Mario Harik: Playing to Win

**Mario Harik** (0:00)
In my mind, what ego is, you think that you're so good at something that you stop learning.

**Shane Parrish** (0:10)
How does a software engineer end up as the CEO of one of the largest trucking companies in the world?

**Mario Harik** (0:19)
Well, I think engineering gives you a very good road map and a very good framework of solving problems.
I have young kids and I always tell them, whenever we have something that gets broken or something we want to build, I always tell them, what do engineers do? We say they build things and they fix things. And I think in the world of business, you're dealing every day with either problems or goals you want to accomplish. And an engineering mindset gives you a framework of how to solve for these problems. If you think of the engineering design process, it's based on one, identifying a problem or a goal. Then it's about collecting a lot of data around that particular problem or goal. Then defining your requirements, then designing and building a solution, and then eventually testing it for what the outcome would look like. And that discipline and rational thinking and data-driven analysis actually helps you in being able to run a company. Now, the other side of that though is around people skills, because when you run a company, you're effectively, you have teams of people, and your goal is to make sure that they are the best versions of themselves.
And applying engineering principles to that also helps a lot. So then your team becomes very data-driven. Your team becomes problem solvers in terms of how being able to go from point A to point B, or whatever, again, whether it's a goal, whether it's a problem you want to solve as well. So I think these are some of the early innings in terms of as I grew in my career, engineering gave me that framework to be able to solve problems and achieve goals. Couple that with people skills. This is what has enabled me to effectively run a trucking company.

**Shane Parrish** (1:53)
Wait a second. How does that engineering mindset help you as the CEO?

**Mario Harik** (1:58)
As a CEO, your first goal is to actually figure out what is your overall strategy. How are you going to be able to create a lot of shareholder value? Are you going to be able to create a company that can grow earnings, that can ultimately deliver a lot of shareholder value? To be able to deliver that, as you define your strategy, you have to have a framework by which you define a strategy.
Now, once you have your strategy, you have certain elements associated with that, where you have certain KPIs that you are monitoring on a daily, weekly, monthly basis of whether you are achieving the levers of the strategy.
Then from that, for every KPI in terms of being able to define how you go from one value to another value, you need an action plan. You need a solution for that. That engineering mindset is a problem-solving mindset. Whether it's defining strategy, whether it's executing on levels of your strategy, an engineering mindset is going to enable you to deliver on those outcomes over a period of time. I think that discipline and grounding your decisions in data does help make you an effective CEO. Now, that on its own goes at odds with being able to manage people, because as an engineer, you're thinking perfection, you're thinking the process has to work just right. But the reality is, people don't operate that way. So I think engineering on its own gives you a framework. However, how you can transform or translate that framework and how you manage people, and love people, and believe in them, and believe what's best in them, is the other ingredient to be able to then enable you to deliver good outcomes.

**Shane Parrish** (3:33)
What surprised you the most about people coming from an engineering background where things are predictable?

**Mario Harik** (3:38)
Well, first, I'll start by introspecting, looking at myself as a person. As I was growing up, I remember I always used to think that perfection is a good thing. So every time I was set to work on a certain project, on a certain task, that the outcome has to be perfect, that the outcome. And you tell yourself in your own mind these things that, you know, like, this is not good enough, it can be better than that. Or you're building a piece of software. This piece of software has to be just exactly right. The code has to be simple. It should not have any bugs in it. And I think the human mind typically doesn't operate in perfection. We all have our own idiosyncrasies. We all have our own biases. We all have our own way of doing things. So for me, in terms of managing people, a lot of it goes back to looking at how they view solving a problem, how they look at the world, how they look at being able to deliver value, how they look at being able to treat others with respect. And I think what surprised me the most is that every person is different. And every person in their own way, they are beautiful. Their mind works in a beautiful way.