Walgreens CEO Roz Brewer to Leaders: Put Your Phones Away and Listen to Employees

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**Adi Ignatius** (1:10)
Hi, welcome to Harvard Business Review's The New World of Work. I'm Adi Ignatius, Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Business Review. And each week on the show, we speak to a top tier CEO about this transition moment that we're in, to sort of get ideas and inspiration about how we can work more effectively going forward. Before I introduce my guests this week, I just want to quickly read a message from our friends at Unisys, sponsor of The New World of Work. Unisys is an IT company that builds critical solutions trusted by demanding businesses and governments around the world. They partner with clients to enable cloud transformation, protect critical operations, and empower the modern workforce. Visit unisys.com to learn more.
So my guest today is Rosalind Roz Brewer, the CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance. She has a very impressive resume. Before becoming CEO of Walgreens, she served as COO of Starbucks, and before that, as CEO of Sam's Club. In her first half year or so at Walgreens, she started to lay down a strategic rethink that we will talk about later. She also has been an outspoken advocate throughout her career for diversity and inclusion issues.
Roz, welcome to the show, and thank you very much for being with us.

**Roz Brewer** (2:27)
Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

**Adi Ignatius** (2:29)
Let me just tell our audience, if you have questions for Roz, please put them in the comments box, and we'll try to get to some of those later in the show.
Roz, let's start with your career. You have had a series of top jobs, as I said, at Sam's Club, at Starbucks, now at Walgreens Boots Alliance. Talk about the challenges of walking into a new company, a new industry in some cases, and projecting the kind of confidence that you need to do, that you need to be able to do your job from day one.

**Roz Brewer** (2:59)
Great. That's a very good question, especially now having walked into a healthcare company in the middle of the pandemic. And I think that was a pretty gutsy move, and every day it's proven to be true.
But I will tell you that I have been fortunate to really accumulate so many different learnings over my career. And I'm pretty adamant about making sure that I am clear about my role, what my intent is, and how do I bring together my toolbox. I think the one thread that I can pull through all of my roles and opportunities is my personal leadership. And that's the way I show up first and foremost, because most of these business problems that I face in these leadership roles, it takes character, it takes guts, it takes problem-solving. And when I bring that basic toolkit to bear in these different roles, it has been proven effective for me every time. So I think the other thing I will tell you is that whenever I take on a new role, I become a real student of the business.
I remember when I joined Walmart after being with Kimberly-Clark for such a long time, and being in consumer products and going into retail. And I decided to, my job was based in Atlanta, Georgia, but I decided to move myself to Bentonville, Arkansas and go on a learning journey for 90 days. And I stayed in a little small hotel and came into the home office there and really studied them during what I call the honeymoon period. And it was the best thing I could have ever done. I met people, I learned more about retail, and I really put myself in a learning position and not in a position initially of leadership. And I chose to learn and be an advocate and open.

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