booktv on c-span2 great by america's cable-television companies. today we provide to you by these television company superbright e booktv to viewers as a public service. >> and not on c-span2 use booktv more television for serious readers. >> good afternoon and welcome to the 565th 565th meeting of the economic club of new york. 113 year. i'm john williams, chairman of the come present of the federal reserve bank of new york. with a distinguished history since 1907 the economic club of new york is a premier nonpartisan forum for time of discussions on a wide of issues facing new york, united states and the whole world. mission is important today as ever as we continue to bring you people together as a catalyst sharing diverse points of view. in particular for these challenging times we proudly

stand with all communities seeking conclusion after inclusion. like stigma directed expos of our 312 members of the centennial society who are attending today as her contributions continue be the financial backbone of support for the club and help enable us to offer a wonderful and diverse programming now and in the future. i would also like to look with the members of 2020s class fellows a select group of rising nextgen business thought of postgraduate students from nyu stern school of business. it's an honor for me to introduce our special guest today, chair of the guardian life insurance, a trustee at the economic club of new york deanna mulligan. piano was named chief executive officer at guardian in 2011 and serve in the role until this month -- deana takashi juul'ing guarding in 2008 at executive vice president to lead the compass individually and disabilities business.

she also serves as a trustee and the board of directors of the vanguard group. opposite shia told since 2017. her background is in both strategy consulting and operational management. she's a principal mckinsey & company and held senior positions at asa financial and new york life insurance company. she was a director on the board of arts capital and active in industry and community, she serves on the board of directors for american health of life insurers and department of financial services come state insurance advice report. she is committed to advancing communities, she serves on the board of trustees for the new york presbyterian hospital, the partnership for new york, catalyst chief executive for corporate purpose and the recent museum in greenwich, connecticut. she was appointed to present obama's advisory council of financial capability for young americans. and his crew and member of the stanford graduate school of

business advisory council. in 2019 she was named one of the 50 most powerful women in business. one of the 50 most powerful women in new york for the fifth time since 2011. in a recent book "hire purpose" which debuts tomorrow she offers an inspired analysis of how smart companies fill the gap as a conference a guy get businesses can meet the employment challenges of the 2020s. the former today is a conversation with her fortune to have economic club in your club member and chief executive officer janice ellig and honest. we will end at 2:45. as a reminder this conversation is on the record as a do have media on the line. i will turn over to you, janice. >> thank you so much. appreciate that. deanna we do have a long list of accomplishments and surprisingly we are still able to write this phenomenal book. we are really going to talk

about that today. i wanted to start with, you did become ceo at guardian in 2011. you joined in 2008. in 2011 and you talk about this in the book, there's strong saying and doing make sure there were guiding principles into the for people to follow. it was a doing the right thing and people count and holding yourself to a higher standard. that was during that time. then you say in your book the principles are great because they are what they are for us to follow, but it's purpose by which we live. that's part of what you did with the book, "hire purpose" and jeff led a a purposeful life. my question is in your role as ceo, how have you maintained a purposeful leadership during this tumultuous times now in 2020? >> first of all, i want to thank

you. it's an honor to be here with you today and you have you monitoring -- moderating this discussion. thank you for inviting me to this club, feel very honored to beer be here and have all of you on the line. thank you, janice come for introducing my new book "hire purpose." first of all i just want to say tankage of people at guardian come many of them are probably on this call today who helped me and my cowriter who helped me organize my thoughts. but going back to your question, janice, on purpose. guarding is a purpose driven company although we are fortune to a to 50 company. we not public. we are owned by our policyholders. we are a mutual company, and we are driven by providing value to our policyholders. guardian is 106 years old and we always seem want to be here for another 160 years. people are attracted to guardian

because of our purpose. we are with people in the most difficult times, and certainly that's been true in this covid in five after we are here to provide economic support when people die, when they die to sin. we're here to provide economic support when they become disabled or when they can't work. we also administer paid family leave which has become very important in this time as you know. purpose is a natural thing and it is how we run the company at guardian along with our values, which you stated. we do the right thing. people count and behold ourselves to a very high standard. >> yes come at in a heavy work with you those years you are very concerned about that, and diversity as well in your company in terms of very purposeful. so this book "hire purpose", i think your timing of publishing

this is impeccable because right now it's the bible of how to really rescale and keep workers retain frequent is this idea ce from you to do this book? was his recent or in a while ago? >> i think as john mentioned i came to guardian in 2008, and while he guardian was not deeply affected by the great recession, as a matter of fact were upgraded not long after the great recession by our rating agencies, there was chaos all around us as you all recall. i observed a number of people who are losing their jobs in this great recession and as you recall it also took many years for an appointment to come back down and for them to become reemployed. i started thinking to myself, the next time we have a disruptive event i don't want guardian to be a company that lays off a lot of people. how do we deal with what's going

on in the world in terms of technological change and also for us, a very low interest rate environment, how do we deal with those things and make sure that we can keep as many people with us as possible and be true to our values and our purpose? and so in 2011-12 after super storm sandy, we decided that we need to make a lot of change in the company, and that's what started me thinking about writing the book. and although it seems like it just popped onto the scene, it's actually been in the works for a number of years. >> really the 2008 crisis really prompted you to think about that, rather than playing off which is typically what we do, right, that it's much more costly oftentimes to layoff. the question now is how do you do this meeting current and

future needs in terms of ceos are looking what do i do with my talent? how do i look at the rescaling? is it just technology or is it much barter you you're taking in terms of rescale? what steps to ceos take particularly large companies and how you scale that up? >> that's a great set of questions, janice l start with the first one. your comment that it costs a lot more money to lay people off is definitely true. studies have shown it can cause five to six times as much to lay people off and go rehire thank you reskill sobered into the same job. in this environment come in this economic environment it makes a lot of sense to try to reskill as many people as possible. we know that its equity be 100% solution but i think companies owe it to the people, and we as business leaders owe it to the

country and the economy to try to do this. and yes, the question is how do we do it at scale? are a lot of people right now who are working on the answers to that question. we have done it at scale and to think our biggest scale project happen not too long after storm sandy when we said, well, we were put out of our building for nine months. we left on a friday and we didn't come back into nine months later because we were in lower manhattan. we had five feet of water wash to our building, within the infrastructure in the street in front of us which contain asbestos was basically destroyed and we had to wait for the asbestos to be cleaned up and our electricity and internet to be restored, and it ended up taking nine months. after that i said that's it, we need a new technology platform. we need to be location independent. and the story is in the book.

we hired dean to be our cio and he mapped our plan and it took us about five years to move from our data center infrastructure largely in the cloud, doing that required a massive reskilling upper i.t. people. many were given a choice whether they would like to stay in the current job but they were told it's not going to be forever or what they would like to reskill a a retired. fortunately, many people chose to reskill to the new eye contact algae. from that early when we felt a number of pilots and develop a number of programs and really focus on developing a learning culture. but guardian is not the only one. in the book with many examples of companies, large and small, who have rescale to we talked about the way they did it. we did receive some outside help

and are many companies springing up now and many of the large consulting firms are also often tell. james can i know companies like yours know a lot about this. so while it's possible to do it in totally and on one's own, it's also possible to go get some outside help and do it more quickly. >> it's not just technology roles though. this is beyond technology that you've done the reskilling. can you talk about those programs, other skills being change pgh yes. there are some people here reskilling. they automatically think technology and a large number of the jobs that we have reskilled for have been in technology. but but i was just looking at se research a few days ago that talked about the top ten skills for 2020 and their changing very rapidly. but video design in videoconferencing, no surprise, given the environment we are in,

are not all of a sudden really hot in technology. communication skills, breaking down silos, really important when you're doing things remotely. sales skills are always a perennial on that list. it's not just technology. certainly soft skills are really important. i was on a call recently with the ceo of microsoft to said soft skills are it right now. we need a combination of both hard and soft skills, if you will. >> so the obstacles that you faced at guardian in terms of when you started reskilling and you're still doing, what are some obstacles your company and other companies are facing when presented with that task? >> well, i think, i hear from other companies sometimes they say this is a massive project. how can we reskill at scale? and i say start small. start small, do some pilots, be

prepared to fail, and then focus on developing a learning culture. so start small, find the problem that is vexing today and visit if we had a different skill set a different way of looking at this, how far can we go? and then figure out how to get those skills into the organization, and there are lots of ways to do that. everything from working with your local community college to looking online for retraining programs come too going to get outside help. but start small, give people the room to fail. this is not always going to work the first time, and then finally i think the most important thing is to develop a learning culture. because if you develop learning culture in the organization not everything is going to have to be top down. people throughout the organization are going to start applying knowledge to solve the problems. they will start looking for and

asking for help in reskilling themselves. >> you speak about this learning culture, because the air of the 40 year career is, right? people are going to turn over and make moves and what have you. you are talking about that saying it's okay if you reskill people and obedient and they go elsewhere. .. >> to make this happen. talk to us about that. >> well, janice, i think if you look at what's happening in the world right now, this problem is a big one, right? we have a big problem not just in the united states, but around the world of people who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own because of the situation in which we find ourselves.

and government is not going to be able to solve the problem entirely on its own. our educational system is not going to be able to solve the problem entirely on its own, and certainly the people affected are not going to be able to solve it on its own. we really need business to step up, be a partner in this and maybe even take a leadership role and develop some public/private partnerships and across business partnerships to work on this issue. it's just too big for any one entity to handle on its own. and in terms of the people who say, well, what if i retrain my people and they leave, i always say what if you don't retrain them and they stay? the world is moving so fast right now, and customer expectations -- and we've certainly seen this in covid -- are changing. and you need an educated, flexible, fast, agile work force to be able to meet customer

needs. and so i think it's incumbent on all of us to try to make this happen. >> and those public/private partnerships, you talk about those in the book too, many of those should be local as well as at higher levels, correct? in terms of coming together to make that happen. >> absolutely. i think it's very important to reach out in your local communities in which you operate. we've done that in a series of pickups with community -- partnerships with community colleges around the country to help them. we started out saying we want to help you, but we ended up being helped as well because we hired many people from community colleges which really wasn't a source of hiring for us before, and they've turned out to be great assets to the company. so, yes, i think reaching out to your local community college, we talk in the book about the ibm p-tech school which is a fairly

well known story at this point, but how ibm reached out to high schools and developed a five-year program where their graduates have not only a diploma, but a degree. ibm has put a model out there that other companies can use. and we talk in the book about a small business in upstate new york, a cabinet-making business, that actually started a p-tech school in its small community so that they could have trained cabinet makers join them after high school graduation. so this doesn't have to be a corporate-only phenomenon or a large company phenomenon or a large city phenomenon. i think small towns across this country are being affected pretty hard right now in the covid crisis and are also going to have to find a way to rebuild their economies and their work forces. >> and in doing that, going to the community colleges and

taking students out of high school and giving them apprenticeships or internships, you're also going into some of the underserved communities with increasing diversity, are you not, in terms of that training? honestly, beneficial for people to come up on vocational training because you're also challenging a four-year degree here, is it really necessary. versus a community college. >> well, thank you again for raising the point about inclusion and diversity, which is obviously on everyone's mind right now. so 50% of our interns come from underserved communities or diverse backgrounds, and we are finding that using community colleges as a source we also admit people who have high school and certificates as their credentials but not necessarily a college degree. and, of course, continue to train them when they arrive at guardian. that's worked out very well for

us. we recently started a program with ashford university where one can earn a bachelor's degree online at guardian free of charge, and we looked at the statistics and who is using that program, and we found it is by farah majority of -- by far a majority of women and people from other underserved and diverse backgrounds which thrilled us. and also it's people within the first five years of their career. so we think this is really working where poem come to us -- people come to us, they maybe have a certificate or a technical high school degree or an associate's degree from a community college, they can take college classes while they're being trained at guardian and earn a college degree without undertaking that bone-crushing debt that we sometimes hear. and it really helps us to make our population much more reflect i have of the communities -- reflective of the communities in

which we live expect people we serve. so it's a win-win-win. it's a win for the employee, it's a win for our customers, and it's a win for guardian. >> so -- [inaudible] as you know, and we sometimes have to have our clients look at people a little bit differently. and you're, i think, suggesting that there's going to be a skilled staffing. it's going to be different backgrounds that people are going to hire for positions that before they might have wanted that four-year degree, they might have wanted certain experience. but it sounds like you're saying you can hire or a great person who has had a different background. >> well, the business round table has recently taken up this cause and has done a lot of research on this idea of skill stacking and certifications. you know, a four-year college degree is a great thing. i'm not going to say that people shouldn't get four-year college

degrees. however, sometimes while a four-year college degree can teach you how to think, it doesn't teach you necessarily the skills you need for a specific job. people who, for whatever reason, don't have a four-year college degree but actually have the skills needed to do the job in previous times have often been left out of the job market because many companies had used the four-year degree as a screener. we're finding increasingly that companies are not using that anymore. they're saying we want to hire people with these specific skills whether they have a degree or not. and the business round table is trying to make it easier for companies to identify those skills, and we're hoping to make it easier for potential employees to identify their skills. we have a ways to go on this as a society, but if we can move from more of a degree-based to a skills-based -- not to bias

against degrees -- a skills-based hiring situation, i think we can put more people to work more productively, and we can move faster in this environment where skills that are required are changing, you know? it doesn't end when you with walk across the stage and collect your diploma. your learning journey these days is really just beginning. >> that learning environment, the culture that you built at guardian, people come in and they're really mentored by others, right? in terms of to build those skills up and to stack them as such? and so is that a lot of training on the part of your people with these new hires? >> mentoring is really important. i think it's important in any learning-based organization and any learning culture. it's certainly important if you're going to be hiring people based on skills but who may not

have done a specific role before or, quite frankly, may not have worked in a company before and may not, you know, understand all the ways that things happen in an organization. so we have been very fortunate at guardian that our employees have been very generous and very willing to mentor others. we do a lot of mentoring at community colleges, and now recently we've brought that in-house. we've actually signed a pledge with m power which trains a lot of veterans, and our cio's on the board of m power. so we've had a lot of employees volunteer to be mentors to veterans whom we're trying to bring in the organization. veterans are a great example of people who have a lot of skills that they may have learned in the military but might need some mentoring and coaching in order to really bring them to life in a corporate or environment. >> how has the pandemic impacted

reskilling as you see it at guardian and other companies? working virtually not as easy. >> yes. you know, that's interesting, janice. i mean, we've -- like many companies, we've had good success working virtually, and we've seen a lot of increase in productivity, and we've even macked to issue some -- managed to issue some new products and hire some new people and bring them into the organization while working remoteliment but i was on a call this morning where some ceos were debating whether or not learning is really happening in this remote environment. and i, you know, the research hasn't really been done yet. i know we've continued to offer our online courses, but we have to find new ways to mentor and help people develop their skills in the online environment if we're going to be totally successful with this going forward. >> so it does present challenges

at this point. >> yes. this is, this is not easy. going back to my three tips for how to make this happen in your organization, start small, don't get discouraged there will be failures and then develop a learning culture. there's, you know, everybody has their share of failures. and i think sometimes one of the failures you see is you assume that everyone wants to do this. and not everyone is going to sign up. and that's okay, right? and i think another misconception that people sometimes have is that age is a barrier to this, and we have found that not to be true at all going back to the story of retraining and reskilling the people who are working in our data centers to have more cloud-based skills. we did not find that age was a factor. many long-tenured employees were able to make the transition. and some recent research by gardner group backs that up. when they looked at employees

who were successful in reskilling especially in data-driven and digital jobs, they found that the number one characteristic of employees who were successful was deep knowledge of the subject matter. and as a matter of fact, 50-year-olds were the category that they found that had the most success once they determined that they were going to be reskilled. so i think a mistake that companies often make is to say, oh, well, this only applies to a surgeon category of employee -- a certain category of employee. that's on one side of the scale. on the other side of the scale they say, oh, well, everyone's certainly going to want to do this. and it's really important to. just go out there and test. >> an a astounding figure, potentially an estimated 85 million jobs will be unfilled globally by 2030. because of this gap.

so there's a serious implication to being competitive. so how do we mitigate that from happening? reskilling and other methods? >> yes, janice, that's new researching that's just out, and it was actually done by a large search firm who did this estimate. and it's higher than other estimates we've seen by other organizations in the past. but if you think through the experience we've all had in the last 6-9 months, we've all had to learn new skills. i doubt that many people on this call were zoom experts, you know, before six or nine months ago, and we've all learned more about managing our technology and our environment from home, even making videos from home as we were discussing before the call, working on things like lighting. so just that little example. the number of people around the world who have learned new skills in the last 6-9 months out of necessity is huge. and if you roll that forward ten years and you think about the

acceleration and change that has happened because of covid-19 and continues to happen, i heard someone say recently i wish i had a dollar for every ceo that told me we've made, you know, three years worth of progress in three months. and we've found that at guardian too. on certain things that we wanted to change, were planning to change and had maybe a two-year plan to roll it out, we rolled it out in 3-6 months. and if that continues to be the case going forward, that's how you get those 85 million jobs potentially going unfilled. because the skills requirements are changing rapidly, and we need to make sure that we work together in public and private partnerships. education, business, government and employees themselves taking responsibility for learning new things. it's how we're going to get through this. >> it's a balancing act though,

isn't it, for some companies that are under tremendous pressure, some sections of our economy under tremendous financial pressure to reskill employees. you know, develop capabilities of those you have, people coming in, retaining people. and at the same time, cutting some costs. so it's quite a balancing act for ceos. what you've heard, what you're seen, what you're doing in this regard. >> yes. we've been fortunate at guardian, although i don't think anyone has had an easy time. we have not had the tremendous economic pressure that you see in some industries because of the shutdown and, obviously, both categories of employees like people in entertainment or the restaurant business or the airline business are needing to be reskilled. at some point that becomes larger than individual companies can take on, and the government really does need to jump in and help. and we see two examples of

states that have come to my attention recently, rhode island and maryland. and this is not a partisan, you know, this is not a partisan issue. we have both republican governors and democratic governors who have really stepped up. and, of course, our government has really stepped up in new york state. i've heard examples of retraining from a lot of different states who are really jumping onboard saying we have to get involved, and we have to engage with business so that the people in our state -- some of whom were, you know, financially just on the precipice before this happened -- can be retrained to get new jobs. >> so we are in the pandemic, hopefully coming out of it at some point, or building back better. what do you see as the work force of tomorrow and the workplace of tomorrow?

your vision of what that might look like. >> well, janice, i think that's all still evolving, right? and that's a topic of a lot of conversation. are we going to go all remote, do we need to have office buildings, what is the role of cities. it's a big conversation we're all going to be a part of over next few years. i personally don't see 100% remote as the solution in most cases. however, i do think there's going to be a lot more remote work than there has been in the past. at guardian we were about 30% remote before the pandemic, and we have a lot of flexible hours and flexible locations and situations. we're certainly going to continue that, and we will probably find i think that many of our employees are going to, we think whether they want to be remote, maybe we'll have more who want to be. but we'll always have places for people to gather and, you know,

have camaraderie and train and so we can pass down the corporate culture. a lot of what we've done over the last6-9 months i think in all companies is really, you know, building some culture and relationships we had already built in person before the pandemic started. whether we can continue to be as productive as a society as we have been remotely, it remains to be seen. so i think there's always going to be a role for some sort of in-person contact. there's always going to be a role for cities. people want to get out there, they want to experience culture, they want to go to great restaurants. it's going to take a while, but there will be, there will be unforeseen impact from the situation we're in now, there's no doubt about that. >> so what do you hear from employees themselves in terms of what they're looking forward to doing through this reskilling that they've done at guardian

and, you know, working remotely, working at the company? what's some of the sentiment you hear about some people? >> well, we've been staying very close to our employees, as we always do, but especially during this time period. and we have found that our engagement scores have actually gone up. and we do have locations in parts of the country where people often have long commutes. so one of the big pluses of the remote work we've heard is, boy, this cuts down on my commute time. and we find that people are using at least a part of that commute time to be very productive in their jobs. we've actually had to encourage them, as many companies have, to remember to take some time off, and we don't want people to burn autoout. out. we are hearing that because of the situation we're in where we have a lot of home schooling that some people find that difficult, and we have put in new family and parental leave

programs, new grieving programs because, quite frankly, we've had people, sadly, who have lost, you know, relatives, friends and loved ones to the disease. so we've been listening to our employees and adjusting our programs on the fly as we go to try to be more supportive. i do think people are looking forward, though, to getting back together and seeing their colleagues in person and having some social interaction as i think we all are, but we don't know yet when that's, you know, going to be widespread and happen in a safe way. >> i want to direct you back to 2014 when president obama had you on his advisory council on financial capability of young americans, and that was quite a, i think, experience for you. what you learned from it and what the lessons going forward in terms of young people in america, what we need to focus on. >> yes. well, it was an honor to be part

of that advisory council. and it, again, was a public/private partnership in that we had representatives from treasury, the department of education, consumer representatives and people from business and education outside of the government and also from not-for-profits and think tanks. and, you know, one of the things we quickly decided we were talking about really financial literacy and financial capability for young people, how to make sure they graduated either from high school or college with the ability to really manage their finances. and we quickly learned that one of the big problems they had was finding a job. so working on this advisory council really got me to thinking about the content of the book and, you know, thinking about how do we make sure that young people can get jobs. and at one point we brought some of our students from a community college where we were mentoring and teaching financial literacy

to the president's advisory council meeting which was a great experience for them, and they quickly, you know, brought us all down to reality and talked about the difficulties they faced just affording school and, you know, transportation and computers and seeing their families as many of them who had families, it was very interesting. they actually received credit in the report for their contributions. but what we, what i had underestimated is they did a wonderful job finding their way to d.c., and we helped them, and they really were excited to be there, but they'd never been in a big meeting before. and so, you know, meeting etiquette was something they hadn't learned. and it's just a microcosm of what we're facing when we're trying to bring students in to a

corporate environment, and it just showed us how important it is to really have that mentoring function when we're bringing people in who haven't had a lot of work experience. >> so let me just talk a little bit, i know it's getting close to the end, but leadership and how leaders have had to step up during this pandemic. some of the things that you've experienced that you hadn't experienced before and and really called deepening the core of your leadership and what you've seen in others as well. >> well, thinking about this topic and talking about it, in 2008 public/private partnerships and ceos doing good in the world wasn't really quite as popular a topic as it is today. obviously, today the social mission of companies is something that's discussed all

the time, and the business round table came out with a statement a little over a year ago. but five or six years ago when i started this book, it seemed a little pushy for a ceo of the financial services company to be taking this on. but i was really driven by what we were experiencing at guardian and what i was seeing in the outside world. so it was a little countercultural for the time, but happily now i think it's topic du jour, and everybody is kind of hopping on the bandwagon. i would say, one, experience -- one experience that really sticks with me is we had a small number of people, this was probably five, six years ago, we were phasing out an operation that we had, a back office operation where people were taking paper mail that we received from our customers and using machines and scanning it into our system. and we were going to automate

that process. and we had about 30 people, and we were very worried about what would happen to them because they didn't have college degrees, and we weren't sure how their skills were going to transfer. some of them did get other jobs within guardian, some of them decided to retire because they were close to retirement. some of them opted to take severance because they had other plans, you know, i want to move to florida, or i'm going to start a business with my brother. but we did make them the offer that we would pay for up to two years of tuition at our local community college. and one of our community college partners was very helpful to us in saying, yes, we do have jobs in the community that we think your employees could qualify for. here are some certificate programs they can take to requalify, or they can earn an associate's degree. and we said, yes, fine, we'll pay for an associate's degree in whatever topic they find useful.

and i did receive a note from one person who said no one in my family went to college, no one ever told me that i was college material. until i came to guardian, i never believed i could do this. and they ended up earning an associate's degree. and it just shows me the impact that corporations can have at very little expense on people, on real people, change their lives. not only that person's life, but maybe change their families' lives and, you know, change the trajectory of a whole generation. so it really is important. it just takes a little more time and planning. it's a lot less expensive than laying people off, and it's much better for your internal culture, the people who are left are inspired by what they're seeing, and they're inspired to go out and learn more. so it really is a virtuous circle in terms of reskilling

whenever one possibly can. >> goes back to one of your key principles, right? people count. and i can tell you that when i'm placing people, they go to companies where they know they will count. you know, that's really important. so as parting words, advice for those of us really trying to make this work? besides reading your wonderful book which has great examples. but, you know, parting advice, two or three things that people should really focus on today? >> so, thank you, thank you very much, janice. and, again, it's been an honor to be here, and i thank john and barbara for providing me with the great introduction today. and to anybody who's thinking about doing this, i would say start small. pick one problem, engage your employees in solving one problem. start small. be patient. expect failure and welcome it because it's part of the learning journey. and then finally, develop a

learning culture. and if you're a senior executive, you need to model the learning culture, and you need to show that you are learning too and that it's not always easy for you, but you can be vulnerable, and you can try new things. >> so i know you've been a purposeful leader, you've led a purposeful life. any insights into what's next for you now that you've stepped down as ceo but currently still chair at guardian? >> well, i'm busy with my guardian responsibilities and the book right now, janice. but i always say looking ahead, you know, we have a lot of challenges out there as you have outlined today and we've discussed. i would just like to be part of the solution. so is i'm looking forward to that, whatever form that might take. >> deanna mulligan, thank you so much for a very insightful discussion about what we all need to take charge of. john, back to you.

>> thank you, janice. thank you the, deanna. this was absolutely a terrific conversation. i've been taking notes the whole time, especially around the learning culture and learning journey and all the things you discussed. again, thanks both of you for participating in this wonderful discussion. ♪ ♪ >> you're watching booktv on c-span2, every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and no, sir. booktv -- authors. booktv on c-span2 created by america's cable television companies. today we're brought to you by these television companies who provide booktv to viewers as a public service. ♪ >> here are some of the current best selling nonfiction books according to "the boston globe." topping the list, in the first volume of his presidential memoir, "a promised land," former president barack obama reflects on his life and political career.

then isabel wilkerson explores what she calls a hidden caste system in the united states. after that it's bag man, rachel maddow and television producer, their examination of richard nixon's vice president. that's followed by dade alan sinly's what it's like to be a bird. and wrapping up our look at some of the best selling books according to "the boston globe" is "the best of me," a collection of stories and essays by author and humorist david sedaris. >> hello, and welcome to in conversation with p.j. o'rourke and dave berry. my name is jack perry. we are honored to sponsor this dialogue with the authors. as a locally-owned automotive group proudly serving south