Rich Wallach, Chopra Global COO, on why every COO role description is different

There is no standard COO role description, and Rich Wallach has the resume to prove it. He has been a chief operating officer three times, at Credit Suisse, at the film discovery startup GoWatchIt, and now at Chopra Global, the company behind Deepak Chopra's work, where he is also CFO. The three jobs shared a title and almost nothing else.

That is the thread running through his conversation with Michael Koenig on Between Two COO's. A COO role is assembled from whatever the company happens to need, who else is already at the table, and how the org is structured. As Wallach puts it, someone who is a great COO in one circumstance is just not going to work in another.

From philosophy major to three-time COO

Wallach studied philosophy at the University of Michigan on a pre-med track, planning to spend his career at the intersection of the mind and the body. He decided against medical school, concluded that a philosophy degree had prepared him for everything and nothing, and went looking for a business education.

Investment banking followed. Two years at a boutique M&A shop, then a larger firm, then an MBA, then a return to banking that he intended to last a couple of years and lasted about ten. He describes looking up a decade later and asking what he was doing.

When he told the firm he was leaving, they offered him something else instead: run a group of roughly 150 to 200 people as its COO, inside an organization of 70,000. He took it, and he is blunt about what it was. His day was HR matters, financial matters, insurance, travel. He pulled in resources from around the firm and ticked off boxes. He calls it pretty mindless, and says he learned a lot anyway.

He left to co-found GoWatchIt, a tool that helped people find content across streaming services. The real product was data about what consumers were interested in and where they discovered it, intended for film marketers. The company sold in 2017. Wallach's assessment is characteristically unsentimental: some sales are better than other sales, and it was a sale.

The acquirer offered him a large role running digital marketing at a public company, with a direct line from his work to the value of the business. He turned it down. Selling more digital ads was not going to get him out of bed.

Chopra Global was the opposite problem. The company had existed for more than 20 years but had been run as though it were a startup that was not planning to grow. Meanwhile the market for meditation and whole health had gone mainstream. Wallach describes it as the puck moving to where the company had skated long before.

What a COO actually does when the CEO relationship is the job

Asked what he would tell someone entering a new COO role, Wallach starts with the CEO and does not move on quickly.

Some CEOs want a COO to take a pile of work off their plate. Others want a partner who still brings anything meaningful back to them, which Wallach notes is not scalable. The distinction has to be made explicit before anything else. What do you want me to take care of entirely, and where do you want me involved with you.

After that comes structure. Which parts of the business report in, and who those people are. He calls this table stakes. Perform there or fail outright.

The part he cares about comes six to nine months later. By then a COO should have looked around the organization and found where more help would matter, where a team wants support but is not confident enough to ask, and where something needs to change but inertia has held. Building consensus with the CEO and those departments is how a COO moves from doing the job to making an impact.

His warning is about pace. Move too fast and you rub people the wrong way, and you are probably still missing information. If a company has done something a certain way for a long time, you owe that history respect. Lose the team's trust, in your skills or in your intentions, and you fail completely.

He tells a story about a COO he worked under at the bank, who told him in confidence that her goal was to make her boss believe her ideas were his. Wallach, then in his thirties, objected that she got no credit. Her answer was that they reached the right outcome, which was better for everyone. He says he has been working on that one for fifteen years and is not there yet.

Certainty as an operating discipline

Wallach's view is that in certain companies the COO's job is to provide security and safety to employees, and Chopra Global is one of them.

His reasoning is practical. In an early stage business you hear about a new competitor, or a celebrity deal, or a product launch, and it is easy to get distracted and operate at a fever pitch. His estimate is that 95% of it never goes anywhere. The work is sticking to what makes the company unique rather than reacting to what someone else is doing.

The same applies internally. People are often out of position in a smaller organization, and being out of position is uncomfortable. They need to know they have support, that the company is on solid footing, and that someone is paying attention to their career. Only when people feel secure can they do their best work.

This leads him to a position on transparency that cuts against the usual advice. He is a fan of giving people a lot of information so they can make decisions themselves. But he has declined to share things with the team on the grounds that they may change soon. Strategy shifts week to week. Tell everyone everything at every step and you confuse them, and you make them uncertain about whether today's work still matters. Most of the time their jobs are unaffected, and the insecurity is real anyway.

He puts process on the same side of the ledger as people, which is not where most leaders file it. Rigorous processes, he says, help people find certainty. They know there is a predictable time and place to spend attention on a given thing, so they can stop worrying about it the rest of the time.

Running a company with no office

Chopra Global gave up its physical space. The California office lease ended in April 2020 and the shared space in New York was vacated.

The distribution shifted fast. When Wallach joined a little over two years earlier there were about 80 people in California. At the time of the conversation there were 28, and employees in 17 states, with 15 or 16 open jobs posted. Part of that is people leaving California once they could, and part is hiring without regard to geography, which he notes his accounting team does not love.

The rhythm holding it together is a Monday all-group call that opens with a 20 minute meditation, appropriate for a mindfulness and whole health company, then moves through the businesses to celebrate wins and losses. They used to do it daily. It caused fatigue quickly, so they stopped.

A culture team runs events a couple of times a week, including trivia nights, happy hours, yoga and meditation sessions.

Wallach is candid that none of it fully substitutes for being in a room. He thinks not being co-located is taking a toll that people would never attribute to the office, because everyone has ready reasons why remote work is better. His own view is that the energy in a room and the body language you pick up matter to creative work and to feeling part of something.

Their answer is to gather deliberately. A three day customer event in Los Angeles, the first after 19 months without any, followed by a two day employee offsite with flights and hotels covered. It was going to be developmental. It became a celebration of what the company got done against the headwinds of the previous two years.

Michael's own experience at Automattic, a fully distributed company, produced the same lesson. Teams met up quarterly and the whole company once a year, and over time they learned the meetups should not be spent on ambitious side by side projects. Work happens fine at a distance. Relaxing together, having fun, and building shared experience do not.

When the problem is a person

Wallach estimates personnel issues make up 30 to 40% of the thorny problems he has faced as a COO. Partner problems come up constantly, and so do governments, product recalls and data breaches. All of it lands on the same desk.

His example comes from banking. An analyst pushed hard for a third year, which is not automatic, and Wallach was on the fence but agreed because she was committed. About two weeks later she stopped coming to the office. There were health issues and he did not press, since HR was handling it. Then he learned she was attending recruiting events, and after that, that she had already accepted a job in San Francisco with an apartment lease starting in three weeks. The reason she had not told him was that she was hoping he would find out and fire her so she could collect severance.

What bothers him is not the maneuver so much as the distance between it and how he operates. He says he almost cannot process how someone would think that way.

He is equally direct about the reverse case. Earlier that week he lost a key team member. He told her why he thought staying was right for her and what he knew about where the company was going, and then stopped. He does not know what is in her head, what her goals are, or what she is going through, so he was not going to talk her into anything. His one request was that she not stay out of obligation to the company or the people, because that is not a reason to stay. Her life matters more than a period of dislocation for him, and the odds they are working together in twenty years are slim.

The underlying belief is simple. Almost everyone at the company can do their job better than he can. That makes each of them important, and it makes his job making sure they are challenged, getting what they want, and on a development plan.

The 5 things I took away from this conversation

1. Ask what kind of COO the company is hiring before you accept the job. Wallach has held the title three times and describes three unrelated jobs. The role is defined by what is missing, not by a standard job description. A candidate who does not establish which version is on offer is guessing, and a great COO in the wrong configuration still fails.

2. The expectation conversation with the CEO is the whole foundation. Not a values conversation. A specific one. What comes off your plate entirely, and what do you want to stay in. Skip it and you spend a year discovering the boundaries by crossing them.

3. Radical transparency has a cost, and the cost is paid by your team. This is the most contrarian thing Wallach said. Strategy churns weekly. Broadcasting every turn of it makes people uncertain about work that was never actually at risk. Deciding what not to say yet is a real part of the job, not a failure of openness.

4. Process is a people benefit, not a people tax. The framing that stuck with me is that rigorous process tells someone there is a predictable time and place for a concern, which frees them to stop carrying it around. Most operators sell process on efficiency. Selling it on peace of mind is more honest and probably more persuasive.

5. Move slowly enough to keep the trust you will need later. A new COO can usually see what to change in the first month. Acting on it that fast costs the trust required to make it stick. Respecting how things have been done is not sentimentality, it is the price of being allowed to change them.

FAQ

What does a chief operating officer do in a company? It depends on the company, which is Wallach's central point. His group COO role at a large bank was administrative task management across HR, finance, insurance and travel. At Chopra Global the same title covers corporate strategy, the financial plan, and providing stability to a distributed workforce. The role is shaped by what the CEO does not cover and what the organization lacks.

How do you become a COO? Wallach's path was philosophy at Michigan, investment banking, a group COO role offered as an alternative to quitting, then co-founding a company, then an operating role at a company whose mission he cared about. He also notes that many of the COOs on the show came out of humanities majors like English literature, philosophy and sociology, and connects that to seeing colleagues as human beings first.

What should the CEO and COO relationship look like? Clearly bounded. Wallach advises establishing early what the CEO wants handled entirely versus partnered on. He also observes that a CEO who wants to be consulted on anything meaningful has created a structure that does not scale. Beyond boundaries, the COO often has the deepest knowledge of the strategy because they built the financial plan behind it.

What is the difference between a CEO and a COO in practice? In Wallach's telling, the CEO wants to know the strategy, buy into it and advise on it. The COO knows the micro levers that actually achieve it. He describes himself as more intimately familiar with the company's three to five year strategy than anyone else, precisely because he is the one building the plan underneath it.

How do you keep a fully remote company connected? Chopra Global uses a weekly all-group call that starts with a 20 minute meditation and covers wins and losses across the businesses, a culture team running events a couple of times a week, and periodic in-person gatherings. Wallach's caution is that these do not fully replace being co-located, and that the deficit is real even when people attribute their dissatisfaction elsewhere.

Also mentioned

• Chopra Global and the Chopra app, which reached over 700,000 installs without paid marketing, offering personalized practices across nutrition, movement, purpose and relationships
• Ayurveda, the healing system underlying the company's approach, built on the idea that people have a base nature and move in and out of balance with it
• Automattic, the distributed company where Michael learned that remote teams should use in-person time for connection rather than project work
• CliftonStrengths and Myers-Briggs, cited as familiar examples of the premise that people are wired a certain way
• Wallach's animal, for the record, is a lemur. Small, unobtrusive, thoughtful, with a sense of humor.

Listen to the full episode

Rich Wallach on Between Two COO's

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