Full Transcript

Darren [00:00:01]:
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of One of One. I’m your host, Darren Gold, CEO of the Trium Group. My guest today is Chris Cocks, CEO of Hasbro, one of the most iconic toy and game companies. If you’re a CEO or interested in what makes the role of CEO so singularly important, you are going to want to listen to this episode. Chris gives us a masterclass in the ability of the CEO to fundamentally alter the trajectory of a company by making one or two powerful new choices. He describes in detail the past three years leading Hasbro through a challenging and successful turnaround. And we wrap with a discussion of the importance and likely future of play. Please enjoy this wonderful conversation with Chris Cocks. Hey, Chris. Really excited to have you on the show, and thank you so much for agreeing to spend some time.

Chris Cocks [00:01:06]:
Darren, thanks so much for having me.

Darren [00:01:08]:
Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this and for so many reasons. And maybe the reason I’ll start with is the company that you’re the CEO of Hasbro. What an iconic game and toy company, and I want to try to bring that to life for listeners. I think a number of our listeners will be very familiar with the brands and franchises that you own and distribute. But maybe before we get into that, I wanted to start with your own passion for gaming and toys and maybe bring us into Chris Cocks through the lens of games and passions. You can start wherever you’d like.

Chris Cocks [00:01:43]:
Oh, gosh. In a lot of ways, my story is not unique. Everyone plays. Everyone started off their lives playing in their cribs, playing on their bedroom floor or on the living room, playing with toys and games. I’m just lucky enough that I get to actually build the things that I grew up playing with. So I’ve been a gamer all my life, ever since I can remember playing Candyland for the first time with my mom back in Cincinnati, Ohio. I must not have been much more than four. I’ve been playing basically every kind of game, playing with every kind of toy, and collecting since I was just the littlest of kids all the way through present day, even before I started working at Hasbro and before that, Wizards of the coast, which is our games division, really is something that I highly identify with. It’s how I’ve made a bunch of friends, lifelong friends, how I’ve made a bunch of new friends. My wife and I actually spend our third date competing against each other in a video arcade. So you name it, I probably have played with it, probably have collected it at one time in my life, and fortunately enough, a lot of Those things that I’ve played with and collected happen to be Hasbro products and Hasbro brands. So it’s fantastic to be able to kind of pass that torch on to the next generation and carry it forward.

Darren [00:03:06]:
What a special treat to be leading the company that had such an important part of your childhood and still an important part of who you are. I’d love to talk about how you got there because I know you spent a number of years at Microsoft working on Xbox and other aspects of that company, and then became president and CEO of Wizards of the coast and now CEO of Hasbro. But walk us through the professional arc. How did the personal passion and the professional career line up?

Chris Cocks [00:03:35]:
Well, I started off at Procter and Gamble after college, and I was working on pharmaceuticals. I was working on. In 1999, I was working on a pharmaceutical called Actonel, which was an osteoporosis medication for women, 65 plus. And I was doing a bunch of focus groups, kind of talking to women and talking to doctors about bone health. I was probably 25 at the time, and I remember I wasn’t overly passionate about bone health or osteoporosis medications. And my wife, she was my girlfriend at the time, now she’s my wife. She had just recently, for Christmas, given me a game called Baldur’s Gate, which I could play at least partially on the road with the CD ROM in my laptop at the time. Not well, because they weren’t super powerful laptops, but I remember being able to play that game. And it took me back to my childhood, back when I was 10 years old, and the first time I saw these little lead figurines in my best friend’s house down the street and had discovered D. And the Internet was exploding. Gaming had been exploding for years. And I decided, hey, I needed to stop going to these focus groups based on osteoporosis and find a job in technology. And that same girlfriend, who’s now my wife, she started interviewing at Microsoft. I interviewed and got a job at Amazon. Microsoft learned that her boyfriend was interviewing at the time down the street. So they wanted to talk to me, and they ended up giving me a job in games. And so Amazon was a great company, fantastic choices there. But being able to merge a lifelong passion as a gamer with a fantastic company like Microsoft was too good to be true. So I jumped ship from Procter and Gamble and joined Microsoft. And about four or five months later, I was moved from the PC games team into a secret project that had the code name of Xbox at the time. And I was probably, probably one of the first 50, 60 people on Xbox, mostly on the game side, and I had a great run there. I was able to. I was part of the team that brought on board Bungie, who were the makers of Halo. So I was one of the first product managers on Halo. I got to work on all kinds of our different action games, things like Mech Warrior, which became Mech Assault for the Xbox. I worked with this legendary designer named Peter Molyneux, who did games like Black and White, and he did Fable for us at the time for Xbox and just had a fantastic run there. And part of the reason I went to Microsoft was so that I could join a technology company that did a whole bunch of things. So I went and after a couple years on Xbox, I went and did a bunch of other stuff at Microsoft, notably going over to MSN and what ultimately became Windows Live and our online services. And from the time I was in Xbox and starting in 2000 through 2016, I kind of moved around different technology and gaming opportunities, whether it was at Microsoft in our Live services and then Windows Devices, which is where I was for the last several years, or leaving Microsoft for a couple years and leading educational games at a toy company called leapfrog. I just got a bunch of different kind of foundational experiences in consumer electronics and Internet services and games. And then one day, a guy who had been my college intern at MSN gave me a call and said, hey, I’ve got a job opportunity for you. He was working at a recruiting firm called Spencer Stewart. And he remembered I was a big nerd growing up and still was. And he presented me this opportunity to become president of a company called Wizards of the coast, which was a nice sized games division of Hasbro, and Wizards makes the Gathering and D and D. And man, that was a fantastic fit. So I ended up going to Wizards in 2016. I led that division for about six years. We had a great run. Magic had been around for close to, at that point, 25 years, and D&D was 45, 40, 45 years old. We just launched fifth edition, and between 2016 and 2022, we almost tripled the size of the business. It went from a little over $400 million to a little under $1.2 billion. And as a percentage of the total profitability of Hasbro, it went from about 15% of the company’s operating profits to over 50%. And that includes after we had acquired a big TV and film studio called Eone. And I think based on that, and just based on my passion for all the brands at Hasbro. They gave me an opportunity to bump me upstairs, and I became CEO of Hasbro in early 2022, and I’ve been doing that for the last two and a half years. So that’s kind of my journey of how I’ve gotten here.

Darren [00:08:46]:
Incredible. I’m curious to go back to 2016. It’s obvious that you were a passionate gamer, but you had 16 years of experience. And I’m wondering what Hasbro saw in you to give you the president role at Wizards of the Coast. What was it about your experience at Microsoft that prepared you, and where were the gaps?

Chris Cocks [00:09:05]:
Well, I think a couple things. I’d had experience in video games from Xbox and then leading the games team at Leapfrog, But I don’t think that was what was necessarily unique because a lot of people had games experience. I think a couple things that Hasbro liked in me at the time was I had games. I had kind of classic brand management training and experience from Procter and Gamble, and I had a legitimate passion and kind of feel for the target consumer that Wizards of the coast catered to. And what Hasbro was looking at the time was for a general manager of that business who knew the fans, knew the brands authentically, and also had some experience in digital games and digital marketing. Because at the time, we were very much focused on kind of like the classic analog versions of the games and didn’t have a lot of bets inside of video games or what are called now games as a service. And I think I brought that in to the company, and that was a big part of our success. We launched a game called the Gathering Arena. A couple years after I started, we acquired a game service called D and D Beyond, which is now the primary way people play D and D. And then we started a host of new game studios and signed a lot of licensing partnerships with some big licensing partners. That’s been a big part of Hasbro’s success story today.

Darren [00:10:37]:
So when you think about your qualities as a leader, particularly in a president slash CEO role, what did you bring in that was really helpful, and what did you have to nurture over those kind of critical six years?

Chris Cocks [00:10:48]:
Yeah, well, I mean, a couple of things that I think were real strengths. I understood the consumer, but I didn’t take for granted that I had complete knowledge of the consumer. I got that we really needed to invest very heavily in consumer insight, and we couldn’t just go on our gut or our own lived experience. And actually that focus on investing in consumer insights Investing in data analytics. That was really the big unlock, in my opinion, about the success we had at Wizards and that we continue to have today. We decoupled the amount of resources we put against that, and I could have probably decoupled it again and it still would have been a winning combination for us. I think I also understood fundamentally how a games company is supposed to be organized. I was surprised when I joined Wizards that they were a marketing led, like brand management organization. And no game company or game organization that I had either worked for or worked with was marketing led. They always were studio led because the assumption was the product really was the brand. And I changed that within a year and a half of joining the company. And I think that combination of increased insight with getting the right people who really understood the consumer and were closest to it, the designers, and putting them in charge really was a big set of unlocks for us. Where I think I had gaps is the biggest team I’d ever run was probably 150, 200 people. And there’s a gear shift that you have when you go from 150 to 200 people to 1,000 people plus. And then there’s another one when you go to like 5 to 10,000 people. You have to show up differently, you have to think differently, you have to have a certain maturity in which you keep your creative spirit, you keep, like your passion, but you have to think broader than yourself. And that took a couple years to kind of get used to, to be frank. And then I think, like the other gear shift that I had, and this is kind of funny, and it’s almost counterintuitive because I don’t think you read about this in a lot of leadership books. If you would have asked me in 2015, what’s the most important thing for a company, Is it the leader or is it. Or leaders, or is it the. Like the teams? I would have said unambiguously, unequivocally, it’s the teams. And I discovered how important having the right leaders were, how important that function of a leader is to unlock mindsets, give permission to think differently, give permission to grow, and just how critical that is. And I still believe teamwork is super duper important. I still believe, like, the quality of talent is important, but I probably didn’t appreciate enough how powerful the role of the leader was. And that’s been a lesson that I’ve continued to learn to this day.

Darren [00:13:51]:
I’m really fascinated by that. I’m so glad you brought it up. Can we drill into that a little bit I’m curious what it was that opened your eyes to that phenomenon. And then what in particular are the. What I call kind of high leverage points where a leader can actually amplify their impact?

Chris Cocks [00:14:09]:
Well, like at Wizards of the Coast. So I had to make some painful calls. Like, we had to. We had to turn over a large number of people, particularly in our technology functions, because we just. We hadn’t hired people who had expertise in a certain area or knew what good looked like. And so, yeah, we had to bring some. A lot of new people in, particularly in the digital side of the house. But the majority of Wizards of the coast was kind of a traditional tabletop games business. Like, they. It wasn’t high tech. And the biggest kind of like a B test for. For me on leadership was that transition of going from being marketing led to being design led. It was the same designers who’d been there for decades that I put in charge, and it was the same marketers that we had remained there and just that switch and just that changing of the guard and saying, nope, hey, the designers really understand the consumers and the product experience is really what matters to the target audience. And feeding them the right insights. That was a total switch in how we started thinking about things. It was like the difference, to use, like a football analogy, an American football analogy. It was like the difference between playing offense versus playing defense and the unlock that you had for these people who’d been working on this product for 5, 10, 15, in some cases, 20 years, putting them in charge and saying, no, grow it. And forget all those rules that we thought we had. Forget all the things that we were afraid of, like moving our cheese or thinking about the audience in one way and think about it in a completely different way. That was super powerful, and it worked marvelously well. Like, we went from. For the three years before I started through, like, the first year I was there, so call it 2014-2017, the brand was growing 2%, 1% a year. In early 2017, we made this switch, and the marketers kind of went into a service function, and the product people took over. By 2018, Wizards went from growing at 1 to 2% to growing at like 18% a year. And it was 100%. A change in leadership direction, a change in attitude, and a change in mindset.

Darren [00:16:39]:
That’s incredible. So I imagine, number one, you need to have the pattern recognition experience or just instinct and insight to be able to see that, and then, second, the courage to be decisive and to take risk. It sounds like you had both of those things. And I want to just again, go a little bit deeper. Like, what was going on for you? How did you wrestle if to the extent you wrestled at all? Because the impact obviously of this one decision was profound.

Chris Cocks [00:17:10]:
I’ve always had a bias towards action and a bias towards growth. My psychology is I probably dislike losing more than I love winning. That describes a lot about, like, kind of what decisions I’m willing to make and what risks I’m willing to tolerate. The other thing I’m very focused on is really getting to the. Really getting to a common vision of what the truth is and making sure that we’ve bulletproofed that and really interrogated what we think the truth is. And I’ll give you a couple examples. So we had these tough decisions that we had to make on the Gathering, which now is like Hasbro’s billion dollar product. And it drives a. A ton of our profitability. Circa 2016. We believed that the Magic audience was like, really focused on this highly competitive 1v1 player who a lot of them aspired to get into some kind of tournament circuit for Magic. And we knew of. Of course, we knew of other card games, like you had Pokemon, you had Yu Gi oh, for instance, to name two popular ones. And those tended to be more kid focused and on the extreme, collector focused for, like, adults who had played it when they were kids. But in Magic, we kind of disdained the Collector and we felt it was too complicated for the kid, even though these other card games were just as big as us and were somehow doing fine with them. And the other thing we thought of is we had to stay true to this one primary format of play, this format of play called standard. And if we did anything that kind of veered from that, we would put in danger, like this highly engaged consumer who was super passionate about the game and was spending a lot of money on the game. And so there was very much this like, hey, we can’t move the cheese because we could lose the whole thing. And that was super reinforced by like all, like, the social channels that the product teams listen to, like Reddit and Twitter and our Facebook channels, like our store network, that were very invested in these players. But like, the dichotomy though was, is that these other brands were doing all these other things and they were making a bunch of players happy. They were growing, and in some ways they were more vibrant from Magic. And then we also saw that there was like this thriving secondary market on Magic, and a bunch of people who participated in the secondary market were playing this Other format of play that we knew of called Commander. And Commander was like this super casual format of play. It wasn’t about chasing like the latest card tech. It was about making these fun, super large, but one of decks. And it had been growing for years and years, but we’d been barely servicing it. And so you kind of had a choice to make there. That was a tough choice, which was like, okay, do I just keep doing the thing that had kind of made us so successful and had us grown so much over the previous five or six years, even though we were starting to. Even though our growth was starting to flatline? Or do you take some calculated risks and try doing what these other brands were doing and try also building products that maybe this large segment of silent consumers who weren’t engaged with you on social channels obviously enjoyed a lot. And we decided to embrace taking some risk. We tried to do it in a smart way. And we called the strategy castles and boats. And we said, okay, we’ll continue to service like our core competitive player. That’s a castle, and we’ll try reinforcing that, but we’re going to launch some boats. And those were kind of low risk, highly agile and flexible kind of bets that if they found solid ground somewhere across the ocean, we could maybe establish a new castle on. And if they didn’t find anything and were metaphorically lost at sea, we didn’t bet the kingdom on it, so to speak. And what we ended up finding is just about every castle we invested in, or, sorry, every boat we invested in, hit paydirt and the growth and Magic’s close to $1.1 billion business today. That competitive set is probably the same size as it was in 2016. And all of our growth, all of our growth has come from that social player, that Commander player, and that collector segment. And if we hadn’t, and that was just an unlock of mindset, we didn’t have to do anything different. We didn’t have to fundamentally reinvent the product. We just had to make some products that were germane for them. And then we also, on the negative side, we had to tolerate some static back through those social channels from those highly engaged players who didn’t really like things changing and didn’t like it when products weren’t made just for them. But that’s just a calculated risk that you had to make. And it goes back to my mentality, which is like, okay, we never seek to go anger anyone or make anyone have a bad time, but it’s a worthy trade off. If you maybe upset 1% of people, but all of a sudden can attract 50% more. And I think that’s magic and magic and the unlock that we had.

Darren [00:22:58]:
I’m struck by, as you described, this incredible strategy of sending out sort of trial balloons or boats. A parallel between sort of gameplay and how you described your strategy. Am I onto something there? Is there something about your deep rootedness in games and how you think about business strategy overall?

Chris Cocks [00:23:18]:
Well, I’m a gaming omnivore, so it’s probably. No, it’s no. There’s no accident of why I would use game analogies quite a bit. I try to keep it accessible.

Darren [00:23:28]:
But even the underlying strategy itself, in terms of where to place bets, to take risk, right. To experiment, to be creative, there seems to be a really interesting parallel and maybe a lesson in all of this because there are lots of CEOs running businesses probably have are either closet gamers or just love it. But it’s an interesting thing to think about in terms of how you think about overall strategy.

Chris Cocks [00:23:52]:
Yeah, I think maybe it’s a little bit too reductive to say that running a business is similar to like running a strategy game because you’re dealing with people’s lives and there’s important regulatory aspects that you have to think about and safety and a whole host of very serious and weighty issues that you have to think through. But when you get past those very important aspects of the role, you really are making a lot of choices that you would make in a kind of classic strategy game. Business is fundamentally about resource allocation, and it’s fundamentally about taking your employees and your leaders and applying your best talent to your best opportunities and then also thinking about what the counter moves will be from the people who are competing in the market with you. So from that perspective, it is a lot like playing name a competitor’s Game, Settlers of Catan, or the negotiation portion of Monopoly, or pick your favorite game. Yeah, I don’t think I’d be able to find a good Scrabble analogy, but I’m defensive Scrabble player, so there’s a certain degree of that too.

Darren [00:25:01]:
Something in Dungeons and Dragons that I’m sure you could pull from if you had to. Yeah, I want to pull on the thread that you first articulated, which is this idea of like the singular importance of a leader and these kind of high leverage moves that can fundamentally shift the trajectory of a business and open up new mindsets and possibilities and take us to 2022. Is 2022 is the time where you become CEO of Hasbro and maybe we could just start with what were the circumstances, how were you brought on, and what were you being asked to do, and what did you realize you were being asked to do as you joined?

Chris Cocks [00:25:37]:
Yeah. So I became CEO of Hasbro at the end of February of 2022. The prior CEO, Brian Goldner, who’d been. He was a legend in the toy industry. He’d been CEO for 13 years, maybe longer, maybe 14 years of Hasbro had grown at like, just astronomical growth during his period. He died of complications from colon cancer. He had a relapse. He’d first had it in the mid 20, like, 15, 16 timeframe. And then unfortunately, it came back, and he was planning to retire during that time, but he passed away well before his time and certainly well before the CEO succession process had fully played out. So what was supposed to be a super orderly and one year plus transition became still orderly, but far more truncated. And then what also happened is a couple months before I became CEO, we had become aware that an activist investor had taken a stake in the stock and had started making outreaches to us. And so, like a week or two before I officially started that activist started a proxy campaign and basically wanted to split up the company and put on. He’d owned like 3% of the shares of the stock, and he wanted to put on like 50% of the board. And so I spent my first four months in a proxy battle with this activist, going to proxy advisory firms, talking to all of our investors, and basically learning about investment banks and the arcana of proxy fights through a fire hose very quickly. The benefits of that were I really got to know our investors very well, very quickly. I probably had two or three years worth of investor meetings with our top 2030 holders in the course of three or four months. I also became pretty tight with our board because there was a lot of frequent board interactions as you waged a proxy fight. And ultimately we won. So we won by over a 9010 margin, which was pretty decisive because I think the merits were on our side. I think the negative of that was when you read the CEO for Dummies book, it’s, hey, listen for your first five or six months and play your cards as close to the vest as you can so that you can understand the situation. And if you need to make a clean break on strategy, you can, and you can do that thoughtfully. And I was denied that because of the proxy fight. I basically had to go in and defend the company’s strategy as opposed to kind of think through the company’s Strategy. And I was still thinking through it at the same time, but that it limits your options to a certain degree when you have to be so vocal in the defense of the prior strategy. The other thing that was going on in this time was we were about two and a half years into a big acquisition that we’d made of a company called E1. They were a film and TV studio based out of Canada and the UK. And some aspects of that acquisition were going well. Like we had acquired their animated unit which ran. One of their signature brands was Peppa Pig and Peppa’s huge. But there were several aspects of it that were underperforming quite significantly. And that was a lot of the live action film and tv. And that was the biggest acquisition in our history. And I made the tough decision that we had to unwind it. We were two and a half years in. The E1 film and TV team was still spending probably 99, 98% of their content budget on non Hasbro IP. And the whole idea was, is that they would make film and TV shows based on Hasbro IP and then we would monetize it through our significant licensing and product development capabilities. And that just wasn’t kind of coming through. And the cultural kind of merge between the two companies, there’d been a fair amount of tissue rejection. So I started up fighting a proxy fight, deciding that we had to unwind a big acquisition. And then we also were coming out of COVID And during the COVID timeframe, the toy industry grew by about 35, 40%. And starting at the end of 2022, we started having a correction of the toy industry back to getting back to normal. So at the end of 2022, like Q4, the toy industry declined by 7, 8%. And then in 2023 it declined again by another 7 or 8%. So I had a couple headwinds that I had to contend with in my first couple years as CEO.

Darren [00:30:33]:
Yeah, that’s to put it mildly, I think inheriting a business in the time of a proxy war, an acquisition that needed to be unwound, decline in the toy industry, I think I heard you describe it.

Chris Cocks [00:30:47]:
And taking over for a legend.

Darren [00:30:48]:
And taking over for a legend. Yeah, that’s a. I don’t know what the game metaphor there is, but you were dealt a rather poor hand in some respects. Of course, an incredible opportunity. I’m really curious though. In some ways it sounds like you were perfectly suited for what was quite a difficult beginning of a CEO. But I think you’ve referred to it as A turnaround. And I’m always curious to understand the nature of the role of CEO in these turnaround situations. How would you describe the nature of your role, given that dynamic?

Chris Cocks [00:31:20]:
Take everything I said before about what I had to learn at Wizards of the coast and how you had to show up and multiply it by 10. It’s just natural. That happens anyway, when you go from being a division leader to being a public company leader, because just the external exposure you have is just immensely higher, no matter how much kind of PR and outreach you do. But then when you’re going through a turnaround, especially for a company like Hasbro, which had so many good years of growth and enjoys such favorability among consumers around the world and investors around the world, people, I think, take an outsize interest in our company simply because they have such a vested personal interest in it. If you go into any home in the United States, like, nine out of 10, probably 99 out of 100, have a Hasbro product in there. If you ask someone to name, like, 10 of their favorite memories from childhood, probably at least two of them have to do with, like, a Hasbro product. Whether it’s playing a board game with your family or a treasured toy or a gift that you got for Christmas or a birthday, we have a big part of. We have an outsized portion of people’s lives. So from that perspective, there’s an awful lot of responsibility that kind of rests on your shoulders. You want to make sure that our mission is to spread joy and community through the world, and you have to be like the citizen in chief of that. You have to represent that and make sure that comes through in everything that you do. On the flip side, you also have to make some very hard calls in the context of a turnaround. You have to look very soberly at what you think the market’s going to do. You have to look very soberly at the cost structure you have and the assumptions you had in a prior plan versus what the likely outcomes are going to be in a new reality. And you have to make a whole host of tough decisions, and we’ve had to make those. We’re in the process of taking out $750 million of costs from our overhead, which is a large percentage of our overhead. We’ve had to reduce our total headcount. When I started, our total headcount was probably in the neighborhood of 6,500. Our total headcount will probably exit the year under 5,000. And then you have to figure out where you’re going to invest for growth. And you have to do that in the context of, hey, I’m in a whole bunch of segments. I’m in entertainment, I’m in licensing. I’m in games. I’m in video games, I’m in toys. And what’s the right place to place Our place our key leaders, place our best talent and place our capital bets. And a lot of that is just standard with the job. But I think in a turnaround, you really have to think carefully, and sometimes you have to move quite quickly to make sure you’re getting ahead of where the market’s taking you. And for the first year or two, I would say we were behind the eight ball. We were trying to get out in front of an acquisition which hadn’t worked out well. We were trying to get out in front of a toy market which was declining faster than I think anyone anticipated. But over the last 12 months, I think you’re seeing that we’re getting in front of that turnaround, and we’re starting to see daylight at the end of that tunnel. Our cost structure is getting where it needs to be. Our toy business is. It’s not growing yet, but it’s starting to stabilize. Our games business is on fire. Our licensing business and the bets we made there, I think we’re very prescient and are driving a lot of growth for us. And so the nice part of this is, like, the stock market reacts, the investors react, and the teams that work for you, they’ve been going through the grinder trying to drive this turnaround, and they’re starting to see daylight as well. And that feels good.

Darren [00:35:13]:
Yeah. But I imagine a really tough 12 to 18 months for everyone at the company, you having to hold this responsibility. And I’m curious what it is that motivated you, that gave you the strength to persist and get to the other side? I know you’re not obviously any. You were never all the way there, but get through what was undeniably a hard period.

Chris Cocks [00:35:37]:
Well, I mean, for me, there are three things. The first thing is you just want to win. Like, I’ve played sports my whole life. I’ve played games my whole life. I’m the CEO of the biggest publicly traded toy and game company in the world. Of course I want to win. I’m an unapologetic capitalist. So I want to see us thrive. I want to see us get to the other side. And there’s a lot of intrinsic energy that comes from that. I think the second thing is this notion of legacy. Hasbro celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. And it’s regularly seen ups and downs in its business. It’s just the nature of kind of an entertainment business that there’ll be cyclicality, that you’ll be exposed to some categories and some segments that are going to be in growth phases and others that aren’t. And when you’ve been around for 100 years as a company, and really we’ve been around for more like 150 years because Milton Bradley started making board games back in the 1860s, you have this kind of like long. It causes you to have a longer view than a company that’s maybe been around 20 or 30 years. And it causes you to kind of study the history of it and appreciate that there will be a tomorrow and it’s always darkest before the dawn, so to speak. And I think the last thing is fundamentally it’s the nature of what we do. And you know, when I have a hard day and there are more than my fair share of them, particularly when you’re going through a turnaround, I’ll go to a Target or I’ll go to a Walmart and I will just kind of shop the toy aisle. And you get a lot of energy by seeing like a five year old kind of light up when they go into the toy aisle picking out a birthday gift or talking to their mom or dad about what they want for a holiday. You see a lot of you get that when you go to a movie premiere and you see people delighted by the story that you’re telling. You see that by reading the reviews of a game that really lit up someone’s week or lit up someone’s month playing and connected them together with other people. And ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s not about the winning, it’s not about the legacy. Those are important. It’s about ultimately bringing a smile to people’s face and giving some joy to people. And that’s what really gets you through it.

Darren [00:38:07]:
Well, you obviously made some tough but very right calls over the past couple years that brought a lot of joy and a lot of smiles to many people’s faces. I imagine there were some things you got wrong or maybe would have done differently. And I’m curious to hear, like what were the lessons? What would you have done differently? Were you, you know, were you given the opportunity to do it again?

Chris Cocks [00:38:27]:
Oh gosh, so many. A couple things. Every CEO I’ve ever met, when they look back, they’d say they’d always would have gone faster, probably would have gone faster and slower. When I Started, I was a brand new CEO. I’d never been a CEO of a public company before. My board was very concerned about continuity and they really wanted me to preserve like a lot of members of the prior management team and today only one of them is still with the company. And it’s not because they were bad people. It’s not because, like they weren’t good at their jobs. It’s just you need to have a management team that has cohesion of vision and is perfectly aligned about which direction they want the train to go. And I would have been faster and more decisive at moving that management team out. It took me about 18 to 24 months to move them out. Really should have taken three to six months. And I think that would have been a real difference maker. Kind of going back to my prior example with wizards. And then the thing I would have gone slower on is, and this kind of goes back to my personality, I wanted to get out quickly with a declaration of what my strategy was, especially after going through like proxy battle and making the decision to sell E1. And in retrospect, especially after going through a proxy fight that got nasty in some respects and there was a bit of mud flinging. If I could go back in time, I would have counseled myself, hey, hold off on doing an investor day. Let this go back into the distance. No one’s going to blame you if you take an extra six months. And I think that would have served me better. Many of the themes that we delivered in our investor day in October, which was eight, nine months after I started, they remain true today. We’re still focused on games, we’re still focused on licensing. But it would have given me an opportunity to kind of see what the post Covid world looked like in toys. I think it would have allowed us to get a little further along in the sales process for E1. And I think I just would have had a more cohesive message with maybe a little more quiescent time. Between the end of the proxy battle and the declaration of the new strategy, which I think would have served us well.

Darren [00:40:52]:
Yeah, we spent a bunch of our time looking backwards. I wanted to point forward just for a few minutes and have you think about what is the future for this company? And maybe a deeper question. What is the future of play as you see it? And then what does that mean for you as a leader?

Chris Cocks [00:41:12]:
Oh, gosh. Well, maybe I’ll start with the future of Play first, because I think that dictates where we take the company. Play is only going to become a more and more important part of people’s lives that endures for a longer and longer portion of their lives. I was born in 1973. I certainly think the expectation was in my generation was that around 10 or 11 or 12, you put down playthings and yeah, you know, maybe you play with like the Super Nintendo or maybe you play with like your Sega now and then, but you’re done with toys. And I think our generation, like Gen X, was the first generation that says, no, I kind of like these things and I want to keep collecting them and I want to keep playing with them. And a whole bunch of creators. I think Tim Burton was like a seminal creator with like the Batman series, which is like, no, comic books aren’t just for kids, they’re for everyone. And I think that’s only strengthened over time. When you talk to Millennials, when you talk to Gen Z, their favorite brands are the brands that they play with and that they engage with and have been since they were little kids. And the average age of collectors just continues to get older. The average age of people who play just continues to get older. The fastest growing demographic of video Gamers today are 35 to 55 year olds, not 2 to 23 year olds. And I just think that’s going to become a bigger and bigger and more and more dominant portion of the industry of play, whether it’s toys, whether it’s games, whether it’s video games. And that to me, is entirely informing Hasbro’s strategy. We already are lucky in that greater than 60% of our sales is generated by consumers, 13 plus. And I just see that becoming a bigger and bigger portion for us over time. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop making preschool toys or that we’re going to stop making toys, the classic toys for kids, because they’re like our first handshake. But increasingly, I think when people think of Hasbro, they’re going to think about us as an ageless company that has relevance in what I collect now and what I play with now, as opposed to a kid’s company that I remember fondly from when I’m a kid or that I buy for my own children. And I think that’ll have a pretty big ramification for us. And then in terms of me, I think that just makes it even more important in terms of picking the right leaders with the right mindset who are connected to that audience. You have to pick people who have an open mind about where their brands could go. I can’t talk too much about our product portfolio. But a classic toy industry professional would look at a brand like GI Joe and say, well, that has to be A rated G IP because our core target customer is kids 4, 5 and 6. A growth, mindset oriented leader of that brand would say, well, hey, GI Joe is actually one of our fastest growing brands and the average age of the consumer for it is 35 to 45. And what I really need to be making is I need to be making products with the tone and manner that appeals to a 40 year old rather than a 4 year old. And you’ll make drastically different decisions based on that. And so I think as a leader, you have to pick people who can think that way and think about where the hockey puck is going as opposed to where the hockey puck has been.

Darren [00:44:51]:
So as we start to wrap up here, I wanted to give you an opportunity to add anything. Something that we may not have spoken about that’s important to you or something that you may just want to synthesize or summarize that we have covered.

Chris Cocks [00:45:06]:
Oh, gosh. I suppose I would just. It might sound self serving as the person who’s in charge of a toy and game company, but I would tell everyone who’s listening, regardless of how serious they are or how important their job is, take some time to play. It’ll make you feel better. It’ll help you make some friends. It’ll help you connect with your family in a way that maybe you didn’t expect. And there’s all kinds of different ways to play. You could play wordle on your phone if you just want to do like a little brain teaser. You could play Scrabble with your spouse. You could go really bold and try out some silly voices and roll some dice and try role playing with D and D. There’s all kinds of wonderful opportunities. And speaking as someone who’s made more best friends in the last 10 years, I had in the prior 20 years since college. Play is such a wonderful part of your life. Always embrace it and don’t forget about it.

Darren [00:46:01]:
What an incredible invitation. I hope people are listening. I hope they take you up on it. And I want to thank you, Chris, for a really extraordinary conversation. We covered a lot of ground in a short period of time. So thank you very much.

Chris Cocks [00:46:14]:
Thanks, Darren.

Darren [00:46:15]:
Yeah, talk soon. That really was a masterful illustration of the ability of a CEO, through decisive, courageous, and oftentimes contrarian choices, to unlock mindsets and alter the trajectory of a company’s performance. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. And I look forward. Forward to being with you on the next episode of one of one. Until then, I hope you live and lead with courage, wisdom, and above all, with love.

One of One is produced by Erica Gerard and Podkit Productions. Music by John LaSala.