The Dive
Ten weeks ago, I sat down with Johnny Taylor for the first episode of Culture Creators and asked what makes a great HR leader. His answer, in one word: courage.
Last week, on our tenth and final episode of the season, I asked Ann Rhoades the same question. She helped build the culture at Southwest Airlines, then led people for Promus Hotels (the company behind DoubleTree), then co-founded JetBlue, before she started her own culture consultancy, People Ink. Different guest, ten episodes apart, same word.
It's not just her own telling of that track record, either. Forbes profiled her values-driven hiring philosophy at JetBlue back in 2011, and Harvard Business School built an entire case study around how she scaled that culture fast without diluting it. The receipts exist outside her own retelling.
That's not a coincidence, and it's not why we picked her to close the season either. We picked Ann because she's the one guest who ties together the two threads running through all ten episodes: a real commitment to values and behaviors, and a real commitment to courage in how CEOs actually solve problems. Every other conversation this season pulled on one of those threads. Ann pulled on both at once.
She told me the hardest part of being a true partner to a CEO is having the courage to tell the truth. Not the comfortable version. The accurate one. So I asked her point blank: does any of this change now that AI is in the room? Her answer didn't take long. The methods are ripe for AI. The why isn't. Use every tool you can get to gather feedback, spot culture drift, communicate values at scale. But a tool can hand you the data. It can't hand you the nerve to say what the data means when the room doesn't want to hear it. That part hasn't changed since she was building Southwest's culture decades ago, and she doesn't think it ever will. More than ever, she said, leaders need a team they've actually built trust with. One that will level with them and tell you exactly how things are happening on the ground, not the version that's easiest to hear in a status update.
Two other things she said have stuck with me all week. Together they're the closest thing to a blueprint I've heard for what she calls operationalizing culture: treating it as a hard metric you manage, not a soft feeling you hope for.
The Save
Three things, straight from Ann, that every CEO and executive leader running a business today should sit with:
Courage to tell the truth is the job, not a personality trait. Build a team that will actually tell you how things are, not how you want them to be. Reward the truth-telling when it's uncomfortable, or you'll stop getting it.
Values are a marketing tool that sits right under your brand, if you define what they look like in action. Most companies write values and stop there. Ann's book, Built on Values, is her blueprint for the harder part: naming the specific behaviors each value produces, so culture becomes something you can actually manage rather than a poster on the wall. She named three moments that should always trigger a hard look at your values: a change in senior leadership, a change of more than half your executive team, or a change in strategy. Your values are how a strategy actually turns into action. If they're stale, the strategy stalls with them.
Treat employee feedback like you treat customer feedback: constant, and acted on. Companies obsess over customer input and let employee input pile up unread. If you want to know what benefits actually matter or what motivates your people, ask them directly. Stop assuming one program fits every role. Different jobs, different needs, and the technology to run several versions at once is already sitting there, so there's no excuse not to.
Ann doesn't think any of this becomes optional because AI showed up. If anything, she thinks it gets more important: the tools get smarter, but the leadership still has to be human.
Where would an honest look at your own values start today? A leadership change, a strategy shift, or just the fact that no one's asked lately? Reply and tell me. I read every one.
Talk soon, Anita
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This is Issue 8 of Live Wire, a weekly jolt of candid thinking for CEOs, founders, and people leaders who know culture isn't a side project, it's how a business performs. I'm building this alongside my forthcoming book, Everyone Sells. If this landed, please forward it to a leader who thinks values are a poster, not a metric.