Carol Cone:
I’m Carol Cone and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact.
You know, there may be no tougher job today than being a CEO. Leaders are operating in a world defined by upheaval, geopolitical instability, economic uncertainty, cultural division, relentless technological change, and now the rapid acceleration of AI. Expectations are higher, trust is more fragile, and the margin for error feels smaller than ever. In that environment, the questions CEOs are asking have shifted.
They’re no longer just about strategy or innovation. They’re about people. Few people are listening more closely to those questions than our guest today, Alan Murray. Alan is a journalist at heart with decades of experience covering business and leadership at the highest levels. Today, he is the founding president of the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute. Created to give senior executives something increasingly rare, a trusted space for peer learning.
In our conversation, we talk about what CEOs are truly wrestling with today, why purpose is moving from aspiration to expectation. How does it really drive an organization forward? And why in an age shape by AI, humanity, empathy, and trust may be the ultimate sources of competitive advantage? So please join me in welcoming Alan Murray to Purpose 360. It is a fantastic conversation, so let’s begin. Welcome back to the show, Alan.
Alan Murray:
Great to be back with you, Carol. Thanks for having me.
Carol Cone:
Oh, it’s my pleasure. I was trying to think about, “What do I call Alan? Is he a CEO whisperer, a CEO listener?” Your entire career, you have spent interviewing CEOs, being with them at conferences, round tables, et cetera. How might you describe your CEO leadership title?
Alan Murray:
Oh, so many ways to answer that question. Look, but I appreciate what you say. I’m a journalist. I’ve been a journalist my whole life, think of myself as a listener more than anything else, but I have had the good fortune over the last two decades to have extraordinary access to the CEOs of the largest organizations and being able to have conversations with them and get a clear sense of what they’re thinking about and what’s top of mind and what their anxieties are.
Carol Cone:
There’s a lot today.
Alan Murray:
There’s a lot there, but to your question about the Leadership Institute, I think the guiding motivation of The Wall Street Journal Leadership is this sense that everybody’s talking about technology, everybody’s investing in technology companies or thinking about how AI is going to transform them. And if you stop and think about it or if you listen to CEOs, you pretty quickly come to the conclusion that the challenge they have is not a technology challenge, the technology is doing fine, it’s a leadership challenge. It’s how do they create organizations that can accept this rapid pace of change that they’re seeing in technology? But not only in technology.
Look at what’s happening at the public policy level in the US where you do this wild swing from the Biden administration to the Trump administration and a complete change of policy, or what’s happening in the world, the geopolitical threats that are having an enormous impact in business. So, what we are trying to do is figure out how can we help people lead these large human-based organizations in a way that makes them resilient enough and strong enough and creative enough and courageous enough to [inaudible 00:03:07]-
Carol Cone:
Courageous enough.
Alan Murray:
… challenges of the future.
Carol Cone:
That’s fantastic. So, was it your idea to create the Institute, was it The Wall Street Journal? It’s probably a combination, but I’m very curious about the backstory, the backstory.
Alan Murray:
I had spent 20 years of my career at The Wall Street Journal. I loved The Wall Street Journal. I ran the Washington Bureau of The Wall Street Journal for a decade. It was kind of, in many ways, the pinnacle of my young career. And I met with the CEO of Dow Jones, Almar Latour, and he said, “What are you thinking of doing?” And I told him about these conversations I was having. He said, “Well, don’t do it for them. Come do it for us. Come home and do it here.”
Carol Cone:
Great. Come home.
Alan Murray:
And I thought, “Well, yeah, that sounds fun.” And it was in a conversation between the two of us that we decided that creating a leadership institute.
Carol Cone:
Okay, so you have created various communities within the Institute. So, first, I’d love to talk about a little bit the shape of the institute.
Alan Murray:
Yeah. So, let’s do a quick look at the Institute. Right now we have about 800 members. Close to half of those are in our CEO Council. The other half are spread through the other councils, CFO, the Tech Council, which tends to be CIOs and chief technology officers. We have a CMO Council. We think that 800 can be two or three times as large as that over the next couple of years, both by strengthening the existing councils, but by figuring out where we should build new ones.
Each of these councils has events, summits. We also do dinners. We’re also looking at other types of services we can provide, both kind of one-on-one connections, but also research that we can provide to them. We’re doing some peer polling, elite polling where we will… Let’s just take as an obvious example, when the tariff… What was it called? Liberation Day. When Liberation Day happened in April, we went to all our CEOs and said, “What do you think the effect of this will be?” And we got a very quick response and we were able to take that back to the CEOs within just a couple of days, so they could see how their peers were thinking about it.
So, it’s that notion of peer exchange, peer sharing, peer learning that is at the center of the Institute. And the basic premise is that most of the challenges that leaders are dealing with today are being thrown at them by the pace of change. So, they’re not things that they would have studied in school or can learn in school. And the best way to learn is to learn from the people who are on the frontlines doing it. And so that’s what we try to create at the Leadership Institute.
Carol Cone:
So, it sounds… It’s very agile, it’s fast in many ways, it’s one-to-one, and it’s something you can really get insights and really apply them quickly?
Alan Murray:
That is our aspiration.
Carol Cone:
Right. Okay. And how is it going so far?
Alan Murray:
It’s going great. It’s very different. At Fortune, I was the CEO. I had my own little organization, and people tended to do what I asked them to do. At The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, it’s a much bigger company, much more matrixed organization, and requires me to rely more on informal rather than formal power, but I think I’ve got a great team in place. I think everybody at the organization understands what we’re trying to do and we’re moving ahead.
Carol Cone:
So, what are CEOs saying right now? What’s the conversation that’s going on?
Alan Murray:
I have many conversations, some of them off the record, some of them on the record, but we just recently had our CEO Council Summit that kind of encapsulated what I’ve been hearing all year. And there are two things I would say. One is I thought the obsession of the year would be what’s happening in Washington, the policy changes because they’ve been huge; tax, tariff, complete reversal of regulatory direction, the transactional nature of the new administration, all of those things have created huge new obstacles and opportunities for CEOs. I thought that would be the leading topic of the year. I knew AI was on everyone’s mind, but I thought it’d be overshadowed by policy. I was wrong. The AI opportunity and challenge is so huge and so captivated the minds of the CEOs that it continuously rises above everything else.
And that gets to the second thing, which you will appreciate and are very tuned into: while the conversations I’ve been having start as conversations about technology, you get about 15 minutes into them and you very quickly realize we’re not talking about technology, we’re talking about people, we’re talking about culture, we’re talking about leadership.
Carol Cone:
Ah, an idea that is now perfect for the times. So, perfect for the times. But are the conversations about people, culture, “How am I going to be a human in this AI…” Let’s pivot to the AI world that we’re in that you call it maybe the fourth revolution in… Is it?
Alan Murray:
Yeah.
Carol Cone:
I also… I want to take one question. Do you use AI? You must.
Alan Murray:
I do. Personally, I use it every day. I’m consulting chatbots all the time for personal and business reasons. Earlier this year, we had an offsite and I was trying… I had a couple of very specific problems I wanted to address, and was trying to think of exercises I could do with my leadership team that would help get to the right outcome. And I threw it into… It wasn’t even a special leadership AI, it was just ChatGPT. I said, “Help me with this.” And it came up… It suggested several very good exercises that were right on point.
Carol Cone:
Great.
Alan Murray:
Carol, you may know this, but between the time I left Fortune, before I went to The Wall Street Journal, I had my hands tied by a noncompete for a few months, and I wasn’t allowed to talk to anybody about this leadership institute that Almar Latour and I had talked about creating. And so the only conversations I could have were with LLMs, with ChatGPT and Gemini.
Alan Murray:
I would put together some plans and run my plans through there. Now, some people will tell you it’s not a great idea because everything you’re doing becomes part of the LLM. But I wasn’t using proprietary information. I didn’t have any access to proprietary information. I was just sort of thinking, and using the LLMs as thought partners, and it was amazing. They were good.
Carol Cone:
Let’s turn to the new culture of organizations in an AI-driven organization. First of all, I’d love to know what are your CEOs talking about, or are you talking with CHROs? Because I think it’s fascinating that you’re going to create that cohort in the Leadership Institute. So, what are you talking about to balance this new world?
Alan Murray:
So, over the course of the last year, I’ve met with the CEOs many times, but I’ve also met with the CFOs many times, and I’ve met with the chief technology officers many times. And the differences in how they are looking at AI was fascinating. The CEOs, the thing about the event of November 2022, when ChatGPT launched onto the scene, it was so accessible, it was so easy to use, and the CEOs very quickly understood, “This is going to transform my organization.” So, CEOs immediately got excited about it.
That put the CIOs in kind of an interesting bind because all of a sudden the CEO who would generally let this CIO or the chief technology officer or whoever do their thing suddenly was in their office saying, “Why aren’t we using this? Why aren’t we using it more? Look at the potential here. Why don’t you get on the case?” And so all of a sudden the CIOs and the CTOs are seeing this renewed interest from the CEO, and they’re trying to respond and they’re buying chatbots for their employees. And then the CFOs started stepping in and saying, “Well, wait a minute, we’re spending all this money on Microsoft Copilot, but I’m not seeing any return. What are we getting for this investment? The bottom line doesn’t seem to be moving.”
So, there’s that kind of triangle of interest that then led to kind of a frustration. It’s like… What I would hear from CEOs is, “Wait, I know this is transformational, I know it is going to change my company in the future, we’ve done a lot, but I’m not seeing the return on my effort and my [inaudible 00:30:59].” So, that’s been a big part of the conversation over the course of the year. At the end of the day, Carol, you can talk about strategies for getting… People will say, “Don’t do a thousand experiments, do a smaller number of experiments and very quickly decide what you want to focus on.” All of that makes good sense, but really at the end of the day, the core issue there is people-
So, I don’t think anybody should be too surprised that there’s some tension there between the CEO’s desire to unlock those opportunities, and the employees desire to say, “Hey, wait a minute. Do I really want to be embracing this technology that may replace me in a year or two?” That’s one of the reasons we created the Chief People Officer Council-
Carol Cone:
That’s great.
Alan Murray:
… because you’ve got to figure out: how do you create a culture where your employees are willing to embrace and experiment and take advantage of this incredible technology wave without feeling like their jobs are on the line?
Carol Cone:
Absolutely. So, you have said, “The most effective CEOs today are not the loudest voices of the room, but the ones who combine conviction with empathy.” And you’ve talked about why empathy is really important, and you also talked about there’s a higher premium on social skills. So, let’s talk about empathy because empathy, we say, “Oh, you’re going to take somebody into the room…” No, it’s not that at all.
Alan Murray:
Yeah. And that’s why it was so interesting to listen to AT&T’s John Stankey and Chevron’s Mike Worth, they were talking about exactly that point. Look, it gets back to that core change in the nature of leadership. If the way to be successful in business is to raise a lot of capital so you can buy a lot of plant and equipment and inventory and oil wells so that you can make a lot of money, then that… which is the way it worked, in a simplified fashion, 50 years ago, then obviously you’re going to focus a lot on capital markets because it’s the capital markets who provide you the money you need to do all of that.
But if the way to make money is about engaging your employees, so that they come to work and give their best talents, so you can take advantage of those talents to create something valuable, then you’ve got to know what moves them, what they care about, what their hopes and opportunities are and where they see the opportunities at. I frankly… This is one of the things that’s interesting about having done this or a version of this for four decades: I’m pretty sure the first two, maybe two and a half of those decades, I never heard a CEO use the word empathy.
Carol Cone:
I bet.
Alan Murray:
Yes. And then during the pandemic, we did a CEO survey and asked an open text box question, “How has your leadership changed during the pandemic?” And the majority of answers, a little over 50% of answers had the word empathy or empathetic in there.
Carol Cone:
Wow.
Alan Murray:
So, this was a word that CEOs didn’t use two decades ago and most of them understand is critical to their leadership now. They’ve got to be listening to their employees. They’ve got to be listening to their customers because they have to understand how the world is changing, so they can pursue the right policies to engage all of those people towards creating more value.
If the CEO’s job is much less about telling people what to do than it used to be and much more about making people feel excited about the mission and the purpose and engaging them and giving them kind of a directional North Star, then CEOs have to practice a different kind of leadership. And it requires them to be great communicators. It requires them to be inspirational. They don’t have to be television stars, although sometimes that works too. They just have to have a way of understanding what motivates people and communicating that effectively to those people.
Carol Cone:
Yeah. Have you seen… I know you talked about Doug McMillon, have you seen any other examples of the balancing of the humanity with technology?
Alan Murray:
The short sellers will come after me for the comment I’m about to make, but I’ve been a big fan of Mary Barra who has led GM in a very different way than her predecessors by setting big, audacious goals and then giving her team freedom to pursue those goals. Now, the problem she has right now is one of those goals was, she said, “No emissions, no accidents.” That was a big audacious goal. It required a complete redirection of GM. And at the moment, it looks like that redirection went too far. They moved too fast towards electric vehicles, and the market isn’t ready for them. Now, some of that is because you had a dramatic shift in policy from Biden era policy supporting this to Trump era policies not supporting it, and that stuff happens. But the way she decided to lead by setting big goals for her people, I thought was really impressive.
Carol Cone:
And you’ve also described that employees increasingly expect moral leadership from their companies, so that’s probably an element of this humanization. What does moral leadership look like? Does business have a soul?
Alan Murray:
I think it does. I think it does. I think what this change… Look, management in the 20th century was all… If you think about it, if you study it, if you look at Frederick… What was his name? Frederick Taylor. If you look at the great management giants, Alfred Sloan, even up to Jack Welch of the 20th century, a lot of what they were doing was trying to make people into machines, because that’s what you needed. And what’s happened in the 21st century is the machines are taking care of themselves, thank you very much.
People don’t have to be machines. Machines are doing a very good job at that. People have to be better people and leaders have to engage them as humans. So, it’s really a humanization of the workforce that we’re seeing happen here. And if organizations are really going to engage humans, they have to have a soul, they have to have a purpose, they have to have a North Star. They have to give people a sense that they’re making an important contribution to society, not just give them orders on what to do next.
Alan Murray:
If the goal here… If we are no longer in a world where the CEO can simply tell everybody what to do and expect them to do it-
Carol Cone:
Do it, right.
Alan Murray:
… but instead has to create a culture that engages people, so they are motivated to do it. You can’t ignore the moral element.
Carol Cone:
If you had to choose one factor that will most influence the next generation of businesses to really become human organization, humanized organization, a force for good. What have you heard? What would you say?
Alan Murray:
Yeah, I think it’s this. I think AI is going to be one step further, one step forward in exactly the conversation you and I are having, because the machines are going to take care of themselves even better than they did before. And what companies have to wrestle with is: how do we differentiate ourselves? We’re all going to have great technology. That’ll be table stakes. If you don’t have great technology, you’re dead. If you do have great technology, then you compete, but you’re going to be competing a lot against a lot of other people who have great technology. So, I think the differentiator is: how do we get better use of talent, better people? And I believe a lot of companies are thinking that way.
Carol Cone:
Great. And your chief people officer cohort is a great testament to that. I can’t wait to see the podcasts and the articles that come out of that. I wanted to ask you a question. You have been at phenomenal organizations, Fortune Time, Pew, The Wall Street Journal, what’s the one most surprising thing that you’ve learned about the true soul of business or about leadership?
Alan Murray:
It’s just the continuing reinforcement of this point that the people part is hard. It is hard. There are very few people who know how to do it well, and it’s going to be the core of winning the future.
Culture is so strong and so persistent and so hard to change. And in some ways the media world got hit with the consequences of technology sooner than most other industries. We were being disintermediated by Google starting in the mid-1990s. And the decline of the legacy media models started in 2000, and has continued at a solid pace since then. So, we were early to feel the effects, and yet there’s so many cases now, 20 years later, where I can still see legacy culture in media organizations that hasn’t adopted to the reality that we’ve been living with for two decades.
Carol Cone:
Wow.
Alan Murray:
So, all of which gets back to the bigger point, which is culture is sticky, culture is hard, and getting it right is critical, important, but difficult work. And that’s why it was so interesting at our CEO Council Summit to hear the same thing is true at Chevron, the same thing is true at AT&T, that this is the great challenge of our times.
Carol Cone:
So, is activating, is discovering an authentic purpose and living it, really bringing it to life in innovation and employee engagement, in customer relations, in community engagement, is that one of the major ways that the culture may evolve?
Alan Murray:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Look, it’s not a silver bullet. You can have a great purpose and a lousy culture and a terrible company, but I’m not sure the opposite is true. I’m not sure you can have a great company if you don’t have your people aligned around a clear, inspiring, engaging-
Carol Cone:
Inspiring, right. I love that. As we begin to wind down, I had asked you in our previous conversation, what were the most pressing social issues of the day? And you said, “Growing inequity and the lack of opportunity, DE&I, climate, taxes, CEO pay, voting rights and China.” A lot.
Alan Murray:
Yeah.
Carol Cone:
Yeah, but so what would you say today? What are the most pressing social issues of today that companies need to pay attention to?
Alan Murray:
Well, China is still clearly on the list. I spend most of my time talking to global companies, and they have grown up in a world of globalization, and they’re now living in a world that sometimes feels like deglobalization, and managing that is a pressing problem. I think most of them, but again, this has gone very quiet, or maybe not most of them, many of them still understand that if you want to run your company for a long time, climate has to be pretty high on your agenda because there are some changes that are going to have to happen. You can’t be a successful company in a world on fire. So, there are some changes that are going to have to happen in the long term. And even though it may not pay to talk about it right now in the current political climate, you still have to pay attention to it. And I can give you dozens of examples when that’s happened.
I think the disappointing thing to me is that DEI has really fallen off the agenda. And you and I have been talking for 30 minutes here about the importance of culture, but I don’t think that the DEI movement did its job in terms of convincing corporate leaders of the core value. You and I know at the end of the day, you have to… This gets back to empathy, frankly. You can’t be a great institution if you don’t have your ear to the ground and you’re listening to all kinds of information from all kinds of places and all kinds of people.
Carol Cone:
And reflect your customers.
Alan Murray:
Yeah. And those people have to reflect your customers. So, I think that’s a fundamental fact.
Carol Cone:
And thank you for that. So, two more questions. What advice would you give to young people who say, “It’s hard times, but I want to work for a company that has got a soul or it’s purposeful, it’s real, it’s authentic.”? What advice do you give to young people today, how they can get that job? Because it’s really hard out there right now.
Alan Murray:
It’s hard. It’s hard. And, look, you have to show some flexibility. If every young person follows their purpose and their purpose doesn’t happen to meet the demands of business at the moment, somebody’s going to be left out in the cold. So, you have to show some flexibility and you have to understand that you can’t expect companies to share all your political beliefs if their customers and their employees don’t share all your political beliefs. So, I think there’s been a lot of inflexibility among young people that has contributed to the problem. But, look, at the end of the day, if I’m right, and I’m pretty sure I am right, companies need employees who are better people, who understand how to build loyalty among groups of people and get everybody aligned around a mission and get everybody moving forward in the same direction. What you referred to as social skills, that’s what they need.
There was a time not too long ago, Carol, when the cover of Business Week said, “Learn how to code. Everybody needs to learn how to code.” Well, that advice no longer holds. The LLMs are going to do a pretty good job of basic coding. What everybody needs are people who can motivate, organize, who can ask the right questions, get people moving in a same direction around a common purpose. That’s the challenge of the future, and that suggests a different approach for young people. It’s probably not spend all your time learning how to code. Maybe spend some of your time studying philosophy or English, which is what I did, or history-
Carol Cone:
Interesting. Yeah.
Alan Murray:
… so that you have the judgment to help lead these organizations into the future.
Carol Cone:
That’s great. Unfortunately, we have to end this great conversation, but I always give the last word to my guest. So, what final word would you like to say, Alan Murray?
Alan Murray:
Look, at the end of the day, I can cite all sorts of potential problems and concerns about where we’re headed, but it’s a very exciting time to be alive. We are going to remake the world over the course of the next couple of decades, and we need everybody to lean in and be a part of that. And try and understand where we’re headed, try and understand the tools that are going to get us there, and try and make sure we use them for good purposes, not bad purposes. Technology is neither good nor bad. It all depends on how you use it.
Carol Cone:
That’s great. Super. Well, you never disappoint, Alan Murray, and it’s been a wonderful conversation, so thank you so much.
Alan Murray:
And Carol, thank you for having me. Thank you for what you do. Keep pushing Purpose because it’s important to how we get to the right place.
Carol Cone:
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I’d love to thank them; Anne Hundertmark and Kristin Kenney at Carol Cone On Purpose, Pete Wright, and Andy Nelson, our crack production team at TruStory FM, and you, our listener. Please rate and rank us because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available, so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
