This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did your collegiate tennis career at Northwestern prepare you for life after a playing career?
I think excelling at anything in your college career helps you develop good work habits and helps you appreciate that if you set a goal for yourself and you work hard at it, you can achieve it. My wife was in theater. She applied herself in theater and and she did well, so tennis at Northwestern prepared me in the sense that I learned if I applied myself, I could excel.
I also found that coming out of that tennis experience, I was more comfortable under pressure than most other people that I worked with. I had felt pressure a lot. They might have felt pressure in school, getting good grades or something, but [tennis] sort of transcended that. Playing under pressure helped prepare me for working under pressure in in the corporate world. I’m now celebrating 50 years in the corporate world. I was well served by the game of tennis going through that and learning how to perform under pressure. I think was probably the single greatest gift I got from tennis.
In your various business and leadership endeavors, how did your tennis background help and assist you?
I was cut from the freshman high school tennis team because I really wasn’t good enough, and I did not thrive immediately when I got my MBA and went into the corporate world. I learned that I really had to become a student of the corporate game.
I had to work hard at it to understand it. I had to work harder than most to learn the nuances of what was expected in that arena, and I had the patience to do that. I knew it was going to be a long road. But ultimately, ten years into my career, it all started to come together, interestingly, after I was fired from a job. I had to gather myself and deal with the fact that I had a wife, two small children, and a very large mortgage and no job. That was pressure, and I figured out how to navigate that. I’d like to think that the game of tennis helped me there. As I got into the next stage of my career, I started to pull it all together.
Over the next forty years of my career, things came together. My perspective was galvanized by losing my job. I was able to hit stride, but I had to be patient. There was there was no quick fix. It’s like, if you have a hitch in your forehand, there’s no quick fix. You gotta work work it, work it, work it, and then work it some more. It’s a process, and I learned to manage the process.
In 2019, you were named the ITA’s David A Benjamin Achievement Award recipient. What did that mean to you personally and professionally?
Gosh, the the sport of tennis gave me so much. The collegiate experience gave me so much. David Benjamin is a friend of mine who I hold in the highest regard. For me to be acknowledged by the ITA was just quite an honor.
To be thought of in any way associated with those very inspiring coaches was a real honor for me.
I knew the people, I knew college tennis, I knew the ITA, and I knew all these coaches that I held in high regard who weren’t doing it for the money. They were doing it for the love of the sport and the love of the kids, and and I found that very inspiring. To be among that group was really quite special, and it still is.
How did Conant Leadership come to be, and what do you enjoy about this endeavor?
I’ve been a a leadership geek for my whole career, all fifty years of my corporate career, and I quickly came to realize that boy, we could get a whole lot more done if we could bring others along on the journey with us. I could only do so much as an individual contributor. I saw just so many examples of what I considered to be inadequate leadership.I said, there’s just gotta be a better way, so I became a student of leadership early in my career. As I started to hit stride, I had opportunities to get to know and work with some of the leadership gurus of the 20th and 21st centuries.
I learned so much from them and I saw, gosh, if you could create the right culture, the right high-performance culture, in a way that was tough-minded on standards and with kind-hearted people, you could do almost anything. I didn’t see a lot of people paying attention to that, so I focused on that when I was a president and CEO, and I saw great return from it.
I saw the companies I was working with become renowned for what is now called employee engagement, where we had a spring in our culture that was second to none.
I could see what a difference it made. If you created the right culture — guess what? You perform better. It’s not rocket science. I was attracted to it then, and then I devoted myself full-time to it when I when I retired back in 2011. It’s been going on 15 years now. But even when I was a CEO, I spent more time on attracting, developing, retaining, engaging with my employees. I was all in on the talent piece and the leadership piece for the last couple decades of my career. I’ve been doing this in a very serious way for about 35 years, and I’m going to keep doing it until I get it right.
Writing hand-written notes to your employees has been a staple of your career. Where does that come from?
I was a terrible introvert and I was a terrible interviewer. I had a mentor say, ‘Look, you’ve gotta find a way to distinguish yourself with these people.’
So, when I was looking for a job, I started getting better at interviewing. Not great, but I got good enough. Then, I was trying to figure out, how am I going to distinguish myself? Well, when I would go to an interview, I would collect the names of everybody I met, including the receptionist at the front of the building and every executive assistant that was walking me around to meet executives that I was interviewing with. As soon as I left, I’d go next door to the coffee shop and I would write a handwritten note to each one of them, thanking them for their help in a specific way, including the receptionist at the front of the building. It could have been a security guard. They would have gotten a note from me.
Before I left for the day, I was sending thank-you notes to people. Nobody ever gave the security guard a thank-you note. Nobody ever gave the executive assistant a thank-you note. And guess what? The next time I went back, that receptionist was so helpful. ‘Doug, it’s great to have you back. I’m glad you made it through the round of interviews. Who are you seeing today?’ It changed everything.
When I went to work ultimately as a President of Nabisco Foods and CEO at Campbell Soup Company. I started sending thank-you notes to people every day – 10 to 20 notes a day. I wrote notes to people saying, ‘Thank you for your contribution,’ or something specific related to the company.
We did the math, and I had sent over 30,000 notes to Campbell employees, and we only had 25,000 employees. Anywhere in the world you would go, you’d see one of my notes handwritten stuck in a cubicle and or in an office like yours. You’d see it on a on the bulletin board wherever you went. People appreciated the recognition. I found that most organizations didn’t spend enough time celebrating what was right and enjoying it. We just try to bring a little balance to that wherever I go or whatever I do.
I try to celebrate what’s working. Lord knows you have to deal with what’s not working. You have to fix it, but that doesn’t mean you don’t celebrate what is working.
If not for tennis, where are you today?
Heaven only knows. Thank God tennis was so formative in my life. I needed something at the time, and tennis filled that need. Some of my best friends and relationships were cultivated through tennis. I’ve had a lifetime love affair with the sport and with the people in the sport. What a blessing.
Man, it doesn’t get any better than this.