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Award-Winning Leadership Speaker, Executive Coach & New York Times Best-Selling Author

Michael C. MacDonald

“Turnaround CEO” who led Xerox, OfficeMax, and Medifast asks: Do you have the courage to make tough decisions?

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Michael C. MacDonald is known as an underdog athlete and Turnaround CEO. He spent 33 years climbing the ladder at Xerox before OfficeMax hired him as Executive Vice President where he led a $3.6 billion dollar a year division. In 2012, he was named Chairman and CEO of the nutrition and weight loss company, Medifast. Under his leadership, Medifast’s stock rose from $4 to $218 per share.

As a blue-collar kid growing up in Philadelphia, Michael loved the game of basketball so much that after being cut from his high school team as a freshman and sophomore, he fought back well enough to be recruited by Dick Vitale and Tom Young to play at Rutgers University. Once he got there, he did everything he could to become an important member of the school’s basketball program.

When he broke his wrist senior year, he realized a different future awaited him. Although Michael never missed a game or practice, Coach Young sat the smooth-shooting senior down and delivered the bad news.

“He said ‘Mike, I just want to let you know that another player is going to take the minutes you would play this year. I didn’t want you to hear it from anybody else or read about it before I told you,’” Michael recalled. “I assured Coach that I still wanted to continue to be a valuable member of the team,” he added.

The event cut the young man to the core, but the courage and respect the coach showed him by having that hard conversation stuck with Michael and helped prepare him for an outstanding business career in which he became nationally respected not only for making tough decisions but also for making them the right way.

Fast forward a few years and Michael was asked to take over a division of Xerox that had gone down $500 million in profit and badly needed a turnaround. He knew his new role would include restructuring and layoffs, so he gathered the 2,000 employees who worked at the facility in Rochester, NY, and delivered the bad news. “I told them we were going to have to reduce the staff by half,” he said. “We would give them outplacement services and severance. Years later, people continued to tell me I was one of the few executives they’d known who told the staff before the newspaper.”

Xerox wasn’t the only organization he applied the lessons basketball taught him. In 1994, Michael joined the Board of the V Foundation, a cancer research organization named for Jim Valvano, the legendary coach, and broadcaster who lost his battle with cancer in 1993. “I worked for Jim Valvano for two years as a coach at Iona and played against him as a player when I was at Rutgers and he was coaching Bucknell,” Michael said.

Duke’s Coach Mike Krzyzewski is described as a “persistent and determined” leader on the V Foundation and I am excited for you to learn from him today!


You will learn:

  •  3:00   His experience with Dick Vitale as his college basketball coach.
  •  5:00   Lessons learned working alongside Jim Valvano.
  •  8:00   How to find mentors early in your career.
  • 11:30  How to consistently update your goals.
  • 17:00  The role of positive energy and belief in motivating your team.
  • 22:30  How Michael defines “stick-to-itiveness.”
  • 28:00  How to develop your listening skills.


You will learn:

  •  6:00   How easy it is to cut corners in practice and why you’ll suffer as a result.
  •  8:00   How to emphasize the power or “we” on your team.
  • 11:00  How living and working in Japan in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster taught Lane that caring was the universal language of respected leaders.
  • 15:00  The level of employee interaction required to achieve success.
  • 18:30  The difference between being accountable and responsible.
  • 27:00  How to identify a meaningful friend or mentor.

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“The ability for athletes to get hired is carried on through you because you are putting out the message that lessons learned from sports are important in life. It is embedded in this podcast, what you’re doing is significant.”

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Longtime Medtronic CEO, Harvard Professor

“Many of the leaders I have worked with were excellent athletes, and I think there is a direct correlation. You’re one of the few people that really has pursued this study, Don. Keep up the great work. What you are doing really makes a difference.”

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Special thanks to Dave Moore, Lauren Hafner, Samantha Clark, and the Florida State University Internship Program for consistently supporting our research team.

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