3 Engineering Skills that Make a Great CEO with Dawn Zier

Intro: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real- world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with my friend Dawn Zier. Dawn is the former CEO of Nutrisystem. She was a longtime senior executive at Reader's Digest. She's on a large number of boards, both private and public. And Dawn, thank you for being here today.

Dawn Zier: Great to be here, Matt. Thanks.

Matt Blumberg: So here's my question for you. You had a really interesting career. Before you became a CEO, you were both a marketer and an engineer. And we have a lot of founders in our audience who are engineers, they're technical founders. So my question to you is, what are your top three things that you either learned or practiced as an engineer that made you a better CEO?

Dawn Zier: Well, the first thing I learned as an engineer is that I didn't really love it. I liked engaging with people. But I will say that the engineering background, I believe, is the most important thing that made me successful as a CEO. It taught me how to set the table with facts and data, which is an approach that I bring to everything I do as a marketer and also as a CEO. That was probably the first thing. It was really setting the table.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. I mean, facts and data are so important. I forget who it was that said, " If we're going to use opinions, we'll use mine. Otherwise, let's use facts and data."

Dawn Zier: I've said that. I've said that many times also. Mm- hmm.

Matt Blumberg: All right. So setting the table, facts and data is number one. What's number two?

Dawn Zier: I think problem solving. As an engineer, you learn how to problem solve. And you can take complex problems, and you're taught in engineering how to break it down into components so they don't seem so overwhelming, and then you can build it back together. So it's really the breaking down of a problem into its pieces and then building it back up into the solve.

Matt Blumberg: It is so important for founders, because everything just seems like a giant insurmountable problem at one time or another.

Dawn Zier: Absolutely.

Matt Blumberg: Okay. And then what's number three?

Dawn Zier: Discipline. I think it's what gets measured gets done. Again, I think having the analytical rigor in place to know what goals you're setting and how to put the discipline numbers against it. I think that's something I also brought forward from engineering. So really has been, even though I didn't choose it as a long- term career, was probably the best decision I ever made, was to go in and get that mindset of thinking as an engineer.

Matt Blumberg: That's great. Great top three things. Dawn Zier, board member, advisor, mentor, coach extraordinaire. Thank you for being with us.

Dawn Zier: Thanks, Matt.