well.

Can you talk us through that process, right? So what typically goes on when
you try to acquire a new company? And obviously culture is a very, very
important thing. How do you ensure it? Is there like a formula you use or is
there a method you use when you acquire companies? And how do you integrate
them with your culture, right?

Let's say, for instance, you're acquiring a company and you talked about
transparency, you know, which is very important. But then the other company
is not so transparent, the company you're acquiring, right? So does that
happen? How do you get them? You know, what does that process look like?

Eric Chernik: Yeah, so there's a lot of good, there's a lot
of answers to your question there.

So even before I think about acquisition, I think about market expansion. I
think about, okay I can grow geographically, I can grow through new
products, I can grow through new services, I can grow through new channels
to market. Here are all the ways I could grow. Can I grow that organically
in what I'll call Greenfield?

A few years ago, we put a, a new branch in Phoenix, Arizona. So that was a
greenfield. You heard me talk about Boston. Well, we expanded in the
Northeast by acquisitions. So it really depends. You could do it either way.
It's probably a little longer to break even and longer to make money if you
do it or if you do it only through greenfields.

And so, but sometimes that's the right strategy for a certain part of the
model. Other times it's through an acquisition. And yes, you're absolutely
right. Culture is very important. So I usually am doing my diligence on the
company that we might acquire to figure out is that going to fit with our
culture.

They don't have to do everything exactly like us, but do I think the leader
is going to mesh well with the rest of our leadership group? And bring new
best practices and new ideas and be welcoming of change and change
management when I, when our team brings ideas to that person. So I try to
assess that ahead of time, talking to other vendors, talking to customers
about the, you know, the company we might be acquiring.

And then I work really hard to figure out how, when we merge together, you
know, what are we going to communicate together? How are we going to handle
the employees, the differences of their jobs, of their pay, of their way of
communicating with some of the practices, which I think are best practices
that we've been building in our company.

When we did this, started this five years ago, we were, myself and the CFO,
we were building our integration plans. Now that we're a little bit larger,
we have an individual on our team. That's an operations, you know, an
operation leader that has built out a whole playbook for how do we integrate
our teams together?

I still spend a lot of time on the people side of things and the
communications and then behind the scenes, our operations team figures out
the product cleaning and matching up with our product information, our
customer information. What are processes in terms of order, you know,
everything from inquiry to order, you know, how to what are process
similarities and differences and over usually about a three to four month
window.

We've integrated those companies, everything from the brand to back end
processes to accounting to payroll, all the different technologies.

Karthik Chidambaram: Yeah, one thing I've noticed is you
guys invest quite a bit on technology and you stay ahead, right? So first
off, I want to DC cap customer. So I was chatting with our team and I
vividly remember this, right?

So when you start with us, you are just integrating a couple of systems,
right? But then you added more systems and you started, Hey, you know what?
Let's do it. Let's make sure that, you know, seamless automation is
required. And you started integrating more systems, even though it costs you
more money, right?

But that's the, it makes it seamless for your end customers, right? So talk
about your investments on technology, right? So how do you look at
investments in technology?

Eric Chernik: Yeah, so there's two parts of technology.
There's the customer facing side of technology. And in various parts of this
conversation, we've talked about the products that are You know, technology,
innovation is very important in taking the next step for our customers in
terms of them doing business.

But then there's a whole part of technology that's more internal. How do we
operate, how do we go from manual processes to automated processes within
our business that allows us to service our customers in a more efficient way
or a more cost effective way? So we're always looking for manual processes
and looking to automate, you know, more and more and more.

And we do it on the accounting side. We're doing it on the e commerce side,
we're doing it in a number of the supply chain side of things to figure out
how do we keep making ourselves better and more efficient so I can do more,
maybe with the same amount of people in the future. As we grow, as we double
our size, maybe I don't need to double the size of my people, workforce, I
can, you know, grow it by 50%.

And still keep up with the volume coming in.

Karthik Chidambaram: Can you talk us through some of your
failures, Eric? You know, and how that helped shape who you are.

Eric Chernik: We, we fail every day. And we learn every
day. And so there's never a And it's constantly evolving. I learn as much as
I do today as I probably did when I was In my first job when I was 15 years
old, I mean, you're always learning, you know, to tell you a funny story
when I was 15, I was had a job to run a hotel.

And so I ran a 22 room bed and breakfast hotel on the New Jersey shore. And
I made a lot of mistakes.

Karthik Chidambaram: When you were 15?

Eric Chernik: And customers taught me about those mistakes.
I ran a bed and breakfast hotel. And when I put out breakfast, I was
thinking the cheapest way possible to put out a breakfast. The frozen
muffins and the instant coffee, and that's breakfast for everyone.

It's the cheapest way to do it. And once I learned that customers didn't
like that, and they gave me some pretty tough feedback about need to go to
the bakery, need to put out, you know, percolated coffee. I learned a little
bit about customer experience and customer delight. And then kept trying to
figure out new ways to enhance that customer experience.

Do I, you know, do we put an antique in the, in the bedroom instead of, you
know, an Ikea piece of furniture, do we, you know, give them fresh towels
every day instead of you know, letting them keep the towel for the whole
week those kinds of things. So that was experimentation kind of by fire in
my early days of business.

Karthik Chidambaram: No, I love that, right? So this
happened when you were 15, right? Yes. But the theme of this podcast is
driven, right? So obviously you're not 15 today, and how are you so driven?
You know, what keeps you going?

Eric Chernik: I don't know why I'm so driven. If it's, if
it's, you're born with it or if you develop it, I'm not sure.

You know, I was driven when I was running that hotel. I wanted to build up
my clientele. I wanted to make money for the business. When I went into
consulting after college I wanted to help my clients be as strong as they
could be. I had to figure out how to consult to Starbucks and how much to
pay Howard Schultz for executive compensation.

I wanted to figure out the right kinds of incentive program for him. Howard,
as he was going from a private company to a public company. When I worked
with Disney, it was trying to figure out, okay, how do I, they, they, Disney
talks about, you know, customer experience and delighting their, their
clients.

How do I pull that into job descriptions and what the employees would do?
Based on what their vision was for their client population. I think I've
just been, you know, driven to get results, to try new things, to innovate.
Continuous improvement. Continuous improvement is something we should all be
doing in their jobs all the time.

And I guess I'm driven to always, you know, continuously improve. Things
around me in my world today. It's it's figuring out. How do our vendor? How
do our manufacturer partners team up with us and we team up with our
customer? It's kind of that triangle between You know supplier distributor
And you know and customer and how do we make that, you know magical
experience?

Karthik Chidambaram: For someone who's not as driven as you
are, okay, so what advice would you give them? How can they be driven? Any
thoughts around that?

Eric Chernik: I don't know if, well, I think, I think gain
a variety of experience. I mean, that would be my, my advice to someone
coming out of college or even grad school or Even somewhere middle of their
career.

How do you gain some more experience if you've always been in finance, even
though you love finance Maybe take a job in Supply chain or maybe take a job
in emerging technologies Just to be in some other people's shoes as well as
learn more about your business from another angle or another perspective And
so i'm a big believer in Kind of diverse experiences in college.

It might be liberal arts where you take You know a bunch of different
electives In business it might be that you move from this function to that
function to this function so that you can be stronger overall, you'll have
more tools in your toolbox and you can add more value to the company. And
maybe you'll find some new passions in some other functions.

Again, you know, you hear me talk about the customer a lot. Make sure you
get out in the field. Make sure you go talk to customers. Make sure you
don't just stay in your office or in your, whether it's your office or your
home office. Make sure you don't just stay in one place. Meet more people.
Yeah, I love that, right?

Karthik Chidambaram: I think exposure makes you, exposure
gives you a lot of new things, right? And you try different things. Just
don't do the same good thing for too long. So, Eric, you said you worked
with Howard Schultz. Howard Schultz, yeah, yeah. I think he's got a
fascinating story. I mean It's a great business, right?

Tell us about your experience working with Howard, and what were your
learnings there, and what did you do for him?

Eric Chernik: So, it was a long time ago. It was back when
Starbucks was a private company. Believe it or not, they were in three
cities in the world. They were in Chicago, Seattle, and Portland. It was the
very beginning of Starbucks.

And I got, I was hired to help figure out how much to pay Howard Schultz
when they went public. So they were getting ready to go public and I was
doing executive compensation consulting and I did a lot of research about
different kinds of emerging companies and their retail space. And I made a
recommendation of what to pay Howard Schultz.

Little did I know that a few weeks later I would get a phone call and Howard
Schultz was calling my boss, calling to reach my boss, couldn't reach him.
And he reached me and said, Hey, Chernick, I don't like this this pay you're
suggesting. You're not recommending enough. You must not have compared us to
the right companies.

And I learned about the art. Versus a science of executive compensation and
that, you know, who do you compare to and what surveys do you use and what?
Motivating factors and in compensation you try to create not just base
salary But various incentives short term incentives long term incentives to
try to to tie to What the vision or the growth or the expectation is, you
know of that company.

It was interesting visiting Starbucks They were in the early days Very
quality focused and very customer experience focused. And so just touring
their plant and meeting their VP of quality that would drink some coffee, a
cup of coffee out of every batch that went out of the manufacturing plant. I
don't know how many cups of coffee that guy had in a day, but it was really
interesting to hear the whole leadership team at Starbucks talk about
customer experience.

And then the quality of their product. Now it's evolved over the years and
there's many books that I think Howard Schultz has even written, you know,
about the growing up the company, but, you know, in the early days I could
see this entrepreneur that was trying to really focus on customer delight
and create that experience different than going to a Dunkin Donuts or
drinking coffee at home.

He was trying to create a whole experience in the Starbuck. You know you
know, retail locations.

Karthik Chidambaram: So, customer delight here. When you
talk about executive compensation, you know, I have a question on that as
well. So, I mean, that's a very complicated thing, right? Because sometimes
executives are compensated a lot for what they do.

Or let's say, even if sometimes they're let go for whatever reason, you have
to pay them a lot, right? How does that really work? You know, I mean What
is a fair compensation for an executive? You know, how do you determine
executive compensation?

Eric Chernik: Yeah, I mean there's There are peer
comparisons. So you compare to other types of companies in the similar
industry You can look at where that company is in the life cycle of their
history.

Are they emerging? Are they mature? You really think about compensation in
three different, three different ways. Base salaries short term incentives,
and long term incentives. The most creative pieces on the long term
incentive side of figuring out, Okay, what are we tying to, if an executive
is going to create a new strategy, Is it a one year strategy?

Is it out five years? You want the leadership team to be thinking about the
long term. Not just about short term the annual bonus to take care of the
short term the long term incentives take, you know, kind of really impact
Long term longer term strategies and some of these strategies are not always
in Parallel, you know in concert And so there is sometimes some friction
between long term strategies and short term earnings and, you know, and
short term, you know, kind of results.

Private companies have certain kinds of executive compensation programs.
Public companies have different kinds of compensation. As an executive,
they're also thinking about things like severance and change of control when
there's a change of control. So there, there's a lot of complexities that
come into.

Karthik Chidambaram: Yeah, like short term incentives
focused on the short term growth and then you have long term incentives
focused on the long term growth. And sometimes you read the newspapers and
you see, wow, that person made 30 million dollars. Was that really worth it?
It was, it was linked and tied to some metric that the board of directors
thought was important for, you know, for compensation and for that
individual.

Eric Chernik: And it is a supply and demand world out
there, so if you don't hire them, if you don't pay them well, they may get a
job at your competitor, you know, making that big money. Yeah, I think we
can have a whole new podcast on that. I would like to end with this
question, Eric. How do you keep yourself updated, or what book are you
reading right now?

I'm reading a couple books right now. Well, I just finished a, you know,
book, a book that I like that I've read recently. A couple books by Simon
Sinek.

Karthik Chidambaram: Yeah.

Eric Chernik: He asked the question, why? Start

Karthik Chidambaram: with why. And

Eric Chernik: so it's always, you know, try to figure, if
you're rolling out a new idea, if you're trying to convince somebody of
something or you want them to do something new, explain the, explain the why
to them or ask them the why.

I think that's a good book. You know, I read a lot of business books, but
then I also read some books just about history. I'm reading a book right now
written by H. R. McMaster, who was part of you know, kind of our defense
team over the years. Comes out of the Army. And he's describing his kind of
one year working in in the Trump's administration before he was fired.

But it's interesting to hear the political and social aspects of what goes
on in, Politics and, and, you know, really the history of our, you know, the
backbone of our country. So a couple of interesting books, you know.

Karthik Chidambaram: Yeah, I did read the other book you
were talking about, right? Start With Why, and I totally relate with it,
right. Because I enjoyed Simon Sinek's writing, where he talks about, hey,
you know, anything you do, just start with why. And now, anytime I do
something, I just ask that question, hey, why am I doing it? And does it
make sense in the long term?

So, Eric, I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for your
time. It was a great conversation for me. And there was a ton of learning.
I'm sure it was the same for the audience as well. So, thank you so much for
joining the Driven Podcast.

Eric Chernik: You're welcome. It's been fun. Thank you.