The Power of Curiosity: Carla Bailo on Smart Cities, Boardroom Wisdom, and Transforming Mobility

Carla Bailo

When you're a big idea person you always need to have somebody around you that's going through every nitpicky detail and you know the seventh generation guy that's gonna say "but, did you think about this?"

Mark Cleveland

Haha.

Carla Bailo

My best jobs have always been those that I was asked to do and I said yes and I had no idea how the heck I was going to do it. But that gets my brain going.

As the rules began to change and businesses were held accountable, you couldn't have cat calls when you walked into the manufacturing plant anymore. You know, the things that I had to put up with and just basically put in the back of my mind.

My brightest ideas have always come in the middle of an exercise routine.

Mark Cleveland

What happens when a top automotive industry executive starts thinking like a systems architect for the future? Today's guest is someone who's helped steer the future of mobility, and I mean literally. Carla Bailo spent decades inside two of the world's automotive giants, General Motors and Nissan, leading global engineering teams and innovation strategy. She then took the helm at the Center for Automotive Research, guiding the industry through the shift to sustainable, connected transportation. But what really sets Carla apart is how she shows up. She's a boardroom level leader with a teacher's heart, someone who builds bridges between people, policy and technology. She's a parallel thinker in every sense with insights that stretch from the garage floor to global governance. I'm honored to welcome Carla Bailo to The Parallel Entrepreneur Podcast. Carla, welcome to the show.

Carla Bailo

Thank you, Mark. It's wonderful to see you again and be able to chat with you.

Mark Cleveland

Well, you know, I would love for you to help me set the stage here. What do you consider to be your greatest contributions to the cities that we live in and the roads that we drive on? Like, how did you get people behind those big visions?

Carla Bailo

So I think when you look at your totality of impact, back in the day of working in the automotive companies, what did we do? We designed cars, we built cars, and we passed them over to salespeople to sell the car. I mean, that's fundamentally what we did. We passed all safety standards. We were always thinking about unique attributes to put in the vehicle. But the end goal was to build cars and sell cars. When I left the industry and you know, rightly you mentioned teacher and went into academia for a few years, I learned that there's so much more to the world of transportation than just selling cars. There's a number of people that can't afford a car. There's a number of people who would love to be able to drive a car, but can't because they have some kind of disability that doesn't allow it, be it cognitive or physical.

There are a lot of people that can't get the education they need because they don't have a way to get there. A lot of people can't get a job. Again, they have no way to get there. They can't get to the proper doctors because they have no way to get there. And as we saw during COVID as well, there's a lot of students that get left behind because they don't even have the basic things that we think are important like internet.

So, you know, when I went into academia and started thinking differently and started talking to people in agriculture, started talking to people in public policy, started talking to people in architecture, urban planning, it completely made me think differently that yeah, we make a great product in the automobile industry, but jeez, there's a lot of people that need many other different solutions and we need to be thinking about that comprehensive picture and then how we can use technology not only in products, but also in the way we arrange for rides, arrange for travel, arrange for payment. All of this is a very complex ecosystem that we all need to be involved and we all need to care about because we want to use technology and data to really improve people's lives. That's the end game.

Mark Cleveland

So this is what led you to the Smart Cities Initiative. I remember Nashville was applying for a Smart Cities grant. Everybody in the whole country was trying to advance a vision for a smart city. You're too modest because you didn't say that you won the Smart Cities grant. So you began from this industry insider, engineer, innovator role in General Motors and Nissan,

went into which is kind of cool all by itself, right? Because I think a complaint that I've heard throughout my life would be that the teachers have never been the doers and you were the doer who moved into the teaching role. So you could really bring a lot of practical knowledge and insight to that, which apparently helped you because as you thought more broadly about

multimodal and what mobility means, you crushed it. So that was a huge accomplishment and you got lots of people behind you. So let's let's focus in a little bit on what it meant and how you you won a smart cities grant for Columbus, Ohio.

Carla Bailo

Yeah, one of the things when I first went to the Ohio State University, which is a whole funny story being a Michigan grad that just tells you I can get along anywhere I work.

Mark Cleveland

Yeah, and you're talking to me and I'm an Oregon guy and I've got my Oregon life behind me. Yes, it's Ohio State thing. I still have twitches.

Carla Bailo

Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah. thing that I did at first, it was a blank sheet of paper job. I've always loved blank sheet of papers. Job's never been done before. Make it what you will, but find a way to bring all of our different colleges together and work on big projects. And then of course, be able to bring funding into the university to help, you know, research students, PhD students, et cetera.

So that was my goal. And in that goal, I initially started doing things basically on university property. So we built up a whole infrastructure between a proving ground, which the university owned, and the university itself and put a smart roadway in. Then working with the Ohio Department of Transportation, we continued that smart roadway project around the perimeter of the city. Columbus has a large ring highway around it. So that's how it started. And then I heard about the smart city challenge and I had learned enough about the community to know that we had certain communities that were absolute deserts. There were food deserts, they were transit deserts, they were healthcare deserts, and they were less than five miles from the university campus. And I had heard about, you know, people who are born in these communities have less than a 10% chance of leaving those communities, again, because they can't get where they want to go. So I began looking at some of our public transit that was happening in the city, and it quickly became obvious where some of the concerns were - why people were unable to get to healthcare and doctors, et cetera. So we heard about the Smart City Challenge. I heard about it. And the first thing I did was called the mayor's office and said, I really want to do this. I think I can lead it for the city of Columbus. These are some crazy ideas I have. Who do I need to get involved? Who needs to be part of this process? And we were able to amass people from so many different areas, not just the university, but from the city offices themselves, from the mayor's office, from a group called Smart Columbus, from various startup communities throughout the city. And we got this whole group together, I want to say in less than a week, and we sat down for about six hours and said, what are our biggest problems and how can we solve them using technology?

And how can we put these ideas then into a great proposal that the U.S. Department of Transportation will agree to give us $50 million? So we started that and fortunately the mayor was all behind it. Once we showed the idea, we were able to get more support, more dollar supports from the public and private sector to be able to write the proposal and then get people to travel where they needed to travel. At the end of the day, there were 87 cities that applied. The short list was down to 15. So out of 87, we were one of the 15. And then from there, they selected one and Columbus beat out, you know, some big guys like Portland, Oregon, and, you know, Las Vegas, and some that had a good proposal. But the reason why we won, was because if we can make smart mobility and smart cities work in a city in the middle of Heartland, a small mid-sized city, they thought the big cities wouldn't have a problem duplicating it. And part of the rule was if they gave us the money, during the five years, we had to take time to give presentations and talk about our learnings, so that other cities could begin to duplicate some of things that we did. The basis was three. First one was to put in a bus rapid transit system that went smack dab in the center of that underserved community to again allow people to get where they needed to be. There were people that had a minimum wage job that were on the bus for over two hours a day. Portland has the same problem, you know, from an Oregon perspective to get from A to B can take up to two hours with the different routings, et cetera. And a lot of times it's not timely. So putting in that bus rapid transit as a hub to then be able to do hub and spoke from the ends of that was one of the first things that we worked on. And that still exists today. And in fact, it's been expanded. It's even better. The other was to do a middle mile experiment from Rickenbacker, which is a large inland port, one of the largest in the country on the south side of Columbus, to be able to get goods out on time, delivery to the various companies and warehouses that needed them. Because I don't know if you know this, these are some of the things I learned. If you're even one minute late for your window, let's say you're pulling into a warehouse or you're pulling into a Meijer grocery store, for example, you've lost your window and you have to sit there and wait until one opens and that can be anywhere up to 12 hours. So in the meantime, the logistics company is just sitting there burning manpower and fuel. ⁓ You missed it.

Mark Cleveland

Right, right. You missed your window and you no longer get a slot and you don't get paid for detention and it's all on you and the drivers paying a penalty too. Drivers not making any money.

Carla Bailo

Right.

And the third idea was to take a very busy section of the city where we had this huge mall and we had a lot of living area and we had a lot of businesses that just became jam packed with people and to create hubs for people to park their vehicles and or to come in on public transit and then create a, was supposed to be autonomous. It never got autonomous, but the shuttle system to get people into their businesses and to get people into the big shopping mall. That one, we had a lot of issues. There was a lot of public policy issues, who owns what and safety concerns. So I'm not so sure that one ever happened. But one of the coolest things about this was there was a group in Columbus of all the big business owners.

And this group banded together and said, yes, we want to do this. This is good for our businesses. It's good for the growth of our city. It's good to get people to want to live here. And they invested their own money. So on top of the 50 million that we got, we ended up with several million more from the private sector that allowed us to do even more than we had planned to do in the beginning. We set up a smart Columbus office so that the, the population could come in and see what we were doing, get demonstrations. So it wasn't just, what are those crazy people doing? You know, this was an all community effort. One of the funniest stories when we were going to announce that we were the winners and we had all kinds of, you know, we had Secretary Foxx coming in from the Department of Transportation, had all kinds of big wigs from the area, from the state politicians, that we could do this big show that we won, we decided to do it at a school in this underserved community, part of Columbus. And so all the residents are standing around as all these cars are coming in. Nobody ever comes to where they are. And cars are parking along the streets. And so this group of ladies and kids starts to gather.

And I got out of my car and I don't know why they decided to ask me, but they said, ma'am, what is going on here today? And it had been in all the papers that we had won and we were going to do this big announcement. And I said, we won the Smart City Challenge. This is the big announcement today. Didn't, didn't you hear about it on, the news or on the internet? And she goes, "ma'am, the only way we get news in this community is if somebody puts a flyer on my front door."

Mark Cleveland

Mmm.

Carla Bailo

So this light goes off in my head, my gosh. You know, this is, we need to rethink what we had planned for this community because even if we put in this bus rapid transit, nobody's gonna know about it. They're not gonna know how to get there. So we had to completely change how we thought about the project. And it was one of the most, know, another aha moment for me that, you know, this is bigger than we thought.

And we need to structure this differently if we're going to have an impact.

Mark Cleveland

That's amazing. know, alternative transportation is a word that we hear used. I mean, I've been in the transportation space for most of my career, some form of logistics, some form of information systems. And I used to go to Columbus all the time, fly into Columbus and then drive to Wilmington, because that's where Trip Pack had their data center, sort center. It's a great little town! I think quite a few people were surprised that Columbus would win. But alternative transportation, you and I don't even think about taking alternative transportation. We take a car. And our conversation could lean deeply into AI and automotive automation systems and EVs, all these things that you have a deep level of understanding about. And I hope we get there, but we don't consider that an alternative and the people who don't have an alternative are not very well served. And I think that's been true historically in Nashville. I came from Portland originally to Nashville and I watched I was there when the BART systems equivalent, you Max was being deployed. A lot of very forward thinking investment. You see what's happened in Denver. You know, they got the Tiger Grant that Nashville turned down.

You know, we're not necessarily thinking about the future of how we could help people not have to have the second most expensive investment in their entire life cycle, which is a house first and a car second. And then there's nothing left over to get to work or to, you know, we have this direct relationship between your mobility and your economic success. And if you do not have mobility, you do not have economic success. I think it's also true if you don't have internet access, you're not going to have economic success. So you weave together this group of business forward thinking, aggressive, paralleling activities here, right? You're weaving together the business community, the state, the local, the federal, the education.

Carla Bailo

Yeah? Yeah?

Mark Cleveland

I mean, this is paralleling on steroids. What did you learn? was your, what was it? Tell me another aha moment.

Carla Bailo

Well, I think, you know, when you look at how the heck we design cities and our building codes, for example, we build our cities around roads. First, we think about where the roads need to go. Then we think about where we're going to put buildings and where we're to put parking. And, you know, if you put in a certain office building, if you put in a restaurant, you have to have X number of parking spaces.

This is by code and by law. And when you look back at how we're teaching, let's go all the way back to the roots, how we're teaching, that's exactly how architecture and urban planning is thought about. How the roads go in and then we design the buildings. We don't think about how are people going to get around? How are people going to socialize? I mean, cities started back in the day because people need a place to come together, to share meals, to share ideas, to talk about, you know, whatever of the day. Heck, yeah, I mean, today we don't even know who our neighbors are

Mark Cleveland

trade, get educated, yeah.

Carla Bailo

most of the time. And in a city, you know, we don't have green spaces for people to get together to just, again, enjoy a meal, enjoy a picnic. I mean, it just doesn't happen. And we need to think about the whys of that and how we can do planning completely differently. There was a great project that was done and several universities did it for the city of Seoul.

And they said, can we create, the puzzle was how can we create a livable city here? And basically what they ended up doing was putting autonomous vehicle roadways beneath the city and above total green spaces so people can walk. We want people to exercise too. I mean, that's the best thing for your health, not just physical health, but mental health too. You've got to exercise and get air.

So, you know, allowing more and more opportunities to use your own body to get around, designing roadways, streets so that it can be shared with some buses and cars, but bicycles and pedestrians and people in autonomous pods, whatever. It all needs to coexist, but you need to design it properly, and have the proper communication protocols to be able to do that safely. We tend to look at things, and we want to policy it to death and think about why we can't do it. I mean, engineers are real good at telling you why we can't do things. We're the best at that. Guilty as well. We can't do that. It'll never work. It won't meet FMVSS. It's too unsafe. It's too risky. Can't be that risky.

But you know, you look at some of the big breakthroughs that have happened, people have disregarded everybody who said it's too risky or we can't do it. Because as my father used to tell me, can't never does anything. And I truly believe that's true. And so when I hear my children or grandchildren say that, you can guess my reply. You know, I think anything pretty much is possible. If you just break it into bite-sized pieces

Mark Cleveland

Ha

Carla Bailo

and figure it out and get the right people and the right conversations. I think that's one of the biggest problems that exists is who do you get in the room? Who really needs to be in the room? Who can make the decision? And what are you going to do as you begin to implement it? One of the things that we did in the Smart City Challenge, we said, we're going to pick these projects. They're all distinct. They're small. And we're going to start off again, very small, learn from it and then begin to grow it. I think one of the biggest problems that a lot of companies face or people face when they're trying to expand a business is they expand it way too fast. They haven't fixed it first in the first location so that they know they have a smooth business to operate. And then they're suddenly too far, they have too many things to fix and suddenly they're just gone.

It's just human nature to want to do that if you start to feel like you're having success, but wisely you should always take a small prototype, perfect it, and begin to expand it.

Mark Cleveland

I love that wisdom. There's a couple of things that this is calling up for me. I am really excited, looking forward to an interview that's coming up with Bo Burlingham, the author of Small Giants. And he gave me permission in reading that book, he gave me permission to be the best at something. And that can be great.

You should be a giant and be excellent at this thing. And at that time it was a sock company and we were trying to figure out how to become Under Armour. And then we decided, wait a minute, we don't need to become something else. We don't need to grow and scale that way. We just need to have a world class company doing a world class thing. And then I applied that same logic to my hobby company. And what I'm just hearing you say is that some companies in your experience, big ones and small ones, just try to bite off too much because I think there's this pressure to scale. It's like scale, scale, scale. Well, why why would you scale rotten processes? Why wouldn't you focus on great processes? And I had a I had a personal working experience with you, and I think I want to dive into great questions. I was proposing I was putting together a proposal for the city of Seattle and a mobility project, and I ran it by you.

And you gave me some feedback and it is really important to be open to really good questions. And I thought I had knocked it out of the park and you asked me some really good questions, which just dropped, stopped me dead in my tracks. And I was grateful for that. And, and I think you must have got some superpower in asking great questions and keeping, giving people permission to be small and to learn from that. That's what I just took away from what you said. Would you mind developing that a little bit? Because I think that's a superpower.

Carla Bailo

Yeah,

I didn't know it was my superpower, but I'm always curious. I think that's what makes me ask a lot of questions. I'm always asking a lot of things. And, you my quest, I like to learn at least one new thing every day. I don't care. It can be a foreign word. It just something new.

But you know, in my career as an engineer, even when I was studying to be an engineer, I always questioned, why'd they do it that way? You know, wouldn't it have made more sense if we had done it this way. Looking at, you know, various things that were designed when I was growing up, especially women's products, which are typically designed by men. Why did they do it that way? It doesn't make any sense why is this dress so hard to put on that i need you know somebody else to button in the back you know it just silly things like that are why didn't they develop a tool for that? think when when i'm hearing about something a lot of my questions are just out of curiosity you know what about this but i'm always thinking in the back of my mind, we don't want to create unintended consequences by a good idea. And you can see many examples of where unintended consequences happened. When we put in our public roadways, our big infrastructure projects many moons ago, what did we do? We put them smack dab between the good places to live and the bad places to live. And we cut off communities completely by roadways.

And we did that very purposefully. That's why this particular area in Columbus was so bad too. It was across a freeway and literally there was no bridge to be able to get across. There was no crosswalk. So it was just isolated by a roadway. ⁓ So I'm always encouraging people to think and ask why five times. I use the five why all the time. Okay, I want to build a new road. Why? Well, I want to enable these people to get from here to there. Why? Why do they need to get there? And then beyond that, then well,

Mark Cleveland

Right.

Carla Bailo

Why does that matter? Why can't they go this way or that way? What are you really trying to solve? And by the time you get to the fifth why, you often realize, you know, maybe I need to rethink this. Maybe that is not the reason. Or sometimes you get down to the root cause and you're like, okay, I got it. Maybe a different solution is gonna work. The other thing that I like to always think about is the seventh generation, you know, our...

Mark Cleveland

Right.

Carla Bailo

American lore, so to speak, where the chiefs of an Indian tribe, if they were making a decision, always thought in seven generations from now, now remember the generations are much shorter back in the day, but in seven generations, is this still going to be a good idea for my people? So they didn't think about just the next 10 years, they're thinking about decades.

Mark Cleveland

Hmm.

Carla Bailo

And is this decision going to be good in the long run? And if you, if you step back and think that way, it makes you think differently about some of the decisions that you may make as a business leader, as a parent, it can make, you know, a lot of difference in the things that you're thinking about doing.

Mark Cleveland

We're tending, think, as our culture is getting faster and faster and higher energy and, you know, things feel a little bit more chaotic. And wow, you know, what are we doing seven generations from now with this decision that I'm investing in today? And, you know, there's another mythology, maybe a Chinese cultural mythology that they've got a 500 year plan as opposed to us having much, much shorter term perspectives. And I wonder, you know, with with the things that you're doing today, let's transition for a second to this question. You've been running companies, you ran the Society of Automotive Engineers, you organized a winning smart city initiative between public and private sectors.

Then you're moving into the world of the boardroom, which is not a conversation we've had yet on the parallel entrepreneur. The relationship between the board and the leader or the founder and the board and the role of the board representing shareholders, I think it's fascinating. So I know that you serve on Advanced Auto Parts board of directors, for example.

Talk to me a little bit about what you've learned in this new parallel universe of serving on multiple boards and how many boards do you serve? Just walk us through that.

Carla Bailo

Yeah, so

I serve on three public boards and probably five nonprofit boards. And then I'm on advisory boards for some smaller private and government institutions. And I really started my board journey in academia.

I was asked to be on the board of a small university, actually the university that I attended to get my undergraduate in engineering. And this was back when I was still at Nissan, so it was several years ago. And of course I joined that not knowing what a board was supposed to do, but I just felt I can give back to the university. But what I discovered was the board's role is really important, be it a nonprofit or a for-profit company or private company, family held. Because first of all, the CEO or the president reports to the board. You have the ability to create their objectives for the year, to help them navigate situations. And you also are a fiduciary responsible for the financial health of that company, and reviewing it and making sure that the ethics are right, making sure that we're doing the audit as it should be done, making sure we're doing compensation properly. So there are many different elements to being a board member that I think a lot of people don't understand. I have a lot of people come up to me and say, hey, I want to be on a board. Tell me how to make that happen. I say, well, first you got to make sure you know what being on a board means and your role on that board.

I had a great opportunity as a child to understand that too. My father was on the school board for a number of years. And one thing that I don't think people realize is the readiness and the preparation to be a good board member. So we get between five and 600 pages of material for each meeting and we meet at least a quarter. Five to 600 pages, yes, of

Mark Cleveland

Hold on for a second. Five. Hundred pages, OK.

Carla Bailo

data and materials prepared. And that's not even talking about the different documents that we have to submit as part of being a public company. But my father, this was back before computers or anything, used to get delivered to our house a packet that was about this thick. And he would sit for days reading this before the meeting because as he told me, because I said, dad, how can you sit there and read that? That's so much material.

So boring. And he said, I got elected. I have a duty to the people of this school district and I need to go to this meeting prepared and ready to discuss this material. And I never really thought about it after that. And then when I got my first board and I got my first board deck, again, this is this aha moment where I hear my dad again telling me, you know, you have to read this, you have to be prepared because you're on the board and you owe it to the company that, you know, or the shareholders or the students, whatever kind of board you're on, you owe it to that population to come into the meeting prepared and be ready to ask the right questions and understand the data and make sure that the direction is proper.

So, you know, this was one of my, you know, big moments when I got on the educational board, but I found I really loved it. I loved the camaraderie of the board members. I loved hearing the other questions that people on the board were asking that I hadn't thought to ask. And I would say, ⁓ God, that's a really good question. You know, it made me begin to think differently about, you know, the data I used to prepare to give to the boards when I was running companies. And then, how to be as a board member. So, knowing that, that kind of led me down the path where I really like to be on public boards. I've done nonprofits, Engineering Society of Detroit, universities, Automotive Women's Alliance Foundation. I had done all of this. I loved it. And I thought I'd really like to take this to the next level and I'd really like to get paid to do it.

So I really need to look at private or public boards.

For me to be on a board, it has to be something I'm passionate about. Be it technology, be it the people or the structure of the company or the "why we exist" of the company. It has to be something that I'm passionate about. If you're not passionate about it, I don't think you can be a good board member, because you're going to be apathetic about the product and apathetic about how the company performs and the company doesn't need somebody like that on their board. Once I finally got together a board ready resume, actually I didn't do that until I was already on boards, but it's usually managed by a recruiter and a recruiter reached out and they said, you know, we've got this board position, it's an oil and gas company upstream.

I know nothing about it, but they're looking for somebody out of industry to be able to help them navigate the energy of the future. You know, to know about is consumption going to go up or down? Should they stay in the oil and gas business? Should they invest in solar panels? You know, all the different things related to, you know, the future of energy.

It sounded so compelling to me. So as I read more about this company and I saw how they started and then how they grew from there, but throughout the entire time, this "who we are" and "how we want to be seen" never changed. You know, their commitment to the environment, even though they're drilling, fracking and pumping oil, that's what they do, their commitment to making sure, you know, flaring was down, the commitment to the health and welfare of their people, the commitment to their communities and the amount that they gave back to their communities. This all made me say, this is really interesting, something I'd like to do. I think I can add value. All my boards, I want to add value. Again, if you're not adding value, there's no reason for you to be sitting in that seat. I think I can add value. And you know what? I can learn a lot about a business that I know nothing about. I've used that business. I just thought, you know, I know they drill it somehow. I know it shows up, you know, in the pump somehow, but I never knew all of the things that I've learned since being on that board, the amount of geology, these people who work in the scientific office are nothing short of amazing.

Mark Cleveland

and a lot of cars.

Carla Bailo

How they can decide the different levels to go down in the rock, analyze that rock and know if it's gonna be a good producer. I mean, it's just amazing to me. And you know, the care that you have to take because it uses so much water and it, you know, the things that happen with mud and the discard and what you do with that.

It was just amazing. My first trip out to the oil fields in Texas, I spent a whole day out there with the guys on the rigs and learned and participated, saw guys sitting up on these rigs that are drilling and oil. I mean, it was not the best conditions in the world. It was a rainy gloomy day on top of it, but you got to get out and you got to understand what everybody in the company is doing.

It's just so important. But that was my first board. And they were very kind with me and did a great training for me. And then as we went into board meetings, and I would ask a lot of dumb questions because I wasn't an oil and gas person, very patient to answer the question. And then, you know, if I had other questions, I would ask on the side or call somebody and they were just great at training. So that kind of heart of the company became very clear throughout the board because the board had the same heart. And you know, I think that's really, really important. Never get on a board just to say, hey, I'm on a board. I'm getting paid to do this work. And you know, I only meet a few times a year. No, no, no. You're reading about that company every day. You're on call if somebody wants to ask you a question or ask your advice. This is what being a board member is about and what makes a good board member.

Mark Cleveland

This feeds your curiosity. It feeds your forward leaning perspective on everything. You're learning a whole lot more than one thing new every day, I'm sure.

Carla Bailo

Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, it's not just about, you know, the technical processes. And now we're talking about how we're going to use AI and other tools to be able to become even more efficient because "efficient" is the buzzword of almost every industry. But, you know, learning things about, you know, CEO compensation, you know, the various things we have to submit to the government all the time, to the SEC. And then, of course, we're always talking about, you know, when a new president comes and goes, one of them cares about DEI and cares about various environmental policies. The next one doesn't. So what do we do as a company? You know, it's very interesting conversations and you have to think again about the long term. You know, where do we want to be? And we should never deviate from the values of the company that were established.

Mark Cleveland

That's a great perspective. At the same time, people don't fully appreciate that a CEO's impact on the business can be extraordinarily positive and it can also be extraordinarily negative. People will sometimes imagine that. That's so much money, whatever that number doesn't matter. And yet I've seen

Carla Bailo

Yep, yep.

Mark Cleveland

that much money evaporate from the share price of a company in less than a day because of a poor comment or because of just a lack of judgment or maybe a market condition that's outside of the control. Some public announcements been made by a politician and all of a sudden your stock takes a 20 percent dive.

I know there are things that are external factors at work, but you're trying to find the greatest possible talent in the world to maintain and grow shareholder value. And one of my most recent guests, Matthew Joynes, talked about the product of your company, what you do and who you are is consistent, but the product of your company is the share price. You might do a whole lot of different things in order to underpin the share price. Those strategic decisions, how you go about framing your offering and your value is a substantially complex and I'm sure incredibly creative exercise.

Carla Bailo

Yeah, for sure. And then you think about, you know, your CEO has to go out and talk to the investment community all the time, you know, to talk about their value, talk about the initiatives, you know, talk about why they should stay invested in you, you know, and it's a big part of their job. And then to begin to think strategically, you know, where do we want this company to be long-term down the road?

And the other thing that's interesting is depending on where a company is, is it in the middle of a turnaround? Does it need a turnaround? Does it just need a steady growth? It will determine who you bring in as CEO. I've done several CEO searches and these are always really, really interesting because the spec can be completely different depending what you need.

Mark Cleveland

And it's up to the board to make that determination of what we need. ⁓

Carla Bailo

Yes.

Yeah, you need to get that spec together and, and, you know, some of the CEO searches end up being six to nine months long, easy. And when you're involved in one of those, you know, that tax on several more hours and, and yeah, for some reason I, I keep getting in charge of, nominating and governance committees,

Mark Cleveland

Yes, several more hours, I'm sure.

Carla Bailo

which puts me in charge of all those searches as well as any new board member searches. So I'm becoming an expert at that, but I can read people sometimes and it's a very funny trait. I can meet somebody one time and say, okay, I think I know that person or I see something in that person.

Mark Cleveland

intense.

Yeah.

Carla Bailo

It's funny because my spouse is exactly the opposite. He sees everyone as just no agenda, just genuinely wonderful person. And then, you know, he'll bring somebody home. We were doing a business together and bring somebody home and he said, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, having them invest or be a partner with us. I'd be like, no, you cannot bring that person in. And he said, why not? I've known him for years. There's something wrong with that.

He's a shady guy and I don't know why, but you can't trust him. And one time he didn't listen to me and he ended up having a bad experience and he broke off the business relationship. And like six months later, the guy was in jail for a check hiding scheme or something. I said, see, you gotta trust me sometimes.

Mark Cleveland

Well, you know, I think this is trusting your instincts. This is trusting your antenna, trusting.

Carla Bailo

That's the whole thing and that's such a big part of business and I don't think people do that enough.

Mark Cleveland

Yeah, I completely agree. The gut, I mean, I know this, I know when I've had gut feelings, sometimes I would think I would try to outthink my gut. And could I think my way through this? Of course. And almost every time, whatever neurons are down in my gut that are actually firing and giving me good instruction, I need to follow that. Whenever I don't, I usually wished I did.

Carla Bailo

Yeah always surrounded myself in a business role with somebody that I counted on as my devil's advocate. Because like I told you before, I have lots of ideas. I'm always full of ideas and you know, I want us to try to get to Mars because I hope we'll at least get to the moon. And I always had somebody working with me that says, but Carla, did you think about X? You know, out of the whole alphabet, did you think about X because I've gone through this in great excruciating detail and these people would you know have a whole analysis and I don't like the way X looks. I'm like, yep, I didn't think about that. So you always have to have somebody When you're a big idea person you always need to have somebody around you that's going through every nitpicky detail and you know the seventh generation guy that's gonna say "but, did you think about this?"

Mark Cleveland

Haha.

Carla Bailo

So always make sure you have somebody like that on your team.

Mark Cleveland

Yeah, absolutely. And I was going to ask, you know, you mentioned your dad and the empowerment that you, the lessons that you took away. I want to ask this in the context of mentoring. Well, two questions.

I think mentoring is a really important activity. You're clearly mentoring people, mentoring CEOs, being mentored by other directors. Your dad was a mentor. So I'm curious about why can't I find great systematic tool sets and examples of mentoring being explored and managed in most companies. And maybe I've just missed it.

Carla Bailo

Let me let me tackle the mentoring. It's one of my most favorite topics. I'll be honest, when I was in companies, I usually had 15 mentees. It only works if the mentor and the mentee can learn from each other. That means as a mentor, you don't go in like you know everything and you're going to advise this person.

You go in and you say whatever questions they have, I'm going to try to answer. And then I'm also try to learn something from them because they can help me. and I think that's where a lot of mentor programs fail because they're too prescriptive. You know, I remember they asked the mentees to come in with X number of questions at each meeting so that they could fill up however much time it was, so that we, you know, be sure that we had enough to talk about. Instead of just letting the conversation go synergistically, because I think that that has a lot more value. But even if the company doesn't have a program, I think it's important for people who feel they need a mentor to just reach out. I can't tell you the number of times in my career where early in my career, this is a great example, I was doing testing on buses, big old public buses. And I was doing some work on the brakes and they were making noise and I forget what was going on, but I had been asked to solve this problem or test this product and I had no idea how the brakes on a bus worked. Not a clue. Not a clue the different parts, never studied as a student.

Nothing. So I simply went to the head of the brakes group for the buses and I said, when you have time, I would love to sit down with you or one of your engineers to explain to me how this brake system works on a bus. And he said, I'm so busy. But he said, I'll try to do that. I'll try to do it quickly for you now.

Two and a half hours later of excruciating detail of a bus brake system, we finished our conversation. Because somebody who's an expert in something loves to tell you about it in excruciating detail sometimes. But after I sat there and listened and understood, I more than understood how it worked.

I could go to that group anytime and ask them anything, parts, whatever I needed, I'd get it. Because it's all about the personal relationships that get formed when you take the initiative and ask somebody what they do. And it's a...

Mark Cleveland

When you're curious, when you ask good questions, and when you listen.

Carla Bailo

Yeah, and you gotta listen. That's a trait most people don't have. You gotta sit and listen. And as a mentor, you need to do the same thing. Listen and really hear what they're saying. Don't put your bias filter on, but really listen. And mentor can be, what should my career path be? I mean, they always come with the same questions. What should my career path be? What was your career path like? What should I study? Should I get a second degree?

You know, and those are easy questions, you know, for anybody to answer. But what I always enjoyed was, you know, "I had this tricky situation with a technician. I wanted to get something done. I told them what I needed to get done and it just seemed to take forever. They didn't understand. We had to keep redoing it." So I would then, let's walk through the conversation you had. How did you ask? Did you just write a work order and throw it over? Or did you go talk to the person about what needed to be done? Do you know anything about them? Do they have a family? Maybe it was a bad day. Maybe one of their kids were sick. Do know anything about them? Do you just talk about sports or anything with the person to find out what makes them tick? And, you know, after that, I hope it made people think differently. Business isn't just, I'm gonna throw you this piece of paper, this work order or whatever on your desk.

It's about having conversation. And sometimes that conversation leads to many different things. I remember when I was head of SVP for R&D and quality, back in the days, we had a mail person come. There was still paper mail that came. And she used to come to my office every day. And if I saw her come, I'd known her for years, I'd go out and say, "Hey, how are you doing?" You know, and sometimes she'd have a limp because she was aging and "What's going on with your leg?" "How's your daughter?" Because I knew she had a daughter. And when I saw her many years later after I had retired, she said, you know, no other person ever did that. No other person ever said, "Thanks for bringing the to see your family?" And she said, you were just always different. And she said, I really respected you because of that. And it made me think.

That took me two minutes maybe out of my busy day to say hello, how you doing? How's your leg? How's this? How's that? It didn't mean that much. I didn't think it meant that much, but it meant a lot to the person who was receiving it. So I don't care if they're the lowest level person in the company or if they are your boss's boss's boss's boss. Treat everybody properly. Be kind. Learn something from them.

You can learn from everybody. And I know as a young engineer, I learned so much from the technicians who knew a vehicle inside and out, much more than I knew as a Greenhorn engineer that knew a lot of things academically.

Mark Cleveland

This is.

Carla Bailo

That took a different path than I think the way you started it on mentoring, but.

Mark Cleveland

No, no, I mean, this is great. This is it causes me to ask. I know that you and your husband have started businesses. I know you've had your own companies. I know you've been in charge of companies and now you're on boards. So the paralleling thing, you know, applies so obviously. And at the same time, you have four children, 11 grandchildren. You have a mentoring opportunity at the dinner table.

And you must ask great questions to what's life like right now for you and the rest of the personal paralleling universe.

Carla Bailo

I'm just having a ball. I gotta be honest. All four of my children are long out of the house and they all have children of their own. I'm having the most fun with my grandkids because I'm seeing them now. I have one that's getting to be a tween. And so she's starting to have these self doubts.

You know, can't do this, I can't do that. So of course I use my father's word, know, can't never did anything. If you don't try, you're certainly not gonna succeed. You know, you're not gonna be good at everything. She wants to be good at everything. You're not gonna be good at everything. But I think as a grandparent, it's a different world because you can enjoy the good, you can talk, you can just sit and talk. As a parent, a lot of times you don't have time to just sit down for as long as the kid wants to talk to you, and just forget about everything. When my grandkids are around, no matter what was on the schedule, it's gone. We're gonna do sticker books. We're gonna bake things. So I'm always doing things with them.

But it's just having the time. And I think as a grandparent, you can really do that. And you can talk about not just, you know, things for them to learn, but real life things.

You know, I learned a tremendous amount of stuff from my grandparents. Sitting and listening to a tiger game for three hours in the garage because it was too hot to be outside in the sun and nobody had air conditioning. So you sat in the garage with your little transistor radio and you talked about, this big garden he planted and, how many potatoes he thinks he's going to get and why it's important to have fresh food and why he has chickens and all these things that you just, I don't know, it's common lore, but sometimes I don't think we do a good job of just sitting down and talking about why these things are important and how you can teach in ways you don't even realize you're teaching when you're doing it.

Mark Cleveland

Yeah.

Jenny and I have just had our first grandchild and ⁓ they're blank slates. They're going into this universe. I don't have this experience yet, except vicariously through other people, but they're going into this universe asking great questions and you're performing with love as a mentor. But I noticed something in our conversation, which I want to draw us back to, which you didn't know anything about being a board member, really. Right. And you didn't know anything about the upstream oil and gas business at all. And you didn't know anything about brakes at all. And your grandkids don't know anything about much of anything except how to play and have fun and and be present.

Carla Bailo

You good? You good?

Mark Cleveland

I've started and sold six companies in six different industries. I did not know anything, generally speaking, about those industries that I went into. And I think that that is a superpower. Look at, I was not afraid. You weren't afraid. I made mistakes. You made mistakes. I asked questions. You asked questions. I sought out mentors. You sought out mentors. You know, is there something about

Carla Bailo

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Mark Cleveland

going into the unknown that is really lights you up.

Carla Bailo

Yeah, beyond a shadow. My best jobs have always been those that I was asked to do and I said yes and I had no idea how the heck I was going to do it. But that gets my brain going. You know, okay, who do I need to help me? What skill sets do I need? You know.

What questions am I gonna ask? How can I begin to put together this rough outline of what I'm thinking? I don't know, something about that just totally energizes me, the unknown and let's try and we can do this. I don't know, it's so much more thrilling to me than using a cookbook to do anything. Some of the best meals I cook have no cookbook.

Mark Cleveland

discovered.

Carla Bailo

And I think it's also, you just have to put your fear in your back pocket. I see so many people that I know, they believe they know so much.

But when they're asked something out of the box, their first instinct is, I can't do that. I'm going to stay here where I know everything in my little box. You see it again with lot of engineers. I'm going to stay here. I know what I'm doing. I know I can do a good job. I can do this for 30 years. Don't ask me to do anything else. And they should do that because that's what they're comfortable with.

But as a young engineer, I was always, want to try this, I want to do this, I want to try something new, I'm going to learn something new. I was never, never satisfied to just stay in one role forever. Because that's that curiosity.

I always said if I can have an outline and then begin to break it into steps, just like if you're writing an essay, I always was really good at writing essays too for that same reason. Make the outline, break it into steps, decide what you want to say and how you're going to conclude it. And this is kind of how I attack, gosh, a lot of things, just about everything.

Mark Cleveland

Just about everything. Yeah.

I mean, cooking is a process. You understand your kitchen, your resources. The recipe might be prescriptive and you might adjust the contents and experiment. Yeah. Yeah, I love it. You reminded me one of my favorite books is Michael Singer's Surrender Experiment, where he talks about the power of saying yes. ⁓ I'm curious, what's on your nightstand, Carla?

Carla Bailo

Perhaps.

Yeah.

You

Mark Cleveland

What are you reading?

Carla Bailo

Oh gosh, right now I'm reading some Western books about game wardens and a lot of mystery. I like figuring out who did it. So I enjoy that kind of thing. And my husband and I pick different authors and then we read, reread the books and chat about, you know, what we thought. But I enjoy that kind of reading. I read a lot of fluff because I read a lot of serious stuff, you know, the day. I also read a lot of SAE authored books. I'm an SAE author. I've written two books for SAE International. A lot of it is about women in engineering and I had women tell their story of, you know, "The Road to the Top is Not Always on the Map." and each woman had a very unique way of rising within her companies. I learned a ton.

Mark Cleveland

So at this point in life, what are you trying to do a little bit more of, or what would you like to do a little bit less of?

Carla Bailo

Um, you know, I'm really quite, quite happy, um, because I'm able to blend very well, um, fun and work. So I'm still learning. I'm still active in business, but I travel a lot. My husband and I love to do cruises. We love to golf. So we get out whenever we can. Um, I exercise all the time. I it's good for my brain. I think that's where I do some of my best thinking is if I'm on my spinning bike or I'm out jogging or whatever. My brightest ideas have always come in the middle of an exercise routine. I want to become an expert baguette baker. And I've made several loafs and I still haven't figured out how to get my oven quite steamy enough to be able to get that crust that you get on a baguette that tears the roof of your mouth apart. That's what I'm trying to do.

Mark Cleveland

You're an engineer, you will solve that problem, I'm confident.

Carla Bailo

I'm working on it. I don't know My friend just told me she's learned how to do it. So I'm gonna have to take lessons from her. I think

Mark Cleveland

So I'm, I'm fortunate if I just don't set the fire alarm off when I'm cooking. ⁓ Your spirit is really obvious and your, I think, approach to humanity, like, let's talk, let's have a conversation, let's mentor each other, let's learn, let's listen. It's really encouraging.

I'm listening for the question that you thought I might ask, but I did not. What's the question that you thought I might ask or that you want to make sure that we do talk about in this wonderful conversation?

Carla Bailo

You know?

I thought you might ask something about what it was like being an engineer in the late 70s and 80s in the automotive industry as a female. Because, and the reason I thought you might ask about it is I think in a lot of ways it made me who I am. It was a very tough time to be in the industry. It was when there were no rules about what people could say, how people could treat you, the different posters that could be hanging up in the office. And it made me realize very quickly that I had to pick my battles. I had to decide what was really important to fight and what I should just let go. Because if I didn't let some things go, I would have had such a chip on my shoulder and I would have been so disenfranchised with the industry, I probably would not have persevered.

And I think that's something that has truly continued in every aspect of my life. You know, I know people who take everything literally and seem to be always angry. And I still do that today. Is that worth getting upset about? Is that worth making a big fight about? Or should I let that go and tackle something that's really, really important?

And I think that's made me think it made me think differently all throughout my career. You know, should I get upset about that? Probably not. It's not that big of a deal, but this happened. You want to, you don't want to let that continue. You have to make a big deal about that. So, it's just the way now that, kind of gets me through, any crisis or, or anything.

It made me think differently. And As the rules began to change and businesses were held accountable, people couldn't say those things. you couldn't have cat calls when you walked into the manufacturing plant anymore. You know, the things that I had to put up with and just basically put in the back of my mind. You know, if you ever seen the play the Book of Mormon, turn it off like a light switch. Yeah, that's what I had to do for a lot of things. But no, it made me think differently. And it made me really think about what's important, and what things we have to give people a little grace about. ⁓

Mark Cleveland

And these are stories that you've told both through your own lens and through the experience of others in these books that you've written. What a great contribution to the wisdom bank, Carla. Everybody, we'll put links to your books, we'll make sure we put links in the show notes.

I'm so grateful that we would have this time together. I want to reflect something back that I just don't know how many people have said to you, but I get the privilege. The entire United States was impressed and competing against you and learning from the impact that you had in the industries have been influenced by your technology vision and how you view the future for mobility from automotive to bus rapid transit. You've had a lot of people that you've hired and fired and you've had a lot of people that you've mentored.

I mean, if you stop and think about the tens of hundreds of thousands of people that owe some debt of gratitude to you, not very many people have had the kind of scale of impact that you've had.

Carla Bailo

Well, you're gonna make me cry and as I often say, I just wanted to make a difference.

Mark Cleveland

You have today. Thank you for joining us on The Parallel Entrepreneur, Carla. It's been a pleasure.

Carla Bailo

That's my motto.

Great talking with you.