Aneel Bhusri

Today's guest is Aneel Bhusri, the Co-Founder, Co-CEO and Chairman of Workday, an American on‑demand financial management and human capital management software vendor. When Aneel started Workday with David Duffield, they defined a handful of core values for their company. Now this is pretty common practice for business leaders, but here's the problem. A lot of leaders write down the company values and never think about them again. They even laminate them, put them up on the wall, but I’ve got to tell you, all they do is collect dust. But that wasn't the case with Aneel and his Co-Founder Dave Duffield, they decided that investing in their people was going to be the number one value at their company. So how did they live out that value? 

Well, believe it or not, they personally interviewed the first 500 team members they hired. Now that's something that says they value people over anything else. The key lesson here is that they aligned their schedules and their priorities with the company's number one value. You see, the great leaders I know walk the talk of their core values. They just don't write them down and forget them. They actually use their core values to dictate how they spend their time, and how they focus their energy. We have a lot to learn from today's conversation, including:

• Why Aneel shifted from applying for a job at Apple to join an HR software startup instead
• How a hostile takeover led to a new venture
• What value system Aneel and Dave built the company around
• Why the Co-Founders interviewed the first 500 employees together, regardless of other work and time priorities 
• Why Aneel looks for “shiny new penny folks” when hiring talent
• Why the tech team goes off-site every few years to talk about the future
• How to get customers involved in innovation
• How to build partnerships between humans and machines that don’t compromise the work value of either
• Why Aneel prefers having a Co-CEO
• Why Phil Mickelson does Workday advertising
• PLUS Aneel’s advice for aspiring leaders

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