>> Well, I'm in New York today with Sandi Peterson.
Group Worldwide Chairman for
Johnson & Johnson and
a member of the Microsoft Board of Directors.
So, Sandi thank you for joining us.
>> Oh, it's a great pleasure. Thanks, Mike.
>> Thank you. Your career has been so incredibly diverse.
You've spent time at
major companies including Johnson & Johnson,
Bayer, Nabisco, and Whirlpool.
I even understand you spent a year working in Germany.
Tell us a little bit about this background.
How did this all get started?
>> I never planned to work in business.
I started out being
a policy economics person
who dabbled in the humanities and the arts.
And it was really quite honestly, a fluke.
I ended up right after college
spending a year trading stocks
on the American Stock Exchange,
which was a fascinating learning experience.
And then I went to graduate school and got
a degree in public policy
in Economics and Science policy.
And I was very fortunate during that time,
I got to go live and work in Germany.
I worked in the finance ministry,
I did a bunch of interesting things
there and when I finished graduate school,
I joined McKinsey, and I was one of their experiments.
I was one of the first non- MBA's who went to McKinsey.
And I spent a number of years there and I learned a lot,
because I worked in many very varied industries
from computers,
telecom, cookies and crackers, jet engines.
And I learned a lot about you know,
there's some fundamentals about
business that are interesting and you
can take them from one place to another and from that,
it just launched me into being
a business executive in many different industries,
in many different contexts.
>> What an array Sandi.
What was maybe the earliest career lesson you
think you picked up and still take today?
>> I think the most important lesson I
learned is intellectual curiosity,
agility of learning, and relying on
other people and figuring out
how to get the best out of them.
>> How does this unique background,
how does it fit with or complement
the other members of the Microsoft board?
>> So, as you well know,
we have a terrific board that's filled with people,
some who've come out and haven been in
the technology world forever.
People who've worked in finance,
people have worked in lots of
different parts of industry around the globe.
And I would say, I bring a couple of things to the board.
One is I'm a complete globalist.
I've lived and worked and
run businesses around the globe.
So, I have great sensitivity of how all of that works.
I also would say I am one of
the enterprise customers that
Microsoft works with every day.
So, I bring a sensibility
to what enterprise customers care about,
what's most important to them,
how to translate some of
the amazing technology that exists inside
Microsoft and helping make it more relevant
to the productivity of people
who work in companies all over the world.
>> And you've been an independent director on
the Microsoft board since December of 2015.
Can you tell us how were you invited to first
serve on the Microsoft board?
>> Microsoft has a terrific process of working with
outside advisers to figure out what's
the right profile of a board member to add to the mix.
So, we're always looking at the composition of
the board and how to make it most relevant going forward.
And I was approached by a recruiter,
who was part of that process.
I spent time with board members on
the Microsoft board in
this process to decide whether I was the right person,
whether I had the right experience,
all those sorts of things to join the board
and it's been a terrific experience.
>> That's great. For those of us that
don't know what a board of directors meeting is like.
Can you tell us what happens
inside the Microsoft meeting?
>> So, I would say couple of things about the role of
a board member and I think it's one of
the things that makes Microsoft a terrific place.
Not only is it important what
happens inside the board meeting,
but it also is very important what
the interactions are outside of the board meeting.
So, it's a very open environment.
We have a lot of interaction with
individuals inside the company
either because we're asked,
"Can you help this team,
because you have some experience
and come spend time with them?"
and vice versa. When we have an idea
of something that we think might be important,
it's a very open environment where we can come and share
our knowledge expertise with
individual members or groups of
people inside the company.
So, I think that's as important as what
happens in the board meeting itself.
But what happens in the board
meeting is a couple of things.
One is we have
governance things that we need to attend to,
whether it's compensation, audit, regulatory,
financial matters that are part of
our committee structure and so their committee meetings
where there's a subset of us that
interacts with individuals in
the Microsoft team and so that's part of the process.
And then, we have
the meeting time is a full board meeting,
where we talk about
the most important things in the company,
whether it's strategy, people,
talent development, priorities.
And it's a very open dialogue.
The thing it's great about the Microsoft board is it's
light on PowerPoint presentation and it's heavy
on bringing issues forward or things that the team
is thinking about and
seeking our advice, seeking our input.
And because of how this board works,
there's a lot of playoff between different board members.
It helps make it a much richer
dialogue and a set of conversations.
And at the end of the board meeting,
there's clarity about, "Okay,
these are decisions we made.
These are things we'd like some more follow up
on in the next board meeting" and "Oh,
by the way, you know,
I'd like you and you to help this team do
some work outside of the board
contacts" and then come back at the next board meeting.
So, it's a very dynamic process.
>> Sandi your experience in health care runs very deep.
As we turn to tech, I guess,
what surprised you most about joining Microsoft's board?
Perhaps the view of the company.
>> So, I think one of the things that
surprised me the most and I would tell you
in a very positive way and it's been a great part
of my experience at Microsoft is
that you know when Satya was asked to become
CEO and John Thompson took over the chairmanship,
clearly, that it was an inflection point of the company.
I joined the board shortly thereafter.
And how do you reinvigorate
this company that has a great history in technology?
How do we make it most relevant for
the next generation of what's happening in technology?
And how do you get the culture to be
a vibrant exciting culture and
the place where everybody who works
in technology wants to be?
And so, one of the things that's been
a terrific positive surprise for me
is how the company and how
the leadership has been able to really make that happen.
By really focusing on a learning culture,
focusing on there are no stupid ideas.
How do we get this culture to be much
more collaborative and open?
And the thing that's been
a great fun surprise for me is watching what comes out
of these labs and the extent to which
this company has unbelievable technology depth.
That it's really not an issue of are they the best?
It's really what choices are they going to
make to bring to the market first.
>> So Sandi, you've been at the forefront of
Johnson & Johnson's efforts to
transform health care through technology.
What are some of the most compelling developments
you've seen in recent years?
You know, what excites you about that future?
>> So, as you know I've been in health care for
a really long time and I
lived through the era of the dot.com,
when the tech industry thought,
"We can go figure this out ourselves,
we're going to disrupt healthcare" and it didn't work.
And it didn't work for a couple of reasons.
One is that healthcare
is more complicated than many other industries.
There is the data to be
able to really have a big impact is
locked in all sorts of
old systems that exist all over the place,
whether it's a doctor's office or
in multiple different hospital settings.
And so, that is a huge barrier to getting
a seamless view of the person who's
a patient or somebody who's just trying to stay well.
And there are a couple of things that
have made a significant difference in
our ability to use technology to transform healthcare.
So obviously, the advent of
the mobile phone and mobile technology,
where you now have access and
interaction with people that's
completely different than it used to be,
makes it a lot easier to engage with people as
consumers or patients or doctors anywhere in the world.
You also, with the advent of cloud and
technologies then it can pull
data out of these old systems,
put it in a data like whether it's structured or
unstructured and do the analytics around it.
It's a massive transformation and what we are now
able to do when it comes to ingesting data,
analyzing it, and making it relevant back
to the doctor or back to the consumer.
But you also need a couple of other things.
Obviously, the breakthroughs we've had in biology,
which have been enabled by technology,
quite honestly, have made a big difference.
But our knowledge of behavior science and how you
engage people. You know
everybody knows they should lose five pounds.
Everybody knows they're supposed to sleep.
Everybody knows they're supposed
to take their medication.
Why don't they?
And we've done a lot of work on
the behavioral science side and we know
how to interact in a very non-intrusive way.
And so, we're really at the forefront of
being able to do very different things
now and using technology to help transform healthcare.
So, as we like to say at J&J,
we want to be in the well care business,
not the sick care business,
and we want to positively impact billions of lives,
every single day, around the world.
>> And Sandi you've been vocal about the fact
that the gender gap for women in the workplace it
still looms very large
and you've been successful at improving
the number of women in leadership roles at companies
you've been involved with like Johnson & Johnson.
I'm wondering, what is the key to
sustaining that momentum, moving forward?
>> So, to me it's about diversity of thought, experience.
It's not just about women,
although that's really really important.
I've always believed that you need to reflect
the customers that you serve in
the world in which you live it, and you don't,
I mean it's a smart business thing to do.
There's been a million studies done
that say that if you have diversity of thought,
experience trying to solve a problem,
you're going to do a much better job solving
that problem by having that kind
of diversity in the world.
And so, I've always been
a huge advocate of making sure that that happens.
But you have to remember you know
business people are trained
to deliver results based on metrics.
So just saying it,
doesn't make it happen.
You actually have to hold people accountable
and you have to do all the
right things to make it happen.
So, you've got to put teeth behind it,
but you also have to do
all those things around sponsorship, mentorship.
We do a lot of work and a lot
of people at J&J are very enthusiastic
about helping women early in
their lives and it's something Microsoft does as well.
How do we get women to want to do the quote unquote "hard
sciences" and keep them in those disciplines over time?
So, there's a lot that you do with
the early stages of people's careers,
but it's really not that hard,
it's no harder than,
"Am I going to make my top and bottom line number?"
You just have to make it a priority and make it work.
And the thing that's so much fun for me to see is
these women who take on these great leadership roles,
what they're able to do and the engagement level of
their teams is through
the roof and it's just really exciting to see.
>> Well, maybe to close then Sandi,
when you're not in the boardroom,
how do you like to spend your time?
>> So, I spend my time lots of different ways.
I'm obviously, you can tell it,
intellectually curious person.
So, I love to read.
I love to be engaged in the arts,
because I think it's important to always
have other stimulus and things to think about.
I'm also one of these people who believes
that you need to sort of take care of yourself.
So, I'm a big proponent of working out
in some way shape or form every single day,
because it's good for your energy level,
your resilience to be able to do what you do every day.
And I'm also very fortunate that I have two adult sons,
who are terrific, who keep me real everyday and
also teach me every day what
the next generation cares about.
>> Sandi, thank you so much.
It's been a real privilege for us.
Thanks for joining us. Sandi Peterson,
Microsoft Board of Directors. Thank you.
>> Thank you, Mike. It's been great fun.