Communities with inclusion and id like to take a moment to recognize our members attending today. They continue to be the background of support for the club and help enable us to offer wonderful and diverse programming now and in the future and we also like to welcome members of the 20 20 class of fellows with rising nexgen business. [inaudible] its an honor for me to introduce our special guest today, trustee at the economic club, deanna mulligan. Deanna was chief executive officer in 2011 and served in that role until this month. She joined in 2008 the Vice President to leave the company in its Spiritual Life and was appointed to presidency operating officer assured as a trustee on the board of the vanguard group, a position she held since 2017 and has a background in both energy and operational themes. [inaudible] she was previously a director on the board of arts council and active in the industry and in the daa and directors of life insurers and the department of Financial Services advisory board. Committed to advancing communities, service on the board of trustees for the new york presbyterianhospital , catalyst chief executive and the museum in british connecticut. She was appointed to president obamas Advisory Council for Young Americans and is currently a member of the Stanford Graduate School of business undergraduate councils. In 2019 fortune made her one of the theme of powerful women in business and recognized her as one of the 50 most powerful women in new york for the fifth time in 2011. In her recent book higher purpose which date is tomorrow she offers an inspired analysis and fills the skills gap and comprehensive guide to how businesses can meet the employment challenge for 2020 and we are fortunate to have club member and chief executive officer alex doing the honors. Any questions with respect to the club for members in advance and as a reminder, this conversation is on the record as we do have it on the line. Thank you so much john. We do have a long list of accomplishments and surprisingly, its been on the book. So we are really going to talk about that today but i wanted to start you did become ceo in 2011 and joined in 2008, but 2011 when you talk about this inyour book , you wanted to make sure that there was a guiding principle there for people to follow and it was about doing the right thing and holding yourself to a higher standard. That was during that time and then you refresh those and you say in your book the principles are great except they are what they are so i think its the language we live so thats part of what you did in the book higher purpose. So my question is in terms of in your role as ceo, how have you maintain this purposeful leadership during the promoter was times now in 2020 . I want to thank you, its an honor to be here with you today to help you monitor this discussion and for inviting me to this carveouts, i feel honored to be here with you on the line area and thank you for introducing my new book. And first of all i want to say thank you to the people at guardian, many of whom are probably onthis call today. Also my cowriter who helped me organize my thoughts but going back to your question about purpose. Its a Purpose Driven Company and where now public, we are owned by ourpolicyholders and we are a mutual company. We are driven by providing value to our policyholders. Guardian is a 150 years old and we always say we want to be here for another 150 years. So i think people are attracted to guardian because of our purpose. We are with people in their most difficult times and certainly thats been true in the covid environment. Were here to provide economic support when they become disabled or when they cant work and we also administer paid family leave which has become very important in this time as you know. So purpose is a natural thing and it is how we run the company at guardian along with our values which you stated. We did the right thing, people and we holdourselves to very high standards. I know having worked with you over the years we are very concerned aboutthat in diversity as well in your company because its very purposeful. This book higher purpose is how companies can close the skills gap and i think the timing of publishing this is important because right now its about how to rescale and keep workers in change but when did this idea come to you to do this book . Is this recent . I think as john mentioned i came to guardian in 2008 and while guardian was not deeply affected by the Great Recession, such that we were upgraded not long after, there was chaos all around us as you recall. And i had served a number of people who were losing their jobs in this Great Recession and as you recall it took many years for unemployment to come back down and go down to be reemployed and i started thinking to myself the next time we have a disrupting event i dont want guardian to be a company that lays off a lot of people so how do we deal with whats going on in the world in terms of technological change and also for us , a very low Interest Rate . How do we deal with these things and make sure that we can keep as many people with us as possible and be true to our values and our purpose . So in 2000 and 11, 12 time period after super storm sandy we felt that we needed to make a lot of change in the company and thats what started me thinking about writing the book and also, it seems like just came on the scene but had been on the work for a numberof years. Really the 2008 crisis prompted you to think about that rather than laying off specifically what we do , so were going to rescale thats the question now is how did you do this meeting current and future needs. How do i look at the rescaling and is it Just Technology or is it a broader thing that youre taking in terms of that rescaling so what do they take in the rescaling particularly Large Companies that had to scale back . Thats a great set of questions. Ill start with the firstone , your comment that it costs a lot more money to lay people off is definitely true. These have shown that and this is your business that you know can cost 5 to 10 times as much to lay people off as to rescale someone into the same job so in this environment, this economic environmentit makes a lot of sense to try to rescale as many people as possible. We know that its not going to be 100 percent solution but i think company so it to their people and we as Business Leaders it to the country and economy to try to do this. And yes, the question is how we do it at scale. There are a lot of people right now who are reaching on the answers to that question. We had done it at scale i think our biggest scale project happened not too long after sandy when we said we were put out of our building for nine months, we left on a friday and didnt come back until nine months later because we were in lower manhattan. We had water wash through our building but then infrastructure and the street in front of us was basically destroyed and we had to wait for the asbestos to the cleanup and our electricity and internet to be stored and it was taking nine months so after that, i said that it. We need a new technology platform. We need to be location independent and we hired dean delvecchio to be our pio and he mapped out a plan and it took us about five years to move from our Data Center Infrastructure largely into the cloud and in doing that required a massive rescaling of it people. And many of them were given a choice whether they would like to stay in their current jobs but they were told its not going to be forever or whether they like to rescale or retire. Generally many people chose to be rescaled into the new process technology so from that kind of early when, we developed a number of highlights and developed a number of programs and really focus on developing a learning culture but were not the only one. In the book we had many examples of Companies Large and small who had rescaled and we talked about the way they did. We did receive some outside help and there are Many Companies going up now and many of thelarge consulting firms offering to help and i know Companies Like yours know a lot about this. While its possible to do it internally and on ones own, its also possible to go to get some outside help and do it more quickly. Its not Just Technology, this is beyond technology that youve beenrescaling. Can you talk a little bit about other scales being changed . People are scaling in different technologies and certainly a large number of the jobs that we have the skill or have been in technology but just looking at some research a few days ago that talked about the top 10 skills for 2020 and their changing very rapidly but things like video design and videoconferencing, youd be surprised given the environment and all of a sudden there really about technology. Communication skills, breaking down silos, really important when youre doing things remotely. Tech skills are always a perennial on that list so that technology, certainly soft skills areimportant. I recall recently a call with the ceo that says soft skills are at right now so we need a combination ofboth hard and soft skills if you will. How many challenges have you faith guardian in terms of when you started the rescaling and are you still doing it and what are the obstacles that your company and other companies are facing when youare presented with that task . I think i hear from other companies sometimes that its a massive project, how can we rescale at scale and i say dark small. Start small, be prepared to scale and then focus on developing a learning culture so start small, find a problem that is investing in today and say if we had a different skillset or a different way of looking at this how far can we go . Then figure out how to get those skills into the organization and thats the way to do that. Everything from working with your local Community College to looking online for Research Programs to go and get help. But give people the room to fail. This is not going to work the first time and finally i think the most important thing is if wedevelop a learning culture , if you develop a learning culture in the organizationnot everything has to be scaled down. People are going to start applying knowledge to solve their problems and are going to start looking for and asking for help in rescaling themselves. You speak about this learning culture because the era of the 40 year career slot, people are going to make what have you so youre talking about that saying its okay if you rescale people and they leave you and they goelsewhere. And that actually is not a bad thing because you may have somebody from someother company but some would say i dont want to do that, i dont want to lose my comp employee. Can you talk about it as a moral imperative, and essential obligation to make this pathway, talk about that. I think if you look at whats happening in the world right now , this problem is a big one. We have a big problem in not just the United States but around the world of people have lost their jobs through no fault of their own cause of the situation in which we find ourselves. And governments is not going to be able to solve the problem on its own. But Education Systems are not going to be able to solve the problem on its own and certainly the people affected are not going to be able to solve on its own. We need just to step up, be a partner in this and take a leadership role and develop some Publicprivate Partnerships across business partnerships to work on this issue. Its just too big for any one entity to handle on its own. And in terms of the people who say well, what if i retrain my people and they leave . I would say what if you dont retrainthem and they say . The world is moving so fast right now and customer expectation although weve certainly seen this in covid are changing and you need an educated, flexible , fast, agile workforce to be able to meet customerneeds. I think its incumbent on all of us to try to make this happen. And in the partnerships, you talk about those in your book 2, any of which should be local as well as a higher level in terms of coming together to make that happen. Absolutely, i think its very important to reach out in your local communities in which you operate so weve done that in a series of partnerships with Community Colleges around the country to help them. We started out saying we want to help you but we ended up being hoped as well because we hired many people from Community Colleges which really wasnt a force of hiring for us before. And they turned out to be great assets to the company. So yes, i think reaching out to your local Community Colleges, we talk in the book about the ibm school which is a fairly wellknown story at this point about how i the end we reached out to high schools and help them develop a program where their graduates not only help high school but some have an Associates Degree and ibm hired all those people and not only has ibm designed its own tests, they put a model out there that other companies can use we talk in the book about a Small Business in upstate new york, a cabinetmaking business and in it, small communities so that they could have trained cabinetmakers join them after high school graduation. Though this doesnt have to be a corporate only phenomenon or a Large Company phenomenon. And i think small towns across this country being affected pretty hard right now in the crisis and are also going to have to find a way to rebuild theireconomy and their workforces. In doing that, taking inside of high school and giving them internships, we also donate to some of the underserved communities. The in terms of that training, its enormously beneficial for people to come up on the Vocational Training because you challenge the fouryear degree here, is it really necessary to go to these Community Colleges . Thank you for raising this point about inclusion and diversity which is weighing on everyones mind right now. 50 percent of our interns come from underserved communities for diverse backgrounds and we are finding that Community Colleges on the source, we also for the people who have high school and certificate cases as their credentials but not necessarily a College Degree and of course continue to train them when theyarrive. Thats worked out very well for us. We recently started a Program Stanford university where one can earn a bachelors degree online at guardian free of charge and we looked at the statistics in who is using that program and we found it is by far the majority of women and people from other underserved and diverse backgrounds which drove us and also people within their first five years of their career so the thing thats working for us is people come to us, they maybe have a certificate or maybe a Technical High School degree or associatesdegree in a Community College. They can take College Classes while theyre being trained at guardian and earn a College Degree without undertaking that bone crushing debt that we sometimes hear and it really helps us to make our population more reflective of the communities in which we have and people we serve so when for the employee, its a win for our customers and its a win for guardian. So the timing of executive searches you know that we took time out to have our plans look at people a little differently and maybe Skilled Staffing if they are different backgrounds or hiring for positions that before they might have gone with a different experience, it sounds like youre saying you can hire a great person who has a different background. The biggest roundtable weve recently taken up and its done a lot of research on this idea of skills backing and certifications, a fouryear College Degree is a great thing, im not going to say people shouldnt get fouryear College Degrees but sometimes a fouryear College Degree can think you have you have the bank but the doesnt teach you how to fill the need for a specific job. People who for whatever reason dont have a College Degree that actually have the skills needed to do the job in previous times have often been left out of the job market because Many Companies have previously used a fouryeardegree as a screener , were finding increasingly companies are not using the fouryear degree as a screener anymore. Theyre saying we want to hire people with these specific skills whether they have a degree or not and the Business Roundtable is trying to make it easier for companies to identify those skills and working to make it easier for our potential employees to identify their skills. We have a ways to go on this as a society but if we can move from more of the degree base to a skills base, not to rely on degrees, a skillsbased hiring situation , i think we can put more people to work more productively and we can move faster in this environment where skills that are required are changing. It doesnt end when you walk across the stage and collect your diploma. Your learning journey is really justbeginning. So that learning environment, the culture that you built atguardian , people come in their mentor by others in terms of building those skills and to stack them as such so is t