On this episode of Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast, co-hosts Alan Murray and Michal Lev-Ram talk to Jim Rowan, CEO and president of Volvo Cars. The wide-ranging conversation covers the reasons Rowan decided to leave innovation-driven Dyson for the top spot at the almost century-old Volvo, why he's not worried about the pressure of China's massive electric car production, and the customer emails that make him "well up."
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below.
Transcript
Alan Murray: Leadership Next is powered by the folks at Deloitte who, like me, are exploring the changing rules of business leadership and how CEOs are navigating this change.
Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. Hey, Michal, this was a good one, don't you think?
Michal Lev-Ram: I do. I'm Michal Lev-Ram. Alan, today's guest was Jim Rowan, CEO of Volvo Cars, and he has a really interesting background. He was at Dyson and before that, at BlackBerry.
Murray: Yeah, actually, I met him when he was living in Singapore. CEO of Dyson. Got to interview him at a design event we were doing in Singapore because Dyson is one of those companies and we now know Volvo Cars is another one that takes design very, very seriously. And before that, as you said, BlackBerry.
Lev-Ram: Yeah, well, I'm glad I got to squeeze in a mention of blow dryers. Dyson blow dryers, which I felt very passionately about. But he, of course, today is very passionate about Volvo and bringing that innovative spirit to the company and trying to electrify their entire fleet by 2030, which is very ambitious.
Murray: I'm glad you mentioned the hair dryers. You know, after I did that interview, I think it was in 2017, I was so impressed, I immediately went out and bought one of those hair dryers. Not for myself. Podcast listeners may not know that a hair dryer is not something I need, but I bought one for my wife, so we still have one there.
Lev-Ram: And she's a happy customer.
Murray: She's a very happy customer. It's a pretty cool design. Anyway, you and I could talk for a long time, but you were in Spokane, Washington when we recorded this.
Lev-Ram: I was, and unfortunately there was a little bit of background noise where I was staying, so I apologize.
Murray: What was the background noise?
Lev-Ram: Well, listeners might be surprised to know that I was at a wrestling tournament. I was…
Murray: You were wrestling?
Lev-Ram: …not wrestling.
Lev-Ram: My daughter, my 14-year-old daughter wrestles. She actually placed fourth in the country at this tournament. So it was well worth the time and the distraction of all the noise. But I was trying to find a quiet spot and I didn't totally succeed. But the interview was still great. So.
Murray: Good. Good. Well, let's get right into it. Here we are wrestling with Jim Rowan, the CEO of Volvo Cars.
[Interview begins.]
Jim, welcome to Leadership Next.
Jim Rowan: Thanks, Alan. Great to be here and thanks for the invitation.
Murray: You became CEO of Volvo just a little over two years ago. Tell us how things are going in the driver's seat.
Rowan: Great. I mean, it's a really fantastically interesting industry at this point in time. And as you know, Alan, we've known each other for a while, I come mainly from the tech sector as opposed to the auto sector, if you will. And that's what's made it for me really interesting in that we're starting to see a lot of the technologies that have been used in say, let's call it the tech sector, really now start to see full scale adoption in automotive. I think that's allowed me to look at the automotive sector from a slightly different angle than maybe people who have worked in the industry for a long time. And that in itself then has allowed us to say, okay, how can we plan the future? Because people tend to talk about electrification, if you will, as the big change. But if we're being really honest, we've harnessed electrification. We understand motors, e-motors, inverters, you know, power electronics and so on. And of course that will get progressively better, but the big, big profound change is going to be around software, silicon connectivity and data and more and more energy management and vehicle to home and vehicle to grid. Those are the big, big technologies that are still being harnessed. And that's really where the excitement is I think from an industry point of view and from my own personal point of view.
Lev-Ram: And just sticking with the electrification piece for a minute, I realize there's a lot of other innovations happening, of course, but you have set really ambitious goals, turning your fleet entirely electric by 2030. Are you on track to meet that goal? I know there's there's been some progress fairly recently as well and some excitement, but tell us where you feel you're at right now.
Rowan: Yeah. So we're making really good progress. So what we gave is we gave guidance that we expect it to be fully electric by 2030. That we expected to have half of our sales, fully electric by 2025. But it won't be linear on any of these technology changes and these big transitions is never linear. It goes really quickly in the start and it looks like it's going to be a linear transition. But then you've got to pick up the parts of the world that take a little bit longer to transition. So we'll get to 50% by 2025. I'm pretty comfortable about that. That will allow us to reduce the CO2 footprint by 40% as well as we turn electric obviously we have a greater impact on our CO2 footprint. But then I think we're probably going to go into a double S-curve as we pick up. I see it in the U.S. right now, the West Coast electrifying extremely quickly. Even the East Coast, large parts of the East Coast, electrifying quickly. And then in the interior of the U.S. that's taking longer. But we are in a really privileged position because we have max technology. We have really good plug-in electric hybrids. We have mild hybrid technology as well as pure electric, so we can service all of those customers and that gives us a really strong bridge to full electrification. And so that is maybe some of the difference. I'm really confident that we can get to where we need to get to by 2030, but it won't be linear. We'll pick up a lot of it soon and then we'll see it transition slowly in other parts.
Murray: That's really interesting, Jim, because here in the U.S., you're right. If you look at countrywide, things are really slowing down. The U.S. auto companies seem to be concerned about their goals, which are more 2035 focused. And you have companies like Hertz, the rental car company that had said it was going to build a big electric fleet and then it backed off, the charging stations building is going really slow. You say it's not going to be linear, but do you really feel like 2030 is a realistic goal given what we know today?
Rowan: Yeah, because I think you need to look at two things. One is who your customer base is, like rule number one in business school: what customers are you selling to? And again, coming from outside the industry, one of the things that surprised me is that there's really two industries within one industry. You have mass market and you have premium. When you're selling and we are selling into the premium market and the success factors for premium are very, very different from mass. Mass is basically based on price and there's much, much less customer loyalty or brand loyalty.
When you look at premium, you're selling to customers that generally have more than one car, especially in the U.S., and that means there's options for them to have a BEV [battery electric vehicle] or a plug-in electric hybrid as their second car. They may still want to have a full petrol card as their main car and as they go through that adoption curve, but we can still sell them a pure electric car or we can sell them a plug-in electric vehicle. And we see that more and more frequently. The second car that we're selling to these homes are electric. The other thing is when you're selling to the premium sector and the majority of cases, they have their own homes, which means they have their own charging infrastructure, which means they don't rely on public charge infrastructure. And so the adoption to BEV becomes much, much easier.
And then what we find as well is in the U.S. specifically, there's a lot of three-car families, especially in the premium sector. That third car more and more and more is becoming a BEV because generally it's maybe for the children and the children are saying, Hey mom, I want an electric car. So I think when you dissect the industry and remember as well, we have only 1% of the total car industry, Volvo and if we can get to 2%, we’ll be massively successful. So I'm not chasing volume and I think there's enough customers around the world that want safety, sustainability, you know, Scandinavian design, that want full electric. And that's why by 2030, I think we can find enough of those customers to by and large be a full electric player.
Lev-Ram: Are you seeing any similar trends taking place, just kind of how you describe the geographics and the market in the U.S., are you seeing that anywhere else or is it a U.S. phenomenon?
Rowan: All over the world and that's the really interesting thing. So northern Europe electrifying extremely quickly. You look at the U.K. and France and mean look at Norway, 85% as an example. So Scandinavia, Holland, all those places going really quick towards electrification. Then you get southern Europe much, much slower. And then China, you look at the cities electrifying very quickly you look at the provinces, the big distance between those cities and China, again, they're still looking for petrol engines or at least a plug-in electric hybrid. And then in places like Australia, it's very mixed. So if you're in Australia again, massive landmass, if you live in the city and you don't drive much city, you can go electric. If you drive anywhere outside the big cities in Australia, you're going to want to make sure you still have because infrastructure doesn't allow those journeys to happen without some anxiety let's say.
Murray: Jim, let's stick with China for a little bit. I mean, you spent a lot of time. You lived in Asia for many years. Volvo is now majority-owned by a Chinese company, Geely. I was in China in November and was talking to a couple of people, one who works at BYD, another auto company. They said there are hundreds of electric vehicle manufacturing companies. That the competition to make electric vehicles in China is just massive. I mean, how does what's going on there compare to what's going on in the rest of the world and how do companies in the rest of the world hope to compete against what's going on there?
Rowan: Yeah, and that's a super question. And it's a question, of course, that's top of mind for a lot of people in the industry. I'm going to come back to that same dynamic. If you're in the mass market in China and you only have EVs to sell, that's a tough market. There's no question about that. If you're trying to sell EVs on a price basis with no brand, a brand-new company with no loyal customer base, with no services, with no attachment to the dealership network, then I think that's quite a tough assignment.
We've been in China for a long time. In fact, in China we only sell 10% of our cars are electric. The rest of those cars are plug-in electric hybrids or so on because that market's taken a longer time to change. We have a real premium brand statement within China that people really go for our cars because the safety and the attributes that we've built up over the years. And we're selling to the premium segment again, we’re not in that mass market. So we're growing our business in China. And if you just look at our stats globally, last year, last year we grew our company and although it's very turbulent, so this is global numbers, but it's turbulent all over so it kind of stands. But we grew our business by the number of units sold by 15% year over year. We grew our revenue by 21% year over year and we grow our profits by 43% year over year. And that's really a testament to the range of products that we have because we have plug-in electric hybrids, we have [hard to hear] hybrids, we have BEV cars, full EV cars, but we also have the 30 size, the 40 size, the 60 size, the 90 size. We have SUVs, we have sedans, we have wagons, and we sell in over 85 countries. So I think when you've got all of that going, you can adopt to the turbulence a little bit easier than one small electric car and a very competitive marketplace at mass.
Murray: But let me just follow up on that. I'd love to get your view. You're in the premium market, but I'd love to get your view of what's going to happen in the mass market, because, look, we've seen Chinese manufacturers take over the solar panel business because they're more efficient, less costly manufacturing. We've seen them take over the battery business. Right? For the same reasons. Should we expect to see China eventually take over the low-end electric vehicle market?
Rowan: Well, I think that is certainly going to be the market that they attack for sure, because I think brand loyalty is much less in that market. And you're competing basically on price, which I think you would see is where the Chinese manufacturers would have an advantage and they would have an advantage on that supply chain and they would have an advantage, of course, maybe on some of the battery chemistries. But it's going to be quite, if you look at then some of the trade tariffs that have been put in around the world. So it used to be up until four or five years ago, you could sell an electric car coming from China to the U.S. for two and a half percent. That's now 27 and a half percent. So that's a meaningful tax tariff. We're seeing the European Union starting to look at putting in additional tariffs as protective mechanisms, I guess. And so it really will depend on some of the legislative changes that can avoid that happening. But there's no question in my mind that the mass market electric vehicle space will to some extent include a high level of Chinese automotive manufacturers.
[Cross talk. Hard to hear.]
Murray: I have seen estimates, even with those large tariffs, I've seen estimates that the cost differential is like 100%.
Rowan: Yeah, because again, if you, it depends what you're looking for in a car in terms of that you know the attributes that that you're looking for in a premium manufacturer obviously is just a basic basic car are very, very different. So that's, that's obviously where that threat is going to come from. And you know, and I'm glad I'm glad we're in the premium sector that I'm really glad that we have mixed technologies in terms of propulsion systems. I'm glad that we're in so many different markets worldwide, especially as the turbulence within the industries, I think is I think it's the new normal.
Everybody keeps talking about transition, to be perfectly honest, you know, when are we going to wake up and say, it's been like this for a long time. It's probably just going to be like this forever. I mean, it's not it's not COVID or it's not the Red Sea or it's not semiconductors, it will be something else. So the onus on us is to really develop robust supply chains that can cope with pretty much anything that's thrown at us. And to that end, that's why we manufacture and have supply chains in every region. We have manufacturing facilities in Asia and Europe and in North America to try and eliminate some of those trade tariffs that you can get caught out by just to be manufacturing closer to the customers.
Lev-Ram: So given everything you just said, how do you explain some of the declining demand Tesla is seeing and their decision to not go for a lower cost car right now? What going on there in your view?
Rowan: You know, I have no idea. I'm you know, I struggle enough just trying to run Volvo. [Laughter.] That's a full time job for my for my limited intellect. So I don't know. And, you know, we see we see different strategies with different car companies around the world. And it's sometimes it's difficult to, you know, to understand because we’re not inside all those companies so we don't know what their game plans are. We kind of know what our game plan is and that's that is that we want to be a fully electric car company, but we want to make sure we do that in a measured way and bring all of those all of those loyal customers that that don't have access right now to full electrification. We want to bring those, what they've been customers for, for a fact. We've been selling cars in the U.S. for 70 years, right? We are selling cars and they're one of the first Western companies to sell cars in the U.S.A. Those customers have been buying our cars for a long time and they don't have the infrastructure for whatever reason to go electric. We want to make sure we can bridge them, not forever, but at least until there's enough infrastructure. We think that's probably going to take place before the end of the decade.
Murray: Jim, we're talking electric, but what about autonomous? Where is Volvo in the autonomous vehicle journey? Where do you think we're headed on that?
Rowan: Great question. You know I'm an engineer, right? So I'll look at the underlying technologies of this in the legislation that overlaps that part of my background was I used to be the chief operating officer for BlackBerry, and it was a similar industry in so much as it was a very regulated industry. You were trying to guess what the technology was going to be, and it was definitely regulations in every part of the world. On telecoms, you know, you're dealing with very, very different regulations in different settings. The auto industry is the same. So my opinion is that it will be a long time before we get to fill autonomous driving safely. Yes, can you do it on the highway from the airport to downtown San Francisco on a on a separated lane? Yes. You can do that. That's we're very low risk in terms of safety. Driving through urban environments that change everyday where you've got kids and bikes and prams and dogs and, you know, all sorts of stuff and road works that change daily. That's a challenge. So our endeavor is on safety and D.A.S., so driver assisted safety, we want to make that better and better and better until we can get the full AD with legislation allows that to happen. So our focus is not on AD per say, our focus is on continuous developed driver assist processes so that we can see further, the car can see further and warn the driver that something up ahead is as likely to happen or is an obstacle, but you're still in control of the car and yes, the car will talk to you or rumble the steering wheel or send audio signals and so on and so forth, but you're still in control of the car. And I think that's the fundamental difference, because I think without the proper technology, I think if you go too fast at this, it becomes and as a safety brand, that's just it's just not in our DNA to go there.
Lev-Ram: Can you talk about innovations on the battery side as well and sustainability? What are you guys working towards there in recycling batteries and making sure that part of the supply chain is more sustainable?
Rowan: Yeah and that brings us then into the actual to the two different technologies that we have. So we have internal combustion that's been around for a long time. That's been improved for a long time, but we've been doing it for a hundred years. We've reached the kind of limits of internal combustion improvements. At this point, it will be much slower. In a brand new internal combustion engine, a well-tuned internal combustion engine, you will get roughly 35% efficiency for the fuel that you put into the movement that you get in the vehicle. You lose the rest to heat, noise, vibration, and what else. And our new electrical propulsion systems that we developed in our own house with over 90% of efficiency. You don't need to be a data scientist to figure it out. That's a pretty big data point.
And so the technology itself, just from an engineering point of view, from a physics point of view, is a better technology. There's less noise, there's less vibration, there's less moving parts, less servicing costs for customers and zero tailpipe emissions. But there's a couple of friction factors that get in the way of full-scale adoption. And those five friction factors are basically cost. So we need the cost of the batteries down. Range. So we need to get energy density up. Speed. We need to be able to charge the cars much faster than we charge them today. Infrastructure, which stands for itself. And then you've just got change. People have been driving petrol cars for a long time and they've got to make that transit. How do you charge the car? Where they get charged up. How does this work? And so on, so forth.
But listen, we're making massive progress on all of those things. If you just look at the range now of vehicles, you've got enough range in an electric charge as you have in a petrol car. It's just the anxiety of where do I charge it next becomes one of the problems. So we we've been spending a lot of money on all of those areas and they all work together. So battery, battery speeds, power, electronics, energy density and the battery management system that manages that whole electrical propulsion system coupled with the e-motor and the inverter module, that's one unit that is just continually progressing. And it's not just us that's investing in that. Everybody's investing in that. So there's very little investment happening in internal combustion engines these days. Everybody's invested in batteries and inverter motors and silicon carbide and all these great things, which means with that much money and that much investment it’s just going to keep get better and better and better. And that's why I'm hopeful for the future. I know the technology works. I know it's getting better, but the infrastructure is probably the biggest negative that stops people towards going to full scale adoption, and that will happen. Now the Inflation Reduction Act is throwing a huge amount of money into the mix to help external investors invest, and that's a good long term investment, I think, for some of the big P.E. companies and investment companies.
[Music starts.]
Murray: I'm here with Jason Girzadas, the CEO of Deloitte, US, and the sponsor of this podcast. Thanks for sponsoring it. Thanks for joining me, Jason.
Jason Girzadas: Thank you, Alan. It's a pleasure to be here.
Murray: Addressing health equity is not just the right or moral thing to do. It's become a business imperative. In fact, in the United States, health inequities cost $320 billion annually. Every organization has a role to play in making health more equitable. And as business leaders, we need to make sure we communicate how health equity drives business value. So what role should business play in addressing health equity?
Girzadas: I think you're right to point out the moral and the business imperative around health equity. We actually believe that the health equity cost to society could rise by up to a trillion dollars by 2040. So this is an economic issue for all businesses. The role of business is to recognize that health equity impacts the workforces of every single business, and it's needing to be on the CEO agenda and board agendas for all organizations. In our country your zip code can determine your health status, and that's problematic. If you think about the drain on worker productivity, the cost to businesses in terms of the health and well-being of their workforces, making this a priority from the standpoint of looking at what actions you can take through your organization around health and benefits, as well as how it pertains specifically to the products and services and also the types of partners that organizations team with to address health equity issues broadly. There are resources to look at. The Deloitte Health Equity Institute, which has pro bono data and analytical tools to leverage that are accessible to all organizations to start on this journey of making health equity not just a societal concern, but actually a business priority.
Murray: Thank you for that, Jason. A pleasure to be with you.
Girzadas: Thank you.
[Music ends.]
Murray: Jim, before you were CEO of Volvo, you were CEO of Dyson, which makes great products. I've got a Dyson vacuum cleaner right back here, picks up all the animal hair. We've got one of your great innovative hair dryers, which doesn't do me or you much good, but my wife seems to like it a lot. And there was a hot moment where Dyson was thinking about entering the automobile business. So what happened there?
Rowan: Yeah, well. Well, if you look Dyson, Dyson's a disrupter in terms of its company, that's its raison d'etre. And so, you know, Dyson never invented the vacuum cleaner industry, but by goodness, it certainly disrupted it when it went in with a zero bag and the cylindrical pickup system. Same with the hair dryer. I mean, it never invented the hair dryer, but it certainly disrupted it. And so we took a look at the auto industry and it was exactly the same thing. This industry is set for disruption and it's going to be set for disruption through electrification and everything that goes with that. And so that was the genesis of the idea. And then of course, you get and then you think, wow, this is as a private company as well, of course. So you need some really deep pockets to really play in that. There's no point having one car. You got to have a range and you’ve got to build factories and supply chains and…
Murray: It's different than a hair dryer.
Rowan: It's different from consumer electronics in general. Just because it's a very, very different, it's very different supply chain and manufacturing systems and it's very regulated and so on. So great. I mean, Dyson’s fantastic company and, you know, I really enjoyed working with James. He’s such an innovator, such an innovative person and so on and so forth. But I think at the end of the day, that was the right choice.
Lev-Ram: So I am a big fan of the blow dryer, the hair dryer, but I was also a big fan of BlackBerry. And I want to ask you about that, too, because, you know, talk about disruption getting disrupted, a disrupter getting disrupted. Right. What are some of the learnings that you took away from your years at BlackBerry?
Rowan: Oh, man, that is that is such a good question. I mean, it really is. It's because the reason I think it's such a good question is because I actually talk about it internally. In fact the guys here are proper fed up with me talking about the parallels to that and but just think about that industry. You're going through a massive transition. You're going from feature phones to smartphones, and you've got some really credible players, some big players have been who are fantastic at R.F. technology, radio frequency, technology, connectivity and all this stuff you need to be good at to be a cell phone manufacturer, let's call it that. You have Nokia, you have Motorola, you have Sony Ericsson, you have HTC, and of course, you have BlackBerry. Really good at that stuff. Two years, that transition to two, two-and-a-half years as you went from feature phones to smartphones and the guys who came out the back end of that as the winners weren’t even in the game to start with. It was iOS and Android.
And it wasn't a hardware play that made the difference. It was software and it was the software architecture of iOS and Android and then of course Android that enabled people like Samsung to get back in the game. And that's what I see, right now people are talking about electrification as the change profile within the auto industry. They’re missing the entire point, it's software it's silicon. Probably more importantly, silicon as connectivity, real time connectivity with zero latency and it's data. And if you want a fourth, that's energy management. But those four things come together. So and I'll give you an example. When I started with the company, we had to make some quick decisions around did we want to buy in technology or build that. So what do you build versus what do you buy? Very quickly, I looked at the silicon architecture and said and Veri is a pretty good company. They understand core compute technology. If we were going to move to a core compute architecture, we should go, we should go make sure we talk to the NVIDIA guys, because I think these guys know exactly what to do in terms of high computational silicon. And I speak with [CEO and President] Jensen [Huang] often and it's always enlightening to speak to someone who really understands the industry in a way that we just don't understand as much as they ever will. So and then we've got Qualcomm and what a fantastic part of they are on the infotainment stack. So we say we're going to buy that technology and we're going to partner with these great technology companies. And we also then partner with Google in terms of Android Auto and we partner with Apple in terms of Apple CarPlay, because I don't think we need to be making those things when 7 billion people have either got an Android or an Apple phone. They just want to connect the phone seamlessly to a car. And I don't care whether they say Hey, Siri or Hey, Google. I don't think they need to say, Hey, Volvo. I don't think that adds any value to the customer. So that's why it's such a great question, because the make versus buy ,the build basis buys decisions were quick decisions that I had to make when I joined the company. But we did want to own electrical propulsion. That's at the core of what we do. And we did want to own the safety stack. So although we're using Nvidia silicon, we are building the whole software stack from the silicon layer to the application layer of cameras and radars and lidars and so on, because we really wanted to make sure we understood that software. So I have seven, 800 people that just build the safety stack within Volvo cars to core compute that connects all of our safety applications with the core compute applications so we know exactly what's happening inside that software.
Murray: You know, Jim, that's a great answer. It's clearly about hardware. It's clearly about software. It's about data. But it's also about leadership. And I'd love to get you to dive into how you lead in a period of such tumultuous change. You know, I was, Michal, I don't know if I've ever told you this story, but there was a meeting at the Wall Street Journal of of about 25 reporters and editors before the iPhone was launched. And all of us were using Blackberries, all of us. We were all addicted to our BlackBerries. And Steve Jobs comes in and hands out these new phones for the first time and we're all kind of fiddling around with it and playing with it. And at some point, someone in the room, I wish I could remember who it was. But one of the Wall Street Journal people says, you know, this just isn't going to work for the business user, it doesn't have a keyboard. And Jobs, without hesitating for a second, said, I don't give a F about the business user. And, you know, at the end of the day, he was right. He knew what he was doing. He was making something addictive that would ultimately knock BlackBerry into oblivion. So how do you think about leading when you got hundreds of companies in China, you're going up against Elon Musk. You how do you lead a company through a period of such tumultuous change?
Rowan: Yeah, and I'm really lucky. I mean, I'm lucky I inherited as the CEO, I inherited a business which was in good shape, and my predecessors had made a lot of the good foundational work that we could build on quickly. And we've been around for 100, almost 100 years. I think we just turned 98 in a couple of days time. And what we've got as a company that's been that's had a North Star this last year for that period of time. And we have built our products and our services and the ethos of a company around safety, sustainability, human-centric technology, not technology for the sake of technology, but human centric technology and Scandinavian design. Those have been really strong anchor points for us to keep attached to even in this turbulent sea of change. If you're a company that's been around for a long time and you have set values within that company and we know what we want to be, and we're running our own race. Let's be honest, we're never going to out-Chinese the Chinese, right? We're never going to out-Tesla Tesla. You got to run your own race and see, this is what we stand for. We think there's enough people in the world proven over 97 years that like our products and what we stand for and they get in our cars because they feel safe and valued. Of course, I get some customer complaint emails that say that say, you know, I bought this car and it's not working and I'm upset and so on, so forth. But I also got another type of email and the emails are very personal and they say, I just wanted to write to let you know that yesterday I got in the car, I put my two twins in the backseat. I was going to drop them off at my grandparents, our grandkids, whatever, and we got sideswiped by a garbage truck or whatever. And they show me the pictures of these cars and they say, I have no and these cars are you know, they've been hit badly and shit. And these letters say, I just want to let you know that today, Volvo saved the life of me and my kids. And I will never drive anything other than a Volvo ever. And I well up on that stuff. I mean, I’m a softie anyway, right? But I well up on that stuff. And I'm like, that's why I [hard to hear] them. That's why I took this job. And that's exactly what and I think that's really beneficial because when you talk to the people within Volvo, whatever that as sales, marketing, H.R., engineering, or dealership network, they have that same sense of purpose so we don't get waylaid and just trying to make a quick buck. We don't get waylaid and trying to kind of, you know, chase the fads of today.
And you know, we had an ad in the U.S., a promo, remember this, Alan, and we had an ad in the U.S. that said it’s boxy, but it's safe. That was that was that was one of the ads. Like we're not hiding from the fact that it's boxy but it's damn well safe and that's why you buy the car. The interesting thing for me was we used to pick up the lawyers and the doctors and the accountants and the dentists and stuff. That was our tribe, if you will. What's really encouraging now is we're picking up the young software engineers. We're picking up the young marketeers. We’re picking up a much, much younger demographic into the brand. We're still keeping that loyal customer base that's been for a while, and that's what's allowing us to grow, I think, so quickly. They care about, of course, the safety, especially if they're starting a family, young, young couple starting families for the first time. They want to make sure they're in a safe car. I think they care about the attributes of sustainability and human-centric technology. And, you know, just just us being just a decent company that's trying to do the right thing. We don't always get it right, of course. But, you know, we're at least setting out some goals around sustainability that I think are a shade higher than than the market is prepared to do. And I think that's what makes it easy to lead a company like Volvo, because you don't need to do that much. Everybody knows the North Star, you just need to add pace.
Lev-Ram: I'm guessing the emails were a little bit different at Dyson. As important as vacuum cleaners are, they probably weren't saving lives.
Murray: I am pretty emotional about my v. 11 animal vacuum.
Lev-Ram: And I don't travel without my hair dryer. So, you know, there's that.
Rowan: But you know, I think I do get that. I get you know, people say, Hey you worked for Dyson. That’s fantastic. That's a fantastic company. And it is a fantastic company and I really, really enjoyed the time there. We built some fantastic designs, some fantastic products. But you're right, at the end of the day, if your hair dryer doesn't work, you have a bad hair day. If your brakes don't work, people die. And that is the multitude of of the difference between running a company that's steeped in purpose especially about safety and family-centric and human-centric. So well, it is a privilege, you know, probably most people see this when they come on the show, but it is a privilege to work with like-minded people that just want to, you know, fulfill that purpose. And that to some extent makes it much easier, I guess, than some other places to work.
Murray: Well, Jim, that last bit is what we live for on this podcast. That's the essence of Leadership Next. So thank you so much for that great summary of your leadership principles and thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
Rowan: You bet. I really appreciate it and and good luck in your future endeavors, Mr. Murray.
Murray: Thanks so much. I'll keep I'll stay in touch. I'll let you know what I'm doing next.
Rowan: Yeah, please do. Please have a great day, guys.
Lev-Ram: Thank you, Jim.
Murray: Thanks.
Murray: Leadership Next is edited by Nicole Vergalla.
Lev-Ram: Our executive producer is Chris Joslin.
Murray: Our theme is by Jason Snell.
Lev-Ram: Leadership Next is a production of Fortune Media.
Murray: Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune’s editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel. Nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.
