The Secret Sauce of Leadership: Creating Leaders Who Lead Cultures with Rue Patel

Connect with Rue: Email: Rue@RueWorks.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rue-patel/ CLASSIC EPISODE! (Originally Aired January 23, 2021) Show Transcript: Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited to introduce you to our guest today Rue Patel. For 15 years, Rue Patel led General Mills' largest manufacturing site. He was accountable for delivering expected quantifiable results with a focus on employee consumer and environmental responsibility. Rue is the founder of Rue Works. He works with smaller businesses to define and implement their growth strategy, provide executive coaching to their leaders, and speak at industry conferences. Welcome to the show. Rue Patel: They said, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Lisa Ryan: Well, I know that you spent most of your career at General Mills, but you share with us a little bit about your journey. Rue Patel: Yeah, so my manufacturing journey started at PepsiCo, followed by 29 years at General Mills in various roles, mostly manufacturing, but some Research and Development roles. We had an incubator, a little business where we had a skunkworks factory and did some cool experimental things. I found that my love and passion was in building our brands through excellent manufacturing to driving people leadership, people growth, and development of great talent, driving great processes that deliver great results for General Mills.  And our $2 billion plant was an example of one that doubled in size in the last seven or eight years. And we were able to do a lot of that without capital and without adding additional headcount, so purely through improvement and some great technology.  It was the use of that technology with great planning, so it's been a lot of fun. I then kicked into Rue Works when I retired a few months ago. It's a passion to help smaller businesses - under 100 million dollars thereabouts - and help them improve themselves through the same things: strategy development, people develop