In his early adulthood, Tim Chow still hadn't made peace with who he was. He went to law school, not for his own reasons, but to satisfy others' expectations. Eventually, he realized there were lots of reasons to embrace who he was and celebrate what was at the core. That compounded when he let that translate to his work. Find out how living with integrity can pay off in many ways.
Guest Tim Chow took a long time to make peace with who he was. As a closeted gay man in the mid-nineties—not a particularly open time—his college rah-rah spirit masked a feeling of not living authentically in his skin. He found pockets of interest, tucking himself away in the small Italian department, often working one-on-one with his professors, and studying abroad. But when he left college he still didn’t have a clear sense of who he was. In going to law school, he was following someone else’s expectations and eventually realized he needed to come out. The experience, however, was somewhat clouded by his father’s health issues.
When he had the chance to work abroad after law school, he jumped at it and lived a hard-charging international lifestyle for more than a decade. But that ultimately caught up with him and it took an “Eat Pray Love” moment for him to put things into perspective again. When he realized there were lots of reasons to embrace who he was and celebrate what was at the core, he flourished. That compounded when he let that translate to his work, expanding what integrity looks like on both a personal and professional level.
In this episode, find out from Tim how living with integrity can pay off in many ways…on ROADS TAKEN...with Leslie Jennings Rowley. //
About This Episode's Guest
Tim Chow is Chief Business Integrity Officer and General Counsel Commercial at Diageo, the multinational beverage company behind some of the biggest alcohol brands in the beverage industry. He helps the company be world class in its ethical decision-making in everything from environmental sustainability and supply chain issues to employee diversity and inclusion. You can read more about Tim and his role in the Vanguard Law Magazine.
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Tim Chow: Really what we wanted to kind of focus on, you know, what does it mean for people to feel that they can operate in a way that's consistent with their moral core. And also what are at least the stated values of your organization and where is there tension and where, and how do you elevate ethical decision-making?
Leslie Jennings Rowley: In his early adulthood, Tim Chow still hadn't made peace with who he was. He went to law school, not for his own reasons, but to satisfy others’ expectations. While there, he realized there were lots of reasons to embrace who he was and celebrate what was at the core. That compounded when he let that translate to his work. Find out how living with integrity can pay off in many ways…on today's roads taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
I'm here with my friend Tim Chow today, and we are going to talk about rambling this girdled earth and figuring out our place in it. And I'm just delighted to see you again, Tim. So thanks for being here.
TC: It's great to be here. Thanks to ask.
LJR: Okay. So I start this the same way every time with two questions and they are: when we were in college, who were you and when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you were going to become?
TC: So, you know, it's funny that question. Cause I have listened to some of our other classmates’ podcasts. I knew it was coming and you know, just this past weekend I was at my sister's and after we graduated there were some boxes of papers and other pictures and things, which I think went to my childhood home then went to my mother's and somehow migrated to her place.
And now that I'm actually living in a home for the first time as an adult with a basement and they're coming back to me. So I opened some of them and I haven't even had a chance to go through them yet, but just looking at some papers that I wrote in Italian back in the mid-nineties, and I was thinking, who was the kid that wrote these and you know, who was I when was there? I'd had always had this sort of a romantic idea, I think, of what I thought college was supposed to be. And I remember the very first time I saw the Green. I had been doing a bus tour that was run by Harvard summer school, who take people to colleges in New England. And the moment we came around the Green and I kind of saw it and it was just one of those perfect Hanover days. That was it. Like that to me was exactly what I wanted. Yeah. I think a lot of my time of Dartmouth was kind of trying to live up to what I thought were those things you were supposed to do. So I was, you know, so rah, rah school spirit. It's like, oh, I'll build ice sculptures on the Green in freezing temperatures winter after winter and, you know, run the tour guide program and all those things. And all that was genuine, you know, but you know, a lot of it, I think masked the fact that I also, who was, I was also a closeted guy, you know, at Dartmouth in the mid-nineties, which as far as I can tell from talking to more recent alums, was a very different place. [LJR: Yeah.] And, and so I think there was always this element of feeling a bit of a fraud or trying to, you know, almost like pass a test, but except there was no way to ever know if you were passing it. And I think actually for a lot of years after we graduated, I felt a lot of deep ambivalence for Dartmouth because I just didn't even know who I was. So like, how do you have an affection for something if you're kind of, you can't really relate. So I was someone who now I look back very fondly and I have a lot of great experiences. And of course the relationships, you know, have stood the test of time. But I would just have said I was very lost. And actually then what I did were sort of pockets of activity, where there was like, like the Italian major, you know, I mean, it was something that I loved and I loved the time I got to spend in Italy and doing a FSP in Rome and that sort of think. But it was all very pocketed and it certainly wasn't part of some like future idea of who I wanted to be. Like, I did not have any integrated sense of what I wanted to do when I left.
I think when I was leaving, you know, I still could not get my head around coming out that like, that was just in fact in my head, it was like, how can I keep postponing that for as long as possible. I was also very in some ways I think very emotionally immature in the sense that I, I kind of did what my parents wanted me to do and I did what I thought society wanted me to do. In fact, I ended up going to law school. I mean, I'll tell you when I showed up to law school on the first day, I had no idea what life law school was supposed to even be about. I just knew that I didn't want to be a doctor and my parents expected me to get a degree of some kind.
LJR: One or the other.
TC: You know, and a lot of those basic questions about what you want to do and how you want to do it. I just kind of kept being the student.
LJR: Yeah. I just want to go back to this Italian point. Cause I think he must've been one of two or three sign majors, right?
TC: Maybe.
LJR: Yeah. So where did that love come from and did that really shape some of your, or, or the antecedent to that shaped some of your later kind of international life?
TC: Yeah. You know, if it comes from a center silly place, I mean, remember obviously, you know, school of Rassias, we all had to do languages and I had done that. In high school and I was horrendous at Latin. I mean, I hated it. And so when I found out we had to do a language at school, I thought, well, Italian, super close to Latin. And at least I'll be able to use. And as it turns out, I'm not good at dead languages, actually, once you can speak and interact and I'm fine. And I subsequently I got to be pretty proficient in Chinese, which I started at Dartmouth. And I think I loved it because it was really small. I mean, you know, at first I thought I'd be a history major because I've always loved history, but the classes were so much bigger. And, you know, as Italian, as long as you did the core texts in any given period, and usually it was just by the century…19th century time literature…you could really carve anything else you want. So almost every single class became an independent study. You could work with the professors. They were excited because let's face it, not that many people were interested in their discipline. And then as far as whether or not it was a foreshadowing of things later in life, I think so. Yeah. In the sense that maybe because I'd always had such a fixed view of what I thought life was to be like all these adventures that started happening that were completely outside of anything I could have imagined, were, you know, not surprisingly, really fun and really great. And so I love the time I spent sitting abroad. And I do think that that did play a part. I also, it's funny after I became a lawyer, you know, people kept always saying to me, what are you going to do with the time? What are you gonna do with time?
Well, I moved to London. All of my clients were in Italy. The first two years of my, my job. I spent almost every single week in either Rome or Milan. I did use Italian now, whether or not using the Italian of Dante and Boccaccio is super helpful in corporate law is a separate question, but at least I was like halfway there.
LJR: That's right. That's right. And you you've had the living experience, so you know how to do it. That's great. Okay. So. You did do just more than get the degree for your parents. You saw something in law that could fit with you. So let's, let's start from there. The end of law school or the experiences in law school that helped shape that career choice. And where are you now with trying to push off your coming out story? Talk me through that.
TC: Sure. So, well, so I, right after college, I actually took a year off between college and law school. And originally I actually wanted to be a TA on some of Dartmouth’s foreign study programs, which was you know, not paid well, but it was a paid position. And my father said no. And it didn't occur to me to argue with him. I was like, well, if he said no, so instead I went to Taiwan and I lived in Taiwan for a year studying Chinese teaching English, but pretty much just like going out every single night. So it was kind of a continuation of, of some of the lifestyle in Hanover.
And then I came to law school. Finally screwed up the courage to come out. I think I called my parents, you know, one week, one weekend. And then the next weekend my father called me. And told me he had been diagnosed with colon and liver cancer. So the whole coming out thing, there was such a lead up to it. And as you can imagine, such, so much pent up emotion and other things, but then it all seemed to get a bit stunted because then everything became a shift to focus to my father and his health. And he ended up passing away actually during my third year of law school before, three months before I graduated. So there was a period where I actually would fly home every weekend and I used to stay up you know, my, we would kind of do shifts of helping at this point. He was in hospice care, so doing shifts and my mother would kind of take the day and I would take the night and I would edit large view articles.
You know, it's funny. I feel like even as I was coming out of law school, again, a very unmoored, very sort of, and I really, really, I frankly, I think I just wanted to escape. I think I wanted to get away. And so when the firm that I was going to join, which was Sullivan and Cromwell, had openings for roles in the London office, I Ieapt at it. Yeah. I mean, and I thought, I kind of thought like, oh God, there must be a million. People want this. I think I literally contacted the recruiting person within a hot second of opening, the envelope that, that, cause this was before actually they would have done a mass email. And yeah. And so I was, you know, graduated in three months later, I was in London and I was supposed to go for two year tour and I ended up staying for 10 years. So.
LJR: Wow. But in that 10 year time, it just wasn't about wining and dining, your Italian clients. You got to do substantive work that related to other pieces of who you were becoming or allowing yourself to become.
TC: Yeah. Well I mean, I only stayed actually in private practice in the firm for four years and I learned an awful lot and I do think it's important if you're starting out particularly in the way that we're trained in the U.S. in law, I think you really don't actually learn things until you kind of get on the ground. And theoretically, of course, and there are, there are all sorts of aspects of law school that I actually really enjoyed. But as far as the practical day in, day out, a lot of that's just in the context of work, but you know, for me, it wasn't so. Healthy in that, I think it kind of kept up that same, like working for your parents paradigm, it's sort of like the firm became my father or my mother, you know, in the sense that, you know, I didn't want to disappoint the partners. I didn't, you know, so. Round the clock, you know, dropping off marked up copies of an agreement at four in the morning was completely normal put possibly the worst health, but we're shaped. I've ever been in my life. My sister got married during those years and the photos are brutal.
But one of the clients I started to work with, it was such a small office that I was kind of put in charge of, of working on this account for alcohol producer called Diageo. And it was one of those things where I was getting 15 calls a day from the company. So it started to become a kind of the general guide to answer all this kind of mish-mash of, of questions. And so when I was looking to leave the firm, they caught wind of it. I had been on taking some, you know, saved up holiday. I got back, there was a voicemail saying you have to come into our offices to. The woman who hired me, pushed a sheet of paper and finding me saying, I think this is what you do for us, but let me know when I had a signed agreement with them four days later, which now that I've been in the company almost 18 years, I know as an HR miracle, I mean, nothing ever for large corporations, nothing ever happens that quickly, but it just was one of those serendipity total moments.
And then immediately I said, Handling sort of a whole range of things, but in a much different context, I think that the great thing I loved about and still love about being in-house is that yes, there's the part about risk mitigation and what you bring as a subject matter expert or the skill set you have, but a lot more of it is about the relationships you develop, you know, truly understand the context in which people are operating. Like, how do you make change happen in a huge organization that's in 180 markets around the world? You're just a lot more privy to the people side of things. I'm not a great process person. So the sort of technical parts of the law, bore me, frankly a lot. I was never that person, some people are, some people love the problem solving. I don't. So having that people side was critical. I mean, I don't think I'd still be doing it today if I hadn't found that aspect to it.
LJR: Yeah. So Tim, you're still of counsel, but have this kind of change management broad role. That seems very progressive. And I don't see that in many places. Is that true?
TC: So I have just a couple of years ago, I was asked to take over what would have been historically the compliance and ethics program in the company. And as part of that, it was sort of rechristened “business integrity” for all sorts of reasons, but one of them being that, you know, really what we wanted to kind of focus on was, you know, what does it mean for people to feel that they can operate the unit in a way that's consistent with their moral core. And also what are at least the stated values of the organization and where is there tension and where, and how do you elevate ethical decision-making? And I think also it's part of a broader understanding of the role that corporations play in the world, right? I think there's for a host of different reasons, but, you know, what's now under the umbrella of ESG. So, you know, how you interact with environmental impact or what you do about sustainability and diversity and inclusion, all those things. I think, again, we're just recognizing the role and the power of corporations and what they can do. And so I think this is very much part of that evolution of understanding that it's not just, you know, shareholder return. Yeah. Right. Sure. Though a big part of it.
LJR: Well, I'm going to, I'm going to try to draw a parallel then to Tim, because I mean, what you just said was this idea, even the nomenclature of business integrity…integrity for someone who knew they weren't being true to themselves for so many years or true to the people around them about what they were. And then finding a place that's saying out loud, like we want people to feel consistent with their moral core when they are here and showing their full selves and making these good decisions…That must really feel an alive. Yeah, but you told me that there was a moment where you needed to do an Eat, Pray, Love thing, and kind of come to that for you. So can you talk to us about that?
TC: So I would answer that question two parts. One is I think that a lot of the things that during my sort of late twenties, some post-graduation prior, including the years at school, up into my early thirties, you know, which at the time were difficult, like sort of bad, very bad depressive periods, a lot of anxiety, and frankly, a refusal to get the help that I needed when I, when I needed it…of course, was all miserable to go through at the time, I think inform a hundred percent who I am today and also what I'm trying to do or achieve. But, you know, as part of that, I think that that treadmill that I was on, you know, that kind of just the next ring, the next ring…the problem is I think that as you get older and particularly if you're trying to have some kind of leadership impact, whether or not that's work, even in your personal life, you know, actually leading the narrative as opposed to just kind of seem to be following it, that kind of behavior has diminishing returns. Like you keep putting in a lot of effort, but you start seeing less and less. Like, I think when you're a junior person in an organization, a lot of those habits may be unhealthy, but will get you to the next level. We'll get you the goal star. But at a certain point, people are, don't give you the gold stars and you, you have to think about it a little differently. And I found that I really hit a wall. It was about late 2000s, so 2008, 2009. I remember being very much, I was at a new year's thing. And of course you're always in that mode of looking ahead and I didn't want to look ahead. And I don't mean that in that hurt myself. I didn't feel I didn't have. It was more of an energy suck than anything exciting.
And I started this path where I started just to really explore areas that I'd never been open to or interested before. So, you know, I start with a yoga class and then I like the meditation at the end of the yoga class. So what don't I do the meditation course, and I think partly the Type A parts of my personality took over in the sense that I thought, well, if I like a little bit of meditation, then I should like alone the meditation and you know, and if I'm going to be a practitioner, well, why don't I become an instructor? This series of events where I actually was going to leave my job and go on a yoga teacher training, meditation teaching, and that was going to be my life. And then as I was about to do the program I told my boss, I was leaving. He said, you know, How about—and this is when you're lucky to have a mentor who knows you better than you know yourself at the time—He's like, I'm going to give you time off. You're going to take six, seven months, do a sabbatical. Then if he's don't want to come back great. But if you do want to come back, your job will be here. You know? I mean, how lucky? Right? And, and then right before I was about to go, I realized. I didn't want to become a meditation teacher. And so I then called my boss sheepishly and he's like, well, you've already booked the time off.
Go, just go do something. And so I did, and I do call it my eat, pray, love kind of moments, because I did things from, you know, spending time in ashram in Rishikesh. I lived in an ayurvedic clinic for three weeks, which by the way, is a real long time to live in an ayurvedic clinic in south Delhi. I did a month-long yoga teacher training course in Tulum. I did trekking in Bhutan. I, you know, was a Hampton socialite for a month during the middle of summer. And it was just so interesting that if you finally have the time to think about things, I realized that I was perfectly happy living in corporate life. And in fact, I would have gone nuts trying to be a meditation teacher. But I had to choose it. I couldn't feel that it had been, I had just like blindly stumbled down a path. And so I come back to do at the time, the same job I left, I felt like a completely different person. And also I just prioritize certain things. I had lived abroad for for 10 years, but at that point I just realized that I wanted to be home that it was important for me to be closer to family. I actually started to reconnect with a lot of friends that I had absolutely lost touch with both from Dartmouth and from my boarding school years. Again, I think because I couldn't in my head reconcile the person I'd become with a kind of ambivalent lost child I had been at that time. And so starting to be able to link those things together was huge. So, yeah, so I moved back to New York, not very long after I did that. And it was sort of an explosive new chapter.
LJR: Yeah, that's great. And, and likely for the organization that you're with too.
TC: So, yeah, I it's funny. I actually there was one of my colleagues who, for other reasons, family reasons is leaving the company, but it had been there for as long, if not longer than me and he said, well, I'll always remember that fact that you gave me the gift of meditation. And I completely forgotten that. Like, when I got back from this program, anytime they put me on a leadership stage, anytime there was a training program, I would work some sort of like esoteric, you know, froo-froo thing into it. And, but, you know, was so different than what most people would ever hear in a corporate context that they loved it. And there were any number of colleagues who. Themselves, like went off and did things including taking up meditation practices or other things, because they could see what a difference it had made in me that I was having…I really think I went from the point where I was so uptight that, you know, just energetically, it was like all nerves is what you got. You know, you got a decent amount of intellect. I hopefully that I cared about things, but it was kind of all, a lot of white noise. And I think that there was a bit of calmness that came over me and I'm just an ability to engage slightly differently in that. I just didn't, I literally did not have the tools to do in, in my prior sort of incarnation. So it absolutely did.
And also I got much more involved, particularly when I moved to New York and sort of philanthropic areas, you know, it's sort of funny. I always felt like, oh, I, you know, I came out late. You know, I always felt like to be perfectly honest, like never been terribly good at operating my own romantic life, but you know what, I'm good at? I'm good at working within organizations. I'm good at like that, actually trying to identify ways to tackle change. And I sort of started to realize that in any kind of social justice movement, there are all sorts of different roles to play. And you know, you don't always have to be at the parapets. You know, and that's never been me, never been my personality, but I eventually joined the board of the LGBT Center in New York, which is the second largest of its kind in the world. And I love throwing a party. I used to, I started turning that to charitable events. The dinner that I co-hosted for about six or seven years, I think. 400,000 in revenue the first year. And then when we broke a million, I'm like I'm out. But you know that those are the things I was good at. And I actually could really make a difference and ways for me to engage with communities and people that I wouldn't have before.
But to your point, if you don't have a sense of self, it's almost impossible. To do that with all the desire in the world. And I kind of discovered that there were skills that I picked up in corporate life that were very transferable to other areas where you could actually make a really big impact. And so I feel like the richness and the quality of my life opened up so much, but unfortunately for me, it did require almost having a bit of almost complete breakdown for them to have that. You know, I was the personality who would push myself to the furthest edge of, of any kind of reasonable, you know, ability to take a certain amount of stress on and then broke. And I had that break before I could start pulling myself together.
LJR: Well, that's why the word integrity is so interesting because it's the integration. Various parts, right. And, and sometimes it does have to come to the, breaking it apart before you can put it all back together again. Well, Tim, it just sounds like this has been a ride for sure, for you and those around you, but those pieces are all finally feeling like they're coming together and doing good in so many different domains.
Thank you so much for sharing this path of us. And it's been just a delight to hear a big trajectory of where you've started in and now look at you.
TC: Well well, I mean, thanks. And I, I think I, you know, it's funny if you, if you'd ever said, I mean, of course, I didn't know what podcasts were back in the day, but that I'd ever be having a conversation like this, it would've, it really would have been unimaginable to me. And I suppose the biggest thing I've learned is that. That's fine. But also to a certain point, you have to also be able to at least open your mind to other things for it to be possible to happen. You know, so it's again, so I wish some of the doors may be opened a bit easier, but I don't think I'd be in the same place that they had.
LJR: That was Tim Chow, Chief Business Integrity Officer and General Counsel at Diageo, the multinational beverage company behind some of the biggest alcohol brands in the beverage industry. He helps the company be world-class in its ethical decision-making in everything from environmental sustainability and supply chain issues to employee diversity and inclusion.
We try to vary things up here, too. Listen to the full archive of our shows at roadstakenshow.com or wherever you find your podcasts and be sure to join me. Leslie Jennings rally for future episodes of Roads Taken.