#78 Embracing a learning mindset, David Barnett, ex CEO, Pearson, Asia Pacific

DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE

• What caring in the workplace means for David.
• David’s bold vision and compassionate leadership.
• Practical, real-world examples of how David built a culture grounded in care, connection, and belonging, and he explains why these elements are essential to the success of any organisation.

RESOURCES

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Transcript from the interview

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SPEAKERS

Graeme Cowan, David Barnett

Graeme Cowan  00:00

Today’s guest is David Barnett, who was the CEO of Asia Pacific and Australia for 20 plus years with Pearson. Pearson are involved in education through books and digital learning. He chairs Victoria University’s online learning and a couple of other e learning organizations. David shares one question a coach asked him after delivering a very average year of results, which really turned everything around, he also had to lead a huge transformation when the business went from 75% textbook based and 25% digital to the exact opposite. He provides some very practical examples about how he built a culture of care, connection and belonging, and sees this as a critical success factor for any organization. He also explains what his son, who is 28 years old and has severe learning difficulties, taught him about learner, centered education. He is a real music fan, and discusses one song that still brings him to tears every time. David is a very human, centered leader, and there is lots to learn from him. Enjoy. Welcome. To the caring CEO. David.

David Barnett  01:25

Thanks, Graeme, it’s great to be here.

Graeme Cowan  01:28

David, what does care in the workplace mean to you?

David Barnett  01:32

Graeme, I think for me, it starts with employees having a clear understanding of the organization’s purpose or its mission, its vision, where it aspires to go, and how that translates to the individual. Because, I think unless the individual, and we’re still employing humans in many cases, and not robots, unless the employee, the individual person, understands and can engage with that mission, that purpose, that vision, I don’t think they can then commit to what the organization’s asking of them in their particular role. And then I think from then on, there’s just a mismatch, or a misalignment, between where the organization’s going and what the individual understands their role to be and what’s expected of them. And I think that’s often at the heart of where you find people not working, not performing at work, and that is, I think often times the basis of issues with people’s performance, and then people’s health can suffer as a result. If they’re not if it’s not clear what they’re there to do, and it’s not clear what they’re what’s expected of them in terms of performance. It sounds so simple and basic, but I know that it’s not the case in lots of organizations. Yeah, you led Pearson for a long time in Australia and Asia Pacific. And I presume during that time, there was an incredible transformation from books to digital different ways to learn. Can you just give a bit more background about Pearson, but and then about the challenges you had going, from nice books you could hold and feel and look at to on a screen essentially, or in your ear or in your eyes, sort of thing, I was very fortunate to be at Pearson for the vast majority of my working life up to this point, still working, but I’m working in more part time capacities these days. I was very fortunate to be a part of an organization which it’s had a very bold and in some ways extravagant mission to help people make progress in their lives through learning. It’s a again, sounds simple, but complicated and complicated in many ways, because Pearson, as you say, began life a long time ago as a publisher of content still does that. I left Pearson about four years ago now, when I joined Pearson, it was a publisher of textbooks for students at school and university, but realized that in order to understand how exhibition could be fulfilled, it needed to be operating in a far more digital way. And as we go print, print has been largely disrupted in many different sorts of environments. So you know, my role as the leader of the business in Australia and towards the end of my time across Asia was to figure out how we were going to transform the business in order to continue to be relevant. Because our customers were saying to us, by not purchasing the things we were selling them or trying to sell them, what you’re giving me as a learning product is not really what I’m looking for. So that was at the heart of the need to change the business. Need to transform the business. When that transformation started to get real in terms of impact on employees and our workforce, and that was hard, because we built a workforce that had certain skills. We did a different skills. We needed different business models. So we established different sort of business units doing different things with different skill sets. But as you’d imagine, that created quite a cultural challenge, because we had different people, with some cases on different salaries, because they were on roles that were needed to be competitive externally, but we had internal relatively to try and manage, which was complicated. So I could talk for hours about this Graeme. I think in the end the transformation, measuring it in terms of revenue, the amount of revenue generated from digital and lives are successful. We flipped around the the percentage. I think when I started, it was all when we when we genuinely started on this transformation, it was something like 25% digital, 75% great, and we flipped that around completely by the time I left Pearson, and I did that with some very talented and committed colleagues, a great leadership team. Think, you know, we had to deal with those challenges around culture head on. That was these things are never straightforward. It’s quite messy at times. But I think most people would say in the end, they understood the reason for the change, and that we did our very best to try and respect and care for people as sometimes as that change turned up in job losses and so on. Yeah, and were people able to learn the new skills? Or there were just people that couldn’t make that transition, a bit of both. So some people did learn new skills and were able to transition. Some people either didn’t really want to or didn’t have the ability. So there were people who had to leave the organization for those reasons, which was difficult, but, you know, we worked very hard at looking after people when, when they left the business, either as a result of their jobs being changed and restructured, or as a result of performance issues or their own election. How did you create a shared future, you know, with people that had a certain way for a long period of time, and suddenly there was an urgency to change. We talked a lot about, you know, it’s one of, one of those things in corporations that corporations adopt, often languages that’s not helpful when it comes to communicating to to employees. Some employees don’t have, really have any interest in the corporation. They’ve got an interest in what the corporation’s doing. So when you hit them with the corporate speak, they tend to tune out. So we try very hard to rethink that corporate speak and represent it in terms of of customers. So rather than saying revenues falling, therefore, we’re making the following changes. We say our customers are not buying the products that we have designed to help them where they want to get to. They’re just not buying them

anymore, or not in the same numbers. So we tried. That was the first thing we tried. Then I think we really tried to help people understand things like market size, addressable market size. So if you’re thinking about the Australian environment for textbooks, it was not a very big market. But if you looked at the market, for example, digital services to universities, or English language testing, there’s much more substantial markets and as a part of a globally, publicly. This is a company, of course, we had a responsibility to shareholders to buy and grow the business as we could while managing all those competing I think the thing one of the things I learned through that experience was it’s the old adage about communication, you need to do it again and again in different forums and a combination of large groups and smaller groups and formal and informal. And I think over time we I mean, my one of my early mistakes was to assume that a few different pieces of communication and a few different settings was adequate. It wasn’t. But then hear people saying to me, I just don’t understand where we’re going, or I don’t understand why we’re not investing as much in this great area over here. So we then just doubled our efforts and try lots of different approaches. You mentioned before. You know, corporate speak, and then translating it, I guess, to people speak, or, you know, employee speak. Can you think of an example of when you did that? What was the corporate speak, and how did you then translate that to people speak? Yeah, I think. And I don’t even know whether I planned this, but I remember being in a meeting and talking about financial results, and I started off, and I went through the key, key headlines in revenue and expenses and gross margin and operating profit. And some people are looking in there, around the room and seeing a sea of quite disengaged and disinterested faces. And I felt some frustration, because I thought, why aren’t they getting it? I’ve talked about these things for a long time, and they’re just they’re not getting it. And I think just in that moment, I said, Look, we’re over here building these products. People are not buying them. And there was a that was a shock, because I think many in the group were people whose job it was to build products and build learning products, are very proud of what they did, and they built great learning products really well thought. Through, well designed, very engaging, but at the end of the day, doesn’t matter. Most people are buying them in enough quantities. So, you know, I think for me, that was a moment of insight for me, where, I think after that point, I tried very hard to and it wasn’t a case of dumbing stuff down, it was just in case of representing information in ways that was understandable and actually connected with people

Graeme Cowan  10:27

You shared before we came on air that you know, your first year as CEO was a really tough year, and great results weren’t necessarily delivered. And had a very good mentor, and he asked you a key question. Would you mind telling the listeners about that?

David Barnett  10:45

Yes. So very grateful to my boss. When I was made Managing Director of the Pearson Australia business, I reported to someone responsible for all of Pearson’s businesses, and he in, he got me involved with an external CEO organization, which whose model was to have a the chair of your group was your mentor, your coach. So I’d meet with my coach once a month for a couple of hours, and we’d had a very difficult year my first four years as a CEO, and it’s fair to say I was struggling. So we were having a meeting, and I was running through the results and obviously expressing some frustration. And my my my coach, John, looked at me, I’ll never forget this. He looked at me and said, David, what are the sanctions for poor performance in your organization? Never forget it as more than 20 years ago, and you know, I didn’t have an answer great. I didn’t have a good answer. And I think at that point, my

mental model for performance was really to put care and concern and respect first and then worry about performance later. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the importance of good performance, but I think that sort of lit a fire in me of that, that I think the next 20 years I spent trying to figure out the balance, the right balance between care and performance and the relationship between a high care and high performance organization. But we really started then being much clearer with people and much more specific about what good performance looked like, what we expected of everyone, and then and married that with good feedback and clear and direct feedback. And, you know, it’s a funny I think my mental models got rewired through, really, through that question and through the ensuing work that we did with the business to to think differently at that performance. It’s an interesting word, isn’t it, sanction. You know, we tend to think more in a trade situation. There’s been lots of that playing out in Europe and those sort of areas now. But by sanction, did he mean, you know, is there punishment for people that don’t reach their performance goals? Correct? Yeah, it was. What are the implications? What are the what are the consequences in that instance, what other questions that you find really helpful to use with your team to make sure they’re on board or to hear if you’ve got any issues which that may not have spoken about. I would, when I was feeling brave, I would ask my direct reports. What are the three things I do that really frustrate you? And if there’s any of those colleagues listening, they’ll probably have a chuckle, because they probably say he didn’t ask that question as much as I would have liked to, but, but I was genuinely wanting to create an environment where I was vulnerable, where I was asking them for feedback, but in a way, rather than just asking a very open question about, what feedback do you have for me to try and hone in on the things that and to try and give them permission to say, well, when you do this, I find that frustrating. So we were able to have a more constructive and open conversation about that. I then hoped that they would then take that question to their direct reports, so that we create a an environment where people will feel like it’s fake out without risking, you know, any other sort of negativity. What were some of the important things you’d learned from asking those questions? I think early on, following on from the performance conversation I mentioned a minute ago, I probably created a set of structures in the way I work with my direct reports that were that they felt a little bit too constricting. So my weekly catch UPS initially were quite heavily scripted with or heavily structured. And I think they probably felt, I know they felt that was a little bit controlling. And, you know, being a control freak is something I never wanted to do. I probably felt that I was initially too controlling into wanting to be too involved in the specifics. I think I was trying to figure out what it meant to be CEO, having been a line manager before, figuring. Out the step up to this role. What, how do you do that successfully? And what does it mean when you’re not actually driving an individual business unit, you’re not running sales, marketing, the structure was a series of business unit leaders. So but look at after a bit of time, and I think, a bit of feedback back and forth, I relaxed a bit and figured out other ways that, rather than just working through them, I could understand how their business unit was performing, and see my role as a coach and support, rather than as a as an intervener.

Graeme Cowan  15:32

I think I heard, I think I read this about, I think he was the human resource director of Google, and he recommended asking three questions. And it’s usually those questions that he asked, because the person that asks them gets a chance to feel okay. So the first question is, what am I doing regularly that’s really helpful.

David Barnett  15:55

Then what am I doing as as well that you’d like me to do more of and the third question is, what can I do differently to, you know, to really increase your effectiveness and productivity? These can be very powerful, can’t they, you know, because they really, and I know you would have learned a lot about this in being a learning business that questions ask, help people to reflect and help people to decide what they want to focus on, and can uncover areas where we, you know, need to do things differently. That’s right. I think so I would do a version of that. Sometimes I’d ask people, What do you want more of or less of from me? And I think they’re critical questions, because unless we’re showing, as I said, Before showing some vulnerability and being open. And I think for me, I have a strong perfectionist drive, so letting go of that, which I’m not sure I have yet, but on the work in progress, letting go that and admitting there are things I didn’t know or was not so good at, and others were much better at learning how to then empower them to do things that they were good at that would help the business. Was something I tried to do as much as I could. Managing all those stakeholders is not easy. You know, I also suspect you had lots of travel you had to do, which can be very tiring, and it’s in its own right. How did you keep fuel in your own tank? What do you do about your own personal self? It’s a very important question. I think having good exercise disciplines has always been good and important for me. So I always exercise regularly, whether it’s just a 45 minute walk in the morning or a run or a gym session, it’s it never ceases to amaze me how it can change your mood and your outlook, and there, therefore, the version of you that shows up in the workplace to stressful situations, I would not notice the difference if I’d done some exercise and been in a good head space, particularly, I think when traveling, I think to use the time To exercise was really important because the combination of long hours, jet lag, coping with different cultures and and the stresses of logistics when traveling made all of that, you know, the cumulative effect of all of that is is pretty substantial. And then on top of that, you’ve got constant work calls and pressures of delivering results. I think, exercise those you can see my guitars behind me on my wall, Graeme, that your listeners won’t be able to but I’m a avid amateur musician, and that was a hugely important outlet for me to have music and to have projects that keep me busy, and then family and friends, you know, also very important. What What was your favorite music look it’s very hard to choose Favorite music, but I do have I love Australian music. I love Paul Kelly, amongst lots of other wonderful music, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Pete, Floyd, some of my favorites. But there is a song by Paul Kelly that always moves me to tears. It’s called deeper water. It’s about the stories of images of kids on a beach with their dad in the surf. That’s I’ve got strong memories of that from my own childhood. And it’s a song of love and loss and death and life. And it’s incredible. It’s an incredible song. And I think the ability of music to not just move you through the music, but through the lyrics, is something I find fascinating in that song. Just every single time it moves me.

Graeme Cowan  19:25

Yeah, I it can really bring memories back harder I remember. I’ve recently, well over the last three or four years, lost both my parents, but I never could. I’d always be surprised, but how hearing some music could just bring it something back to them, you know, something they’re already alive and has a remarkable capacity for that, doesn’t it?

David Barnett  19:49

And I guess you when you hear that music now, it brings them all back their favorite music brings things back for you. Yeah, that’s absolutely.

raeme Cowan  19:57

We have some helpful resources that you can find out. Wecare365.com.au, the first is our mental ill health calculator, which is a quick and simple way to work out what poor mental health costs your organization in lost productivity and employee turnover. You will also find our building a mentally healthy culture checklist, which shows how to launch a great initiative and keep that momentum going. These resources can be found at, we care365.com.au.  You’ve been in the learning business long time, and perhaps you would mind just sharing with the listeners as well what you’ve been doing since you’ve left Pearson?

David Barnett  20:43

Yes, so I initially I took some time out, so my role was made redundant. And so one of the things that lots of people, including Pearson CEO at the time, said to me, was just make sure you take some time out. So I did that. I put some time out and did some sold a house, and, you know, moved where I lived, my wife and I and then when I re engaged, I started to talk to my network. And I think it’s the old adage about the network is where opportunities arise. It’s certainly been the case for me in the last four years. So I’ve done a mix of things. I’ve done some advisory and strategic consulting type work with a couple of different organizations. I did a an interim chief operating officer role at the University for six months, which I found fascinating, and that was a wonderful experience. And then I’ve taken on some non executive roles, and that’s, I think, where I’m feeling myself quite settled. So range of non executive roles these days. I’m chair of a couple of education organizations, and I’m on the board of a local school on the Central Coast, and I do some other mentoring work on that little side as well. And I find that that mix now is is good. It gives me a little bit of time for hobbies like music, but I’m actually quite busy with those roles, and it really, I think, so critical to have a sense of purpose and to have some some things for me that bring me in touch with with new colleagues in new organizational settings, again in education. So there’s that connection for me having worked in education, but they’re different sort of environments. So yeah, I’ve really enjoyed that. Did you feel a sense of loss of identity when you finished your full time role? Yes, I did, and it took me, and I would say, I’m still working through that. I would have dreams about Pearson. Pearson colleagues listening. You’ll be laughing to hear that, but yeah, and I think for me, because I was there for a long period of time, perhaps not surprising that that it took a while to unplug and let go. But you know, I think the other thing is, even though the redundancy process was very well managed and sensitively by the company, and I was very grateful to the way I was treated very fairly. I’d always imagined that’d be a great way to finish your career in getting redundancy and sort of, you know, walking off with a golden parachute and all of that. But it’s actually harder than I expected. I found it difficult. There was a reasonably long hand over period, so being still employed but not relevant and not involved was hard, and was really hard. Then when I left, there were the was just a constant process of dealing with the emotions around not having that role, not having that status anymore. And for a while I I really thought I should try and jump back into that. I had lunch with a former colleague who said to me, why do you want that? What do you want that life? You’ve now got a life where you’re working but you’ve got time through to yourself. You don’t have to travel constantly, you’re not on constant calls day and night. And she was right. She was absolutely right. So, but it is a process, and I think it’s taught me. I talk a lot about myself and what other people go through in those experiences. You mentioned previously about a boss who, sorry, a coach who asked a great question about sanctions and that sort of thing. You also mentioned that you know, you asked the people that reported you questions to get insight and to evolve more. What other important leadership lessons did you get? Was there any one particular or a couple of books or TED talks or experiences that were really insightful? Yeah, they were. They were, I’ll talk about colleagues first. You know, I work with some amazing colleagues. I learned a lot from them, and I have to give a shout out to my former HR colleagues in my own right. She and her team put together a wonderful program called Pearson Well, which really provided a framework that we thought about care of in the workplace quite differently. So I was very fortunate, and many other great colleagues as well who gave great support were great sounding. Rewards for me, in terms of books, I’ve always loved Patrick Lencioni work and a couple of his books, five temptations of a CEO, I found incredibly insightful. They really I mean, they’re deceptively simple, because he uses fables to illustrate his points. Five Dysfunctions of the team was another really interesting one. And I think, you know, he’s reflected a lot on dysfunctional and functional workplaces, and care comes through very strongly in his work and in his writing. And is a marvelous speaker, and one of the, one of the funniest and most entertaining speakers, I think I’ve ever seen. But, yeah, particularly talked in that book five dysfunctions of a team, or story of a dysfunctional team. And one of the things is they don’t do conflict. They can’t do conflict in in any kind of constructive way. They’ll have it by the water cooler, and it’ll be toxic and all of that. And he talks about mining for conflict in a meeting. So if you’re in a meeting, and you know, there’s two colleagues who disagree, but they’re not saying anything, bring it out. Ask them a question. That brings it out. And so I’ll try. I’m a naturally conflict, diverse person, so I still, to this day, I’m better than I used to be, but I still have to practice that. But it’s a really interesting example for me of care in the workplace to say, I know these two colleagues disagree. I’m going to bring that out in a way that’s constructive and respectful and gives them both a chance to say their piece, and then we’ll move on as I really find I’ve been very grateful to him as a writer, because he his stuff is so practical, and it’s been a quite insightful What do you remember from the five temptations of the CEO. What really stood out that for you? I think certainty versus clarity, and I think the temptation of a CEO to have every single piece of information and every single data point and every single before acting, versus having enough clarity to make a decision and move on. And I, actually, I use that a lot, and I think, you know, Pearson was a workplace that was encouraging we risk taking and supportive when things went wrong. And sometimes we made decisions with what we thought was enough clarity and we got it wrong. But I think that’s very much the nature of successful businesses, is having that culture where it’s okay, where you give them permission. Yes, you’ve got to learn from that mistake. But a lot of times that served us well, that approach I’ve read where Jeff Bezos from Amazon talks about the 70% rule, and basically, we can’t ever have enough 100% information to make a decision, and if we wait till we do, it’s probably too late. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. You judge whether it’s enough or whether it’s enough to move forward. A lot of teamwork, a lot of team discussion, debate, and I think over time, when you work with colleagues, you learn to trust their judgment. You learn when they need a bit more they need a bit more time on there needs to be a bit more ventilating of an issue. But I think taking different soundings around the table or inside a management team of the business units that I ran, and I found that actually incredibly exciting and energizing was to sit around the table with really bright people, brighter than I was, in many ways, and to listen to then work through the listening to the logic and the frameworks they were using to develop their point of view. Gave me confidence that actually we’ve thought this through to a level that’s appropriate and we should just move on. And I think teams then develop a confidence in in in their own collective decision making, that you as a leader, can then, you know, really trust. I think extending trust in that setting was a little important. How do you build care, connection and belonging? It’s a fundamental human need to feel like we’re is that a conscious way to do that? Or do you have, you know, certain things that you try to practice each week to encourage that. It’s a combination of the informal, you know, I would find out that a colleague was sick, or they had a sick partner or relative or someone who passed away, and I’d make it my point to personally contact that person and express my sympathy and support, and I know that people appreciate that I had a lot of feedback that people appreciated, that I used to send handwritten notes to people in that instance or in other examples. So the informal, I think the formal. So I would talk about care a lot, and the relationship between care and high performance a lot in my town hall meetings and in team meetings, because I wanted to give permission to the rest of the business to also talk about that. And then I think social events are really important. I think having fun together was really important. So my leadership team, we would have, we’d have. Have a range of different meetings. We had a weekly check in every Monday where we would just quickly go through what’s everyone got on their plate for this week, and are you green, amber or red? So we kind of we’d put the week in, put the week into a context of, how are you going? Where do you need help, and how can the team help you? So and then we had, you know, we had regular, other, more substantial meetings, and we did fun, social things together as well. I think not everyone in a workplace needs to buy into that. Not everyone wants to or has the capacity. But think having those things available is is important. I love that green, amber, red, as you may recall, I haven’t moved on the top where I talk very much. I do, yeah, about about that, and I like it because it’s, it’s a lower stigma to say you’re in a zone, rather than to say that you’re really stressed or anxious or depressed or whatever. Did you find people were able to share if they were in the red zone or more, just sort of an amber zone, green zone, some more so than others. I think some struggled to open themselves up. But as we went along and as people saw colleagues saying, I’m read this work, I’m really struggling. I’ve got these five things, or I’m really not sure about this, or we’re struggling in this part of the business. So I would say towards the end of my time leading that team, people were pretty, pretty open and honest with each other. Yeah, it’s great. You would have been, you know, very aware. In fact, I read in various places. I can’t remember exactly where that, you know, the whole concept of learner centric training and education was so important. What exactly is that learner centric training, and how did it change training? Yeah, it’s a great question, because the learner isn’t always the person making the buying decision in the context of the businesses that I used to lead. So for example, in a high school, student doesn’t choose one science book from one publisher over another one that’s the choices made by the teacher or by the school. In the case of the Higher Education Services business that we set up, the decision to use Pearson over to the provider was made by the university, not by the individual learner. In fact, the individual learner enrolled in an online program didn’t know that Pearson because it was a white label offering. So that’s the first thing, because it could, you couldn’t just look at it through the mindset of the customer and say, How are we going to make the customer centric? So, you know, we would take feedback from teachers. We set an example about the science textbook. We employed a lot of former teachers who understood pedagogy and how to construct engaging content, learning content, how that should be designed? So we considered that we talked to in the university example, we talked to the people delivering the training to understand, how do we support these learners? How do we give them enough astral support so that they can access help when they need to? One of the other things we did at Pearson was we created a learning day where every single member of our business, we had 450 people across the region, could take one day a year for their own learning unrelated to work, just something, all they had to do was give us a brief report on what they did that day, so it could be doing a barista course or learning of a new language, or whatever it might be, and I think that process put learning much more this is ironic, given that we were a learning company, but a lot of the times we were thinking about building products to sell,

not products to help people learn. So it was a, I think part of our transformation that we were trying to work through. And so we’ve sort of tried to bring learning front and center in informal and informal ways, in fun ways and in in more serious ways, so that we did demystify it a little bit. Yeah, yeah. What did you find people did learn about when they had that day off was that, if you have to split it into work oriented, private oriented. What? Where do you think that balance fell? Probably the majority was personal, fun, but things, but some things that were also so learning a language or a musical instrument. Some people did things related to their work. Maybe they learnt in the put some time towards learning a computer language or learning how to use an application, computer application. So it really was a genuinely a mix of different things, yeah. And on that topic of learner centric you shared with me earlier about your 28 year old son, would mind just sort of sharing that story? I think it’s very powerful. Yeah, so I have a son, James, who’s now 28 and James is severely intellectually disabled. He doesn’t have a diagnosis, but he’s since the age of about two. We realized that he was intellectually disabled and became apparent as he grew that his development was substantial. Behind is peers. So that was an incredibly challenging time. James is non verbal, physically, okay, but needs help to do everything, all the personal care and eating and so on. He needs help with. And I think, you know, I made an assumption, because of his disability, that James’s capacity to learn was not insistent, and I was just amazed. And my wife is has been, you know, much more obviously, a bit optimistic about James, in many ways than I have been. But I was amazed when James, we started teaching James some sign language that over time, he actually picked up some of those signs, and in fact, developed his own version of those signs that meant he could communicate to us. And then when the iPad arrived on the scene and he got his first iPad, I was absolutely amazed by his ability to and he we didn’t teach him how to use his iPad, but he can now sit with his iPad and he can flip through YouTube clips, he can navigate, he can swipe, he can point at a thumbnail and access the clip and watch the clip and use the device without a lot of help. And so the lesson for me was anyone can learn. Anyone can can learn new things or new skills that help them communicate and get by in the world in their own way. And so it was a big lesson for me.

Graeme Cowan  36:29

Yeah. I also remember watching, I think it was, a YouTube video of the first day that sat in the Nadella from Microsoft took on his role as CEO in that sort of presentation, he shared how he’d been able to access Microsoft resources to help his three kids. He had three kids with learning difficulties, and then he basically threw it out to, you know, all the people watching him there and just saying, you know, what problems do you have that Microsoft could help solve? And it’s interesting that there’s been a remarkable turnaround at Microsoft. You know, it was once a very competitive company and didn’t really partner, and that really turned around to having greater collaboration, but make the passionate about solving a problem that was really important to you, and there is a great example of demonstrating purpose of a technology company.

David Barnett  37:31

Definitely.

Graeme Cowan  37:32

It’s been wonderful. Catching up today. David, the time’s gone very quickly.

David Barnett  37:37

Thank you, Graeme.

Graeme Cowan  37:38

But I’d like to end just on the question I always do, but which is knowing what you’d know now. What advice would you give your 18 year old self?

David Barnett  37:50

I mentioned earlier that I have a perfectionist freak, and I think sometimes that means that I’m not as curious or as as open to new ideas or new experiences, as I wish I was. And so I think I’d be saying to my 18 year old self, be more curious, ask more questions. Realize that you don’t have all the answers. And you know, perhaps I would have spent more time living in other parts of the world, rather than just staying here as it’s happened, because of family reasons. Up needed to be here. But I think, yeah, I think I did more pushing myself to be more curious and more open.

Graeme Cowan  38:26

Well, that’s a wonderful quality we all should embrace, isn’t it, especially with the rate of change going on in the world, it’s, you know, it’s hard to hard to keep up, but at least being conscious of it and making that decision, I think, is, you know, a very strong message for anyone, thanks very much for being part of the caring CEO. David, been lovely chatting with you.

David Barnett  38:46

Thank you, Graeme. And can I just quickly say a wonderful your efforts have been in the area of raising awareness around mental health issues and strategies that companies can employ to support their employees and the friends to support each other. I think, are you okay? Day has been a wonderful, you know, a wonderful initiative, and you know your willingness to step into that situation, often very vulnerably. Graeme is something that I know my colleagues and I pierce are really valued and appreciated, and I know many other people do as well. So thank you so much.

Graeme Cowan  39:20

My pleasure, and it’s very kind of you to say that. Thank you.

David Barnett  39:24

Thanks, Graeme.

Graeme Cowan  39:26

thanks for joining us today. We hope you’re inspired to strive for a culture of care that also leads to great results. If you’ve enjoyed this interview today, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform, and don’t forget to subscribe so that you don’t miss an episode. We also welcome any comments. If you’re interested in seeing details about our scalable Wecare365 mental health training programs. Please visit us at wecare365.com.au, our goal is to make these programs accessible, practical and ongoing. You can also find me, Graeme Cowan on LinkedIn, and I’d love to hear from you. And finally, if you’ve come across a senior leader who has impressed you and you think they’d be a great guest, please email us at support, at WeCARE3605.com.au, thanks once again for listening today.

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