How To Change Yourself To Change Your Company

The new book, Reinventing the Leader, is an inspiring account of the magic that can happen when a leader realizes they must undergo their own transformation in order to transform their organization.

This candid and practical book by Guilherme (Gui) Loureiro, Regional CEO overseeing Walmex, Walmart Canada, and Walmart Chile (now Chairman of the Board for Walmex and Regional CEO for Canada, Chile, Central America, and Mexico), and his executive leadership coach Carlos Marin shows how even the most successful leaders must be open to personal change in order to transform their company. The book details how the pair pioneered a data-driven, customer-centric business transformation at Walmex—Walmart’s biggest division outside of the United States.

“This book is a blueprint for transformational success for leaders in any business who find themselves facing the need to retool their own company’s systems and operations and energize and inspire an entire corporate culture in order to compete in an ever-shifting digital economy. It’s about sustaining a cherished brand while disrupting the very essence of how it has done business in the past. And perhaps most important of all, it’s about learning to learn—becoming aware of how to better leverage your strengths, limit your weaknesses, and listen more effectively to your associates and customers to find out what they really want and need during a time of major transition,” says Gui.

The blueprint for transformational success includes these steps:

Start by questioning and challenging the organization’s underlying assumptions and beliefs about the sustainability of its success.
Revitalize or discover the purpose that will give deeper meaning to why the organization does what it does—the compelling motive for its existence.
Engage the hearts and minds of the people of your organization by reinforcing that vital purpose.
As a leader, you must define on a personal level why your life matters, what you stand for, and what you want your legacy to be.
Establish clear goals that are in alignment with the higher purpose.
Set specific objectives and targets to be reached to provide benchmarks during each aspect of the transformation.
Communicate a plan that consists of clear tactics and action steps, outlining what, how, who, and when for each objective.
Actively promote and practice learning on an ongoing basis. As the process advances, your new experiences and insights will lead to adjustments and adaptations that will improve the final results. As a leader, encourage your team to work cooperatively to learn and grow in order to make the transformation successful.
Learn to tell a compelling story about what happened and how it was done.

Gui Loureiro (Photo by: Roberto Rubio Macaria Cinco)

Carlos Marin (Photo by: Shadi Ameri)

Some of my favorite lessons from the book, in the authors' words, include:

Humility: Doing the hard, personal work it takes to get to know yourself better is fundamental to growing and maturing as a leader. It requires having the humbleness and curiosity of a novice, which will allow you to have new insights and flourish free of the sanctions of your own self-perceptions.

Curiosity: As a leader you’ll want to cultivate a desire for learning and to see opportunities and possibilities where others see only difficulties and impossibilities. A sense of curiosity and wonder will allow you to reframe challenges as potential solutions.

Mentors: Wise leaders recognize the benefits of having someone with more experience to advise and support them throughout their career. Try to find a mentor who will help you learn and find the strengths that may be hidden within you as you move forward on your journey.

Comfort Zone: Expand your comfort zone. Be willing to part with old and familiar ways to jump into new possibilities, despite how scary that can be.

Listening: One of the best ways for you to value and show others the respect they need and deserve is to genuinely listen to them.

Coaching: The journey toward transformative self-awareness can be made more effective by working with an experienced coach. A professional coach can help you understand your strengths and opportunities better and faster as well as to help you change and improve. Using your strengths can be a very powerful tool to help you correct what needs to be fixed.

Self-Reinvention: A key ingredient of self-reinvention is identifying those you can learn from and humbly drink from their fountains of knowledge and experience.

Underperformers: Don’t confuse caring for people with tolerance for underperformance. Being a leader requires the appropriate and timely recognition that despite your efforts to help, someone may not want to change, adapt, or evolve…and that’s when you must act swiftly.

Vision: It’s vital for you to provide clarity of vision so that everyone is on board and aligned with it. Communicate, communicate, and communicate the vision. It is never too much.

Talent: Value the leadership talent of your team and invest in the continued growth and development of those who are able and willing to cope with change as the company evolves.

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.

Comments

How To Rewire Your Mind To Build Your Adaptability Quotient

Alec Litowitz argues that the most valuable skill of the next decade isn't IQ or even EQ (Emotional Intelligence). It's AQ: your Adaptability Quotient, the ability to question assumptions, update beliefs, and respond effectively when reality changes. Litowitz is the author of the forthcoming book (releasing on September 15, 2026) The Adaptability Quotient: Rewiring Your Mind For Success In The Next Human Era . And he shares that “AQ is a learnable way of using your mind like a high-performance machine: to model risk, absorb feedback, make faster corrections, and create repeatable advantages in conditions where most people stall out—or drown.” In short, it’s all about how to move from “making the right decision” to “making decisions right.” “As artificial intelligence, media, and scientific advances reshape the cognitive landscape, adaptability becomes the essential discipline for reclaiming human agency,” adds Litowitz. “And a s AI resha...

Learn The Power Of Probabilistic Thinking

Dive in for a fascinating read as you discover the life-changing power of probabilistic thinking, taught by Kyle Austin Young in his book, Success Is A Numbers Game . “Every goal that you’re pursuing has two hidden numbers attached to it—a probability of success and a probability of failure,” explains Young, “If you can make the first number bigger and the second number smaller, you can rewrite your predicted outcome.” “Whether you’re trying to start a business, run a marathon, get a promotion, earn a pilot’s license, grow a bumper crop of tomatoes, or sign an acting deal, these two percentages are always lurking in the shadows predicting what is going to happen.” But, adds Young, "Most of us never think about them. We assume our odds are unknowable and unchangeable. This dangerous lie leads millions of people to fail at goals where they were perfectly capable of succeeding. You can choose a smarter path,” encourages Young. In Success is a Numbers Game , ...

Daily Intentions For Leaders

Everyone can benefit from the book, Dear Friend , which features bite-sized, daily notes for contemplation, inspiration, connection, and clarity. Busy and stressed business leaders can particularly benefit from the 365 profound, heartfelt reflections from author Michelle Maros , founder of Peaceful Mind Peaceful Life and cohost of the podcast, Life Happens with Barb and Michelle . Dear Friend invites readers to go deep and use the notes as a daily practice that compounds over time, nurturing strength, resilience, and clarity. In just a few minutes each day, this book will offer you a daily reprieve when you feel burned out, beaten down, or overwhelmed by the strains and stresses of modern life. The heart of Dear Friend began in the quiet mornings Michelle shared with her mom, Barb. Every day, they would sit together, reading affirmations or passages from Barb’s beloved books. These small rituals—simple but powerful—set the tone for each day, grounding them in g...

How To Maximize Employee Involvement

Here are 10 tips for how to maximize employee involvement : Have active ways to listen to your employees. Check often with employees to see if the information you are sharing with them is what they need and what they want. Share information about customer satisfaction with employees. Discuss financial performance with your employees and be sure everyone understands the importance of profitability and how they can contribute to profitability. Allow ad hoc teams among employees to form to address organizational problems and work with those teams to tackle the identified issues. Encourage employees to make suggestions for improvement whether those ideas are large or small. Take an idea from one employee and share it with other employees and teams and let everyone make a contribution to build upon that idea. Train! For long-term employees, find ways to keep their jobs interesting through new assignments and challenges. Conduct meetings around specific issues and brai...

How Will You Get Involved?

"Philanthropy isn't just a pursuit for the wealthy. Philanthropy is about involvement . Pick your issue, work at it, and do your best to make things happen. Even if you're not wealthy, you have time, expertise, skills and other resources you may not even have realized that can be used to serve others." Thanks for this great advice from author Eli Broad.

How To Transform Your Perspective And Lead With Positivity

Here is a new book I imagine nearly everyone will benefit from. It is, The Negativity Fast . It's both a self-help book and a book for leaders who want to lead with positivity. At the core of the book is a thirteen-week negativity fast, during which you’ll progressively eliminate sources of negativity in your life for 90 days. And then from that point, you’ll have a new outlook on life and will have learned how to use gratitude to completely transform your mental outlook as you reframe the negative events in your life into events that made you stronger, more resilient, and better prepared for future setbacks. “My goal is to help you reduce the time you spend in a negative state and increase the time you are positive,” explains the book’s author, Anthony Iannarino . Particularly for business leaders, the book offers easy-to-follow lessons on l earning to lead with positivity for effective change throughout your team and organization. The evidence-based exercise...

Seven Indicators Of The Right Work For You

In Brian Tracy 's new book, Find Your Balance Point , he shares this helpful list of the seven indicators of the right work for you and the career where you will feel fully engaged and where you will be the happiest in serving other people: The right work for you is something that you really enjoy doing; something that you love to do. The right work for you is easy for you to learn and easy to do. In many cases, you learned it automatically, without thought or effort. You love learning more and more about the work if it is the right work for you. When you are engrossed in this work, the hours fly past. You forget what time it is, and later you are surprised to see how much time has passed. The right work for you gives you energy when you are doing it. You can spend hours at this work, often forgetting to eat. If it is the right work for you, you want to be excellent at it, and you are constantly striving to learn and improve in that area. If it is the right work for y...

The Three Things Every Mission Statement Must Reflect

A lot of companies struggle when creating their mission statement. Author Peter F. Drucker provides the following good advice in one of my favorite book's of his, The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization :" Every mission statement has to reflect three things : Opportunities Competence Commitment In other words, he explains: What is our purpose? Why do we do what we do? What, in the end, do we want to be remembered for? How well does your mission statement meet Drucker's recommended three requirements?

The Nine Times When You Should Thank Your Customers

During this season of giving thanks, I thought I'd bring back one of the most popular posts from my Blog. Here it is from 2012: In your leadership role, it's vital that your team members know how to deliver excellent customer service. " Knock Your Socks Off " type service as book editor Ann Thomas and Jill Applegate would say. Part of delivering excellent customer service is saying "Thank You" to your customers and knowing when to say "Thank You". Thomas and Applegate recommend telling your customers "Thank You" during at least these nine situations : When they do business with you...every time. When they compliment you (or your company) When they offer you comments or suggestions When they try one of your new products or services When they recommend you to a friend When they are patient...and even when they are not so patient When they help you to serve them better When they complain to you When they make you smile...

How To Write A Company Policy

Keep these five tips in mind when you craft your next company policy: Keep the policy short and simple. Get rid of two old policies for every new policy you implement. Make sure that your organization's policy and procedures are written to serve your employees and customers--not just your organization. Don't write a policy in reaction to a single incident. The problem may never arise again. Don't write a policy longer than one-page, no matter how large your organization may be. Thanks to author Bob Nelson for these great tips from his book, 1001 Ways To Energize Employees .

Eric Jacobson On Management And Leadership

Search This Blog