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Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to creating conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, June 5th, and I'm Mark Ross, retired managing partner of PwC and president of the City Club Board of directors.

It is my pleasure to introduce today's forum, which is the City Club's annual forum on leadership for the Greater Good.

And this year, we are thrilled to welcome one of Northeast Ohio's most notable leaders, Tricia Griffith, president and CEO of Progressive.

Prep, for today's introduction.

A colleague of mine from PwC told me of a recent executive leadership training event he attended at the Wharton Business School.

Miss Griffith was the subject of a case study on leadership and the importance of culture.

Wharton professor Michael Useem, after personally shadowing Miss Griffith, put it plainly the outdated notion of the untouchable, distant leader is just that outdated.

People today want to know who their leader is, what he or she stands for, and what they value.

They want their leader present not just on investor calls, but in hallways and town halls and one on one conversations.

You seem described, Tricia, watching Tricia navigate a room of hundreds with the same warmth and genuine curiosity she brought to a conversation with five shaking hands, asking about families, remembering names, and concluded, she wonderfully illustrates what it means to lead through personal presence rather than from a high tower.

Now that is what I call servant leadership.

Griffith came to the role as CEO with a well-rounded perspective shaped by decades of experience and talent development, organizational design, operations, and strategy.

In fact, when Tricia Griffith joined Progressive in 1988 as an entry level claims representative, her job often required crawling under cars to assess damage.

To this day, she still plays an active role in onboarding new employees at every level of the organization, and she remains committed to doing whatever is required as she leads one of the largest and most successful property and casualty insurers in the country.

Progressives growth has been fueled not only by its recognizable brand and memorable advertising, such as flow and actor Rick, but also by a deeply intentional approach to company culture, for which it recently earned the number one spot on the forum's Forbes America's Best Employers for Company Culture list.

And speaking of number one, Progressive has recently overtaken State Farm as the number one private auto insurance company in America.

A ranking State Farm had held since World War two.

In this year's leadership for the Greater Good Forum, we have the privilege of hearing from Tricia and reflect on what it takes to lead at scale without losing sight of the individuals who make growth possible.

In conversation with Tricia this afternoon and also joining us on stage is City Club CEO Dan Mouthrop.

Before we begin, a quick reminder for our live stream and radio audience.

If you have a question during the Q&A portion of the forum, you can text it to (330)541-5794, and the City club staff will try to work it into the program now.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Tricia Griffith and Dan Mouthrop of.

So Tricia Griffith, welcome to the City Club.

So great to have you here.

And you know, we didn't plan it this way.

We began talking about this forum nine or 10 or 11 months ago.

And then it just so happened that we get you on the heels of two really kind of significant accolades.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

It we a portion of my team and I were in Silicon Valley kind of doing an AI tour, and we were at Google when we found out we had reached the number one spot.

And so I was like, we have to tell you, we have to tell the company, we have to share this.

So my CMO, she she took a video on her phone.

We sent it out to the nearly 70,000 people.

And we'll do a huge celebration next year because it's also our 90th birthday.

So we're getting a lot of plans together on that with my team, and I'm very excited.

And I will say the the passing State Farm is like I sometimes I still can't believe it because, you know, we were so little when I started and there was this big behemoth.

But I'm more proud about the culture part because we think we have the best brand, the most competitive prices, great segmentation, but if you don't have the people in the culture, you really can't be number one.

That's really what I want to talk about.

Want to focus our conversation in on the on the culture.

When you first started in 1988 at Progressive as a as a claims evaluator, as we heard, what did the culture feel like to you at that time?

You know, it's funny because I hadn't I had no desire to work in insurance.

There was sorry, that hasn't worked out well for, you know, there's two things I didn't want to do.

I didn't want to be a waitress because my mom did that, and I didn't want to be insurance because my dad's cell door to door life insurance.

So when I went to school, I followed a bunch of my siblings there.

And when I had a business undergraduate and when all my siblings were going to the local big, huge company to work, which was State Farm, because I went to Illinois State, I'm like, I don't want to market insurance.

So but I did happenstance upon it at some point because I had to pay off school loans and some other debt, and I was going to work here for two years and then figure out what I really wanted to do with my life.

And I don't know when it turned out.

Have you figured that out, what you want to do with your life right after my husband?

No, but like 8 or 9 months into this job and it was a hard job.

I'm working with plaintiff attorneys.

I'm crawling under cars.

I'm a 22 year old.

I fell in love.

I fell in love with the people.

I fell in love with the culture, our core values that Peter had just written a year before that are still maintaining today.

And we talk about those all the time.

That's my whole basis for every move I make is our five core values.

And I fell in love with coming to work literally every day and learning something new.

And I was like, I'm here, this is it.

And if they'll have me, I'll be here as long as I can.

I think a lot of people will be.

Who outside of the industry would be surprised to hear you say that in insurance you're learning something new every day.

I want to go back, however, to the core values run us through those real quick.

So we have five core values.

And I think the key part of those is they work hand in glove together.

So one isn't great without the other.

So the first one is integrity.

It's basically we Revere honesty.

It's not just being legal.

If that's the table stakes, it's being really honest and making sure that you always raise your hand and have that courage to say something's wrong.

The second one is Golden Rule, and it's kind of biblical.

So I'm treating others as you'd want to be treated, or more importantly, how they'd want to be treated.

And we have that opportunity all the time with our peers, with our customers.

We're privileged to serve with our communities.

The third one is excellence, and that is really being better today than yesterday and being better tomorrow than today.

And we constantly strive to do that through processes, through coaching, training, technology.

And that's where the learning comes in.

Have always, always growth mindset.

The fourth one is objectives and we have had the same overarching objectives.

I'm not sure exactly how long, but I know for sure since 1971 when we went public.

So we were founded in 37, went public in 71, and our objectives have been the same.

It's so nice for me because I don't have to worry about giving guidance to Wall Street.

It is grow as fast as we can and make for sense of underwriting profit.

So when you hear a 96 combined ratio, that's what that means.

And the only caveat to that is we won't grow if we can't service our customers in the way they should be serviced.

And there have been times in our our tenure that we've said we have to slow down.

And then the fifth one is profit.

And a lot of I do every new hire class.

And oftentimes someone will say, that doesn't seem like a core value, but we're a public company.

We have owners that that want their return on their investment.

And you can be really honest and great to people and not make money, and you'll cease to exist and vice versa.

So again, our five core values that Peter wrote in 1987 really work hand in glove together.

And they they position every, every position.

I think about every move I make.

The core values are my underlying infrastructure.

I just want to go back to something you kind of glossed over there that your target, your target profit margin is 4% on premiums, and you're actually doing three x that.

You're at over 12%.

Yes.

And there are times where that's that's sort of the we won't go over 96 at all possible.

You know there's been some inflation we've had we've been doing a lot around efficiency, a lot around technology to get more efficient.

So, you know, in some areas if we think we're making too much and that happened during the pandemic, we will reduce rates to have growth.

So we do want growth to continue.

We're growth company.

So it's always that balance of profitability and growth.

I wasn't questioning whether 12% is appropriate.

I was just I was I was marveling at it actually.

But but I understand.

But like your answer is so revealing because because you don't want to be overly profitable on the backs of your customers.

Correct.

It's the whole the whole business of insurance is is a challenging one in that way.

Because essentially you it's a deal.

You're striking right with your with your customer.

Give me a little bit a little bit of money every month.

And I will make sure when something bad happens, we're there for you and your and you remain whole and part of your relationship with your customer though, is is that whole culture piece, right?

Yes.

Can you talk about how you talk internally about customers?

Yes.

Yeah.

And I think when we don't sell anything tangible, we sell trust.

And so that's the first part of it.

And so and we also don't know the cost of goods sold when we make that promise.

So something could happen where there's a catastrophe.

So it's always it's really such a fun business to be in because there's always something challenging going on.

But we are obsessed with customer service.

And I would say none of us on my team will ever be satisfied of where we're at.

There's there's constantly things we can do to make sure that people feel cared for.

People are respected.

So when you say you're going to call them back on Thursday because you think you'll have the police report and you'll be able to understand liability, and you don't get the police report, you don't not call them back.

You still call them back because you know, they're waiting.

This is a very stressful situation, and we want to make sure that they feel cared for and respected and, and and communicated to.

And I think I've always talked about the claims because that's where I grew up.

And that's sort of I don't have favorite children, but I have a love for claims.

Okay, I do, I do, but but it's so important because it's like that's when the rubber meets the road.

So you have this contract, you buy it and then you, you know, you we really clear no one wants to pay for insurance.

The only thing worse is actually using it.

So we have to be.

So when you use it, it has.

You have to build that trust.

I have to tell story because I've only been in one accident.

And I always talked about the stress you gave the safe driver the whole snapshot.

Yes, yes I do.

Norman.

Yeah, but Norman is.

No, he's my driver.

But but I and I always talked about that because I saw the distrust on the other end as a claim job.

But I was in an accident many years ago.

My son Jack was driving his little Veloster.

We had a lake house and we were driving home in an early on a Monday morning.

It was raining and we're talking.

He's driving and we're on this rural road like 50 miles an hour, and all of a sudden the deer comes out and hits, you know, hits our our hood hits.

I mean, it's really dramatic.

He did a great job, pulled over, did a really nice job.

And all of a sudden it was like.

And I in my mind I always thought deer hits are easy.

It's comp coverage.

This is all, you know.

I mean, you know, but it's not easy because we pulled over and I was like, and he was like, what are we doing?

I'm like, I don't know.

And he goes, well, what do you do for like, what do you want?

My God?

And I was like, okay.

And I literally forgot the phone number and I was on the team that made up the claims phone number like a year ago.

And so then he is this big football player.

He sees this dead deer on the side of the road and he starts to cry.

And he said, I can't believe that I killed another living creature.

And I said, I can't believe we have $1,000 deductible.

And both are true, but both are cause for sad.

Sad.

But my point, my point is saying that is I literally was like, how do I go through this?

And then I thought, imagine this is the business I know.

Imagine all of you that have your first accident, and maybe it's with a different company because each company is a little bit different.

So we are becoming even more and more obsessed with customer service.

Our teams are working across the board to find more metrics, to dig in, to understand and reward the people that are the best in this.

I just want to I know we've got a lot of people listening on the radio, right live on the radio right now, and if they haven't figured it out, you're Tricia Griffith, CEO of Progressive.

We like to restate that sometimes I'm Dan Mouthrop, of the City Club, you mentioned earlier that you you participate in the onboarding of every employee.

You have over 70,000 employees at Progressive bears, noting that, and I would assume hundreds and hundreds of new employees every year.

How do you.

Thousands.

Yeah.

How how do you manage that?

I think it's the most important thing I do.

And so a lot of times people will say, is this the best use of your time?

And it's absolutely the best use.

I take a half an hour and I go through what I call our four cornerstones who we are, which is our core values, why we're here, our purpose, where we're headed, our vision and how we'll get there, our strategic pillars, a really nice construct for people to understand about the company, tell a little bit about myself, and then I open it up a half an hour for questions.

I could probably do two hours of questions, and the questions are always insightful.

But my point is I want them to understand one our core values and how my expectation is for everyone to intentionally live them every day, for each other, for our communities, for our customers.

And I want them to understand our vision and their role in that vision.

And to me, if that's not a good use of my time, I don't know what it is.

It's it's a remarkable thing because.

Yes.

Yeah.

I'm not sure how many CEOs who are on the who's companies are in the fortune 100.

No.

Footnote number 51, soon to be in the fortune 50, I'm sure, but I spend their time that way.

I mean, that means, you know, just rough calculation, right?

You're spending hundreds of hours doing that every year.

Yes.

Yeah.

I can't tell you the I can't quantify the payback on it.

But our culture is something that is is really hard to define.

But if you talk to anyone that works with Progressive or knows Progressive or has been around Progressive, you feel it.

It's different.

Even though we're so large right now, we celebrate when great things happen, when someone gets married, when someone has a baby and it's a family, and when tragedy happens, we rallied together.

I guess that's kind of around the golden rule, and that's what's kept me here.

You know, it's been besides the fact that I learned something every day and I've had so many incredible opportunities.

That's what's kept me here, are the people that I get to work with every day.

And we're always making decisions that aren't necessarily good for the business either.

So good.

More about that.

Okay, so quick example that that came to mind just now is so during Katrina so huge storm.

And typically when there's a catastrophe, you know, the water comes in, it recedes.

And then you think about, okay, is it fresh water?

Is it salt water?

And then you make decisions on the cars that are flooded.

This was very different because the water sat there, if you recall, so much different.

And there was sewage and all and all those things.

And so we had made a decision that we would we would.

When you sell the salvage, it's about 22, 23% of the value of the vehicle.

And we didn't want the cars to be sold, but we could sell the parts.

And after further thought process, I was an HR at the time.

We decided that, you know what?

We couldn't trust the fact that if I sold a car to you, that you would just take the sheet metal and clean it, that it wouldn't be refurbished for use.

Then three years later, one of our children is driving that car and it becomes moldy.

So we made the decision as a company to crush every car.

It cost us millions and millions of dollars, and that was the right decision.

It wasn't the right business decision if you thought about it totally from a math perspective.

But those are the kind of decisions in some way, shape or form we are able to make my team and the teams under them every single day.

And when you're able to to make that right call, it just makes putting your head on your pillow at night more joyful because you're like, I believe in everything we're doing.

It's a great example of what leadership for the greater good is about.

I want to ask you to take us inside the company some more.

You.

You're known for a history of innovation.

The first drive through claims in the 40, in the 40s.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Probably earlier.

And then we did our service centers.

But yes.

Yeah.

You mentioned earlier to when we were before the program began that you were doing online claims before Google was online.

Where do ideas come from at Progressive?

They really come from everywhere.

And that's the beauty of it.

And we're all challenging each other all the time.

I think our roots with Jack Green and Joe Louis early on, you know, there are two attorneys from Cleveland that saw an unmet need to give insurance to people who couldn't get insurance.

So right there is innovation to say, could this be a business?

Could we help the city of Cleveland?

And then Peter was kind of bigger than life, and he was always thinking of crazy ideas that we were all like, I was brilliant.

So he thought of our service centers, and it came from proposition 103 in California, when basically California revolted.

And instead of us getting defensive, Peter said, it's because we weren't good enough.

The consumers of California said that we have to change as an industry.

So we had these immediate response vehicles going out because it is really stressful, and you want to get to people as quickly as possible.

And then we we were the first ones to to start snapshot.

You know you're driving behavior.

And we started it probably 25 years ago with a big sort of technology thing called autograph.

We did it in like 600 people in Texas.

It was not feasible economically.

So we just kept like a device that would go into your car.

Yes, but we knew that it helped us to understand how people drove, but we knew we couldn't.

That couldn't be something.

Was it terrifying to see that data, or was it actually it was reassuring to our other segmentation, segmentation data like, yes, this does this does matter.

And it constantly we constantly iterate it.

So now we've had snapshot.

They had to plug in and now it's on our mobile device.

And it continues to be our most powerful variable.

And then we have leaned into technology like you said, we started what we called Auto Pro, which ended up being our online selling of autos.

And we did that in 1995 before Google.

And that was a great bet, because that's more than half of our auto business.

Now, on the direct side, we still love our independent agents.

We're sort of our theories around broad coverage.

We want to be aware when and how customers want and want to shop.

And now we're working on what does AI mean to Progressive and how do we do it responsibly, and how is it good for employees, how is it good for customers, and when will it create biases.

And so those and those are really challenging questions.

That's why I said a team of a team of are actually Carlos here.

He let our team and we went out and met with OpenAI and anthropic and Sierra and Advent and Google and a bunch of places, and we all kind of came away saying, okay, here are some things we think we could try, but let's do it in a really smart way, because I think that's really important.

And I don't want to have hallucinations and we don't want to create biases, so we'll do it right.

We'll lean into it because from a technology perspective, if you if you're not leaning into those things, you will become irrelevant.

And so it's just how you do it.

And our core values will help us do it in the right way.

Are there are you using AI yet or just experimenting with it in small ways?

Both.

If you go back from from you know, when you think about technology.

We started with chatbots a long time ago.

So a good example is probably 15 years ago or so, we knew people were called into our call center to get their insurance cards.

Now you can get it on your app, but at that point they would call in.

And that is kind of a waste of time for a customer service rep who could be helping someone who needed help or selling insurance.

And so we had had a chat function that could do that, and that was about 15% of the calls.

We've continued to to iterate at that.

We've had large language models for a long time now.

We're just kind of into more generative AI.

So I think from a technology AI perspective, I think we think right now the generative.

But we've had predictive AI.

So it's been an evolution.

We're always going to lean into it.

But we're doing we're doing some pretty deep experiments on the customer service side with AI and doing some other efficiency sort of experiments in other parts of the organization.

You are fond of saying that Progressive is a tech company that happens to sell insurance.

What does that actually mean to you?

To me, it means that you have to lean into this great infrastructure.

A technology enables things, but it's really the business part that that leads us.

So you have to have the technology and the evolution, because if you don't, you will be lost.

If you look at the companies, Kodak, other companies that that didn't evolve and didn't understand that this was going to become your computer, your phone, your camera, then you don't exist.

And it's my job to make sure that 90 years from now, we even enduring business and technology will do that.

And so for me, it's everything.

But it's really it's it's the business and technology that, that, that get married and make a successful company with the basis of values and people.

What you've done a lot of experiments to with pet insurance and things like that.

When you when you start out, when you think like, oh, there's an idea over here, there's something we need to explore.

Like, what does that what does that look like for you guys?

So about seven years ago we decided to start a strategy team.

We actually just recently did that with AI.

We started a strategy council and now we have our first ever AI officer, chief AI officer.

But we have a strategy group that we kind of put things in horizon, like the here and now, the short term growth opportunities in the longer term.

And that group actually has a an office downtown here.

We call it level 20.

And they come up with ideas and they think about okay what's an unmet need and can we fulfill it.

Does it make sense for us to fill it.

And so we have a direct to consumer life insurance and we have pet insurance.

Those two things are the ones we're focusing on now, as well as some unsecured loans and some other things that were we're testing will test will test things and then put them down quickly if they don't work.

And we had one not too long ago that I still think it was a good idea.

We could make it work.

And that was it was we called it Castle and it was you.

We would go into your home.

It could be a big project or a small project.

No one has people.

None of us have someone you really can count on.

And so we tested it.

Unfortunately, it was right before Covid, so we had to kind of halt on it, but it was really hard to get great people that wouldn't negatively affect our brand to go in and help people.

And so we ultimately we tried and did a great job.

We put that project just like it was like a general contractor who was actually going to finish the job.

Yeah.

Yes.

And they could they could subcontract and we would manage it.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

No shade to general contractors, but they're very busy people.

Yes.

I think we all know what you're talking about.

Yes.

And that didn't work.

No.

And we worked really hard.

And then one of the things I said when we created this strategy team was if we if everything's successful, we're not pushing hard enough that we'll have to put you we should put things down because you've got to shoot over here and go, okay, come back.

And then that idea failure is an option.

Absolutely.

It's my gosh, I wouldn't be here if that were the case, if that weren't the case.

But yeah.

So I mean that team continues.

And we have a corporate group that looks to see if we ever want to do acquisitions.

And so we're always looking for the future.

But we're you know, we focused in this last ten years on really making sure that we executed on more auto insurance, more commercial auto insurance and bought a homeowners company.

And then we have we call them horizons.

Horizon two has been more investing in things.

It's typically in our commercial lines organizations.

So we bought a fleet company.

We work with Uber and Lyft on there and sure.

And ensuring them.

So there's because we know what we do well and we think we can monetize that.

So whether it's claims or analytics or segmentation, we'll be able to do that.

And that's really in Karen Barlow's Commercial Lines organization.

I'm really curious what you're learning about autonomous vehicles, autonomous vehicles or driverless cars.

You know, Waymo's and the future of personal personal consumption of driverless cars.

We're learning a lot.

So we have a group that we've had for probably at least ten years called our runway Group.

And what they do is they look at the like the addressable market and where it's going, where we think private passenger autos will go, frequency, severity, sort of the whole the whole dynamics.

And then we actually just in March, we presented to the board the kind of scenarios of what would happen we had on X. Waymo executive come and talk about the technology with Waymo's versus Tesla.

So we are watching that all the time.

It will come later than most people think.

We are not naive that the technology is out there.

Our head is not in the sand.

And we we have relationships with many of those companies to understand how could we be a part of it?

And so we we meet with those companies all the time to to dig in and understand if there is a position for us.

And that's also one of the reasons why we formed the horizons.

Because if, let's say the private passenger auto market does shrink a bit, we've invested in all these commercial lines organizations on in Cairns world on small business fleets, TNC which is Uber and Lyft.

And then in the third horizon on what we talked about with Pet and life.

And that's the whole point.

You can't just we could we could probably relish in the success we've had in the last ten years.

That's not enough.

We have to be always thinking about the future, because what we're doing right now in commercial lines will be what someone here ten years from now is talking about when you talk about the future.

We've been talking about the future of auto.

What about the future of residential at home?

Insurance is a very different environment and impacted by climate change in ways that auto insurance that the auto insurance segment is not?

Yes, it's it's a tricky market.

We knew we bought a company called ASI in 2015, American Strategic Insurance.

It's now Progressive Home.

We did that to get access to the home auto bundle in the independent agent channel.

So we have about 40,000 independent agents and we've had fits and starts there because we weren't as good.

And I'll own this.

We weren't as good in technology, process or segmentation then we should have been.

And that kind of came to bite us.

So we took a step back.

And now we have a blueprint to grow in those areas, and we feel much better about our product model, our cost sharing with our customers.

And we're careful about where we're going to.

Right.

So that that that ASI was based in Florida and had a lot in the Louisiana area, Colorado, and there's a lot of storms there.

So we have a different trajectory.

Now.

On the direct side, we work with our auto Progressive, our home Progressive home.

And like a bunch of other unaffiliated carriers, to make sure that we can match that, that risk if we don't want it.

So we actually that will be the content of our our quarterly call in August.

We'll do a deep dive.

We do a deep dive every other quarter for our shareholders and analysts.

We'll do it on property.

But I that market with the auto home bundle, we have a huge opportunity.

I'm very excited about it.

We have great leadership on it and I feel like we're going to do really well.

We'll do it in the right way.

We're not going to swing the pendulum again, but it's huge.

But it is what's much more volatile.

Yeah, I think I heard you say that you're very careful about where you sell insurance.

Meaning there are some parts of the country, some states, that you won't sell home insurance.

There's some states that we won't sell.

It's not necessarily always based on catastrophe.

It could be based on the atmosphere in with the regulators.

So for those that don't know insurance we're state regulated.

So there's rules in every single state that are different.

And if you if we can't get the price, we think that will handle what we think could be the lost cost.

We're not going to sell business.

We're not going to knowingly do that.

And sometimes it's a challenge in some bigger states to be able to get those rates from those regulators.

That comes back to your 4% target.

Yes.

Yeah.

That is that is set in stone.

And that's so important to us.

Do you worry as a, as an industry leader that there may become there may be in the future regions that are uninsurable for home?

I mean, I do, but I think there are ways that we could work as an industry to to make that a little bit better.

And there's ways you can use your capital structure to do things differently.

So we're thinking about all of those things.

Yeah.

I mean there's some places that if something happens there uninsurable, I think that happened in Katrina, I think that's happened when there's been floods in Houston, you know, or obviously coastal areas.

And I think it's just how much, how much of it.

Do you have on your balance sheet.

And so I think I think we're going to have to share the risk with many other carriers because I think there's two issues availability for consumers, because that's really important.

That's why the fair plan happens.

That's why citizens in Florida happens, that the states have to create that and then affordability.

And so right now you want to kind of toggle both of those.

We're going to get to audience questions in just a second.

And I wanted but we haven't talked about marketing, which I think is the public face of Progressive.

Whether it's flow and her colleagues and Doctor Rick, who reminds us that you can't stop us from becoming our parents.

Where does all of this come from?

Well, we have I've already mentioned my incredible CMO, Marie.

We have, we have we have a just a great group of firms we work with for different things.

If you work with digital, etc.. Arnold has been our agency that we've worked on with flow.

That was sort of a serendipitous commercial that we shot and it worked.

We didn't think we were going to have.

We were never for one commercial and whatever.

20 years later, she's still here.

And then we knew her sister.

Yes.

And Janice.

Yes.

Janice and her whole family.

But I've been I've devoured all the Progressive online content.

It's delicious.

There's more to come.

Mara just showed me a bunch last night.

But.

So we really try to figure out how to get.

How do you have insights into consumers, especially consumers, that we may not be selling as much as we would think we would.

So flow is been great.

We added her squad.

So Mara Allen you know Jamie, that group and then Doctor Rick came about.

We talked.

We were talking and laughing about how you become your parents.

And we were like, yeah, my dad used to say, defense wins championships.

And we're like, you know, don't leave the door open.

We have stock in the electric company.

We were all like, there was too many.

There's so many that we were like, we have to do this.

It was it.

We called it parental amorphous.

And we had a couple commercials that were not great.

And then we found a doctor, Rick.

We have a couple of new ones coming out pretty soon, but there's so much material because, I mean, the one where the guy goes and sits down there like, you don't have to grow and you sit down, that's my husband.

That's why I got that from.

Whom you love very much, who I love very much.

But it's like I'm always, like, walking around.

That'd be a good idea.

That'd be a good doctor, Rick.

All right, we're about to begin the Q&A with all of you.

For those just tuning in by our live stream or Wksu, I'm Dan Mouthrop, chief executive here at the City Club.

We're in conversation today with Tricia Griffith, president and CEO of Progressive.

We're talking about leadership, leadership for the greater good and what it takes to drive long term success.

We welcome questions from everyone, city club members, guests, those of you joining us by our live stream or at City Club or our radio broadcast at 89.7 Ideas Stream Media, you can text a question to (330)541-5794, or you can ask it yourself, as our good friend Scott is going to be the first.

Go ahead Scott.

Thank you, Tricia, for being here.

And thank you to Progressive for everything you've done for our community for 90 years and you being a part of that, really.

Two questions, one internal, one external.

How now with such a large number of your employees being remote, do you maintain the cultural that you pride yourself on so much?

And secondly, now that you're number one, how has that changed?

If it has it all, your relationship with the government and your role as a leader for the industry?

Great question.

So I'll start with the first one.

That was really a challenge for us during Covid because, you know, I'd been in this role three years and no one, no one has a playbook for how to handle a pandemic.

And we were all home for a long time.

And again, the first thing we said was, let's get our our employees home safe and sound.

Being able to work from home, that worked really well.

And then it was, let's make sure our customers are taken care of.

And we at that point, we were making too much money.

We gave $1 billion back in 2020 to our customers just because they weren't driving as much, and we did not want to make that much money.

The next year, we reduced rates on average about 3% and gave another 800 million back.

So we did the right thing for our communities, right?

Things really across the board.

And so as we were thinking about coming back, we weren't sure what to do.

But people really enjoy flexibility.

And I started thinking about times where I was, we have six children, and when I was a young mother, having to take off, take, take vacation time to go to a parent teacher conference, that was all my vacation time was.

The things, the field day, you know, Valentine's Day.

And I thought, wow, that would have been so great to have some flexibility, knowing that I would do whatever I needed to do to work to get my work done later in the night or on a Saturday.

And so, you know, we've really are my team.

And I really made the decision that we're going to consolidate into our larger headquarters, which is which we have now.

We liked people to come in if they can, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Remember, a lot of our staff is across the country and claims and and claims people come in to learn.

And then a lot of times they're out in body shops anyway.

But what I found is that allowing that flexibility has we have very, very low turnover, extremely low turnover, probably the lowest we've had in the history.

And I think people feel that we're respecting the fact that they can have that balance.

And I know a lot of people are, you know, you come back and if you would have asked me this in 2019, I would have said, no way, or we're going to do this.

But it's been really incredible and I think people appreciate it.

What we do is we create moments that matter.

So we do Progressive Field Day and we have thousands of people that come in.

We had people in here this week.

My team and I went and saw some supervisors that were coming in from around the country.

So we have nearly every week at our headquarters, something big happening that one of us will stop by and see.

And so we continue to create those moments that matter.

What I talked about celebrating being number one and being being 90 years old, we're already talking about the two weeks in April.

We're going to go out throughout the country, meet thousands and thousands of people.

And I think that's important.

I think for me, just because people are all around the country, I do a video every single month called Trisha and two, somebody asks me a personal question.

Someone ask me a business question.

I try to, I never get it done in two minutes.

I try to get it done in two minutes and then every quarter I have live with Trisha.

We do a quarterly update.

John Saarland, our CFO, gives the financial update and we'll interview somebody.

So and we have lots of events like we had a couple of years ago.

We focused we're focusing on men's mental health.

And so I interviewed Kevin Love.

And so we had thousands of people, virtually hundreds of people there.

But to be able to have quality people like that, talking about such an important topic is crucial.

And we do that all the time with our employee resource groups.

So I and I asked that question, Scott, that's such a good question.

I literally asked that every time I talk to remote people.

How are you being seen?

How are you?

How are you?

How do you feel like you're you're able to continue with your career.

And so we'll keep working on that.

I'm sure it's not perfect, but we'll keep working on that from the number one position.

So with government we work you know, we work specifically with 50 different regulators.

And so we have good relationships.

It's a lot of it's based on so much data.

So it's not like you can say we think this is a rate.

There's actuarial data.

And so we work with them.

And when things don't work out we we try to we have challenging conversations.

Our goal is to make sure we can have available and affordable coverage.

We have to make our sense of underwriting profit.

What I would say for our perspective is my team and I celebrated for a solid five minutes and they're like, let's move the goalpost.

And now we're shooting to be the number one property and casualty, which is that auto home bundle.

So always moving this that excellence, core value, always moving the goalpost to say what can we do next.

And I we never rest on our laurels.

We are extremely paranoid.

The fact is we you know, we're always like when we passed Allstate, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is my dream.

I can't believe it.

Geico's always kind of been our nemesis because it's kind of the Coke and Pepsi and and then we pass them and it's like, oh my gosh.

And then it was like, this can't happen.

We can't pass State Farm.

And we did.

And I want to celebrate that with the people that do the real work, the people that are on the phones, the people that are going to body shops.

But I also need for our shareholders and for us, just us.

We'll need to move the goalposts and that's what we're doing.

Go ahead.

You've talked a lot about employee culture, corporate culture, and I'm curious as to how the city of Cleveland buys into that.

And I think we all would like the answer that we all think.

But is it a separate employee?

Is it does it influence who recruits, who comes to Cleveland, and how being in Cleveland influences your observation of the United States not being on a coast?

Yeah.

I mean, I think that his typically been a challenge.

I, you know, I moved here in I lived all around the country.

I moved here in 99.

And I love Cleveland so much and I and it's like I want when people get here, when you have people that get here, they're like, oh my gosh, who knew I could, you know, I could buy a house.

I have great schools, we have a great park system, and we have, you know, incredible things my husband and I are investing in, in soccer.

And, you know, so I think that to me, I, we, you know, when I retire, we will we will stay here.

It's getting the people in here, getting people to feel it.

So we do that a lot with recruiting for like product management interns.

I'm speaking to a bunch of interns from I think it's 34 colleges next week, and they're from across the country.

And and that's why we have we have a very immersed intern program because we want them to see Cleveland.

We want them to see the great restaurant scene, the great theater scene.

And we do a lot of that.

And many of those people come back.

So we have a lot of success.

There is there's some people that are always going to say, I don't want to live in New York.

And for some jobs, because you're learning so much by being side by side with people having conversations, it's necessary for them to be at the corporate office.

A lot of our product roles are really important to be there.

And so, you know, it's showing them Cleveland.

And I think as Cleveland continues to do great things, that will be easier and easier.

And I just I want to yell it from the rooftops.

I think we get a bad rap, but it's it's the best place I've lived.

Hi, my name is Charlie.

I want to thank you first for your love of Cleveland, that you have impacted a lot of people's lives by being such a great leader.

My aunt actually worked for Progressive for about 44 years, I think.

So what's her name?

Carol Schneider.

She ran the okay.

She ran the something with technology training.

Anyway, she started out as a typist in 1980 and retired in 2019.

I love that.

So thank you for your love of Cleveland and my my question is, I know that Progressive has a very extensive art collection.

Can you tell us the origin of where that came from, how that goes into your core values, and how supporting artists and the arts are a part of your core values?

Absolutely.

So we if you haven't been to our art collection, Charlie talks about we have an incredible art collection.

So I would invite any of you for a tour.

It really started with Peter.

Peter had a love for art, not just for the love of art, but the love of investing in young artists that maybe we didn't know are going to, you know, be someone someday and then investing in things that challenged us around diversity and inclusion and having really tough conversations.

And his ex-wife was our curator for many, many years.

We still have a curator, Scott Westover.

And actually, I was telling Dan, every single year my the most fun part of my job is I write a theme.

I don't tell anyone.

I write a theme for that year.

For the annual report, I meet with a few like seven artists to see what art resonates with me for.

That annual report and our annual reports are our pieces of beauty.

We use.

We use our in our art tours for a lot of what we would call courageous conversations.

And and I think those are it's it's so it's such a piece of our fabric of who we are because it's important and and I don't know if this story is true or not.

Janet.

You might know, but this is how this is a story that I always heard.

So we have these Andy Warhol, Chairman Mao's, you know, and so people he got those early on and people were like, you have to take those down.

This, this horrible dictator.

We can't have these in the halls.

And there was like a petition signed.

And what Peter did was bought a second copy.

And that's what we do.

It's like these are conversations you have to have.

And so some of our art is very like people.

We get complaints from employees sometimes.

And we it's a great thing to be able to talk.

And we we have a management kind of class.

We go through that you walk and you kind of say what the art means to you.

And then everybody has the discussion.

It's very interesting to see from diverse perspectives how people have the art, but I that will be the part that I miss most when I do retire, because it's just an incredible collection.

It is vibrant.

It all of us love it and it just brings to life our headquarters.

And it's just it's just so superb.

So it really is a big piece for our culture.

It's wonderful.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Charlie, I think we're gonna have to thank your mom.

Yeah, it was his aunt, I think, anyway.

But I think we're going to have to do a follow up, follow up like event at Progressive to see the art.

You're all invited.

Okay.

Updated.

So Dan mentioned the evolution of technology earlier including rideshare and autonomous vehicles leading to individual consumers driving their personal auto less.

How is your strategic thinking changing around the approach to and pricing of auto insurance going forward, given that many consumers are using their cars only a fraction of the time in mileage they used historically?

Yeah, and that's really one of the reasons why we one of the great reasons about snapshot, our snapshot device is that if you aren't using your car very often, you should get snapshot.

Because we look at time of day, we look at hard brakes and all those things all have to do with time as you're driving.

So if you don't drive very often and when you do drive, you drive, okay, then you could get because because some people you may drive a little bit, but you're still in a bigger risk.

So there's still that variable of that.

And we know that.

We know that when you get so we have surcharges and discounts, when you get a large surcharge you typically leave Progressive.

We're okay with that because you're going to one of our competitors and we have data they don't have.

But to answer that question, I mean yes, we watch you know, it's based on rate to risk.

So your rates are going to be based on your risk.

The risk is on many, many, many variables.

And if you drive less and you have snapshot and you drive well, the likelihood of you getting a discount is high.

So does snapshot encourage people to become better drivers?

Do you have that data?

It does have things.

Things that signal you when you do things beeps because we get complaints like this keeps beeping.

It's because you're not driving very good.

But so yeah we do we do encourage that.

Sometimes it's just.

But does the data suggest that a bad driver has become a better driver because they're getting that feedback, or I don't know if I have that data, I couldn't I couldn't go like it's pretty much any one.

I mean, yes, we think that we think that that if you're getting a discount, you're going to and you know that discount, you're going to be more careful.

You're going to know that heartbreaks is something that we're looking at.

You're going to know that time of day, you know.

So I was driven, but I'll probably have to be predisposed to being a good driver.

It sounds like Patrice.

Hi.

I'm Patrice Blakemore from Greater Cleveland partnership.

Love Progressive.

I talk about you guys all the time like I used to work there, which I haven't, but I still love you.

One of the reasons that you resonate in Progressive resonates is because you do respect diverse perspective, people, ideas.

And a lot of organizations say, I want a, you know, like we're in a multi generational, multi diverse culture and I want different perspectives.

But when you know, when they're at the table is difficult to listen to others that have that perspective or a different perspective.

Can you give an example of what Progressive does to bubble up those different perspectives, where you're now able to use it to the best of your ability and be more successful?

Absolutely, Patrice, that's a great question.

And that's one of my passions.

So my first big role in leadership was in HR.

And although I said I loved the culture, I thought we had a lot of work to do around diversity and inclusion.

And so that's when we started in earnest.

Our first two employee research groups I started, which is Progressive African American Network in our LGBTQ.

Plus, we now have nine ergs representing a large swath of our company.

Some are, some are.

You're a member of two because you're you fit into two.

And we do a lot.

We fund a lot of things around that to kind of understand how people can be in someone else's shoes.

And I think that's really important.

So we do a lot of employee resource group and we have we have a lot around diversity.

So we have a multicultural leadership development program for we had in our last our last objectives from my team.

We were looking at equity level people, and we kept looking at it and saying, we can't make any movement with people of color in the equity level.

And everyone's like, you know, we're we're trying we're trying our hardest.

But there was enough data to say it's not working.

And so we made a goal, not a quota.

We made a goal to double our our number of equity level people of color was at 10% at the time.

We were trying to get to 20%.

We didn't quite reach that, but we got to 19%.

That's because we made a goal.

And with that, then I think you're more apt to say, I need to have the pool beat look a different, because if I'm going to interview the same exact person, if it looks like you or me, that's going to be or you're going to hire.

And so sometimes it takes longer.

And we just said that bake that into your hiring process.

But that's a key reason.

If you look at my DRG, we are we are very diverse in our thoughts, in who we love, in how we look and that and we want it.

We want to reflect the customers we serve and the people we lead.

And so we have to do that.

So to me, my and, you know, there's a lot of pressure on companies now not to talk about that.

And this wasn't something I was an HR in 2002.

This isn't something that all of a sudden we decided to do.

We've been doing it.

It's part of our fabric.

And Peter started as well.

And I think when people say, are we going to change?

We always tweak things, but it really is who we are.

And for me, I need every Progressive employee to feel seen, feel heard and feel safe.

And if we do that well, people are going to want to continue to grow the company and I and it was really very helpful to me during the pandemic because you had the pandemic and it was scary enough.

And I was doing these at home with Trisha videos.

I mean, literally it was like, so he felt so disjointed and I was like, you know, what's the pandemic?

I have a home.

Or I could work out.

I was eating like cheese balls by the thing, like from Costco.

And I was like, I'm gaining weight and I'm like, not exercising.

So I'm telling the team that I literally people have been sending me cheese balls, like, you can't do that anymore.

I really, I can't.

I had cheese balls and M&Ms.

I would say all these, how disjointed I felt because I knew people felt disjointed.

But then fast forward, George Floyd's murdered and I have to talk to the people of Progressive about that.

Had we not had the culture we have, and I had I not had our Progressive African-American network board, I think my communications wouldn't have been as good.

I was able to say, does this resonate?

Does this feel okay?

I need to talk about this.

And of course, subsequently, there's been so many things that I that I've talked about because of that.

So I think everybody knows my stance.

I'm not this is not the, you know, you know, thing of the day for me to do.

This has been built into our culture and it's here to stay.

And I think people know that when it's true to your heart that it's important to me.

And for me, there's so many diverse people at Progressive, and what is important to them is important to me.

And there's a lot of variety there.

And I think that's why we're successful.

Thank you.

We have another text.

As a new generation of youth turns to enter the workforce, Cleveland is experiencing a so-called talent gap.

What are your thoughts on this and how do you think to address it in an equitable and realistic way?

I mean, I think you need to look one.

We have such great companies here, and there's so many opportunities here to do a variety of things.

I have a quarterly dinner with Heidi Petz from from Sherwin-Williams and Jenny Parmentier.

I mean, there's a lot of great big companies here.

It's a great city.

We have great sports.

I mean, it's just it's the Cleveland Museum of Art.

I mean, like, think of what we have to offer.

We probably have to brand it better.

We've been working on that.

I think we continue to do better on that, I think.

I think the pandemic put a lot of cities like ours back, but I think you need to showcase that.

And if I'm going into the workforce, I'm looking at the CEOs of these companies in all these other areas and saying, is that the type of person or, or leadership team I want to work for?

And I think the answer to many companies around Cleveland is absolutely yes.

And you get here and you try it.

And I think that's what we have found when people come here that have never lived here before, me included, it is like, wow, this is a this is a well-kept secret.

We just need to tell it more, tell our story better.

Awesome.

Well, Tricia, thank you so much for joining us today for sharing your leadership journey, for sharing how you've managed to how you've managed creating culture at scale, positive culture at scale.

It's a really wonderful story.

And your comments about Cleveland and what a great community this is.

I really appreciate it as well.

Forums like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like all of you.

You can learn more about how to become a Guardian of free speech at our forum.

Today was presented with support from the Greater Cleveland Partnership.

Thank you so much.

It's also our annual Forum on leadership for the Greater Good, which was made possible by a generous gift to the City Club's endowment from an anonymous private family foundation.

Coming up next Friday, June 12th at the City Club will be joined by Doctor Peter Salk.

He's president of the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation.

He's the son of Jonas Salk, who you may recognize as one of the leading scientists behind the polio vaccine.

He'll be in conversation with Doctor Arthur Lavin to discuss the state of public trust in science and the future of public health.

You can learn more about this forum and get your tickets at City Club.

We also have a bunch of other upcoming forums you can check out as well.

Once again, Tricia Griffith, thank you so much.

We really appreciate your presence here today for all your great questions.

It's my pleasure.

And.

This forum is now adjourned.

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