From spacesuits to trucks across multiple timezones, Tim Fiore speaks not only about his craft in the world of the supply chain, but he is also the spokesman for a key economic indicator known as the  Manufacturing Business Survey (PMI®)

Tim makes the case for authentic leadership and is grounded by his humanity, caring, and respect for his people, the business, and all of its stakeholders.

02:03 Janet Yellen can dance!

03:32 Tim’s story

12:41 The evolution of the supply chain

15:20 Lessons from the Pandemic

22:00 Embracing WFH

29:41 The high-performance team

40:29 Innovation

46:28 Transparency

51:36 Respect

55:25 Advice to your 25-year-old self

1:00:59 What is Gravitas?

1:02:07 The Legacy

[Transcript]

00:04

Welcome to the Finding Gravitas podcast brought to you by Gravitas Detroit. Looking to become a more authentic leader. Finding Gravitas is the podcast for you. Gravitas is the ultimate leadership quality that draws people in. It's an irresistible force encompassing all the traits of authentic leadership. Join your podcast host Jan Griffiths that passionate rebellious farmer's daughter from Wales, entrepreneur, leadership coach, keynote speaker, one of the top 100 leading women in the automotive industry as she interviews some of the finest leadership minds in the quest for Gravitas.

In this episode, you'll meet Tim Fiore. Tim is the Senior VP and Chief Procurement Officer for Ryder. He is responsible for their global supply chain operations. He is also the chair and spokesperson for the Institute for Supply Management's manufacturing business survey committee or PMI. He is certainly no stranger to the microphone. He is often called upon for his insights on the economy. From leading business publications such as The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, you name it, you'll see Tim's name come up. But today, we're not going to talk about that. We're gonna talk about Tim Fiore as a leader as an authentic leader. What makes him the authentic leader that he most certainly is today. And we will cover topics such as trust, high performance team, what Tim believes it is and how he creates it. We'll talk about transparency. And we'll talk about attracting and retaining new talent and a whole lot more. Tim Fiore. Welcome to the show.

It's good to be here, Jan. Thanks for inviting me to participate.

Well, you have quite a story. There has to be a tale to tell behind Tim Fiore. This is the man who interviewed Dr. Janet Yellen on stage just minutes after we had her dancing. Remember that?

That was quite a sight.

You know, it was part of the that with the EV guys. We were at a conference a couple of years ago at an ASM event and the AV guys were saying, you know, oh, yeah, you know, you'll you'll never get her out on stage dancing. I said, Watch me.

Do actually had her leaping on stage. She was.

I know, I know. I know. I will let our audience into a little secret. There's actually a video on my YouTube site. But she was she was great. And you know, Tim, she was such a great warm human being. I didn't expect it to be that warm. You know, what a great leader. Right? What a great woman.

Yeah, I felt the same way. It was my third time meeting her. Oh, was it really? Yes, yes. Unfortunately, in my, my eyes and PMI position, once a year. I get to go meet the Fed chairman to have a conversation with him or her and their staff. And it's, it's something I look forward to every year unfortunately, with the virus issue. Now, we are not going this year. And we'll see if we go next year. So let's see that.

Well, that was great. That was the first time that I met you personally. And so now we get the opportunity to go much deeper. And I want to know Tim fury. What is your story take us back to the beginning.

So well. So I got 43 years in the business. I started in supply management in 1978. I was born and grew up in North Central Connecticut, right near the Massachusetts border. And I had great parents and I got my way into college. I got my way through high school, never went to college. In those days supply management people kind of fell into the jobs that didn't go to school for I don't think there was even a school at that point was offering supply management skills. I'm actually a second generation supply management person. My father is a first generation. He came out of the storeroom, an aerospace company and Connecticut called come in. And they saw his skills. He was a Korean War vet and they they use his administrative skills to do logistics and management of people in equipment. And he grew through the ranks and I actually had my first interview by a friend of his who told me right off the bat he said, Look, I can't hire you but I will give you an interview just so you can hone your interview skills and I'm this 23 year old can knows nothing. I still do remember his name is Sam Panella Soulive I do remember the advice he gave me he said look, what you need in your life is a short term goal and a long term goal long term goal meaning five years short term gold mini wanted to keep those in mind and you'll do fine. So So I got into supply management early on. In those days I was hired by a great supervisor who was determined to hire a person into purchasing and supply who had a four year degree. It was not a common thing back in the 70s for that a lot of people got promoted out of the shop and put into those jobs just to chase hardware. So he brought me in because I had a four year degree. And at the time, I really had no idea why he hired me. The great job mentoring me and exposing me to additional challenges. Throughout the five years I was with that company.

I actually worked for a company that designed and built a spacesuit, and was building environmental systems for the space shuttle program. And they put me on a small business that made rocket engines and other propulsion devices for satellites and missiles. I had no idea what I was getting into. But boy, I look back at that period of my life. And it's a great period. So much fun. So much experience I learned with teamwork was really like, because when you're building a spacesuit in the space shuttle or rockets to protect the United States, there's no room for personalities, there's only room for performance. And I learned how it's a very smart people work through tough technical challenges to achieve success. And I was actually at Hamilton Standard, which was a division of UTC, when we launched the first two spacesuits on the space shuttle was on I think it was mission three. And the astronauts put one splish spacesuit on and it failed. They put the second spacesuit on and that failed. So they scrubbed the mission, came back to Earth, the head of NASA came into the company and said, You need to fix these things, you need to fix them quickly. And in a space of six to eight weeks, we redesigned fall tolerated came up with three different designs, and launched two new spacesuits that successfully spacewalk in the space of six weeks. These were these are guys that worked on Apollo. These are guys that worked on the spacesuit that saved the Apollo astronauts on Apollo 13. So it's a really great experience. It's funny, I was up in Connecticut a couple of weeks ago. And I went into a hardware store that I've known for a long time. And I've met a young woman who is the granddaughter of the prior owner, as well as your grandfather, Joe, now he's doing fine. I said, What's this propeller doing here was the Hamill the standard propeller at the front door. And she said she lit up like this beautiful beam. And she said, Oh, I work in Hamilton Space Systems. It's the great job, best job in the world. I love my job. She was actually leaping almost like Janet Yellen. So my wife was standing there with me and I can't believe this. She's got the same fever that I had 45 years ago. Because I mean, it's so important, your first job, it's when it really motivates you. And especially when you learn teamwork skills like that, and there's no tolerance for failure. But you know, so So throughout my my early life, I like to read a lot. My mother was a great reader. And I read a lot of Salesforce was novels. And he had a guy called ratio Hornblower who sailed around the world on a British man of war and a frigate, and went to all different places around the world. And what I love that and I really wanted to get a job that allowed me to travel and see the world. And eventually, that was my five year goal. And I eventually got there. I've got 4 million miles on the airplane. I've seen 60 or so countries, the cultures and things. I've lived overseas for a while, which I still look back 20 years ago was a great experience. So you know, I took that, that first five years at Hamilton, my boss was great. He really mentored me to the point where United Technologies was setting up a laser weapons system laboratory down in Florida, Jupiter, Florida. So they they internally, they went around to the CFOs and said, Is there anybody who you have working for you that could go down there and help set up a system they wanted, obviously, a young person who had the technical background that could work with the scientists developing these laser weapons systems. And I was fortunate I competed amongst internal UTC candidates, I got the job. And my wife and I in 1984, with two very small kids, packed up, waved goodbye to our families and moved to Jupiter, Florida, Navy for during what was called the President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. We designed and built prototypes for space based laser weapons, ground based laser weapons, LIDAR systems that people take for granted today. So you know, we sit, we live down here for eight years. And then when the Berlin Wall came down, I had to go because I was too young to retire here. I went back to another Hamilton unit, and worked in the aircraft systems business for six years and probably the most difficult job in my career. High High, high mix low volume parts, driven by spares a lot of challenges every day every day woke up to a new challenge. So I just stick to that. And then I was fortunate. There was a an organization at UTC that was going to do global sourcing. And I was asked to join that team, one of about 12 people. And after about a year that they asked me to move to Paris so I went to Paris as the director of sourcing for UTC. I got into the commercial business quite a bit up to that point. I've been pretty much metal Metairie aviation aerospace. So I worked with the carrier business, the oldest business got to know the Europeans. Great people lived in Paris traveled all over the Eurasian continent. Got into China and the 1993, I think was my first time there. I was in Chang Ching, many, many years ago, stayed at one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed in Chang Chang is about 1200 miles inland, about 30 million people. And I also remember when I was in Shanghai once I went to a conference there and I remember walking down and Ching Street, and that was the only Caucasian on the street had to have hundreds of 1000s of people on it. So it's been a great career. I worked for Ryder, I worked for Ryder. Back in 2002. When I finally left UTC after 22 years, I was writers for a CPO brought some really good people in we we made a big difference in the industry, as well as with the company stayed there for about five years and went to a couple of other assignments. And then I retired for four years. And I was very happy in retirement, no doubt about that. I did all those I restarted all those things that I had lost in that 40 year career. But I said when people would ask me, Are you gonna go back to work? I said, No, I'm not going back to work. You're going to consult? No, I'm not going to consult. But if writer asked me to come back, I would seriously consider it. And the reason is, is that the writer, people are great people, you still find people there 35 years, the first thing a writer person will tell you how long they've been there. The writer management team is excellent. I've worked with them in the early 2000s. And I was I was very thrilled and honored to get back to work with them directly. The suppliers are very big manufacturers of big equipment. And over the years, I've dealt with many of them, not only in a writer job, but at some of my other jobs. So on a first name basis for several of the CEOs. And a lot of what we do at writer, we do supply chain work. So a lot of our customers are big CTOs. And after 40 something years, I know a lot of them too. So I decided to come back and I'm about two and a half years into it, enjoying every minute of it developing my staff. Looking forward to retirement again, I'm glad at this point in my career, I got the energy to keep up with it. But it's been a great career. My daughter also is in the business. She's a third generation Supply Manager person. I think that she's the only I'm sure there's two, two generations, but I'm not so sure there are three. And she's a third. She's got a Sloan School MBA degree, she married a guy who's also in the supply world. So it's kind of all in the family.

That's amazing. You know, you said, when you started your career, you were the first degreed person that they put into supply chain. And I remember back in the day, it was the place that you put the deadwood, right. I mean, it was That's correct. People, if people didn't have the guts to take action to move a person out of an organization, they put them in purchasing because they thought, well, how much damage could you possibly do? You're just buying nuts and bolts and screws or whatever you're doing. And look how far the profession has come. But also look at recently, I mean, just as recently as several years ago, when I was in supply chain, I would say to people, I work in supply chain, and they would sort of look at me like, Huh, what's that? You know, you know, we kind of Yeah, well, maybe. And now everybody in the world knows what supply chain is because of the COVID situation. So we've gone from one extreme completely to the other.

Yes, we absolutely have. It's it's a it's a great story. And I saw a lot of the evolution, I saw the corporate sourcing activity back in the mid 80s. Like I said, when my boss hired me, he hired me because I had a four year degree. But it was little bit more complicated than that him and I used to go out to lunch like twice a week, we were that close. So at one point after about two years into it, I asked him, so why did you hire me anyway, he thought I was really simple. He said you'd like to work on cars and motorcycles. So I knew you were technically strong. And you could keep up with the engineers. And you had a history degree, which means you know, how to research hypothesize, and present an opinion you were natural for would never have thought. So, you know, the message is, is hey, it really doesn't matter what your background is, you know, if you can put all the pieces together, you can make it work because the most important thing and supply chain job is really to get people to work together. And it took me a while to kind of grow beyond. I'm really good at what I know and I can apply it well to how do I get everybody else to kind of apply the same amount of knowledge and skill and use your strengths to do something better for the company. And that's, that's what's kept me motivated for a long time.

You strike me Tim is the kind of person that never stops learning and growing. I mean, obviously your career is evidence of that. But you're you're not stopping. Now, you haven't reached a point and said, There's nothing I can learn anymore. Because you're still learning and growing. And I see you, you're sharing your knowledge on talk radio, on TV, well on publications, but what have you learned, both professionally and personally, from this pandemic? Let's start with the personal What have you learned about yourself from this pandemic?

Well, so early on, when this thing came about, I've got buying responsibility, obviously, at Ryder. And I had several people who were pursuing hand sanitizers and other disinfectant agents and they were sitting around my office to I knew they were involved in it. I didn't know how serious the whole thing was, at the time, we were talking about it the leadership team, but so I went to them got fully briefed on what they were being asked to do. came to the conclusion that, you know, we need a program manager to do this, because this isn't just buying. This is acquiring planning, buying a bunch of stuff, and and distributing it across 1500 locations around the US right away. And are we really buying the right stuff? How much should we buy? How long will this go on? So I remember going upstairs to a couple of my peers and my boss and says, Well, how long do you think this virus is going to last? How much stuff should I be buying? And we all agreed, three months? Three months? Okay, I could do that. So I go back downstairs. And you know, we got about three months, right? Okay, fine. So at our next leadership team meeting, I said, you know, we need a Program Manager for this. This is more than just a buying task. So after about five minutes of going around the table, my boss will tell me, why didn't you do it? So okay, I could do that I know how to do this stuff. I was so glad that he did. Because I was able to rely on a lot of my experience, expediting material and chasing hardware. And that's exactly what we did, getting all the stuff that we needed to do. But I was determined that, you know, I think we all need to be near each other. So we empty the building. The only people left in the building before the shutdown orders was my small team of five people, as well as the management team. So and we were chasing things five, every 510 minutes, we were having to make a decision, had to stand up a warehouse to have it all received had to engage some people to read bottle things. We had to repackage and we had to get the stuff out into the rider community right away. Because my boss said to me, he's absolutely right. He said, Look, I can't ask people to come to work if I can't keep him safe. And we're keeping him safe. So probably about seven or eight days into this, we had order stream set up or mailing checks out or wiring money paying in advance whatever it took. I'm sitting in my office, I said, you know, I don't know that we really need to be in the office to do this anymore. I think the urgency now is passed. And I think we probably manage this remotely. So we did. And as it turned out, we ended up having somebody in the office who had contracted the virus, and we were all sent home anyway. But he had recovered. So it was we were concerned at that point that maybe one of us had got sick. So one of the first things I've really learned is, and I've never been a fan of people working from home, for a lot of reasons. I mean, the first one I first reason is, well, how are you going to get promoted? Who's going to know you? How do you get to walk around the halls? How do people get to know who you really are? how committed you are? People always wonder how hard you're working? Because they figure you're at home, you're gonna work however hard you want to and that may not be 100%. And everybody always says that, well, if you've got the right goal set, and they perform to the goals, what are you worried about? Well, I've always believed that people have infinite capacity to do more. I saw that back when the spacesuit failed, and I saw people working around the clock.

If I was lived by that, and I thought, you know, if you're not part of the company here, where we all are, then how are we going to progress? You know, my opinion on that it's all changed, no doubt about it. And I think you're seeing now in some of the media that even the CEOs are starting to wonder whether working from home is really great for everybody long term. And I'm not surprised at that. I think the culture of a company is defined by people interfacing together on a regular basis socializing somewhat. So we'll see where all that kind of pans out. But I think the technology came along really well at the right time. Because without this technology, we'd all be on conference calls. And being a global person traveling around the world on conference calls all hours of the night. I know what that's like, it's only partially effective, you don't get a chance to really speak up that easily. If you can't see the person, you're not sure what the body language is. But all this technology is really helping. So I think and I mean, it's always the key is that you generally in an organization, you have 10 to 20%, who are really strong performers, 10% who are not performers really hardly at all, and the rest that are in the middle. And if you accept the fact that look, you really can't do much about the ones that aren't going to perform to your expectations. And you concentrate on the high performers and the ones in the middle They asked them to do a little bit more than you get a lot more out of it. So I've kind of sat back and said, you know, we've between the commuting, and the lack of travel, and the inefficient meetings, you know, you'd have a meeting. And if it was an hour meeting, you'd be there for an hour. Now, if you have an hour, teams are Zoom meeting, if it's over, and 20 minutes, everybody's gone on to the next thing. And with everybody being centrally chained to their computer monitor, you can reach anybody, anytime. We have executive calls with our key suppliers, and the writer executive team, gets on the team's call, along with the executives of the big O EAS. And we were able to schedule these calls in four weeks in the past would take us four months to align calendars. That was four weeks. So we're really doing things a lot faster. And at this point, I think a lot more efficient. I think we're a lot more productive. But you know, the problem is, is how do you define a company's culture? Can you really do it remotely by a number of people living everywhere? And I will say we're, we're getting ready to probably hire our First Person post COVID. And the first question is going to come up is well, do I have to move. And South Florida is an interesting market to recruit into. And it's a difficult market to keep people in. And I've experienced it several times, especially down in the Broward Miami Dade area. And so it kind of limits the our ability to attract the best and the brightest from outside the area. But I think what we're gonna do this time is I look for the next couple of years, don't worry about it, you can stay where you are. And longer term from from a career standpoint, we'll figure that out. And I'm kind of optimistic about that is that we're going to really be able to access a different level of talent to because of that.

You know, this technology that we're using, it's been around for a while, it made me zoom is not new. It's been around for many years, actually. But it took a pandemic for us to get over the hump to really embrace the work from home model. What advice would you have for leaders out there who are still uncomfortable with it, because they still want to control what people are doing. They don't know what they're doing. They don't quite trust enough to let go. What advice would you have for those leaders?

Well, so I've been asking, we received a study that came from CAPS, it's the research arm of bias. And ASU, they surveyed a number of companies about how are you attracting retaining your under 40 year olds? So we got to study and I asked the people who are for me that are under 40, to take a look at it. And give me their opinion about the conclusions? Well, they came back last week and gave me their opinion. And they ranked them the number two issue. Was this whole issue around work? Life flexibility, not life flexibility, will I be able to continue to work from home. So I think that what's happened is with everybody was forced home. And everybody has their reasons why they should stay safe, right? I mean, I'm not a 2530 year old, where I can pick this thing up and have a sneeze. And three days later, I'm going to be fine i Who knows what could happen to me. So everybody now has gotten that taste from working from home, though they know how effective they are. Their bosses are confirming that they're effective, it's going to be very difficult to change that. So. So the next thing I asked him was alright, I got my direct team together. And I said, when my boss asked me what I should do, as we reopen up, what am I going to tell them? So you guys need to tell me what you want me to tell him. And you know, almost to the tee, we all kind of come up with the same conclusion that we're not in any rush to get back. Why? Why would you rush us to get back with now we're in a headquarters facility, right. And the writer has 40,000 employees. There's only about 2000 that are working from home, all the rest of it out there. And in dangerous jobs, frontline people, we move material, we move food, we move drugs, we have to keep those trucks running. Like I said, we have 1500 locations around the US. That's why it was so important to get that PPD out there right away. So what you know, what, what are you going to tell them? I'm going to tell them what we're going to look function by function and decide what are the pros or cons for them to come back. So we're gonna go level by level, there's about 10 different functions that my group actually does. And we'll come up with a recommendation. But my, my thoughts to the anybody trying to work through this. And of course, I work with all my suppliers, too, because they all have a hybrid mix of some are in the office, some are not. Most of them are engineering companies. So they're very concerned about the culture. Engineers are generally the ones who develop a company's culture. You see it in their vehicles, styles and things and you feel it when you get behind the wheel of a car. We're just going to have to take this slowly. And you know, until until you can promise people that they're not going to get sick by going into an office. Why would you force them back? There's really, there's no need to force them back. And if you do find that there is a need in the future, then figure it out. out. But if you try to force back people now who have been gotten used to this, you're gonna have a problem. The other thing that was brought up to me, a friend of mine who does a lot of recruiting him and I had a conversation the other day, and he said, Do you realize that all your people now are approachable? I never thought thought about that. I thought about hiring people that work from home. But now, all my people here who liked the South Florida area are now approachable, they can be taken to another job, and another employer will tell them, you don't have to move for at least two years to stay where you are. So all of a sudden, now it's like, Oh, I gotta keep a close eye on this. I tend to try to take care of him. Anyway, I'm late career. And my goal here was really just to leave a strong organization in place, I can continue the legacy so that we don't lose them.

Tim, you just said something that's very powerful. And you said it. I don't know that you realize how powerful these words were. But you said that, when you're asked for a recommendation that you would have to give your boss a recommendation or work from home, that you asked your team to come up with that recommendation. So I think that there's you know, there's a lot of people out there, that wouldn't feel comfortable asking the team to put that recommendation together that as the boss and as the leader that they were supposed to make that decision by themselves. So but you just you just said that because that's part of your obviously your normal leadership style, right, let's, let's explore that a little bit. You know, you obviously go to your team for their input, can we can you talk a little bit more about that approach? And how come you're so comfortable in your own skin and doing that, you know, a lot of people would feel that as the boss, you will have to make the decision. Could you talk about that?

Sure. So I mentioned that I lived over in Europe for a period of years when I was at United Technologies. And it was a big transition. And in my own personal style at the time, part of that time, I felt that I had some strong functional skills. And that's how I've been successful getting to where I was. But I also knew I had some limitations. And so my boss's boss sends me to Paris. And he says, okay, Tom, I want you to go over there and get them all to work together. So I said, Well, how am I supposed to do that? Why do you think I'm gonna be successful with that? And he said to me, Well, if you're American, of an Italian descent, so you'll get along with everybody. I whacked myself on the side of the head, I thought, I mean, the Europeans were notorious back in the 90s, for not working together, well, you could not put a leader in there who was German, you know, managing the other four countries, you couldn't put a bird and you couldn't put a Frenchman it was just not allowed, but an American. At a time, when America was really perceived very well around the globe, with apparently an Italian American background, could be flexible enough to get them to do things together. The other thing that I've always been pretty adamant about is I would never allow anybody to do anything I wouldn't do myself. So I tend to do a lot I don't, I don't direct, I don't delegate strongly, I'm actively involved. And the third thing is, I believe in transparency. And I learned this when I was at Hamilton, back in the early 90s, that if you can be as transparent as as possible with your suppliers, they can't lie to you. So I kept with that concept, when I went to Europe, I assembled teams, everybody had a say, We collaborated, we were transparent with each other, we're transparent with our suppliers. There's no hidden agendas. And I've carried that through, you know, since the since the late 90s. And I think that's what works. And I've actually worked in companies, where that was really not the leadership's preferred style of management. And, and it didn't really work out all that well for me, because, you know, people expected me to just make decisions in direct but, but I've always felt that the more people you include, the more transparent you are about objectives, no hidden agendas, and you're willing to put the time in yourself. You can lead people and you can get them to stretch their capabilities. And you know, through that they learn and they grow. And that's, that's been my style.

Yeah. And I think sometimes people underestimate people, right? People know, if you're not telling them the whole story. If you're misrepresenting things, people just have that gut feel, you know, they can just tell you're not fooling anybody. And I think the sooner people sort of wake up and realize that then we'll have a lot more authentic leaders out there than we do today. But I have a question for you. You know, we talk a lot about teams and team performance and individual performance. This term, a high performance team, what does that mean to you? What is a high performing team to you?

So I actually mentioned that term at a board meeting about a year ago and they all looked at me like what? So for me, a high performance team means that I don't have to do anything But I kind of just stepped back. And I just kind of watch and I advise and for me a high performing team is that everybody on that team isn't equal, and that they all cover for each other. And they use their strengths to fill gaps and others who may not have those same strengths. And I learned that technique. When I was first at Ryder, I assembled a small team of about six people and everybody had their strengths and weaknesses. And I, I allowed them to kind of speak up and help each other out. At that point in time, it wasn't a common thing to help appear out, right, you were in my prior jobs, you were competing against your peers. So and when I came back to Ryder, that's one of the things I really wanted to do. So I've got a really fun team, a really great team. And they watch out for each other, they know who's strong and certain skills. They know when somebody's falling behind. And they essentially manage themselves. And I set some high level goals. I'll jump in, obviously in adjudicate if it needs to be but I have very few disagreements amongst team, they, they tend to resolve it, I also have a pretty, I would call it a pretty diverse team, meaning that a lot of them have first gen European backgrounds tend to be a bit more adaptive anyway. And so they're not, they're not like individual hard chargers that are going to run over everybody. And that's, and it took probably about the first year and a half, to get them to believe that that's what I wanted them to do. That I wanted them to work together. I didn't want to delegate, I didn't want to have to prove I wanted them to figure it out, I set the top level of judges, I think they and some of them got frustrated. Because not only did I want them to do it, I wanted them with all their activities to do it with their customers. I wonder customers have an equal voice. I didn't want to go telling anybody, this is what you're going to do. I don't believe that ever works. So and they struggled with getting their people who didn't work for me on the team to help make the decisions that needed to be made. And it took about a year and a half. Some of them felt it was slowing things down. I said look, there's no time urgency here. What's more important is that we have a culture change and that everybody works together for the benefit of the company. And with a company like Ryder, that we buy trucks, we service trucks, we send trucks out to be serviced by dealers, we buy a ton of parts, we buy a bunch of lubricants, fuel, it's all interrelated. And my role there is to get everybody who has those electronic vehicle electric vehicles that are common in autonomous driving. It's my goal to get the suppliers to match up with everything. Because in the end, the person who makes the decision on what we're going to buy for new trucks, gets the suppliers attention. But I made sure that the supplier gives everybody else the attention that they need to move their job forward. So it took a little while. But I think the time is not wasn't time urgent. It's not like we had to save $100 million in two years, I did not have a sub optimized objective. And that's one of the good things I like about Ryder too, is that they wouldn't have put me in that position. It's just wasn't, it's not the right away. It's more, we've been around for 85 years. And the gym rider started with one truck. And we'll be here for another 100 years, we do a great job. And I think we perform better now, with all of us working together.

It sounds almost too good to be true. It sounds like a wonderful culture and a wonderful way a place to work. And I know people that have worked directly for you who just absolutely love the experience. But how Tim, how do you how do you create a high performing team that's got each other's back where you've got trust and psychological safety, and that they operate as a unit? How do you make that happen?

Well, I think the first thing is you've got to look for the people internal to the company that will fit that profile. If you go out and hire or even bring in people who you know, and plop them into the company and you say, Okay, I want you guys to work together. They don't know the company, they don't have the relationships, they're not going to be successful in the long term, they'll be lucky to probably survive a couple of years. So I think the right mix is no 65% of people who were in the role, get him off the team, bring in another 20% from outside the role but within the company, bring them on the team and bring 10 or 15% in from outside. And I found that work my first time at Ryder I tried to repeat it several times in other locations. Sometimes it works sometimes it didn't. In this case, I'm probably more 70% inside the company. And it's actually more like 80% with only a couple of strategic hires that have made a big difference. So it's all a function of leadership. I mean, when when I came in there really had not been a supply management leader. There had been a function that had split objectives, a lot of focus on electric vehicles and things, which is all great. But we had lost our alignment with our key suppliers. And we needed to reestablish that alignment, and they were more than happy to give it. So I think you really need to use the strengths of the people inside. And then, you know, obviously, I teamed up with my major partners that at my level, and they assigned their people to work with my people. And over time, they learned to trust us that we weren't out to do something. And overtime, we learn to trust them. And when that happens, it's a great feeling. It's just, it's all for the company.

Yeah. So it sounds like you really modeled the behavior yourself, at your peer to peer level.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I like I said, I wouldn't ask anybody to do something I wouldn't do myself and I absolutely believe it. And, you know, I'm 40. Like I said, I'm 43 years into the business. I'm looking forward to going home at some point in the future. I survived for years retired very well enjoyed it like crazy. I miss it today. And like I said, I wouldn't come back to work if it wasn't for Ryder. So, you know, I put my time into make sure I leave an organization here that can continue on.

I'm curious, if somebody from the outside comes into your organization, let's say you hired me, right, I come in. And I'm that, you know, you often see people who are new into an organization, they're desperate to show people how much they know, and that they're going to have an impact to the bottom line. And sometimes they may come into your office and say, you know, I think we should do this, because I see people over here doing this and doing that essentially, you know, telling tales of their peers, right? You've you've seen that behavior I know you have. So that. So when somebody comes to you, with that sort of storyline, how do you handle a situation like that?

Well, it's all about the long term game, right? It's not the short term game, and started about a sub optimize objective that we may have. And a lot of people in our roles are savings oriented, I believe that we have to develop savings. And we also have to develop value. We spent a ton of time in the last couple of years when the the market really took off, making sure that we had advantage lead times and slots, and getting our suppliers to deliver as close to on time as possible. And that had a lot more value than saving $50 million. I mean, we saved our share money, too, no doubt about it. But you got to be aligned with what the business needs. At that point in time, the business needed to be able to grow. And in order to grow, you had to be precise about execution. So so we you know, that was our number one concentration. And then we also looked at the savings piece. And like I said, this company has been around a long time, if we don't save it this year, we'll save it next year. But we're not going to do something that's not right, just to score a win in a savings column. I've got a great partner and Tom havens who's heads of the maintenance function, we work really well together. We know what the issues are. It's a very complicated business. And we just continue to do a good job of getting better every day and probably took us about nine months or a year to get there. But we did. And we've actually made some pretty dramatic changes in some of our key suppliers that had a big impact on his operation. And he was as supportive with doing as I was, and and when when when you do a deal, you don't walk away from it and leave it up to the operators to manage you. You'd be there to offer to loan and people I'm I continue to have calls that the CEOs of all our big suppliers, I keep that line of communication open. Historically, we haven't really done that. And one of my objectives is to when I do retire, again, is that we have relationships across the entire organization with with our key suppliers. I mean, these are big companies download Trucks North America have a star of although Chevy Suzu. There are big companies and we're we're a big customer, we're one of only four or five customers that are in our league, and actually only one of two, so and the industry is the type that doesn't really have concentrations and customers. They deal through dealers. So the dealers are essentially diluted, and they have dealer councils and things but it's hard for them to get the mother company to move. And the mother company moves on its own schedule. When you have a big buyer like myself, or our competition number one competitor. They listen and they move and because of that they become better companies. And and they say to me pretty frequently and I learned that when I was a Hamilton back in the early 90s, too, that if we concentrate our spend, we expect you to get better. And don't don't stick fingers at each other just get better. That's what it's all about. And that's the nice thing about the writer job is that it's really partnership development. And people use that term very loosely. I know what it is because We have so much concentration with 15 suppliers, we can make their businesses and they can make our business. And we thought like, we want to walk away from any of them, and they don't want to walk away from us either. So we're kind of forced to work together. And I think it works out for a great partnership. After all these years of doing this, I mean, this is a, this is kind of like apple with with Foxconn, you know, without Foxconn, Apple would be a much weaker company. And without Apple, Foxconn wouldn't exist. So it's a very similar situation.

We love to talk about innovation these days. And it's over 90% of CEOs have innovation on their agenda, and we love to talk about it. But often, these companies will pawn that off to their head of engineering or design or r&d, they don't think of it as being part of the culture. Innovation is part of the culture and to have innovation, you must have trust, because you have to get rid of fear, you have to banish fear. Innovation means you have to try, you try and you fail, and you try and you fail. So if you want innovation on your agenda, you can't have a culture or an environment where people are afraid to make a decision or come up with a new idea. And that takes trust, people have to feel safe in your organization. It sounds like you have built an organization where trust is a very important factor. So how do you now build upon that to get innovation, talk to us a little bit about innovation and bringing innovation to the forefront from your team.

So innovation can be there's there's two paths of innovation in my world, right? It's unlocking innovation, I supplier world level, making sure that that innovation is available to my company, so that we can evolve and stay ahead of our competition. And you know, think about electric trucks, battery powered trucks, think about fuel cells, autonomous driving, these things are all coming. And and they they represent threats to to our business. I mean, autonomous driving, essentially means that when you get to the anti state, whenever that is, you don't need drivers, and we part of our businesses, we manage 12,000 drivers every day. So if you don't have drivers to manage, then I'm not sure what the what the purpose is, for that piece of our business of electric vehicles, we've got 1000s of technicians who maintain diesel vehicles. Every day, when you have electric vehicles, you're talking about replacing battery packs, and brakes. And that's it. And the core of our business on the maintenance side is we take the problem off of your back, we'll maintain these vehicles, we'll sell them at the end of their life, we'll deal with the parts issues, warranty issues, and 65% of that is predominantly engine related. So we need to be current and upfront and find our piece of that space. You know, if we're just going to maintain battery vehicles, what does it mean to write or long term. So we're constantly innovating in other areas adjacent to our business. And a lot of that has to do with key suppliers, as well as key technology platforms that continue to come out every day. But in my world, in my world, within the organization of supply management, it's really trying something different from what we've done in the past. And, for instance, we've got, we have over 600 repair locations around the United States in Canada. And we spend somewhere in the range of three to $400 million dollars a year locally, that is almost impossible to manage centrally. Because if you try to manage it centrally, you probably tell somebody to use some supplier who's not a good service performer. And this is the area of spend where service performance is number one. And cost is number two. And number three, if you don't have the service level, it doesn't matter what you're paying. So we're trying to come up with a way to do that, in the COVID crisis, the strategy was to deploy two or three small teams of two people out around metropolitan areas and or regions of the US to work with our local people to understand who are the best service providers? Who do they prefer to use? Is there a reason or their reasons for that, and then to really understand the finances around them the business relationship with the virus coming? Unless any people out in the field know, nor to our field, people want to come and see them? Nor are the suppliers going to come to a big bidders conference where you get 200 people in a conference room. So that's all kinds of debts. And now we're trying to figure out how do we do this project at the central level, and not have that full of visibility and involvement at the team level locally. So what we decided to do is okay, we're going to see if we can't strike relationships with key providers that are spread out around the North American market may not be specific to a certain market, and we'll establish a better deal and we'll see whether they are local people you use them or not. So it's only a partial solution, I don't think it's the final solution. I don't believe in spending any time on anything that people aren't going to use. So I'm nervous about it, because there will be a point in time where I'll be recommending that they try somebody or use somebody. And I don't know the full story locally. But I mean, you have to be flexible and may not be successful, it's a significant savings activity for us for the year. One of the things we're trying to do like, like I said, we have a lot of dealers that support us around the country, you know, 1000s of locations, we're trying to use the, the, the O ease relationships with their dealers to establish performance metrics locally, like stock outs, turnaround time for orders, and things like that. And if I can get that kind of visibility, which nobody at the local level has, then I'll feel a lot better about maybe developing deeper relationships with those dealers who are performing better than the rest of the way I get these companies to do things. It's, it's a competitive pressure, right. And that's where the transparency comes in. So if I can show a dealer body, that the competing dealer body is operating better across three or four or five important criteria, they're going to respond. And that's really how you deal in an oligopolistic market is that you just you force them to compete against each other. And with the position that Ryder has the size of us, they can't ignore us because we're too important to the business.

Yeah, it's obvious that transparency is a very important value to you.

Absolutely. And we do a lot with, in our case, because we were a transportation company, a lot of our customers are also suppliers, and a lot of our suppliers could be big customers. And it's been interesting, as we've been developing that concept, obviously, every deal has to stand on its own merits. But our concept of transparency is not the same on the other side. So what I do is I since I am so transparent with the CEOs of all the companies I make the comment to them is, look, if we're going to compete for your business, you should be as transparent as we are with you. Be as clear and not opaque. Don't Don't sit there with cards against your chest, show them because that's what I show you. And it's it's interesting with a lot of mine, because I'm dealing with other CTOs, right and big companies, and I know them. But you know, they have cultures within their companies that are trying to deal with this transparency issue. But since we are so transparent with them, and allows them to be better companies, how can they not be transparent with us?

I bet they're shocked. Right? I bet some of them are shocked to the level of transparency that you share, that you come from such a good place, you know, you you're very authentic, you're very real, you have credibility, you have integrity, how can I argue with that, but I'm sure you throw some of them off.

That's exactly right. And and, you know, the time we have trouble with that is if you're not really being straight and open, right? If there are you have an insecurity, that you're not going to meet your goal, if you'd be fully truthful. I'm not saying that you total total truth, but I've, I don't hide pretty much anything that I can think of that's important to the relationship. And, and I think I get a better response for and I know, I can, I can establish that value prop of our management much clearer. So but it is, it's a culture changing thing for some of these organizations, because a lot of them have CPAs that maybe aren't as tenured as I am. And you know, they're fairly new in a job that are not as comfortable with themselves. And it's more like three bids. And you know, who can I get to get to the lowest price? And I've never believed that the lowest price was the best price ever. And if you're within 5% I mean, what's the difference? I mean, let's let's talk about what this really means to us. And, but there's when people have sub optimized objectives, like savings targets, you know, a million dollars, the additional is important to them. And because they're being measured on it, and unfortunates an unfortunate situation, I've had those roles before and it's, it's a difficult job.

Yeah, well, it's much more than just the ROI, right. And that's what people are starting to understand or recognize. And if you listen to the work of Simon Sinek I love the way that he articulates that. It's much more about the number it's much more than the number of seats it really is about the people.

Yeah, a lot of these jobs get filled by consultants coming in, right consultant comes in says you got all this opportunity, but you need a good CPO to bring it home and then CPO gets hired the CEO hire the consultant who's put 10 or $20 million up there and he wants that savings and that's and you come in sometimes with the best of intentions. But in the end, sometimes you're forced to kind of chase that savings number down whether it's real or not. And so it's an unfortunate situation. Unfortunate that I'd never have to face that situation again.

You I think there's a lot of people still out there doing. You know, I remember when I started my career in purchasing, you know, people would, I was trained I was told you know, well Your your target is whatever it was, you know, for this particular component, maybe $5 cost reduction, but then up it by 10%, you know, and that's what you just tell them, you just tell the supplier that that's your target. So I was, you know, dutiful young purchasing agent, you know, and I would go out there with this well, but that's the target. And a supplier would say, Well, why why do you? Why do you need that? And I could not take a lead a story behind it, because it was just a made up bullshit number. Right? Exactly. And then no. And then later on in my career, I learned that it was much better to talk about maybe what were the overall cost objectives of the program? Well, you know, what other things could we bring into play have a much more deeper, more meaningful conversation with transparency? It's much more powerful, and you get a lot more out of it at the end of the day, but sometimes people don't get that.

No, they don't, no, no. So I I'm a target price or at heart, you know, I'm a target price at heart. I explained to him what that target is. So here's our current costs. I'll show it to you. And if you can beat it by 5%, or whatever it is, then it's yours, and then find a way to do it. I think that's much better than give me your bid. And I'll tell you, it's too high. Yeah, right. Right. Right. For me, it's like once they've given a bid, it's really hard to get him to change because they're embarrassed. So you might as well target price. And from the beginning, it's much, much quicker.

Yes, yes. Well said Well said, trust and transparency are clearly important to you. There are two traits of authentic leadership. What other traits of authentic leadership are important to you?

Well, you know, I think you, I think what's allowed me to be successful in my role is, over time, the degree of respect, right, I've been able to develop a certain level of respect, that gives me some motion. For instance, I was very happy that at the time, I really wasn't. But when I ESM asked me to take over the PMI. I'm very happy to be involved in that. And the reason is, is that I get to use my 40 some odd years of manufacturing, discrete manufacturing and process manufacturing, to interpret what the supply management community in the United States is really feeling about the economy for the prior month, I don't think I would have been given that role if, if I hadn't developed a level of respect. At the time that I was asked to do that job. I remember my, my daughter was the one who convinced me to do it, because I was retired for two and a half years. And I got up and I wanted to get up, I went to bed when I wanted to get up and to do this job. Not only do you have to devote two to two and a half days of time to it, you got to analyze and write the report, then you have to report on it. But you also have to spend a bunch of time during the month to understand what's going on with the economy, because you can't do the analysis without understanding what's happening. So I really was reluctant to get back into it. She said, Well, look, why don't you just try it out. Try it out. And so I assumed asked me to shadow Brad Holcomb, who was the predecessor on the report for a couple of months and and a couple of months, I started to get, you know, read back into the business community. And off I went, right. So I was, I was glad I did it. Because I think if I hadn't done it, I probably would not have gotten back to work for Ryder because I think I would have been that far away from business. And I probably would have said now, I think I'm gonna rather ride my motorcycle around the Northeast more and grow my garden. No, it's canning season now. And I've got eight batches of 30 pounds of tomatoes that I have to can or I'm making cayenne peppers this year, I'm drying them out. I don't have time to go to work. But I think the fact that I that I got back into the into the business community that PMI really helped a lot. So I'm not sure I'm answering your question directly. I think I'm very comfortable with the fact that I've had a really fantastic career. It's been exciting and it's still as exciting. I never thought I would be chasing PPE. At the end of my career. I you know, I started my career doing that. I never thought I would. We used to call it the toilet paper brigade. I'd never thought I would say at one point we were buying toilet paper for PPE because nobody could get it. I've I've traveled the world I've been exposed to a ton of different cultures been to some really, really great places. And I'll because I was in supply management. One of the things I missed the eyes to see as far as I looked right when when Sam Panella had told me Look at a five year goal. My five year goal was to travel the world and have somebody else pay for it. So that's when I got into the global sourcing roles in the in the mid 90s. That's exactly what it was to the point where when I finally retired I was kind of glad I wasn't globally traveling anymore. And now I talked to a bunch of sales guys and CEOs and nobody's traveling and Ashley anymore. It was such a, such a big part of everybody's jobs and careers and now in a lot of organizations now have gone from global organizations to regional just to account for that. Because if you're living here in the US, and you're running a business in China, pretty hard to do unless you want to spend a month in quarantine both ways. So you know, a lot of changes as viruses cause a lot of things to change.

Tim, what advice would you give your 25 year old self today in today's environment?

Now, it's a, that was an interesting point in my career, I remember I got married when I was 25. I was working on a program called the MX missile. And I was buying the key sub components for a coolant system that kept the avionics cool. So the missile would hit its target 1000 miles away. And I got married, and I remember, a wife and I took a three day honeymoon, because I couldn't be gone any longer than I look back at that, like, no, why did I do that? I really need to do that. So you could you could you have found more time to go somewhere different rather than drive to the Cape and back. Thankfully, thankfully, we've survived all these years, I think the thing is, you know, find a better balance. I mean, I think the longer I work, the less balance I had. And it probably even got more acute, the more I traveled internationally. And, you know, I always I also felt that since I did move at 28, for the first time. And I also saw that if you stay in a company long enough, you eventually bump up against the ceiling, and you have to wait. And if you're not willing to wait, then you have to move. And that's what I did. I was fortunate with, with my first company at 25 years, I had six jobs and that company, I had to move three times. And then once I left it for rider in the early 2000s. Once you've left your mother company like that, it's never quite the same. So I did tend to I ended up moving a lot, which I'm not sure is good or bad. My wife and I still wonder where we really belong anymore. Do we belong in North Central Connecticut? Or do we belong in South Florida? Well, how about both? That's a good, that's a good answer. So I think you know, I think try to retain some of that work life balance. If you want to pursue a career, you got to be willing to really do what you have to do, meaning you got to relocate I, at least I'm saying that now here in the COVID crisis where nobody's going to relocate, right. And we may be at a point where you could do a CPL job from 1000 miles away, as long as you don't have too big of a time difference. You know, when I was working in Europe, most of my work was in Europe. But I still have a lot of coordination activity that I just stay. It's not really I remember working late 910 o'clock at night conference called nobody in the US started to work until one o'clock in a European Time. But the day went on long. A lot of a lot of personal sacrifice, you know, fortunately, you know, wife was willing to put up with that. family who learned and grew with it, too, and has done quite well. So I guess Yeah, I don't know, my 25 year old self, I tried to find a little bit more work life balance, like I mentioned that I had a lot of hobbies, and I was younger, a lot of hobbies. And as my career progressed, I lost more and more of them. So what I really when I retired, the first time back in 2012, my whole goal was I had a retirement plan. And the goal was to bring back all of those things that I had lost over the years and keep the ones that I really wanted. And I was very active at it for four years. And I think that's a if you're thinking about retirement, make sure you have a plan. And the plan is not play more golf.

Yeah, yeah, I would agree. And what I hear from you is, maybe if I can just summarize some of that advice in that is, first of all, find a partner who understands your passion. And if your work is your passion, make sure they understand that it sounds like she she most definitely has done that. And then not to not to sacrifice your whole self for your career, understand what it is and what in a work life balance is different to everybody. It's not necessarily a balance, there are choices that we make in life. So don't sacrifice things that you know that are important to you. Would that be fair?

I think that's good. The first one, absolutely. The second one, try not to sacrifice. You try, try. Try harder, don't don't sacrifice so easy. Think about a little bit longer. Right there. There was definitely clear career choices I made where I knew what I was doing. And I knew when you get into a global job, you know what that means? That's a lot of time gone. And it's just constant territory. And it started with me in the 90s with UTC while I moved my family with me. I traveled back to the US quite a bit every six weeks, a lot of the traveling takes a lot. That takes a lot out of your personal time. And by the time you get back, you're jet lagged and couple days recover.

Yeah, I think, Tim, sometimes people think that they have, they have to make every decision in their life when you're in a global job like that for the job. And the reality is you, you don't have to make every decision for the job. It is your schedule, you control it. But you have to understand what's important to you to make those right decisions. But once you make that decision, you live with that.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. Absolutely. Right. Yeah.

Well, it's, it's clear to me that you are a leader with gravitas, gravitas, being the term that I love to use to describe the hallmark of authentic leadership. gravitas is one of those words, everybody's got a slightly different understanding of what it is, what is gravitas to you, Tim, in leadership.

I think has been comfortable yourself, and allowing people to see your value. And knowing that you're legitimate, and that you're, you live by a set of values. I think that's that's key, you know, I think, and that's kind of how I was raised. I still think about my grandfather's all the time. I think everybody should always think about their grandfather's if you're fortunate enough to have known them. Remember, their hard working man graduated high school, I remember some of the lessons that they pass on to me, and I would never want to disappoint them. So and disappointing them would be by being not legitimate. So or being evasive or just just trying to get ahead and climb over people. So I think that's gravitas. I think it's no being respected because you've earned it. And you've earned it because you've got the right values.

Yeah, it's beautifully said. So what is your legacy?

Well, besides my, my children and my grandchildren, I think I think I've been in a bunch of businesses now. And I still stay in touch with a bunch of people that work for me, where, as I kind of evolved, what I guess I would call mom, I toolkit, post post, post Europe. And I think that leaving, you know, these people in other organizations, is continuing to support them and counsel them and watch them grow in their their businesses in their careers. It's very gratifying. I mean, I came from a group, when we were at United Technologies, we got the medal of professional excellence, when purchasing magazine was still around. And one of the one of the things that they had put in there was all the people who had come out of that organization, and became VPS on their own. Well, that was really all due to Ken Burton and Shelley Stewart attracting the right people and putting the right amount of investment in terms of knowledge, and, and having the ear of the leadership of the company to allow us to be successful. So you're looking at all the the men and women who did so well from that, and I mean, it's more than two hands worth. It's, it's really impressive. So no, I think I think my legacy is, I always work as a team, be as honest and transparent as possible. Don't you know, don't be insecure with yourself to the point where you can't be. And you know, it's all about continuously getting better. I mean, I remember when I left Ryder, back in the mid 2000s, one of the reasons why I left was we really were not practicing continuous improvement. Very well and I had been schooled and it really extensively, you know, I technologies and I really, I got the fever back in 1993 when I was at a Pratt and Whitney Canada manufacturing factory making jet engines doing it in a lean fashion. And the the VP of ops at the time, Lou Shonibare went on to be the CEO of UTC. And I really felt that that was part of my DNA was continuously improving things didn't have to be a big leap. It just had to be better every day. And I've kind of lived my life that way in my career, it's got to be better every day. Staying still at the same level is not acceptable. You got to get better every day. I think that's, that's the legacy. You just you can do better every day.

Getting better every day, small incremental steps of improvement. And that is a beautiful way to end our time today. Tim Fiore. I can't thank you enough. It has been an absolute pleasure.

Same here, Jan. Great talking with you. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

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