Strategy, execution, and leadership: Stuart Udell on turning plans into performance

In this episode of The Middle Ground, Dr. Kathryn Ritchie sits down with Stuart Udell, CEO of Prometric, for a candid conversation about what separates organizations that formulate good strategy from those that actually execute it.

Stuart argues that while strategy is critical, execution is often the harder discipline—and the place where most organizations fall short. He walks through how Prometric translates mission and vision into a layered strategy architecture: from market choices and competitive advantage, down through growth and enabling strategies, initiatives, tasks, owners and due dates. The result is a 1,300-line dynamic execution plan that becomes the backbone of cross-functional business reviews every six weeks.

Key themes from the conversation:

• Strategy versus execution. Most companies have a viable strategy; far fewer have the discipline to execute it. Execution is where value is won or lost.
• The strategy cascade. Mission and vision → Uber strategy → growth and enabling strategies → initiatives → individual tasks, each with clear ownership and accountability.
• Talent to value. Identify the 25 roles that drive the most value, define the attributes that matter, and decide whether to coach, support or change the fit.
• Alignment is king. Speed without alignment is dangerous. Alignment requires shared ownership, cross-functional reporting and a rhythm of accountability.
• Cross-functional QBRs. Report by strategy, not by function. Bring the people working on the initiative into the room, not just the senior leaders.
• Culture through involvement. When people help build the plan, it becomes our plan, not the CEO's plan. Eliminate internal politics and communication problems so the team can focus on the work.
• Leadership humility. Treat people as circles, not triangles. Walk the floor, do skip levels, visit customers, and stay self-reflective as a leader.
• Mission and business. Revenue and profit are a byproduct of doing the right thing for customers and candidates. Serve both stakeholders well and the results follow.
• Operational metrics. Find the handful of metrics that really drive value—like Prometric's displacement rate—and make them visible to everyone.
• AI as a competitive enabler. Use AI where it creates genuine advantage, where it protects mission-critical work like security, and where it can be responsibly driven through the whole organization.

Watch the full conversation above—and read the complete transcript below.

Full transcript

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (00:01.832):

Good afternoon, Stuart. And it's wonderful to have you here. We've spent many hours working together, all of which I've thoroughly enjoyed. And I look forward to your thoughts and perspectives as a leader through many different kinds of organisational transformations. you have led a number of organisations through periods of significant growth, transformation and very successful exits. When you go in, how do you distinguish between a strategy problem

and an execution or a capability problem. And they're obviously overlapping. But what gives you a sense of how each of those elements are an organization?

Stuart Udell (00:42.464):

Yeah, well thank you. First of all, thank you for having me here today. It's great to be chatting about these

really fun and important topics. you know, as you said, they are overlapping. it's hard to have great strategy without great execution. You can get one right, the other wrong and and have a real problem. I I you know I've always thought getting strategy right is critical and I I I I I mean this I I say this carefully. It's it's hard to get it right, but it's not that hard. If you get forty or fifty of your best people in a room for a few days over a couple weeks

You know, usually you can exit with a strategy that generally makes sense. I'm not suggesting it's easy. It takes, you know, professionals like you ideally to independently lead great teams through the exercise. So I don't mean to diminish it. But what I say on the other side is execution, I think, is even more important. So when I think about the strategy part of it, first of all, even defining the word is sometimes tricky. People think about strategy as pricing strategy or sales strategy or product strategy, but organizational

Strategy to me, and you and I have talked about this very often over the years, is really about in what markets are we going to play and how are we going to win. That to me is the essential question because then you start with the external environments. What's happening in the regulatory world? What's happening with my competition? What are my internal strengths and weaknesses? How does that feed into strategy and you know how do we come out on the other side? You think about competitive advantage, you think about differentiation.

And ultimately you end up at the end of the day with a strategy that generally works. And I think most companies have a strategy that's maybe grade B or better. Where I think you know the trickier part is around execution. And I think it's a lot of the brilliance of the Ignition Institute is bringing it all together, both strategy formulation and strategy execution. So when we go all the way back, as I have in exercises with you, you go all the way back to mission, vision, values, like why are we here?

Stuart Udell (02:47.312):

and you know the interesting thing in the company I'm in now, ProMetric, we've talked about this. The strat the mission statement at the company when I started was 19 words long, which like a really long phone number is not memorable. The mission needs to be short, memorable. You can you have to be able to tell stories about it. I'd say it's all the stuff out of Made to Stick by Chip Heath. You know, that's the way you communicate and tell stories. So it is important sometimes to brush off mission, vision, values, or principles and get that right.

Then where I know ignition takes us down to is what we call the Uber Strategy and and I2 like the discipline market leaders model, which is while you have to be good at all three things in the triangle, is your primacy around customer intimacy, product leadership, or operational excellence? In our case, it's around customer intimacy, although again the other components are very important. From there you work down to strategies.

Of my organization, we have four growth strategies and three enabling strategies that kind of underpin the four growth strategies. So an enabling strategy might be operational excellence or driving innovation through all parts of your business, or in this world, driving AI through all parts of your business. And then ultimately, what you get to down to, and this is where a lot of strategy formulation fails, is what are the initiatives that support those strategies, and what are the individual

Individual tasks at an even more granular level. And then, of course, who owns them? When are they due by? How are we going hold ourselves accountable? So that whole process is important, and that's all of what enables strategy execution. So again, I'd say both are critically important. You have to get them both right. If I were to pick one, it'd be more about execution than strategy, because I do believe most organizations have some semblance of a viable strategy.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (04:45.252):

Look, I would agree with you. And I think what I loved about what you described there and have appreciated the time that you've given us to really ensure that you have that translation, that you're not taking one giant leap from the higher order strategy down to those tasks. And you've got to you've got to layer yourself down in order to preserve the competitive strategy. Stuart, when you think about execution, and I know how critical you see that being, and I do as well.

What are some of the traps, if you like, that leaders can fall into? Or conversely, what are the things that you immediately go to think about? I've got to make sure, now that I've got it translated, I've got a solid plan, what are the next things that you look at when it comes to execution?

Stuart Udell (05:31.053):

Yeah, well I think first you have the right team on the field. To me, a lot of it comes down to talent because it's it's hard to execute a plan if you don't have the right team. Now

You have options if you don't have the right team. Are you gonna coach up? Are you gonna, you know, is is an area is is a particular individual good enough for the moment in time, or do you need to bring in outside talent, which could be permanent talent, could be, you know, consultants to help support the organization, but do you have the right team on the field? And one of the methodologies I subscribe to is was founded by my chairman, Sandy Og, who talks about talent to value. So, you know, we my organization is one that relies on about three thousand seven hundred employees.

Employees on top of it, we've got another four or five thousand employees who work for our partners representing themselves as ProMetrics. We have a lot of talent out there. But when we think about talent to value, the way we approach it is what are the 25 most critical roles to drive value in the organization? That may not be the roles we typically think of. There may be lots of SVPs that are left off that list with no disrespect. But what are the roles that drive value?

Example. 20 years ago we didn't really talk about a CISO driving value. Now a CISO is critical because we have a single significant security event, it can destroy years of work that we've done. So that would be an example of someone who's on our top 25 list, that CISO role. So then you define those 25 roles. What are the what would be the job responsibilities or the attributes that are most important? And then you say, well, for the guy or gal I have in that role, is it good fit? Is there congruency or not? And then

And there's not, do you train up or do you support in a different way or do you just make a change? I think beyond talent, I would think about leadership, behavior, speed of decision making. By definition, if you're in a if you're trying to change or transform an organization, speed matters. You want to be thoughtful, you want to be planful, but you want to execute fast. So I think about if you have all the decision information you need to make a decision, make it and move on. And that of course takes

Stuart Udell (07:39.761):

alignment in the organization. So you can't move fast and unaligned. You have to be fast and aligned. So you know if I was thinking about either the traps or the opportunities in an organization and how to jump start strategy once it's in place at an execution level, those are some of the things that I think about.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (07:59.903):

I think alignment is king. At the end of the day, we work out how we position ourselves to win in the marketplace, so our competitive strategy. And as you say, inside that broader set of critical directional messages of mission and vision and the values that carve out the way that we need to operate to support that strategy. And everything else should be in service of executing against that strategy.

And you've got a reasonably large organization that you're approaching sort of 8,000 if you bring in your more those that work for some of your contracted organizations around the globe. What are the things that you do? What are the practical tactics, Stuart, that you find as a leader, a really crucial to firstly establish alignment and then to maintain it? And I say that in a world that's changing very rapidly.

Stuart Udell (08:29.976):

Yes.

Stuart Udell (08:58.924):

Yes. Yeah, well look, I think it it you know, alignment is key as you said. There's no question. I think strategy sits in the middle of alignment.

You know, if I go way back to the 1990s when I was in business school, I had a professor named Michael Tushman, who along with a guy named Nadler wrote a whole bunch of books on you know alignment around strategy being the middle. And then kind of in a spoke system, effectively, you've got operational systems and reward systems and personnel systems and culture kind of surrounding strategy, hence called the congruence model. so again, as we talked about earlier, you take all these external in inputs into this process.

You've got these systems built into your organization, and then you kind of measure along the way. And I think that's where the brilliance of the Ignition Institute comes in because it takes conceptual models like the congruence model, which is a great model, and then operationalize it by turning it into an execution plan. So if we go a little step backwards to where I was talking about a moment ago about getting your, in our case, four growth strategies, three enabling strategies.

is each with seven or eight initiatives under each strategy and each with hundreds of tasks.

That scaffolding is the way we we kind of organize our strategy strategy execution plan with those 50 leaders in the room. We came up with that plan. What it's manifested in in our case is a 1300-line dynamic smart sheet organized by strategy, by initiative, by task, each one with an executive champion, because to get things done in an organization, sometimes you have to go upstairs. But rather than going upstairs, that executive is.

Stuart Udell (10:43.886):

attached to that strategy. And then more importantly, day-to-day owners with start dates, with end dates, with milestones, and with status reports. And then what we then do, and by the way, you can track that in Monday.com, which I know is something that Ignition often uses. I've used Monday.com before as well at prior organizations. But then what you do is that becomes the basis for your quarterly business reviews. In our case, we felt quarterly isn't enough. We do our business reviews every

six weeks now we bring 40 to 50 people together, most in person, some of them virtually. But

What's really important about good strategy and good strategy execution is it's not siloed, it's actually cross-functional. So the wrong way to do a QBR, and sadly it took me 20 something years to figure this out, is to have marketing report out, and then to have operations report out, and then to have finance report out, because almost all of the most important work is cross-functional. So now we report out around strategy. So our strategy, growth strategy number two, is to become a globally dominant language assessment.

player. I don't need to hear about from operations or marketing. I need to hear from the group of folks who are working on a specific initiative or task that is under that strategy. So that's kind of the way we make it work internally.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (12:05.322):

What you've described as a set of roles, set of governance activities, I would say, that establish a real rhythm in your organization to keep it networked, cross-functionally, to keep it fluid. I could sense a formality and an informality as you were describing that, and a sort of real sense of ownership. that whole...

I'm going to say web of mechanisms and roles and people in the mix of all of that. It has a cultural impact. I'd like you to think about sort of how firstly has your organisation responded, the people in your organisation, the leaders, how are they seeing it? How are they appreciating or not, as the case may be, this approach?

Stuart Udell (12:51.244):

Yeah, well, look, I think they appreciate it because they've been very involved in the process. When we go all the way back to step one, and we had people in the room who've been here twenty-five years, and you know, again, going all the way back to mission, vision, values, folks in the room, including myself, could not recite it. So, you know, when you start to rebuild, starting from the top, working your way down to pieces of the strategy, and every department is represented, and they're not ch every department's not just represented by the SVP.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (13:01.278):

Mm-hmm.

Stuart Udell (13:21.228):

Who runs that group, but you know, by a couple folks down as well. When the individual strategies as we move forward are owned by key leaders in the organization. Again, maybe not the most senior folks. You know, our talent pillar is not run by our chief human resources officer. It's run by one of our directors in the HR department. And that's fine. We want the team to own it. You know, that's what really starts to get the culture because then, you know, by the time we get there, like it is our plan.

It's not the executive's plan. It's not the CEO's plan. It's not the board's plan. It is our plan. It is an aligned plan. And as we said earlier, alignment's hard. And you know, my view on alignment is, you know, if I have two pet peeves in business, I hate internal politics and I hate communication problems because those are footfalls. Those are self-inflicted. When I when I played baseball growing up, my dad coached me for a long time. He was a great coach. And like most dads, he coached me a little harder than some of the other.

Kids, if I made a physical error, he'd pat me on the back when I walked in the dugout. If I made a mental error, I threw to the wrong base, I got caught in a rundown, you know, that's when the fireworks flew. And I think what we try to do internally in our organization is to eliminate the internal politics, the power plays, the communication problems to focus on the work. So alignment becomes important. Focus is important. You know, I I don't know if it makes sense or not, but I run around our organization very often saying, our

Our focus this week is focus. That's how important focus is. So we work the plan. We don't let lots of things from the outside creep into the plan. We try to, you know, stay aligned on the things that we said we were going to do. Now, when we get together for our every six-week business review, you know, we may pull a couple things out. We may decide, hey, we're de-emphasizing expansion into Antarctica this year, if that was part of our strategy. We've decided that was the wrong strategy. You can pull those things out, but again,

There's a process for getting to those decisions, and it ing it involves sign-off across the organization. But it's not like a long process, it's in the moment, and we debate it as a team and we make those decisions. And then ultimately, when you do all those things, then it gets down to accountability, which is really critically important. And accountability is not just down in the organization, it is up as well. So nothing makes me happier than when someone who's a manager level calls me out in a meeting because

Stuart Udell (15:50.824):

I was supposed to get something done and I didn't because we're all accountable to the plan.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (15:56.479):

Yeah. So it feels like you've got a very dynamic dialogue that's not burdened by hierarchy and role title or whatever. It just feels like there's a realness to it. It iterates your learning. What other communication mechanisms have you found as a leader that you employ to keep that, you know, close to 8000 people connected, Stuart? And I don't just mean from your office, but more broadly, what would you be encouraging other leaders through the business to keep that

connective tissue, I can feel it in those that are involved closely. How do you take this through the organization?

Stuart Udell (16:32.78):

Yeah, well it's tricky and you know, one of the questions we ask on every engagement survey, which we do twice a year organization wide, about a third of our you know, four thousand or thirty seven hundred employees respond. But one of the one of the questions we always ask is, is communication better or worse or the same as six months ago? And you know, to be quite frank, it never moves too much because it's never ending. You have to continue to communicate. It's not like you're done and now you can, you know, just rest on your laurels. So, you know

We work really hard when we have town halls, for instance, we work really hard so that it's not just me at the front of the room. I bring other folks into the room. By the way, not just leaders, but

employee I'm sorry, other employees, customers, consultants who have a a view on our business. So we make sure that we take a well-rounded view. But you know, in our work, you know, when we're in the business, we're we're in an educational technology and services company. By definition, we're trying to change the world in a very positive way. And that sense of mission is very deep in the organization. But we we do one of the one of the tasks one of the tactics we use

To drive communication through the organization is to continue to talk about mission, vision, values, because that's why a lot of folks are here. You know, if you take a functional job, maybe it's you know working in customer support, you can do that in a lot of different places. You may be able to make a little more money somewhere else than with us. But the mission plays an important role in keeping people connected. So actually, the first question on our engagement survey is.

I believe in the mission of the organization on a scale of one to five, right? And we get very, very high ratings in that area. People are connected to the work. But you know, we have weekly and monthly newsletters that we push out. We push our our our functional leaders and our strategy pillar leaders to in their regular meetings talk about mission, vision, values and and we do make sure you know one of the things that's part of the ignition process is

Stuart Udell (18:39.142):

is making sure that those strategy teams, which are organized by the seven strategic pillars in our company, stay engaged. So they actually continue, even though we did the beginning of this work two and a half years ago, they continue to meet once a week as teams. And then once a month,

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (18:49.448):

Thank

Stuart Udell (18:58.496):

All those team leads get together with the executive team and talk about how we're doing. And then every six weeks we do the deep dive through 1,300 lines on a spreadsheet. So, you know, the alignment and the continued communication across the, I'd say, more, you know, senior stakeholders then hopefully trickles down to the rest of the organization.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (19:16.414):

and

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (19:20.034):

You've got a very personable leadership style and I know that from having spoken to a number of the people and in different organisations that you've led. What are some of the personal elements of leadership that are really important for you that keep that earthy personal feel? And I would say that in the context of having driven extraordinary transformation and growth and performance.

Stuart Udell (19:47.139):

Well, you know, it's a it's a really good question. You know, the first thing I would say is

You know, my wife says to me, this is very easy for me to say as the CEO, but I tend not to see triangles and org charts, I see circles. And if you think about it, you know, the circles are who are the groups of people that get things done. You know, if if it's this task, there may be eight people surrounding it. If it's that strategy, there may be fifty people str surrounding it. But, you know, I I try to treat everyone in the organization the way I wanted to be treated 30 years ago, as valued, important. That does not mean that everybody feels

that way. I certainly hope they do, but I'm also a pragmatist. I know that's not the case. So we try to take ego out of it. We try to take you know and really just say like who are the groups of people that need to get the work done. So that I I think that's one that's one you know method that you know I've tried to deploy in in in in in this work.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (20:44.542):

Thank you. And you genuinely have driven turnarounds, performance turnarounds, and in some instances, to very successful exits. What are some of your most critical lessons, learnings, if you like, along that pathway, Stuart, of going in, looking at what's there, and then moving forward? And we might start with, when you walk first into an organisation,

What is your personal assessment? How do you figure out what's going on here and where you need to pay attention?

Stuart Udell (21:19.03):

Yeah, well, you know, talking to multiple multiple stakeholders is certainly critical. So well, you can certainly get fast information from your new direct reports in a situation like that. And of course, you know, they should have a lot of knowledge and information. You know, doing skip levels certainly and going really all the way down the organization, you know, walking the office floor, certainly talking to a lot of customers. You know, I can say that, you know, I spent the better part of my first month out visiting customers. Very sadly, some of whom said, you know.

I remember one gentleman said to me, you know,

My office is half my whole corporate headquarters is half an hour down the road from yours, and in 11 years the the you're the first executive I I met. You know, that's problematic, right? That's not what any customer should ever say. And by the way, they weren't a wholly unhappy customer. But you know, we happen to be a significant line item for a lot of our customers in their budgets. And, you know, whether we're talking about a $20 million customer and we have a whole bunch of those, or we're talking about a $50,000 customer and we have a lot of them.

Those. You know, if we're one of your most expensive most expensive line items, you deserve attention. So scaffolding levels of service to align to our customers is a really important way to get a fast read of the business. I think back to a prior organization where one of the first things I look at always is the product roadmap. Where are we going? What are we building and why? And you know, I remember at this particular company there were all sorts of great features and whiz-bang, you know, little

Pieces of functionality being added. All of them thoughtful, none of them were bad. When I talked to customers, and I talked to three in a row, and that seems to be a magic number, who said, Look, the worst part about your company is onboarding students. At this particular organization, we had not done the integrations of our platform with the various student information systems and learning management systems out there. So I came back and I said, literally, our roadmap is upside down. I talked to three of our big

Stuart Udell (23:21.666):

customers and the the one of them actually said I will fire you this fall if you don't fix this. So you know I think it's really p important to get out there and get multiple stakeholder opinions.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (23:32.511):

Thank you. in terms of culture, I know you take a very pragmatic view to culture, which I appreciate enormously. We often have clients going, well, we need the culture program, do you think? Or should we be doing a culture program? And I make the comment, whether you know it or not, you're already doing it. You are the leadership team.

Stuart Udell (23:52.876):

Yes.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (23:54.001):

You are shaping the culture every day. So you don't need another one. You just need to be deliberate about the culture you are shaping and less sort of glitzy and stuck on by way of a program, the better. You have shifted the culture in your organization. I can hear it and I've observed it as well. What do you think have been the most practical and impactful things?

that you potentially others through the organisation, maybe sitting at the leadership table, maybe not have done to shape the shift in your culture, which I imagine has been in part to do with the performance uplift.

Stuart Udell (24:35.328):

Yeah, well look, I think nothing shapes culture better than

feeling like you're part of a winning team, right? So you have to start getting those wins. So we were in a little bit of a stall when I got to this organization. And and by the way, talent was a big issue. We had some great talent in the organization, some folks who'd been here 25 years and were still doing a fantastic job. But I also had to bring about 20, 25 people with us to kind of fill some of those gaps to really get to a position of like, you know, the best of the old guard, the best of the new guard put together hopefully is one plus one equals three.

You know, getting some early wins matters. You know, a book I always read before every new job is the first 90 days. And, you know, the main point of that very simple book is get some early wins, whether it's getting an acquisition done, which we actually did, and we hadn't really closed an acquisition in a few years. So that was exciting to people. You know, winning a client that we thought we were going to lose, winning a new client, you know, holding that new purchase order up and waving it around at a town hall. But I think nothing improved.

Culture more than just starting to win because everyone knows what it feels like, right? Then you don't have to worry about are we getting bonuses at all this year? Are we getting good bonuses or lousy bonuses this year? you know, it's really important to get those to get those wins in place early on. The other thing I'd say about culture, and I think you and I have talked about this a little bit in the past, is I don't actually like have a playbook. I don't know how to change the culture, I know how to do the right thing.

for the organization in terms of setting a course, the strategy, executing it against the plan, getting some wins, and then the culture magically starts to get a little better and those scores on the engagement surveys go up and the you know the the the revenue goes up and the profitability goes up and we get to do and buy fun things and invest back in. So I guess that's the way I'd tackle that question.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (26:33.922):

And I mean, the way I look at that is you're shaping the culture day in, day out with various levers and you're doing that in line, having set your direction, engaged and involved your broader organisation. You're now pulling various levers, role modelling it yourself and keeping the active dialogue going, which absolutely in our view is the way that you really get a strong momentum.

and culture and strategy must go hand in hand. You've got to really have your strategy at least clarified enough because your culture lines up behind it. They're not in competition. In terms of capabilities today, Stuart, you mentioned talent to value. And of course, there are specific technical schools that certainly pro-metric and any organization would have because of the area you work in.

Stuart Udell (27:10.231):

Yes.

Stuart Udell (27:19.518):

That's reconnecting.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (27:24.486):

Thinking more broadly though about sustaining performance, about being able to operate in this highly dynamic environment with a lot of uncertainty, lot of AI being a very major and not the only external factor impacting the organisation, what do you feel are the critical capabilities that support sustained performance?

Stuart Udell (27:52.343):

Yeah, well, I'll certainly go back to talent. Having the right people in the right roles is critical and and really, you know, the individual in the roles matter.

The way they interact and the glue between the roles is really, really important. I sold the company a bunch of years ago. There was a great organization. And I I I kind of implored the new organization not to pull people out and putting them apart put them together in different ways until they understood the business, because that glue between roles, between functions is is is really important. And if we think back to what we talked about a little earlier about the the interdependence of strategy.

across functions, glue is really, really important. I think also talent of value, which you just mentioned, assessing gaps, filling those right roles is critical.

You know, in thinking a little bit further of being part of a winning team, you know, the greatest teams are not always the strongest. If we think about Darwinian theory, you know, survival of the fittest is not about strength. It's about adaptivity to change. So, you know, one of the things I often hear coming into a new organization is you don't understand the way it's done here. And that is true. I don't, and I gotta make sure I don't break something that is working well. But you know, it is hard to win without being

very flexible and very adaptive to change. So that means, you know, alignment, that means speed of decision making, that means leadership support across the whole organization, and making sure that that strategy filters from top to bottom and back up in the organization.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (29:29.808):

Something that you've done very well, and it's not always the case, is I know your strengths coming in and looking at the financials of an organisation, the structuring in the financials, and I've seen you do that in your early days. And then you've managed very successfully to blend and integrate that through the organisation so that you're not obsessively target driven. You're a strategy driven organisation. The targets play a key role.

people understand them and the human element is there. What have you done to achieve that? I mean, you might have done it unconsciously. So, you know, if it's not something that immediately comes to mind, I just, a lot of organizations don't get that balance.

Stuart Udell (30:15.35):

Yeah, well I think, you know, it's really interesting in the general in the education space in general or educational technology, you know, we're kind of mission oriented to begin with, but so is healthcare and so is government. There are lots of sectors that feel that they're very mission-oriented. But you know, what I think about and what I talk to the teams about is we've got an educational mission and purpose. We have a business interest and purpose. They're just different stakeholders, but at the end of the day, we only win if both of those needs are met well.

And if done right,

Driving revenue and profit is a byproduct of doing the right thing for our students or our candidates in the case of ProMetrics. So if we do the right work, the business results follow, and then we get to celebrate them. And that's kind of the way it's a really good message to be able to send to the team because if I came in and just pounded the table about profit and this and that, it just it just does not sound authentic, and it isn't by the way. but but I also you know have to be very straightforward with folks.

you know, we have to serve both sides of that equation. The only way we win in the long run is by being good at both. And again, if we do our work the right way and take care of our candidates or students

And our customers who aggregate those students, then usually the the business results follow. But but then part of it is also getting back to the focus this week is focus comment that I made. You know, at Prometric, for instance, you know, we had some misaligned capital expenditures. We had plenty of capital. Our board was you know very gracious in giving us, you know, CapEx to adequately, more than adequately fund the organization, but we just weren't spending it on the right things. When you have that strategy in place.

Stuart Udell (32:00.153):

you can say, okay, those seven things we don't have to do anymore because these are the things we committed to, those are the things that get pushed on the side, and all of a sudden we have more money than we need.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (32:10.914):

So it's that coming back to alignment and then the disciplines once you've got that strategy, made it clear, help people understand and have a shared understanding of that and then aligning everything behind it. Stuart, just a couple of last questions in terms of measurement. I'm presuming on the financial side you do a range of metric trackings and so forth.

Stuart Udell (32:34.552):

Yes.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (32:35.556):

What else do you do to make sure that your capability build is heading in the right direction internally? Is that something you do with technical assessments or is this something that it's more through the leadership practices that you assess that? What advice would you give on leaders there?

Stuart Udell (32:52.462):

Yeah.

Yeah, well look, I think a lot of it's leadership practice. I think it's always key, you know, we tend to, you know, overly focus on financial metrics because that's what shareholders care about and boards care about, and it's certainly important, but you know, you've got to get in front of them to the operational metrics along the way. So, you know, there can be there are always thousands that can be measured, but the key is how do you get down to the things that really drive value in the organization or create problems. So, you know, as a for instance, you know, one metric

We look at very closely is we have we have folks who sign up to take exams and sometimes they can't take a test because if God forbid our staff doesn't show up, that doesn't happen very often. We may have an internet outage, we may have an electric outage, there may be a tsunami, there may be a snowstorm. So there's always some small fraction of folks who can't take an assessment when they expect it to. We call that displacement rate. And we look at that very carefully, and that for us is about 0.4. So 99.6% of the time.

Anyone who signs up for an exam takes it exactly when they expect to. And if they can't, we try to get them scheduled in really quickly, like the next day. You know, that is really important for us because if that rate goes up, let's say it only goes up by 1%, that's actually a 3x increase in the number of displacements. That, you know, is a lot more amplitude to our clients who who you know aggregate these students, and that becomes a problem for us. So, you know, finding those handful of operational

metrics that really matter the most are critically important. And then I think, you know, the rest tends to play out. But but I do think most of the teams that we run, if you think about the thousands of people in my organization, most of them don't really care about the financial metrics other than am I going to get paid every other Thursday and will I get a bonus this year or not. What they care about most is the stuff that's a measure of like, you know, are we making a difference in this mission that we're all in together?

Stuart Udell (34:54.506):

So and the the way I've always thought about mission, I deeply care. I've spent my whole career in educational technology, and I deeply, deeply care about making a difference, as most of my team members do. But to some executives I'd say, can't you even fake it? If you don't care, please just fake it. So

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (35:13.47):

And I can really sense the connection between those metrics and the mission. And I think that, again, an alignment that's so very powerful. One last question, Stuart.

stepping out of the whole array, length, breadth of experience that you've had across a number of organisations, with challenges obviously as well in that mix, what might be the top five or so most significant lessons or things that you have...

you've gained insights that you go, wow, that's the way it needs to be done. And you talked a little earlier about a couple of things that I think it was the six week role, the integrated cross-functional QBRs and such like. What are those gems that really help you succeed?

Stuart Udell (35:59.332):

Yeah.

Stuart Udell (36:07.29):

Well, let's start right there. Certainly the cross-functional QBRs are critical. I mean, I just I felt like a little bit void after every quarterly business review I ever did when we're like, all right, we talked about marketing strategies, we talked about, you know, financial report, we talked about operational metrics, but that lack of connectivity, like it is a hard pivot, but it's a critically important one. So I'd say that. I'd say, you know, secondly, I'd just talk about like leadership humility. Like I try to truly think at least weekly.

If not every day. Like there are things today that I don't do nearly as well as I did 10 years ago or 20 years ago. So we have to realize like we just have to continue to flex the leadership muscles. It is a learned skill. It is not innate. It takes effort and time. And you know, I think in a very fast-paced world, it gets harder, not easier. I think, you know, embracing new technologies is critically important. You know, again, I can't be the most knowledgeable person.

About AI in my organization, but I have to be credible and I have to see what the possibilities and potential are. And again, that gets to humility. I sit on a board of an organization that is doing incredibly extraordinary things with AI. And, you know, I tell those stories when I come back and I say, look, I used to think we were top quadrant. Now I think we're right down the middle. We have a ways to go. So being self-revel reflective as an individual leader, I think.

It also helps you be self-reflective about an organization as a whole. And then I think I'd be remiss to, you know, not end with alignment because, you know, at the end of the day, you know, I am not a process guy. Like I I appreciate process. I don't have the time and energy and patience to put it in place, and I have great respect for people who do. But

subscribing to a couple important processes like the way we do strategy and manage it, the way we do quarterly business reviews, the way we do account management in our organization. I I am the executive champion of 18 of our top 100 accounts. That means once a month I've got to talk to client to my client contacts in those organizations. I have to get into Salesforce and report back to my organization what I learned. You know that that I think is really important. Kind of walking the talk as a leader because

Stuart Udell (38:30.224):

becomes critically important. So I'm sure you know I've had plenty of failures along the way, but I try to you know I think part of leadership is looking around at everything else and figuring out how to do your job a little bit better.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (38:32.574):

I

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (38:42.426):

There was just one thing I wouldn't mind exploring that you raised and then I promise I will end as AI is on the tip of most leaders tongues and how are you approaching it? What guidance would you give leaders as to how to look at it from their standpoint internally, the impact on the strategy? What are some of the lessons and thoughts you have there?

Stuart Udell (38:51.117):

Yes.

Stuart Udell (39:06.934):

Yeah. Well

Look, I think we're all past the first steps around like government, governance and ethics and things like that. You need that those protocols in the organization. But you know, what I would say is this is just not an area where you want to be behind your competition for a lot of reasons. So, you know, we think about AI, I'd say, in three primary ways in our organization. The first is we have products that are like AI enabled and powered products that are in market. So if you want to align any set of curriculum to

To any set of standards, you can push a button with us and do it much faster and much less expensively than anywhere else. And we have some patented technology in that area. So if you can truly gain competitive advantage via AI, that's fantastic. Secondly, you know, for us, we think about AI being really important for security. So we give high-stakes exams all over the world. You want to practice medicine in the United States, you have to pass three, nine-hour exams. You want to get a driver's license in IRA.

Ireland, you have to pass an exam with us. Those are really important exams, and the integrity of those exams is important. If you think about what those exams are, they they represent the validation of trust. So if we have a problem, a security breach, that is problematic because I don't want a surgeon operating on me who can't pass his or her exam. So for us, building AI into our security protocols is really, really important. And we're rolling out

Some amazing new stuff this summer that is very, very advanced, well beyond where you know our competition is, and we're very happy about that. And by the way, I hope it pulls our competition up, and I hope they do things that pull up us as us up as well because you know we are all part of an industry ecosystem, and I do root for my competitors. I just want to win a little more than they do in the aggregate. And then the third thing we think about is how do we drive AI through the whole organization. So we've done tons of trainings and workshops on using AI to you know.

Edit emails and to compare contracts and you know to really understand the possibilities of what you can do with these tools at your hands. Now, I've got a friend who's a fellow CEO who's using AI to he built an AI agent to read and respond to all of his email. I don't like that. I don't want to read an email from a machine. But you know, there are there are very responsible and appropriate ways. So, you know, I think the key is to look at your organization and say, where can I get competitive advantage? What are the table stakes? In our case, security.

security and what are the ways that we can be better in the long run because ultimately AI will be like the internet. No one says to you anymore, are you building an internet company? You're building a company, all of which leverage the internet, and very soon we will be in a place where we're not talking about AI. They are just tools that we use in our business every day. That's my view.

Dr. Kathryn Ritchie (42:01.032):

Thank you so much, Stuart. It's been wonderful speaking with you and hearing your thoughts on many things in your role as a leader and bringing the wisdom into our middle ground podcast. So thank you so much for your time.

Stuart Udell (42:16.377):

You bet. Thank you, Kathryn. It's always a pleasure.