Ravi Saligram is the President & CEO of Newell Brands a global manufacturer, marketer, and distributor of consumer and commercial products. The company has 30,000 employees and it’s brands include a lot of household names such as Sharpie, Rubbermaid, Paper-Mate, Crock-Pot, and Coleman. Ravi has been the CEO at Newell Brands for 2 years now, and looking back at when he first arrived he says the company was in the throes of a turnaround and in the middle of a merger. So he had a huge undertaking from day one. He shares that there were a fair number of integration issues, employee turmoil, and bringing two cultures together was challenging.  After the merger the company had around 110,000 skews,49 ERP systems, thousands of apps, 400 websites, and thousands of legal entities. And all of these had to be chipped away at, as it was just way too complex and unnecessary.  It was a lot of work, but Ravi says it has been an amazing journey. As a new CEO coming into a company with so many things happening where do you even start? Ravi’s first 100 days as CEO of Newell Brands When he first came to the company Ravi knew that it was his job to stabilize the company and get employees aligned on a new purpose and excited to move forward. This situation could seem very intimidating to a lot of leaders.   Ravi took his experience as CEO of two other companies, Ritchie Brothers and OfficeMax, into his time at Newell Brands and he began his time at each company in the same way. He shares he always starts with a listening tour, and at Newell his listening tour lasted 100 days. He went around to employees up and down the company in different parts of the world and asked them questions.  He would ask things like, what’s going well, what’s not going well, if you were me and you had this position what would you change in the company, etc...And then he would just listen. He would take notes and look for themes and patterns in the responses he was getting.  But he didn’t stop there. He also spoke with customers, he looked at what people were saying about the company on social media, he looked at Glassdoor and the reasons why employees had left before he became CEO, and he spoke with stakeholders and shareholders to get their take on things. “So even though we had a turnaround plan, I needed to do the listening tour to validate is this the right direction. And I felt it was, but I also felt what needed most was to uplift our people to really give them hope, to give them a direction, give them a noble purpose, and say, what are we all about? Because I think you want to bring out the best in your people.  And the power of what I would say is, if you're 10 employees, you want one plus one plus one, not to equal 10, but to equal 100. How do you take 30,000 employees and make the power exponentially rise to 300,000? So that is what I think leaders have to really bring out. It's not about their being the best. It is about bringing out the best in their people and taking it up to an exponential basis.” And now, 2 years after he started at the company, things have really improved. Even with the pandemic they grew their organic sales by 6% in the first year and in the first half of this year it’s gone up 23%. They also were able to take the 110,000+ skews and get them down to 47,000 and they are working to get that down to 30,000 by 2022. They have also reduced 85% of the apps and they went from 49 ERP systems to 2 ERP systems for 90% of their sales. Ravi also has a 92% approval rating on Glassdoor, so clearly his listening tour really worked. “I think a lot of it has been really getting a culture which is focusing on the people, looking at people as our solution, not our problem. And galvanizing them to help solve these problems and pointing them and aligning them.” Ravi’s “no jerk” philosophy Starting back at one of his first jobs Ravi felt it was important to create a world where good people finish first, as opposed to last. And that has definitely impacted his