100 Episodes and a Once-in-100-Year Industry Change

In the auto industry, we love numbers. And we really love hitting milestones.?So as I approached a significant milestone on the Automotive Leaders Podcast, I couldn’t resist collecting some podcasting statistics. As of 2023, more than 4 million podcasts are out there. But the number of “active” podcasts in the marketplace, so to speak — meaning a produced episode in the past 30 days — is just 359,000.

Why? It's because people totally underestimate the complexity, workload, and creative juice necessary to produce a show. As a result, most podcasts fail before they hit their 10th episode.

“I think people give up too easily,” says John McElroy , the veteran journalist who brought us the auto industry’s first news and analysis webcast, “Autoline Daily ” (which recently topped 3600 episodes).?

I invited John and another auto/audio luminary, Flat Six Media CEO and SiriusXM host Jason Stein , to celebrate the 100th episode of Automotive Leaders with — what else? — a conversation about cars and a clarion call to transform the culture of the industry we love so much. And naturally, we also talked about podcasting.

Read on for highlights of our discussion on everything from the explosive growth of the audio medium to why culture must change alongside products, an auto executive who’s doing it right, and what they expect in the years to come.?

We all want it now

I’ve come a long way since episode #1 in 2019. I’ve been podcasting through a global pandemic, a rebrand of the company I founded, scores of keynotes to fellow executives, countless auto industry headlines and even a few trips to my native Wales. Now, one of my signature offerings is coaching other leaders to create internal podcasts that amplify their companies’ cultural values. I’ve fully embraced my role as an architect of cultural transformation.

(Re-)creating a culture that promotes innovation through values like transparency, honesty, accountability, and kindness is an investment. It takes time. It requires leaders to be vulnerable and admit their mistakes. We’re all human and we must embrace being perfectly imperfect.

There are quite a few parallels with podcasting, actually. John and Jason agree that it takes a while to build an audience — and you need to be committed to that audience. You have to know your message and be consistent, both in putting out new episodes and in the value you bring to listeners.?

You will make mistakes. As a podcaster, I've made every mistake imaginable. But for those who stay the course, growth can be phenomenal. When I launched my show, worldwide podcast listenership was about 274 million. Now it's at 464 million, projected to top 504 million globally in 2024. In the U.S. alone, 75.9 million people listen to podcasts, a number expected to grow to 100 million listeners next year.?

“Streaming is killing broadcast television. Podcasting is killing radio,” John quips.?

Even a cutting-edge radio outlet like premium satellite channel Sirius XM (home to 35 million subscribers) immediately reposts all of its exclusive talk content to every podcast platform. Jason thinks of his show “Cars & Culture with Jason Stein ” as having “one foot in the present and perhaps one foot in the future.”?

But he knows for sure that recent trends point to consumers “wanting what they want when they want it, which is emblematic of the Amazon[-esque] culture of anything else today.”

Sounds like radio is a century-plus-old industry undergoing profound, lighting-fast change but brimming with opportunities for those who harness new ways of thinking … sound familiar??

Storytelling on demand

The demographics of podcast listenership are fascinating. One of the fastest-growing segments is ages 55 and up. It’s an incredibly diverse and democratic medium.?

No matter their age, people want what they want — but they also “want to know what they want to know,” says John, who points out that the podcast format allows much deeper dives into every topic imaginable than broadcast radio. He knows from experience that for someone who wants to get a message out, appearing for 60 seconds on the radio or a minute and a half on television is about the best you can hope for. Podcasts are inherently more conducive to storytelling and much more able to adapt to cultural or technological change.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Jason produced a show for Automotive News once a week that featured industry leaders in studio. When lockdown made that infeasible, Jason and his team went in the opposite direction — instead of a hiatus, they pursued “this crazy idea of a daily podcast.” The only problem? A daily show needs guests and topics every day to fill the pipeline. It wasn’t always perfect — but Jason says the show’s audience loved listening daily to connect with people in ways they couldn’t while working at home.?

“It all comes down to people,” he says. “It’s people's stories, and it’s telling them in an effective way.”

And the conversational part of this is key, I might add. People want to listen to a conversation. They don't want to read (or hear) corporate-speak that’s been sanitized so much it’s virtually meaningless. We all crave authenticity.

This brings me to my very favorite topic: authentic leadership, and why it’s the only way forward for an industry undergoing the most radical transformation since its inception.?

‘Unlearning’ the legacy model

In the automotive world, our ongoing once-in-a-lifetime transformation is very focused on the products we manufacture. To meet the challenges our industry faces now, we have to rethink how we empower our teams, not just the way we power the vehicles we build. That’s why the mission of my podcast is to promote authentic leadership and people-centric corporate culture; to showcase leaders who truly understand culture transformation — so that we can all learn from them.?

As former podcast guest Stephen M. R. Covey says, “You cannot win in the marketplace without also winning in the workplace.”?

John thinks Covey’s concept is spot-on.?

“If you don’t have a motivated, dedicated workforce that comes into work every day excited to do new stuff that’s going to make the product or the services the company offers better, there’s no way you’re going to compete against those [companies] that have that,” John says. “So culture and leadership … in the auto industry [are probably] more important now than ever before.”

He agrees that the shift from gas to electric vehicles is the catalyst for this cultural change, but that it’s not about the products themselves — it’s about how we make them; how we “unlearn all the practices of the past and learn new ones.”?

Jason points out that over the years, we’ve seen way too many auto-industry executives destroy culture within the companies they led because of their insistence on running things their way — or simply “on more ego-driven desires,” he says. In Jason’s experience, we can destroy culture as fast as we build it.??

That’s “command and control” in action: the hierarchical, top-down, authoritarian, and inflexible style of leadership in place when I came up in this industry. In some places, it persists. Command and control is a sort of cultural hangover from the days when automotive manufacturers produced tanks and other munitions for World War II — and after the Allies won, welcomed thousands of GIs back to the assembly line.

That was 78 years ago.

Today, the best leaders tend to embrace change, push their teams to higher levels of innovation and achievement, and have respect for every individual. When I ask which leaders are doing that now, both my guests mention the newest president of Toyota, 53-year-old veteran engineer Koji Sato. The company’s chairman (and former president) Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company’s founder, personally tasked Sato with transforming the automaker into a “mobility company.”

Jason had the chance to sit down with Sato at his first appearance in front of a North American audience since being named to the role.

“You can feel a difference in Mr. Sato,” Jason says. “He has an engineering mindset, but he also understands teamwork and the value of all the Toyota associates around the world and how his leadership is going to set the path. But he calls himself a team captain. … A leader who exemplifies those attributes pulls a company together.”

Change starts from the top

There are definitely more examples of leaders who get it and are making profound cultural shifts at their companies — just take a look at my back catalog of podcast episodes! But there are many more leaders who don’t get it at all, or who might know change is imperative but don’t understand the rate of transformation necessary, which has to go hand-in-hand with the revolution in our products.?

My experience in the Tier 1 supply chain taught me that in C-suite meetings, anything related to culture change — including training and leadership development — is considered “soft.” Executives are usually concerned with hard data: Are we making the numbers this quarter? What are we going to cut if we don’t meet our goal? But this short-term, myopic view has a tendency to soften — in the sense of weakening and diminishing — a company’s relevance in the marketplace. If we don’t get our heads out of the weeds so we can look onward and upward, we’re not going to have a future.??

That reminds John of the adage, Tell me how you’re going to measure me and I’ll show you how I’m going to perform.?

“All these executives have been tasked by their board of directors to deliver ever-growing profits quarter over quarter and drive up the stock price,” he reminds us. “That’s how the Board of Directors has defined their jobs … any CEO who wants to keep their job is going to do what the Board of Directors wants them to do. It really starts a whole layer above them.”

Back to the future

When I ask my guests to impart words of wisdom to my listeners — specifically about the challenges to come in the automotive space, John takes us back in time.?

“Get ready,” he says. “This industry is going to see more change in the next seven years — taking us to the end of this decade — than we’ve seen in the last 100 years. I think you have to go back to around 1905 to find a similar situation in the auto industry [like] we face right now. Tremendous change going on. And back then it was technological. Today, it’s cultural. And the difference today, of course, is that it’s on a global basis.”

Jason adds that the entire industry, not just legacy manufacturers, will need to “declare their major,” so to speak — everyone from suppliers to mom-and-pop dealerships to trucking companies will have to choose a side: Embrace EVs or hang on for dear life until the internal combustion engine sputters away entirely.?

“This is the period of change,” Jason says. “And if you thought it was a fast pace before, you probably haven’t seen anything yet. The time is now.”

#automotive #automotiveindustry #culture #culturetransformation #leadership

Jan Griffiths is the president and founder of Gravitas Detroit , an organization that accelerates cultural transformation in the Auto industry through workshops, online courses, and internal podcasts. Today, as an architect of cultural transformation, she hosts the Automotive Leaders Podcast and writes about the next chapter of authentic leadership in the industry that anchors America.