Episode 43: Transformation At Scale Begins With Personal Growth First With Keith James
When it comes to business agility and helping your customers and company be quicker to respond to the disruption and transformation that’s taking place in the world today, you don’t only have to undergo a business transformation. There’s a lot of inner work that you need to do to make that happen as well. On today’s podcast, Amy Vetter interviews Keith James, the General Manager of Large Firm Business for Tax Professionals at Thomson Reuters. Keith shares his story on how he changed his personal operating system of moving incrementally because of his need to achieve at a high level to one of moving faster and at scale. Learn the mindset practices he has put into place that may help you shift your own mental clarity and emotional strength as well.
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Transformation At Scale Begins With Personal Growth First With Keith James
Welcome to this episode where I interviewed Keith James. He is the General Manager at Thomson Reuters for Large Firm Business for Tax Professionals. He has over twenty years of experience working in senior leadership positions at leading software and content organizations. Previously, he served as the CEO of AccessData. He's also held several leadership positions at LexisNexis. He graduated from Ohio University with a BA in History. He received his Juris Doctorate from the University of Dayton School of Law. During my interview with Keith, he shares his story on how he changed his operating system of moving incrementally because of his need to achieve at a high level to one of moving faster and at scale. Learn the mindset practices he has put into place that may help you shift your mental clarity and emotional strength as well.
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I'm with Keith James from Thomson Reuters. Keith, do you want to give us a little background on yourself before we get started?
Thanks, Amy. I appreciate it. I work for Thomson Reuters. Essentially what I do is lead the group that focuses on serving large tax and accounting firms. Our purpose as a group is to enable our customers to be trusted advisors to their clients in a world that we know is constantly changing. More specifically the role is helping firms continue to drive their efforts to transform and helping our clients get value out of the services that they have with us.
I know roles like this are extremely important in times like this when people are switching their technologies, switching their practices and what they need to do in order to thrive and maintain what they've got going besides even growing at this point. Maybe you can give us a little background on yourself. Where did you come from? What were your beginnings that maybe led you to eventually doing a role like this?
There are lots of twists and turns, but there are some themes here that we could use as a foundation for our time. I am educated as a lawyer, but I made the decision early on not to practice law. What I enjoyed most was research and technology together. This is back in the ‘90s. It was still thrilling to be able to do all of your work right from your, in this case, bad dorm room and not have to go to the library. At the time being an expert in that, many people will remember that was a competitive advantage. I started working in legal technology. In the legal space, similar to our space now, technology advanced and disrupted business models.
I became interested in business transformation. All of the mindsets and technology that go into that and that question of how to thrive, when business models are being disruptive and the business transformation is what I became passionate about. I joined Thomson Reuters a few years ago to focus on this question for tax and accounting space. I'd say I found an industry at an interesting moment where the complexity and the speed of change have crossed that threshold, where you got to respond to the unknown. Gone are the days of multi-year planning. I'm passionate about business agility, how to help our customers and our company is quicker to respond versus reacting to change. This is all about mindsets, processes, technology and where they intersect. There's a lot of inner work that you need to do to make this happen. I'm happy to share more detail on that with you, but essentially that's the path that led me to where I am.
Let's go back a little so that we can understand. Why did you want to be an attorney in the first place?
The idea of advocacy, this notion of the way our legal system works. The idea that there is a process to get to the right answer. That process was interesting to me. The ideals around it were interesting to me. As a person, I maybe had not informed ideas of what it was like to be a lawyer, but I do like presenting and advocating. I've found an outlet in that in other ways as I grew up having a sales career. That notion of you're doing research, you're advocating, I thought you were presenting. My first couple of jobs were more like reviewing contracts in cubicle and comparing different things, which is great. It’s important to be able to have the attention to detail but at the time, I thought the technology and the research is something that I'd love to talk about and do all day long.
Were there people in your family that were attorneys or was there someone that came to school that you were like, “That was inspiring?” What would even have gotten you down that path?
LA Law, the show. The students alone on that show. I had the chance to work in a law firm before I was a lawyer. This was back when everything was manual and the job was to take all the documents to the core and make sure they got filed. I got to know a lot of lawyers that way and do that first professional job where you don't have that background and you're dealing with these highly educated people. You're getting to know a little bit about the clients, the cases and the notion of how important it is to be part of the process to follow the process. The type of firm was servicing a small firm that did family law and should have had small clients.
These were important moments for those clients and seeing the impact, positive and negative, that this had. I saw how high stakes it was. That was of interest to me. When you get into it, the problems and questions you're working on, these are real people and real-life things. I got more interested in how to help the profession and how to bring technology access. That became very interesting to me, at least in the law side of this, access to the law. When you think about what technology does, it gives people more ability to understand what the law might mean.
What was the technology that got you started seeing that it could enable that?
It’s the research technology. At Thomson Reuters, it's the product called Westlaw. It's the ability to go and run a query on what does the law say on whatever topic.
When you started, it was all the books. In the firm and then they come in and replace the papers.
They did have Westlaw and then these kinds of products, but you would like to go to this certain room. It was hard to do. You had to be careful. The technology was in a different place. There were books. At that time, we’re in school. They were teaching you as a young attorney to be to use these technologies. The idea was they were going to be much more part of how people worked. I gravitated towards that. I thought that was interesting, like, “I can get the answer right in front of me. It's right here.”
That’s what's so important about getting that experience while you're a student. When you get out of school, you're stuck in a role. When you're a student, you can see the inner workings and decide where your passion is.
It's such a little life experience. As many people do, you make decisions based on a handful of experiences and people that you meet, but it takes you on this interesting path. When you think about the essence of who you are, I still love research. I still research all the time. I do it in different ways now. I love public speaking. I'm all about how can I help give people access. These are common themes. No matter what, I probably would have found those combinations anywhere else. I worked in the legal space for quite a long time and I was interested to come to the tax and accounting, which is quite different but has a lot of similarities too. This is where I am at this point in the journey.
Once you started your career, you had some ideals, even habits or patterns that you were going into what you thought was the way you were going to go about work or the way you were going to go about your personal life and slowly those started breaking down as you started going through your journey.
It's an interesting time for you to ask me this question. I'd say for the last few years, I've been upgrading my operating system. We talked a bit about transformation. All of the things that got me to the place are things that won't serve me or my organization, or my family and friends in this disruptive world. All of the things, the habits and patterns, and I can give them more specificity, but they were about how to incrementally fit in with incremental changes. If you get on a track, you do these certain things and you get promoted or you help certain clients and they stay with you. They keep moving on the journey with you. This whole notion of fit instability and continuity. If you examine it, it's based on fear and based on this notion of, “Let's play not to lose because the world is a stable place.”
I've come to know all those things I was doing while they were effective, probably were not going to work in the world, but we don't know what's coming on Wednesday. I would contrast that with a new operating system that's all about playing to win or creating something new. It's this internal operating system that's all about that. I'll get into a much more level of specificity around what I mean by that, what the dimensions are. At the highest level, that's an important and huge shift. If you think about it, that first operating system of fitting in. It's much like a teenager. You're either the smartest person in the room. You're either the doer who gets everything done or you're popular or if you have a big ego like I did or do.
What drove you to want to fit in? Let’s pause on that before we move on. What things were in your life that you were driven to do these changes or be very careful to fit in? Is there something that happened in your life that would have created that for you?
It’s being on a track and being comfortable being on a track. This notion of and many people would be able to relate to this that are part of your audience who are smart and successful. It's this notion of if the identity of, “I'm an achiever. I do well. I work hard.” That was my angle versus the person who's naturally smart, who is always proving they're smart. I was more like, “I achieved things.” You get on this track and it feeds itself. There's no reason to get off of it because it's working for you. What happened was early on in life, I found this way of getting positive feedback and getting attention.
Transformation At Scale: Technology gives people more ability to understand what the law might mean.
As I said, I like to do public speaking. I like to be the center of attention. I got feedback from that by achieving. You do it incrementally. You follow the steps. On the professional side of things, I was a Liberal Arts undergrad. I learned a foreign language. I took the LSATs. I went to law school. You do all those things on a track and you create this identity that's effective. Is it well-positioned to solve our problems? Multi-year planning is probably not the way to deal with what's happened this time. Having a new way of operating has been interesting.
Were you modeling that from people you knew or what was driving you to be an achiever? Were you trying to impress somebody or what was it?
There are tons of examples. From my immediate family, when I think about my sister. When I think about my father or my mom, and the way that things were set up in the family, in an encouraging way, but everything was set up in a way where it was easy. There was nothing on my way to doing those things. I didn't have to overcome a certain thing to have access to get to work on things that maybe I wasn't good at. It was set up to be easy for me to be on that track. I tried to respect that, to be grateful and respect those things that are given to you and do something with them.
That sense of duty and then all the things that come along with that. You have those models. You make certain friends. You have certain teachers. I love to learn. You get all these mentors and these people who are encouraging you to go a little bit farther to try this and try that. I was surrounded by coaches. Now I try to play more of the role of a coach, but surrounded by that I was a competitive tennis player growing up. I had that whole discipline of getting up at 6:00 AM, do the practice, and have a certain diet. All of the disciplines around that was part of things that served me well to always be on this track of achievement. I don't advocate as necessarily the way to be successful in the future.
Did something happen or occurred to you that needed to shift? When was that?
It happened to me right before I joined Thomson Reuters. I had been working for a long time in the legal industry. I knew I wanted to have a change and take a little bit of time off. I gave myself that gift. It wasn't that long. It was maybe a six-month period of time where I was working a job where it was multiple time zones. You're like traveling all over the world and it sounded awesome. It sounds cool. I'm going to get to travel, but there was a level of exhaustion that I inherently knew isn't good for me. I took six months off. At that point, I had the chance to get time during the day to think, to connect to all my friends and all the people that I hadn't been that close. You also need to look around. It’s like, “What am I doing?” I had that time.
What came out of that was an energized version of myself that wanted to do the same things, but do it in a different way. Take on a huge challenge, which is how do we help an industry. That's at a moment of transformation. Because I like learning and because that's my first place to go is to research, I did a bunch of research. I found out that there are all these new exciting ways of operating and running companies, helping businesses transform that is completely different from this old way. It’s like this. If you think about the twentieth century, it was about the factory model. You have this assembly line and that came from building cars because that was an assembly line.
If you look at the 21st century, innovation isn't technology. It's software. The way software is built now is not an assembly line. It's building an agile way. It's built in an iterative way to do the smallest amount of work you can. You test, you learn, and that's how you can run companies. It's also how you can operate your life. What I did during that time is to learn a bit about that. I joined Thomson Reuters and that was where the company was at that place in time. The timing was perfect. Through that came a lot of inner work too. It's not on the business side. It's like, “You’ve got to change yourself.”
Yes or else you’ll fall right back into that pattern.
I still do. I haven't figured all this out.
What was the inner work? What did you do?
I referenced that idea of now it's playing to win and create the future. What I'd say is it lives in understanding my purpose first. It’s like, “Why am I here?” Which I can get into here. It's about adopting practices around mental clarity, emotional connectedness and being physically energized. How do you live for that purpose? You've got to create the energy to do so. It's understanding that and putting the practices in place. I might learn things outside of my job because that keeps me mentally sharp on the job. For emotional strength, I've got a regular meditation practice. I also do this strategic regulation of my mood.
If I have to show up for a particular situation, I think about, what would be the right way to show up? Should I show up high energy, positive emotion? Should I be a little bit more chill, like using strategic regulation of my mood to show up the right way? Physically, it's about, “Move.” Even if it's fifteen minutes, but it's all of the things that you do. It's different for everybody, but it's having that practice. For a minute, if I could reference where I would give credit, all the work I did and where all these principles lie.
A lot of it comes from the Human Performance Institute. That's one area that I spent a lot of time with. The other is I did the free course that anyone can do from Yale, it's the Science of Wellness. I took a course through Coursera. You have to pay for it, but it was worth it, from the University of Michigan called Meaning of Life. Finally, on this notion of that creative leadership, I took a lot of inspiration from the book, Scaling Leadership, by Anderson and Adams. It’s a lot of work there, but those are the things that got me to that realization of it's about my purpose. It's about all that energy, how you create it. That's a much different way of operating as you think about before, where it's like I'm here to achieve this track, do these things in a much more purposeful way of living. It has downstream effects on everyone and everything in my life.
I want you to give an example of shifting your energy. It's an important thing during work. Let's say you have a project budget being cut. You stayed up late the night before. You're tired. Your energy might be frustrated, low, and exhausted. What would you do?
It's a great example. The first thing is the emotional intelligence behind that. I'll address the practices first so we don't show up tired because that's one thing. If I know the budget meeting is coming up, I'm not showing I'm tired. It's the understanding that labeling first that I'm frustrated. What does frustrated mean? It means that there's something in the way of me achieving my goal. That's the definition. Now that I know the definition that's important. The next step I would take in that process is to say, “What am I doing or what was I doing right before this moment that would feed into that?” Now it has told me, “I'm tired and I'm getting bad news.” Now, I know that.
Will that serve me at the moment? Will that get me what I need? Probably not. What I would need to do is think about where I want to be. For that conversation, I would want to have a lower level of energy but positive intention. I want people to listen and I'm going to bring people along for the disagreement. How might I make that transition? I have a handful of things that I use. The first comes from tennis and it's the reset point is thirteen seconds. It's like thirteen steps. One is you take a deep breath, you smile, exhale, take another breath, shrug your shoulders and so on and so forth.
You think of something you're grateful for, thirteen seconds, I can do it. That may not be for everybody. Another example might be to do something funny like look at a YouTube video. That might put me in a more lighthearted, but there are strategies to get in the red quadrant. I would point the audience to a tool called the Mood Meter, which allows you to plot that process I just did. I say, “I'm high energy negative. I'm frustrated. Frustrated means this.” You can play around with them. It's an app to say, “Wherever do I want to be?” It allows you to be strategic with it. I found it to be useful too.
You incorporate those practices we talked about. Whether it's in the moment deep breathing, but hopefully there are all of these other practices around getting asleep, exercising, learning, and meditation that have you showing up more of your best often than not. You've got this bank full of good habits that allow that adjustment to be easier. You can't always do it. You have to recognize, “Is my adjustment strategy a short-term thing or is it a long-term practice that's going to help me grow?”
What have you seen as far as the changes you've made with transitioning from the incremental changes to taking risks or being more transformative? How do you think it affected people around you differently than before?
Transformation At Scale: Recognize if your adjustment strategy is a short-term thing or a long-term practice that's going to help you for the long term.
It’s had a big impact. First, it's speed. That's part of the design of all this is we got to go faster. Without getting into the actual details of what we measure or whatever, that has increased. The team has gotten fast that I can compare it to other teams I've worked with and things like that. The speed is there, but also what's changed is a team now that's more comfortable with doing this type of inner work. The Mood Meter I talked about, it’s a joke in front of me, but I always start a meeting with now my Zoom background or in our case, it's team's background with the Mood Meter to say, “This is going to be a tough decision. Where is everybody? Why aren’t we starting the meeting? You use these tools. The team understands that's what we're doing. It's not the understanding is that people are doing that work. They're putting these practices in place. That's a conversation and a group practice. That's exciting to me.
There's a third thing in that you're showing by example too. A lot of times in organizations that I work with, it's like the leaders want certain initiatives like this to go forward, but then they don't follow it or they don't do it. The team doesn't buy into it or isn't going to do it because then they see that the leader isn't taking it seriously.
The fundamental thing about transformation at scale begins with personal transformation. I’ve got to be the first one to admit that my go-to approach would be one that's based on playing not to lose. What we're trying to do is help the industry win. It's also super freeing too. At the work site at home, that is meaningful, if not more, which it's about creating those moments of connectedness every day and making that a priority. Most importantly, not waiting for special occasions or a seesaw. What I used to do, which is I focused on home and it might take a day or a month or a quarter and say, “Everything's about home.”
Work is like, “Where did the sunshine go?” and I go back to work and the sunshine is gone. Having that to be more integrated and knowing that it is incremental. I don't need to be one or the other. As long as I have the practice to say, “I'm now going to show up my best self at home,” that can be a quick thing on the Mood Meter. I can show up and we can have a great conversation at dinner. I might've been a little bit tired before, but being able to connect those moments like that and having the agility to do that has been good for me but most importantly in my home life. It's contagious. The work I've done with emotional intelligence, I know that moods are contagious. It's essential to be able to show up your best at the moment and quickly recover from things that don't have you in a place that serves what you're trying to do. It's an obvious point but it has a huge impact.
I like to do some rapid-fire questions. I'd like you to pick a category, family and friends, money, spirituality or health.
Let's pick health.
Question one, things or actions that I don't have that I want with my health?
Things that I don't have that I want is the ability to travel to see people that I miss. Social distance, everyone has that problem now. I haven't seen some people for the whole year. That impacts my health.
Things or actions I do have that I want?
It's the things we talked about, the practices around physical movement, emotional wellbeing, continuous learning, trying to keep my mind sharp and that clear understanding of what I'm trying to do. Those are things that are good for me while I have them. I've done the work and help others.
Things or actions I don't have that I don't want?
Fear Of Missing Out, FOMO, spending too much time on social media. I learned that's not good for me.
I went to Oprah's 2020 Vision Tour before we got shut down. I bought it. It's a water bottle that says JOMO, Joy Of Missing Out. The last one, things or actions that I do have that I don't want.
It’s age-appropriate aches and pains.
Is there anything you want to make sure before we close out our conversation that people take away that we haven't covered?
First of all, thanks for having me and thanks for tuning in. I'd say that the world is moving fast and to keep up, I would submit that we have to live and work in different ways, more purposeful ways. Our problems call for leaders that will inspire the creative solutions that we've been talking about. At the same time, we’ve got to play a long game, a sustainable game, and physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy is key to all of this.
Thank you for being on and sharing. There are lots of great tips for people to learn from your journey and see what they can incorporate in their life.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
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For our Mindful Moments with this interview with Keith where he offered many little tidbits of exercises and ways that you can start shifting your mindset by things that he has done in his own life. We started talking about how he had a personal operating system of moving incrementally because he wanted stability. He wanted continuity in his career. When he stepped back from it, he realized that those attributes were based on fear. In order to be an achiever, you needed ways that were stable or have been tried and tested in order to get the positive feedback that he was desiring. In order to move through transformation, we have to think about how do we take those risks and not play it safe sometimes.
His observation during his six months break where he took a break between jobs was how he could get reenergized. That we all have those moments in our careers or work or things that we're doing, where we might get stagnant, might be losing our energy around it. How do we do the work that's needed ourselves in order to create that new way of thinking and reenergizing? For him, it was going back and researching transformation and understanding what creates transformation. He talked a lot about how important learning has been in his process from the time he was young to now in his career of always going back and researching what works, what doesn't work, what are some exercises and things that we can do personally in order to get over that next hump change and doing that in our work is important.
For many of us, we can put excuses up on why we can't do the inner work, whether it's time or so forth. When we want to do something, we'll make the time. Carving out that time whether it's 15 minutes, 30 minutes a day, or you take a sabbatical as he did is an important time for us to understand what our purpose is and how do we want to create that future? What does that even look like? Maybe we don't have all the details, the specs for it, but we understand that the future looks different and we may need different skillsets. That could be personal skillsets. That’s not necessarily something you get out of certification or college in order to achieve it.
Keith shared some practices that helped him with shifting his energy and how he intentionally goes about that in his day, making sure that he's got that mental clarity and that emotional strength. That he's keeping up his physical wellness as well because that becomes important in creating the energy that we want as well so that we have the energy to show up the way that we want to. Some of the things that he talked about were first understanding what his purpose was and how does he get there? What things does he need to learn outside of the job that he does whether that's books that you're reading, apps that you're using, seminars you attend in order to create that mental strength, that mental clarity in order to make those shifts internally?
He also talks about meditation and how that's been an important area for him with his inner work to understand what is going on internally for him so that he can move into his mental regulation. If you're observing thoughts, feelings, low energy through meditation, you're going to shift how you interact with people so that you don't draw energy down with others as well. For us to do that work, it has to be intentional. It also has to be something that we dedicate time to doing. This is something that he was talking about doing it that day, each day in order to make a practice of it so that he can make sure to create the energy that he wants.
One of the apps that he talked about if you missed it was Mood Meter. That was an app that helped him understand, “I've got low energy. I might be frustrated. What do I need to do as a practice to shift my energy so that I show up in a way that's positive, that creates the energy that I want for a meeting or for even the relationships that we have around us?” It’s important to understand that if we want to create transformation in our organizations or transformation with the people around us whether that be personal or in our work life, that we have to make these changes personally first in order for people to take that seriously. To know that we mean it, to know that we care when we're saying these things matter to us and so forth. Think about if there are little things that you want to be doing in your own life or in your business life of changes that you want to make and how you can go about doing it yourself. You start being an example for those around you so that you're not only better for yourself, but you create the energy that you want for the people around you as well.
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About Keith James
General Manager, Large Firms Tax and Accounting Professionals
Keith joined Thomson Reuters in May 2017 and leads the Large Firms business for Tax Professionals.
Keith has over 20 years of experience working in senior leadership positions at leading software and content organizations. Previously, he served as the CEO of AccessData. He also held several senior leadership positions at LexisNexis.
Keith graduated from Ohio University with a BA in History, received his Juris Doctor from University of Dayton School of Law.
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