Disrupt yourself before you wreck yourself
Jordan Raynor sits down with Lisa Lambert, Chief Technology & Innovation Officer of National Grid, to talk about why she went into software development instead of “full-time ministry,” how to disrupt your business or career before someone else does, and the #1 thing this 20+ year veteran VC looks for when investing in startups.
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[0:00:05.3] JR: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I’m Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Every week, I host a conversation with a Christian who is pursuing world-class mastery of their vocation. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits, and how the gospel of Jesus Christ influences their work.
Today’s guest is Lisa Lambert. She’s the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer of National Grid, one of the world’s largest utilities. She’s also the Founder and President of National Grid Partners, the firm’s venture capital arm. After earning her MBA from Harvard, Lisa started her career as a software developer before she made the leap to venture capital which she’s been doing for more than 20 years now.
She’s a fascinating woman with an incredible resume. Lisa and I recently sat down, we talked about Jesus’ radical love of women and what that means for us lifting up women today. We talked about why she went into software development in the first place instead of going into “full-time ministry” and we talked about the number one thing this 20-year veteran VC looks for when she invests in startups. I think you guys are really going to enjoy this conversation with the world-class venture capitalist, Lisa Lambert.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:43.7] JR: Hey, Lisa. Thank you so much for joining us.
[0:01:45.8] LL: My pleasure.
[0:01:46.8] JR: Yeah, let’s start with the real softball question. What’s the short version of what National Grid does?
[0:01:52.9] LL: Well, National Grid is a regulated utility based in the UK and also has businesses in New York and Massachusetts and Rhode Island. We're a transmission and distribution utility for gas and electric products. Pretty important to most folks, they like to have their own electricity and their gas working so yeah, that’s what the parent company does.
What I do at National Grid Partners is I run the investment and innovation function for the group so our task is to make sure that with company, the parent company isn’t disrupted by emerging startups, new business models, new technologies that might impact our business down the road. We’re the eyes and the ears for the company.
[0:02:35.0] JR: Yeah. I want to go back to the beginning for your professional story. You graduated with an MBA from Harvard and you first started working as a software engineer, is that right?
[0:02:45.1] LL: I did, yeah, but I wanted to build my own tech company and that was the expectation when I started and this was well before the .com era had really emerged and a lot of the work that I did, it was a great foundation for the work that I’m doing right now. I think as a venture investor, you really do have to understand the technology, it’s not just about understanding businesses and how to make money.
That foundation proved to be very helpful and was actually pretty enjoyable, it’s a very responsive kind of profession, because you get feedback on the programs that you build immediately, whether you’re doing well or not doing well, you get feedback from your customers immediately and it’s very structural way of thinking and organizing so that kind of suits my skill set.
[0:03:26.4] JR: It’s one of the challenges with knowledge work, right? It can be difficult to get rapid feedback on a work, unlike being – you are an athlete, right? Athletes get rapid feedback all the time, they take a shot at the basket, they make it or they don’t, in knowledge work, sometimes, that’s a little muddy but in software, yeah, it’s easy, right? The command either works or it doesn’t.
[0:03:47.7] LL: Exactly.
[0:03:48.7] JR: It’s beautiful. What made you make the leap to venture capital?
[0:03:51.8] LL: Well, I hadn’t anticipated that out of business school but I love HBS and joined Intel and I worked as a software engineer for a little bit there and worked with our OEM, PCOEM’s as well on the architecture for the hardware side and made my way into what was then corporate business development and later called Intel capital, branded Intel capital and what I liked about it.
Number of things, one, it leveraged my technical background, my background in software but two, and I think more importantly, it was very dynamic so we’re working with these passionate, bright, high energy entrepreneurs and you know, they’re reimagining what the world could look like and how it could function and we get the opportunity to invest and join the journey to where we’re creating something really impactful for all walks of life.
The culmination of using the background, even applying the MBA because a lot of this is around how do you run a business successfully and the fact that we’re having an impact that could get global impact was really inspiring for me.
[0:05:02.2] JR: That’s cool, in addition to your role at national grid, you’re also the founder of UPWARD Women, which has 6,000 something members globally. Tell us a little bit about this organization and why you founded it?
[0:05:13.7] LL: Yeah, UPWARD, I started when I was at Intel in 2013 and it was at a time that I was going through some challenges that were just large company, technology ecosystem, very demanding, the demand issues or the problem, it’s really just kind of the politics and structures and how do you get things done, how do be effective, how do you get promoted, those things were all questions that were weighing on me at the time of my career and so I said, if I’m having these questions and I’m having these challenges, I’m sure there are other women that are faced with similar circumstances and so I’m going to go talk to a few of them and so I gathered what I thought would be 30 or 40 women at my home over diner.
We talk about, what are the challenges that women face is they’re progressing in their career. I was at a point where I was a VP level person but trying to make it up to the corporate VP and senior VP and executive VP level, just finding it really difficult and so we convene this group at my home, ended up being 90 people at our first event and we talked about all these issues and it was invigorating, it was inspiring.
Probably the biggest thing is that everybody felt they could be themselves, one thing that I think women are challenged with in an environment what’s mostly men and they’re running the show is how do you be authentic without being set aside because you don’t behave the way everybody else behaves.
I think all of us felt that we could be authentic with each other because we’ve all been on the road together and we could tell our stories and I think we found some solace, some camaraderie, some fellowship in that community and just have continued to grow it since.
[0:06:49.6] JR: I love it. Part of what I love about it is sacrifice is always necessary to lift up marginalized groups, right? I think most vividly, this is portrayed in the gospel of Jesus Christ sacrificing his life to save us his enemies. You in this later stage in your career, sacrificing time and energy and money to lift up these other women is really beautiful expression and response of the gospel. We talked a little bit about your professional story, what’s your faith story?
[0:07:21.6] LL: Well, I began my faith journey when I was in college, I was a scholarship athlete.
[0:07:27.4] JR: You were at Penn State, right?
[0:07:29.0] LL: I was at Penn State, yeah, that’s right and then relied on scholarship playing basketball for Penn State, grew up in Ohio so already it was a challenge and that I was away from family and away from what I knew, what I was comfortable with.
When I got to Penn State and I think during my upbringing, there was always this sense of, there’s something greater here. I always felt that I had a high responsibility to achieve something really meaningful with my life. I didn’t know what that meant, I didn’t know why I felt it and I really didn’t know that it was the Lord tugging me toward his direction and his purpose, his design for me.
I discovered that while I was at Penn State and I got involved with Campus Crusade for Christ and athletes and ministry and I remember the students there began to take me up under their wing and minister the word of the gospel to me and I got born again in 1987 in March of 1987, bought my first bible and my life has never been the same.
[0:08:31.8] JR: It’s so rare to hear a story like – I shouldn’t say rare but coming to faith later in life like that, even in college, what a great testament to God’s grace in your life. I’m curious how that conversion experience in college changed or at all impacted your outlook on your career, did it make you more ambitious, less ambitious, different ambition, how did it impact the way you viewed the trajectory of your career?
[0:08:56.7] LL: Yeah, it definitely was different ambitious. I think I had always driven to be my best and be excellent but actually, when I got born again, my first reaction was perhaps I should be in full-time ministry, I actually thought that full-time ministry was kind of what every Christian did.
I was new to this Christian thing so I didn’t really know what it all meant but over the course of some months and many conversations with people who knew me, professionals who knew me who were friends, they said, “Lisa, what’s in your heart? What do you feel you should be doing?”
It certainly is a lot about to be in full-time ministry, leading a church or in missions, what have you, “But I don’t hear that coming from your heart. I hear you talking about wanting to run a business, wanting to be a general manager, wanting to lead in a professional capacity.”
“Why are you afraid to pursue that or why are you contemplating doing something different when we don’t hear that from you, we’ve not seen that from you before now?” It was a bit of an awakening for me because I thought that that’s just what Christians did and I discovered later that God has a unique purpose for all of us and if you put this in me, this desire to be in business, that he gifted me for it and that he had a plan for me to pursue it. Overtime, I realized that and got back into my lane.
[0:10:17.9] JR: Amen, I love that so much, it’s a similar story to my own, kind of feeling this guilt of, “Should I move to a mud hut 5,000 miles away from home?” Which is good and God honoring and I’m so grateful for people who sacrifice in those ways but we need Christ followers at the national grids of the world, right? In every corner of creation.
Lisa, you’re serving your employers, your shareholders, your teams through the ministry of excellence first and foremost. That’s good and God honoring in and of itself. I am curious if you’ve had opportunities to leverage your relationships, your powerful positions to “do ministry” in some more overt ways throughout your career.
[0:11:02.9] LL: Yeah. Yes and no, I think. It depends on how you define “do ministry” if you define it as handing out pamphlets and you know?
[0:11:11.2] JR: That’s not how I define it but yeah.
[0:11:16.2] LL: Then probably haven’t avail myself to that. Although, I have done street ministry, I have done door to door ministry, I’ve done it in nonprofessional capacities.
[0:11:24.2] JR: Sure, of course.
[0:11:24.5] LL: This is a part of a missions group in the churches that I belong to. I see my way to demonstrate crisis by doing the work that I do with excellence, doing the work that I do with compassion, being honest, integrous, transparent, being a strong leader and I think Jesus demonstrated those behaviors and in fact, there are many examples in the bible of leaders who demonstrated those behaviors, Esther, the book of Esther, there’s not a mention of the word God in that book but obviously, the Lord was there and present and in a big way.
I think I’m certainly not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ, I’m not ashamed of talking about my Lord but I think you need to be mindful of where you are, who you’re with and how best to reach them and I’ve tried to do that, kind of role modeling Godly behavior more than preaching to people.
[0:12:17.9] JR: Amen, that’s beautiful. Go back to this issue of compassion. Because on the one hand, all Christ followers male and female are called to be merciful, we’re called to do justice, love, mercy and I think that looks different for us at work than the nonbeliever.
As a woman, I got to imagine that’s actually harder, right? Because you don’t want to be perceived as weak, right? At the same time, you're called to be more compassionate, more merciful, have you wrestled with that and how have you thought through that?
[0:12:45.0] LL: Yeah, I think the biggest challenge is not operating in your flesh, you know, you're in situations where the natural reaction would be or the fleshly reaction would be to react in a negative way, someone violates your trust, someone betrays you, someone maligns you, someone’s disrespectful of you or insubordinate. Then how do you respond?
I think that’s where compassion comes out. I think that’s where God’s patience, God’s grace, remembering what the Lord has done for me, reminding myself of how merciful and gentle and kind he is to me. Creates a different response for me.
I don’t say that I’ve arrived and I don’t always do it perfectly but I am very mindful about not reacting, not being tempted to do something that I would regret just as a reactionary, a defense mechanism or something like that. I think to me, those are much more difficult things to do than to hand out pamphlets, I think to maintain your integrity when you're under pressure and you’re being tempted to behave inappropriately is really important towards your witness and that’s how I lead, that’s where I try to lead.
[0:13:55.4] JR: That’s more counter cultural, right? Leading in such a compassionate way. I was speaking recently on the podcast actually with Janeen Uzzell who is the COO of Wikipedia. She splits her time between San Francisco Bay Area and DC and we were just talking about Silicon Valley culture, right? Is very money obsessed, very – yeah, just this culture of your net worth is your self-worth, right? The challenge of operating that.
I mean, you’re in venture capital where that’s even more true. I’m curious how you remind yourself of the difference between self-worth and net worth in such a wealth obsessed field.
[0:14:35.0] LL: Yeah, it’s very easy to be drawn into it here, it is the predominant cultural value here, your position, your power, your wealth, those will define who you are in Silicon Valley, unless you’re a believer and for me, the sacrifice that Jesus made on Calvary defines who I am as a person. I know I wouldn’t be here were it not for His grace.
I know that though He has gifted me with talents, that I have been faced with challenges that would have overwhelmed me, would have taken me out to be quite honest with you. Its’ staying in the word, it’s staying peripheral, it’s continuing to seek his face, it’s continuing to realize that he has a purpose and a plan for my life and that I’m here on the earth to fulfill that.
I’m not here to fulfill my own passions, I’m not here to achieve great wealth, although I don’t think wealth is bad, I think it’s immoral, I think you can use wealth for good but that’s not why I’m on the planet. That God has a purpose and a design for my life and he is revealing that to me via the things that move me. What raises my attention, what creates my energy force? What motivates me, what inspires me, what makes me mad, what makes me angry?
Those to me are clues to why you're here and I think you need to your eye on Jesus and keep your eye on his design and plan for your life and not really look at the things around you because they will be a distraction, they are a temptation but if you have the right perspective, you’re staying in the word, you’re staying in prayer, you’re staying devoted to him, you won’t have a problem.
[0:16:09.3] JR: How do you pay attention to the things that are making you mad, the things that are making you excited. How do you pay attention to the spirits prompting in your lives, how do you slow down? In this really fast paced culture of the valley to even hear those things?
[0:16:26.4] LL: Yeah. I think the things that we see that move us, that are injustices in our mind, part of the reason I started UPWARD is because not only that I want to create a community of women that I can rely on and lean on, and then help other women in similar situations as me.
I’m also very sensitive to women’s plight in the world and children’s plight in the world and those two things, when I see those injustices, more than anything, they drive me mad. The idea of children being abused, the idea of women being abused, they’re the most vulnerable in our society and they’re the most trafficked or the most harmed by the abuses of the society. I listen to that.
It wasn’t just that I wanted to help women because I was in a difficult spot and I thought other women would be in a difficult spot but I actually called a board UPWARD because I believe that one, women have an impact on societies as a whole, they are the nurturers, they are the home raisers, they raise the children and if they’re impacted in a negative way, society’s impacted. If they’re impacted in a positive way, society’s impacted for the good.
That includes raising up children in a way that they can be successful and thrive. Those two things really did motivate me and they do anger me when I see it but I think you put your anger to action and you try to do something proactive to solve the problem that bothers you.
Then I think we do need to listen to that, I think oftentimes, we just get angry and we complain about it and we don’t say anything. You know, we don’t actually take action to try to solve it and that’s how I try to listen to those voices.
[0:18:09.5] JR: Yeah and I think it’s getting angry but also seeing, “Is this anger justified biblically?” and in this case, it certainly is. I mean the New Testament, the way Jesus treated women was radical. Jesus elevated women to in an unprecedented status. I always appreciate that when I am reading the account of the resurrection. If you wanted to make up the gospels, you would have never had Jesus appear to women first. It wouldn’t have never happened, right?
Nobody would have made up that story, right? Which is really beautiful, so part of our response to the gospel is just seeking to do great work and just serving people to the ministry of excellence. One thing that I appreciate about you and your perspective in National Grid Partners is this idea of disrupting yourself. You talked about that a few minutes ago. What do you mean by that? How does National Grid Partners seek to disrupt the core business before somebody else disrupts it?
[0:19:04.6] LL: Yeah, I mean we’re hoping that we can do that. We’re hoping that we can provide visibilities that can see the market transformations that are coming before they arrive and they disrupt their business. Our job is to be the eyes and ears for the company to identify trends in our industry around decentralization of energy or a distribution, different methods of distributing energy or de-carbonization of energy or the digitization of work and how we do what we do at National Grid, either through our customer interfaces or just as employees.
Those are technology trends that will have an impact on how we do our transmission and distribution business. Our job is to find the companies that are developing the technologies that will have an impact that will facilitate these transformations that move us to clean energy and make sure that we are engaged with them so that we’re going on that journey. Ahead of our competition at a cadence that we can maintain given that we’re not a technology startup.
We’re really utility, we move at a slower pace but we’ll never change if we don’t have visibility into what’s coming. Our job is to make sure that we know what’s coming and that we work with those companies through our investments, through innovation projects that we might do collectively with other companies. We work with them to add value back to National Grid and we start to change how we operate. It’s really an important function.
[0:20:30.2] JR: Yeah, so I love that context and I think there’s a broad application here, right? I can imagine there’s a lot of people in the audience doing exactly what you do, deploying capital at a big utility but we all need to be looking for opportunities to disrupt ourselves and our businesses and our careers before somebody else does. What are the broader applications here? How can those listening who aren’t responsible for deploying huge VC funds disrupt themselves and their own businesses?
[0:20:58.4] LL: Yeah, I think it’s not being complacent, not living in your comfort zone, right? Challenging yourself, whether that’s challenging yourself with the people that you are around or challenging yourself by learning a new skillsets or even challenging yourself by trying a new job. Sometimes we as humans get complacent and complacency is the enemy of progress. I’d say stay involved in communities like UPWARD and listen to great podcasts like your podcast Jordan just to keep challenging yourself and learning.
One of my favorite books is called The Fifth Discipline and it’s all about learning organizations and I think learning organizations are the ones that are the most able to continue to grow and it’s the same with people.
[0:21:44.2] JR: It’s just staying curious, right? It’s this perpetual curiosity and believing that better is always possible like master is not a destination, right? It’s a lifelong journey.
[0:21:56.4] LL: Indeed, indeed it is but it does depend on what you look at, who you interact with, what your ambitions are, do you set goals for yourself, are you hungry for something more? Do you want to make the most of your time here on the planet? It’s a short life and you’re going to dictate by your decisions your outcomes and so make better decisions.
[0:22:16.2] JR: I think a big piece of disruption too is looking outside of your industry, looking outside of your particular lane just to cultivate analogues thinking, right? You’d find interesting things in other spaces that you can apply to your own context so I’m curious if that’s a part of your role as a VC in National Grid.
[0:22:36.9] LL: Well, I mean we have a fairly narrow lane, where you know, we're a transmission distribution company so we don’t look outside of that for the most part. I mean, energy is a very broad sector. I sit on an oil and gas board of directors in a public company, so energy is much broader than transmission and distribution but I think in terms of what we’re focused on in our group, we’re focused on the technologies that support our operating business.
I do think it’s wise to look outside of your industry and one of the reasons that I ended up at National Grid because I didn’t start in energy obviously, I started in software but one of the reasons that I did end up here is because I started to see while I was in Intel and I was doing all of software investments for Intel capital, I started to see industry dynamics in the 2005 timeframe, clean energy movement 1.0 started to emerge.
Now it crashed in 2008, so it was a short lived experience but you began to see the momentum around climates and the momentum around consumers controlling their own energy destinations and how do you simplify it, how do you automate it, how do you make it more intelligent, those things started to emerge and I thought, you know, I might want to go pursue that because this actually may become a big thing. I mean if Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley, guess what? They’re going to need energy and do you think they’re going to relieve that to the regulated utilities?
Probably not and so that’s actually when I left to join the Westly Group, which is a clean tech focused venture capital firm before I went to National Grid and began to really immerse myself in the energy sector because it wasn’t my background. That’s a perfect example of challenging yourself by looking at trends and trying something new and I’ve landed on what I think is the renaissance of the energy sector. It is front and center, you know, from the Biden administration all the way down to the mom-and-pop shops across the world. That was fortuitous that I didn’t stay in my lane and I looked outside of my expertise.
[0:24:32.6] JR: Looking back on your career, I’m curious what you can identify as the keys to mastering your craft that would really translate to any vocation, right? You’ve got people listening who we do have VC who are listening but we got entrepreneurs, we got writers, like what are the keys to mastery that you think are common across vocations?
[0:24:51.5] LL: Yeah, you know repetition, at least in our sector. There’s a phrase in the venture capital world called pattern recognition or pattern matching and the key to our business is evaluating many, many transactions. You develop a pattern recognition for good, for successful, for productive good teams, good products, good market segments but you only get that through repetition.
Unfortunately, it is not something that you can even get by being heady or having a high IQ or going to the best schools because those things teach you a certain amount of what you need but there’s nothing like working with a company, seeing it succeed or seeing it fail and all of the things that you get by being in the middle of that situation and so repetition to me is the key. Certainly in our sector, it is the key to being successful.
What I’m doing now as a 22-year veteran in venture capital versus what I was doing when I was a five-year veteran in venture capital is out of magnitudes apart. I have such good judgment because I learned to have good judgment by the process of evaluating hundreds, if not thousands of companies over the course of my career and you really do, you can discern what’s most distractive. My hit rate these days is tremendous.
You know, we’ve got an amazing portfolio in a very short period of time because I’ve seen a lot of deals and I hired a lot of people that have seen and done a lot of deals and so it does make a world of difference. There are other things, of course, having the right people around you, you know staying current on your trade, being disciplined, being focused, having integrity, all of those things are really important but there is something about repetition that will inform you to make the right decisions because you’ve seen it all.
[0:26:37.6] JR: It’s just discipline overtime, it’s putting in the reps, right? In your contact to doing a lot of deals and studying those deals and see what worked, so as somebody who’s been on the other side of the table as a founder raising venture capital, I’m really curious what’s the number one thing you look at in these early stage companies? What’s most important to consider as you’re doing deals?
[0:26:57.7] LL: Yeah, you know, it’s the team. In fact, we did a study at Intel. Intel Capital was the largest probably not the largest any longer but was the largest corporate venture capital firm in the world. You know, several years we did over 300 transactions a year. I mean it’s amazing over a billion dollars in just equity investing.
[0:27:14.3] JR: That’s a lot. That’s a lot of deals, yeah.
[0:27:16.4] LL: That’s a lot of deals and on every continent, so we’re a global organization and so we did a study of our portfolio to find out what were the keys to success. Why do companies fail and why do companies succeed? I think most people will think, “Well, they failed because they didn’t have a great product or the market opportunity wasn’t right or the timing of it wasn’t right.” Repeatedly, we found in that study that it was team execution. That was the primary reason for failure.
You know, you don’t think team, right? I mean, they’ve got to have some capability, right? Some track record but you don’t think that that is the issue. What I have found is that great teams can make really poor products and poor markets work. You have to pivot if you’re an entrepreneur. No matter how great your idea, you will have to pivot at some point in your journey as an entrepreneur. The great teams know when to pivot, know how to pivot and they make successful pivots and they’re just better executors.
[0:28:11.2] JR: Yeah.
[0:28:11.4] LL: That is the number one, hands down in my view. It’s not about whether you’ve got the best design. It is not about whether you’ve got first mover advantage. It’s not about whether the market is big enough. Those things are all important but if you don’t have a great team that knows how to execute, you’re not going to succeed or you will succeed at a lesser pace and nobody wants to do that. If you have to put so much time in these companies, you do want to get the best outcome possible.
[0:28:33.3] JR: Yeah, Lisa what is a typical day in your life look like these days?
[0:28:37.7] LL: Well, I’m an early riser and so I’m typically up around 4:30 or sometimes earlier. I have my prayer time and I have my bible study in the morning. It’s quiet, everybody is asleep and so that’s what it begins and then from there, I’ve got two little boys and so they have to get to school and I have morning duty because I am the morning person. My husband is the late person and so I get to get them up and you know, we do the breakfast routine and get them ready and off to school.
Then I start my work day and my day is filled with meetings. I am a people person and that I think you’d learn through your interactions with people and I even do five, 10, 15-minute meetings to get insights, to get perspective, provide feedback for people and so my calendar is quite full. Typically I start my meetings around 8:00 in the morning, sometimes earlier than that because our headquarters is in the UK so sometimes on 5 AM meetings but that doesn’t happen every day and then I go throughout the day meeting with portfolio companies.
Meeting with prospective investors, meeting with the team, meeting with other executives, so that’s kind of my typical day and then at the end of the day, I try to get home and have a meal. The pandemic otherwise has been a disaster on so many fronts, it has been a family convener from my perspective and I have been able to spend some time with my family.
[0:29:55.9] JR: All right, three questions we love to wrap up every conversation with. Number one, I’m curious which books you tend to recommend most frequently to others. It could anything, it could be spiritual growth, professional growth, whatever.
[0:30:08.2] LL: Well, I mean I mentioned The Fifth Discipline, which is not a new book. It’s just a book about learning organizations that I live by. I mean in terms of how I run my organization, I believe that if you are learning, you’re growing, you’re having an impact and so I love that book. I have read it multiple times and will continue to recommend that one to call it secure about being great leaders.
From a Christian standpoint rather, I love Cloud Townsend books. They’re psychologists, Christian psychologists and they’ve written some amazing books. One early in my life called Safe People had an impact and that it teaches you to choose to have good relationships, right? Be with people that identify that build you up and encourage you. Don’t be with people who are negative and condescending.
I mean you have a responsibility to minister to those folks but you don’t want to have your entire world be surrounded by them and so those are a couple that I recommend.
[0:30:58.5] JR: Yeah, those are good recommendations and you guys can find those books as always at jordanraynor.com/bookshelf. Okay, who would you most like to hear on this podcast? Somebody like you, somebody from the valley or maybe not, they’re great at what they do and they love Jesus and are thinking differently about their work because of that. Who would you want to hear here?
[0:31:18.4] LL: Well, I think the guy that magnifies that concept so well is Pat Gelsinger. He and I worked together when I was in Intel for many years and he left to join the MC, ended up running VMware and now has just gone back to Intel as the CEO of Intel. He is a close friend and colleague. He has been a mentor to me and I think he would be great on the show. He has written a book around faith, family, and his core values.
When he joined VMware, he went to the board and said, “Hey, look, I’ve written this book and I live this and so if you don’t want somebody that lives their Christian values then you don’t want me as your CEO.” I mean just the bonus of that and he lives it and he started taking the Bay for Christ, which is an organization designed to evangelize the Bay area and just is a man who lives by his faith and his values and he’s been extraordinarily successful but he’s never lost sight of who he is and why he’s here.
[0:32:09.9] JR: I love that answer, the CEO of Intel and VMware, that’s no small thing especially such a storied company like Intel. Looking back over the course of this one hour conversation, what’s one thing you want to highlight or reiterate before we sign off? You know, keeping in mind you’re talking to an audience of people who love Jesus and want to do great work for His glory, what do you want to stress one more time before we sign off?
[0:32:33.5] LL: The biggest thing for me is staying in relationship with Him. I think there is a temptation to want to achieve for Him and want to have an impact on society but sometimes, the want to becomes a distraction from the being in the relationship with the one that we call Lord and you’re not going to have an impact, at least not the impact that he wants you to have if you are not in relationship with him. That is real practical, right?
That is studying your Bible. I mean the Bible says, you told the church to go out and make disciples of the nation, disciples that means that you’re learning. You’re growing in relationship, you’re growing in intimacy, you have a relationship with God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. So many times, the Holy Spirit gets left off and he was a key part of evangelizing the early world in the first century when Christianity was born and so being in a relationship with God, keeping that first.
Staying connected to your first love, we don’t want to be like Leah Doschenchurch in the book of Revelation, right? We want to be connected to our first love and so that’s my advice to anyone who want to do big things for the Lord because you’re only going to do big things to the degree that you are connected to the branch and He is our branch.
[0:33:49.0] JR: Amen. Apart from Him, we can do nothing of eternal significance. We may do a lot of work and get promotions and build big companies but apart from the vine, we can do nothing that pleases and glorifies Him. Lisa, I just want to commend you for the eternally significant work that you do every day and for loving well through the ministry of excellence, sacrificing your power for other women and just reminding us to stay connected to the vine.
Hey, Lisa is really easy to find on LinkedIn. Just search Lisa Lambert and if you want to learn more about UPWARD Women, you could do so at upwardwomen.org. Lisa, thank you again so much for joining us today.
[0:34:30.5] LL: My pleasure. Thank you.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:34:33.1] JR: I love that episode, I hope you guys did too. Hey, listen, if you’re enjoying the Call to Mastery, do me favor. Share this episode with somebody. Take 10 seconds right now and think about who in my sphere of influence, who in my favorites lists on my phone, to make this really practical, needs to hear this episode? Text them a link right now. Text them a screenshot, whatever, and share the show with them so that more people could find this content and be encouraged that the work that they are doing, whether they’re a venture capitalist or a writer or a marketer or a janitor, matters because it’s a means of glorifying our great God and loving our neighbors through the ministry of excellence.
I love you guys. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to make this show for you week in and week out. I’ll see you next week.
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