This Ousted CEO Made a Small but Brilliant Change to His LinkedIn Profile and It’s a Masterclass in Self-Awareness
No one likes to lose a job.
Even if you hate your job, it is not a great experience. First, it’s embarrassing to have someone tell you that you no longer have a job because they don’t want you to work there. Second, well, you no longer have a job, which means you have to go find a job. That’s no fun either.
Recently, Dave Clark, who had spent more than 20 years at Amazon before becoming the CEO of Flexport, was ousted from that role. Technically, Clark resigned.
There are a lot of things about this story that make it a classic leadership case study. For example, Clark spent more than a decade leading Amazon’s consumer business. If you’re building a logistics and fulfillment business, I’m not sure there’s anyone you could have gotten to take the job as CEO more qualified than Clark, who was responsible for building Amazon’s fulfillment network into something that rivals UPS and FedEx. Hiring him to run Flexport, a shipping and customs brokerage firm, makes a lot of sense. Flexport had seen blistering growth, earning a spot on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private U.S. companies in 2022 and 2018.
There is, however, an even better lesson in this story. It has everything to do with the way Clark responded to his dismissal.
After leaving his current role, Clark did what most high-achievers do (especially those who might be looking for work) and updated his LinkedIn profile. Except, and this is the part I think is brilliant, instead of just putting an end date on his tenure as CEO of Flexport, he eliminated it from his “Experience” section altogether.
Instead, he added it under “Education.” Right there, under his degree from Auburn University and an MBA in Logistics and Transportation from the University of Tennessee, it just says “Flexport, Sept. 2022 – Sept. 2023.”
On the one hand, people like Dave Clark don’t actually need a resume, do they? I mean, pretty much everyone who might be interested in hiring him already knows who he is and what he’s accomplished. His record is pretty clear. It’s not like someone who might consider him for an executive role is going to wonder why he doesn’t have CEO experience just because it’s no longer on his LinkedIn profile.
On the other hand, working at Flexport was clearly a very different experience for Clark than working at Amazon. Sure, in both cases he worked closely with founders who had strong ideas about the business they built, but I think that’s about the extent of the similarities. I don’t think anyone is confusing Ryan Peterson, Flexport’s founder and now-again-CEO, with Jeff Bezos.
In fact, in a recent Twitter thread, Clark detailed the experience in response to a CNBC article that detailed his final days at Flexport. In his thread, he explains part of the education he received:
“When I joined Flexport as co-CEO in September 2022, I found a company lacking process and financial discipline, including numerous customer-facing issues that resulted in significant lost customers and a revenue forecasting model that was consistently providing overly optimistic outputs. The company had missed cost, margin, and revenue forecasts for multiple quarters prior to my arrival. My go-forward plan for Flexport, which was vetted by Ryan and presented to the Board, was focused on delivering growth and moving to align costs with revenue, not a revenue number based on hope – but one grounded in reality.
Although the problems at Flexport were much more extensive than I thought they would be when I agreed to join, I’ve never shied away from a challenge. During my time at Flexport, working alongside a talented team, we successfully transitioned to a new tech and product organizational model, integrated a significant acquisition and rapidly launched an end-to-end supply chain technology product all while simultaneously improving Flexport’s operations and internal processes.”
What’s actually really great about that is that Clark is able to see what otherwise seems like a bad experience as an education. I don’t know what all of the problems were that led to Peterson coming back and firing Clark. It sounds like a lot of them were there to begin with and Clark never had a real chance to right the ship, no pun intended.
Clark seems to have enough self-awareness to recognize that his tenure as CEO of Flexport is probably not going to go down as his most successful attempt at leading a company. I give him credit though for seeing it for what it was–an education.
