Gary Kusin, co-founder of GameStop, Laura Mercier Cosmetics, and former President and CEO of Kinko’s, unveils his new book Always Learning: Lessons on Leveling Up from GameStop to Laura Mercier and Beyond, and shares insights on alignment and accountability, respect, honesty, and integrity, continuous change, tackling toxicity, good reasons vs real reasons, only getting paid for the stuff you DON’T like, launching what would become GameStop, the delicate and sometimes dark nature of mentorship, the 4 most mission-critical things to look for when hiring, and not necessarily being driven to win, but refusing to lose.

Well, hey, Gary, it's super nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you also, I'm at your mercy.

Well, thank you, you may come to regret that. But

in the meantime, thank you. So I'm super curious. I'm gonna

just jump right in out of the gates in your book always

learning. You know, I think that's such an interesting

perspective. Because folks often would look at your background

and go, What does he possibly have left to learn? Tell me a

little bit about where the idea behind the book came from. Walk

me through some of that.

Be glad to. So after I sold Kinkos, to FedEx, and

after the two years that I integrated it into FedEx

reporting to Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, I was trying

to decide what I wanted to do next. And I started getting a

lot of pressure because of the way that Kinkos turnaround

happened and a lot of things about that from a lot of

interesting quarters saying you have to write a book, this would

be a very big book. And I said, you know, I'm not I have never

been good about talking about myself. But I'm a big introvert.

And I would just assume, not be in the limelight. And so it

really kind of pushed back, but they were really pushing pretty

hard. I told everyone, no, thank you, I am looking forward to my

anonymity. And that's it, and I let it go. Fast forward to the

last year, we had our 11th grandchild. And our view of the

world is quite different. Both my wife and me, we decided while

we while we still could, we wanted to write a memoir, that's

where I started. And through a lot of friends who are authors

and a lot of people, I ended up meeting with some publishers, I

mean, I went through the whole drill, and I found a spectacular

editor that I really wanted to work with. And I started

pounding away on a memoir, gave it to Maria, and she came back

to me and she's a highly experienced person in the book

industry real Book Pro, and part of my belief and my talk track

about my life is essentially I'm the luckiest sob in the history

world. I've fallen up everything that's ever happened to me good,

pure luck. Well, Maria pushed back, I read intention on every

page. And I have a hard time reconciling the intention that I

see that you have written in your own words about your own

life, with your thought that you have just been lucky. And

following up. She said, I don't believe that. And I would like

you to rethink how you have thought about your life. Luck is

what happens when opportunity meets preparedness that stuck

with me. And my book took on a very different, intentional

look, and frankly, morphed into more about my business. I'm a

mentor. That's the one thing that came out of my whole career

that I love the most. And there are reasons and I tracked

through all of those in the book. But I've had over 1000

mentoring sessions last 20 years. And so this book is a way

for me to mentor more broadly, let my my podcast the same

thing. All I'm trying to do is level people's playing fields

who might not have had the advantages I've had my career,

because that is my joy. It's my love out. I spoke a month ago,

and I wrote about this recently on LinkedIn. But I spent I spent

an hour with the eighth grade of a charter school in St. Paul,

Minnesota, who were all Somali refugees. And one little boy had

his hand up. And I said yes, because I was asking for

questions. And he said, When did things get better for you? Now

think about that question. It stopped me dead in my tracks.

And I was able to just talk to this young man about things that

I did at his age, what I learned and what I felt was a way

forward for anybody who is trying to figure out how to

better themselves. It filled me up that interaction with that

young man was what I'm that's what I live for.

There is so much I want to unpack. So let me

circle back to these leadership principles. And respect

alignment, accountability. What else?

Well, I actually do alignment and accountability is

one and two. For me. It's critically important in any

company, for everyone to understand, what are we trying

to do hear, hear and to understand, here's the mission,

there's the flag on a distant hill. That's the flag we need to

take. We're going to take it and then why they're so linked is

you can't give responsibility without authority. And so many

companies do that. They they tell they tell someone, you've

got to get this done. And then when you start to do it, someone

else tells you can't do that. That's a misalignment, it'll

destroy everything. So alignment and then have a culture that

does too. distributed authority, then you can move into respect

for others. And that means that and it TPG were US did a nice

stint as a senior adviser, they had a sign in their lobby that

said, No, it's allowed. That's, you know, I think that's pretty

straightforward. And you can figure out what that is, in the

honest honesty and integrity is a requirement. But there are a

lot of people out there who like to cut corners. And I'm never a

part of that. And the last one is continuous improvement, but

my co founder at GameStop, and I've been talking about the

book, obviously, and he really thinks I should rethink that.

And I am to make a continuous change. Because we could have

been accused at GameStop. being excellent, with continuous

improvement because we work but we should have been thinking

change. Because we came in at the dawn of a new industry, we

were the first software store in the world, when our first store

open, and the things we did to start, were right at the start.

But 10 years later, every one of our kind of pillars of our

business needed to be reevaluated every single one of

them. And all we were trying to do would be better, smarter,

faster, and what we were doing and continued to succeed, but we

were missing the very large and important aspects of change.

Next thing I want to touch on is this idea of

toxicity. How and when do you recognize it? How do you change

it? Just talk me through some of that.

The key question you're asking there is, how do

you change it, and I will get to that in a minute, it is pretty

obvious to see when there is a culture that people talk down to

people in an organization or they yell or they scream, or

they belittle people, there is no reward and recognition, there

is an expectation that people might work all hours be

available all hours in those kinds of things, and not then

not want to pay people keep all the money for themselves, you

know, all that kind of stuff. How do I change that, in one

case I left in life, there are good reasons. And there are real

reasons, I ended up having a good reason. And I'm not gonna

get into it any more than that. And one particular company I was

involved with had a good reason for leaving, but it wasn't the

real reason. And the real reason was, I couldn't stand the tone

at the top. And unfortunately, I'm at the top also. So that was

getting guilt by association. And I decided I didn't want to

go into hand to hand combat with the other top leadership. So it

was easier for me because I wasn't at all concerned about

being able to find something to do, because it's never been a

problem for me. And I decided I can create a new situation for

myself. And I had a good reason everybody believed it. And

that's great. But it's tough. That's one thing people know

about me. And when I was at TPG, again, as a Senior Advisor for

13 years in that meantime, helped assess companies to see

whether we should buy him or not those that we bought, if I

wanted to join the board, I could I could be lead director,

I could be exec Chairman, I could be whatever I want it to

be. But no situations, I was very clear very quickly. If I

saw toxicity at the top, I had very difficult conversations

with CEOs, presidents, and other BNI I have no problem doing

that. I just close the door and I sit down and I say I'm about

to have a very difficult conversation with you. And when

you say I'm about to have a difficult conversation with you

to someone, they kind of sit up, go up, something's come in, I

need to in a focus and you get a very different kind of focus

when you start a conversation like that. And I would tell him,

not on my watch, not on TP G's investment. We're not going to

do things that way. And you need to understand that. And if you

have an issue with that, let's talk about how to gracefully get

you out of here. And I had no problem having those difficult

conversations, because I'm having with people who are

inherently difficult, who have been part of the toxicity who

seem to not understand what their presence is like how

they're being received by other people. So I've had those times

I had much those conversations.

Again, the wisdom that just comes from that

so many people from a leadership perspective, talk about the

difficulty of difficult conversations, and you just gave

beautiful language. Hey, we're just going to have a difficult conversation.

And I'll give you another lesson I learned along

the way that helped me with that. Actually, that lesson came

from Jack Welch. And I asked him, I was having quarterly

business reviews with him. And I asked him, I was very curious. I

had assembled an entirely new management team and 12 months

later, I'd replaced half of them. And I said, I feel very

guilty about that, Jack. And so give me give me something to

think about, as I think about am I a failure at recognizing

talent? What did I do wrong? Or what did I do right? And I

learned from him. First of all, he said 50% is completely

average. He said, I'm not gonna tell you good job, but I'm not

gonna tell you a bad job either. Because when you're rebuilding a

senior team from the ground up in a turnaround situation, you

won't know if you lose half of them. That's, that's average. He

said, Now, the second time around, since you now understand

the business much more closely and the replacement kind of

people, they should have different characteristics. I

learned about that. But the best one I ever got was first time I

ever fired anybody. It was one of those things that has stuck

with me forever. So I started a new job in Sacramento for a

different department store that I had started in a department

store in San Francisco, they and another division in Sacramento,

they offered me a big promotion to go there. My boss in the new

situation, when I sat down, he said, Look, I've been here for

three months longer than you and I've identified the areas that

are weak, we need to make changes. And I think these few

people as needed, we probably need to change them out. Figure

out what you think. And let me know so one of them. I came to

him said, You are right. I need to fire her. She's clearly not

going to be the person to get us the next level. He said, Great.

I couldn't bring myself to fire. She, you know, I was 26. She was

much older. She had a family. I just couldn't I didn't know how

to do it. I mean, I just didn't know how to do it. And every

week at my weekly meeting, he would say, Hey, Gary, have you

fired her yet? No, I haven't. Finally, six weeks later, after

asking me half a dozen times. He said, You know what? I've done

this for a long time. I'm obviously more experienced than

you. This is not my first rodeo. I'm the one that identified or

would you like me to go ahead and do that for you? And now I

know I'll do it. I promise you, Marvin, I'll do it. He said,

Well, I have no problem doing it. So I said, Well, gee, you

know, if you have no problem doing it, maybe yeah, if you do

that, that'd be great. He said, super. I'll do it. He spins

around in his desk. He picks up an old desk phone a dials HR. He

said, Would you please send me Gary's next paycheck? Thanks,

but and he turned around, I said, What? He said, Gary, we

do the stuff we like, for free, we get paid to do this stuff we

don't like. And he said, that's something you don't like, I'm

not gonna like it, but I won't get paid for it. If you're not

going to do it. I want your pay for doing that. I said, I'll do

it right away. And and that served me well then. And it

served me well in conversations. Since then, when I've had those

same issues, because nobody liked your first time you

terminate someone, it's a nightmare. Yet, you're up all

night, throwing up it just horrible. And so sometimes you

need a little pep talk. And that was the one I got. And it stood

me in good stead ever since.

And I think to one of the things I appreciate

that I heard from you, it's just the humanity of it. If there

wasn't that human element, firing people wouldn't be easy.

But to your point, she was older, she had a family older

than you, you know how to family. And here you are up at

night, and but not forgetting the humanity side of it. It's

super important. Okay, so if I'm hearing correct, so you start

out kind of on one path in your career, when did you know you

really had this entrepreneurial bug?

I didn't know. I think it's safe to say I had no

idea. I'm not sure I could spell entrepreneur. But what I'm sure

of is when I graduated business school, my first desire was to

figure out how to make sure my now wife would marry me if asked

her to marry me. And I had mentioned to her if you could

live anywhere in the she's in law school down in Texas, if you

could live anywhere you wanted to live in the US, where would

that be? And she didn't take long to say San Francisco. So I

went back to graduate school and I wandered into the placement

officer. I said, Well, what do we have in San Francisco? And it

was two big department store chains. And since I've grown up

my family in the retail furniture business, I said,

Yeah, okay, I'll do that. And that's what I did. But once I

got into the department store business, and I started to

understand it in I started to go into our stores and malls. I was

realizing that specialty stores were popping up in the malls

that were stealing our lunch in department stores, you know,

stores like the gap. All of a sudden they went our denim

business, you know, Lane Bryant there when our large size

business, I could run right jewelry there, Zales there when

our jewelry business. And I started developing a point of

view about department stores that were so fragmented with

different names on in each city go to the major department

stores had a different name, even though they were owned by

the same large company. So I started lobbying. I started with

two things. One, we're getting our lunch taken. And if you

can't see it, here's the data. And there was data that just we

were growing at 10%. Well, that was great. But the specialty

stores were going 40 50% A year and it was crazy. It was just

very obvious what was going on. And I developed a point of view

that said in any category of consumer goods that reaches

measurable size, measurable size being a billion dollars back at

that time. I said a specialty channel will emerge that will

end up being an important if not dominant channel and

distribution inside that segment. And I could prove it

with data. So I went on this big tear inside of Federated

Department Stores, telling anyone who'd Listen, guys, we're

a dinosaur heading into the swamp. And we don't have to be,

if we had a national name, we could compete with the limited

by being called Macy's coast to coast or picking name. But

everywhere we could develop the programs, we could do everything

to compete. Well, when my business school buddy, we play

poker every week, and we were on the same little section there.

He had just been moved to the Silicon Valley to start working

with video game publishers. And he was coming through Dallas and

some business. And we were dear friends. So he came over for

dinner. And we sat at the kitchen table. And he showed me

all the data about the coming video game, and computers in the

home, all the penetration curves going back to the first record

players to the first black and white TVs to the first alarm

clocks, the penetration curves were the same. And he said there

is no way video game machines, and the software that goes on is

not going to become an enormous sector, there was not a single

video game store in the world. So he's pushing on an open door

with me because I have been preaching to anyone who had

listened. But in any category of consumer products that reaches

measurable size, the specialty store channel will be an

important if not dominant channel of distribution. And I

told him all that I explained, Jim, this is really interesting.

Let me tell you why. And by the time we were through, it's like,

Well, Jim, you got to quit your job at banking, I have to quit

my job at Federated Department Stores. And we got to do this.

And he's like, really, and I'm like, I go home. My wife said

what I said, Hey, wait, if Jim does it because Jim was talking

to the class and our business school, if Jim thinks it's a

good idea, that's our insurance policy. Jim was, of course go in

and tell if his buddies have kids. And being a retailer, he

thinks it's a good thing. So we both quit our jobs. And the rest

is history. And so we opened when we opened our first stores,

the first software store in the history of the world. We had so

much fun for the next 12 years until I jumped to start the

cosmetics company. And we had gone public and we just bought

our biggest competitor and it felt like the right time and

somewhere in there. Towards the end of Babbage's I realized I

could do something else. And I just enjoyed the intellectual

stimulation of coming up with what is the what's the

hypothesis? Or what's the investment thesis if you're in

private equity coming at something very rationally, and I

had been meeting because I still had a little bit of department

store blood in my veins had been meeting quarterly with the CEO

of Neiman Marcus back then who was here in Dallas, he lived

down the street from me. And I'd ask him anything new. And he

would always say nope, nothing new, nothing new. But all of a

sudden, one one time at lunch, he said, Let me tell you about

this company called MAC Cosmetics. And I had cosmetic

responsibility. And when he's talking to me, my brain started

working. Oh my gosh, and I and I had a whole idea about what it

might mean. And that's when I figured out I'm probably more of

an entrepreneur than I give myself credit for being and

that's where we went from there.

That is awesome. That is one of the coolest

stories. Oh my gosh, we shift gears ever so slightly. You talk

about you know, 1000 hours in mentorship conversation. And

that's you mentoring others, correct?

Yes, I probably needed it for myself. But I was

too dumb to know better.

You're doing just fine. I think so. Talk me

through both sides of that. When do you recommend that somebody

starts looking at a mentor? What do you look for in a mentor? How

do you know they're the right person? What are the

expectations to get out of that? And then we'll go to the flip

side about where you focus, etc.

Well, I think it's important to know that and I

will tell you as I got into mentoring, it was very organic,

is people I had worked with, who was family members, it was a it

was people who knew me, who called me and said I've got this

thing going on and I need some I need some advice. And that's how

it's kind of started as opposed to I never have mentored someone

that's we're going to meet once a quarter we're gonna go to

Starbucks, we're going to that's not me. But the last few years

is the pace of this has picked up and I've started realizing

actually the dangers of some mentoring. I am becoming more of

a student of mentoring. And they all just tell you I have some

real issues with the use of the word mentoring and corporations

who as part of their leadership and development,

organizationally, set up mentoring relationships now I'm

in favor We've all heard because it sounds good. And it should be

part of any leadership development. But there is a very

large risk. I know from the other side of the table as a CEO

of companies that had 25,000 or more employees, I have seen what

bad things can happen if you use the word mentor. And let me

just, these are not exact numbers. But I'm going to say

somewhere between a third and 40% of the times that I have

gotten a call from someone in a corporate setting, who really

needed to talk with something about me, at least a third to

40% of them had to do with hostile environment had to do

with the legal goings on. And so let me tell you why I

immediately get very upset about that. Now imagine if you are a

mentor, and I am your mentee. And I tell you, I don't know

what to do with this. But my friend and my peer is having an

affair with my boss. Now, let's just say in that situation, you

are dear friends with that boss, and you can't believe what you

just heard. Now you are in trouble because you have a duty

as a senior officer of a big corporation to report to HR if

there's malfeasance hostile environment, anything like that?

Well, if it's a third to 40% of every mentoring situation, it's

my belief that companies should not use the word mentor mentee,

it suggests a confidentiality it suggests, which is not true. It

can't be true in a corporate environment. But it suggests

things that can't be delivered. And especially if my heart goes

out to young people in a career trying to build a career for

themselves, who maybe they stumbled into relationship with

someone higher up in the company, or who knows, I've seen

every permutation of this you can do. But so I'm an advocate

of using the word coach. And and this isn't just semantics,

because if you asked 100 people what it means to be a mentor and

100 people what it means to be a coach, you're going to get a

very narrowed scope for a coach. There's something very specific,

they've got a very specific skill set. And they can teach

that. So maybe there's a workgroup in an in an area in

the IT area that's coding, and doesn't quite, you know, they

got to work through things. Well, their coach should have

been there before. So they can sit down and tell people, okay,

in this situation, here's what you did. And you can multiply

that by every functional area of a company because the coach has

a very narrow purview. And as a potential mentee, I don't have

to tell you, if you're my coach, about something about there,

someone just got a kickback in my work group, and they're

gonna, and they're gonna open a restaurant with it. I mean, I've

seen that one too. So I worry a lot. A lot of the people that in

the corporate environments who have ended up on my doorstep

wasn't their first doorstep. They realized in their mentoring

session, oh, you know, red flag goes up, and I can't, I can't

have this conversation. But I need to have it because I don't

know what to do. And that's where they end up on my

doorstep. And that's why I have this thing about mentoring is

not so wonderful. If it's not really thought out upfront. And

what could go wrong. All those issues, Jelena who's my co host

on INR. Our podcast is about mentoring. And in fact, it's

eavesdropping on mentoring sessions we're having with

people so the listener can hear honest God real mentoring

sessions, we are talking about having CEO and we both know a

bunch of them CEOs of really interesting companies on to talk

with them about leadership and development on their watch. How

do they think about it, throw out this hot sports opinion I

have about mentoring being risky, and get feedback, because

maybe I'm wrong. You know, maybe they're maybe there ways that

they do it. That is safer. But I'd never paid attention.

Because I wasn't out there advertising myself as a mentor.

I was just getting inbound. And the more inbounds I got, the

more I got and it grew. And then next thing I know the people

that I talked to three years ago call and say, Hey, you helped me

three years ago, I got a bigger situation now. And next thing

you know, I've been mentoring some people for 15 years, but

only episodic and only if it's something that they didn't see

coming and they really it's an issue.

This has been super cool. I so appreciate your

time as we kind of start thinking about wrapping up

anything else we haven't touched on that you want to make sure

that we do?

No, I read your website. And I've listened in to

some of the things you put up on YouTube. And it's, I'm so glad

you guys do this. I mean, I think this is I think what y'all

are doing is awesome. There is something that I feel close to

when I hire people, you talk about helping people get better

and intensity and all that. And how do you get the energy up to

do what needs to be done? We put a big accent on this. When I've,

in companies I'm involved in on hiring, what do you look for?

And because I think so much of this can be if you are

interviewing against that as a skill set, you stand a better

chance of having people come into the company that are

emotionally set up for what you want to do. And for instance, in

a in a turnaround situation, like like we had at Kinkos, we

interviewed for kind of four things as mission critical and

that we have to have a point of view after you spend an hour

with a potential new person in the company, you got to have a

point of view about these things. One is energy level. Did

they feel like they had energy that I feel like they're gonna

bring it every day to work? intellectual curiosity? Okay,

did I? Did I ask interesting questions? Do they wonder about

things three, and this is really important, I'll tell you why

this is my most high aspiration. If I'm interviewing someone, and

I say, what is your, what's your end of the rainbow job. And

they, if they say something like your job, I want your job. It's

like, boom, you're hired, because I need someone with

really high aspirations. And then the fourth, which sounds a

little weird, but I found it to really be true. If I talk to

someone, and I don't feel like they're driven to win, that's

fine. As long as I do feel that they will refuse to lose. And

those are two very different thoughts. Because sometimes

people who are hyper competitive and they got a win, win, win,

win win, well, maybe they're too much, maybe too much glass is

gonna get broken. But if someone refuses to lose, that's a

different thing. That's when they're, when they're in the

middle of the night, and they're thinking about something they

are no, I'm not gonna let this happen. And when I mentioned the

highest aspiration, the most probably the most proud thing,

and I'll leave it at this that I've had in my business career.

13 people on my turnaround team at Kinkos are CEOs. And that, to

me is a incredible tribute to them. Because they were all of

these they refuse to lose at a minimum. They had high

aspirations. They were intellectually curious and they

made stuff happen. High energy, it works.

That's incredible. And thank you so

much for sharing that and I really appreciate your time and

availability today. This has been for lack of a better word

energizing, but also very insightful. So thank you, Gary.

You bet. Thanks for having me.