A CEO’s Insights

Lean into the soft stuff. It works. The importance of the “tone at the top” is business school 101. We all know how important the CEO’s example is for setting cultural norms, and the resulting impact on productivity and results. When the CEO’s behavior is integrous with the company’s stated values…

Last month, I announced I will be retiring as President and CEO of Pinnacol Assurance at the end of March. I love my job and my company, and this wasn’t a decision that came easily. Making such a decision has prompted a lot of reflection on what I’ve done and accomplished over nearly 50 years of…

At Pinnacol Assurance, the verdict is in: we will retain our current flexible working model for the foreseeable future. We came to this conclusion after extensive research and discussion with our teams. The process and findings were so rich, I think it’s valuable to share them. Beginning in June,…

It’s time for Colorado CEOs to lead the state’s way out of COVID.  I drafted this column in mid-August, before the FDA gave official approval (not just emergency authorization) to the Pfizer vaccine. I hope that by the time you read this, more of you will be requiring your staff and, in some cases…

Transformation is more than just a current business buzzword. It’s an imperative for nearly every industry, whether product- or service-based. My company, like every single other insurance company, is no exception. Yet we have been challenged by that transformation, and I’ll wager that that, too,…

A show of (virtual) hands, please: how many of you are not grappling with how to evolve your company in the midst of disruption/competition in your industry, rapidly changing customer expectations and customer behaviors that are still being reshaped by the pandemic? I’ll take the liberty of…

When I talk to my peers these days, “culture” is the main topic I hear. Mostly, it comes with a strong bias that it requires people to be working together in a building. We all know, of course, that there’s more to the concept. But to be frank, I’ve fumbled sometimes in describing Pinnacol’s…

How did you mark the one-year anniversary of the COVID shutdown? At Pinnacol Assurance, we sent t-shirts to all our employees listing our company’s COVID-year statistics: 13 million emails; 1.8 million Gchat messages; 72,787 video calls. Our 655 team members (including 54 new hires over the year)…

For office-based companies like ours at Pinnacol, we’ve seen that remote work works pretty well. Now, as leaders, we’re all deciding what that means for office space, work configurations and work policies. At the core we wonder what model will best support cultures that attract the best people and…

Over decades as a CEO, I have never felt the need to share as many messages with my employees about public events and civic life as I have over the past year. COVID fallout, racial justice protests, the seditious siege of our nation’s capitol: all have prompted me to relay expressions of sadness,…

Now that COVID-19 vaccines have been developed, approved and made (in a limited fashion) available at breathtaking speed, there is a light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. But it’s still a long way off. Virtually all of our companies will continue operating differently for months, maybe years, to…

COVID-19 is not a pandemic. No, I’m not a science denier. I am acknowledging that COVID is much more than a pandemic. It is a “syndemic” where the underlying disease dynamic is exacerbated by the intersection with social and political issues such as racism, poverty, health disparities and…