Name: CEO’s Best Job Advice: Embrace Career Change
Uploaded: 2024-06-28
Duration: 5 min 33 s
Description: CEO Charles Lowrey discusses how Prudential Financial, a 150-year-old company has remained resilient through economic and global challenges, from the Great Depression to the recent pandemic. He also discusses adapting to evolving customer needs by embracing AI and tech innovation.

CEO Charles Lowrey discusses how Prudential Financial, a 150-year-old company has remained resilient through economic and global challenges, from the Great Depression to the recent pandemic. He also discusses adapting to evolving customer needs by embracing AI and tech innovation.

CEO’s Best Job Advice: Embrace Career Change

Leadership

CEO Charles Lowrey discusses how Prudential Financial, a 150-year-old company has remained resilient through economic and global challenges, from the Great Depression to the recent pandemic. 

CEO Charles Lowrey discusses how Prudential Financial, a 150-year-old company has remained resilient through economic and global challenges, from the Great Depression to the recent pandemic

Career changes are going to occur for the vast majority of people. And so that is something that young people just need to understand. The second point I'd make is that careers are never linear. So even if you do stay in the same company, you may be get promoted, sometimes you may have lateral moves. That's all OK? Because at the end of the day, when you think about your career, you are a compilation of your experiences that you had beforehand. And when you move career or when you move into a new position, you're bringing all those experiences with you, which enables you to provide a different perspective than others might. So what I would say is that one should embrace career changes or moves within a company because those make you a a better employee over the long term because of the variety of experiences you have prudential has been around for 100 and 50 years and has seen all sorts of different global economic conditions. It has seen the Great Depression, the great recession, two pandemics and a host of other things. So we do two things in order to make sure that we are resilient and we are strong. First is we always look to our financial strength. We are an extremely strong company. We make promises for decades and clients need to understand that we will be there for them. The second point is that we don't react to any particular economic circumstance because we are looking through the cycle and we manage through cycles in order to make sure that we are resilient for the long term. When I think about resilience, I think about a number of different components. The first of which starts with talent. If you have great talent, if you have great employees, they by definition are resilient. The second component though is do they all believe in a North Star, which is our purpose? And if you have talented people that are all going in the same direction that helps with resilience, the third component is, do they understand their role in the company in fulfilling our purpose? And if you have someone that understands their role that they come in every day and they know what they're doing that will make them resilient. The fourth component is that the company itself credential needs to support our employees both in terms of obviously financial remuneration, which is table stakes, but also in terms of their health and their wellness and credentials have extraordinary benefits to support our employee, you put those four components together. And when we face something like we did in the pandemic, where we were one of the first companies to go remote. Our employees were knocking down challenges right and left. In order to support our customers, I couldn't have been more proud of the company and our employees. And to me that is the single greatest example of resilience that we have faced. Some of the biggest challenges that we face today are external and others are obviously internal. But I would say the the biggest challenge we face today is the rate of change that our customers are experiencing both in terms of their needs and their desires. So in terms of their needs, you think about the aging demographic of our customers, you think about the different needs, they have investing insurance and retirement security. But then you think about the customers and how they are demanding services, they may want them completely digitally online. We can do that, they may want it in a hybrid experience where they start digital and then talk to one of our advisors. They may just want to talk to our advisors or they may want to talk to their own advisor and we do that as well through third party distribution. And therefore, as we innovate as we change, as our customers change, we're also changing the way in which we deliver those products to our customers in terms of speed, in terms of specificity of product. And that's where A I which we've been using for a long time for 10 years and now generative A I comes into play. And as an example, if you think about one of our simplified term products, it used to take 22 days to underwrite and now it takes a few seconds. That's the kind of speed and the kind of innovation that's taking place in the world today, in our industry today. And certainly within prudential.