Jason (00:43)
Janet, how are you?

Janet Foutty (00:44)
So good to see you, Jason. I am great.

Jason (00:46)
Good, well, it's great to see you. Thank you for making time in a very busy schedule for the Wise in Five So why don't we dig in? But before we dig into the questions, I'd love for you to share a little bit about your background and your journey for the viewers and listeners who are fortunate to hear this.

Janet Foutty (01:02)
Excellent. Thank you so much. So I'll do ⁓ the long story and the quick version. So I started Deloitte right out of school intending to do just a couple of years there and then go figure out what a grownup job might look like. And I had the incredible fortune to spend 33 years at Deloitte at the first half of my career in Deloitte consulting at the intersection of enterprise technology and financial services. And then the second half of my career leading a wide variety of businesses for Deloitte.

Jason (01:06)
Hahaha

Janet Foutty (01:30)
technology business, the government business, Deloitte Consulting. And then I finished having the incredible privilege of being elected by my partners to chair the firm for my last four years. So that is my professional journey up till a couple of years ago. When I finished with that role, well, I'm sure we will talk today about what I've been up to now, but I've taken a pretty significant pivot and I'm working in some very different spaces, but continuing to feel really lucky that I had this great foundation at Deloitte to build on.

On a personal note, I live in Chicago with my husband and my dog. I spend a lot of time out and about around the world doing a wide variety of work-centric things. And hopefully along the way get to stop and see my young adult children who are both living on the West Coast right now.

Jason (02:12)
That's wonderful. Thank you for that. And what an amazing journey. And I want to say, it's just the beginning for you knowing what I know about you. So I'm thrilled for you and I'm thrilled for the people around you. So why don't we dive in first question? Where do you find inspiration in daily life outside of our number one or number two Hoosiers? Right? I'm not wearing the hat, but I find inspiration there. I'm guessing you do too at some days, especially on a Saturday.

Janet Foutty (02:36)
I do.

Coincidentally, Jason and I have a shared alma mater. ⁓ love for, well, you know, growing up, was certainly not Indiana football, but we're having a moment in which we're both thoroughly in. So for me, professionally, I know this is going to sound very sort of motherhood and apple pie, but I truly, truly get energy and momentum for seeing ⁓ other people succeed.

Jason (02:42)
You

That's right. That's right.

Janet Foutty (03:04)
My Deloitte career was entirely built on watching the people that were on my teams, figuring out how to help them and getting them to a place where they were getting wild personal and professional success. And so for me, that is a number one. In addition to that, I love complex intellectual problems. I love rolling up my sleeves and solving things with really smart people who challenged me and pushed me. And I love working on problems that really matter for my career. was problems that mattered for my clients.

and then challenges and opportunities for my own firm that I had the ability to help run. And today it's for a wider set of people. And then of course I get energy and fulfillment from spending time with my family and friends and making sure I always sort of create space for that.

Jason (03:49)
That's wonderful. mean, and it speaks to, I mean, what is so amazing when every time we're together, you're just head and heart, right? So you're incredibly intelligent, but you're also incredibly giving and warm. So it's a very special combination. So my second question, what practices have you found most essential for women to not just derive in leadership roles, but to truly thrive and sustain success in those positions? And you wrote a book, Arrive and Thrive, which really spoke to a lot of this.

Janet Foutty (04:17)
Yeah, so we could spend way longer than this podcast on that topic, but there's a couple of things that I feel are really, I frankly essential for all leaders, but for women in particular, in terms of how to make sure that not only are you focused on getting there, but once you get there, that you are wildly successful and thriving both personally and professionally. And maybe I'll just touch on a couple of them.

One for sure, which I've learned a lot about along the way is creating the time to invest in your best self. know, even in my quick introduction, I talked about what mattered to me professionally, but what matters to me personally. I was always pretty good at creating the space for the things that mattered to me personally. That was fitness, family, friends, fun. What I wasn't as good at over the years was really investing and spending the time to be reflective. I was in the mode that if I wasn't

one foot in front of the other and moving and active that that was time wasted. So I've come to appreciate that the time spent in reflection and really understanding what matters to you and being introspective about it is something that is incredibly important. The second thing I'll talk about is really focusing on building courage. So courage is something that I don't think most of us sort of wake up every day thinking that we're courageous.

And courage to me is really something that is about doing things that are difficult for you. And in sort of this spirit of continuing to push ourselves to be better, be more effective, be better leaders, this idea of investing in time and energy into practicing things that don't come naturally to you, and by the way, things that come very naturally to you, Jason, might take a lot of courage for me and vice versa.

So understanding what those things are and being really disciplined about them, I think can really help women and men understand that they are going above and beyond in role models, incredible behavior for your teams. So maybe those are just the two I talked about briefly and maybe we can have another conversation another day about all the rest of those things.

Jason (06:23)
Well,

I welcome that. And you had talked about some of the things that inspire you with friends and fun and family, a bunch of F words. And the F words that I would use against courage are kind of fear and failure, right? In terms of what may drive people to not have that courageous approach. So I fully appreciate that.

Janet Foutty (06:40)
A colleague of mine had this great expression that is you don't want to just learn from failure and rebound. You actually want to bounce even further up because of all the learnings that you have from the things that don't go well.

Jason (06:54)
I love that and it's something I actually teach in one of my classes at Indiana, which is this idea of anti-fragility, where it's not just about resiliency, but it's how do you take what you learn and you get even stronger and better and.

Janet Foutty (07:01)
Mm.

That's a mouthful, but a really good concept.

Jason (07:11)
Yeah, thank you. So can you share, like specifically, a moment or transition in your career that changed how you view leadership and guided your approach going forward?

Janet Foutty (07:22)
Yeah, can I do two? But I'll try to keep them quick because it actually ties back to your previous question about places where I think we should all really be investing. For me, one of the most pivotal moments defined really who I am as a leader around the word authenticity. So when I started my career, authenticity was not in the vocabulary or the conversation. know, everyone did their very best.

Jason (07:23)
Absolutely.

Janet Foutty (07:49)
best to fit in. That was the goal, be as tidy and fit in as naturally as possible. Well, I found myself, I was a senior manager at Deloitte. I was up for becoming a partner. I had a great client, but I was trying to really grow that client and demonstrate both to them and to myself and to my firm that I had what it took to really help this client through some really tough, complicated times. And I was also a young mom. I had twins who were

not even yet preschool age. Something really magical happened to me in that moment. I went from being sort of very buttoned up and doing as much as I could to fit in to frankly somewhat out of sheer exhaustion isn't quite the right word, but I just didn't have the energy to pretend to be someone that I wasn't. And something really magical happened in that moment. I found that by

just exposing a bit more of who I was, what mattered to me, the things I was grappling with, both in my professional life as well as my super complicated personal life, showing a bit more of my quote unquote authentic self. The change in my team, in my clients was extraordinary. They got to know me better. They understood that by me being vulnerable,

In turn, they could show some vulnerability. They were more comfortable and confident in themselves. And we now know, because it's been well studied, that the more comfortable and authentic people are within the boundaries of the work setting, the better their performance is. So for me, that absolutely changed the trajectory of how I thought about leadership. And frankly, I wouldn't be here today if I hadn't sort of understood that sort of really, really critical lesson.

The second thing I want to talk about is being an inspirational leader. So Jason, I never in a trillion years thought that I would have the opportunity to lead at the level that I led to be in conversations with people like you in settings like this. I knew I was a good consultant. I knew I was, you know, generally a sort of thoughtful person, but I had this view that to be a successful business leader,

You had to be the person that woke up at four in the morning with the idea that nobody else ever thought of. And we've sort of idolized that as a nation and as a business society. Well, I'm not that person. I do not wake up at four in the morning with ideas that no one else has ever thought of. However, what I found was that using the things that I was really good at listening really deeply to people around me,

building teams of people that were very different than myself, being able to connect those dots or look for the white space in their ideas, and then work with a team to come up with a great inspirational new idea and then communicate it to a wide set of constituents who needed to be bought in. That turned out to be my superpower. Deloitte Digital, the launch of Deloitte Digital was really the first place I saw that so clearly in action. You know, I'm a Wall Street quant by background.

launching a digital business focused on disrupting the advertising industry was not something I ever would have thought of. If you had said, Janet, you you're going to help launch this incredible business, I would have said, you're absolutely crazy. But for me in that moment, realizing the things I was naturally good at allowed me to actually create very different net new things for my firm, for my clients, for the market was a really pivotal moment for me and built a lot of confidence.

and my ability to lead at scale.

Jason (11:18)
That's fine. Both of those examples are amazing and it's why people gravitate toward you toward you and work with you as a leader because you do see them as who they are and you you match them against what they need. And so to be able to do that and then to see things differently. I know Deloitte Digital very well because we competed from afar as I was building leapfrog. So yeah, I know it very well and and you did an amazing job.

Janet Foutty (11:40)
I don't think that's everything, just what you hear.

Jason (11:46)
I mean, incredible job. ⁓ Yeah, yeah. So as you've entered this next part of your journey, as you referenced earlier, you've immersed yourself even more into helping advance women's role in leadership, women's health initiatives. Can you share some of your learnings and where you see opportunities to accelerate support for those initiatives?

Janet Foutty (11:47)
Great team, great team.

Yeah, so when I finished with my role as chair at Deloitte, I had never really thought about what I was going to do next. I had the incredible opportunity to do such a wide variety of things within Deloitte. I was just sort of in this mode of sort of one thing followed another. you know, for my first year or so after I left Deloitte, I did a lot of really interesting things, but they weren't sort of grounded in a topic. I knew I wanted to do something that would continue to help women. spent a lot of time in women's leadership sort of thinking about sort

business school to the boardroom, how do we help women elevate and accelerate their careers? But I wanted to do something that had a broader impact on women and men, frankly, because every investment in women's health also helps men. That's again, another conversation for other podcasts, but there is tremendous opportunity, both market opportunity in and around women's health and the ability to make a world a better place if we invest in women's health.

Women's health has been ⁓ wildly under-invested in for a wide variety of reasons, both research and development, which is, as you know, where the science that feeds our medicine and healthcare today stems from, in venture capital, where a lot of the innovation comes from as things come out of research and development, all the way through commercialization and reimbursement through our payer system here in the US. that whole continuum of women's health.

has been underserved. So I've been working for the last year or so in how do we draw more attention to, a deeper understanding of, and frankly more money to the conditions that either only affect women, disproportionately affect women, and or differently affect women, which is the things that we struggle with. It's also really important to note that if we actually understand women at the molecular and cellular level and what makes

them healthier, that also helps men because sex-based differences is a critical part of understanding science and medicine and how we make sure that we all live longer and healthier lives. So that's where I've been focused and really excited about the work there. And that work spans from venture capital to philanthropy to big pharma. There is plenty of opportunity to reshape this space and this conversation and enormous

economic upside because this market has been so underserved.

Jason (14:27)
Yep, I'm so happy that you are focused there and spending your time there. And because you are the type of leader you are, and because you see things differently and you're approaching it differently like you did with Deloitte Digital, I'm sure the impact is going to be multiple times what it is today as you go deeper and deeper. So I'm thrilled to see that trajectory.

Janet Foutty (14:48)
I

appreciate your confidence. There's a lot of people working in, a lot of really smart people working in this space and I'm trying to lend my voice and help however I can.

Jason (14:57)
I think it's wonderful. So we're on our last question, Janet. And I'm thrilled that you are going to be part of our launch in the Women in Leadership Roundtable that The Wisory is doing. I can't thank you enough for participating. What do you hope off this roundtable that we're doing in a few weeks that emerging female leaders can take away from the conversation that you're going to have with the other panelists?

Janet Foutty (15:20)
So I'm excited for that conversation. As great as it is to talk with you, I'm really excited to be with a group of incredible women and have a conversation. What I really hope people take away from our conversation is two things. One is for all of the women listening that they know that they are not in it alone. And all of us, all of us have different paths and different ways to think about how to get from here to there.

but we are mere mortals. And as human as everyone listening to this conversation, and the really important thing is that we can learn from each other and borrow great ideas from each other's successes and the places we've stumbled along.

Jason (15:58)
I love that. love it. Janet, I can't thank you enough. We're done with our five questions. You passed with flying colors. I don't think there was ever gonna be a question about that. But as I said, I'm thrilled to have you on the panel. I believe it's November 12th and there's still some seats available. So I hope people sign up for that. And again, thank you. Have a wonderful rest of the night and I'll be seeing you soon.

Janet Foutty (16:06)
Yeah

Thank you, I'm really looking forward to the next conversation.