Richard Fairbank

I started my own practice.

Um, and but one of the big insights from working on Lean Enterprise was, um, I kept spending time with all these amazing teams like, uh, you know, the founder of Capital One, Rich Fairbank, um, the founders of Slack, Spotify, all these amazing people.

And the, the thing that I kept finding when trying to work with them was, you know, learning new skills was never the problem.

Like, these, these people were super bright, super accomplished.

Smartest person you know?

Rich Fairbank, the founder of our company.

Best advice

you've ever

Why do you do it? How important is it to your team? And what do you think it builds for you to do that?

It's a learned skill over time.

I will tell you, there are two people here, my direct boss, Frank LaPrad, and Rich Fairbank, our founder.

They are very involved leaders in the best possible way, not micromanaging, but certainly showing us the passion for sweating the details.

But I've known Evapian for about 25 years when I was with the Technology Council.

And I knew Matt Calkins, our CEO, and I knew what they were doing.

And it dawned on me that this would be a unique opportunity.

So Appian was founded 25 years ago as a platform-based company where we basically sit on top of data, both in the public and private sector, and make it actionable.

And so, you know, if you can make a personal connection with folks and go beyond the superficial... go beyond the talking points, I think that's a leadership lesson that will treat you well in life.

The other thing I'll say here, and I'm interested in your take on this too, Maggie, is the best GR shops think not just on the here and now, but looking around the corner.

My old CEO, Rich Fairbank, great name in banking, by the way, would often bring his employees together and would ask, if you put a bunch of BBs in a sink, Where is it going? And it all goes right down the drain, right? You want to figure out where it's going to end up.

And so where are the BBs going? I keep thinking about that because a GR shop, specifically if you're working longer term, which a company is, a nonprofit is, a trade association is, you need to be thinking three moves ahead.

Back when the company was really just trying to figure it out, what was the place actually like?

Well, Capital One actually was spawned from a consulting project back in the late 80s done by our founders, Rich Fairbank and Nigel Morris.

and and in short the the um the consulting project was focusing on a bank and the bank had a credit card division and they were working in the credit card division and a couple of things were going on you know externally as they were

focusing on the credit cards

So how are we going to get this? And sort of creating a narrative that embodies the strategic transformations that you need to drive as well as the near term sort of thing.

So when people get back to work, they have a sense of, Not just intellectually how they're doing fits in with everything else, but narratively sort of how they're part of the story.

And I think, you know, one of the things we did at Capital One really well, and I credit this to Rich Fairbank, the founder, who I worked a lot with on this.

was we fostered, we were such a preposterous, incomplete thing when we started.