Joe Fadool is the President and CEO of BorgWarner, a company with 38,000 people and products riding on some of the toughest trucks and SUVs in the world.
His path wasn't a straight line… Joe took a role too early in his career. He missed deadlines on a launch and was ultimately pulled from the job. In a later role, he was missing his son's birthdays for two years because of the travel.
He went to his boss and said he had to get off the road, but he was instead offered a turnaround: a billion dollar unionized manufacturing plant in Huntsville.
Joe calls it the best thing that ever happened to him - it got him home for dinner, and it was the operational experience that opened the door to BorgWarner.
In this episode of Talk Real Shift, we covered:
→ Why operational experience is the price of entry for leadership at BorgWarner
→ The difference between one way and two way decisions
→ How to tell when someone is in the wrong role instead of the wrong company
→ What generative AI means for people who didn't start on the same line as everyone else
→ The moment he got pulled from a job, and what he did with it afterward
Thank you Joe for making the time to Talk Real Shift - running a company doesn't leave a lot of open time, and he still showed up ready to talk. Glad to have this conversation with you!
Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:00 Trivia, the pink hat, and a shoutout to the Livonia team
06:30 From a kid tearing down engines to an engineer at Ford
08:00 The leap from engineering into sales
19:41 The failure that got him pulled from a role
20:39 Choosing family over the road, and the plant that changed everything
22:09 Why the shipping doors are the most important doors in the company
33:08 Right person, wrong role: the nine box problem
37:18 One way doors and two way doors: how he makes big decisions
51:10 Advice to his younger self, and where generative AI fits in
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