In the spring of 1988 I caught a break. I was a 2^nd semester Jr. at Bates College, scrambling to get a summer internship in advertising. With one semester to go, I needed something that could lead to a job. Advertising seemed like a great option, particularly for a History major with few other prospects. I put together a resume that included such diverse summer jobs as Security Guard, Peanut World Manager, and House Comedian (more in a future post) and sent it off to Young & Rubicam, NY. I think I called several other agencies as well but I was pretty sure that the Y&R thing would work out. After all, how many kids could possibly apply? Little did I know that a couple hundred other kids had the same idea. To make it worse, many of them had strong connections to Y&R (their parents were clients). The “break” came in the form of Thomas (Tom) Walker, a Bates alum who was working as an Account Coordinator at Y&R, NY. Tom knew Alma Murphy, the woman who ran the Account Support summer intern program. Tom and I were not great friends but we had played rugby together and he very graciously got my information to Alma. On Ash Wednesday, 1988 I showed up at 285 Madison Avenue with my A game and a dream. That June, I started as an Account Support intern on the NYNEX business. If you are under 40 you probably have no idea what NYNEX is, but if you ran a 23 and Me on Verizon about 20% of the DNA would be NYNEX.

I caught a second break that summer when the Account Coordinator who I was working for went out on maternity leave two weeks into the gig so I got to do the actual job of Account Coordinator for much of the summer. I recognized both breaks for the opportunities they were and worked very hard that summer. I also made sure that Dorothy (Dot) Gianonne knew I was working hard. Dot is the visionary woman who somehow managed to control 65(ish) recent college grads working in Account Support until we got promoted into Account Management or left. If you are a fan of sports movies, imagine a mash-up of all the best coaching characters you have seen (tough, all-knowing, compassionate, slightly unpredictable, generous, savvy, mysterious) add a fashion edge (high heels, leather skirt), and you have Dot. My work paid off and I returned to Bates with a job offer for $16,500 plus overtime. At that time, Account Coordinators wore suits and ties, so my dry cleaning bill was about $4,500 a year. Thank God for the overtime!

Over the 25+ years since that first day at Y&R I have had a wonderful run. I have been fortunate enough to be associated with many of the world’s best-known brands and companies. Warner -Lambert, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson all made large investments in my learning and development. I’ve been shadowed by industrial psychologists for days. Warner Lambert sent me to the Center For Creative Leadership, Pfizer sent me to Harvard’s School of Management and J&J sent me to their Lead program in Shanghai to learn from experts and executives. I have had the opportunity to run brands, categories, geographies and companies. I have worked for masterful leaders and disastrous posers along the way. I have learned from colleagues and managers and partners and rivals. I have been to dozens of foreign countries and watched how differently these organizations find ways to win. I have faced immense business challenges. I was even a company spokesman (aka the bad guy) in a Frontline documentary several years ago. I have acquired and been acquired, merged and sold.

The point is, I have learned a lot along the way and in 2017, I plan to share my take on that learning about once a month. As you have already seen, I name names. I have learned so much from others that it only seems fair to give them credit. I don’t plan on trashing anyone but I guarantee you that there will be examples that will make it impossible to obscure their identity. The fact is I have only run into a couple of folks with really evil intent. The rest of the bad examples come from people who are in over their head or ill-equipped for that particular role. The late Mike Irwin, a journeyman comedian, and one of the great comedy teachers had 5 rules for comedy. The first was “Its Your Stage” which meant do what you think is funny and not what you think the audience wants to hear. This is my stage. I will tell you what I have learned, what I see working and not working in companies today and share why I think it may be working or not. Feel free to debate it. If you have a different take, I would love to hear it.

In September 2016, I caught another break. I was two years into a job as President of a medical device company looking to launch a new technology platform in the anesthesia and injection space. The technology is excellent, but the company is very lean and frankly so focused on regularly raising capital that it was a slog trying to get the commercial work done. To make things more complicated, it is a public company and required to publicly report every quarter. After two years of chasing clinical study sites and distributors and regulatory bodies, I was frustrated and exhausted and frankly not making the progress that I had expected to make when I took the job.

I wanted something different but I also knew I did not want to go back to a large corporation. As I thought about the work I wanted to do, it became clear to me that management consulting would give me the opportunity to do the kind of work I liked and was good at without having to live in the corporate bureaucracy that can slow down the process of turning or accelerating a business. I had worked with many firms over the years including McKinsey, Booz-Allen, Boston Consulting, ZS Associates, Mercer, etc. but none of them felt like the right fit and frankly, they all have their own bureaucracies. Fortunately, I had an ongoing dialogue with Gary Stibel, the founder and one of the Managing Partners at The New England Consulting group. I worked with NECG when I was the N. American President of Vision Care at Bausch + Lomb in 2010. Bausch was owned at the time by private equity and it was an intense environment as we were turning around a business that had been declining in N. America for several years at close to double digits every year. NECG worked on a specific innovation project for us and I was impressed by how fast and relatively painless the engagement was. I was also impressed that everyone I had worked with at NECG had actually run a P+L at some point. That made it much easier and faster to get to potential solutions that were executable given the constraints. After several thoughtful conversations and discussions I joined the New England Consulting Group as a Managing Partner and Principal.

To be clear, this is my blog not NECGs. I will obviously keep any of the firm’s client information confidential. I like it there so if I shill from time to time, please indulge me. I have many friends in the performing arts and several who sell Rodin & Fields skin care. Their social feeds often include self-promotion. They promote but they also deliver! I hope to do the same.

Finally, this blog is called The Action Standard for good reason, the one thing I have seen again and again and again across organizations is the intense pursuit of vague and ethereal end points resulting in wasted organizational effort and confusion. In my experience, you must have a clear objective, an action standard, to measure your progress against. We can all feel so safe inside the comfort of familiar activity, but unless it is directed, productive and sufficient it is a false comfort. I have seen several people credited with the saying “Give me the freedom of a tight strategy”.   My hat is off to whoever said it first and everyone who lives by it. To me, setting establishing the action standard before the work begins is the first key to winning for the business and for the individual.