Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Welcome to another episode of the Worst Advice I Ever Got. I'm your host Sean Taylor, along with my producer JB and today our guest is Lloyd Avram. Lloyd is the president and CEO of the Georgia association of Manufacturers. And before that, he held major leadership roles at companies like Nortel and Chevron, guiding communications, navigating global changes, and sitting at the intersection of purpose, culture and strategy. In this conversation, Lloyd reflects on a pivotal moment in his career, one where he was at a crossroads. It's a story about risk, reinvention and what happens when you zoom out to see the bigger picture. Let's get into it. Hey, Lloyd, thanks for being with us today.
[00:00:45] Speaker A: Sean. Happy to be here.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: So, Lloyd, this podcast doesn't beat around the bush. We like to jump right in. Want to get right to the worst advice you ever got?
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Sean the worst advice I ever got is don't relocate for a job.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: Let's break that down a little bit. Tell us more about the advice, maybe who it came from, in what context.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: The advice came from a family member.
It was in the context of me leaving a job and thinking, what do I do next? And I reached out to a family member who had a successful consulting practice and had a conversation and the strong advice I got was don't, don't relocate for a job. You've done this a couple times. Time to plant your roots deeper, grow your network, stay in your community, do what you do, do it well where you are, stop moving around and restarting. I have to say that the opportunity to come on this podcast forced me to rewind my career and my life and my family and everything else and think deeply about the question, what's the worst advice? So I had got out of college largely with a liberal arts background, went to work for Oil and Gas Corporation and started off doing, broadly speaking, communications work. A lot of companies knew they needed help, some help in that area, but didn't really know how to define it. So that was okay for me because I kind of like ambiguity to begin with anyway, so I got my start there and discovered there's really a profession here. There's something that can be done that's got some structure to it. And started building my career over a number of years and several moves in different companies and whatnot. Focusing on not just communication, that's just a thing. It's more about advocating a purpose and a mission to stakeholders, to the public, investors, whoever it might be, management wants it. It's starting to really take shape. So by the time I hit mid career, my Thinking about what I did and the value it brought was pretty well formed. But it was time at that point to ask myself, okay, so I've got this bag of tricks and things that I've done. Where do I apply it next? And so at the risk of sanding Detroit, being purpose driven is really important to me.
I don't just see work as a transactional thing. It's not just showing up to get money, not just showing up to do something. It's showing up to make a difference, showing up to have some kind of impact.
But it's a social psychologist in me that's always been interested in trying to communicate and advocate broadly on big topics, big issues, big thoughts that hopefully move hearts and minds and move behavior. And so I was sort of tickling my brain with the thought of maybe stopping doing what I had done for some time with the notion that maybe the advice was good, that I should stay where I was. But this is around 2004, 2005, when I was asking for some advice and got the worst advice I ever got.
[00:03:41] Speaker C: You'd already moved twice?
[00:03:44] Speaker A: We had moved once, twice, three times, four times by the time we got here.
[00:03:48] Speaker C: That's crazy. Then you already did it.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: Well, yeah, had done it. But the question is, do you stop doing it? Yeah, because it does come at a cost. Family dislocation and replanting kids here and there. And you do have to ask yourself, you know, do you keep doing that sort of thing, relocating?
[00:04:04] Speaker B: And these moves come with a cost. Define what you believe the cost of having to uproot your life and move to a new place is.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: It's the cost of, to some degree, relationships, because, you know, you're not going to see some folks again. But there's a lot of energy and time. We all know this, right? There's a lot of energy and time invested in building a network of people, and you got to rebuild that all over again. That's one portion of it. Relocating kids. If any of you have done that, you know what that's like. I mean, there's a constant consequence associated with that. You hope they're happy. Plus, you know, just the financial dynamics of it. We always moved up market, you know, which. Which was. Was driven by the fact that the. The next best thing was always up market. So you're buying a bigger home, you're paying more for it, and costs go up. So there is a cost.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:52] Speaker C: And even with all that, you're still here on the worst advice I ever got, saying don't relocate for a job. Is the worst advice.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: When you're getting this advice, you're in Atlanta. And the last time I checked, we're sitting here in Atlanta today. So let's dig a little deeper so you get this advice. Continue on from there. What happened next?
[00:05:10] Speaker A: I have to say that one of the things that really drove me was the quest for experiences. So we're all trying to accumulate experience over the course of our cruise because that's ultimately what you trade on. But the quest for experiences over, over experience was my driver. I have to go take take a further step back in my career. And I was probably about seven or eight years into my career where I started reading some books on this thing called the New Economy. What's the New Economy? And we're talking, you know, early 90s. The, the Internet, or a notion of an Internet is not even really known. But it caught my attention, caught my imagination. I thought, my gosh, I've got to prepare. I've got to kind of future proof myself for what's coming. I've got to do things that I can put into my kit bag of experiences that I can trade on in the future. That meant I need to be thinking of moving every two to three years. I don't want to be stuck in one spot for too long because I saw that as potentially career limiting. So I had this, this notion that I have this sort of like this career suitcase with me that I have to have a lot of things in and the more things I can put into it, the more value it's going to give me and the more sustainability I'll have from a career perspective as I get to this juncture mid career and ask myself, you know, what do I do now?
And the reason why that was bad advice, maybe horrible advice that if I would have taken it would have been a derailer for me, is that I decided not to take it. And it opened my aperture to some new possibilities that came my way in my search and came fairly quickly in my search. One of those was to go to California and work with Chevron Corporation.
Absent the ability or absent my open approach to relocating again and ignoring the advice, I would have missed that opportunity. And it would have been a big, big miss for and for my family too.
[00:06:58] Speaker C: Yeah, easier to find your purpose when you've expanded your search. You know, if you're like, oh, well, I can't move.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: So yeah, the advice to me just seems like it's saying your sandbox needs to be smaller.
[00:07:09] Speaker A: For me, I got an itchy brain. I like that I just. I had to keep scratching the itch. And fortunately, God bless my wife and my kids.
I gave all my kids at that time, they were all going off to college. I said, look, you all get a veto here. If you don't want us to go to California and leave you over here on the east side of the country, each of you gets a veto. And they all said, you have to do this.
[00:07:28] Speaker B: Your experiences were partially impacted or influenced by doing it in different places. That was important to you. How do you feel that's impacted your impact?
[00:07:43] Speaker A: For me, Sean, those moves were visceral. It wasn't just showing up at a new office. At the end of the day, a lot of offices look the same. Business parks look the same. And oftentimes when you make these moves, it's kind of like you cross the bridge, but you also burn the bridge behind you. In some ways, there really is. It's like the question, can you go home again? Can you go back again? And once you make the transition and once you see what's going on, you really can't. In some ways, at least your mind can't, because now you've seen something new, you've experienced something new. So with each of these moves, I got opportunities to see and do things I never would have had if I would have stayed where I was. And I could say that, absolutely true. The companies I joined, the industries at the time, the dynamics that were going on, were all utterly unique. And oftentimes those situations came and went. And if I wouldn't have been there at that time, I would have missed it altogether. I mean, an example of this is when I went to work in Texas with Nortel Networks back in the 1990s. I was with the wireless division and we were working on something called mobile Internet. Now, I know that might sound humorous today. We'd all take it for granted. We'd get 5G at 35,000ft while we're working on a cocktail at 500 miles an hour. But back then, you needed enormous amounts of equipment to even make a basic video image possible in a mobile environment. So the company I was working with at the time, we were very much about trying to make the Internet mobile. I would have missed that whole conversation. I would have missed that whole experience. All the people I met, all the things we did, the things we saw, the concepts we were exposed to, would have come and gone and I wouldn't have had that experience. And I'm profoundly happy that I just happened to be lucky and show up at the right time.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: You take the job at Chevron, you move west. But here we are today back in Atlanta. I'd love to know more about your path post taking the job of Chevron. What you added to your bag of experiences and how you think it reinforces what you do today.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: It was a profound experience. A lot of my colleagues who've since left Chevron as well will talk and say we never would have seen the things we did, got the opportunities we did, had a chance to sit in the rooms we did with the people we did, absent Chevron on a range of things. The opportunity to go to Angola, Nigeria, communicating to the market, various things were something you say or not say, well, could move the market. And then there's some consequences associated with that. Chance to work with great executives, people that are really purpose and passion driven. And culture. Culture really matters a lot. And I'll be candid on the culture front. I had seen a lot of people and heard a lot of people and experienced a lot of corporations talk about culture, but culture really became clearly understood to me when I got the Chevron. Here's an example of that. I was probably a couple weeks into the job and one of my first assignments was to work with the CEO on a specific initiative. And I thought, okay, I got a few minutes with the CEO here. Let me just sit down and I should ask some questions and make sure I look bright and know what's going on and find out a little bit about him. Personable person. So I'm sitting there and I said, just give me some sense of what your day looks like. He reaches inside his coat pocket and pulls out a copy of the company value statement. He says, I walk around all day talking about this, and I didn't expect that. And I thought about that and I've never forgotten it, because at the end of it all, that's all that matters.
But job one is culture. How do you keep people in line who speak multiple languages that are in different time zones and different geographies with their own social dynamics?
Big job. So I've carried all those experiences forward from that experience living in California as well. You know, phenomenal state. It's got all sorts of challenges, and I could probably talk about that in a second podcast. But to come back here, it was during COVID and my wife and I were looking at each other going, you know, we've done a lot of things here. It's been a dozen years now, and we thought, why don't we just take advantage of the chaos and get out of Dodge? So we left California and very glad we did and very happy to be back here.
[00:12:07] Speaker B: No, that's true.
[00:12:08] Speaker C: That's going to be my next question. I was going to say, because you mentioned earlier, two to three years. Yeah, you know, that's kind of your sweet spot of moving on. And Chevron sounds amazing. So when do you find that time? It's like, okay, it's time for me to bail out, to move on.
[00:12:21] Speaker A: Well, earlier on in my career, as I said, you know, two to three years was. Three years was sort of the witching hour for me. I thought, okay, somebody had told me earlier in my career, when you start doing things three times, that's probably when you've mastered it. And isn't that enough? So I held onto that because, again, I was driven by this notion of accumulating experiences. Not so much necessarily just experience for itself, but when I got to Chevron, and again, fortunately, I discovered that there was so much to do and so much now you had to show up and work hard and demonstrate yourself and prove yourself. Nobody got a free ride. But if you did that, and the deal was you brought yourself to work and you performed, then the company would reward you with new opportunities, and it certainly did.
[00:13:04] Speaker B: The list of experiences you just talked about having at Chevron, you never have any of those if you take this advice. You mentioned coming back to Atlanta, Sean.
[00:13:17] Speaker A: The 100% impetus was to come back and be closer to family. We'd miss Sunday dinners. And so the move was driven by that with no intention of necessarily finding anything. And that's when I realized that I had some addictions, that I was addicted to process and getting up and doing things and feeling productive and being purpose driven. And I needed to keep going. So I started looking. And I was fortunate at the time that my predecessor, who had my job at the time, was retiring after 38 years, and that there had, in 123 years of operation of the Georgia association of Manufacturers, only been three presidents.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: That's incredible.
[00:13:56] Speaker A: So I showed up at the right time, and oddly enough, I was looking around on LinkedIn and found the job posted on LinkedIn. Nobody brought it to my attention. I remember calling the recruiter and he says, you know, I'll tell you what interesting background, but we've got. We've got about nine candidates that the board's looking at, and the board feels really comfortable with all those candidates. And I'll tell you what, I'll keep you in mind. There's probably something else we could talk about at some point in time, but this is closed. And I said, just let me put my name in for this. I am absolutely perfect for this. Rattle off all my experience, what I had done. And he said, I'll tell you what. Okay, let me, I'll indulge you. I'm going to send this in. But listen, one more time. You know, they're full up. Long story short, suddenly I win the derby and I move from maybe number 10 in the rotation to the person they want to speak to. And fortunately and happily, the board endorsed me and voted me in as the, as the new president and CEO. And it's been a terrific experience.
[00:14:54] Speaker B: Do you think one of the reasons was the fact that you'd been so many places and done so many things, Sean?
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Absolutely. That's exactly right. The fact that I was able to talk to them about what I'd seen and what I could bring and what better looks like, I absolutely believe that's what made the difference. Yeah, that's great.
[00:15:11] Speaker B: I want to delve into your kids or maybe others who have come to you and said and sought career advice from you and how relocating or not relocating plays into that advice.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: I would refer to a two by two that I discovered about 20 years ago. And what I mean by that specifically, it's basically a model. So Ben Carson, who's a famous neurosurgeon and obviously was involved in politics and served in the administration for a while, I was reading a piece that he had put together called, roughly speaking, decision making, how do you make better decisions? And he proposed a simple model. You just draw a two by two and on the left column you put best if I don't at the top and on the right column, best if I do.
And the boxes below are what's the best that happens if you do something and the worst that happens if you don't do something. And you put that on both sides. And it's interesting. It's such a binary experience. When you start to bucket things like that, the things you're worried about look smaller. And when you step back objectively and look at it and go, is that really a problem? I think that's a problem. But if that's the worst that's going to happen if I do something, what's the risk here? Look at all the good things that could come out of doing something if I actually do that thing. And I've used that a number of times with people. And it's interesting, the number of folks that have come back and said, this has really been helpful.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: Lord, I've got A final question on my mind about all of this, because the timing of when you got that advice is important here. Does the fact that so many people work hybrid today or work remotely change the impact of this?
[00:16:59] Speaker A: I think it certainly changes the paradigm a little bit. You know, here's another take on that. Okay, that's where we were a few years ago, where that was the norm, but what's happening now? Yeah, great point, Shaun, yourself. Maybe you've asked your staff to come back. I've certainly observed and I think we all have, a lot of companies across the country and around the world have said that's over now. It might have been a moment in time where, you know, a discussion about relocation might have been moot. But I think increasingly we're getting back to reality that physically being someplace with people makes a difference. Also, experience the places that you can live in as well. It's not just all about work, but what about after hours? And where can you get to from where you are? So keeping your aperture wide and giving yourself the opportunity and the luxury to think broader about how you can apply your skill sets and the benefits for your family and also your career, I think are really important.
I think it's an interesting perspective in regards to how technologies enable us to stay in our homes and do things, but it comes at a bit of a loss as well. The loss of community, the loss of culture, the loss of connectivity, and just also the opportunity of benefiting from being in a geography with people doing things.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: Can I go back to your analogy of cost? The cost to move that you described now, the cost not to move, because you take the technology advances we've made to offset those costs. But your experiences would not possibly have been as rich as they were because you actually moved if you had not done the move, if you had just worked remotely.
[00:18:39] Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. There's no question.
But one more time.
It's up to you, and what works for you, works for you. For me, this is the approach I took and this is what's worked. And I'm glad I did not take the worst advice I would have gotten. The days of having people lined up at your door to go to work are largely over recruiting and retaining and training and upskilling and a whole host of things. In an age of artificial intelligence, automation, robotics is a massive transformation, especially post Covid, where there was sort of a reset in the workforce and a reset in attitudes towards work, especially in manufacturing. So it is a new day. But the secret sauce to this is to really push the paradigm challenge Your thinking. Take highly unconventional approaches, things you wouldn't have done three years ago you need to do today. And frankly, those things increasingly are becoming normalized rapidly. So it's fascinating to see.
[00:19:42] Speaker B: Well, this has been a fascinating conversation, Lloyd. I can't thank you enough for being our guest today. I can't thank you enough for sharing the worst advice you ever got. And I can't thank you enough for not taking that advice so you could glean the experiences you gleaned at Chevron and across the country and bringing them back to Georgia here to benefit us all. So thanks for joining us today, Sean.
[00:20:05] Speaker A: Thank you very much. Can I say as well that by not taking that advice, if I would have taken that advice, I wouldn't be here today.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: Well, thank you for pointing that out, Lloyd. And we're grateful for. You keep doing the great work you're doing for the Georgia association of Manufacturers.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: You know, jb, I think what really struck me about this conversation with Lloyd is just how easy it is to. To. To accept advice that sounds responsible. Don't relocate for a job without realizing really that it can be very limiting. Lloyd really did a good job of walking us through exactly what he would had he listened to it.
[00:20:42] Speaker C: Yeah, he did a great job with that. And, you know, it's not about just the one move. It's, you know, his whole approach to growth. Lloyd wasn't just chasing a better salary or a new life, he said he was chasing experiences and gathering those experiences and putting them in his metaphorical suitcase to take with him throughout his career. And I. I love that.
[00:20:59] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, me too. I. I think about it. It. He had stayed in one place, he never would have joined Chevron, led global media strategy, or traveled Angola or Nigeria doing communications that could literally move markets. Those just aren't bullet points on a resume like on the experience section. Those are perspective shaping moments.
[00:21:20] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. I loved how he framed it. You know, it wasn't just about saying yes to the move. He called it expanding his aperture. Every time he relocated, he got access to a world that honestly simply didn't exist in his previous zip code.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: It's not for everyone. Lloyd was the first to say that. Look, I've been in the same spot for 30 years, and I'm proof you don't have to move to have success. But I can't disagree with him, you know, that shutting down the idea of relocating for a job just because you don't want to get out of your routine, it's just not the way to go. About weighing. To weighing the decision. Right. Obviously, that advice of stay put would have meant shrinking his world just when it was about to open up. I don't know. It's kind of like he said, the cost of moving is real, but what's the cost of not moving? You know, that. That would have dried me out is what I think he said.
[00:22:09] Speaker C: Yeah. Now he's right back here in Georgia. You know, he's obviously leading the Georgia association of Manufacturers, and it's that full circle. But that circle doesn't exist if he didn't, you know, do some zigzags along the way.
[00:22:20] Speaker B: Oh, totally. Yeah. You. You. You don't know what the beach has to offer if you're buried in your own sandbox.
[00:22:26] Speaker C: There it is.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, big thanks to Lloyd once again for joining us. And if you've been sitting on a decision, wondering whether it's worth making a move, maybe this is your sign to expand those horizons. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with another story, another guest, another piece of bad advice. In fact, the worst advice I ever got.
