Marc Stöckli: 13:42
Yeah. You know, starting in 2000, 2001. We really started to do fairly well in 2004 and five, where we won the first larger. And you know, the three four years were a battle. I mean, I had many sleepless nights.
There were many 20th of the month where I didn’t know how to make payroll on the 25th. My co-founder and I, you know, didn’t pay ourselves salary. But you cannot do that to young, young engineers. We we moonlight it on the side. I did some consulting work on the side to finance the engineers.
So that was, you know, a tough, tough year. So that that there we were probably a bit early at the same time, you know, building something new as, as a newcomer, being late doesn’t work either. So so right. You know, it was not terrible, but we were surely early. Interestingly, we started with encryption to the outside, kind of protecting from your firewall until it arrives at the sender.
That was the original thinking and only about 2004 and five. So four years in roughly. I said in a meeting with a mid-sized Swiss private bank and for about one year. One hour into the meeting, I really felt I don’t understand the client. What are they asking for?
Until it dawned on me that they basically were asking for internal encryption for the part where the email is still within your premises. And they were concerned about, you know, sysadmins and all that reading the email, you know, in their breaks, reading the emails of the of the executive team and kind of learning what’s going on in the company. And that actually was probably one of the real breakthroughs, because we understood that and we found a solution. We patented that solution, and it really became the industry standard. Basically, all the large RFPs asked later for internal encryption without a client plugin, without any client side software, and we were the only ones that were able to deliver that.
So that was real, a real breakthrough that helped us to really scale and be quite successful.
John Corcoran: 15:47
Now, I would assume that this is something that comes with whatever your email service provider is. Now for most companies, is is that true? Like in other words, like, was there a window of time when this business opportunity existed? Does it not exist today or does this continue to be a need?
Marc Stöckli: 16:07
It continues. I mean, we we sold to a competitor Dash collaborator in December 2021, Palo Alto based Kite Works. It’s still the product is still the key product in their portfolio. The product is still email has a protocol, SMTP. And whether you use the Microsoft Environment, USB exchange and, you know, 360 or, you know, you know, at that time there was Lotus Notes, it does not matter because the protocol is the same.
John Corcoran: 16:40
Yeah.
Marc Stöckli: 16:41
Yeah. So, so basically we’re just one element in the chain of email. The same as, as, you know, virus or spam filters or another element in the sequence. And we’re in there as well.
John Corcoran: 16:52
I’ve not heard the name Lotus Notes in a while when I. So I’m going to date myself here. But when I, I interned in the Clinton White House and the speechwriting office in 1997, and they used all Lotus Notes in the white House, then back then I think it changed eventually the so you narrow the vision and it takes a couple years to get traction. What about 2008? Did that affect you guys in a big way like many companies?
Marc Stöckli: 17:20
No. Well, yes and no. We I think it we were lucky in essence. I mean, until 2006, early seven, most of our larger clients were financial services clients, banking, insurance, reinsurance. You know, that’s that’s.
Switzerland is big. They’re all in front of the house. So that was a clear dominant sector for for our client base. We managed to win our first large industry clients and pharma clients and government agencies around that time. So when the financial crisis hit and the banks would not, you know, would not buy anything new anymore and probably even, you know, reduce their, their, their license costs.
We had built a solid roster of, of reference clients in other segments, but it was really tight and there was no strategic foresight on that one. That was pure luck.
John Corcoran: 18:17
So you run the business. You, I think, have young kids around the time that you’re growing this business. Was that really challenging for you with travel?
Marc Stöckli: 18:25
No, I didn’t have.
John Corcoran: 18:26
Not yet. Okay.
Marc Stöckli: 18:27
I actually stepped out from an operational role quite early 2006 and just moved into a board role. I handed over the CEO role to one of my co-founders, who up to then had led Marceting sales, and so he stepped up to to CEO because it really became a sales execution. Our strategy was right. Our product was was good, was kind of world class. So it was really about software sales direct, as well as then also building distribution channels in direct sales.
I’m not a board a born software sales person. It’s not my strength nor my big passion. And that was the the main reason to move out. So I had I had moved out already. I so my kids were born at 2011 and 2013.
John Corcoran: 19:09
And so you actually for many years were in the board role. While this company is growing until you sell it around 2021. What inspired the sale? But this is about a year, I guess, into Covid.
Marc Stöckli: 19:25
Yes. I mean, typical entrepreneurial story. There’s a pretty big drop in between. When I did exit, we had a pretty big fight.
John Corcoran: 19:35
It was when you exited in 2006, you mean or.
Marc Stöckli: 19:39
Yes, from my own company. Right. With. With my co-founder.
John Corcoran: 19:42
When you exited from the from the operation. From from the operational role.
Marc Stöckli: 19:45
Exactly, exactly. Had to do with timing, with the shareholders agreement, with the situation we were in. And it took, it took quite a long while to, to fix that to initially we almost sued each other and risk clients. We I mean, we even risked the company because we took some of our fight to our clients, which is about as stupid thing as you can do as an entrepreneur, as a business person. So that was a tough period.
Also, you know, very, very heavy weights on the shoulders.
John Corcoran: 20:15
So you said a moment ago that you felt that you were not a software sales guy. And but was it your business partner wanted you to stay doing that, say, active?
Marc Stöckli: 20:25
It was not so much that it was really that that we had a shareholders agreement. You know, we were hustling, so we didn’t have huge law firms involved drafting that shareholders agreement that that is more my domain than anybody else. Of my co-founder early team. So I drafted that. We had put in a time limit because they cannot be open ended in our jurisdiction, otherwise they become invalid and void.
So we had set five years. I basically exited after the five years, which on legal terms allowed me to keep my full equity stake, which triggered a large reaction. We later, you know, found a solution. I gave away some of my equity for free to to kind of.
John Corcoran: 21:03
Smooth it over.
Marc Stöckli: 21:04
Kind of smooth it over and make right for the fact that I had left earlier and all that, but that, that took us, that took us a long while to come to terms. And it was it was stressful for everybody. And, and only, you know, after, you know, really quite a bit of time to heal the wounds. We got back together to, to more, more civil terms and one of the, one of the most beautiful aspects of selling the company, besides the success of selling the company and a good exit with a good buyer and good terms and everything, was that the last year negotiating the whole sale. We worked again together completely as a team as I have a lot of transaction experience.
I really was a very crucial. Even though I had no operational role, I was very heavily involved in negotiating and really structuring the transaction and all that, and we really work together again as a team, which after the big fight, you know, was was very rewarding.
John Corcoran: 21:57
Yeah. That’s interesting because you had such at that point had such different experiences over the preceding 15 years. You had been in the board role, not an operational role. Your business partner had been in an operational role. So I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d said that, you know, you viewed things very differently because of those previous lived experiences over that 15 year period?
Marc Stöckli: 22:26
Probably yes and no. But I think at the end, I mean, we had we had two other discussions over that period of selling the company. They came. Came to nothing. One, one, one is actually a huge fraud case.
We almost sold the company to a basically a Potemkin village. There was like a just a facade that that that CEO was actually was sued and convicted for wire fraud and other things and, and, and kind of got a 50 year jail term. It was a complete fraud. And we we even did the reverse due diligence. And the company in the US we had hired did not find anything.
John Corcoran: 23:05
So so they were trying to buy you in a fraudulent way. Really. Wow.
Marc Stöckli: 23:09
Yeah. Yeah. They had they had they had non-existing customers. They had non-existing employees. They had actors be in their office whenever they had due diligence type deals.
They had basically Ponzi scheme of their investors putting in money and the due diligence that we paid for with a fairly reputable consulting and accounting firm. They didn’t find anything.
John Corcoran: 23:33
That’s crazy. That’s crazy. How did you not go through with the deal then? How did you discover it? Finally discover that it was fraudulent?
Marc Stöckli: 23:41
We didn’t. The CEO, basically, we were so close to signing. And then the CEO disappeared. There was no more communication. Really?
And we only talk about. I don’t know what the delay was, but surely a month where we didn’t hear we had no clue what’s happening. And then we learned that he was arrested.
John Corcoran: 24:01
Wow. Oh, geez.
Marc Stöckli: 24:03
No, no, we did not find out. We probably would have closed and we would have gotten equity, which was worthless. So it was, I mean, that close to catastrophe. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 24:12
Wow. That’s crazy. That’s a scary experience.
Marc Stöckli: 24:17
Yes.
John Corcoran: 24:17
So you make the decision to sell the company and you sell it. Was it unrelated to Covid that you sold it? Yes, yes.
Marc Stöckli: 24:27
Entirely unrelated. It was really kind of the blueprint of an ideal buyer that we always had thought, which is kind of complimentary product range, complimentary GEOs where they operate. Our bias is very strong in the US and was not so strong in Europe. And a stronger distribution than we have. We always had a world class product.
We always were considered the best product really in this segment. But we always had underwhelming distribution because we bootstrapped. We grow very slowly. Not the typical classic software case, you know, crazy growth and pull in money and A rounds, B rounds, C rounds. We had always self-financed and grown from cash flow.
And that puts some natural limits on growth. So we just had an underdeveloped distribution not really adequate for the quality of the product. And our buyer has definitely a better distribution. So that’s where we are. And the key people are all still on board which you know four years almost four.
Yeah. It’s quite unusual. You know, most people you see leave as soon as their earnout is finished and sometimes earlier they’re gone. Not in our case. So I think that’s testament to a really good buyer and a good combination.
John Corcoran: 25:41
By the way, during this 15 year period that you were on the board of. How would you like it?
Marc Stöckli: 25:47
I was not the whole time on the board because the initial period when we thought, obviously I was not on the board, but I was still a key shareholder, of course. Yes. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 25:55
So when you were on the board of Timo. Yeah. How would you assess, looking back now of how that board functioned or are you happy with it?
Marc Stöckli: 26:04
Yes, happy, but I wouldn’t really call it a it was really it was only the operational people. It was a board to fulfill the legal obligation of having a board. It was not a board in the sense of, of really a different group of people providing support and challenge with more distance to the operational business in, in my role a little bit because I was not in daily operations anymore, But I wouldn’t call it. It was an okay port, but not a real board in the sense of pride in kind of these external checks and balances and sparring and coaching.
John Corcoran: 26:42
Well then let’s talk about some of the other board work you’ve done, because you’ve been on the board of lots of other entities. I’m very curious about you serving as, as you know, going all the way up to being on the board of directors of the Global Entrepreneurs Organization, 20,000 members worldwide. It’s very competitive. There’s lots of entrepreneurs who, you know, who really try hard to get to that point. Yes.
Reflecting back for me a little bit on some of those experiences. You can, we could start with you. Let’s start with that one okay.
Marc Stöckli: 27:10
Yeah. So the EO Global Board is a very interesting role. You can easily discard it as oh it’s just not for profit. You know it’s not the same thing. I would really argue the opposite. It’s a really complex organization with 20,000 members.
You know, if you look at the overall budget, if you add the global budget at the regions and all the chapters, it’s basically a multi-billion dollar company. Also, the fact we’re operating in more than 70 Markets, there’s very few multinationals that operate in 70 Markets. You will not find a financial services firm that really has physical locations like we have chapters, right? In every Marcet. Yeah.
Our members and staff structure, our members are extremely demanding. They’re they’re they’re warmhearted and graceful.
John Corcoran: 28:01
But they all have opinions. Yeah.
Marc Stöckli: 28:04
They’re very opinionated. Right. So it’s it’s it’s really it’s a very challenging, very complex structure. And I learned I think I learned for me it’s like the global board experience is, is almost comparable to my Wharton MBA. I, you know, at the right stage of my trajectory, and that’s one of the key drivers I think we should emphasize in NIO.
It’s not just giving back. We also should be absolutely honest, look at it selfishly and say, I serve you because, you know, I can learn so much. It’s an amazing learning opportunity. Because what I think is special in NIO is you have no hierarchy. It’s very pure.
It’s very interesting. And everybody, I always say I lead an organization with 20,000 members, where every single one of the 20,000 thinks they know. They think they know better than me, right? Yeah. So we’re leading leaders, and I think that’s also the reality.
More and more in our real life, in our business life hierarchy is diminishing. You know, the old world was a leader ‘s follower. It was very hierarchical and patriarchal. And you just said, okay, I want it this way. And it was done that way.
Now that the leadership style is much more collaborative, I think the way we serve in NIO is much closer to modern leadership, and it’s a fantastic practice ground.
John Corcoran: 29:27
Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about any of the changes that you either drove or that you saw occur while you were so intimately involved, either at the global level or across the organization in terms of board structure in particular?
Marc Stöckli: 29:44
Yes. So one thing which was started by my predecessors, Bob Tyson and David Anderson, and I picked it up, it was a big emphasis to try to professionalize the board, to just really become more professional as a board, and that includes many things. For example, it’s now mandatory for incoming global board members to attend a class. It’s called the High Performance Board Program at IMD. One of the kind of signature programs about board governance in the world.
The whole meeting structure, meeting preparation. I think we really improved that a lot. We try to standardize the facilitation of the board meetings. Have a manual for that. So I think we made good progress on, on, and on that side. The biggest change I drove was really restructuring how we’re organized in EO, especially on the member side.
We used to have to operate very heavily in silos. We operate and we optimize what mathematically we call local optima. But if you optimize local optima, you don’t get the optimum for the big picture. So we had the team working for the forum. We had a team working for, you know, the, the, the universities where the team worked for, for GCA, for, for accelerator.
But what we really need to optimize for is the member experience. And we didn’t have this overall this consistent. So we basically broke down the silos and tried to work the whole planning of the year of the Multi-year as well as the year, the execution to much more work cross-functionally and not in this product and service silos. And that was a very big change project. And I underestimated the difficulty of driving this change in you.
John Corcoran: 31:39
And I just want to reflect on the fact that not only was this a difficult product project that you took on, but you had just sold your baby the day the year before. So 2021 and 2022 back to back. You sell your baby. And then you also serve as the chair of the Global Board of Directors. This was a busy, busy time for you.
Marc Stöckli: 32:01
Indeed. And it was quite fortunate because in essence, the global, especially the role as global chair. And it’s really 18 months because you step into the role and the last half year before is already fully intense with the present meetings and all that. So it’s really 18 months of unpaid full time work. So for me, it was quite important, I think, for my sanity of mind.
It was quite important to have a little bit of a liquidity cushion in the back that helped, that helped to be able to, to do that role and not be worried too much. Yeah. The 18 months as global chair were tough on my family. I was I was meeting I met in person with 72 chapter boards. Wow.
In that period, besides.
John Corcoran: 32:52
18 months.
Marc Stöckli: 32:53
In 18 months, besides the present meetings, besides the glcs, besides the board meetings. Wow. And all that. So? So I was away a lot that especially the last months of my chair term were a strain on the family.
John Corcoran: 33:09
Wow. That is really difficult. What inspired me to make boards work? What inspired you to put all your ideas into a book?
Marc Stöckli: 33:20
So when you roll off as a global board or as a global chair, basically you go from 100 to 0 overnight. The term ends June 30th and July. You know, your chairman on June 30th and your nobody on July 1st. My Dave Anderson always called it. So after, you know, after my terms ends I’m Dave who.
Right. And I said, yeah I’ll be Marc who. And it’s a very, very good characteristic. So I knew there would be a time where I had time and I deliberately took that time. I deliberately left my agenda pretty white and open and just took time to think and reflect and write down.
And pretty soon it emerged that this is really one of the things I want to prioritize in the year, to really write down everything. And the context is, is, as I said, I mean, talking to so many entrepreneurs, I would say kind of anecdotally on this one, if I ask 100 entrepreneurs how happy they are with their boards, there’s very few that are really happy. There’s a few that say it’s okay. There’s quite a vast majority that is not happy. And that, by the way, is mirrored by talking to VCs and PE.
Private equity executives and family business owners are not just founders. It’s really across the board. And that just felt like this cannot be I mean, as soon as your company has a certain size or if you have investors, you need to have a you need to have a board of directors. So given that, why not try to do it? Well why, why, why keep it at a nuisance or necessity level?
Why not elevate it to something that is truly valuable and it is so valuable if, if set in place correctly, it can be so incredibly powerful. So let’s help. Let’s help more people kind of unleash their boards and kind of turn them from necessity to, to, to vital.
John Corcoran: 35:13
Yeah. And conversely, if you’ve anyone sat through a dysfunctional board meeting. It is so painful. So yeah, I’ve spent, I guess, I guess about 16 or 18 years now. I’ve been on a board of some sort, including being chair of my town’s planning commission, which is in my town, is like a stepping stone towards being mayor and, you know, had meetings where a hundred of my neighbors are there, basically not literally throwing stones, but really upset at decisions that we had to make.
And so that, you know, kind of crazy and also been on our EO chapter board. So experience those sorts of things. But I’m curious, there’s so much you can unpack in terms of how to make a board function. Well, from the agenda to the way you run the meeting. But take us, take us through your vision.
What are some of the key points that make a functional board, you know, really provide value to a company?
Marc Stöckli: 36:05
So I try on the big picture. I kind of have three buckets. One I call behavioral norms, one strategic thrust. And the third is more tactical. The, you know, preparing the facilitating the aftermath of the meeting on the behavioral norms.
There’s elements like keeping the ego in check. You know, typically if you serve on a board, quite likely there have been some achievements in your life. Right. There is something you’re good at. Right.
That often comes along with self-confidence. Self-confidence is healthy and good. But if it goes a little bit overboard and turns to ego, and it’s a very fine line if you have too many egos in the room, that’s not good. Or or what I call it. And you know that from an EO beginner’s mind that the mindset is incredibly important, but again, difficult to have on the board because these people are experienced, these people are knowledgeable, and these people are competent.
So the the fallacy or the, the the risk that somebody or the whole group can react to something with, I know that I’m fine. You know, I kind of shut down. This is quite high. And to replace that judgment with curiosity and say, no, no, let’s let’s look at it. You know, as a founder, I might easily think, okay, I know so much better than this investor who just comes in once a quarter.
And the investor thinks, exactly. Oh, I know so much more than this young founder. You know, I’ve seen 20 of these deals. I’ve seen 20 years of that. So, that is something that you need to break through on the strategic side.
There is, for example, what I call the information asymmetry, very difficult to overcome because, you know, for a board to work for a board member to be able to contribute, I need to be pretty well informed. There is no board pack good enough that on a standalone basis, puts me in a position to truly contribute. As a board member, I need to have more information channels. So in my case, for example, I try to co-locate. I try to work from the companies where I serve on the board.
Every once in a while I just spend a day there on site. That doesn’t mean I do only meetings for that company that day, but I’m there physically. I bump into people, I go grab, I don’t drink coffee, so I go grab a water. You know, I water colored water, cooler discussions, informal meetings, feeling the vibes, what’s going on? Or I mentor a few people.
In such companies, there’s a variety of steps to establish informality. I have a habit. I get a list of when people have birthdays or anniversaries of some companies, and I just called them. I said, this is Marc, I’m chairing this company. A beekeeper is such a company.
Every Monday on their app, we get a list of anniversaries and birthdays, and I’ll just pick a few people and call them over the week and get information. I get, you know, people feel recognized. They feel heard. It’s so powerful to bridge this information gap. Conflicts of interest.
Huge topic, especially in venture backed and PE backed companies very under-acknowledged, not written about. And it’s not just the major things that we know just you know, if, if, if you have a venture investor and you’re a founder CEO and this venture investor invested in you around who is the best investor to win over for your B round? It’s that same investor. Right. But so I have an incentive to, you know, at some point kind of paint the picture more, more rows than, than it truly is.
Because I don’t want to disappoint them.
John Corcoran: 39:51
Investor board, but at the same time, an investor.
Marc Stöckli: 39:53
At the same time, I should be as transparent as possible. So that is an inherent conflict that is there. It’s not acknowledged. It’s not talked about different time horizons for exit. You know, a PE or a VC might have the fund turned there at the end of life.
So they push for an exit. But maybe not everybody wants to be in the family business, maybe different parts of the family have different liquidity needs. Some want the dividend, others want to reinvest in the company. And that’s where another strategic thrust, where an independent chairman can play a huge role. Because you bring in that objectivity, you can absorb the blows between, you know, a CEO might be a founder and and the director, an investor has the investor head and the director has the mixer’s roles.
And as an independent chair, you can call that out. You can call that out and say, are you talking as an investor? Are you talking as a director? That’s not so easy to do if you’re not independent. So there’s huge value you can provide.
And on the tactical side, you know, board packs, you would think it’s not rocket science to give good information to boards. I’ve been on the board for about three years for a private private equity backed Scandinavian high tech company. Very nice private equity people, terrible board meetings. The board pack sometimes arrived less than 24 hours before the meeting. 160 pages PowerPoint.
Impossible. I mean, terrible. There’s no there’s no way. And then to add insult to injury, we went through the slides in the meeting. So in all my boards I lived the Jeff Bezos mantra.
I say word documents, not PowerPoint in the PowerPoint because I think, or I’m convinced it crystallizes. Thinking much more clearly crystallizes. What are the real issues? Much better if you write them down than if you kind of obfuscate them in bullet points in PowerPoint.
John Corcoran: 41:46
Interesting. I didn’t know that was a thing that he did. So you find you have to coach the companies on how the board pack should be, how it should be prepared.
Marc Stöckli: 41:56
I had companies, I had a young company that I was chairing. It didn’t work out. It was not successful. It went insolvent in Berlin that I chaired for about three years. And they had a fantastic board pack for every board meeting.
A write up, concise, clear, very structured kind of repeated structure and amazing feedback. And it’s possible. And another thing on the board is again a policy many founders or CEOs think of as a chore. You know, I have to produce this board pack for the board. And for me, it’s about the same as, you know, the 5% reflections we do in forums or homework as a kid.
I don’t do it for the teacher. I don’t do it for others. I do it for myself. Yeah. So I encourage the teams I work with to say, okay, you do this, you step away from.
You take this luxury of stepping away from the day-to-day for two hours. You write down, okay, what’s on your mind? What are you most proud of? What causes you sleepless nights? Write these things down.
And that’s the information the board wants to have.
John Corcoran: 42:57
Well, tell you. As an aside, I’m a graduate of the accelerator program and the accelerator program. You have these board packs that you present which you don’t in EO. And I think that’s the one I love EO, but the one thing I regret is that I really enjoyed that reflection, that doing those board packs each month when I was an accelerator and I and I, there’s a part of me that regrets that that’s not a bigger part of. Interesting.
Yeah, exactly. Because I really enjoyed that. Yeah. I want to we’re almost out of time. So I want to wrap up by asking about your most important board, which is your family.
And you’ve written about this book, 18 summers, which Jim Shields authored. I’ve had him as a guest on this podcast. Great guy. And he writes this book about, you know, you only have 18 summers with your kids and the importance of doing it. You and I are in a dads group together through EO and care a lot about these things.
Talk a little bit about, you know, this is top of mind for me right now because I’m about to leave on Sunday for a family trip. And you know, we’re heading into summer, but what does that mean for you? That idea is the 18 summers.
Marc Stöckli: 43:58
With me in ten days. For me, the biggest luxury I have as an entrepreneur is that I have a fairly high degree over my agenda. It’s not perfect. There’s transactions at times. There’s some client demands, you know.
But overall, when I compare it to my corporate peers that are in senior roles in banks or whatever, I have a very high degree of over my agenda. And, and I dedicate that mostly to, to my family and mostly to my kids. So during school vacation, I really try to wind down. I do not not work. That’s not possible, but I really limit the number of meetings I have, the number of calls I have.
I kind of reduce that to the absolute minimum. And I really spent the vacation with my family and with the kids and and so in my case, it’s in ten days, we’ll be spending two weeks at our lake house and then three weeks in southern France. And yeah, every once in a while I have a call or I will work a little bit, you know, responding to some things for an hour in the morning. But I really try to dedicate that time to the family and, and take advantage of, of that privilege.
John Corcoran: 45:02
Yeah. When I first came across that idea, the 18 summers, it just crushed me. It was just like, oh, it just makes it seem so real and just so sad and everything. But, you know, eventually it just kind of motivates you, I think, to take that time seriously with your kids. Yes.
Yeah.
Marc Stöckli: 45:19
And the other great practice from the book is that quarterly one on one with the kids, you know, just an experience, an activity. Nail it as you nail a board meeting. It’s not movable in the agenda. It’s fixed. Yeah.
That’s just a beautiful habit. And it creates so much connection and bonds. It’s beautiful.
John Corcoran: 45:36
It is. Yeah. Marc, I want to wrap up with my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of gratitude and expressing gratitude to those who’ve helped you in your journey. Peers, contemporaries, mentors, other board members.
Who would you want to acknowledge?
Marc Stöckli: 45:49
I think as we talked quite a bit about EO, Dave Anderson comes to mind. He handed over the chair role to me. We initially had a fairly difficult relationship. Not not not animus, but just, you know, a little bit of friction and, you know, probably on both sides a little bit of ego involved. But once the chairman transition started, he was immensely supportive and always has prepared me incredibly well as well as it gets.
You know, I think in that transition time, I, you know, we spoke almost daily and it was such a great example of how a transition of, you know, role to role. It doesn’t have to be a global chair in CEO to global chair. It can be any role how a transition really should be done. Completely ego less is just best for the organization. How can I help?
Do you want to decide this? Should I decide this? Do you take the lead here? Do you, you know, always keep each other in the loop? It was just amazing teamwork.
Tiki taka. They call it FC Barcelona football, soccer style. It was just amazing and fully supportive that I had that comes to mind.
John Corcoran: 47:01
That’s great. And Dave is a friend and he’s a past client. He and his business partner, Roger and are big fans of theirs. Great guys. And yeah, so thank you for shouting that out.
Past guests on the podcast. So I’ll share that here as well. Marc, this has been great. Where can people go to learn more about you, connect with you and learn more about the book when it comes out?
Marc Stöckli: 47:21
So working on the publishing angle now, working also on, you know, having a little bit of a landing page for, for the content. So the label is Make Boards Work and hopefully I’ll have some of you as readers and practitioners of what I’m passionate about.
John Corcoran: 47:39
Awesome. And so LinkedIn, would that be a good place to go to?
Marc Stöckli: 47:42
LinkedIn is perfect. Yes yes.
John Corcoran: 47:44
Yes.
Marc Stöckli: 47:44
Absolutely. Yes.
John Corcoran: 47:45
Okay. Awesome. All right. Thanks, Marc.
Marc Stöckli: 47:47
Thank you John. Thank you.
Outro: 47:51
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