WW’s Mindy Grossman on cultivating culture, authenticity, and passion

By: David Hirsch & Nicole Imhof

Compound is launching our Innovative Leadership Series, featuring interviews between Partner David Hirsch and Compound’s network of Advisors and thought leaders. This month, we’ve interviewed Mindy Grossman, President and CEO of WW and longtime investor and advisor to Compound. She plays an influential role in helping our founders navigate branding, company culture, and generosity.

“Culture trumps strategy,” says WW President and CEO Mindy Grossman. Grossman has transformed what it means to run a company dedicated to healthy eating while at the helm of what was once known as Weight Watchers for two years, this July.

Grossman has been in the game for 38 years, climbing her way up the fashion and consumer business ladder from working with small-scale brands to likes of Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, Nike, and eventually, the Home Shopping Network (HSN). In all of those positions, Grossman oversaw a meteoric rise in sales. Grossman was most prominently known for reinventing HSN’s image, structure and strategy — essentially, modernizing the company — from 2008 to 2017.

In that time, Grossman was, among many other accolades, named one of Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women four times, one of the Fast Company’s Top 50 Women in World Business, and one of Fortune’s Top People in Business.

After a long career in the fashion industry, Grossman was handpicked by WW’s Board of Directors to lead the company. Oprah Winfrey, the company’s main spokeswoman and board member, at the time said that “Mindy is proven as a successful visionary and entrepreneurial force in business … She has the experience, the passion and the positive energy to take Weight Watchers to exciting new places.”

Due to Grossman’s vision, WW has grown with the times. Once a dieting company, Grossman turned WW into a company that promotes wellness over dress size.

“Healthy is really the new skinny,” Grossman said in conversation with Compound Partner David Hirsch. “It’s not about a size. It’s about, ‘What’s my motivation for being healthy?’”

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That notion plays into Grossman’s belief, cultivated while working at Nike and Ralph Lauren, that “culture trumps strategy.” But what exactly does that mean? In her interview with Hirsch, she’s outlined a few key points around culture, work-life balance, branding, partnerships, and purpose that define how she’s led WW into their historic success.

1. Create a Purpose Filter for Your Brand

While, of course, every company needs a strategy, Grossman believes it is unsustainable without “an embedded, passionate, powerful, and positive culture where everyone is aligned against the vision, and motivated by purpose.”

Take Nike, for example. “Not every brand can run a Colin Kaepernick ad,” Grossman said. “For Nike it was foundational, and it fit their brand.” Effectively, “you have to decide what are the motivating factors, based on what you’re trying to accomplish and what you’re doing.” said Grossman.

While working at Ralph Lauren from 1991 to 2000, the “purpose filter” came into fruition. Lauren gave Grossman many pieces of advice while working closely with her and taking her under his wing.

Grossman shared with Hirsch “one of the best pieces of advice that Ralph Lauren” gave her: “It’s even more important to decide what not to do,” Lauren told her. “Everything reflects on your brand.”

Grossman has interpreted this through a checklist of sorts, the “purpose filter.” Grossman applies this purpose filter to every decision she makes or every partnership, ambassador, or influencer she chooses:

“Do they align with our brand? Do they have the same ethos of what we’re trying to do? Do they have the same passion for human impact? Are we aligned on what the outcomes are going to be?”

2. If You’re Pitching Enterprise, Know Their Brand, Too

Grossman has a few tips for entrepreneurs trying to break into enterprise-level business, and those trying to sustain their position at the top.

For entrepreneurs, Grossman advised that a person should, without a doubt, know their stuff.

“If an entrepreneur is coming to approach me, I expect that they’ve done the due diligence on exactly what it is we’re trying to accomplish,” she said. “They have identified why they would be a strategic partner. Is it that they are going to help recruit, are they going to help us retain, are they going to elevate our brand? Are they bringing innovation?”

“The best partnerships are the ones where you have a shared vision,” she said.

3. Tech Partnerships Drive Future Business

Grossman acknowledges that a vital key to WW’s recent success has been the ways in which she and her company utilize technology.

“The reality is that innovation and technology are really the foundation of the experience and the platforms,” Grossman said. “It gives people a tool 24/7, which creates greater loyalty, engagement, and, ultimately, sustainable success for people.”

Grossman has, first and foremost, taken data from WW’s long history in order to understand what the company’s users need most. From that greater understanding, WW has fostered partnerships with fellow tech companies to create what she calls “a wellness ecosystem.” These partnerships allow WW to help users attain goals related to nutrition, mental health, movement, while also cultivating users’ motivation and their communities to help them achieve those goals. This includes everything from partnerships with meditation app Headspace and online meal-kit service Blue Apron to new WW innovations like FitPoints 2.0 and loyalty and rewards programs.

By utilizing tech in this multi-disciplinary way, Grossman now sees WW as a “a technology experience company with a human centric overlay.”

“We want to give people on their own terms — what is going to work for them,” she said. “At the end of it, the technology is what’s enabling us to create personalization. It is enabling us to build this ecosystem. [It is] core and central to what we do.”

4. There’s Only One Mindy

Early on in her career in her first presidential role, Grossman “worked for a toxic person.” But slowly drained by the malignant environment, Grossman knew she had to prioritize her mental health and her morals over a self-imposed duty that she must constantly work to support her family.

The night that her decision to resign was set in stone, Grossman realized, “if I stay there one more day, I am actually saying that I am okay with this culture.”

This moment played into the hurdles women solely face: choosing between one’s sanity, one’s success, and one’s family. She is unequivocally against compartmentalizing one’s life into different boxes, where work life is unhealthy and home life a total refuge– “authenticity” is the most important key to success.

“There’s only one Mindy … There’s not a work Mindy; there’s not a play Mindy; there’s not a family Mindy,” she said. “There’s a Mindy. I can’t bifurcate my life. So, I am who I am and the relationships I have are genuine.”

5. “Work-Life Balance” Is Misconstrued

Grossman surely hasn’t gone through her career without a slew of obstacles as a woman in a male-dominated industry. The main obstacle Grossman has faced is battling the concept of the “work-life balance.”

Grossman came to this realization thanks to Randi Zuckerberg — the former director of marketing development at Facebook, a children’s TV producer, and author of Pick Three: You Can Have It All (Just Not Every Day). Zuckerberg, both in her book and in conversation with Grossman, advised that you, realistically, can only pick three out of the five elements of living (“work, sleep, family, fitness, and friends”) each day. The other two should be dropped, with no remorse in that place and time.

Though Grossman believes existing in this industry is “harder for women,” she has decided to follow her gut each day.

“I have one life. And every day, I’m going to prioritize it based on what I think is the right thing at the time, with the best intentions,” she said. “Everybody’s got to find a different formula that works for them. You make different decisions at different points in your life. And you have to gauge what is right for you at that moment.”

Grossman also advises that any company should be “much more cognizant of the fact that women are going to look for those environments that respect what they’re trying to accomplish in their life.”

Grossman feels that WW achieves that goal to be cognizant.

“[That is] what I love about WW and what we’re doing. I want to lead the best, healthiest life I can, she said. “I want to be here for [my family] as long as I can. In the best possible way I can. And that’s really important to me.”

6. Generosity and Support Drive Business Outcomes

Grossman is dedicated to “[making] other people successful.”

“My feeling is, ‘if I can work to help others succeed, the business is going to succeed and ultimately I will be more successful as well,’” Grossman said.

That materializes in the way Grossman operates on a day to day basis and interacts with her employees.

“I’ll be sitting in a meeting and I’ll just go, “You need to meet this person,’” Grossman said. “I don’t derive any benefit from that, but I’m thinking of what could be great for you.”

She says, “I’m always honest and I have a rule that nobody leaves my office, or a conversation with me, feeling diminished,” she said. “There is always a conversation about how you’re moving forward and what you’re doing.”

“I’ve not done things because I have to,” she said. “I do things because I believe in [my employees] … I believe in the people.”

She especially places this faith in her daughter and granddaughter, too, a reflection of what she loves most about WW. “I want to lead the best, healthiest life I can because I want to be here for them [her children] as long as I can. In the best possible way I can. And that’s really important to me.”

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Next month, Compound will speak with our Advisor and Instagram’s Director of Analytics, Dan Zigmond.