Micho Spring has been a highly respected political and business leader for many years, beginning as a young Chief of Staff to Mayor Kevin White and now as an advisor to companies around the world as the leader of Weber Shandwick’s Global Corporate practice and the Chair of the Board of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. She talks about the critical importance of corporate culture, and for companies and company leaders to deliver on the values they claim to hold. “It used to be enough to have a conscience, but now you’ve got to have a plan – and you have to deliver on it!”
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Quotes
“The role of corporate culture has evolved dramatically. When I started working, it was the Jack Welch days when culture was Six Sigma, and it was all about military discipline to deliver shareholder results. Now comes this generational change, where we see a generation of employees who come to work expecting their values reflected and expecting that their companies are working towards solving societal problems.”
“It used to be enough to have a conscience, but now you’ve got to have a plan – and you have to deliver on it!”
“The delta between what you say and what you do has become the greatest area for reputational risk.”
“It is not easy to lead in a divided society and we have had really have seen with a lot of our clients they have to make decisions that are not 80/20 favorable, but are 55/45 favorable, and no matter which way you go you’re going to get an undertow of complaints. But, if you can stick to values as opposed to issues that you stand for, then you can sort out specific situations with a little more of a compass.”
“Now talk about a change, employees (at Coinbase the digital currency exchange) challenging the CEO who is trying to define what could and could not happen in the work culture (discussing politics and activism at work). That is something that we haven’t seen before.”
“We (at the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce) want to lead and our (diversity) goals are based not on the Boston we are, but on the Boston we want to become.”
Big Ideas/Thoughts
Cultural Audit
I remember very well in one crisis where we saw the incredible difference when we went in and surveyed between employees who were able to work from home and employees who had to experience the culture at work – that was the dividing line. It wasn’t that the company wasn’t principled and welcoming across gender and race, it was that the office culture was toxic.
When you referred to a culture competency analysis, what is that, and what is the information you’re trying to elicit that will help your clients?
Well, you’re trying to elicit what are their values and are they clearly understood throughout the organization and are employees seeing that the behaviors of the company are consistent with those values.
We’re talking about an era of diversity; a generational diversity, it’s certainly racial, ethnic, gender, and it’s important that the culture becomes something that can bring all that together. That’s very different than the old simplistic, “Here are the three things. Let’s put them on the wall and have people know that we believe in something.”
When Twitter kicked the former President off, the reason they said they did it was because of their employees and how they felt about it. Clearly, whatever values they have articulated were not consistent with enabling this kind of civil discourse, and so it was interesting to me that The New York Times story I read was actually the number one reason they made the decision was ‘our employees didn’t feel comfortable with this.’
“No high-performing jerks” is a phrase was really coined by Arianna Huffington in the Uber situation, Think about it, right, because that’s the tension. You’ve got people who are delivering results, but boy, they’re corrosive in terms of the culture. Now, I don’t know about you guys, but we would put up with a lot of high-performing jerks in my time, right? It turns out that the balance, the risk reward balance, of having people who are corrosive to your environment, but delivering results has gone the other way. Now, in a lot of places, there’s no second chance because it’s just too visible and it shows that you’re not committed to your values if you’re going to make an exception, just because this person makes enormous amounts of revenue for the company.
How can boards hold senior management accountable for sticking to their values without getting into the weeds?
I think it’s really the same way we’ve always held CEOs accountable, which is really how we measure performance, how we reward them. This has become important enough that, however it’s framed, it’s important that they know that company’s reputation, as Warren buffet has famously said, it takes a long time to build, but boy, it can go quickly. Right? It’s holding them accountable at the performance level. I don’t think boards can get into the weeds because we don’t know enough about the company’s day-to-day hiring and firing decisions to really make good judgments.
The model is really to hire CEOs who have societal acumen as well as business acumen. And that means that they understand the 360 impact on people of their actions, whether it’s people internally or externally, and that are sensitive to it, are taking it into account. That is a new mark of leadership. It requires EQ for sure – and much more EQ than it has in the past.
Taking a leadership role in Boston – Becoming the Chair of the Board of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce
I do think it’s a pivotal time for the city and there’s no question when I arrived at City Hall we had just been through a civil war with busing and not only was the economy questionable, but really the threads that united us were so torn apart, it really was a civil war. So, to weave that fabric back together and lift the city into a world-class city it became, was very much Kevin White’s vision and I was lucky to have a front row seat and play a role in really that pivotal time.
Now I think if that (past time in Boston) was after a civil war, I think now the city is coming out of a world war. You go and walk through downtown and we’ve a lot of rebuilding to do. And I think it’s a time again, hopefully the bright side is so much of the solutions for this pandemic have come right from Boston. Our life sciences ecosystem has led in addressing the pandemic.
What goals have you set for diversity on the Board of the Chamber?
Our goal is to lead in this regard and to set standards for the business community. So not only have we set five-year goals of 50% women, 37% people of color and then goals beneath that. We intend to ask our members, not only ask our members to follow suit, set goals and make them public but we’re gonna help them get there through partnerships that we have formed and helping them find candidates for their boards.
Under the leadership of Jim Rooney, who’s got both political and societal acumen for sure, we have been able to be very proactive and weigh-in throughout this last year and I think we can play a role in being a very good partner and leader that can get the Greater Boston economy to really deliver on its full potential.
Transcript
Joe: [00:00:00]Hello and welcome to On Boards: a deep dive at what drives business success. I’m Joe Ayoub and I’m here with my co-host Raza Shaikh. On Boards is about boards of directors and advisors and all aspects of governance. Twice a month, this is the place to learn about one of the most critically important aspects of any company or organization: its board of directors or advisors, as well as the important issues that are facing boards, company leadership and stakeholders.
Raza: Joe and I speak with a wide range of guests and talk about: what makes a board successful or unsuccessful what it takes to be an effective board member, what challenges boards are facing and how they’re assessing those challenges and how to make your board one of the most valuable assets for your organization.
Joe: Our guest today is Micho Spring. Micho [00:01:00] leads the global corporate practice of Weber Shandwick, one of the largest and most influential public relations firms in the world. She focuses on advising corporate clients how to use communications to support their business strategies, enhance and protect their reputation and respond to public policy challenges.
Raza: Micho is Chair of the Board of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and also holds numerous board memberships, including National Bank Holdings Corporation (NBHC), the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the Caribbean Educational and Baseball Foundation, and Massachusetts Conference for Women, of which she is treasurer. Born in Havana, Micho is actively involved in efforts to improve US-Cuba relations and is founding Chair of Friends of Caritas Cubana, a non-profit providing humanitarian services in Cuba.
Joe: As a government, civic and business leader [00:02:00] Micho has helped shape public debate on numerous issues in Boston and beyond for many years. She has managed many political and advocacy campaigns and is a frequent independent media commentator. Last year, she was appointed by Mayor Marty Walsh to Boston’s Reopening Advisory Board for reopening the city of Boston during COVID-19.
Welcome, Micho. Thanks for taking the time to be with us today on On Boards.
Micho: Delighted to be here.
Joe: So, let’s start with the proposition that we discussed not that long ago, that company and organizational culture is now a board-level risk. What does that mean? And why is it happening now?
Micho: Well, it’s interesting because I think the role of corporate culture has evolved dramatically. When I started working, it was the Jack Welch days when culture was Six Sigma and it was all about military discipline to deliver shareholder results. That was the focus and it was an [00:03:00] internal mechanism for coherence and purpose, and we’ve gone from there first, because I think of the first wave was really the advent of the digital era, and the fact that employees on social media could actually, influence their company’s reputation.
I remembered Weber Shandwick, where we have done an enormous amount of research on this topic and have been tracking it for over 15 years, when we saw that employees were not only talking about their brands and their companies and their jobs on their social media assets, but they were actually pretty positive about their companies, and of course, your social identity, you don’t want to be just defined by the restaurants you attend and the purchases you make, you want to talk about your job.
So, I think that was the first wave. Then comes this generational change, where we see a generation of employees who come to work expecting their values reflected and expecting that their companies are working towards solving societal [00:04:00] problems. And that was a second change. I mean, we, again, in an earlier generation, you did your whatever purpose work you wanted to do after five and you were at work to work. This generation, kind of, partly because of social media, but partly of who they are, have really brought a certain accountability to the workforce, which we certainly have seen and manifested that, particularly in this last year.
So, now, instead of thinking about employees as brand ambassadors, you have to think of CEOs as ambassadors of their employees’ values and their views. So, that has totally changed the role of culture. And then last but not least is the talent war. In order to attract and retain employees, you’ve got to have a culture that’s values-driven, that’s well-defined, that’s well understood and that’s actionable, because employees now are going to hold you accountable.
So, I’m fond of saying that it used to be enough to have a conscience, but now you’ve got to have a plan and you have to deliver on it, right? [00:05:00] Employees are watching. And so all of this, I think raises the risk of cultural rifts causing crisis, affecting reputation, et cetera, et cetera, and that becomes a board function. HR is not a board function, but cultural risk is.
We talk about cultural vigilance. We talk about really making sure we understand that we’re aligned, that what we’re saying we stand for in companies aligns with their actions, and that delta between what you say and what you do has become the greatest area for reputational risk.
Joe: Do you think that social media is the catalyst for accelerating this trend? Is that fair to say, or is it just too many things to really point to just social media?
Micho: I think it’s a lot of things, but I think social media has enabled it for sure. I’m not sure that without social media, it would have been, yes, we remember the days when an employee [00:06:00] could go rogue and leak a story that would appear on the front page of the New York Times, and that wasn’t social media, but that took a little more courage and intention than just posting on Twitter or or posting on Facebook.
Joe: Yeah, I think it’s easier.
Micho: The transparency that it’s demanded, it’s just the many layers, right?
Joe: Right. So, you’ve mentioned that the work you do at Weber Shandwick with your company clients and their boards, that based on that you believe that cultural risk is a key driver of reputation and at the root of many crises. What have you encountered in your work that has led you to come to that conclusion?
Micho: Well, certainly, I’ve done crisis work throughout my career, both in government and in the private sector. It used to be that the way you approach a crisis was to come in and bracket the negative event. So, you were looking for, “That was then, this is now, and this is why it’s never going to happen again.”
It was in and out. The value of a crisis communications [00:07:00] firm was all about the external view that could help you clean this up. Now, we go in and the analysis leads us usually to a rift in the culture, that you’ve got to really be intentional about addressing, and that takes time.
Actually, Weber Shandwick, a couple of years ago lifted our employee engagement and cultural transformation expertise into a separate consultancy that can come in and attracts people with very different skills other than communications that come from all sorts of consulting backgrounds to go in with our crisis teams and be able to diagnose and stay in afterwards, helping companies cure these risks.
If you think about it, it’s logical, we have much more diverse workforces. We certainly saw this emerge when the Me Too movement, not that the Me Too movement is over, but when it was at its peak before the pandemic, so many of the crises we were called into, it was whether they had happened or whether companies were worried they were going to happen. [00:08:00] So, a lot of companies started doing culture audits to understand where this rift occurred.
We’ve seen it so all over the place, but I remember very well in one crisis where we saw the incredible difference when we went in and surveyed between employees who were able to work from home and employees who have to experience the culture at work, that was the dividing line. So, clearly, there was a problem at work. It wasn’t that the company wasn’t principled and welcoming across gender and race, it was that the office culture was toxic.
There’s been a lot of companies taking that very seriously and trying to get ahead of it by articulating their values, particularly, how they are welcoming to diversity, not only for people to get there and be different, but to influence what happens because they’re different.
Joe: How can boards help make company culture more inclusive? What can they do?
Micho: I think it’s ideally part of two places where it belongs. Certainly, [00:09:00] part of the risk committee function. I think cultural risk has been elevated and should be elevated as serious as misfeasance or other issues that the board worries about, so I think that that’s certainly at the risk level. And then wherever in the board you’re monitoring ESG, the fact is that all three, but particularly, the S in ESG is societal, how you’re really dealing with the issues that go on on that bucket, our board level issues, and it’s a dance. You don’t want to micromanage any CEO, but you also want to raise the importance of these issues so you command their attention.
Joe: When you referred to a culture competency analysis, what is that, and what is the information you’re trying to elicit that will help your clients?
Micho: Well, you’re trying to elicit what are their values and are they clearly understood throughout the organization and are employees seeing that the behaviors of the company are consistent with those [00:10:00] values. Again, you’re trying to really map out, and a lot of the times, we walk in and the values that have been articulated for a long time have been internal and not externally facing. They’re not issues that deal with society, and the other thing we’ve seen is that often they reflect their products., This needs to be elevated. Values need to be now the core, the North Star that unifies all the diverse cultures you have and the global cultures you have.
We’re talking about an era of diversity; a generational diversity, it’s certainly racial, ethnic, gender, and it’s important that the culture becomes something that can bring all that together. That’s very different than the old simplistic, “Here are the three things. Let’s put them on the wall and have people know that we believe in something.”
Now, they can hold you accountable, and we’ve seen this, and we’re going to see more of it this year in terms of racial and racial equity. When all these anniversaries come this year of when companies were so great in [00:11:00] making commitments, employees can now hold you accountable, and they will.
Raza: I think it goes like, as they say, that culture is what you do, but really it comes from identifying the company’s cultural values. How do companies go about doing that exercise, and how do, if at all, boards get involved in that?
Micho: Well, there’s certainly the whole exercise, and different companies do it differently, but around mission, values and purpose, and I think that that’s more than ever not just an exercise for the C-Suite, but that there’s a lot of conversation and serving of employees to really understand what are those threads that bind them together, and that both bind them to their business, obviously, but also link it, not only to the benefits they bring their business, but to the benefits they bring to society.
We’ve seen that, and we’ve seen employee activism direct that when it doesn’t happen naturally. I was amazed, and they’re not a client, but when Twitter kicked their [00:12:00] former president off, the reason they said they did it was because of their employees and how they felt about it. Clearly, whatever values they have articulated were not consistent with enabling this kind of civil discourse, and so it was interesting to me that The New York Times story I read was actually the number one reason was our employees didn’t feel comfortable with this. That would have been unheard of five years ago.
Joe: Great example. Great example.
Raza: You alluded earlier a little bit to this notion of cultural audit. What is that? And how is that exercise conducted?
Micho: It’s conducted by speaking to different levels of the organization and testing whether or not there’s alignment between their mission, their values and their behaviors. And again, it’s trying to really diagnose where those deltas are, where most reputational risk happens.
Raza: We talked about it earlier. You mentioned this phrase, “societal acumen.” How does that play about with the business world now? What do [00:13:00] you feel that the role of the leadership, the board and the company having societal acumen play in today’s world?
Micho: Well, it all connects. ESG is the way they’re measuring it for shareholders, et cetera, but the role of business has changed, and I think permanently. I don’t think it’s because government has been particularly ineffective in many places, but it’s because business has become a platform for change.
That has been driven by whether it’s generational, but again, we used to talk about private public partnerships, and it’s essential to have a government as a partner to solve any of these big problems, but business is taking a much more expansive role in leading, talking about commitments and innovative solutions, and we’ve seen it in this pandemic right and left.
We’re very research-driven, as you can tell, from the way I go back to data, but it was fascinating to us to see at the beginning of the pandemic, when all of a sudden companies realized that there was going to be [00:14:00] no unified government response, and oh my god, they had to make up their own policy.
That actually gave them an opportunity, and we saw the numbers shoot up in terms of confidence in employers to put their employees ahead of profits very early on in the pandemic when business after business on their own were closing down and sending people home.
Now, it’s much harder to bring people back in and much more fraught with risk, because employees now throughout the pandemic had enormous trust and confidence that their employers were doing the right thing by them, and that has held steady for a year, although we have seen institutional confidence drop across the board.
So, that’s an asset for employers to carry forward, and I think that they’re doing it by this societal acumen, that they’re not only concerned about their employees showing up at work, but they’re concerned about what’s happening at home for their employees, the issues that are affecting them, the fact that this affected all of us, [00:15:00] as both professionals and people and the human side of this. I think they’ve really evolved to a place that’s going to put them at the center of continuing to address a lot of societal issues.
Raza: Yeah. So, employers have really stepped up. Also, we used to hear this “no brilliant jerks” or “no asshole rule.” Is it the case that employers are now looking at those type of issues a little more seriously?
Micho: Yeah, I mean, the phrase was really coined by Arianna Huffington in the Uber, and it was interesting. It was “no high-performing jerks.” So, think about it, right? Because that’s the tension. You’ve got people who are delivering results, but boy, they’re corrosive in terms of the culture. Now, I don’t know about you guys, but we would put up with a lot of high-performing jerks in my time, right? It turns out that the balance, the risk reward balance, of having people who are corrosive to your environment, but delivering results has gone the other way. Now, in a lot of places, there’s no second chance [00:16:00] because it’s just too visible, and it shows that you’re not committed to your values if you’re going to make an exception, just because this person makes enormous amounts of revenue for the company.
Joe: But that fits completely with what you said when we first started, that cultural risk is right up there with everything else and the risk of this “high-performing jerk” doing something that will be far more impactful in a negative sense than anything he or she can do because they’re high-performing. People recognize it ,and it makes perfect sense.
Oh my gosh.
Micho: Yeah.
Joe: Oh my God. What a huge change? A sea change. That is almost, I would almost say most people did not see it coming.
Micho: Yup. No, I agree. I agree. And it was yes, the Me Too movement that finally brought it and yes, it’s the fact that we now have such a diverse workplace that these things are clearly not tolerated. I mean, clearly we’re emerging from a single gender workforce model to a [00:17:00] much more diverse.
It’s really interesting to see how quickly it’s happened.
Joe: The pace is breathtaking and not a moment too soon.
Micho: Yeah.
Joe: So how can boards hold senior management accountable for sticking to their values without getting into the weeds?
Micho: I think it’s really the same way we’ve always held CEOs accountable, which is really how we measure performance, how we reward them and I think that this has become important enough that however it’s framed it’s important that they know that company’s reputation, certainly, as Warren buffet has famously said, it takes a long time to build, but boy, it can go quickly. Right? It’s holding them accountable at the performance level. I don’t think boards can get into the weeds because we don’t know enough about the company’s day-to-day hiring and firing decisions to really make good judgments. And that’s not the model.
The model is really to hire CEO’s who have, and you asked me before, who have societal acumen as well as business [00:18:00] acumen. And that means that they understand the 360 impact on people of their actions, whether it’s people internally and externally, and that are sensitive to it, are taking it into account and that again is a new mark of leadership. We know that a lot of CEOs are excellent at what they do because they have financial backgrounds and now this requires EQ for sure and much more EQ than it has in the past.
Joe: I think that’s true. We talked about Coinbase the digital currency exchange, the CEO announced that they were clamping down and discussing politics and activism at work and there was a huge backlash, especially from employees when he did that.
Now talk about a change, employees challenging a CEO who is trying to define what could and could not happen in the work culture. That is something that we haven’t seen before.
Micho: Probably he did that because in the midst of the election, the political [00:19:00] discussion was toxic and very divisive. Not that it’s totally it’s improved for sure, but not that division has gone away. I kind of get what he was trying to do but a little tone deaf because you can’t silence people.
It is not easy to lead in a divided society and we have had really have seen that with a lot of our clients, how uncomfortable they are to making decisions that are not 80, 20 favorable, but are 55, 45 favorable and no matter which way you go, you’re going to get an undertow of complaints. Learning both how to govern in that environment, nevermind how to lead a company in that environment, is a newly important skill for leadership. That’s why we tell clients not to take positions on specific legislation or maybe political issues per se, but to only to tie them to whether or not they’re consistent with their values.
If you’ve got strong values, then you can certainly sort [00:20:00] out what issues are going to matter to you on what issues are not. Obviously some societal issues, you know, the peaceful transfer of power. We saw all the major companies weigh in on that. There’s certain issues that are of course important and transcend this, but usually if you can stick to values as opposed to issues that you stand for, then you can sort out specific situations with a little more of a compass.
Joe: That seems like a great guideline for both management and for boards, actually to think about what are our values and where does that take us in terms of issues on which we take a stand or articulate a position, because if you can do that, you’re probably gonna be okay. You can defend it, that’s for sure.
Micho: Well, you can defend it. That’s the point. You’re not gonna make everybody happy. We’ve gone beyond the era where, you know and, and I certainly, again, this is why its so much fun to have been around so long is that I’ve seen this evolution. I mean no CEO wanted to take a position. unless it was going to be 80, 20.
Right. I mean, you didn’t want to do anything that was [00:21:00] going to cause a backlash because you didn’t have time to deal with the backlash. That wasn’t your job. Now, think about it, not only with employees with consumers, it’s huge.
Joe: So you’re now the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. Why did you decide to take on this leadership role at the Chamber?
Micho: When they approached me to take it, I thought what an interesting time for business. There’s so much change and the role we play is so much more at the center of trying to address societal issues as we’ve been talking about. I thought what a great time for me to lean back into Boston and try and help the business community, bringing my experience in business media and politics to relevance and I’m really enjoying it. I think chambers were created historically from what I’ve read to really raise the norms of behavior for the business community, and this is such a great time and Boston has such great leadership in the business community to kind of organize and raise the norms of behavior and [00:22:00] try and carve out a more proactive role in particularly now leading the city back to a very competitive economy. But doing it in a way that is more sustainable, that’s more equitable that is going to hold us better for the future.
So I’m excited about it and I’ve got to say that part of the incredible opportunity is there’s so much business leadership in Boston to work with. And so many global business leaders are based in Boston. So it’s an exciting time.
Joe: It seems almost symmetrical to me that you’re coming into leadership of the Boston business community at a time that so much is going on and you started your at least political career here in Boston as a very young Chief of Staff for Kevin White, who maybe was the most transformational Mayor the city has had in the last, I don’t know, 50, 75 years.
So you’re coming in at a time that, like you did then, when the things that [00:23:00] leaders will do will really shape our future for years to come.
Micho: I do think it’s a pivotal time for the city and there’s no question when I arrived at City Hall it’s interesting -I was thinking about it the other day -we had just been through a civil war with busing and the not only was the economy questionable, but really the threads that united us were so torn apart, it really was a civil war.
So to weave that fabric back together and lift the city into a world-class city it became, was very much Kevin White’s vision and I was lucky to have a front row seat, and play a role in really that pivotal time.
Now I think if that was after a civil war, I think now the city is coming out of a world war. I feel like , you go through every city, but you go and walk through downtown and we’ve a lot of rebuilding to do. And I think it’s a time again, hopefully the bright side is so much of the solutions for this [00:24:00] pandemic have come right from Boston. Our life sciences ecosystem has led in addressing the pandemic.
And so we have great sectors that are doing incredibly well. But the city’s gotta be reknit together and particularly at a time when there’s a leadership vacuum, because the mayor’s leaving and we have a mayoral race, it’s an interesting time for the business community to step into that vaccum and help shape our future.
Joe: So have you now set goals for diversity on the Board of the Chamber?
Micho: We have, our goal is to lead in this regard and to set standards for the business community. So not only have we set five-year goals of, you know 50% women, 37% people of color and then goals beneath that. We intend to ask our members, not only ask our members to follow suit, set goals and make them public but we’re gonna help them get there through partnerships that we have formed and helping them find candidates [00:25:00] for their boards. One of the roles of the Chamber is really membership benefits, and we want to key benefit of the Chamber to be that we help you get to not only the company you are, but the company you want to be in terms of diversity.
We think, and it’s really unanimous among our board, that this is essential for our economy going forward, that we’ve got to be able to attract and retain the best talent anywhere in order to retain our competitive edge. And that we’re not going to do that if we’re not welcoming to a diverse pool of men and women and diversity across the board.
Going back to my comment that we want to raise the norms of behavior, we certainly want to lead and our goals are based not on the Boston we are, but on the Boston we want to become.
Joe: Well, that sounds like the operating definition of leadership, setting goals to what you want to become, not who you are. What do you hope the Chamber will do to play an important role [00:26:00] in rebuilding the Boston economy?
Micho: I think we are conveners and we do provide a unified voice for the disparate. The great thing about now, we already have a very diverse board of directors and executive committee and the great benefit of that is really that our conversations are so rich in terms of perspective on what to do about all these issues.
Under the leadership of Jim Rooney, who’s got both political and societal acumen for sure, we have been able to be very proactive and weigh-in throughout this last year and I think we can play a role in being a very good partner and leader that can get the Greater Boston economy to really deliver on its full potential. We’re very focused in not only working with the leadership of companies, but with bringing value to their workforces and the kinds of training programs and the kind of programming we have brought has really been particularly helpful in this last year across the board and [00:27:00] we’re hoping to continue to play a role in that.
Joe: Just amen on Jim Rooney. I think the perfect person at the right time. It must be great to be Chairman of the Board and have essentially the Chief Executive to be someone who does, as you said, have both societal and political acumen. Must be a good partnership.
Micho: Oh, it’s a great partnership and I’m not sure I would have done it if Jim Rooney hadn’t been there. He is a great partner and a great leader, I should say.
Joe: Micho. It’s been great speaking with you today. Thanks for joining us.
Micho: Terrific.
Joe: And thank you all for listening to On Boards with our special guest, Micho Spring.
To our listeners, we have a request. If you enjoy our podcast, please take a moment to review and rate it on Apple iTunes. It really helps others find and discover this podcast.
Raza: The easiest way also is to go to onboardspodcast.com, our website, all of the episodes are available there, and you can even put in your comments and [00:28:00] suggestions if you’d like,
Micho: Thank you both. I really enjoyed this.
Joe: Micho. It’s been great and everyone please take care of yourselves, your families and your communities, as best as you can and Raza you take care.
Raza: You too, Joe.
Joe: Thanks.