Acceptance speech:
"Good evening. And thank you, Jon, for that kind introduction. And many thanks to Bill Nielsen and the Honors Committee for this wonderful Distinguished Service award.
This is a very special honor for me for two key reasons.
First, my late parents drove home to my six siblings and me that real success in life comes from finding what you love and giving your whole self to it. Well, this amazing profession and the mission of the Page Society has been just that for me.
Second, many of my mentors and heroes have received this award in the past. In fact, it’s striking to me that every one of the past winners has helped – and in many ways, shaped me – along the way. I owe them all a great deal. In particular, I must call out my dear friends Bruce Harrison, Don Wright, Tom Martin, Ron Culp, Anne Barkelew – and of course my incredible Gagen colleague, Peter Debreceny.
You each were honored with this award because you’ve improved the overall value and effectiveness of our profession. I’m forever in your debt because you’ve helped me improve as well.
In addition to my thanks to Peter, I have to thank my other colleagues at Gagen MacDonald for shoring me up in every way imaginable. It’s impossible to believe that I’d be here tonight without them. Peter and Judith Muhlberg are here tonight, as is Sherry Scott, the newly elected Chair of Page Up.
I’m also thrilled to have my husband Mark join us for this evening. He and our girls have supported the Page mission for decades. My passion has peppered many a dinner conversation and determined more than a few vacation choices. Here’s the best advice ever from my mother, so all of you with children listen up: “You will meet many people you’ll love in your life. Marry the one who brings out what you love about yourself.” I was the lucky one in that deal.
To each of you, I’m indebted. From all of you, here’s what I’ve learned.
To start, I’m incredibly grateful for the amazing field that we’re in. How lucky are we? We get paid every day to learn. And we’ve had front row seats for some of the greatest dramas in history.
I know we all look forward to hearing from our Hall of Fame winner, Nick Ashooh. Nick’s been in the thick of some of the greatest headlines ever written. And no one I know better personifies the Page Principle of “Being calm, patient and good-humored!” I know we’re in for a real treat tonight.
And just speaking for myself, I’ve been blessed to guide United Airlines and six contentious unions to work together to emerge from Chapter 11. I’ve gotten to help Johnson & Johnson continue to live its Credo in the context of ever emerging global pressures, Coca-Cola to execute on its Manifesto for Growth as it transformed itself to address demanding societal needs, Pfizer to transform its world-wide R&D, and ITT to re-invent itself as a 150-year-old start up.
And along the way, I’ve gotten to learn so much! World economics, activity-based costing, Six Sigma, customer satisfaction, global trade, you name it. I even learned that the euphemism for toilets is “After Dinner China.” You’ve gotta love it!
When I think back to these business adventures and reflect on what really helped me lead my teams and my peers at the time – it takes me back to something that happened to me very early in my career.
We’ve all been at a dinner party or a team building session where someone starts the game of “tell us something about yourself that nobody knows.” I used to share that I started as a Russian language major at Purdue and put myself through school teaching Biology and tutoring Math. That seemed pretty odd, given what I’m doing now. But in recent years I’ve found that it’s even more interesting to share that in my twenties I was in charge of oil spill contingency planning for The Standard Oil Company of Ohio. As many of you know, that company is now British Petroleum. I was actually certified by the U.S. Coast Guard to command an oil spill response. I’m sure you’re all thinking “That’s a pretty frightening thought!”
Well, the story I’m going to quickly tell tonight is even more frightening to me. It’s the story of how and why I got that job. I got it because I was sent to a program called FACT (Formal Assessment of Corporate Talent). Many of your companies have something like this. It was a week-long series of management and decision-making simulations, psychological interviews, pen and paper tests, etc.
A few weeks later, I was called to the office of the SVP of Government and Public Affairs. He told me that my FACT results had come in and that I needed to quickly choose another career path at the company. As you can imagine, I was horrified and expressed my regrets for letting him down by performing so poorly.
“Oh no, Maril,” he said. “You aced it. Our Executive Team thinks you’re too good to be in public relations.”
I couldn’t believe he said that!
He went on to say that I couldn’t stay in the job that I loved because I’d scored highly in areas like Leadership, Critical Thinking, Driving for Results and “The Courage to Stand Alone.”
So I pleaded, “Given that I’d done well, can’t I stay here?” He leaned over his big mahogany desk, looked me squarely in the eye and said, “No, Maril. You need to move up now. What you’re good at is not what PR people do.”
I was dumbfounded, confused – and furious! This guy doesn’t get it! What’s wrong with him? Was he been born under a rock?
But I moved on, and I was blessed with fantastic experiences in Marine Transportation, Finance, and Human Resources, before working my way back into my beloved profession. And once back in the realm of Corporate Communication I relentlessly pushed forward every day to prove him wrong.
Decades later, after many corporate jobs and 15 years of consulting I’ve come to the humble realization that there was more than just a nugget of truth in what he said.
So now, it’s clear to me what we must master next. And I know that many of you are on that path or are there already.
Studies have shown that it takes about 10,000 hours to master something. Depending on the assumptions you use to do the math that equates to roughly five years. Our own experiences pretty much jive with this research. For example, many job descriptions require a minimum of five-years’ experience at something because that’s generally considered to be the turning point for proficiency.
So what happens over the course of five years? I look back at the time span from when I started my career to when I hit the five-year mark. During that span of time, back then the profession and the expectations stayed pretty much the same. And after five years of experience, I was better. Better at some or all of things like media relations, speechwriting, or government affairs.
What about now? Can anyone even remember what we were doing in 2008 anymore? And can we fully imagine – much less know – all of what we’ll be doing in 2018?
So those of us dedicated to developing our next generation of leaders think a lot about what we can begin to master today that will improve our proficiency in the future.
I argue that now, more than ever, we – and our successors – need to master ourselves.
Tomorrow we’ll talk more about corporate character. Tonight, I’m talking about our character.
To be more effective, we need to be more powerful and think in a more powerful way. I believe that two of the greatest levers for our power are clarity and courage.
What do I mean by that?
For starters, we need to master the story we tell others. We all know that in this regard, framing is everything.
And framing creates clarity. Every CEO I work with at some point or another admits to being overwhelmed. And we all know why. Shifting regulations, unstable economics, black swan market entries, changing demographics and expectations, and ever-demanding stakeholders have humbled even the most confident of titans.
Each of these factors (and others) is a challenge in its own right. But the greatest challenge of all is the challenge of how and what to think.
And this is where we shine. We can bring clarity out of chaos. No matter the reality of the situation, clarity gives us peace. I believe no matter the channel, the technology, or the vast amounts of data, those who best frame the matter, matter the most. Because the frame we see drives the choices we make. So we have to be clear on the frame.
Stephanie Pace Marshall is a leading thinker in the world of learning and education. She talks about the notion that mind-shaping is world shaping. Here’s how it goes, “When you change the story, you change the map. When you change the map, you change the landscape. When you change the landscape, you change your experiences and choices. And when you change your experiences and choices, you change the world. Mind-shaping is world-shaping. That’s why it matters.”
So what in this world could we change if we changed our story?
For the most part, we’ve conquered the story we tell our external stakeholders. We get them, we empathize with them and we speak their language. In my opinion, we don’t communicate with our employees quite as well. For example, we seldom have the research and understanding of that audience equal to what we know about our customers. And internally, we often act on emotion or anecdotal evidence. So there’s more to do there.
But in my experience, the real gap – the biggest issue with separate realities – lies in our communication and interaction with our peers in the C-Suite.
We attempt to talk with them in the same frame we use to talk with one another. If we could change that story, we could change the world.
To illustrate this point, let’s look at three elements of a successful story: The Hero, The Dramatic Tension, and The Resolution.
In the stories I hear us most often tell, our heroes are reputation, culture and corporate character. Noble heroes for sure. But for most of our peers, their Odyssey has only one hero – results.
The dramatic tension of our stories often hinges on things like engagement, favorability and permission to operate. Their dramatic tension most often centers on time, quality and cost.
Our language of choice is words. Their language of choice is charts and graphs. Bar charts, pie charts, Gant charts, fish-bone diagrams. That’s why all consulting firms have models. I’ve often said that one of the biggest turning points for me as a leader was learning how to communicate in boxes and arrows.
Perhaps the biggest gap of all is that the resolution of their story is rooted in specific measureable outcomes. And our story ends with an adamant claim that what we do can’t be measured.
We wonder why they aren’t listening. And they wonder why they aren’t hearing anything familiar to them. In some ways we have a communications problem. In other ways we have a problem.
To us, they’re the warriors. And to them, we’re the Priests. And sadly, many of us still call them “The Business People.”
So what are we?
This takes me to the greatest story we will ever tell.
That’s the story we tell ourselves.
We need to tell ourselves a story of the Powerful: That’s a story of choice, ownership, solutions and results. This is opposed to the story I still too often hear of the Powerless, as in “Why We Can’t” and “Wait and Hope”.
What one focuses on manifests itself. So we must focus on our power.
That takes clarity. It also takes courage.
When I mention courage, people often say, “Oh you mean the willingness to throw yourself in front of the bus.” No. That’s suicide.
I mean the courage to confront. And the courage to be confronted. Conflict is the playing field of business. There’s always a clash between varying priorities, personalities, ideas, recommendations and points of view. So courage in this regard isn’t just a character trait, it’s also a very critical skill – and that skill can and should be learned and mastered.
We also need to train our people on how to give and receive constructive feedback. Here, we must learn the difference between being nice and being kind. Not hurting someone’s feelings may feel nice. But robbing them of the feedback necessary to grow is unkind.
We also must remind our teams to recognize that no matter what, we do have a choice. That choice gives us the power behind my very favorite of all competencies – the courage to stand alone. This concept was well expressed in 2003 when Bill Nielsen accepted the Hall of Fame award. In his remarks, he called upon each of us to hone the confidence required to act on the strongest of our convictions.
So, we also must have the courage to commit.
It sounds ridiculous that I’m even saying this but you’d be shocked to know how many people in our field still balk at the notion that we drive business results. They won’t sign up for metrics because “We’re not the only ones who impact that result.” Operations people aren’t allowed to think that way. We shouldn’t be either.
I agree that not everything that is important can or even should be measured. However, there are many things that can and should be. And we all know that what gets measured gets done. You’ve got to name it to claim it.
Here’s another area where I’d like to challenge our thinking. I’m frequently told, “We can’t communicate the strategy until ‘they’ figure out what it is.” Who’s “they?” The real business people? The data wonks? We need to help our teams understand that strategy isn’t data in a binder. It’s a collective way of thinking about our business, our customers, and the choices we make every day. Strategy is where knowledge meets choice.
We also must commit to the intellectual rigor required to slow down, dive in, and mess with a challenge or opportunity until we fully understand it. We have to be willing to let our brains hurt. To feel the angst of immersion and confusion and to push through to the other side of an idea or initiative that hasn’t yet caught on.
So, in order to exhibit the judgment required of us, we must commit to making – and taking – the time to think.
My last point is that we also need the procedural rigor to develop sustainable processes and systems that embed our work in the fabric of the work of others. This is necessary to transform our function from a succession of remarkable individuals to a real management discipline. We can’t have sustainable impact unless we have a scalable system.
Our mission at the Page Society is driving us to do more and more to help address these opportunities, to shape our future, and to prepare ourselves and our teams. And meetings like this enable us to learn from each other.
That’s why we have Thought Leadership initiatives, and Professional Development and mentoring opportunities like the Futures Leaders Program, and our newly launched Page Up organization. These efforts are incredibly important and I implore everyone in this room to help in some way. Send us your people, your ideas or your money. Because I believe this is the most time- and cost-effective way to develop those coming up behind us.
Management guru Peter Drucker once said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” And if you ask anyone who claims “futurist” as their profession, they’ll likely quip that the future is already here – it’s just unevenly distributed.
So many thanks to all of you, to Roger Bolton, and to the staff at Page for making this possible. This brings me back full circle to why I do what I do. Much of our future is within this room and within our teams. Let’s continue to work together to create our collective future.
The best is yet to come!"