Have you ever wondered what it takes to turn around a failing organization or to drive remarkable change in business, government, and philanthropy? This thought-provoking question sets the stage for an insightful conversation with Lisa Gable, a seasoned expert in orchestrating turnarounds across diverse sectors. In this episode, Marcia Dawood sits down with Lisa to unveil the intricacies of driving meaningful change, tackling complex problems, and navigating the turbulent waters of entrepreneurship. Lisa Gable boasts an illustrious career, beginning with her time in the Reagan White House and Defense Department at the end of the Cold War. She has served as a troubleshooter for Intel's CEO and has held numerous presidential appointments. Her vast experience spans turnarounds in business, government, and philanthropy, including as a US Ambassador of one of the largest public-private partnerships in the US government. Lisa's journey is a testament to her deep understanding of utilizing manufacturing processes to address complex issues and her commitment to making organizations more robust and future-ready. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the art of the comeback. Lisa talks about the common factors that precipitate organizational failure, including the damaging effects of hubris, and emphasizes the importance of revisiting an organization's founding purpose. She also highlights current trends in AI and technology, showcasing her work with Six Star Capital in combating online hate speech. For those keen on fostering a dynamic, transparent, and resilient workplace culture, Lisa offers invaluable advice, drawing from her extensive experience. Whether you're an entrepreneur facing difficult decisions or an investor mentoring leaders who are striving to create a more cohesive team, the insights and practical strategies shared in this episode will equip you with the tools to navigate and thrive in challenging environments.
Have you ever wondered what it takes to turn around a failing organization or to drive remarkable change in business, government, and philanthropy? This thought-provoking question sets the stage for an insightful conversation with Lisa Gable, a seasoned expert in orchestrating turnarounds across diverse sectors. In this episode, Marcia Dawood sits down with Lisa to unveil the intricacies of driving meaningful change, tackling complex problems, and navigating the turbulent waters of entrepreneurship.
Lisa Gable boasts an illustrious career, beginning with her time in the Reagan White House and Defense Department at the end of the Cold War. She has served as a troubleshooter for Intel's CEO and has held numerous presidential appointments. Her vast experience spans turnarounds in business, government, and philanthropy, including as a US Ambassador of one of the largest public-private partnerships in the US government. Lisa's journey is a testament to her deep understanding of utilizing manufacturing processes to address complex issues and her commitment to making organizations more robust and future-ready.
This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the art of the comeback. Lisa talks about the common factors that precipitate organizational failure, including the damaging effects of hubris, and emphasizes the importance of revisiting an organization's founding purpose. She also highlights current trends in AI and technology, showcasing her work with Six Star Capital in combating online hate speech. For those keen on fostering a dynamic, transparent, and resilient workplace culture, Lisa offers invaluable advice, drawing from her extensive experience. Whether you're an entrepreneur facing difficult decisions or an investor mentoring leaders who are striving to create a more cohesive team, the insights and practical strategies shared in this episode will equip you with the tools to navigate and thrive in challenging environments.
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Marcia Dawood
Well, Lisa, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming.
Lisa Gable
Well, thanks for having me. It's so nice to finally meet you.
Marcia Dawood
I know I've been following you on social media for a while. You have so many interesting posts that you put up about everything, especially related to small business, entrepreneurship, AI, so many amazing things. So I'd love for you to just start out, tell our listeners a little bit about your background and what you're working on right now, what you're passionate about.
Lisa Gable
Sure. Well, my background is that I've done turnarounds in business, government, philanthropy, and I really started working in those areas after coming out of the Reagan White House and Defense department at the end of the Cold War. I was hired by the man who had become the CEO and chairman of the board of intel, and I was his troubleshooter. So he really taught me how to use manufacturing processes to solve complex problems. And I continued to do so through presidential appointments that I served in as advisors to different presidential administrations, and then also my work in Silicon Valley and with companies across a wide range of areas, and then leading turnarounds myself as the CEO, or in one case, as a us ambassador of one of the largest public private partnerships that we have in the us government.
Marcia Dawood
Wow. Wow. That's a lot. Okay. Yeah, no, that's incredible. So tell us a little bit more about, when you're talking about turnarounds and solving these complex problems, what are some of the factors that you kept seeing over and over again, even that led you to write your book? So I'd love to hear a little more about that.
Lisa Gable
Yeah. I identified a number of different factors that I've seen in every turnaround. And again, I've done them in business, government, and philanthropy. And one of the biggest issues that I have always come across is that of hubris, which is that people put their own self interest above the interest of the organization. And I think we see that in business many times. We see it in government quite a bit, and we unfortunately also see it within the nonprofit sector. And so hubris is that one element where someone has stretched the organization to such a point, possibly not as focused on what is good for the organization, but instead what may benefit them for their short or long term goals. And so that's really one.
Lisa Gable
The other is, sometimes organizations outlive their time. They just do. And so it is natural, we're seeing it even more and more quickly today that organizations may have been a wonderful organization at a given point in time, perhaps in the area of patient advocacy or even in a particular product area. But unless they were able to grow within where the world was going, they may have topped out on their success. And guess what? Actually okay to shut something down. It's okay to say, now is the time for us to merge with someone else. It is perfectly fine to seek out that joint venture that will enable the organization to reach the higher level of performance. And I think one of the third item that I may say is identifying the underlying cause of the disease.
Lisa Gable
And that's a term that we use in the biopharma space, but it really applies to business and government also, which is that we walk into a situation with a series of assumptions. We think things are going badly because of things that we may be seeing. But the reality is that organization may have gotten off course a long time ago. And so what I suggest to people is go and actually pull out the original charter. What was the organization supposed to do? Why did you start this business? What problem are you trying to solve? And how are you really spending your time, your resources, and your money right now?
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, I love that you're saying that, because I've talked to so many entrepreneurs, especially in the last two years, we have seen a terrible shift in the funding, just not being there for entrepreneurs. Many of these small companies have had to do down rounds or extensions of rounds, even though they're hitting milestones and moving forward. But sometimes it does require that they either pivot or maybe even shut down a part of the organization, if not the whole organization, together. So maybe talk a little bit about, like, how can you get the team to rally around that and think that, hey, whatever we're going to do moving forward now is the right thing to do?
Lisa Gable
Well, like I said, one of the things I do is I tell people to go back and actually look, literally look at the original documents. Why did you start this organization in the first place? And then look at where you want the world to be? And we all have this phrase, wave your magic wand. If you could wave your magic wand and people were interacting with the product or service that you're providing them in a future world, what would that look like? And then I recommend to people that they go and they audit the past, right? What are they currently spending their time on? Rank and rate, how they're spending their time, and stop spending their time on the things that don't help you accomplish the primary objective. What I find most interesting is even going back to organizations that may be very old, is that they start for a particular reason. And that reason, even though the way in which it manifests itself may change. The reality is that the core element of what motivated them may still exist in the future world. It just is going to happen in a very different way, in a different environment with a different group of players. And so don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Lisa Gable
Figure out where you want to go, rank and rate what you're doing, get rid of the stuff that you shouldn't be spending time on, and then begin to really help everyone understand what the true cost of something that they love to do is. Having to the organization, that cost might be in time spent, it might be a money spent, it may just be in taking their ball, their eye off the ball. And so once you get people to really focus on, this is what we do. We know you all love doing this, but this is how much it's costing us and can't do it anymore. If we want to achieve the subjective, I find that through that process, you can begin to change minds.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now, speaking of change and how things are changing so rapidly, I know that you're involved with a company called Six Star Capital, and I'm so interested in what it is that they do because it relates to AI technology. And we're seeing so much happening in the AI world right now. And I know there are a lot of startups out there that are trying to work on these different types of technologies. What are you seeing, and what are some of the things that we can be on the lookout for?
Lisa Gable
Well, the reason six star capital was formed is it was really trying to address, the founders were trying to address the rise in anti semitism and hate speech online. That that was the motivating factor behind the start of the organization. And so they began to look at what technologies exist today that would enable us to monitor hate speech, see where it's coming from. A lot of the work that I do in tracking foreign adversaries, it comes into play here. I don't think people realize the degree to which you have a right. China, Russia, North Korea, active in the area of hate speech online, the amount of content that they're putting out there, and the way that they're hoping to disrupt how we view our own culture within the United States and also within the free world. And so that's another key component. Is this coming from a foreign actor, or is it just coming from someone who has another type of issue? And once we do that, is there a way for us to develop a response? One of the areas that we're evaluating right now, and nobody's quite got it right, is that currently you're fed information, that information has bias.
Lisa Gable
But what would happen is if you were fed information where you did a search and you were given information, and then you were told, but there are these two other opinions out there. And here's the research on those opinions. If we had that in our news stories, if we even had that in our own search engines, where we understood that maybe there's a group of scientists that believe this, but there's this other group of scientists that believe that. And we trained people to always look at alternative viewpoints that may actually enable us to become smarter consumers of content. And so those are some of the issues that we're addressing. Those are the types of companies that will be invested in.
Marcia Dawood
Wow, that is amazing. I have seen several instances now, especially I help primarily women led companies where the algorithms, the things, anything related to AI is so predominantly male or skewing one way or another, whatever that is. And it does change people's perception of how, whatever the topic is, just how they're going to be able to look at it, because they're only seeing that one way. So I love this, that you're talking about having multiple viewpoints being shown to someone at the same time. Is there anything right now that we could see as an example of that?
Lisa Gable
Well, I'm so glad you asked the question, because my brother in law has a site called allsides.com. and allsides shows the top news stories of the day from the left, right and center. And so it doesn't provide any commentary. You just literally see how the different news stories line up, and you as a reader can consume all three, and then you can make a decision which one you agree with. Or perhaps you say, that was interesting from the left, and surprisingly, that was interesting from the right. And so John Gable started this company about ten years ago. They get about 20 million visitors a month. And so the good news is that their numbers are going up as people are saying, hey, I read something online, and I just want to know what other people are saying.
Lisa Gable
It's funny, because my husband and I used to be voters in California, and if you've ever voted in California, we never did it in the ballot box because the thing was so dang long. So they would send it to us and we sit down at the kitchen table, and then it would tell you for every initiative and referendum, the three different viewpoints. And I just love that. That's how my brain thinks. That's how I research things. And so any degree to which we can help people just naturally look at the alternative. I think John's done a great job, and so I can give a plug for allsides.com dot.
Marcia Dawood
That's great. Yeah, we'll definitely put that in the show notes. And how do you spell out the website?
Lisa Gable
It's www.allsidesallsides.com. allsides.com.
Marcia Dawood
Got it. Okay, great. Perfect. Yeah, I'm like, I would love it if we had more of that. More where we were seeing all sides of what a topic was. I feel like sometimes I'm seeing a lot of people who are very passionate about their side, and they don't necessarily take the time to identify or even acknowledge or research at least what else is going on the other side. So that's very interesting. And you brought up something about culture, and I feel like that sometimes can be a starting point for where we do in these, especially when a company's smaller and they're starting to grow.
Marcia Dawood
If you aren't recognizing what needs to happen within a company in order to create a good culture, that can lead to problems down the road. So maybe talk a little bit about your experiences with culture and building that, especially when you are dealing with a company that has to turn around.
Lisa Gable
It's the hardest thing. I'm going to be very honest with you because what you have to do is you have to find people that are willing to stick with you. And I am always very direct with everybody. When I take an organization over, I was taught we walk in the first day and you say, this is the problem I've been handed. This is where the organization is financially. These are the challenges that we're seeing. There will likely be a downsizing that will happen. And so some of you may decide that you love the new direction and we would love to have you on board.
Lisa Gable
Others of you may look at where we're going and say, you know what? That's not the organization or the company I joined. And so I'll leave and we will give you a letter of recommendation and say, absolutely, we're happy to be here for you. We're happy to recommend you. You did a good job, and so therefore, you should be recognized for it. And then other people will struggle going through the process, and that's just the reality of the way it is. And so you have to, the question is, do you have to change the culture, or is it a matter of maximizing one element of the culture that's going to make that organization more successful and able to lead into the future. And it is the hardest part of a turnaround because sometimes you have to go through changes so rapidly to keep the organization alive. That culture does take the biggest hit, and it may be the person who comes, comes after me, who is the one that actually stabilizes the organization as a cultural element and begins to build that fusion.
Lisa Gable
That's not the job I've had. I, on the other hand, just want to be very transparent. I want to make sure that there's always an open door and that people can say exactly how they feel. And the reality is, I don't blame the existing employees for the problem the organization has. I just don't. Because, again, as I pointed out earlier, if there's an underlying cause to the problem, that underlying cause may have actually started shaking the foundation of the organization. Ten years ago, I had one organization that I never felt was designed properly. It should just never have happened.
Lisa Gable
But it did. And so then we had to adjust to that and a lot of people got burned by it. And so I had great sympathy for anybody and I wrote letters of recommendation for every single person and actually helped them find jobs because I knew how uncomfortable the process was.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah. Wow. You bring up a good point about being direct and I being open about what's going on. I think sometimes that culture, if there are problems, it can start to spiral downward because you're having people talking like, oh my gosh, we don't know what's going on. We're not getting a lot of transparency from the management. Now what do we do? And the smaller the company is, the harder that is to even sometimes control because now you've got almost an us against them. And if it starts in a small way, it's just going to keep growing into something worse. So I love your, your thoughts there on just being open, being transparent and being direct with the people in your company.
Lisa Gable
For sure, it's important. And the other thing I do is I do use a lot of executive coaches, ones that are skilled in this area, to really help pull together people and ensure that they are not struggling or that they have a mechanism for improving how they all work together during the difficult times. I find executive coaches to be truly a huge benefit.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah. And is that you bring them in for mainly the management team or to work with the whole organization?
Lisa Gable
To work with the whole organization. Sometimes what they'll do is, especially if we have to. The hardest thing is I find some subcultures develop here, science is over here, marketing's over here, engineering, whatever it might be. And it's okay. I need engineering, marketing and comms to all talk to each other and they have really different cultural ways of interacting. It's like they've hired in these silos of people just like themselves, but they're not like each other. And so I've really used coaches quite a bit to do that sort of cross silo alignment to help people work together better. The other thing that I do is I am a big believer in okrs.
Lisa Gable
I started my corporate career at Intel Corporation with Andy Grove and I hand out the book measure what Matters by John Doar and get people to integrate the OKRs of the other silos into their deliverables. Because if you have to move very quickly, you are highly dependent upon each other and that forces people to understand what each of them has to do over this shared element that they're responsible to getting that thing to market, whatever that market might be.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, that alignment is definitely critical. So in another hat that you wear, you seem to have so many the world of 2050, you're the chairperson. Tell us about that. What's going to be happening over the next 25 years as we get toward 2050?
Lisa Gable
Well, the tagline is we want to help the world arrive. Well, and my friend Anna Roald, who very quickly, I'll tell you about her, talk about an amazing entrepreneur. She approached me when she was 26 years old and I was coming out of being US ambassador to the world's fair and she said, I'm going to build a global magazine to compete with foreign affairs and these other types of magazines. And I want you to be on my board. And she laid out such a distinct plan and this was 17 years ago, 18 years ago, that I said I would join her. So I was her second board member and I've been on the board since 2006. Ana then created the world in 2050. The diplomatic career, the magazine itself has ended up being a staple both within the international community, but especially at that intersection where you have business and large scale NGO's, large international development organizations, where they come together at things like the United Nations General assembly meetings, Davos, the world economic, other types of activities.
Lisa Gable
And so when they were at one of those large scale sort of multinational activities that involved people from all the different sectors at the highest levels, there was a decision that we needed to come up with a series of things that we would monitor and what we were looking at are trends. And our goal is, and always has been to provide different viewpoints on where that trend is today and where it needs to go. And so we publish through both diplomatic career as well as convenience that we host at these major global forums.
Marcia Dawood
Wow, amazing. So what are some of the things that we might be able to see in 2050?
Lisa Gable
Well, what we're hoping is that well being will finally have a moment where we're looking at. We're looking at prevention, right? Where we're not just. We're looking at health and wellness, not just sick care. I think one of the things that we see is that people are so focused on ensuring that we keep people alive that we're not actually making sure that they live life well. We're extending life, but life isn't always beautiful and wonderful after that life extension. The other is that there's so many things, and it started really during the Michelle Obama era, where you started more of an attention to health and wellness and trying to prevent chronic diseases. Right. Prevent obesity from developing further.
Lisa Gable
And so I believe the other element of this is to the degree to which we can prevent a disease from happening. And finally, there is, as we're all excited, and if it will work out, the way we hope it will, is where will AI be able to do some level of prediction that will enable us to see a disease developing at such an early stage, or at least giving us red flags for that, that we will actually be able to get support for the patient and ensure that they are both identified and taken care of before the disease fully develops. And that's where I have a strong personal interest in diet related disease, because I believe that there are factors across consumer health, behavioral health, and clinical that if we had combine ways of looking at information, that we may actually see the signals before the patient becomes very.
Marcia Dawood
Ill. Wow, that would be amazing. I talk in my TEDx, talk about my mother was diagnosed in 2016 with ALS and what a horrible disease. So, not that I don't know that diet would have necessarily helped, but you never know. But, yeah, I'm really interested also in how can we get our healthcare system to really encourage people to take care of themselves better, to be on a wellness plan, not necessarily a sickness plan. So are there other things that you wish people would read about, research, try to do in order to be healthier?
Lisa Gable
Well, I think it's a matter of understanding the degree to which you can understand both your genetic composition. Right. What are the tendencies that you're going to have? What are those inherited factors that you're going to have, and then really being able to start to adapt to an eating and exercise style that works best for you? And so I think as people are taking a Zempic has really taken off. But what we don't know is how long someone has to stay on it. And secondarily is, we're not sure that people are making lifestyle adjustments, that if they had to go off of it, that they'd be able to retain the weight loss that they were successful in securing through the use of those types of drugs. And so all of those factors do require lifestyle change, but they also require an awareness about family history. My daughter's adopted, and so we have really addressed the family history. Well, because she's had to go and try to figure out what the history was of family members that she doesn't know.
Lisa Gable
And can we make adjustments in our lives? In the diet related disease space, there's something called early intervention, where you can start feeding babies the top eight allergens early and often within the first two years of life. And that, we know with peanut, that actually reduces the propensity of someone developing that disease.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, that would be incredible. Interesting. So your daughter is adopted. Tell me a little bit about that process.
Lisa Gable
Well, we went through, we did what a lot of women do, which was a lot of IVF that didn't work out, and then finally going to adoption. My daughter was adopted domestically within the United States, and my goddaughters were adopted from China. So we got my daughter when she was a month old, and my godchildren, my best friend, was able to adopt one of her daughters when she was 18 months old and the other one when she was seven years old. So my family's been in this area for quite some time. My mother actually took foster children into our home, so we had five newborn foster babies in our home, over 13 foster babies over a five year period of time.
Marcia Dawood
Oh, my gosh, how wonderful.
Lisa Gable
So when someone handed me a baby, I knew what to do. My husband's what do we do? It's like, I have blessed. I know what you do.
Marcia Dawood
I love to hear stuff like that. That's great. So, Lisa, you have such an amazing background, is such a wealth of knowledge. I'm just curious, what would you go back and tell your 20 year old self to do?
Lisa Gable
Well, I was a perfectionist, and I did things very fast. I went to grad school while I was working at the White House and the Pentagon. When then I held numerous presidential appointments while I held full time jobs in industry. I piled a lot onto myself at a young age. It ended up being beneficial to me. But at the same time, one thing I do tell a lot of young people is you don't have to do what I did. You have a very long life and there are many things that you can do in that life. The number one is to enjoy yourself.
Lisa Gable
And I was just very fortunate that I had mentors who took me down multiple different paths that I found what was core characteristic that made me unique and allowed me to have these opportunities. But finding that unique specialness of what you do differently than other people and then also recognizing there are no limitations. I'll be doing a post in a few weeks about when I moved to Taiwan after being in the White House. Don't ask me, but I did. And it was during when Taiwan didn't have a lot of industry in. It was a rising tiger. It wasn't actually a full blown manufacturing center at that point in time. And it was freeing to me because the fact that I could leave the penultimate of a role in my twenties to go live in a foreign country and pursue a career where I didn't speak the language and there were really very few people like me, and yet I could do it.
Lisa Gable
I've learned I can do anything. You can drop me anywhere and I can be fine.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, well, you've definitely done some incredible things in your career. I will encourage everyone to go get your book turnaround, how to change course when things are going south. And definitely people should follow you on LinkedIn. You really do post some very thought provoking and very interesting content, and that's what attracted me to want to talk to you and find out more about all of the amazing things that you're doing. And we will definitely be keeping track. So thanks so much for coming on the podcast today.
Lisa Gable
Great. Thanks for having me.