WM CEO Jim Fish never wants to be too busy to say hello to employees

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Transcript:

Jim Fish: So, what has caused this doubling, basically, of our life expectancy over a fairly short period of time? I mean, 125 years. And her answer kind of surprised me, and one of the other CEOs sitting next to me nudged me a little bit well. I mean, she said, you know, obviously there have been tremendous advances in medical science, and that’s a big component of it. But she said, one of the big components that people don’t think about, and I didn’t, by the way, I didn’t prompt her with this. I’d never met her, but she said, is the commercial collection of trash.

Diane Brady: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Leadership Next. The podcast about the people…

Kristin Stoller: …and trends…

Brady: …that are shaping the future of business. I’m Diane Brady.

Stoller: And I’m Kristin Stoller.

Brady: And this week, we are talking about waste.

Stoller: Yes, everyone’s favorite subject on this very hot New York City day the trash smell wafts up to us.

Brady: Especially Lower Manhattan, where there are hundreds of garbage bags on garbage day.Waste Management, which, by the way, much like Kentucky Fried Chicken, is now known by only its acronyms, WM.

Stoller: WM, they wanted to make a big sustainability rebrand. They’re all about recycling, which, by the way, I have a ton of European, British, Irish neighbors in my building, and they make fun of me so much because of how I use paper towels. I use plastic soap containers.

Brady: The British are big recyclers?

Stoller: Yeah, apparently. They get so mad and say, Americans are so wasteful, you don’t recycle.

Brady: We are. We are pretty wasteful. I will say it’s a continuum. Having lived in parts of Asia, like India, parts of Africa where I’d say they’re less advanced on the trash collection front, and then Europe, where you have to pay like, $2 to $3 for one trash bag, it really makes you think about how much you put out. So I do think we don’t have enough financial incentive to reduce. Yeah, we have some incentive to recycle, not much to reuse, unless you’re a depression era baby.

Stoller: Not really. But I guess that brings us to our CEO, Jim Fish.

Brady: Have we not mentioned Jim Fish yet? Because Jim Fish is the heart and soul of WM. He’s been there since 2001.

Stoller: Yeah. And he has a very interesting job. Because part of the thing that I think is so interesting about Jim is his workforce. He has to deal with people who this is obviously, or maybe not, their first choice of a job. It’s a dirty job. It’s hard to be on the back of those trucks.

Brady: It’s unsafe.

Stoller: Yeah. How do you keep people? How do you keep an aging workforce in this profession?

Brady: I think technology is going to be interesting. He does tend to cite Herb Kelleher of Southwest as being one of his inspirations for a people-first mentality. And some of those people, 50% of them, do go from jobs for very good reasons. They’re backbreaking jobs. And so how he does that, and of course, I’m fascinated, what does Jim find in the trash?

Stoller: Yeah, that’s my biggest question. He has some good stories for us.

Brady: I’m sure he does, and we’ll be right back with Jim Fish. 

Brady: Cities are home to the majority of the world’s population and account for 80% of global GDP. That makes the health and sustainability of our cities critical to creating a prosperous future. And of course, business has a role to play. Jason Girzadas, the CEO of Deloitte US, is the sponsor of this podcast, and he joins us now. Jason, great to see you. 

Jason Girzadas: Great to see you, Diane. Thanks for having me. 

Brady: So how should businesses play a role in creating more vibrant and sustainable cities?

Girzadas: It’s clear to me that the health of cities is inextricably linked to business’s viability and success. I think it starts with an awareness or a recognition of that mutually dependent reality. I think the how is around collaboration. It’s bringing to bear the capabilities of businesses to support cities’s renewal and innovation. To understand the criticality of cities’s role around economic prosperity, innovation, as well as cultural exchange.

Stoller: Jason, could you give us some examples of successful urban transformation projects that have been driven by these innovative business practices?

Girzadas: I’m proud to say that Deloitte, back in 2023, we started an effort called Yes SF. Here in San Francisco, where I live, the launch of Yes SF, with other business collaborators, has brought together our competencies around stimulating interest amongst innovators to bring sustainability and technology innovation to benefit the city itself.

Stoller: Excellent. Well, that sounds like a very cool project. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. 

Girzadas: Thank you.

Brady: Thanks, Jason.

Brady: So, Jim. You know, I couldn’t help but notice that we should be saying WM instead of waste management, much like KFC with Kentucky Fried Chicken. So I have to ask, Why? Is there a reason? Is it just, is it partly to say something about that you’re more than just waste management, or why are we now calling you WM?

Fish: You nailed it.

Brady: Is that it? Enough said?

Stoller: We can end the interview right here.

Fish: I’ll tell you where it came from. We have a sustainability forum every year that’s held in conjunction with a golf tournament in Phoenix. I’m a golfer, yeah, that’s maybe a little bit of a stretch, but I enjoy it. But one of our guests said, you know, you call yourself Waste Management, and I understand that’s been Waste Management since you were founded, but you’re, you’re becoming more of a sustainability company and this whole golf tournament is focused around sustainability. It’s been zero waste now for 12 years, I think. And not an easy task, by the way, to make a big event like that zero waste. So she said, “Why not call it WM?” And she said, “It might be heresy to you know, suggest that, but why not call it WM, to take the waste out of the were out of the name of the company?” And so we thought about it, and our marketing team said, you know, that’s actually a pretty good idea. It takes a while to get to kind of catch hold. I think when United Parcel Service changed to UPS, my parents called it United Parcel Service forever, but eventually we all know it now as UPS.

Brady: Recycling is a form of waste management, isn’t it?

Fish: In essence, it is.

Brady: But you’re right. You’ve got the energy, you’ve got a lot of different businesses, sort of stemming from your core business, that are much more than waste management. Do you want to give us a broad sense of what you do?

Fish: Sure I mean, we do collect waste, and we dispose of it. And of course, recycling is a big and profitable part of our business as well. So those are the two primary components. And then you can break it down further into the segments of waste. We have commercial waste, we have industrial waste, and we have residential waste. Most people think about this company as a residential waste company, because that’s when we see them. We see them at our house picking up our recycling or our trash. But a big, big piece of our business is commercial, which are the CVSes that I walked through this morning, although we’re not servicing that CVS, but we do service CVSes around the country. So that’s more commercial waste. And then industrial waste is typically the big Exxon Mobils and Marathons and companies like that at their refineries. So, that’s the industrial waste segment.

Stoller: Where are the biggest areas you operate? Because I know New York, you said, isn’t one.

Fish: Well, New York is big for us, but not on the collection side. So that’s the other…

Brady: …we’re not going to blame you for all the trash on the streets this time of year.

Fish: You can’t blame us for the trash on the street.

Stoller: Okay yeah, the trash smell is not Jim’s fault.

Fish: But so, we do have a big business in New York, and it’s kind of the disposal side. And disposal comes in several different forms. It can come in the form of a recycle plant, it can come in the form of a landfill, and it can come in the form of a transfer station. And a transfer station effectively takes the waste, it ends up on a concrete floor, and then it’s loaded into some type of vehicle. Can be a train, as is the case here in New York. It can be a barge, as is also the case here in New York, or it can be a truck. So New York has all three kinds. Most of our transfer stations are truck transfers. So it gets loaded into a big 18-wheeler, and that 18-wheeler goes a fairly long distance, typically to a landfill.

Stoller: And now Diane brought up a good point about WM and your rebrand to sustainability, and I feel like a lot of companies right now are leaning into this sustainability push. For a lot of companies, it’s a lot of marketing, you know, they want to do good for the planet, but also be able to tell their shareholders and customers that they are. But for you, it’s kind of like a new, not a new business line, but an important business line. I’m wondering, are there any times you had to make a trade off between profitability and sustainability? And how do you weigh those?

Fish: I would tell you that if you think about those lines of business I just went through–commercial, industrial, landfill, transfer—the second-highest return on invested capital for us, of all those lines of business, is our recycling business. And so, some people do make the mistake of assuming that, well, you know, when times are tough, you’re going to throw it in the trash because it makes more money at the landfill than it does going through a recycle system. And yeah, but a lot of recyclables don’t weigh that much, but landfill is not the number one. By the way, the highest return on invested capital for us is the commercial line of business, and then second highest is our recycling line of business. So, if I were completely agnostic about the environment, which I’m not, but if I were, I would make the financial decision every time to send it to a recycle center where I can, versus a landfill. So I think it’s something that is a little bit misunderstood about recycling. It’s a very good business for us. It’s not just that we want to be good kind of partners with the Earth and stewards of the environment, but we also are, you know, our shareholders are important to us, and hence the fact that sustainability and financial returns go together is important.

Brady: You know … I’m not sure if you have your golf tournament on a landfill, but I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that landfills can actually generate energy because of the gas that is produced. Talk a little bit about—is that actually a line of business that is lucrative for you? Or is it just a good thing to do? You know, I’m obviously—I won’t say pennies on the dollar. But given the amount of landfill in the U.S., how much can we be relying on that as a source of energy going forward?

Fish: Well, it is profitable for us. And I think every one of these lines of business, we are looking at whether it’s a—regardless of whether there’s something good that comes out of it environmentally, we’re also looking at it as a profit center for us. I think Jamie Dimon said, you know, “if you’re in the sustainability business, and you don’t care about your financials, then then you’re in the wrong business.” And I think he’s right about that. We’re in the sustainability business, but we do care also about the returns on those investments. And when you think about landfills producing gas, they naturally produce gas because the trash decomposes. And probably for 20 years, we’ve been turning that gas into electricity. Most of our landfills have some type of landfill gas to energy, whether it’s landfill gas to electricity through a big generator set, or now landfill gas to renewable natural gas. And part of the beauty of that is that our fleet of trucks, and we have 20-ish-thousand heavy trucks, and about 75% of those are natural gas. They run on CNG. And so, in fact, you create a full circle, because you take trash and you pick it up in a CNG truck, and you take it to a landfill, and it decomposes and turns into gas, and we clean it up, because the gas that comes out of the landfill has some constituents in it that aren’t good for the truck engine. So we clean that gas up. Some of it gets put on the pipeline, and some of it actually goes directly into the tank of that CNG truck. So, it truly is a full circle for us.

Stoller: Are we running out of landfill space? What’s the future of that?

Fish: Landfills do have a finite life to them, and, in the next 15 years—and we’ll present this at our investor day—in the next 15 years, there are about 400 landfills out of a total of 2,000 in the United States that will come offline. And so the question is, how do you replace those? And we, part of our strategy that really separates us from the other guys is that we are: A, we’re better at replacing those, B, we have longer life than the average. See where we’ve really made an effort to divert a lot of material away from landfills to recycle centers, and hence the big investments that we’ve made in these recycle centers that make them more efficient. So there’s, there’s a number of ways that—and then you can also develop alternative forms of transportation. We’re building rail lines to run from, for example, from Miami up to Central Florida. And we have a landfill in Central Florida that has, I don’t know, 100 years of life left. The Miami landfill only has about 10 years of life left. So now we’re expanding that landfill, and we’ve bought a piece of adjacent property, so that’ll help. But at the same time, we are moving some of that waste either to a recycle center where we can or putting it on this newly developed rail line and moving it…

Stoller: For us non-trash people, how do you replace a landfill? What does that mean?

Fish: Well, you can, you don’t really replace—it’s because it’s a finite amount of space. The only way to really replace it—once it gets to a full capacity, some landfills, a small number of landfills fill up based on time. So you know, you have X number of years to fill this landfill, and then you’re done. Most landfills fill up based on capacity. And so you have X number of tons that can go into that landfill. And once you get to that amount, then that landfill is done, it’s closed, and you have to go through a closure process. And so the only way to replace that is to find either another site or another mode of disposal. We owned some of the incinerator plants, and we sold those in 2014, and that is another mode of disposal, and there are some other companies that still do that today. Those are hard to get replaced, harder to get replaced than a landfill, because…

Brady: …It doesn’t sound good for the environment. How are incinerators generally?

Fish: I mean, in Europe, they’re more heavily used because they have less land. In Europe, I think incinerators have done a good job of reducing their emissions. Again, we’re not in that business anywhere. So I’m probably a walking commercial for my competitors here, but I think the incinerator business is a much cleaner business than it ever was. It used to be, when they were initially built in the ’70s, that emissions weren’t as…

Brady: …just toss it all in there and off it goes.

Fish: Right today, I think those incinerators are much, much cleaner than they used to be.

Brady: As you’re talking, you know, I think about personal culpability when it comes to trash. I feel a slight bit of guilt when I see those barges go by, and I know you’ve spent time, you know, on the back of trucks in Pittsburgh and such. So I mean, give me a sense, how much do you think your customers take responsibility for the amount of trash they produce? Because you mentioned Europe, that’s a place where you have to pay a lot of money. In Switzerland, for example, for garbage bags. It’s very expensive to put out your garbage. Here, it’s really not. And what do you think about the reduce part of the equation?

Fish: I think it’s part of our responsibility to—my wife gives me a hard time when we go to a baseball game or whatever, and I see a, you know, a Dasani water bottle in the trash bin and I pick it out of there. And she’s like, “Are you kidding me? What are you doing?” And I said, “it doesn’t go there. It goes over here.” So I’m pretty particular about making sure that what goes in the recycle bin actually is in the bin. Even at our house, we have two girls, 22 and 20, and they’re pretty good about it, too. But sometimes something ends up in our trash can that should go in the recycle bin. So I think we all have a responsibility there.

I will say this about trash, though, and I saw an interesting presentation at the Business Council. I sit on the Business Council, and so the speaker was, she was from Stanford University, and she was talking not about trash, but she was talking about health care, and why health care is so much better today than it was 100 years ago, and why the average age—so we’ll all live to be an average of, I think the average for all of us, maybe women is a little bit older than men. But 82, 83, something like that, is kind of our life expectancy. And in 1900 it was 40, 45, something like that. And so the question was asked of her, “So, what has caused this doubling, basically, of our life expectancy over a fairly short period of time?” I mean, 125 years. And her answer kind of surprised me. And one of the other CEOs sitting next to me nudged me a little bit. She said, “Obviously there have been tremendous advances in medical science, and that’s a big component of it.” But she said, “One of the big components that people don’t think about,” and I didn’t, by the way, I didn’t prompt her with this. I’d never met her. But she said, “is the commercial collection of trash.” So, since you lived in India, you understand this. You walk around Mumbai, and the Dharavi Slum, which I’ve walked through a couple times, and the trash. You think about the trash being dumped on the curb here. I mean, yes, it gets dumped on the curb daily, but then it gets collected daily. But the trash is just thrown out in the street.

Brady: It’s like Shakespearean almost.

Fish: It is like Shakespearean. And so that’s, that’s maybe a kind of a good time period to associate that with. I mean, you think about the bubonic plague, and what ultimately caused that was waste, and these and rats kind of gravitate to it. And if you walk around Mumbai and in the Dharavi, I mean, there are rats all over the place. And so that is, and that was her point was, the commercial collection of trash didn’t really happen in this country until probably 1900, and then ultimately, the guy who was the founder of Waste Management, a guy named Wayne Huizenga, his grandfather, his name was Harm Huizenga, and he came over from, I think, from Poland, and started a commercial trash collection business in Chicago in 1910 or something. And he had a cart, a horsedrawn cart, and he would draw that cart around the streets and pick up trash and then take it, probably take it someplace and dump it in the ground or whatever. Which isn’t great today, but it was better than it sitting there on the street. And to me, that was a really interesting factoid that I hadn’t heard before, that a big component of the health of our society is a function of…

Stoller: Yeah, you never think about that.

Brady: Yeah, and unleaded gas and cleaning up our rivers and waterways.

Fish: Yeah, we all remember—well, you probably don’t, you’re young. You’re young, too. But, the commercials in the 1970s with the guy with a tear running down his face. The Native American guy.

Brady: Like the Coke commercial, it moves you to tears.

Stoller: Oh, wow. So you mentioned India. Are you doing any work there?

Fish: We have 1,500 employees in India, but they’re back-office employees. We’re not doing frontline operations in India. We’ve thought about it. We’ve been asked to do it. It’s not that uncommon for us to be asked. I get emails probably once a month from places around the world saying, “Can you come help us?”

Brady: Why do you say no? Like you said no to New York residential trash, I’m not going to, well feel free to mention that. But what makes you say no to a particular market?

Fish: Some of it’s logistics, you know, I mean, going to Bangladesh. I mean, I’m sure they have, I’ve never been there, but I’m sure they have a problem just like parts of India do as well. But, you know, we have a lot on our plates in Canada and the United States, and then a small piece in Europe. So we could do that. But I think part of it is just getting out over our skis, a little bit. It’s not that we don’t care about those places around the world. I mean, we can talk about people. My single biggest focus is on people.

Brady: Your own people. Yeah, you quote Herb Kelleher, in the past. Why are they your most important stakeholder?

Fish: Well, and I’ll quote Herb again here, he said, and he wrote that kind of crazy book called Nuts, and it’s a book that I’ve read several times…

Brady: …former CEO of Southwest Airlines, for those who don’t know…

Fish: …Yeah, and I never met Herb Kelleher, but in the book, he talked about the constituents and in what order they are most important. And I think Southwest has always had really good customer service. And so I think people would have thought that he would put customer first. And you always hear that, well, it’s always customer first, but his point was, you put your employees first, and you treat them as—it’s kind of the Golden Rule, do unto others what you would have them do unto you, and you treat them that way. And if they feel valued, they feel included, they feel like their opinions matter. They feel like it’s a place they want to make their careers. If they feel that good about working for that company, then in turn, they will make the customer feel good. And if the customer feels good, if the customer is happy, then ultimately, your shareholders are happy. And his point was, it has to be in that order. You can’t get them out of order. I gave that answer one time to a group of shareholders, and they looked at me like I was crazy. I’m third in line here? And I always say, look, there’s, you know, we have two other constituents, at least at WM. We have our communities, and then we have the environment. And I always say the environment is kind of the voiceless constituent, because it speaks in longer terms and nobody … get plenty of calls from customers saying, “Hey, what happened to my recycling pickup last week?” The environment doesn’t call me. They don’t send me mail.

Brady: How are you feeling about that voiceless constituent these days?

Fish: Look, I think we always have room for improvement, but I think we’ve made tremendous strides just over the last, you know, 30 years, whether it’s with automobiles, whether it’s with trash collection, whether it’s with recycling. I mean, we can do better, but I’m pretty optimistic that  we’ve done pretty well. And you look at these rivers, I mean, even these rivers here around New York. I mean, I remember coming to New York. The first time I came here was with my family, and we took a vacation here. And, gosh, the East River, I looked at the East River and thought, my gosh. I mean, look how horrible that East River is. And I think the commercial that we were talking about, I think he was in Lake Erie, and it was, you know, you could set it on fire, I think. And so I think we’ve done a lot of work as a society to improve the environment. Are we there? No, but are we better than we were? Yes.

Stoller: I will say that I have kayaked in the East River, very unpopular, but my skin looks okay, so I’m ok right now.

Fish: You didn’t turn over, did you?

Stoller: No, no, just, just a bunch of splashing. So I think I’m okay, but I feel like it’s really unpopular right now to care about, you know, the climate, sustainability, kind of like DEI. How do you convince people to care, to recycle, to do these things?

Fish: I mean, I don’t get that, that it’s unpopular. From one political party to another, I mean,really, our business is very strongly focused on sustainability. I haven’t changed my personal view on it. I mean, I have a personal view on politics but that doesn’t change my view of sustainability. It doesn’t change my view of the environment. I mean, my view of the environment was really formed because my mom grew up in a very beautiful place, which is Wyoming, and my dad grew up in Colorado, so two, you know, kind of pretty states. And so every summer was just a Station Wagon. It’s like the Chevy Chase, you know…

Brady: …National Lampoon’s Vacation…

Fish: …town and country, and it had wood paneling. I grew up in Austin, Texas, but we would drive from Austin to Denver, and then we would drive from Denver to Casper to see both my parents’ families. But you see places that are really incredibly beautiful. I mean, the Tetons and Yellowstone, and just, unbelievable. So I always had this love for the environment and a hope that we could get better. And then at about the same time, we took that trip to New York, and I thought, Gosh, it’s filthy. And I think New York has done a–look, it’s not Tokyo–but it has done a nice job of improving over a 50 year period.

Brady: Right, nobody’s saying “drop dead,” or anything like that anymore. Tell me what attracted you to the waste management business? You know, you’ve been there since 2001. Was there something about the nature of the business or was it just the opportunity for advancement?

Fish: I just needed a job. I will tell you, it’s kind of funny, I really had no idea what Waste Management was, and so I got out of University of Chicago, and I went to work for a guy named Maury Myers. I hadn’t really spent much time with him previously, but he had—the first company I worked for coming out of college was KPMG. Then I went to work for an airline that was based in–that’s no longer–but it was based in Phoenix. The airline got into trouble, just like a lot of airlines do financially. And so, a guy named Maury Myers came in and was CEO. And I didn’t know Maury very well, but I went on to graduate school and left America West and went back to the University of Chicago and Maury went on to run a company called Yellow Corporation, which is, at the time, was a LTO business, trucking business. So afterwards, I spoke with him, and he said, “Why don’t you come over and work for Yellow Corporation?” So I did, in the finance group, and then he left pretty quickly, and Yellow consolidated. And so I ended up being out of a job. And so I was looking for work, and I reached out to him and said, you know, “hey, thanks for leaving us.” So what do you have down at—I knew he’d gone down to waste management in Houston—and I said, “What do you have down there?” And he said, “we’re kind of restructuring a bit. We have a lot of open positions. Why don’t you come down?” So I took a manager in financial planning position in Houston, and it was nice. My parents were, you know, kind of down the street in Austin, and so I really didn’t plan on working in this industry. It’s not as if I said, you know, I really want to do something for the environment, or I want to, you know, I feel like this is a company that’s pretty progressive, and I want to work for that company, I just needed a paycheck.

Stoller: As a young boy you weren’t dreaming of trash?

Brady: Then maybe we should say that, was there a role that you took on where you thought, huh, this really, you fell in love with it?

Fish: I think when I eventually moved out into our field operations, is when I said, “Okay, this company is doing a lot of good things.” Because, you know, in financial planning, I mean, I’m not to take anything away from that group. I mean, we have a financial planning group today. They do a fantastic job, but they’re a corporate group, typically, and so they’re doing financial planning and analysis, and they’re assessing acquisitions, and so you don’t really get to see and and feel the the operations of the company. And so Maury had, and he retired in ’04, but I started asking him, you know, what should I do? And he said, “Look, if you work for Procter & Gamble, which is a marketing company, you want to work in marketing at some point. If you work for Goldman Sachs, which is more of a finance company, you have to be in finance at some point. If you’re ultimately going to move…

Brady: …or Waste Management, get on a garbage truck.

Fish: That’s right. So Waste Management is an operating company. And he said, “If you want to give yourself an opportunity to learn the business, then go out into our operations.”

Brady: Get thee to Pittsburgh.

Stoller: What did you do, did you actually get on a truck?

Fish: Oh, I did, until about three years ago, I used to go out probably two times a year, and when I was in the field, I would do it probably once a month. But we moved, actually, from Houston to Boston, lived there for two years, then moved to Pittsburgh, and then Philadelphia back to Houston. But I’ve always felt that my father in law, who was a Pipe Fitter in St Louis, Missouri, and a union guy and he and I were great friends, and unfortunately, passed away too soon. But he said when I was going out to Boston, he said, “Look, are you union or labor or non-union?” I said, “we’re union out there.” And he said, “Well, look, there’s no difference between union and non union. They’re all people.” But he said, “My advice to you is if they have some kind of meetings, because he said, is your office located on one of the work sites? And I said, No, it’s in an office complex. He goes, well, then go out to those sites. And he said, Do it every week. And he said, but if you do it just once, then don’t do it at all, because then they’ll say, Yeah, okay. Jim came out here one time, and we’ve never seen him again. But if you do it every week, then you’ll earn respect. And he said, if you’re unionized, you’ll really earn the respect of the labor union guys. And he said, you’ll earn the respect of the non-union guys too. But so I would go out and ride along on the back of a truck and throw trash with them.

Brady: I don’t know if I’d want my boss riding on the back of a truck.

Fish: Our board did say, once I became CEO, they said, you know, you can ride around in the front And most of our trucks now, we’ve transitioned away from those trucks that where you have a helper on the back anyway,

Stoller: Right. Now, I want to rewind a little bit, because you briefly mentioned your college experience, but I know you had quite a harrowing experience with your undergrad. Is that correct? Can you tell us about that and what you learned from that experience?

Fish: So I started out at University of Texas, growing up in Austin. I mean, I was a Longhorn, and always had had, you know, plans to go to UT. And so I got into UT and was going to—an accounting major is kind of a five year program, not so much four years. So in between year three and year four, I went out to visit an aunt and uncle of my mom’s, and she’d been kind of badgering me for a while, “why don’t you go visit them?” And so I did. And they were, they were living in Scottsdale, and they were, they were elderly, they were in their early 80s. So I went out to visit them in the summer and I got out there, and within about a month, because I was going out there for the summer, so a month into it, I started having these really excruciating headaches. And I didn’t know what it was about. I never had migraines or anything like that. So I ended up going, and they took me to the hospital, and what I had was fungal meningitis, which is a bad form of meningitis. All meningitis is not great for you, but this one was treated with a really strong antibiotic, and so I had to get these spinal taps with this big long needle right there in the base of the skull, so called a cisternal spinal tap. And I got that tap, I had 200 of them to purge this meningitis out of the system. So the interesting part, and the reason I ended up at Arizona State University, actually, is because my mom came out and she—and I did not want to go back, it was such a sensitive treatment. She said, “You want to come back to Austin to have a neurologist treat you?” And I, I mean, I literally cried. Said, “No, I don’t, I don’t want to have anybody touch me.” Even when this neurologist went on vacation.

Brady: So you were stuck in Arizona because of this meningitis, wow.

Fish: And it took me two years to get over it. So three times a week, I would have a spinal tap, and I was completely out of it. I mean, they would give me that spinal tap, they give me a shot of Demerol, and I’d be knocked out for eight hours. But the other four days a week, I didn’t know a soul out there. My aunt and uncle are way up in north Scottsdale, and I was going to a hospital down in South Scottsdale. So my mom rented a small apartment. She had to come back to Austin because the rest of the, you know, my sisters and my dad were back there, so I’m by myself but we’re trying to figure out, before she left, how I would get to that hospital? Because it was a little bit away, and, you know, I wasn’t going to walk. And so she, you know, there was no such thing as Uber at the time, and I wasn’t going to take a yellow cab, because I was really pretty out of it after I got the spinal tap. So she called Arizona State University, and they said we have a van, that’s a handicap van, that we will send over and we’ll take him from his apartment to the hospital and back. But the catch is he needs to be enrolled as a student. And so I enrolled as a student at Arizona State in their accounting program. And then for most of that time, they sent a teaching assistant over to my apartment to give me accounting classes and to finish my degree, so I finished my degree at ASU.

Stoller: Wow. Is there anything you learned from that experience and that time that you’ve kind of taken with you into your leadership role today?

Fish: I think the main thing I learned from that was patience, because when we’re young, we’re all impatient, and I think that’s just human nature. And I was as impatient as anyone. And so when I first went into the hospital the neurologist came in and said, “Well, here’s, here’s the diagnosis, you have spinal meningitis. It’s not a great form of meningitis.” In fact, I was being treated with three other people, and two of the three of them passed away during the treatment.

Brady: Were they young people too?

Fish: One of them was young. One of them was a little bit older, but that doctor came in and said, “You’re gonna have to”— I had had my first Spinal Tap, which was not a pleasant experience. And he said, and I’m thinking, you know, I’ll be over this in a month. I mean, I’ll have to, you know, get maybe four or five spinal taps, but I can put up with it. And he said, “You’re gonna have to go through this. We’ll have to give you a spinal tap. It’ll probably be three to four times a week, and it’ll take about two years to get rid of this.” And I’m 21 at the time, and I’m thinking two years is like 10% of my life. I couldn’t think—I mean, we talked about how people don’t normally think far out. I mean,  I’m thinking about what I’m going to do for spring break. I’m not thinking about what I’m going to do two years from now. And so I just had to, had to learn patience. And so every single time I would go into that hospital. And by the way, when I would go in—I still, to this day, when I smell that kind of alcohol, pungent smell in a hospital, it still makes me nauseous, because it was like Pavlov’s dogs. I associated that smell with that treatment.

Brady: I did spinal tap once. I can’t imagine having 200 of them. That’s crazy.

Fish: So I think what I learned from it most was patience. And look, things don’t happen in your timeframe all the time, and my timeframe was not two years. I can tell you.

Brady: Well you mentioned you’ve got daughters, Gen Z, and what do you think of—let’s go back to the talent question—what attracts people now to WM, you know, since that’s your most important constituent, what is it that you think gets them in the door?

Fish: I think, you know, Nicole, our oldest, is going through an interview process right now. She wants to live and work in New York, and so she’s going through an interview process. So I’ve had this conversation with her about what gets her in the door. And in addition to being well prepared when she goes in for the interview, I do think there’s something to be said for your approach and people tend to gravitate to people that are pleasant. You know, have a pleasant expression on their face. And, not everybody, not everybody has that. But I said Nicole, you know, even if you’re not enjoying the interview, act like you’re enjoying it. And so I’ve had some feedback on her and the interview process that she’s gone through, and she’s done extremely well, and she’s a smart young woman, but she does have this very pleasant demeanor about her. And I said, you know, if you don’t have that, it’s a bit off-putting. And so when, sometimes,—I don’t do a lot of interviews, but I’m mostly looking for that type of people connection when I talk to folks. And by the way, it’s not just the interview process, it’s when I’m talking to someone at one of these Business Council meetings, for example. I mean, or, or any kind of social setting. I want to see, is this person kind of going to be socially agreeable. And when I say agreeable, that doesn’t mean they agree with the points that I’m making, but they’re—both of y’all have a very pleasant…

Brady: …that’s our day job, right? No but I get your point. I mean if you have a team, you want people to be a culture fit.

Fish: I think it’s important for me. I mean, I think it’s important, maybe as important for me as anyone, because when I run into people in the elevator or in the offices, I always make a point of saying hello, and I always make a point of smiling. And I’m never too busy to—while I have, you know, a fairly busy schedule, I don’t ever want to be so busy that I can’t say hello to you. Now, it doesn’t mean I’m gonna remember your name, and I’m not great with names, and I try, but…

Brady: …Diane and Kristin…

Fish: …I’ve got Diane and Kristin, but we have 62,000 employees, and many of them I’ve met multiple times, and sometimes their name sticks and sometimes it doesn’t. But I do think it’s important, particularly for me, to demonstrate that. If I’m going to tell Nicole she should be that way, then dad should be that way.

Stoller: Speaking of people and culture. It just, of course, brings me to AI and the future of that in the workforce, because the workforce right now is facing so many challenges. We got immigration reform, we’ve got an aging workforce. WM, you know, said that you were going to eliminate 5,000 jobs through 2026 through automation. I’d love to hear about that journey and how you’re looking at using AI, but also keeping that people-first culture.

Fish: Well and that always, you know, people say that sounds counterintuitive if you’re going to eliminate jobs, but you want to be people-first. And by the way, those jobs that we eliminate are coming from attrition, so I’m not going and doing a reduction in force. Just how when somebody leaves, we, if we’re able, we just don’t replace that position. And so that’s how we’re planning to eliminate 5,000 jobs. There’s a couple of different places where we’re doing that. One is, I’ve mentioned a couple of them. One is the trucks where we’re moving from a traditional rear loader, which is the old style truck, and there’s a person on the back, and that person is loading it, loading trash in the back. And as we’ve talked, I’ve been out there quite a few times on the back of those. And those can be pretty dangerous. I mean, we’ve had, in fact, what really prompted this whole interest for me to move away from those was not financial, it was safety. And we had, we had a guy killed in East Texas, and there was a young woman who was texting and ran into the back of the truck while he was back there. And you don’t survive that. And it was not the first time that that’s happened. And so I told the area, look, we need to move away from those old style trucks. They’re just too dangerous. And this was on a busy street in this town. It was on Martin Luther King Boulevard, which is a busy street in Port Arthur. And so the city said, Well, I’ll tell you what. We’ll put a chase truck behind it, and that’ll protect your people, and we’ll do that for six weeks. And so they did, and literally, the week after that Chase truck dropped off, seven weeks later, we didn’t have somebody hurt, but another person, boom, hit the back of the truck. Fortunately, the helper was not back there. So I said, Look, we have to move for safety purposes. I do not ever want to have somebody else hurt, or, worse yet, obviously, killed behind a truck. So we’re going to move away from those. And at the same time, you can imagine those positions are hard to fill. I mean, the 50% turnover, it’s a growing job. It’s a tough job. Having been back there and done that, it’s heavy, it’s hot, or in the winter, it’s cold. I was back there one time when it was—I went out and it was 10 below zero on the back of a truck climbing over snowdrifts. Your hands are cold. I mean, it’s a hard job and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the folks that do it, but when they leave, and eventually they do, I mean, you know, with 50% turnover, we’ve started to automate those trucks to the truck that has the arm on the side. And those don’t require somebody behind the truck. In fact, they don’t require anybody getting out of the truck. And the most dangerous place around those trucks is when you’re outside of it. So that’s one of the places where we’re reducing head count. And then also these recycle plants. We’re automating them. And again, another position that is hard to fill are those pickers. They’re sorters. They have a conveyor belt that’s coming by pretty quickly, and so they’re picking 2x4s and things like that that don’t go through the recycle equipment off of the conveyor belt, and that can be done in an automated way more efficiently and produces a better product. On the back end, it can handle a conveyor that’s going faster so we can—it increases throughput. And at the same time, you have these jobs that are hard jobs that are hard to fill when people leave, and people do leave them pretty regularly, so most of the positions that we’re eliminating, and I don’t like that word, but the positions that we’re eliminating are positions that are hard to fill, positions difficult to hire for positions and high turnover positions.

Brady: You know, I think about…most CEOs we speak to, actually, are looking at these reductions in workforce because of AI or other factors. And I think—where do you see the opportunities for the next generation as some of those on ramps maybe close a bit? Or the advice you have to your daughter or what you would be doing if you were starting out now?

Fish: Well, I think the advice I would give is that, because there’s always this concern about AI and you hear a lot recently about AI is going to eliminate all these jobs. But technology forever has eliminated jobs. I mean, there’s not a job as far as I know, that’s a plow farmer, any more. So what happened to the plow farmer when tractors came around? Well, that plow that, you know, the plow operator who was doing it with a horse, found something else to do. So technology does replace positions, but then they create positions.

Brady: I’m an optimist, but it feels different when you’ve got agentic AI. And again, I think there will be jobs. It feels like there’s going to be a transition period.

Fish: I’m sure there will be a transition period, but I’m not sure it’s that much different than the Industrial Revolution, which was a massive change from an agrarian society to more of an industrial society. I would argue that was a bigger change than AI will make today, and with that came a whole different type of job. I mean, a mechanic’s job—there was no such thing really as a mechanic on a piece of machinery prior to the industrial revolution. So those are jobs that were created by technology. And I think the same will happen. I think you’re right, I think there will be a transition period. But you know, some of the jobs that Nicole’s interviewing for are not jobs that would have been around in 1950.

Brady: Well, the environment certainly is creating more jobs.

Fish: Yeah, exactly. We were just a trash company in 1970 and now we’re a trash and recycling company, so we have an entire division that’s dedicated to sustainability that wasn’t there 30 or 40 years ago.

Stoller: Is there some other arm of your business that’s not happening right now, besides trash and sustainability that you think will be the next big thing in 2035?

Fish: I do think autonomy is real. I’ve got the app on my phone, the Waymo app, and so I’ve ridden in probably five or six different Waymos in Austin, Texas, in Phoenix. And, I mean they get out on the freeway and they drive to your exit, and they get off, and they drop you off at the restaurant. And it’s pretty amazing, and there is nobody up front. But they do, they do work. I know they’re still working through a few—it’s hard, I think, for Waymos, to navigate snow covered streets. So you don’t see them in Minneapolis, I think, for probably that reason. So the places that they are right now are in California, which, you know, on the coast, they don’t get a lot of snow. Austin, I saw one in Houston a couple weeks ago. Phoenix. So there could be an autonomous garbage truck. Look at Caterpillar. I sit on Caterpillar’s board of directors, and they have autonomous mining equipment for a lot of their mining customers. And part of the reason is it’s hard to hire out in the middle of nowhere, and these mines are out in the middle of nowhere. So we’ve been talking to Caterpillar about developing autonomous or remotely operated heavy equipment, and we buy a lot of Caterpillar equipment, and then on the collection side of our business, we think there’s an opportunity. I’ve challenged our team to come up with an autonomous residential contract in the next two years. And will they do it? I don’t know. But, and I think the way that would kind of manifest itself is that you would have somebody sitting up front, and this wouldn’t be a huge contract. This isn’t going to be, you know, the city of Seattle. This is going to be probably a homeowners association that has, you know, a few hundred homes that we have a contract with. Ideally, you’d have a truck that is that automated side loader. It recognizes the can coming up. We would certainly initially have somebody sitting up front monitoring things, but the truck would be operating itself. That’s my goal. And at least initially, you wouldn’t eliminate anybody. You’d still have a person sitting up front. And I think it’s probably going to be a while before you eliminate anybody. Although, you know these residential driver positions, they have a pretty high turnover too. So you could get to a point down the road where you truly have an autonomous truck, kind of like a Waymo, where there isn’t anybody in the truck, but I think in the near term, I would envision an autonomous residential truck that has somebody up front, so there still is a job there, but it’s it’s testing out the autonomy of a heavy truck.

Brady: How do you keep people engaged in jobs that most people don’t want to do? You’ve mentioned several cases.

Fish: I think part of it is, you know, the obvious part is people want compensation that is adequate. And so we’ve raised our compensation for those types of positions over the last five years. We’ve raised it almost 30% so that’s, you know, an average of about 6% per year. So that’s pretty, that’s well above inflation. But typically that’s not the main reason people leave their jobs, not just those jobs, but any job. People typically leave their job because they’re disinterested, or they don’t feel valued, or they don’t enjoy who they work for. Their boss is a jerk or whatever. And when you look at these exit interviews, number 12 on the list, or 13 on the list, is pay. Because if somebody comes to me and says, you know, look, I love what I’m doing here, but this company, company X, is willing to pay me more, I can resolve that. But if you come to me and say, you know, “My pay is fine, but my boss is such a jerk,” that’s a little tougher resolution.

Brady: Or the nature of my job is such that my back hurts, that’s hard to change, too. 

Fish: Or I just don’t feel valued here. The pay is fine, Jim, but I don’t feel like I’m valued. I don’t feel like it matters what I do. That is a tougher resolution. So that’s why I think pay is something that—I can solve that. If you came to me and said you’re not feeling adequately compensated, okay, fine, we’ll work through that. But if it’s, you don’t feel valued, that’s a little different.

Stoller: How do you get people to stay then, to Diane’s point. How do you get them to love trash, love the industry? Because it must be hard.

Fish: Well, when I came to the job in 2016, my goal was to really affect a culture change at the company. And so I kind of have coined the term people-first. And again, I didn’t come up with the idea. Really, I think Herb Kelleher was one of the first CEOs to start thinking about this, but I did coin the term people-first at WM, and I said, look, it’s, you know, I want people to feel valued in what they do, regardless of what the job is, whether it’s a driver, whether it’s a technician, whether it’s an accountant, you know, whether it’s a sales rep, whatever it is, I want people to feel like that they matter. And by the way, they matter all the way up to Jim. Jim cares about me. He cares about my family, he cares about what I do every day. He genuinely seems like I matter to the organization. And then I think it doesn’t really matter whether it’s trash or whether it’s heavy equipment, or whether it’s technology, whatever the business is, I think is less important. Some people leave because it’s a dirty job. Most people don’t leave for that reason. I mean, they get it when they apply for the company. I mean, they know applying for WM or Waste Management, they know what it is. They leave because of a lot of other things, and I think if they feel valued, then they grow to really, really enjoy the company. And regardless of what line of business we’re in.

Brady: Well, you’ve certainly been there 24 years. One question I do have, you’re in the Business Council. You know, one stakeholder we haven’t talked about is the regulatory stakeholder, because obviously that has a huge impact on recycling, trash, the nature of what happens, certainly at the municipal level. What are you seeing there? Are you seeing—åre we moving as quickly as we need to be on that front?

Fish: Well, I always say about regulation, regulation is a good thing for us, and some people say, “Wow, really. That doesn’t sound right,” but regulation is a good thing, I think, and part of that is that we regulate at a higher level than the government. No matter who’s in office, we’ve always regulated ourselves at a higher level than the government would otherwise regulate us. And whether it’s at a landfill, whether it’s collection of landfill gas, whatever it is, we tend to self regulate at a higher level, and so I look at it as a differentiator. Some people, that’s tough for them. Some companies have a hard time with regulation.

Brady: But are we moving quickly enough on, for example, recycling and some of the climate initiatives around waste. I mean, there’s reduce, recycle, reuse, obviously. How are we doing on that front, do you think, as a nation? And you know, obviously these things are regulated at a local level.

Fish: Exactly right. I think they’re regulated more at a local level. So whatever happens with the White House doesn’t matter as much to us from a regulatory standpoint, because most of our regulation is either local or state. And I would say, to answer your question, I think some states do a better job than others.

Brady: Who’s doing a particularly good job?

Fish: You know, when it comes to recycling I think California does a pretty good job. I wouldn’t say California does a great job on all regulation, not necessarily in our business. I think California has their own set of problems, but when it comes to recycling, I think California does a pretty good job. I think the west coast in particular does a pretty good job. I think Oregon does a good job. I think Washington State does a good job. But look, other states are kind of getting on board as well. I mean, Austin, Texas, Houston, Texas has made it important to them. Dallas, I think a lot of the big cities. Less so, maybe, in some of the rural areas. But I think it’s more critical in the big Metroplex’s. I could go down a long list of states that do a pretty good job. You know, I think Florida has done a nice job. And, you know, look, there’s 50 states, and we’re in 48 of them, so we encourage recycling in each one of these states. So that’s why I say there’s a bit of us kind of intervening and saying, “Look, how about adding recycling here?” And most of the time, the communities, or whether it’s the community, whether it’s the municipality, are willing to take that on.

Stoller: I know we’re coming kind of at the end of our time here, Jim, so I have a really weird question for you that I’m just dying to ask you, because I’m curious, what is the…

Fish: about the golf game?

Stoller: …well, that, but also, what is the most kind of bizarre or surprising thing that WM has ever been asked to process or collect?

Fish: There was a, there was a boat anchor that came through, like a cruise ship anchor, almost, I mean, a huge boat anchor that came through one time that ended up on the floor at one of our recycle centers. And this was a long time ago, and pretty clearly that’s not like an aluminum can. It somehow got loaded into the back of a roll off box and I don’t know how much those things weigh, but clearly the people that saw it said, Well, okay, so I don’t think I can move it. That’s not like a two by four that I can pull off. It never made its way onto the onto the belt. But it was on the floor. So there’s been a lot of crazy things that have come through, recycle plants, you know, but that’s the one that kind of comes to mind as being the kind of the craziest.

Brady: Is there any question you wish you were asked more often or don’t get asked often enough?

Fish: I think I wish I was asked more often, particularly by other CEOs, how do I do a better job of taking care of my people? I just think that, while the environment is very important to me, I go back to that ordering of constituents. And you know, if you don’t take care of your people, then they’re not going to take care as well, at least, of your customers, your shareholders, the environment. If you really make that a mandate, that I’m going to take care of my people, and I think I’ve been somewhat successful. I’m never going to be 100% successful in this, but I do think we’ve made some cultural change at WM but I wish other other leaders would focus on that more. I think in today’s world, we don’t focus enough on the culture. And, you know, these jobs, every job has challenges to it, and all of us are under some form of stress. So if I can take a little bit of that stress away from you in your role, and make you feel good about the alarm clock going off in the morning and coming to work, and some of these folks come to work at pretty insane hours. They come to work at two o’clock in the morning or three o’clock in the morning. And so if I can make them feel good about the fact that they work for a company that really cares about them and their families, then I think we will have gone a long way to creating a great culture and ultimately, a great company. I don’t get asked that very often, and that’s maybe a question I wish I had.

Stoller: Thank you so much, Jim. We appreciate you being here with us.

Fish: Thanks for having me.

Brady: Leadership Next is produced and edited by Ceylan Ersoy.

Stoller: Our executive producer is Lydia Randall.

Brady: Our head of video and audio is Adam Banicki.

Stoller: Our theme is by Jason Snell.

Brady: Leadership Next is a production of Fortune Media. I’m Diane Brady.

Stoller: And I’m Kristin Stoller.

Brady: See you next time.

Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune‘s editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcasters and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel. Nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.