Aggie Legends Podcast S1E7: David Cordani ’88

DAVID CORDANI:

Understand that leadership is a privilege you are given by those you have the opportunity to lead. It is not a given right because of hierarchical position or title. If you mistake that, I think you will be an ineffective or unsustainable leader.

BEN WIGGINS:

Welcome to Aggie Legends, where we talk with founders, CEOs and other successful Aggies about the lessons in leadership they’ve experienced throughout their careers. I’m Ben Wiggins, Mays MBA class of 2018, and today we’re talking with David Cordani, class of 1988. David, how are you doing today?

DAVID CORDANI:

I’m doing great. It’s good to be with you today, and it’s great to be back in Aggieland.

BEN WIGGINS:

My pleasure. Gig ’em. David is chairman, president and CEO of Cigna, where he has led the company’s growth to become one of the world’s largest health services organizations and number 13 on the Fortune 500. A Mays Business School graduate, he is also a health care advocate, bestselling author, endurance athlete, and dedicated supporter of Aggie and veteran communities. David, can you tell us about your early years and growing up in a blue‑collar background? We’d like to hear a little bit about lessons you learned from family and early upbringing.

DAVID CORDANI:

Sure. I was born and raised in Connecticut, a smaller manufacturing town. Back in its history, there was a lot of copper and brass manufacturing, and I was raised in my grandparents’ house with my parents and my two brothers. So a little bit of a different environment, in a smaller Italian community, and a lot of good learnings from that.

BEN WIGGINS:

Yeah.

DAVID CORDANI:

Especially with the blue‑collar upbringing, instilled in us from an early age was intense hard work. Always intense hard work. A service orientation. I didn’t understand it at the time, but our family tried to give back in different ways. And lastly, through my grandparents, they were really relentless relative to instilling — I didn’t understand it at the time, but what I know now is the golden rule: just treat people like you want to be treated. So I had a great upbringing, and I look back on it fondly. There are a lot of lessons learned in it.

BEN WIGGINS:

Yeah. What led your family to move from Connecticut to Texas?

DAVID CORDANI:

Yeah, my father made a decision, for and with the family, in 1981 to pick up and move here, which is a huge deal because we grew up on a street where I had great‑great uncles and great aunts all on the street. It was my great‑grandmother’s farm initially, and my dad decided to leave the police force and come down to Houston and go into business with his cousin for at least a three‑year commitment. They actually ran dry cleaners toward the tail end of the then oil boom. So it was a big deal for us. First time on an airplane. A whole new world and new environment. Giant high school, etc. So my dad was pursuing a little bit of a different, broader life for his family at the time.

BEN WIGGINS:

What was your reaction to it as a kid?

DAVID CORDANI:

Yeah, it was shocking. Because in the environment I grew up in, I went to a Catholic school because the neighborhood was in the same group of kids every class. I was a freshman in the Catholic high school because that’s the environment we were in, parochial high school. And then it was a culture shock in every way, shape or form — size, scale, diversity, environment, everything was different. But after the first couple months, I loved it. I just loved it. I loved that, in our neighborhood, people were there from all over the world because of the oil environment. The breadth of what was available down in greater Houston in terms of whether it was sports or other activities. First couple months, though, were a shock to the system.

BEN WIGGINS:

Sure. Was there a particular moment where you thought, “Oh, okay. All right, I think I can do this”?

DAVID CORDANI:

I don’t think there was a moment. I think if I reflect back on your important question, it was actually finding a couple of people you could connect with. So try to envision your first day of high school, knowing no one in a giant high school. I went to Klein High School — thousands of people, I knew no one. And so starting over, once you made connections with a couple people and you found that, at its core, there’s humanity. And once you make a connection, then it starts building momentum. So I guess indirectly, it was that. It was finding some commonality, some connectivity, some engagement that opened the door.

BEN WIGGINS:

And then your decision to attend Texas A&M and pursue a business education. What were the most important considerations for that?

DAVID CORDANI:

Well, first my folks were not that excited about it, because we moved from Houston back to Connecticut. When I graduated high school — in fact, I came home from my graduation and the house was empty because everything had been moved already. We were in transition, literally.

BEN WIGGINS:

And you were effectively staying.

DAVID CORDANI:

Well, yeah. And I applied to only two schools, Texas A&M and the University of Connecticut. I qualified for in‑state tuition for both because I was graduating from high school and going to college. Fortunately, I got into both. And so my parents were certain I was going to the University of Connecticut. And when I said, “I want to go to A&M,” they were not happy, just because it’s far from home. We’re very family‑oriented.

So back to why: the sense of service, as I look back at the time, and I appreciate it more as every year goes on, the value‑based culture. Something as simple as, you know, the grass outside the MSC, the symbolism of that, and the self‑governance around that and the respect that exists. To me, that was just so powerful at the time. And the more I learned about A&M, the more I was attracted to A&M. So when it was the choice of being 2,000 miles from my family, or being at University of Connecticut, I’ve got to go to A & M. That service, the culture, the environment, the diversity, etc., had its draw, and I’m so glad I made that decision.

BEN WIGGINS:

The decision to attend college in the first place and to pursue a business background — what do you feel like got you started along that path?

DAVID CORDANI:

I think there are two big foundational pieces there. One is interesting. My brothers and I — three boys — my older brother is three years older, my younger brother is eight years younger. But my older brother and I, we actually didn’t want to go to college, because we grew up in an environment where none of the folks we grew up with went to college. They either went to work in the factories, went to be firemen, or went to be police officers. And our parents were insistent that we were going to college. They wanted us to have essentially a first‑generation college experience. So it was our folks first — number one, my mom and dad pushing us to pursue higher education, which was interesting as opposed to the kids pulling on it the other way.

As it relates to business, somewhere deep down in my roots, I’ve always had a drive for business. For example, I ran, oddly, the biggest paper route — when they existed — in Waterbury, Connecticut, where I grew up. And I sublet to other kids delivering papers because there were too many papers for me to deliver on my own, but took a spread on the delivery of papers. I had my own car detailing…

BEN WIGGINS:

Getting the overrides.

DAVID CORDANI:

Yeah, very much so. I had my own car detailing business where I detailed cars at people’s homes. I had my own house painting business. So I always had an entrepreneurialism orientation. So to me, business was a natural attraction in terms of an opportunity to pursue higher education and learn business more systemically versus organically from a small micro‑business owner. And then the more I leaned into the business opportunity here in the business school, I went from a single major to a double major. Enjoyed it very much. And then that propelled me after college to pursue, obviously, a series of business opportunities. But it was that entrepreneurial spirit in me that correlated to pursuing business in higher education.

BEN WIGGINS:

Ok. And then how did your experiences at Texas A&M shape the values — you talked about values driving the decision to come here, but how did your experiences here shape your values and kind of help forge the path both personally and professionally?

DAVID CORDANI:

So I’ve been very fortunate in my work career in so many different ways. I’ve only worked for two employers. So to me, deep down inside, there’s a loyalty effect. And I was fortunate to work for Coopers & Lybrand when I got out of college, and then get into a leadership development program at Cigna.

I think one of the most important fiber components from Texas A&M that I like to live, breathe and sleep in my professional career is ensuring that you stay true to your center of integrity. In business, your word is everything. And in business especially, there are forces that push and pull at times to be able to push against the line. So if you’re doing a business deal, if you’re doing negotiations or otherwise, to try to get more than your fair share of the loaf of bread, and if you look somebody in the eyes and shake hands and you have an agreement on principle, it’s an agreement on principle.

And maybe I’ll give you an example. We were looking to buy a company that was HQ’d in Europe, headquartered in Europe. And it was a pretty competitive process to go after this one company — it was a unique, niche company. In the latter negotiations, I decided to fly overnight and meet the family representative of the business because it was a family‑founded business. And I remember, this is probably 15 years ago, his first name was Mark. Never forget it. We were in Brussels, and I looked him in the eyes and told him, I said, “If you give us the opportunity to own this business, I will ensure that the family’s integrity is carried through. The name is respected, and all your colleagues are respected, and the brand promise that you gave to all your clients is there.”

We had breakfast. I left. We ended up winning or earning the transaction at a price less than my primary competitor. So I went back and talked to Mark. I said, “Why did you let us win the deal, even though my price was less than the other player?” He leaned forward, looked me in the eyes. He goes, “I believed you had integrity and you were going to fulfill your promise.” That’s powerful to me in business, and sometimes it’s lost.

So I think there’s a fiber here relative to instilling those values that culminate in integrity. And integrity gets tested not when the tailwinds are blowing. Everybody’s a genius when the tailwinds are blowing. It’s when the headwind blows. When the headwind blows, it becomes a clarifying event.

BEN WIGGINS:

Yeah, what then motivated you to pursue that leadership role and the leadership opportunity in the health sector? I mean, tell us a little bit about, you know, what you were — the landscape within the Cigna group and what you were doing.

DAVID CORDANI:

Sure. So as I mentioned, I had the good fortune of working for Coopers & Lybrand, and my client portfolio was largely financial services and health care. And I always loved financial services. I was always fascinated by complex finance. The health care caught me even more intensely because, at the end of the day, I believed that health care at its core was trying to help people live better lives.

One, I’ll come back to that. Two, the health care ecosystem globally at that time was pretty fractured and fragmented, and therefore there would be evolution. But change creates opportunity. And lastly, change and opportunity create learning. So it was as simple as that. It was the values of: if I’m going to be in business, I want to do something that really matters and see if I can help people. I want to be in an environment that is going to be fluid, dynamic and in some cases volatile, because it creates opportunity.

So when I had the opportunity to go to Cigna in the leadership development program — and I was recruited from outside Cigna — Cigna had a health care business that had a history back then of high integrity. Integrity mattered. This was before Enron, before WorldCom. It had an integrity governance configuration. And ironically, it had a track record of taking bets on individuals early in career. And I am a net beneficiary of a lot of bets early in my career because I had leap‑of‑scope opportunities well beyond what I, on paper, deserved. But that health care component was always center to what I was pursuing.

BEN WIGGINS:

You talked about coming back to the “leading healthier lives” component of that. Where do you think the biggest shortfalls were then, and where are the biggest shortfalls now?

DAVID CORDANI:

Yeah, I think the opportunity then, if we go back in time — the global health care system benefits now, like a lot of industries, from significant innovation. We have life‑altering medications. You have life‑sustaining medications that exist today. We have surgical procedures that are very minimally invasive to be able to help people, down to putting a stent in a vein that is lifesaving or otherwise. So the innovation that is taking place, in terms of availability of supply, is massively differentiated today.

On the other side, if you break down the health care equation, lifestyles and behaviors have continued to erode over time. So when you look at the overall health care equation, if someone wants to live a vibrant, high‑vitality life, you need your health. You need your physical health, you need your mental well‑being, to be able to pursue anything. In today’s day and age around the globe, we have actually a more sedentary lifestyle, less physically active. And our food consumption is less clean. Statistically, greater than 50% of all calories consumed in America are highly processed foods.

So that’s a change of innovation on the supply side, but you have a bit of erosion on the demand side. And so now it comes down to the promise of how do we harness technology in a different way to be much more personalized and precise with health care interventions, with health service interventions, etc. And that’s a lot of what propels The Cigna Group. We have the blessing of serving over 180 million customer relationships around the world. And we’re trying to help people maintain their health, lower their health risks, optimize their quality of life if they have a chronic disease, or get the best possible care coordination if they’re dealing with an acute situation. And that’s what we do.

So it’s harnessing those forces of change. We have a headwind and a tailwind. Headwind is lifestyle, aging population, more chronic disease. Tailwind is: how do you grab some of the innovations but be able to afford them and match them back to the right person? That’s what we do every day at The Cigna Group.

BEN WIGGINS:

Yeah. So your biggest challenge at some level is consumer preferences. How do you fight the human preference for, frankly, unhealthy food? And get people moving?

DAVID CORDANI:

We believe fundamentally in choice at its core. So you don’t do to anyone — you help individuals. You meet people where they are and help people. So the biggest opportunity to me is first and foremost awareness. There is a lack of awareness in many ways relative to the multiplier implication of certain actions or lack of actions.

Second, then, is much more targeted support. It doesn’t mean stop; it may mean evolve slightly. It may mean evolve your diet slightly, maybe evolve your physical activity slightly. It may be more medication‑compliant. We could take certain medications, for example in chronic disease. You could augment someone’s lifestyle with a medication and help them lower their cholesterol, for example, and therefore avoid a heart disease risk after moderating the cholesterol levels. If the physical activity or diet modifies itself somewhat, you could titrate them off the medication. That’s a highly personal event. That’s a very personalized event.

So awareness and support and care coordination — that’s the future. And what makes it both exciting and complicated is it’s one person at a time. All health care is personal and all health care is deeply local. It’s not a national solution. It’s not a statewide solution. Those are architectures. It’s bringing it in a highly personalized way and harnessing technology and other modalities to make those moments that matter really impactful for an individual — but in support of somebody’s health journey, not telling them what to do. In support of someone’s health journey.

BEN WIGGINS:

What is the highest‑impact way that AI, the big AI, plays with all of this?

DAVID CORDANI:

So for AI, first, there are transformational opportunities. I think most people believe our global society is really in the early innings still of harnessing some of the value. The spend is there.

BEN WIGGINS:

Without a doubt.

DAVID CORDANI:

If I oversimplify AI for business: first, indisputably, AI allows us to do what we do today in business better, faster, or more efficiently. And what that means is you could return more value to the customer — lower prices, better service experience. So that’s bucket one. More than 50% of everything we’re doing in our company that’s AI is in that category.

Bucket two, which gets really exciting, is more precision or more speed. For example, you could identify somebody in a pre‑diabetic state and in many cases help them from becoming diabetic. We could identify someone with a high cancer risk and in many ways help them avert the risk. You could identify an expectant mom that has a high probability of having a premature birth, identify it way earlier on, and help that individual and their care team increase the probability the mom goes full term.

Why is all that relevant? The baby’s healthier. The family’s healthier. So speed and precision — AI fuels that. And then the last category: there are net‑new developments where we could stand up solutions in two or three weeks that would have taken me 10 months because of the technological architecture underpinning. So better, faster, cheaper — just more value. Speed and precision. Everybody wants a more precise solution that is immediate. And then net‑new, net‑new categories of value.

BEN WIGGINS:

Fantastic. Within that framework, how does your leadership philosophy shape Cigna’s approach to all of that?

DAVID CORDANI:

Yeah. So first, from a leadership standpoint, I think you need to be quite deliberate relative to your leadership philosophy. And most importantly, when I talk to folks about a leadership approach or philosophy, I think the most important aspect for any individual is it’s got to be authentic. Especially today, fabricating a leadership style because you think it’s what’s necessary for a moment is not sincere, it’s not authentic, and will not have a leverage effect.

For me, there are some key building blocks of an approach to leadership, and I’ll highlight a few. One is communication. Most people think when you start with communication, it’s speaking, presentation — that level. I actually always flip it on its head. The most important part of communication for me is being awesome at active listening. And I think, as every day goes on, it’s more of a lost art — whether it’s one‑on‑one with an individual, whether it’s with a group or otherwise — really working hard to actively listen and understand what the root is behind a point of view.

Second is creating an environment of inclusion. So diversity of perspective, experience and thought process creates an explosive positive effect. I was just with a team last night, congratulating them and thanking them over a working dinner. They are building a net‑new offering that doesn’t exist in the marketplace right now. These individuals are handpicked. They are all from different backgrounds. They come together with commonality. So creating an inclusive environment.

Next is seeking and embracing change. Sometimes senior leaders stop learning. Sometimes senior leaders think they have all the answers. That’s an impossibility, in my philosophy, in this environment. So relentlessness relative to seeking and embracing change.

Last two components are consistency and courage. Your words and your actions need to line up. If you say something as a leader, but your actions and behavior — especially when the headwinds blow — we talked before about that, you’ll lose. You’ll lose the privilege of leading.

And having the courage in the more complex situations to make decisions. For example, when we were in the worst of Covid, we didn’t know what was going to happen globally. We were the first company to come forward — and our industry did not want to. We made a public declaration that we will pay for all costs for Covid care, regardless of your coverage, if you’re a customer of ours. We had no idea what it was going to cost. No idea. When we made that call, it was a Saturday morning. I remember I was pacing in my backyard. There wasn’t a business case attached to that. That was guided by our mission and our value statement. That’s having a dimension of courage.

And the last piece, we talked a little bit about, is integrity. You’ve got to maintain your integrity as you carry forward. So for me personally, that’s a bit of a leadership framework that I keep grounding back on to help govern and guide The Cigna Group, especially over a long period of time.

BEN WIGGINS:

Okay. Let’s talk about biggest gaps for those biggest opportunities. So if we look at active listening, what is one tactical way that you feel like people can improve their active listening? If somebody says, “I want to be a better active listener,” what’s the one tip?

DAVID CORDANI:

I’ll try to put it into a little bit of a context. So, as leading The Cigna Group, to me, my responsibility is to ensure that we have a vision that guides us with a mission. That gets converted to, ultimately, we have to have a strategy. Then you get the right people in place to execute the strategy and the right support structure. My job then is to get out of the way and support the team in any way, shape or form.

So now you come back to active listening. Active listening comes down to being very deliberate in scheduling and spending time to consume different points of view — not common points of view, but to consume different points of view. So, for example, I spend a lot of time in the field. Field is other than the headquarters. That’s how I’m raised; I’m oriented around being with my clients, my producer partners, my physician partners, my coworkers.

BEN WIGGINS:

Lean entrepreneurship speaking right now.

DAVID CORDANI:

Be in the field and spend my time with other stakeholders, sitting, talking, listening. With my colleagues, it’s not just the senior‑most people in the market. There are skip‑level meetings. It’s grabbing coffees. It’s lunch‑and‑learns. It’s open‑mic sessions. It’s talking.

You’re always quilting together this mosaic. It’s a perpetual mosaic. And as soon as you forget or delude yourself that you’re not quilting together that mosaic, danger signs should come in. That’s active listening.

Lastly, for an individual, we’re all prone, when someone’s talking to us, to be spending time logging what we want to say next. If we’re doing that, we’re not listening effectively. So it’s just being mindful of it. Just being mindful.

And the last concrete example I could give: the most powerful thing to do is ask an open‑ended question. Don’t judge a point of view — try to understand it, because there may be some pearls in it. In fact, there typically are some pearls in it.

So one is the relentless pursuit of perspectives. I use interacting with stakeholders at a variety of levels. Two, check yourself. I’m an impatient person. A few other people are as well. Check yourself. Don’t spend the time thinking about what you want to say. Try to listen hard to understand. Ask the open‑ended question and pause on trying to judge. Don’t try to judge. Try to appreciate and understand, because it’s the differences that create propulsion. Too many people thinking the same — that’s easy. That’s the inclusion. That’s the open‑ended dimension of getting back to inclusion of different perspectives.

BEN WIGGINS:

Yes. How do you balance between sort of the more traditional inclusion/diversity to inclusion from a thought perspective? Like how does all that mix together, and where do you think the gaps are there?

DAVID CORDANI:

Yeah. So maybe I’ll bridge back a little bit to both beliefs and experiences. I mentioned I started at Cigna through a leadership development program — a financial leadership development program. But part of the underpinnings of the program were to take people who have a kind of classic skill set — in my case, it was financial — and rotate them (the operative term: rotate), move them from assignment to assignment, whether you want to or not. You’ve got to sign up. It’s a gift to get. Rotate you to assignments that are really diverse.

So I worked in HR. I worked in technology. I worked in our investment division. I worked in field assignments. I worked in actuarial assignments. I’m not an actuary. I worked on a variety of different assignments. And every time you do that, it opens your perspective up. It broadens your perspective. It broadens your perspective.

So then fast‑forward to your comments. We do that today at the senior‑most levels of the corporation. We structure environments to look at someone’s experiences, skill sets, towering strengths, flat spots or development opportunities, and rotate them even at the senior‑most levels — C‑suite executives — into positions that are going to push them far outside their comfort zone. That enables an individual to continue to grow, that requires an individual to have foundational skill sets that they’re drawing upon from members of their team, and then puts them in environments to broaden their perspectives or take different points of view. And it creates a multiplier effect. It creates a foundational multiplier effect.

And I’ll end with, again, a little bit of an illustration. The group I mentioned that I had dinner with last night, who are building something new — when we architected the concept, I sat in a room with two people. We blue‑skied the concept. They are two very different thinkers. One of the thinkers looked me in the eyes and said, “This will be an abysmal disaster.” “Tell me more. Think about it this way. Think about it this way.” So I said, “Take it away. Think about it for a couple of days. Come back and let’s talk about it.” The person is a brilliant thinker. Came back and said, “This could be awesome,” right? So it’s a combustion event that happens.

So stepping back, diversity of experiences is important in someone’s career. And oftentimes people will get — I’m using my hands — people get less diversity of experiences and more commonality, and by mistake, assuming that promotions or growth are successful, it may be false success because you’re narrowing yourself. You’re narrowing your perspective. Breadth matters. Diverse experience matters. Alternative points of view matter. Understanding operations matters. Understanding sales matters. Understanding human resources matters. Understanding technology matters if you’re going to be in a senior leadership position.

BEN WIGGINS:

Opening the aperture, as it were.

DAVID CORDANI:

Well said.

BEN WIGGINS:

You talked a little bit earlier about the challenges that came with Covid and how you addressed those. What about some of the more recent challenges, like the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthCare? How do you deal with something like that?

DAVID CORDANI:

Yeah, that’s kind of a “stop the presses” moment when that transpires, because those are what you would think of as “never” moments. And then it transpires. So as soon as you process the shock of someone being coldly murdered — who’s a business person, but who’s a father, who’s a husband, etc. — you step back and things get real raw, real fragile.

So you go into Maslow’s hierarchy — safety of your colleagues first. Safety of your colleagues and family members. That becomes a real central point. And there’s physical safety, and there’s emotional safety. There’s not a textbook of how to deal with that. So you lean into that pretty intensely and heavily.

The second piece is, in our society, in some ways, you saw some celebration of what that looked like. That was yet even more disorienting — how you could celebrate murder of any kind.

BEN WIGGINS:

Sure.

DAVID CORDANI:

Holding that a bit adjacent, we went back into listening intensely — like listening deeply and intensely — with accelerated, iterative, oversimplified focus groups of interaction that were taking place multiple times per day, with executive briefings coming out. And we internally flipped that around to an action orientation as we dealt with the immediate security issue, both physical and psychological, and said, “We have to do better. We have to do better.”

I can look at all my statistics — 95% of every interaction that doesn’t have a prior authorization, 98% of this, x percent of that. But if you flip it on its head, if I’m serving 125 million people in the United States and I have 2% of them that have something that’s other than a positive result, that’s millions of people. Unacceptable.

So within 30 days, we converted that to our “Commitment to Better.” We made a public declaration — no one told us we had to — around five large commitments: easing access to care, expanding support services, improving value, elevating the accountability of our organization by weighting customer/patient satisfaction three times what it was weighted for in the bonus program, and a commitment to transparency — we will issue an annual transparency report on how well we’re doing.

So stepping back, that was December 4th of 2024. I remember exactly where I was. I remember exactly what was happening. Time stood still. And then you have to restart, and it’s coming back to the basics — the safety aspect, both physical and emotional. The emotional safety that was disorienting for the organization and individuals was off the charts. Then you listen differently, and then you take action.

BEN WIGGINS:

Thanks for going through that with us. What was a moment where the values were tested, or where you lost your way, or felt like you had to recenter?

DAVID CORDANI:

Maybe I’ll try to give you an example where I’m not sure we lost the way, but there wasn’t a playbook to figure it out. So this was a while ago, it was early in my career, but I was rushed into a very large leadership role by the then‑CEO.

We had a large multi‑year program to reformat all the technology products of our biggest business. And after multiple years of work and 1 billion dollars plus of spending, when it went live, it was a disaster. It didn’t work. And it was a horrific disaster. I was put over the program on April 1st — April Fools’ Day. So you can’t make it up. You don’t forget that, to figure out how to fix it.

And there wasn’t a leadership playbook for me to sort through. And there was a lot of political infighting in the company.

BEN WIGGINS:

Sure. Who’s…

DAVID CORDANI:

The finger‑pointing was like nothing I’d ever seen before. And in an environment where I would expect people to be coming together to fight fires, people were actually hunkering down and pointing fingers at one another. So there were multiple days of guiding through the darkness of trying to figure out what to do. And meanwhile, our customers, our patients, our clients, our physician partners were having horrible, horrible experiences.

And in an environment like that, sometimes you have to go back to the first principles, which are basic. So what we did learn from that — and I’ve done it multiple times now in complex situations — is I bypassed all the hierarchy of the company. All of it. And I went to all levels of management and leadership, etc., and I went to the closest part of the frontline that touches our customers.

So the most junior people in the company, by way of positional authority, had the most insights and answers because they weren’t political. They weren’t pointing fingers. They were trying to deliver on the promises. And from that, what I learned was to simplify the complex, because everybody’s lost in the complexity, and to put tenets and frameworks around problem‑solving that would activate a lot of individuals around pursuing it.

So I think back — it was a little different, for example — but there wasn’t a leadership approach that was clean. The political morass made it almost impossible to navigate. There wasn’t any common information in any way, shape, or form. The normal places you would go to look for help from the subject‑matter experts, you couldn’t get help from, so you had to almost flip everything you thought was normal on its head and do the opposite, which was to go to the most junior people in the organization.

Spend time away from every business process. Hell, we even set up petty cash funds with millions and millions and millions of dollars to be able to pay, because the systems weren’t working. We had to work very, very differently. And I view that as something I hope never to have to relive, but so formative in terms of simplifying the complex, putting tenets and frameworks, going as close to the customer moments that matter to try to understand them, and working back from that as opposed to working from the C‑suite forward. There’s a lot more expedited clarity that way.

BEN WIGGINS:

I’m hearing some echoes of Gall’s Law here — the idea being that you can’t design a complex system to work. A complex system that works has to evolve from a simple system that works.

DAVID CORDANI:

That’s well said.

BEN WIGGINS:

Let’s talk a little bit more about your personal approach to health. You’re very active. You’ve competed in over 125 endurance events. Why those?

DAVID CORDANI:

Yeah. So, I found it was interesting timing, too. It was between my senior year of high school and freshman year of college — I lost 55 pounds. And I’m about the same weight today as I was my freshman year. So why? I took on two things: running, and I moderated my diet a little bit. And the reason behind it was I kind of wanted to live a healthy life.

BEN WIGGINS:

Makes sense.

DAVID CORDANI:

Fast‑forward. I had an injury because I love basketball. I had a knee injury, and I couldn’t run. I couldn’t do a whole variety of things. And it’s a little hokey, but I saw the Hawaiian Ironman on TV. I didn’t know what it was. Never saw it before. I had a little bit of an emotional moment watching the stories behind people pursuing that, and I said, “I want to do that someday.”

BEN WIGGINS:

Okay. And you couldn’t run at the time, you said.

DAVID CORDANI:

Nope. So in 1991, I did my first triathlon — the sprint triathlon. I had to learn how to swim. I could swim, but swim, like, proficiently and survive the swim. I had a pretty good bike ride. Had a pretty good run. Sprint triathlon is short: a half‑mile swim, 50‑mile bike ride, three‑mile run. Piece of cake. And I was hooked. I was like, “This is pretty awesome. This is a pretty awesome test of goal‑setting, preparation, in hindsight, overcoming obstacles, execution, some dimension of achievement or lack thereof, and feedback. Rinse and repeat, and go at it again.”

And I found that for my professional life, therefore physical activity became a really important foundational part of my professional life. And still today, I will work out an hour every morning before I start work — almost all the time. There may be an exceptional day here or a day there. And it gets my head straight. It gets me focused on the day. I consume business information, but the racing part of it has been a gift time and time again. It’s been learning. Every race has been a learning experience. Every race has been a test of will because you’re racing against yourself. You’re racing with others. Nobody knows whether or not you back off the pace a little bit but you. Nobody knows whether or not you can push the pace a little harder but you. It’s a very deep test of personal will, and I love it.

BEN WIGGINS:

What are your PRs? I bet you know them. Swim, bike, run.

DAVID CORDANI:

Different PRs. When I was a really proficient runner, I started running shorter distances. I ran a 5K in under 16 minutes — that was 15:54. So then post‑injury, it was like 17:10. But for me, the individual unit PRs were less relevant because triathlon was everything for me. It’s the combination. So the question was, could you be in the top quartile in each of the three disciplines? If you could be in the top quartile in each of the three disciplines, you’re probably in the top decile in finishing.

So, for me as an amateur, it was: can I qualify for the nationals as an amateur? And I was able to. Was I able to qualify and get into the Hawaiian Ironman? I was able to. I qualified and went and did the European Ironman after that. So those were the goals. They were all means to the end. The time was not relevant. It was actually the achievement. Can I place in the top three in my age group? Can I achieve the top decile? Can I qualify for nationals? Can I get a time that gets me into consideration for the World Championships, for the Hawaiian Ironman? And each one of those tests was wildly anxiety‑provoking.

And I’ve learned in life that the best things are greeted with excitement and fear — call it anxiety — because if there’s no excitement, it’s not going to get the best out of you. If there’s not some sort of anxiety or fear, then it’s not a big enough challenge. Or maybe you’re overconfident. And I’ve just found it is a multiplier effect. That it fits as a big part of my life.

BEN WIGGINS:

There is a specific track and kind of a culture around CEOs, specifically in the Ironman. Are you — I figure you’re probably aware.

DAVID CORDANI:

I’m familiar with it.

BEN WIGGINS:

Why do you think that is? Why specifically that, for specifically those?

DAVID CORDANI:

Being a CEO is a pretty unique role. When you sit with other CEOs, you can have a pretty intellectually honest conversation because of the level of accountability, responsibility, strain, stress, etc. Your responsibility is to be supremely confident in terms of the direction of your organization and simultaneously questioning everything you’re doing all the time. The dimensions of that are quite interesting.

If you take the symbol of an Ironman, it’s a symbol. It’s not absolute. The symbol of an Ironman is that it’s out there a little bit. It’s not an easy thing to attain. And so the pedigree of CEOs — if you’re a driven, motivated CEO for any length of time — is to pursue a challenge. Let somebody tell you it can’t be done: “I want to do it.” Or when you look in the mirror and you’re just being intellectually honest with yourself and saying, “I wonder, I want to test myself and go back and test myself.”

And then for some of us, you test yourself, and you cross the finish line, and you’re like, “Wow, I did the Hawaiian Ironman.” I wondered if it was a one‑hit wonder because I don’t want to do one Ironman — they’re brutal. I said, “I’ve got to do another one to make sure it wasn’t a fluke.” And I loved that one. I said, “Okay, that gave me feedback.” So I think it’s a drive and desire to test the art of the possible. I think that’s what is ultimately underneath it: can you test the art of the possible?

BEN WIGGINS:

What inspired you to turn that passion into a giving opportunity through Achilles International?

DAVID CORDANI:

So Achilles is an organization that was founded to support people with disabilities but to pursue goals and largely use the recipe of physical activity to do so. The founder, Dick Traum, who passed not that long ago, was the first amputee to complete the New York City Marathon.

So now, for me personally, I competed at the Disney Marathon Weekend and saw firsthand a bunch of the Achilles athletes that we were coordinating, coming down to the marathon — both the Freedom Team veterans and non‑Freedom Team, non‑veteran athletes. And I had just a little pause moment watching. There are hand‑crank cyclists, there are push rims, and there are prosthetic racers. And then there are other racers. And I was watching some of the prosthetic soldiers — double‑amputee soldiers — and I was just blown away by their drive and their will.

And I learned that there are one or two guides matched up with an amputee athlete, a prosthetic athlete. I volunteered. If I could guide, I’d love to do so. And I guided my first athlete in 2012 — a Marine, double amputee. And after that experience, which was unbelievably fulfilling and wildly emotional, I said, “I will guide you anytime, anywhere, anytime.”

And the really neat thing about it is that it made racing all new again. So I kind of stopped racing competitively — that became less interesting — and I started guiding more. And it became an unbelievably fulfilling process where I believe that most people think the person giving, so you’re in support of as a guide, etc., is giving. Actually, I kind of wrote about it a little bit: the givers actually benefit more. You get a lot more enrichment in terms of seeing the will, overcoming obstacles, the power of the human spirit. And I see it tested time and time again.

So for me, that first guiding experience was such a gift. The gentleman’s name is Mathias. We’re in contact. He texted me in 2012. He calls me Uncle Dave. Mathias has two children. Mathias is the only double amputee to qualify and complete all the physical tests to become a police officer. He’s a police officer in Long Island. I helped him with all the training related to overcoming those obstacles and more and more soldiers in terms of their stories.

So I could talk to you about that all day. It is deep. It is rich. The power of the human spirit is off the charts, and it reinforces that anything is possible with the right preparation and support and will, driving resilience in overcoming obstacles.

BEN WIGGINS:

So then, bringing all that back around, how has your experience with people with different abilities, wounded veterans, all of that — how has that influenced your perspective on professional leadership and growth?

DAVID CORDANI:

I think, in an indirect way, it comes back to one of the words we talked about before in leadership philosophy: inclusion. You know, it’s easier stated — you don’t judge a book by its cover. You seek to listen and understand.

I was just at the Disney Marathon Weekend this past weekend, and I was with a bunch of the athletes for a solid hour before the start of the race, between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m., reconnecting with some athletes I know, connecting with some new athletes, and there’s a richness of learning that you can extract from the different points of view. So one is, I would say, inclusion.

On the other side, resilience. Great things aren’t easy. People tell me all the time what’s not possible. I don’t accept any of it. I fundamentally won’t accept any of it. And it’s odd, but seeing other things that theoretically are impossible — example, one of the veterans, Master Sergeant, Army Ranger, Cedric King, and I run many races together. We ran on Saturday. I love him to death. Big personality, big heart, big will.

He wanted to do the Dopey at Walt Disney. The Dopey is 5K on Thursday, 10K on Friday, a half‑marathon on Saturday, full marathon on Sunday. And not that the running is difficult enough — you get up at 2:30 or 3:00 every morning to get transported in the corrals, etc. — and when Ced said he wanted to do that, deep in my heart, I was like, “I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”

BEN WIGGINS:

Okay.

DAVID CORDANI:

It happened. It was dark on the marathon course. He tapped out a couple times. I documented in a book — I had the privilege of writing a couple stories with him at the Boston Marathon and down there — where he just tapped out.

BEN WIGGINS:

Okay.

DAVID CORDANI:

Find a way to help him tap back in. You tap back into the will in a very different way, knowing the person. And my job was to get him to the finish line safely. My job. I deal with your hydration, your nutrition. I carry the extra parts for your prosthetics in my backpack. Get you to the finish line safely.

But then you see that happen. You’re like, “Wow.” Able‑bodied people look at that and say, “I can’t do that.” The double amputee did, in excruciating heat, in a difficult climate as well. So, back to resilience: there are excuses, and then there’s will. There are challenges, for sure. But that resilience is so powerful. And for me personally, when I experience these moments, it is a reinforcer for me. And it’s an invaluable reinforcer of the art of the possible.

BEN WIGGINS:

You’ve written a book on all of this, The Courage to Go Forward, and one of the overarching themes in that book is the value of micro‑communities. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that is and how it’s meaningful?

DAVID CORDANI:

Sure. So first, for our listeners, if you choose to go download the book or buy it, all the proceeds benefit Achilles. And I would believe that there are some learnings for all of us.

What we do is we tell stories. We tell stories by a diverse number of athletes. The term “micro‑community” we made up. So why did we make it up, and what is it intended to communicate? In many ways, a lot of individuals who want to do well and want to provide some sort of positive experience and volunteerism and support sometimes conclude, “Well, the only way I can have an impact is in a giant organization,” or “I need a giant event,” or “I need a giant program.”

But Achilles taught us, and gave us the courage to go forward. The micro‑community portion of it talks about the power of one. One or two people can make a huge difference. And so now you take the symbol of one or two running guides with an individual, helping that individual in terms of goal‑setting, planning for how to prepare for it, executing your preparation, approaching the event, executing the event, overcoming obstacles, and making it to the finish line.

That reward event that happens in making it to the finish line is goal achievement. And then how that individual propels that goal achievement to other aspects of their life. So the race itself is a symbol of an event. Cedric is now a very accomplished motivational speaker. Mathias is a police officer. Melissa Stockwell, the first female to lose a limb in Iraq, owns and operates her own prosthetics company with her husband. So it’s the accomplishment and the achievement.

So the micro‑community dimension is helping all of us to step back and say, “I can make a difference if I choose to.” And then that giver gets — givers get — the principle of “I will get enrichment out of it,” unknowingly gets enrichment out of it. But don’t wait for big to have an impact. Small can have an impact, and its combustible impact has a multiplier effect.

BEN WIGGINS:

How do you differentiate this — the micro‑community thing — from the traditional one‑to‑one mentorship, or one‑to‑two mentorship, or two‑to‑one mentorship? What’s the delineator there?

DAVID CORDANI:

I think the delineators are here. There are similarities, number one. But the delineator here is it’s kind of a fit‑for‑purpose, moment‑in‑time, achieving‑a‑goal. So coaching or mentorship has a longevity that’s attached to it.

All but one of the athletes that I’ve had the privilege of guiding have my cell phone number. We communicate. One is just not communicative. So part of it grew out of the micro‑community events into more. But they don’t have to. The micro‑community is a moment in time and has an impact. And it’s not looking past that. It’s not waiting for the 10‑year coaching relationship or a mentor relationship, or somebody who may be there.

Mathias and I met in 2012. It’s 2026 right now. I’ve known him for a while. Love him to death. I will do anything to help and support him. But it may evolve to that. If that micro‑community event was the only thing that happened, that’s measurable and impactful.

BEN WIGGINS:

Okay, okay. What are the top lessons in leadership, to sum it all up, that you’d like to share with our listeners — Aggies or otherwise?

DAVID CORDANI:

So, pulling back up, if there’s one thing I believe folks need to reflect on relative to lessons in leadership, it’s that our leadership approach and our leadership style always have to be authentic. I mentioned it before. It’s easy to try to absorb somebody else’s leadership style, or try to absorb or project yourself in a different way because you think it’s appropriate. At the end of the day, authenticity rules the day.

Understand that leadership is a privilege you are given by those you have the opportunity to lead. It is not a given right because of hierarchical position or title. If you view it differently, I think you will be an ineffective or unsustainable leader.

Lastly, in the senior‑most leadership positions, you’re in service of others and in a perpetual learning environment. If you think others are in service of you, or you’re done learning, a caution flag should go up. Fundamentally, a caution flag should go up because I don’t think that’s sustainable. It’s a privilege you’re given by others. You’re in a learning mode, and you’re in support of others. Others are not in support of you. You’re in support of others along that journey.

BEN WIGGINS:

Thank you, David, for sharing your lessons in leadership here today with us. On behalf of Mays Business School, I’m Ben Wiggins. We hope you’ll subscribe, and please take a moment to leave a comment or a like, if you have time — it really helps. Here at Mays Business School, we’re building a better future through business, and we thank you for being a part of it.