Laura Sorrell:

[00:00:00] Make sure you go somewhere that you will be mentored and that you'll be a part of the team. You all help to see that we should just not be tied to some bread and butter work that wasn't really gonna help us grow. Leadership has to participate. It's both end. It's bottom up and top down too. They have to be in conversation together.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:00:35] What happens when a 23-year-old banker walks into Korn Ferry? Jots down a specialty Kim org chart on butcher paper and never looks back. Meet Laura Sorell the Change Whisperer . CEOs called to replace 30-year legends, tame cutthroat boards, and mentor Gen Z prodigies into future CFOs. Stick around to hear how she breeds talent as a strategic weapon.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:00:58] Laura, we're so happy to have you here. We've been looking forward to this interview. We've had a lot of experience with you and know that you've had an amazing career doing amazing stuff with leading change and guiding companies through change. So we wanna talk about that today.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:01:12] Great. Well, I have to just.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:01:14] You know, say right back at you. You know, the first time I met you, you were on a whiteboard with a, a group that was connected to rice and you were going over a business plan for them. And I was just astounded. Uh, it was so different from any marketing strategic plan I'd ever seen. It was great to be in the room just as a bystander on that.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:01:37] When, when was that? When did y'all meet? Oh,

Laura Sorrell:

[00:01:38] gosh, that was before 2000. Late nineties. You know, one event that occurred about that time is um, Jeff Bezos came to the business school at Rice and I was invited with that group to go hear him speak and there were about 10 people in the room and he had just started Amazon.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:02:00] So that kind of tells you when it was. And they asked him when he would make a profit. He said Never. That's not our goal. It's to innovate and we don't care if we ever make a profit. And you know, back then that was unheard of, but now we kind of understand it.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:02:16] That's amazing. I never, I didn't realize he went to, uh, uh, spoke at Rice.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:02:21] I know that he has Houston ties. He lived here.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:02:23] Yes.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:02:24] For a period of time. But that's, that's pretty amazing.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:02:26] Well, and I'll take it one step further. John Doer has created a leadership center there. Early after I left Korn Ferry, my boss went to work in San Francisco and he was running Accenture and he called and said, Lori, you've done so many emergent type businesses for the major oil companies.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:02:47] And he was my boss mentored me. And he said, if you come out here, I'll introduce you to some people 'cause we're on. The front end of the biotech high tech wave that's happening. And so he, I went out there and he had me do meet with Beck, which was the law firm that was doing a lot of that work and they were taking a piece of the action in those companies at the time, which was pretty unique.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:03:15] And we did a couple of searches. Got partners hired and then the managing partner wanted to meet us and he had been doing more initial public offerings than any attorney in Northern California, uh, John Larson. And he goes, Laura, I wanna introduce you to the VCs on Sandhill Road. And he introduced me to John, do.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:03:37] And you know, John and I are like barely late twenties, early thirties. And he saw me come in the room like now. I, I thought John, you knew what you were doing. But it ended up being a really great conversation and that was probably the first couple of years he was doing, you know, the venture capital stuff.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:03:58] And he just said, well, you know, we're all lined up here on this road. Just go door to door.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:04:03] That's, that's amazing. You have such a fascinating background.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:04:07] Well, it was just by accident, believe me. So it was fun.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:04:11] I, I think one thing that would be good to start is why don't you just tell us a little bit about the CliffNotes of your background.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:04:17] Okay. When I graduated from Baylor, I went to work for a bank and the oil business was going through the roof. You know, it was after the Arab oil embargo and things were happening 1979. Lester Korn and Dick Ferry were running Korn Ferry, uh, three days a week in Houston, and they, he, they had about 10 partners.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:04:37] They'd been complaining that they couldn't find anyone to help support the work. They'd never had an office exploding like this. And through connections, I haphazardly met, and then I was invited to come interview and they hired me. I was. All of 23 and their business model was to hire people who had books of business or, or had been C-suite executives and had been hiring in their functional area.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:05:07] And then they would come to work there as a consultant when they were ready and they would. I'm gonna use this term, they would have Rolodexes and they'd bring those. And so the goal was hire the same type of functional expertise for our clients, because you'll know what that is. So I came over and their assignments were.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:05:28] Becoming very different. The first time I went to a meeting was a specialty chemical company that was looking for someone in charge of commercial development and to start a new entity in a new area that the oil and gas major had never. Really done something in, and we were in the room and they were describing it all.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:05:49] And we got in the car and I said, well, what is commercial development and specialty chemicals? And they said, we don't know. That's for you to figure out. And you know, there were no cell phones, no computers. I was in the library back and forth and running around, asking questions, getting on the phone with people in specialty chemicals, asking them, and I couldn't figure out if it was commercial r and d type product of.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:06:15] Or business development. So I was kind of dividing it up, but I ended up with a piece roll of butcher paper, drawing out what seemed to be a org chart of those areas and took it in their office and they said, okay, well this is very helpful. And so that was kind of the beginning of me being involved in all the assignments and mentored.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:06:39] I always tell people when they're. Calling me about opportunities in their twenties and thirties. Make sure you go somewhere that you will be mentored and that you'll be a part of the team. You know, hybrid or working remote in front of a computer screen is not going to do that. You'll miss out. That's the whole reason I have a career and people who invested and you know, suffered fools gladly and all kinds of things to help me grow so that we spent 10 years.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:07:11] Years after the market fell, two of my partners in the firm, we joined up and we went out to California for, turned out to be 10 years, three days a week at the bidding of my initial boss and rode the biotech high tech wave all the way up. So it was wonderful to have that emergent. Business experience with oil and gas and then to go there when the market wasn't doing well in Houston and be on our own.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:07:41] And you know, out there they don't care. You know, if you have an office, they don't care who you work for, just get the work done. So it was a great experience.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:07:51] So you then moved into. Really a, a special niche that you'd start worked in and describe that niche.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:07:59] The niche was emergent businesses inside major companies and in groups that had spun off.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:08:11] From major companies to start their own deal. Back in Houston, there were some biotech medical technology companies that were emerging, and a lot of times it was scientists working on technology and they had a group of investors or grants. And they needed the business piece to what they were doing. So we had to go in and learn the technology.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:08:37] Um, there was one company that they were implanting devices and the parts were very, uh, miniature that they needed assembled

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:08:47] like heart.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:08:48] Yes, yes, yes. They had cleaned rooms and I ne never knew what that was. And they needed people to assemble those parts. And my partner signed me up for it. And, uh, when I got over there, I found out that it has to be people with very small hands to do it, and I had to be able to call them out of clean rooms to talk about changing jobs.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:09:13] So, you know, there was all these opportunities to work on new technologies, new types of positions. The, uh, fiber to the curb was created out in the Bay Area during that. Period. So we were working on that. Um, we worked on a position where one of the major tech companies wanted to hire someone, and I got a call from the CEO and he said, one of the other search firms keeps sending me people with telecommunications backgrounds.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:09:49] And I said, well, they're a great firm. I, I'm not sure what you're telling them. And he said, well, come down here and I'll have you sign an NDA and I'll. Tell you a little bit more. And after he told me, I said, well, I'm gonna have to sit with your engineers 'cause I really don't know what you're talking about.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:10:06] So we went in a room and we spent three or four hours, they drew on the whiteboard and then they brought in what looked like a sewing machine and said, we want this computer talk, talk to other computers. And I said, well, who's doing that? And they said, well, no one yet. And I asked who's doing the technology to get it, get it there.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:10:29] And they said, bell Labs and being engineers. Um, I then said, well, what, where would they be located? And they took me very literally and they all went and got their Rolodexes and they said, well, he's on the third floor of X building. And, and it was crazy. I had like a floor plan of where these people are.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:10:54] Back then you could get people on the phone, you know, it was just so much easier. So I researched and did my investigating and came back and said, well, 20 of them I could find, and here's their basic backgrounds. And they said, well, 10 of them, we'd love for you to talk to and directly just for recruiting.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:11:17] And, um, I said, okay, well what is the position? They said You can't tell them. Well, can I say what company? No. Um, can I say what the techno No, just find out if they would consider leaving, find out all their background and if they would be willing to leverage it into a conversation on a very confidential, low key basis.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:11:41] And I got five of them to the table and they hired one of them. Um, but it was a. Fun, fun project. Even though I was on the edge of my chair, the front four inches the whole time. But those were the kinds of things that were so emergent that because of the experience I had being mentored early in my career, I was fearless in how to move to something like that.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:12:07] And how and what you were doing essentially. Was in this last example, you had to understand what the business was and what the skillset that was required to get this company to the next level. So this is,

Laura Sorrell:

[00:12:20] yes,

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:12:20] truly a change management initiative with the bodies that would get them there.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:12:25] And they could not really articulate exactly what that meant other than this machine.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:12:31] We'll talk to this machine and, and they're engineers and they're still trying to figure out even what that means. A lot of times when you're drilling down with people, and this goes back to the guardrails, you have to ask questions in such a way that they can answer the question. You've gotta help them.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:12:52] Articulate a language or, or say what they're imagining when they can't say it yet. So it's, well, you know, you just have to learn how to ask many non-threatening questions to get answers that they feel comfortable giving you. I hope that makes sense. Mm-hmm. No, totally. You know, and what I learned during the guardrails, a future state.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:13:15] Is what everybody's after in their intuition or in their intuitive understanding of what's going on, but they don't talk about it that way. They don't really say much. That is language that says, I need to hire someone that. Well, tell me how to get where the roadmap for five years from now. Uh, most of the time you're talking to them about, well, what exists today?

Laura Sorrell:

[00:13:45] Why is it changing? What is your objective? Where do you wanna go? Using a lot of the guard rays, rails mindset that we had to been taught to think about in our own business, and that's where they start kind of figuring out how to talk about things.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:14:03] One of the things that that we talk about in the guardrails is identifying the characteristics of your clients from heaven and clients from hell, or prospects from heaven and prospects from, I

Laura Sorrell:

[00:14:12] was just thinking about that.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:14:13] What are your characteristics of the ideal companies that you like to work with and what you're looking for in the ideal candidates? Do they have any common threads? Right.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:14:22] Well, the common thread for characteristics in the companies are if they just wanna replace a certain type of person or don't want.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:14:32] To change. We're not their firm because we're not a cookie cutter. You know, just go replace what you've got. In fact, many times I just tell them, you know, you can call a contingency firm that this is all they do, and they'll give you a slate of candidates and you'll, you'll probably end up being very pleased and 'cause you're well-defined, you know what you want, but you're not trying to look.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:14:57] To the future or turn around something or get new types of talent. Then the second thing to your question about the characteristics, we, we really do well when the firm wants to create the position description together and. Think futuristic. Think about what type of talent is different to get them there.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:15:23] Sometimes they don't know. So I do kind of like I did in that first assignment, I'll say, well, why don't we go research best practices? Why, why don't we talk to some people? Why don't we do some, uh, surveillance work to help understand. Who's your top five favorite competitors? Who's at their organizations?

Laura Sorrell:

[00:15:44] And you know, now with AI and everything else, that doesn't take very long. But those are just top of mind questions that will ferret out that, and for years we were trying to do too many cookie cutter positions that were just killing us, um, and, and holding our profits down, holding us down. And really, you all helped us see that.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:16:06] We should just not be tied to some bread and butter work that wasn't really gonna help us grow.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:16:12] Your sweet spot is in the undefined.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:16:15] Yes.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:16:15] Can you give us a couple of great examples of where somebody might have come in and said, this is what I'm looking for, and you looked into and said, that's not what you need and you need this.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:16:24] Yes, that would be fine. Um, there was a chemical company and the third generation had come in to take it over. His uncle owned it. And he was being groomed to take it over. He'd been in Europe and the main operations were in the US and he was now in charge. One of the board members who I had worked with in the past called and said, we need a COO to work with him.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:16:50] So I went and met with him and I said, well, I really need to meet your. Staff that reports to you now? 'cause they've been there forever. They were legacy people and I went and met with all of 'em and I knew they were gonna run him off. Anybody that was hired, they, they were locked in. So I went back to him and the board chair and I said.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:17:10] This is not the time to hire. You should not be doing that. You should be working on leadership development, strategic development, change management, and building out those pieces. Because if you do not do that, you can't bring anybody in here. So the board ended up making some big changes on that front in lockstep with the.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:17:33] New CEO. He fought it a little bit. He brought in their Myers-Briggs because he was an engineer and he said, well, look at, look at this. This is their personalities and don't you think, you know, we could work with that. And I said, not yet.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:17:50] So give, gimme another example of where you said, yes. But you had to convince them that what they were looking for wasn't what they thought.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:17:57] Well, seems like that happens a lot. We've been working with, this is on the nonprofit side in the last five years. It's interesting since COVID, a lot of the major nonprofits in Houston that have been around a hundred year anniversaries, the person who's been in that role 30 years, even more maybe is leaving.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:18:21] After COVID, it's like, okay, I'm done. And we were working with one and the board, well, they didn't have term limits, so you can well imagine. And they wanted the same thing they had, but a different person. And this person had been there 30 years and I, you know, had to ask why we weren't looking for.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:18:46] Someone that would be there the next 30 years since that's how they were thinking. They really opened up and I started asking a lot of questions and I said, well, can we develop a position profile for you to review redline, figure out if this is it? And that was a good experience. They said, we really want you to do this.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:19:06] We've interviewed five other firms and you're pushing us. To think beyond our current thinking. And it was not an easy search to find the right person. They ended up saying all of them to a person, well we're looking for a unicorn. So, you know, that was their language they adopted.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:19:25] So this very much is, in keeping with the title of this podcast is Rethink Change and certainly is.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:19:31] They were looking for a little change, but you, you were saying no, you need a much bigger change.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:19:35] Right, right. And then we've been referred by some of those board members to. Three others that were related to them in a relationship manner to do the same type of search. So it's been really great experience for us in getting in that space, getting it more involved.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:19:54] When you talk to a candidate who might not necessarily have direct leadership experience but is potentially. A candidate for a leadership role? What are you looking for? What characteristics?

Laura Sorrell:

[00:20:05] Number one, I'm looking for people who aren't really looking to leave and they're not trying to leave something.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:20:12] They're just focused on their careers and what's next. And a lot of times they've been so entrenched where they are. They have such a great track record, but they see that the next five to 10 years aren't gonna be the same. And so they're not actively looking, they're just thinking. And so I start asking questions about why have you been successful?

Laura Sorrell:

[00:20:38] What matters to you? What are your motivational needs and beliefs? What is your expertise? And when you talk to 10 or 12 people like that, you start mapping to best practices and traits. That you can start seeing the differences and seeing what motivates and leverages them into their next level, and it becomes kind of a give and take of learning together.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:21:05] I really want to emphasize that, that you're kind of learning together about how to think future state, how to do it in your own career. It really is fun. I love doing that because people are so invested in their careers and they've been so successful.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:21:21] That's such, such a different way to think about it, that you're not filling a, a position or filling a role.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:21:26] You're providing a, a long-term source of growth for the company and for the candidate.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:21:32] Right. I think the candidates are just as important as the clients. Lester Corn and Dick Ferry told me that, they said, Laura, pay more attention to the candidates. It'll, it'll go a long way. And it's fun to place people who are so good on a, you know, a strong trajectory for one nonprofit.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:21:51] The board were all CEOs of major companies and we gave them a slate and one of them took me to lunch and said, we want better. It was a nonprofit that I wasn't anticipating that the board would be that engaged and it was a different mindset from the. Organization. So we went out and got a whole new slate of candidates and I called someone in in Atlanta that I knew would fit the job, but be really hard to get them.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:22:21] And he was describing what he did and I said, well, do you have your replacement? He goes, what do you mean? I said, do you have your replacement because you're gonna come to Houston? And he did. And he was in one organization here, grew at like. Tenfold in five years, and then another organization here has picked him up in the last month.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:22:47] One interesting thing about about your career is you've worked in all industries all over the world with extensive leadership teams. How pervasive is it that you're dealing with these senior, senior executive. And they have a very hard time articulating what it is they actually do.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:23:03] They can articulate pretty well what they do, what they can't articulate is what they want to do in the future very well.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:23:13] 'cause it's very, you know, they've been very isolated and compartmentalized. So that's where you open it up to a lot of different questions and that's a great question. Matching skills with what their opportunities could be. That's a big part of the conversations. Thank you for asking that. I think, I

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:23:30] think a great example is when you worked with Newton Nurseries.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:23:34] Mm-hmm.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:23:35] And they were looking for SEOO and you came in and they were looking for somebody, well, you tell the story.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:23:41] They were looking for someone to run a re wholesaler business in live goods, and it was a small organization at the time, but they wanted to grow from like 7 million to a hundred million.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:23:57] So, you know, they had to scale it. They had to professionalize it. They money wasn't the issue. It was talent. It was vision, and it was skills. And they said, well go to all the organizations already doing this and pick the best person. And I argued with that pretty quick and said, well, I've researched that and they're all like this.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:24:23] They don't have a vision for what you're talking about. There's only two or three in the whole globe that have any progression in that direction. I went and met with them. They wrote on the back of a napkin their strategies, their business plans, that everything they were trying to do. I went back and told the investors that, and then I said, you know, we could look in some.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:24:48] Ancillary industries with different skill sets now that we have those data points. And that's what we did. And I presented someone who came out of Distribu Industrial, uh, distribution as a CEO of a 200 million plus division. He ended up being the perfect candidate because he had a different mindset for distribution, which is what.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:25:13] Their business wise at the end. And he said, I don't know, plants, he, you know, he even said, I'm not a plant person. I said, do you really think that matters? And then he met the investors. He saw the vision, he saw the strategy, and he globbed onto it. So that was very as much taking someone with the right skillset that they never knew existed and putting it into a different situation.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:25:40] If I asked you what business you're in, you wouldn't say I'm in the talent acquisition business, which is what all the other people in your space is. So what business are you in?

Laura Sorrell:

[00:25:52] So you're asking a question that the CEO I'm working with right now has known me for years, and he goes, Laura, how do I. What business you're in.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:26:01] And I said, well, it's more of a talent management, a trajectory of people's career, progression and development. And then we went into a meeting with the PE firm and he described what I do and I went, boy, I wish I had written that down. Hi. His point was that she's not bringing me a resume or a candidate.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:26:26] She's bringing me a way to think about growing the talent pool, and then we're designing it together, what that looks like, and we've hired. Nine people in very different skill sets and we're not at critical mass yet. So, and then what goes along with that is helping them articulate their culture. That's been a real challenge because all of them come from nine different cultures.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:26:53] How, how do you approach getting alignment across varying cultures like that in an organization?

Laura Sorrell:

[00:26:57] Well, I spend a lot of time with the CEO and the top executive team, getting them to articulate it, and they, what I've learned is that they've gotta be very explicit and very detailed about what is in their mind of what it is.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:27:16] And we write it down, we go over it. We review it three months later, we determine is it what you think it is? And they're changing as they evolve. And we've learned to tell people coming in that we're building this as we go, so it's fluid, it's gonna keep changing and it's rapid. So I love that kind of environment because then they have to think that way.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:27:46] They can't sit static on anything. And it's hard to screen for that. [00:27:51] W ard P ennebaker: Yeah, I can imagine. So when we work with, with clients who are struggling with culture, there are essentially two perspectives. One is we don't dictate the culture. The culture builds from the bottom up. The other is that leadership defines the culture and they lead to the change.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:28:09] Where do you fall in that continuum?

Laura Sorrell:

[00:28:11] Leadership has to participate. It's both end. It's bottom up and top down too. They have to be in conversation together and, and almost like I was describing how they sit and design a document for a client, they have to do the same thing for themselves. They have to stay in complete conversation.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:28:33] I was talking with one of the more mid-level individuals on Friday. I said, how do you think the culture's going? He said, Laura, I'm not sure we have a culture yet. I said, well, we have principles. You have. He said, yes, but I'm not sure anybody's thinking about it enough. We're just doing our work. And he said, I would love it if we were in more conversation just about what it is and what we're trying to do.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:28:59] And what are the components that you say you've gotta have in place to have a cohesive culture?

Laura Sorrell:

[00:29:05] Well, you have to have everyone agreeing on what. The North Star is that you're shooting for, and there has to be alignment around what the behaviors and the natural rhythms are in the organization. And then there has to be common respect and I think.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:29:25] Transparency and a desire to say, I'm wrong when I'm wrong, and fall on the sword. And even the CEO has to do that.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:29:34] The, the world has changed so much, obviously, especially since COVID and a lot of organizations now are fully remote or hybrid. How would you approach. Elevating a company's culture that is in that hybrid remote environment.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:29:47] The main thing we've been doing is helping smaller companies in the 15 to 25 range and closely held or nonprofits. Um, we're helping the boards think. Hybrid and remote for some positions, and then what does that look like and how are they going to adapt? And the senior leadership adapt, not the people below them.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:30:12] You're pushing a rock up a hill if you're not starting at the top with those conversations.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:30:17] Is it possible to have a cohesive culture in a hybrid environment? It's

Laura Sorrell:

[00:30:22] harder. Where I've seen it is more in a functional area of a larger company, like if it's the financial area or the legal area or an established function that can create some systems and processes and approach.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:30:39] I as a larger company, I think it's much harder. So

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:30:43] over the years we work together a lot. You've sent several companies. For, for guardrails, what were the characteristics of the organizations that you're talking to? And it's like, you know what you need? You need to talk to Ward.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:30:56] It's the companies that are ready for change that sometimes don't know what they don't know to get there.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:31:04] They're open to conversations and they're open to learning growth mindsets, learning. They want to get better, and they realize they're stuck.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:31:14] I like how you put, they're stuck. You know, a lot of organizations try to get to the next level. They just don't know how they're at this real inflection point. And so pushing past that is, is real critical.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:31:24] Well, there's part of it. They don't have a language. To talk about it and Ward opens that up. [00:31:30] M att P ennebaker: Clarity. He provides clarity.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:31:32] Mm-hmm. [00:31:32] M att P ennebaker: With guardrails, who you're, how to talk about yourself, who you're targeting, how you grow, what that path looks like.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:31:38] I was talking to one of our clients yesterday. The pattern I'm seeing is they're, they talk.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:31:46] Succession. We need to think about succession. That word is becoming pervasive. It's replacing other words that you would use to build your company. We need a succession plan, not a growth plan, not a a new strategy, not a ability to. Change and adapt. We need succession. I find that very interesting. That's the word they're using.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:32:12] That's essentially what the nonprofit was looking at that you described earlier. Yes, yes. But it's

Laura Sorrell:

[00:32:16] pervasive. It's in, it's in everything. That's why I've started noticing it. I've been working with other private equity companies that have grown with us, involved from 10 million to 50 million in two or three years, and.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:32:31] It's the same thing. They're not really talking about changing their business models or their go to market, but they're talking about changing the talent and type of talent and how do you change the type of skills and talent if you don't have a cohesive operating model or growth strategy. And that's where the conversations kind of start to blend

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:32:57] that term succession's.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:32:58] Really interesting. It makes me think. In terms of preservation as opposed to growth. It's how do we, we need to, we need to plan in place to survive for the next 50 years.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:33:07] Yeah. They, they're thinking in terms of replacing something, but they don't have a better term or a thought pattern for how to get, why they want that.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:33:19] And is it about growing the business, you know, their EBITDA and their growth? Do they have the. Types of people they need to do that, and then they, it starts breaking down from there. And then you look at their website and you're like, oh dear,

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:33:36] what do you do? Yeah.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:33:38] Yeah. You say that you're seeing a trend.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:33:42] In your work with much more succession focus in five years, what do you think your business will look like?

Laura Sorrell:

[00:33:48] I said this earlier yesterday. We're ready for a refresh 'cause it is changing and the AI piece of this where we could be out hardcore, um, developing information they can get their hands on. You can.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:34:03] Do a blue sky. Yeah, I can work with a blue sky, um, strategy that's put in front of me and we need someone, and probably in 10 hours I can give them a framework for what's exists today and what the options are. Well, that's, that's not expertise. So we really need to flesh out. What is it that makes us distinctive and how do we express that when we're in, I'll give you an example.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:34:31] A huge retailer has asked us to present, well, you know, the old questions of, well, how many retail searches have you done and how many of this, how many of that is all they know to do? And we can get them off of that. But I, we need a better. Framework to be able to talk about what we have become and what we're becoming.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:34:54] I love that you're leaning into AI so much because it is going to be the most disruptive change of our generation by a factor of a hundred. So I'm, my philosophy is you gotta lean in and embrace it a hundred percent or else you'll be left behind.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:35:08] Well, and discerning how to take that information and keep talking to it and saying, no, no, no, no.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:35:15] Or can you clarify this? Or, and they can take it so far and then they'll tell you, I don't know anymore. Which is so helpful. 'cause then you can get on the phone, you can keep going, you can do other things. I think it's a great tool, but you know, it could be very threatening if you don't use it, right?

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:35:33] Yeah, yeah.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:35:34] Well change, change is hard, right? Most people don't like change.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:35:37] I really think that's what we need right now. The retailer I'm talking about, they're kind of of a Nema Marcus level. It's one of those where the founder has been there forever and their treatise of their values and their hospitality and their way of doing things is phenomenal, is age old.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:35:57] It's timeless, but being able. To show how we can take them into the future, where our stories old, we need help.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:36:06] Yeah. Yesterday I, I was in a room with about 50 CEOs and it was shocking. It was all around AI discussion and of the 50, almost nobody knew. How to apply it to their business. They were all looking at it as something that they need to, to lean into, but I have no idea what it's, I'll

Laura Sorrell:

[00:36:26] take it one step further.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:36:27] There's a couple of major universities on the East coast considered elite institutions, and I've been visiting with the provost quite a bit and he said they have these meetings with all the deans. And the conversations are ridiculous. They have no idea what to do with it. It's, it's, it's, it's astounding.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:36:47] It's astounding, but it's also exciting times. Yeah. Uh, I was, I was an adjunct professor at U of H for a little while, and I taught a business school class over there. And in 2022, like right when. Chat. BT came out. I did. I did a lecture to our class on like, this is gonna be the most transformative thing that you've ever come across.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:37:08] And here, application types. 'cause it's scary. Nobody knows where, where to start.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:37:12] R ight. And it's just been in the last six months that it's started to really be accessible to so many, and now we're watching how AI is being shaped within one organization. Yeah. So all the more they have to be able to articulate.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:37:30] What they're doing [00:37:31] M att P ennebaker: right. A lot of organizations are really leaning into now is we've gotten the great crew change here that's happening in the next five years with just mountains of institutional knowledge. And so a lot of companies are trying to capture a lot of that knowledge so that it can then be leveraged.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:37:48] Or a very junior person that's a gen, you know, a millennial or whatever, add a future date so that knowledge just isn't lost.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:37:54] Well, I'm all for that, but are they going to mentor and tutor people? Are they just gonna hand them the data?

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:38:03] Well, that's the thing. You gotta, you gotta do it. Right. And obviously the former is the way to go.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:38:07] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's a real thing that you all focus on is the people side of integrating information and tools and processes. That's really what you do.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:38:19] Interesting. Interesting way to, good way to look. I haven't thought about it that way.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:38:23] Yeah. You're helping companies integrate tools and processes to have a story to tell and to know their identity and what they're doing.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:38:31] But they know how to use those tools and process.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:38:34] You've been a part of several of these, these types of exercises with us. Is there anything that particularly stands out to you that's really memorable about that process?

Laura Sorrell:

[00:38:43] The ability to see it, not just talk about it. You give visual. Descriptions also, you facilitate what someone's saying and then you ask questions, and then you put down what they're saying, but then you start to pull it up to a third way to say it that they're not able to do.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:39:08] Out of the weeds. Yeah. Especially the engineering weeds,

Laura Sorrell:

[00:39:10] but, but it's also articulating it a third way. That's a blend of everything you've been hearing. It's a real synthetic experience as well as you're giving a new pathway.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:39:25] If you were to describe what the outcome of guardrails is to somebody who's, who had no idea what it was, what would you say?

Laura Sorrell:

[00:39:32] I would say that it's taking the basic framework of your, what's good in your organization, what's working, and then asking. Where is that going to take you begin to map to where that's going to take you and then articulate and synthesize what that is so that you can begin to think about it in a very specific way and everyone in the organization can change your identity to that.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:40:03] So it's a very much an identity shaping experience.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:40:07] What advice would you give to any of the listeners who are on the younger end with aspirations of being future leaders?

Laura Sorrell:

[00:40:16] I'm working with a small private equity startup right now with a major PE firm here in Houston. So the CEO had a vision for hiring people at a DI number of levels.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:40:29] He didn't have the skills he was hiring. We've hired nine people. In a year, and five of them are fresh out of MBA school, and that's the group that we've spent the most time with and we've been nurturing them in all aspects of the business model. And he's had them be trained in writing skills, communication skills, social skills, and he's had them shadow the three senior.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:41:03] People, they've been in every meeting, every conference they are writing, every day they're sending out emails. He is in the room with them when they call a client and they're leading the call. So they have intense mentoring. Training and they have to give constant feedback of what they're hearing, seeing, learning, and they have to contextualize it.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:41:37] And he's teaching them, don't give me a finished product. I'm gonna give you a big. Project, go work on it, bring it back. It'll be iterative and there'll be changes. And he even will sit in their office while they're in their computer and have them making those changes with him sitting there and redesigning or rethinking, changing their approach.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:42:03] It's constant. And he and he is teaching the more senior people to do the same. And it, it's interesting, he's told them words matter. Sentences matter. We right now have a couple of PhD communications professors coming in and taking what they've been writing and do some more analysis and input on things.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:42:29] One of them has addiction coach to help with. How they're verbalizing things we've been working on. What kinds of questions that you ask? There's five different kinds of questions that you ask when you're in conversations. How do you adapt what their technology is? To the audience so that the audience isn't flooded with information that they can't pace with.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:42:56] So understanding how to understand motivational needs and beliefs. I have check-ins with the more junior people once a month. You cannot even believe how much they're applying, what was theory and how it's dismantling their mindsets and actually increasing their. Self-confidence.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:43:20] Laura, this has been such a great engaging conversation.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:43:24] We'd want to get you back 'cause we've only scratched the surface of the stuff that you know and have done.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:43:29] Well, thank you. You know, I appreciate being able to come and that you'll sit through this.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:43:36] No, this has been great. And one, one of the things that we always ask people are, is there anything that we should have asked?

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:43:43] That we did not.

Laura Sorrell:

[00:43:44] I think y'all are pretty thorough. Frankly. There's a lot of things you asked we can follow up on. How's that?

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:43:51] Well, really, really appreciate your time again. It's been fun. Yeah,

Laura Sorrell:

[00:43:53] was, it was amazing. Thank you.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:43:56] Thanks for listening to Rethink Change. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it and be sure to follow the show so you don't miss a single episode.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:44:04] If you're a disruptor looking to challenge the status quo. And don't know where to start or what to do next. Pennebaker can help find out more at pennabaker.com.