"If you're a leader and you want to create a culture of innovation, you've got to be really okay with failure." — Blake Tablak
During a recent Trax discussion, Blake Tablak, CEO of Trax, shared his perspective on leading through constant change. He explained why he starts from the assumption that volatility is permanent and why he believes staying where you are is more dangerous than taking a risk.
What This Conversation Covers
The conversation was built around four questions. They covered why adaptability has become a critical leadership skill, how leaders can move beyond traditional playbooks, what role training and continuous learning play in high-performing teams and what advice Blake would give leaders guiding their organizations through uncertainty.
Along the way, Blake explains why he values cultural adaptation over technical adaptation, why heavy friction usually means you picked the wrong play and why he tells his teams he'll take the blame if a risky idea fails in front of a customer.
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Full Transcript
Host: Hi everyone, and welcome to the Trax channel. Today I'm here with Blake Tablak, CEO of Trax. Hi Blake, how are you?
Blake Tablak: Wonderful, how are you?
Host: Good. We were chatting before, and I was like, this is the most Friday Thursday I've ever felt in my life.
Blake Tablak: The days have felt dense this week. I got home at midnight last night, and I was up at five, five fifteen, something like that. Dense. That's where we're at.
Host: It is. That's such a perfect way to describe it, because I'm like, what is going on? It's not a full moon. The kids are good. What's going on? Anyways, the show must go on. So today we're talking about leading through constant change. The first question is, with businesses facing constant change, why has adaptability become such a critical leadership skill?
Blake Tablak: Because there is no other way to do it. We laid out a strategy as a company where we made the assumption that the marketplace is always going to have a few key characteristics, and there’s really nothing you can do about it. One is volatility. If you’ve ever been to the University of Chicago, they put on a great executive weekend session, and one of the topics is VUCA. It’s basically volatility, uncertainty, et cetera. It’s this whole idea that if you’re making plans for consistency, it’s not going to happen.
So if you just start by saying, look, we're living in a volatile world, that means I'm going to have to adapt to things constantly. In logistics, you get missiles in the Red Sea. You get anxiety over the Strait of Hormuz. You get anxiety over the Strait of Taiwan. The Panama Canal isn't working. There's something happening at every given moment of the day, and you'd better adapt. So I think the first thing is just accepting the fact that it's going to be volatile. Once you accept that, you can get to the next step, which is, okay, great, how do I adapt to that?
As a leader, I can tell you cultural adaptation is way more important than technical adaptation. What I constantly tell other people is take risks. I'm not talking bet-the-farm-on-black risks. I just had this conversation with a friend of mine. He's a pastor. He said, look, getting married is a risk. Having children is a risk. Go back and think about when you asked your wife to marry you. I was like, yeah. I didn't know if I had enough money. I didn't know if I could take care of her. I didn't know if I'd be a good dad. All the things. And you step into the risk, and you do so with a bit of faith.
I think it's the same thing. Think about that decision versus, say, should we build a new product, should we design something in a certain way or should we serve a customer? It's the same risk. Where I think people also get this wrong is that staying where you are is way more dangerous. So you just have to culturally get your company to a place where you're willing to take some risks. When they don't work, and assume they won't work, the company doesn't feel like it fell on its face. It just feels like it found one way not to do something. That cultural element is important.
The other one is focus. What do we want to be? We have a very clear focus. There are three categories, and one of them is, we're going to be the best in the world at this. That opened the doors to other things. So we're super focused. We want to be the best in the world at this, and we're willing to take some risks to get there. Not bet the farm on black, nothing like that. Just, I'm going to try something no one's ever tried before, and if it goes really poorly, that's okay. I think that's why it's so critical. There isn't any way to get around it, so you might as well just embrace it.
Host: Absolutely. You kind of just answered this question too, but how can leaders move beyond traditional playbooks and create organizations that are prepared to evolve?
Blake Tablak: I chat with other people about this all the time, especially people who are younger in their management or leadership experience. Playbooks don't work. When we were young, we all wanted to believe that once I figure this out, it will be great and I'll be able to do it again. Two former chief revenue officers I got a chance to get to know, and in one case worked for, talked about first principles a lot. I didn't get that. I was like, what do you mean? We always do the same thing. And it was, no, no, no. Here's the principle. Here are the variables. Take these into account and then figure out how to apply the first principle.
The first principle may be that volatility is a constant and I have to go adapt to that. Well, volatility in logistics is different than volatility in finance. So if you think you're going to build a playbook and it's going to work everywhere, again, it's not. You need to understand what those principles are first. Then, from there, create an organization that takes into account the variables of what you're doing, and pay attention to how those things work together.
By the way, if you notice massive friction, don't try to force it through. With massive friction, what you're usually finding is that you picked the wrong path or the wrong play. Make an adjustment. Don't be so hellbent that the thing in your playbook says I have to do it this way. No, no, no. I need to get a result, and that result needs to look like this, and this is how I think I get there. Here's the gap in the middle, and that's what I'm going to figure out. So that's moving beyond traditional playbooks. Understand your variables, understand your first principles and then mentally sit back and think about how to combine the two.
Host: Absolutely. So what role do training, continuous learning and development play in building high-performing teams?
Blake Tablak: One of my favorite jobs ever, and for those of you who worked with me there, I hope you felt the same way, was at an online education company. We literally changed people's lives through education. You don't get to work at companies like that very often. Most of the time, you're improving a process or saving a couple of bucks. We really got to change people's lives. Through one program, we educated a million people from lower-income environments to learn a highly technical skill, which brought them out of poverty. We did work with a large technology company for different groups of people who otherwise wouldn't have access to education. There were so many cool companies we got to work with.
What I understood even before that, and really got to see firsthand, is that education and training is the thing that makes change. There's the old joke where the CEO and CFO are talking. Not my CFO, she's amazing. But in this joke, the CEO says, we've got to train these people. And the CFO says, well, what if we train them and they leave? We just wasted all this money. And the CEO says, what if we don't and they stay? It's awful, right?
So my first thing is, anybody who wants to learn how to do something, you should be spending money to send them to it. I don't care who it's with. That training creates a different mindset. It doesn't just train them how to do a task. It teaches them how to think differently, which is what you're desperate for if you're a CEO, or any leader, honestly. You don't want people to do the same thing over and over again.
The men and women I know who are really good at their jobs firmly believe they don't know what they're doing. They firmly believe there's something around the corner they didn't know about, so they're constantly curious. Continuous training is a way more fun way to live your life. It's way more entertaining and way more interesting, and the people who work with you will be way more excited. I think it is the cornerstone of really high performance.
Host: Absolutely. Our last question is, what advice would you give leaders who are trying to guide their organizations through uncertainty?
Blake Tablak: Pick a couple of risky things you want to do. Pick a couple and go do them. When they fail, pick your people up, dust them off and throw them back up in the tree. An old boss of mine, and I wish I could tell you who it was and give him credit, I just can't remember, talked about living out on the short branches. He said, we live on the short branches. We're going to try different things. We're going to try new things. When they don't work, the branch breaks, and I'm going to pick you up and throw you back up in the tree. If I yell at you, you will never leave the safety of the trunk. I was like, what a great mental analogy.
We launched a new product not long ago. It helps customers and gives them feedback on how to improve their operation. When I was talking to some of the teams about doing this, there was a lot of fear. Am I the guy who can deliver this to my customer? Are you the company that really could do that? I took the weekend with an LLM to figure out how to do it, how the calculation should work and all that kind of stuff. Then I said, I did this, this is the prototype. If it goes poorly, I'm going to go to the meeting with you, with the customer, so when they laugh at you and point at you and tell you you're an idiot, I will be the idiot. I will take credit for the failure. If it goes well, I will give you credit. How does that sound for a deal? And they took me up on it.
So what I'm telling you is, if you're a leader and you want to create a culture of innovation, you've got to be really okay with failure. You've got to encourage it and encourage people to go out and take that risk. The personal emotional risk of failure is real. It's not made up. And it's never as bad as you think it is. In your head, you've worked out that your career is going to end if you screw this up. The reality is you just have a bad hour, and that's it. By the end of the year, you'll know a way not to do that.
And it's been received incredibly well by operations leaders and procurement people. It's been super helpful for them to be able to see this information in a way they've never been able to see it before. Now you've got a bunch of believers, and that's awesome.
Host: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. I know it can be a lot of pressure to be the CEO, the encourager, the continuous learner, all of the things that you are. It shows in the success of the company, so that's pretty cool to hear in your words.
Blake Tablak: Yeah.
Host: All right. We'll talk to you again next time. Have a really good weekend, Blake.
Blake Tablak: Awesome. Thanks.
Keep the Conversation Going
Blake's full conversation is available on the Trax channel, where you can subscribe for future live sessions with Trax leaders. For more on risk, failure and building teams that keep trying new things, explore more insights from Blake. You can also follow Trax for company updates.0