Profile Magazine Q2/18 Vol2

CEO David Osborne and his team at Virgin Pulse focus on the fundamentals to improve workplace wellness and thrive in a competitive market P.82

Attracting Top Talent

From renovating company headquarters to changing approaches to working remotely, discover how these executives are adapting to changing times and looking toward the future to bring in the best talent.

Q2/18

In the Same Boat

Michelle Hertz—vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary of CGI Federal—believes that if her team is all rowing in the same direction, then there’s nothing they can’t accomplish

Why the Law Is Not Black & White

Dan Troy understands that legal matters are often in gray areas, so he embraces this in his approach to leading the law department at GSK

54

Changing State

Jason Jackson is working on behalf of the governor’s office to streamline HR for the State of Nebraska 17

When Tastes Change

Chris Hobson and his project team at VF Corporation help deliver apparel brand solutions in order to meet consumers’ evolving preferences

58

Jason Hornick (Hertz), Tom Whipps (Troy)

The Fundamentals of Wellness

David Osborne and his team work together to ensure health and wellness solutions provider Virgin Pulse thrives 82

International Alignment

Scott D. Nader ensures that GCG takes advantage of every resource its parent company has to offer to ensure global success 102

The Keys to HR Achievement

With decades of experience, CIRCOR’s Andrew Farnsworth shares his tips and tricks for creating a cohesive company culture on a global scale

Help Found

Kristina Palmer Shedd and her team at SapientRazorfish rely on a collaborative culture and innovative technology to ensure they’re hiring the right people for the right jobs 110

Don’t Get in the Way of Business

How Katherine Haar turned her legal career into a prominent leadership position at Informatica 126

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Rewriting the Résumé

Every job interview I have been on has started with the same question: Can you tell me about yourself? From here, the traditional script tells us to give them an outline of your résumé, highlighting your skills and prior experience that may lend to the job you now desire. On my résumé, there are few keywords that will catch a recruiter’s eye in the publishing industry. Nowadays, though, it seems that the most successful companies aren’t looking just for skills, but rather who is going to be the best culture fit within their company. That is accomplished not with terms such as “strong editor,” but with the intangibles.

As the executives in our feature section explain, getting the best talent in today’s competitive market starts with skills, but more importantly, it’s about looking beyond the x’s and o’s of a typical employee. It’s about recognizing who is a good culture fit, who can go the distance, and who is going to elevate the people around them. Take for instance Matt Beliveau (P. 32) and Ann Powell Judge (P. 40) , who explain how finding those who are a perfect culture fit is critical for helping a business accomplish its objectives. Dan Spaulding (P. 37) emphasizes the importance of a work/life balance, while Laura Cushing (P. 45) explains how inclusiveness and collaboration go handin-hand. Robert Vipperman (P. 47) stresses how a relentless curiosity is just as important as having a sense of humor, and Diane Sanford (P. 51) looks for those who lead with a positive energy and have an openness for change.

After working on that section, I went back to my own résumé and started seeing how I could rewrite it. Rather than stating something along the lines of being a sound editor, I could express how a relentless curiosity improves my ability to be a detailed editor. Or rather than explain that I write stories, express that it’s a collaborative mind-set with my fellow editors that helps inspire my work. As the executives in our feature section explain, it’s easy to find someone with skills, but finding the right fit for your company can be quite the task.

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While I may disagree with some of the labels millennials get, one statement has resonated true: We want to go to a company where we are contributing to a purpose and a mission. We want the culture to be just as strong, a place where a shared mind-set for growth and excellence is not only encouraged, but also expected and celebrated. As workplaces evolve, so too will how they hire. And in the end, the answer to tell me about yourself may be a completely different conversation.

Danny Ciamprone Senior Editor

TALENT

Setting the Example

How CGI Federal’s Michelle Hertz leverages her experiences to develop an authentic, adaptable, and team- and client-centric leadership style

By GALEN BEEBE

Michelle Hertz VP, General Counsel, Corporate Secretary CGI Federal

Effective leaders come in many forms, and Michelle Hertz knows this from experience. Throughout her nearly thirty-year career in the federal government contracts arena, Hertz has experienced many different leadership styles, ranging from the military’s command-and-control approach in the public sector to highly collaborative styles in the private sector.

Today, Hertz is the vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary of CGI Federal Inc., a wholly owned US operating subsidiary of CGI Group Inc. CGI Federal is dedicated to partnering with federal agencies to provide solutions for defense, civilian, healthcare, and intelligence missions.

Before joining CGI Federal, though, Hertz began her career in federal government contracting with an elite internship with Naval

Air Systems Command for high-potential professionals. During the three-year program, Hertz worked as a contracts specialist and pursued an executive MBA at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. She thrived within the highly structured, multicultural military and civilian environment, which employed an authoritative approach to leadership.

After completing the internship, Hertz worked by day as a government contracting officer while attending George Mason University Law School at night. After graduation, Hertz joined Holland & Knight LLP as an associate in its government contracts practice. There, she leveraged her practical experience and insights to build partnerships with and advocate for her diverse government contractor clients. As a practitioner, she found herself drawn to working more directly with her business partners.

As a result, when the opportunity arose for her to move in-house, she took it. Over the past thirteen years, she has held various contractor-side counsel positions of increasing responsibility at several firms, experiencing both hierarchical and collaborative corporate cultures.

When Hertz joined CGI Federal in April 2010, she was the company’s only attorney. At the time, CGI Federal was a $400 million company. A few months later, CGI Federal acquired Stanley Inc.—a firm twice its size— to become a roughly $1.2 billion company. To meet CGI Federal’s growing needs, Hertz had to build her team on the fly while also growing into her role as a leader. She currently leads a small but efficient team of more than sixty compliance and contracts/subcontracts professionals. Over time, she has matured her approach from a single contributor into a working manager.

“I try very hard to work with and support my staff rather than always being out in front or taking over their matters.”

MICHELLE HERTZ

But just as there are no universal leadership styles or approaches, there is no single general counsel archetype that Hertz emulates. She has, however, always appreciated people with a genuine approach and aims to be authentic for her staff. “It is essential for me to be true to myself as I fulfill my role and not simply play the role of a general counsel,” Hertz says.

As a result, Hertz has evolved her own style by taking the best practices from each professional experience. The approach she adopted is to be available, informed, supportive, and selectively hands-on.

To effectively manage her team as well, Hertz maintains an open-door policy and meets regularly with her direct reports in the legal, compliance, and contracts department, both in scheduled one-on-one meetings and on an as-needed basis. “Although I have my own workload to manage, I make time to be accessible and available to my internal clients and my team,” she says. “Not only does it keep me current with new developments, but more importantly, it also helps my team be responsive and proactive to keep CGI Federal moving at the speed of business.”

Hertz enjoys coaching from behind the scenes, providing a safety net of sorts for her staff. She promotes a culture of growth within her team by allowing individuals to expand their depth and breadth of expertise. “To fully leverage my team’s talents, it’s essential that they be seen as trusted counselors and business advisors by our clients,” Hertz says. “To that end, I try very hard to work with and

Arnold & Porter

Kaye Scholer LLP is proud to honor Michelle Hertz VP, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary, CGI Federal Inc.

Michelle’s recognition is well deserved and we look forward to continuing to partner with her.

Michelle Hertz

Pro le Wiley Rein LLP congratulates on her well-deserved recognition in

We are honored to work with Michelle and CGI Federal Inc., and look forward to many successful years ahead.

Government contractors like CGI Federal operate in complex and ever-changing environments.

Rogers Joseph O'Donnell’s agile lawyers help them navigate with confidence. Focused. Expert. Effective.

The Bowen Building 875 15th Street NW, Ste 725 Washington DC 20005

311 California Street, 10th fl San Francisco, CA 94104

Congratulations to our friend and colleague Michelle Hertz of CGI Federal on her dynamic career and continued success.

support my staff rather than always being out in front or taking over their matters.”

She finds that working together with her colleagues on novel or high-risk matters presents a development opportunity that benefits the whole team. “We need to be able to work outside of our individual comfort zones from time to time,” Hertz explains. “It is a better, more sustainable approach to help team members expand their repertoire and develop muscle memory on matters outside their typical expertise. By rolling up my sleeves and working with them on those matters, they’re able to handle future matters independently.”

Hertz employs a flexible communication style, emphasizing formality where appropriate and using humor as a rhetorical tool. She doesn’t play against type, but she does play to her audience. “Leadership is a very relative term. The most important thing I can do is fulfill that role in a way that resonates and is meaningful to my team and clients, and help them make informed and timely business decisions,” Hertz explains.

Regardless of the delivery style used in a given situation, Hertz emphasizes that her focus as CGI Federal’s general counsel is to develop pragmatic business solutions and deliver advice that enables executives to make sound decisions on behalf of the company as a whole.

While Hertz’s leadership style has evolved throughout her career, her goals as a leader have remained consistent. “My aim is to create a collegial and collaborative work environment, where the people on my team enjoy working together and supporting their clients while feeling successful both individually and as part of a team,” she says. “If we all are in the same boat pulling in the same direction, then there is nothing that we can’t accomplish together.”

With Hertz at the helm of her team, CGI Federal is poised for continued growth in the federal marketplace.

RJO values our relationship with CGI. We congratulate Michelle on being recognized for her leadership. And we thank her for the trust she has placed in us. RJO is a focused firm that delivers positive results for government contractors and others. To learn more about the firm, visit rjo.com.

Williams & Connolly greatly values the opportunity to represent CGI Federal and work with Michelle. With her relentless focus on efficiency, ethics, and excellence, she exemplifies the best of the profession, and CGI Federal is recognized as an industry leader. We are proud to partner with Michelle and CGI Federal.

Many engineers get their start as kids, tinkering with toasters, bicycles, or whatever else they can dismantle without their parents noticing. For Liam Quinn, it was no different. He even went a step further when he literally wired his family’s farmhouse back in Ireland. Today, as senior vice president, chief technology officer (CTO), and senior fellow at Dell, that same passion to tinker and solve problems drives him as he leads one of the world’s most respected computer company’s technology efforts.

Lighting the Path Forward

Liam Quinn of Dell explains how he helped engineer the personal computing revolution over his thirty-five-year career

By DAVID LEVINE

“I always had an interest in electronics when I was growing up, especially wireless radios,” Quinn says. “I ruined many of the portable radios my parents had, taking them apart and seeing how they worked.” Growing up in rural Ireland, Liam had full days as the eldest of nine children. He did his chores on the farm and walked to the local two-room school each day. As a teenager, his interest and curiosity grew, and he set in motion a project that changed his life: he wired his childhood home and brought electricity to his family farm for the first time. “That was my initial start into electrical engineering,”

he says. “Since then, I have always been in engineering, and I never looked back.”

That focus drove Liam to be the only student in his high school class to attend university, an opportunity that lead him to the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT). He worked in Dublin for a while, then went back to school to earn a degree in computer engineering from the University of Limerick. He was hired by a US company’s Dublin office and taught at DIT until he was transferred to the United States in 1986. In the United States, he earned a master’s in computer engineering from Boston University and started

Liam Quinn SVP, CTO, Senior Fellow Dell

working for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). At the time, the PC industry was in its infancy, and companies such as DEC were resistant to the innovation driving change at that time.

In 1989, a small Texas-based start-up began discussing the personal computing model as an alternative to centralized computing supported by DEC, IBM, and others. This new PC concept and business model conflicted with Vax architecture (a successful innovation from DEC in the 1970s) and unsurprisingly, it didn’t sit well with DEC leadership. DEC at that time had more than 145,000 employees worldwide. Innovative ideas and new business models coming from small start-ups such as Compaq Computers were seen as disruptive to the established paradigm from incumbent market leaders such as DEC.

Quinn moved to a start-up in Austin, Texas, in 1993, which was later acquired by Compaq in 1996. He was then recruited by Dell and moved over to the company in 1997.

“I had worked on the same campus as Dell and heard good things about the company and people,” Quinn says. “Its culture had a lot of passion, its competitive model and focus on product innovation was really attractive, and at the time, they were really innovating around customer care.”

Now, as CTO, Quinn is responsible for leading technology innovation across the Client Solutions Group. Following last year’s acquisition of data storage company EMC, Quinn is now working with his CTO peers across the Dell Technology family of companies to drive end-to-end solutions and product differentiation that can best serve customers. “We have a whole set of products being built, our core products, and want to add value to those products year after year,” he says. “In parallel, we want to drive new markets. A great example is how we’re driving the virtual reality and augmented reality ecosystems. We have incredible products that span the creation of content—to the infrastructure that houses, secures, and serves

that content—all the way to the systems that all kinds of people use to power and consume these experiences.”

In August 2017, the Dell Canvas product came to market and added another innovative accomplishment to Quinn’s résumé. “Dell Canvas is a full-touch environment that sits horizontally on your desk workspace,” he says. “It’s a beautiful, twenty-seven-inch monitor that enables you to work with touch, pen, and a totem knob device. It offers a new way to do things. It connects to just about any Windows 10 PC and consolidates many different user interfaces in a unique way. We had to develop the software and electrical wiring and hardware, and we had to do things that were not off-the-shelf. It was challenging but rewarding to deliver something innovative, unique, and potentially transformative for users in the creative markets.”

The Dell Canvas is just one of many examples that has Quinn getting noticed by his peers in the industry. “Liam is a visionary and a driving force leading the development of cutting-edge technology that is delivering groundbreaking experiences,” says Mark Papermaster, CTO and senior vice president of technology and engineering at semiconductor manufacturing company Advanced Micro Devices. “He fosters a culture of collaboration and partnership that keeps Dell at the forefront of the industry.”

Quinn clearly has passion for what he does, whether for products in market now or the ones coming from his future-minded team. “It’s exciting and wonderfully challenging to be in the eye of the storm,” he says, “where customer needs, market trends, competitive trends, and technology evolution are blending together in a competitive strategy.”

But to say the world of engineering has changed since he tinkered with his first radio is an understatement. “It has been a fabulous ride, from where it was to where it is now,” he says. “Just think, the processor in your phone today likely has more capability than computers from the late 1980s. When you look at it like that and know the future will only exaggerate the comparisons, the acceleration of technology can be frightening. But only if you let it be.”

hange State of

How Jason Jackson is helping Nebraska meet the changing needs of its population

By CHRIS GIGLEY

Government bureaucracy doesn’t intimidate Jason Jackson. His background in the military and technology has taught him how to be an agent of change in virtually any situation, and he’s doing just that as the State of Nebraska’s chief human resources officer.

“What I enjoy in this role most is how visible the results of your work are in terms of impacting people’s lives,” Jackson says. “If we can make government more efficient, then we can improve services or provide tax relief through greater efficiency to our citizens.”

If that sounds like a big goal, then it’s because it is. Jackson enjoys leading major change, and his place in state government gives him that chance.

Jackson is a US Naval Academy graduate who served for five years in the US Navy, earning the Navy Achievement Medal and Navy Commendation Medal for his service in the War on Terrorism. Today, he attributes a large part of his management style to his military experience. Specifically, his time in the navy taught him how to make decisions under ambiguous circumstances.

“The military imbues leaders, out of necessity, with the ability to make informed decisions under pressure with limited data and have a personal commitment to those decisions,” Jackson explains. “You

Jason Jackson CHRO State of Nebraska

also learn to execute upon those decisions quickly and get the whole organization in line behind them.”

Making those decisions is about more than having the confidence to make them. It’s also about recognizing that failing to be decisive is more detrimental to the organization. The key, Jackson says, is simply optimizing decision-making in the time you have. Jackson is finding that skill particularly valuable in government. Bureaucracy in general, he says, has a history of perpetuating the status quo and avoiding risk.

“We’re suboptimizing our performance when we wait to have all the information rather than using our judgment to know when we have enough information to make informed decisions,” Jackson says.

The other notable lesson Jackson learned from the military is how to adapt to a number of leadership roles in a short period of time. Jackson says his navy career forced him to be a leadership generalist to a greater degree than his peers in civilian jobs were afforded.

“You go from being an engineering officer to being a combat officer to leading an IT division to being an assistant operations officer all in matter of a few years,” Jackson says.

As a result, Jackson quickly grasped how to lead diverse organizations and apply generalist leadership principles. He also learned when to defer to subject-matter experts and how to remove barriers. Those have turned out to be the building blocks of his civilian career.

Jackson didn’t start his post-military career in human resources, though. In fact, he didn’t even plan on going into HR. But in his third year at the personal finance software company Intuit, an opportunity arose. Intuit was building a shared services organization and wanted someone with an operational background to lead it.

“They knew my military background and asked me to do it, and I fell in love with HR from there,” Jackson recalls.

He enjoyed the strategic component of maximizing the performance of people, processes, and organizations. That, and the people-centric aspect of the job, were a perfect blend for him. He ended up helping to lead Intuit’s HR department for more than six years.

Then, in 2016, the administration of Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts came calling. The chance to apply his skills in a public service capacity was too good to pass up. The work environment, however, was completely different from his time in tech.

“Strategic organizational design is very foreign in the public sector and in state government specifically,” Jackson says. “You have agencies created out of legislation from the 1940s and 1950s that haven’t changed in the seventy years since. In the private sector, that’s unheard of.”

Intuit’s structure constantly changed and adapted to shifting customer expectations and new technologies and processes. Now, thanks to the work of Governor Ricketts and his team, including Jackson, those types of changes are happening in the Nebraska state government, Jackson says. Nebraska, for instance, was the last state in the union to have a Department of Roads and not a Department of Transportation. It also had a Department of Aeronautics. Jackson combined roads and aeronautics into a new Department of Transportation, which has done much more than make the state’s organization more current.

“Having one department instead of two reduces the burden on taxpayers and allows us to think about the commuter as a customer,” Jackson explains. “We recognize the commuter is looking for the government to optimize the whole ecosystem of transportation.”

Jackson also played a role in supporting the governor’s merger of the Division for Veterans Homes and Department of Veteran Affairs. Again, the benefits were widespread. Not only did it save on administration costs, but the merger also created a more convenient, one-stop-shop for Nebraskabased military veterans.

The success of those two moves has helped facilitate more improvements that Jackson wants to make. However, there is no time to sit back and reflect on the change he’s been able to enact in a short period of time.

Jackson has turned his focus to workforce design, researching what type of talent the state government will need five and ten years down the road, as the needs of the population evolve. A major portion of that project is getting leadership throughout the organization to think strategically about their personnel. “The most effective organizations recognize that there’s always more they can do to get better,” Jackson says. “That’s our attitude here. As we build momentum and do more to educate and empower our frontline workers, I expect those successes to build upon themselves.”

“The most effective organizations recognize that there’s always more they can do to get better. That’s our attitude here.”

JASON JACKSON

Serving the public isn’t a new concept for Jason Jackson. Before his role as the chief human resources officer for Nebraska Governor Ricketts, Jason served our country as a Navy officer. He graduated from the US Naval Academy and deployed overseas in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Through his work, Jason honors the service of more than eighteen thousand state workers in Nebraska by working with UnitedHealthcare to balance the wellness needs of the workforce, while saving money for both taxpayers and his employees. Jason also brings the best practices from the private sector to government, ensuring progress is made through collaboration and innovation.

“UnitedHealthcare values our long-term alliance with the State of Nebraska, and we are proud to work with administrators such as Jason Jackson,” says Matt Milam, executive director for UnitedHealthcare of Nebraska. “Through his leadership inside Nebraska’s Department of Administrative Services, we are able to provide innovative and useful tools that allow members to understand their benefits and navigate the health care system together.”

The Mountain Climber

Rick Merritt tackled the major rocks and never looked back, turning OSI Systems Inc. into an HR success story

By KELLI LAWRENCE

There’s a classic analogy for time and life management that involves trying to fit large rocks, pebbles, sand, and water into a container. If you jump to the analogy’s conclusion, you find that in order to fit everything in at once, one must place the big rocks—the most important aspects—before anything else. Only then will there be room for the rest.

Rick Merritt describes himself as a “big rocks” thinker when it comes to his work philosophy, which means that he takes on necessities before dealing with any minutiae— departmental or otherwise. As a result, when he assumed the role of senior vice president and chief human resources officer for OSI Systems Inc. in the fall of 2014, he did so knowing it was based in California. However, it was staffed by more than six thousand people across nineteen different countries.

But that only made Merritt, a former exercise physiologist, more eager to take on those big rocks.

“If I were to make a change in an exercise program, I’d know the change it’s going to have on the various key functions of the body,” he says. “If I make a change on the compensation plan, I can tell with some level of certainty how that’s going to trickle down through the organization and what impact it’s going to have. The physiological dynamics of the human body are similar to the dynamic interdependencies of organizations. Bringing those two elements together is what’s really exciting about what I do.”

OSI Systems Inc., a diversified designer and manufacturer of specialized electronic

systems and components for homeland security, healthcare, defense, and aerospace, was in need of its own form of an exercise program.

Merritt saw the need for changes in multiple areas, so he set out to redesign OSI’s HR structure, develop a globally applicable talent management strategy, and create a more reliable system for data management. If that sounds like a lot of change, it’s because it is. But that wasn’t all. Merritt sought continuous improvement in other areas, from goal setting to learning modules to a proper total rewards model.

Leading the charge for so much change is seldom easy, but pushing for necessary change is an essential aspect of Merritt’s philosophy. “Sometimes I hear, ‘Rick, thanks for driving that forward.’ Other times it’s, ‘Rick, you went too far,’” he admits. “I might think, ‘OK, I made that mistake. Now I’ll let them take a breath before I push again.’ But if the HR function and the company are not evolving, then we are falling behind, and I can never not get there. So I’m always trying to make my team a little bit uncomfortable.”

One necessary push that Merritt made was instituting a significant advancement in OSI’s in-house technology, which he says was quite dated. In getting it up to speed with current industry standards, Merritt has expanded HR’s reach—essentially doing more with less and delivering more to both employees and managers. But a challenge arose in regards to his compensation model. “It took us a little longer to get that piece in place than I originally hoped,” he says. “I think I underestimated where we were as an HR group and company and what was needed for us to move those critical elements forward.”

But it was a collection of steps toward greater transparency that is one of the best representations of Merritt’s efforts. An online

Rick Merritt SVP, CHRO OSI Systems Inc.

“I like to get to the top of a mountain, survey the valley below, and then determine the next mountain to climb.”

RICK MERRITT

portal now contains small profiles of each employee at the company. It’s the first time such information has been internet-accessible. A public posting of each individual’s workrelated goals exists as well, which Merritt explains allows people to see up and down the organization and have a better understanding of the company’s goals as a whole. And over the past three years, Merritt’s team has gradually worked information about meritbased salary adjustments and bonuses to the point where directors and frontline managers can see it as easily as senior managers.

“As a result, every year that we do the performance evaluation process and the salary administration process, we learn more about what managers have not seen or information that’s incorrect because it hasn’t been put in the system properly,” he explains. “So we’re getting increasingly accurate data, which makes the company better.”

Improved technology, more accuracy and efficiency, and greater transparency is an impressive to-do list for any HR department to carry out in three years, let alone for a

company of this size and scope. But Merritt recently brought his team together to take inventory and prepare for the future.

“I like to get to the top of a mountain, survey the valley below, and then determine the next mountain to climb,” he says. “Do we tweak our mission statement next? Is it still relevant, given the growth of the company? Is the structure of the organization still correct? Does it need modification? We’re doing that for the first time since launching the initial strategy three years ago.”

And when Merritt holds those meetings, he maintains one rule: everyone has to sit in a different place each time. It’s an illustration of what he calls his simple mantra: Challenge the status quo every day.

“If I can get my team to think this way on a more consistent basis, then they’ll challenge what is considered factual,” he says. “And often times, it’s not. It can be changed. It can be adjusted. You take that focus, and you apply it to the big rocks. If you can drive that level of focus, then I think you can make really significant changes.”

SourceWest Partners joins Profile Magazine in recognizing Rick Merritt, Chief Human Resources Officer, OSI Systems, for his leadership and commitment to excellence.

At SourceWest Partners we understand how important it is for our clients to attract and retain the best talent possible and quite simply stated is the reason our firm exists.

Why Embracing Problems Is Good for Business

Tony Fogel welcomes every challenge to develop talent, minimize expenses, and improve operations at Coveris Group

By JEFF SILVER

When Tony Fogel joined Coveris Group as senior vice president and chief people and culture officer, he brought the perfect blend of knowledge, experience, and attitude to the job. In fact, it was during his time at Pepsi where he learned the power of having outstanding people working in a great system and how to build consensus. At Morgan Stanley, he learned to identify, analyze, solve problems, and how to think on his feet to make quick decisions. And at Lehman Brothers, he gained experience growing and scaling an organization. Through these experiences, he believes problems present great opportunities to improve.

“Some of the methodologies and cultural norms from my previous companies were incompatible, so I had to adapt to a new environment,” Fogel says. “But together, they gave me a lot to draw from to address the challenges of developing fit for purpose, coherent, and comprehensive systems and processes at Coveris, where five independent companies were consolidated to form the sixth largest packaging company in the world.”

Those skills and values are also well-suited for the Coveris Business System, which is grounded in customer and operational excellence, talent leadership, and acquisition integration. It also prioritizes data-based decisions, transparency, and collaboration. For example, when a manufacturing issue is detected at any facility around the world, production employees closest to the problem implement kaizen—a Japanese approach to continuous improvement using systematic data collection, monitoring, evaluation, and improvement sessions. Their solutions and accomplishments are then shared in weekly enterprise-wide meetings.

“Everyone is involved in addressing the requirements of a high-performing culture at all levels,” Fogel explains. “With twelve thousand employees, we want twelve thousand problem-solvers.”

Tony Fogel SVP, Chief People and Culture Officer Coveris Group

David Markowski

From the beginning, he focused on HR providing value to and aligning with the business. Initially, this meant mastering lean manufacturing to improving quality and reducing operating expenses. Later, he directed his attention toward developing strategies, processes, and systems to better serve customers and increase revenue. This included building a robust CRM platform, establishing appropriate metrics, and creating rigorous sales training and tools. The lean manufacturing focus reduced cost of goods sold by about $81 million in one year, and the focus on sales capability saw several business units double their annual new business revenue.

Simultaneously, Fogel was working to upgrade Coveris’ recruitment practices and procedures. The company was outsourcing about 60 percent of its professional roles to numerous contingency firms, had no employment branding or formal recruitment process, no recruitment metrics, and an inadequate applicant tracking system that provided no onboarding technology.

With the goals of improving the quality of the candidate pool and recruitment visibility, cutting fees, and developing meaningful metrics, Fogel began an uphill battle to build consensus for consolidating external recruitment. Ultimately, Tri-Search, a new, smaller firm was selected. He believed Tri-Search would act as a partner to address Coveris’ requirements and would develop the expertise needed to service the demands of its business.

“To change our recruitment practices, I had to be willing to take a risk and persevere at persuading managers to leave the firms they were familiar with,” Fogel recalls. “But I was able to demonstrate the benefits of working with a single partner that would develop the expertise to grow with us, instead of our having to conform to larger firms’ established models.”

That risk has paid off handsomely. Fees were cut nearly in half, time to fill positions has improved by an roughly 25 percent, and conflicts of interest—such as firms filling positions at the same time as they recruited talent away from the company— were eliminated. Additionally, Coveris now has a comprehensive employment branding package, as well as a full range of metrics to continue honing all recruitment and retention activities.

One year after Coveris was formed, Fogel was asked to lead a project to evaluate and improve expenses. Working with McKinsey

& Company, a plan was developed to benchmark selling, general and administrative expense to identify both opportunities for reductions and potential areas of underinvestment. Spending on transportation, utilities, and warehousing was added to the project, and Fogel formed a global cross-departmental steering committee. The steering committee identified efficiency opportunities, and they were successful in identifying root causes and executing appropriate action plans.

“We tracked everything relentlessly to show deviations to best-in-class processes and progress toward reducing spending,” Fogel explains. “For some discretionary categories such as travel, we built zerobased budgets with a spend-category owner who was responsible for monitoring and managing the checkbook, with no overdrafts allowed.”

In addition to identifying areas, such as legal, where adding in-house talent would ultimately reduce external costs, or sales— where more investment was indicated in order to continue growth—this initiative achieved its initial target of saving about $13 million in the first year. The process is ongoing, working toward the goal of reducing spend by roughly $30 million over the course of three years.

In all of his endeavors, Fogel always looks for ways to align HR efforts with business needs. “I want to build capabilities for the long-term, not just check an item off a list,” he says. “I ask a lot of questions, do a lot of listening, and try to focus on how we can collaborate to solve a problem.”

That’s true even when he isn’t leading a project, such as a recent implementation during which he brought all the stakeholders together to constructively address issues that were impeding progress.

“Even though I was not directly accountable, it’s what the business needed,” he says.

Human Resource Solutions provides executive search and advisory services for entrepreneurial, growth-oriented, and private-equity-backed companies. Our mission is to be an expert at recruiting senior management talent for those situations when cultural fit is key to the executive’s success. Our clients value our approach of project immersion and direct development of strong client relationships. Understanding our clients at a deep level allows us to respond to each search with accuracy, creativity, and attention to detail. For more information about how our services can help your company, contact Woody Daroca at 720-746-1011. website: www.hrsolutions.com

For more information on how Human Resource Solutions can help your company identify and select key executive talent, email or call Woody Daroca: woody@hrsolutions.com 720.746.1011 www.hrsolutions.com Human Resource Solutions recognizes colleague Anthony Fogel Chief Human Resources O cer for Coveris Group, on his exceptional career achievements and well-deserved tribute. Congratulations Anthony! Human Resource Solutions is proud to collaborate with Anthony and Coveris on executive search e orts and looks forward to a continuing partnership.

EXECUTIVE SEARCH CONSULTANTS

The Sky’s the Limit

Alison Malin Zoellner has worked across numerous verticals in her corporate law career. Now, she’s encouraging her employees to take similar risks.

By RANDALL COLBURN

Alison Malin Zoellner VP, General Counsel, Advanced Materials

Honeywell

Honeywell

(Photo); Jany Zhang (Illustrations)

Alison Malin Zoellner’s career path was written in the stars, it seems. “The announcement of my birth was actually styled as the announcement of an initial public offering,” she says with a laugh. “So that probably presaged a long career facing Wall Street and being a securities lawyer.”

That said, her journey working in corporate law has been anything but straight forward. Over twenty-seven years, she’s found herself working with financial institutions and multinational corporations as an associate at New York’s Sullivan & Cromwell law firm. She’s also managed a diverse portfolio of media investments as the vice president and assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company. Today, she serves as vice president and general counsel for the $2.5 billion Advanced Materials business within Honeywell, which manufactures high-performance products, including environmentally preferable refrigerants and materials used to manufacture products, such as bulletresistant armor, computer chips, and more. Honeywell is a Fortune 100, global softwareindustrial company headquartered in Morris Plains, New Jersey, that delivers industryspecific solutions that include aerospace and automotive products and services; control technologies for buildings, homes, and industries; and performance materials.

“Looking across Honeywell, it’s probably one of the most disparate businesses in that it encompasses many smaller businesses within it,” she says. “So that’s made for a very complex portfolio of issues and challenges to get my head around.”

Zoellner stepped into this new role a little more than a year ago after having worked in Honeywell’s corporate department focusing on matters related to securities and corporate finance for more than four years. It was a daunting shift, but Zoellner is used to it, having taken on a variety of roles in her career. Everything she’s experienced in her career so far, she says, has helped prepare her for this new role.

“The nice thing about starting out in a big law firm is that you’re constantly becoming an expert on a new client or matter every day. You go from zero to sixty on a new client, a new industry, a new vertical all the

time,” she says. “It trains your mind so that if you elect to step over and go work for a company, then you’re well-positioned to roll up your sleeves and learn about that company in an in-depth fashion.”

That training is especially helpful when moving into large businesses with a labyrinthine internal structure, such as Honeywell. It’s also helped her realize just how many threads connect across multiple industries. “No matter where you are, you expect your in-house lawyers to be experts,” she says. “You expect them to be completely independent and have their own articulation of legal advice and the issues at hand.”

Too often, there’s an expectation in major corporations that employees stay in their lane in terms of their prior expertise. What’s so special about Honeywell, Zoellner says, is how the company works to diversify its talent. Zoellner’s shift into Advanced Materials isn’t one she would’ve expected when she arrived at the company, but she describes Honeywell as a place that believes if someone’s successful at one thing, then they can be successful at something else.

That’s absolutely true of her shift from securities and corporate finance, where she’s invested a great deal of her career, to an area wholly specific to Honeywell itself in Advanced Materials. At Honeywell, Zoellner says, people have the option to leap between multiple verticals. “Here, you see people being extremely open to a variety of different outcomes,” she says. “That makes for a dynamic and exciting work environment.”

And Honeywell’s environment has only emboldened her own leadership style and the ways in which she interacts with employees. “When I interview people here, I truly say to them that the sky’s the limit,” she says. “You could start out as a lawyer, and you could end up running global M&A, as my colleague Anne Madden does for us today. The only constraints here are the ones you put on yourself.”

Not only is this approach representative of Zoellner’s own journey, but she says it’s also appealing to the more junior employees at Honeywell. “Employees at the beginning of their careers want constant feedback and a clear sense from you of how you’re going to help them optimize their opportunities,” she says. “I think there’s a big responsibility when you’re a manager to imprint upon them that you’re there to partner with them to drive their career forward.”

This sense of fostering growth and discovery also extends to Zoellner’s work

recruiting outside counsel, whom she finds via a partnership with AdvanceLaw, a company that works to identify the best law firms and provide fee and performance information. AdvanceLaw’s careful vetting process and commitment to transparency works to ensure a level of certainty in those using its services, which is certainly the case for Zoellner and her crew at Honeywell. “We love partnering with AdvanceLaw because they have the same theory as us, which is that you need to get the best quality for the most competitive price,” she says. “But I also view them as an opportunity pipeline to discover excellent, diverse firms that are less known to those of us on the corporate pyramid.”

A year into her new role, Zoellner has completed building her team and is focused on providing the best possible support to Honeywell’s myriad of businesses.

“What makes my business so interesting is that there’s such a strong culture of innovation,” she says. Although she’s talking about the business’ intellectual property, it’s also easy to see how Zoellner and Honeywell are working to innovate the way individuals look at their career trajectories. For them, anything is possible.

“Alison and the rest of Honeywell’s legal team understand it’s possible to receive both quality and efficiency from outside counsel, and we are enjoying partnering with them to identify the best firms and lawyers for their needs. In our experience, there is no necessary trade-off—some of the best lawyers and teams are highly efficient.” Firoz Dattu, Founder & Chair, AdvanceLaw.

AdvanceLaw is a group of 180 general counsel, working together to identify firms and lawyers that deliver, especially strong innovation, expertise, efficiency, and quality. This is achieved through the sharing of in-house lawyer feedback on firm performance.

A Hacker’s Vision

How Joey Johnson’s background influences the way the Premise Health CISO handles his role today

By CHRIS GIGLEY

Joey Johnson has a knack for pursuing his passions. Right now, the chief information security officer for Premise Health is most passionate about employing security fundamentals with a hacker’s vision in order to keep the company’s systems safe.

Johnson’s first passion, however, was anthropology, a subject he pursued in college until his now-wife helped him realize that career paths in the field were limited. So, he started looking elsewhere.

“I had a friend in IT sales who was making $80,000 a year,” Johnson recalls. “I thought that was spectacular, so I started studying computer networking.”

His timing couldn’t have been better. In the late 1990s, many companies and organizations were just beginning to understand the importance of IT security. At the outset of his technology career, Johnson landed an internship with the Metropolitan

Washington Airport Authority in 2000, and the experience left quite an impression. A colleague at the time also introduced Johnson to the idea of hacking as a means to solve and prevent security breaches.

“He showed me that a hack is just an interesting solution to a challenging problem,” Johnson says. “At the time, there was no such thing as ethical hacking or that being a career path. It was still this mysterious world of people up to no good.”

Johnson admired that hacking made him look at network security challenges from different perspectives. It was like solving a fascinating puzzle. The more he did it, and the more he met other IT professionals doing the same thing, the more he enjoyed it.

“This whole world of fascinating people and characters with a unique way of perceiving the world opened up to me,” he says.

Joey Johnson CISO Premise Health

“In a way, it really appealed to my anthropology roots. I appreciate different cultures and diverse ways of perceiving the world.”

Before joining Premise Health in 2010, Johnson served as chief security officer for the US Department of Commerce, Office of Computer Services. He now has almost two decades of experience in cybersecurity that includes leadership roles in both the public and private sectors. In February 2017, the Nashville Technology Council named Johnson its CISO of the Year. A month later, he was separately named the 2017 Southeast US Security Executive of the Year by the Technology Executives Network.

A hacker’s vision has helped Johnson succeed just as much as a willingness to go against the grain. He doesn’t think of himself as a maverick in the world of IT, though.

“When you’re the one walking in your own shoes, you don’t necessarily think you’re doing anything different,” he says. “You’re just doing things the way you do them. I’m always looking for ways to reach goals in the most efficient way possible.”

That can get lost in a vast corporate culture, where IT personnel often keep doing things the way they’ve always been done. Johnson doesn’t believe in that.

“I’m always taking opinions and thoughts from other people, but I never was afraid to go down a path that seemed different just because it was different,” he says.

Johnson explains the idea with a metaphor of a door that has eight locks on it. Asking how to get past those eight locks is the wrong question. A better idea is looking around the room for other ways out, like that open window on the other side of the room.

Johnson’s value to Premise isn’t only his ability to see challenges from different perspectives, though. He also has an ability to articulate his methods in nontechnical terms to leadership so that everyone can understand what he’s doing. That’s a rare quality in the IT world, and it presents a challenge to him now as a hiring manager.

“There’s a massive shortage in cybersecurity skill,” Johnson explains. “People are not at the right level for those jobs, but they’re being put in those roles anyway. The work has to get done, but there are not enough people currently in the market to do it.”

This challenge is recognized throughout the industry, but Johnson tries to address the problem from a different perspective. “We keep hearing that we have a cybersecurity talent deficit,” he says. “We don’t. What we have is a skill deficit. The talent is out there. We just have to be more creative in identifying it and drawing it out. As a society, we’ve taken

this approach in finding new ways to get to elusive pockets of oil reserves. We should be using similar tactics to draw the raw talent out from places beyond the job boards. The white male saturation of the cybersecurity market is embarrassing. We need diversity, not just gender and racial diversity, but also diversity of thought and perspective. That’s what being successful in this field is all about.”

Another challenge Johnson and other IT executives face is the flood of security solutions in the marketplace.

“We’ve actually reached a tipping put of diminishing returns,” Johnson says. “Companies are throwing these solutions at problems, and what they should be doing is focusing on the fundamentals.”

The Equifax data breach last September, for instance, came at the expense of the company failing to deploy a patch. These aren’t always easy fixes. Systems patches take IT teams a lot of time and effort, but it’s fundamental work that doesn’t cost companies the price of new security solutions.

“A lot of the solutions out there are great,” Johnson says, “but if you don’t know the right requirements for the tools you need, then you won’t get what you need at the end of it.”

Johnson has also shown his expertise in prioritizing risk. Again, he uses a metaphor to explain his outlook.

“The Great Wall of China is massive, but when you get out to the far reaches of the Gobi Desert, it’s crumbling,” Johnson says. “You can only protect so much. Is all of it worth wrapping a wall around? You need to know which assets are most valuable to you, and you need to know those assets intimately to protect them.”

Johnson’s skills will only get more valuable as the importance of CISOs becomes more apparent. The role used to be behind the scenes, but now it’s front and center in many companies, including Premise Health.

“Corporate boards want to hear where the IT organization is at because they know something can go bump loudly in the night, and the company can collapse over it,” he says.

Fortunately for Premise Health, its CISO has a knack for vigilance, both night and day.

As the leading provider of healthcare security operations solutions, Syncurity congratulates Joey Johnson and the Premise Health team on the well-deserved recognition of their efforts. Syncurity is proud to continue working with Joey and the Premise Health team to reduce cyber risk and drive efficiencies across their security operations processes.

Seeing Investment from Every Side

As a former investor himself, Greg Klaben knows that the best investor relations executives need to understand their business inside and out to be able to tell the story from every angle

By ADAM KIVEL

From the first investor relations role Greg Klaben took on at Seagate Technology, it was clear that the field was a good fit. The gregarious, personable, well-spoken New York native could move from phone call to phone call, in-person meeting to meeting, communicating the vital information to investors and working closely with leadership, all with a sense of purpose and dignity. “You have to give everyone the same access to information and treat them with respect,” he says. “You don’t really last in the industry if you’re not completely honest, open, and credible.” But little did he know that the earpiece he was using to make all of those telephone calls would one day prove just as vital to his career as the deep interpersonal analytical skill sets he’d developed.

“When I was spending all of that time on the phone, I started out with the Plantronics headset,” Klaben says. “I loved the product and thought I’d really love to work for the company.” Now, a decade and a half later, Klaben is the vice president of investor relations for the electronics company and has been a guiding hand for the company over the past ten years.

The connection to the headset, however, wasn’t the start of Klaben’s interest in technology. He started his career on the other side of the

investment relationship, working for a money management firm and calling investor relations employees to invest in their companies. But as he observed the quickly changing pace of technology and business, he knew he wanted to be a part of the movement and relocated to California to attend business school at Santa Clara University.

After earning his MBA, Klaben quickly took on a new role at Seagate Technology and made a quick connection with the CEO. “He hired me on the spot, and a few weeks later, I was on his private jet with him,” Klaben recalls. “I was really lucky to have that inside access. It really taught me a great deal.” The process of looking at the investment relationship from the other side was a challenge, but one that he relished. “It’s a very tough industry, but Seagate offered me a great opportunity,” he explains. “Even though I’ve done a hundred quarters of earnings releases, every quarter is different and offers a new challenge. It keeps me engaged.”

After positions in investor relations for companies focusing on everything from telephony to software and hardware, Klaben found the opportunity to make a major

impact at Plantronics. Former CEO Ken Kannappan immediately recognized that the skill set Klaben offered could be of essential use to the company and investors alike. “Greg took principal responsibility for a singularly broad scope of activities,” Kannappan recalls. “He is an extraordinary talent. He generated all of our quarterly communications from the CEO and CFO. He took the lead in developing the financial model and our investment story. He organized event showcases for the company and the team. And uniquely, investors were entirely content to speak with him.” And unlike any investor relations person that Kannappan had ever worked with, Klaben dug into the business so deeply that he became an active member of strategic planning, referring to him as the company’s “librarian source.”

Klaben’s background and history as an investor himself prepared Klaben for many of the key challenges. He could, in a sense, think from an investor’s perspective and then change to the CFO’s mind-set at the drop of a hat. For that reason, he sees his value, in large part, as adding value to the stock price, for the benefit of all parties involved. For that to transpire, Klaben needs to be sure to communicate the direction of the company clearly and frequently with investors and then contribute information from investors back to the leadership team. More over, he needs to represent the company to investors from a variety of leadership viewpoints, from the CEO to the CFO, depending on their question.

Additionally, Klaben has developed quite a massive scope of work. He works closely with investment bankers, offers guidance on capital allocation and acquisition strategies, works on incorporating marketing methods into messaging, works closely with manufacturing to track quality and potential issues, and keeps in constant contact with departments ranging from legal to finance. “When I interviewed for roles, I always wanted the keys to the company,” Klaben says. “I need to have the same access that the CEO does in order to have the entire framework to tell the story to investors.”

To amass that necessary information, Klaben extends his network at every opportunity and communicates in person whenever possible. “I have a ‘friend of a friend’ program,” he says. “I always ask if institutional investors know someone else who I should be talking to that might be interested

Greg Klaben VP of Investor Relations

in investing in Plantronics. Things have moved toward email, but people are most interested in meeting you in person and looking you in the eye for those conversations. That’s important to build credibility over time.”

People who work closely with a business’ customers get an abundance of feedback, but as the investor relations executive, Klaben gets feedback from each of Plantronics’ owners. In addition to his one-on-one phone calls, Klaben distributes a survey every two years to ask for constructive criticism and then shares anonymized results with leadership. And although the results are overwhelmingly positive when it comes to his work with investors, Klaben is sure to dig through the masses of data for every opportunity to improve the company he can find. “We both have to be successful,” he says. “I want them to be successful, to make money in owning the company, and I want the company to succeed as well.”

That long-term view is informed by the fact that Klaben has provided a consistency in the face of massive change in both the

organization and the industry at large. As Plantronics changed strategies and entered new markets, listening to investors proved essential. “We’ve changed enormously over the past ten years, including new products and categories that I’ve helped launch, as well as helping investors understand them,” Klaben says. That was even more true, he says, when Kannappan, the long-tenured CEO of Plantronics, retired in 2016. Yet again, Klaben’s experience prepared him to help lead through the transition to new CEO Joe Burton. “I’ve been through every kind of crisis that you could think of,” Klaben says.

Once again, Klaben’s regular conversations proved essential in the transition. By meeting as frequently with Plantronics leaders as with investors, he was able to assure the company’s blue-chip investment base of Burton’s perfect fit and leadership’s strategy from firsthand experience. “When I meet with investors, I’m trying to replicate the experience of an investor meeting with the CEO,” Klaben says. “It’s a big responsibility, but it’s something that I love.”

Plantronics

TOP TRAITS

EXECUTIVES LOOK FOR WHEN HIRING TOP TALENT

SOLUTIONS-FOCUSED

COLLABORATIVE

STRONG RESILIENCY

ILLUSTRATIONS THROUGHOUT THE SECTION BY ANNA JO BECK

RIGHT CULTURE FIT

RELENTLESS CURIOSITY

TwentyFirst Century Talent Strategy

THE DEFINITION OF TALENT has almost become archaic in the twenty-first century. No longer do HR professionals and companies sort candidates by experience or by who earned the highest degree from an acclaimed university.

Instead, being the right culture fit is just the start. Then, it’s seeking who has the intangibles to make the greatest impact: leading with positive energy, a willingness to change, a collaborative mind-set, hunger to make a difference, relentless curiosity, a sense of humor, a never-say-quit attitude, etc.

“One of the top traits I look for is resiliency,” says Matt Beliveau, vice president and chief human resources officer for Morton Salt. “I think that people who have navigated through a very challenging business or personal situation and successfully emerged on the other side have an edge. Businesses are constantly faced with internal and external challenges, and resilient leaders are needed to help teams and organizations thrive.”

These are the traits that will not appear on a résumé. And it’s why having a talent strategy for the twenty-first century is more vital than ever for obtaining an edge in this competitive landscape.

The Umbrella Girl Steps into the TwentyFirst Century

From an office redesign to new wellness programs, vice president and chief human resources officer Matt Beliveau reinvigorates Morton Salt

MATT BELIVEAU VP, CHRO MORTON SALT

WORDS BY ADAM KIVEL PHOTOS BY CALEB FOX

RALLYING THE TROOPS

“There’s a big difference in your morale if you’re cold and wet, sleeping in a foxhole, or if you’re sleeping in a bed in a climate-controlled building,” says Matt Beliveau, Morton Salt’s vice president and chief human resources officer.

Beliveau knows a thing or two about morale and foxholes. He spent four years as a logistics officer in the US Army. Although it may not seem like a direct translation to HR work, he sees that time as an invaluable influence in his work.

“As an officer, the fundamental core of your success is how effective you can be at motivating others,” Beliveau explains.

In his service time, Beliveau saw his job as taking care of people, which clearly translates to his role in HR leadership. Upon completing his time in the army, Beliveau worked with an organization that helps place military officers into the corporate world. Through that program, he was brought into General Mills’ HR leadership program and learned how well his skill set fit. “It’s like logistics with people,” he recalls. Although he’s found it to be a little more nuanced than that, his experience clearly led him on the right path.

In 2014, Morton Salt celebrated the hundredth anniversary of its iconic Umbrella Girl logo, though the company’s roots date back to 1848. That said, the company aims to constantly innovate and engage with new customers and potential employees. As someone with a history of innovating from within legacy companies, Matt Beliveau, vice president and chief human resources officer, knows there will always be room for improvement. After a thirteen-year tenure with General Mills, he had become well acquainted with the drive to excel more than a century into a company’s existence. So Beliveau knew he had to figure out how to make all the right changes without losing the soul of a company so ingrained in American history.

As millennials make up the largest generation in the workforce—followed by yet another wave of young professionals—organizations are looking for whatever edge they can find when competing for the best talent and keeping them happy. An intentional, thoughtful office will be beneficial for the company as well as employees. In fact, a study from global architecture and design firm Gensler revealed that the lost productivity caused by poor workplace design costs US businesses roughly $330 billion each year. And though many have tried, an open-office concept and a foosball table aren’t the answer.

When the challenge of updating Morton Salt’s Chicago headquarters arose, Beliveau knew that intelligent, intentional choices could make a major difference. “I explained to the CEO that it wasn’t a real estate move; it was a culture change,” Beliveau explains. “It impacts culture when you’re either coming to work every day in a dated space or you’re in a cool, contemporary, fun space.” Though it wouldn’t typically fall under the responsibilities of an HR executive, Beliveau took on the challenge.

At the outset of the three-year journey, Morton was primarily known for the production of table salt and the Umbrella Girl logo. While the new offices still display the girl in the yellow dress prominently, the physical space connects employees and guests to a much deeper understanding of the organization. A massive interactive video wall allows guests to scroll through information about the company, watch old television commercials, and learn about current initiatives, among other topics. “We had a lot of content in our archives, and we wanted to find a way to bring it to life,” Beliveau says.

“The core of my job is to make sure that my team can attract, develop, deploy, and retain talent across the organization in a timely fashion so that we have the right people and the business can accomplish its objectives.”

Everything was done with a goal of driving collaboration, health, and happiness. The inviting cafeteria is full of healthy snack options, and the open-office layout features adjustable desks and floor-to-ceiling windows. Printers, trashcans, and recycling bins are also situated at strategic places. In addition to individual desks, Morton offers booth-like breakout spaces, quiet areas, and conference rooms. “Open workspaces get a lot of negative perception as not having anywhere to go, like being in an open cage,” Beliveau says. “We didn’t want people to feel chained to their workstations. By having printers and trash cans scattered around, you’re either more physically active or you’re reducing the amount of paper and waste. We’ve been able to measure that our employees are nearly 10 percent more physically active on a daily basis compared to our old office.”

The new offices are also situated closer to public transit stations, which means that

employees from Chicago and surrounding suburbs would have an easier commute. Everything is done to ensure employees feel happy coming into the office and just as content when fulfilling the organization’s core values. “I think there is a connection between the space you operate in every day and how you show up to your consumers and potential employees,” Beliveau says. “People cut across every aspect of what we do, whether it’s extracting salt from the earth or designing a new master brand strategy to connect with millennials.”

Beliveau joined the organization in 2014 and immediately went about redesigning the hiring and onboarding process to better keep pace. First and foremost, he found that there was a lack of clarity of what HR did for the organization. “I had to go out and meet with different leaders and function and say, ‘This is what HR can do for you,’” he recalls.

Getting the organization aligned on positive change circled back on providing

— MATT BELIVEAU

PROUD TO PARTNER WITH MORTON SALT

Congratulations to Morton Salt on the success of DASH and for recognizing that employee health and wellbeing drive culture, engagement and the bottom line. We are thrilled to partner with such an iconic company in building a culture that motivates and supports all of Morton Salt’s employees to be their best, every day. We look forward to continuing our journey of Changing Lives for Good® together!

www.virginpulse.com/mortonsalt (508) 766-3300

.”

Matt Beliveau, Vice President, CHRO, Morton Salt, Inc.

“I explained to the CEO that it wasn’t a real estate move; it was a culture change.”

— MATT BELIVEAU

the best opportunity and environment to the constantly changing workforce. In addition to the new office, Beliveau has established new projects, such as a wellbeing program, created in partnership with Virgin Pulse. The program offers enrolled employees free fitness trackers, helps them assess health goals, and offers incentives, such as gift cards to buy health equipment, to those that engage most with the platform. “One of our long-service employees had been a smoker for thirty years and used the platform as a way to quit smoking. Another used the program and lost more than one hundred pounds,” Beliveau explains. “Retooling health and benefit offerings to be more focused on wellbeing helps our employees and has made us more attractive as a potential employer to millennials.”

That intentional, long-term strategy has driven important success for Morton Salt in the past three years, which is evident from the first step into the new office. Whether it’s stepping up to oversee the art installation in the waiting area or reinforcing the organization’s values, Beliveau ensures that his role is an essential business partner. “The core of my job is to make sure that my team can attract, develop, deploy, and retain talent across the organization in a timely fashion so that we have the right people and the business can accomplish its objectives,” he says.

It’s a big challenge to keep a legendary American company thriving. But by pushing a culture of innovation and change with an intelligent, intentional strategy, Beliveau has helped ensure that Morton Salt will continue to be a top-tier employer and brand for generations to come.

Beyond Performance and Productivity

Zillow Group’s Dan

Spaulding counters tech’s

grind culture

BY JOSEPH KAY

DAN SPAULDING CHIEF PEOPLE OFFICER ZILLOW GROUP

Zillow Group’s Dan Spaulding respects five o’clock: Leave the office. Leave earlier, if you can, without fearing retribution or shame. As the head of people and culture, he leads the organization in optimizing benefits, honoring boundaries, and fostering the employee as a whole person.

Throughout high school and college, Spaulding stoked ambitions for law school and a legal career, but during his first legal internship, he discovered that the work wasn’t quite right for him. “The work felt confining, and I wanted to have a career where I was working on the whole system—not just one piece of it,” he explains. He did find some aspects to cherish and enjoy, such as the variety in his duties and the opportunities to make positive impacts on individual lives. Pursuing those, he was aiming for a career in business and human resources by his senior year in college.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in political science and history from Knox College and a master’s degree in HR and industrial relations from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Spaulding entered the tech world just as the dot-com bubble was beginning to collapse. Spaulding recalls that one of his first major responsibilities was to manage a host of layoffs.

“I don’t know how you can go through that and not be profoundly impacted,” he says. “I think about that every day. The decision to hire or let someone go is one that you have to take on with gravity.”

Spaulding left the consumer tech industry in 2007 for roles at Life Technologies and then Starbucks. In 2016, he returned to tech, better prepared to navigate the field’s characteristic pace and disruption.

“The most profound lesson I took from the dot-com bubble is that the decisions you make today are going to have impacts in

increasingly faster time frames,” he recalls. “The tech industry continues to be the one that accelerates other industries. It’s disrupting itself almost on a continuous basis, and when I’m working with leaders, I think a lot about how to take care of employees as they’re going through significant changes at any given time.”

His invigorating, troubling, and inspiring experiences from early in his career continue to inform his approach at Zillow Group, where he keeps sight of the obvious yet easily neglected truth that work and jobs affect people. These experiences shape health and identity, and Spaulding says an organization has deep, serious responsibilities to its employees.

Spaulding is proud that Zillow Group employees have a variety of communication channels directly to leadership. Employee feedback has led directly to substantial institutional change, and he cherishes the process. Zillow

“A couple years ago, we started to receive a lot of feedback that benefits weren’t as competitive as our employees needed,” recalls the chief people officer, noting that many were starting families at the time. “That led us to engage our employees on their ideas, and about two years ago, we rolled out some of the most competitive benefits for any company our size—including enhanced parental leave and medical benefits.” While other organizations are making comparable transitions, Spaulding credits those open, direct channels with enabling Zillow Group to anticipate the trend.

Zillow Group maintains an email alias for employees to contact Spaulding, CEO Spencer Rascoff, and a host of other key leaders simultaneously. Anyone can reach out at any time. Feedback has included new product ideas, discussions on project flow, and individual observations on how leaders might be more effective. Every message receives a response. Spaulding notes that his previous organizations never had such a robust feedback channel.

Leadership has to invest in a healthy work/life balance, Spaulding says, and he draws a distinction between Zillow Group’s culture and the familiar stereotype of the late-night/early-morning tech-industry grind. The vast majority of Spaulding’s team leaves the office at—or before—five o’clock. He says it’s not a “face-time culture,” and they aim to tie the value of work done over hours spent in the office.

The pace of the workday and its discrete closing time guide his colleagues toward elegant, simple, and easy-to-explain solutions.

Collaboration is encouraged at Zillow Group in order to help drive problem-solving.

While another company’s meetings may take sixty-minutes, those same meetings at Zillow Group may take thirty. Long hours and austere demands damage morale, increase turnover, and threaten the whole organization’s sustainability. Zillow Group offers employees structured opportunities and programs to recover and re-energize. Along with access to health and mental healthcare, the company does not cap vacation time, and after six years, an employee is eligible for a six-week sabbatical. Spaulding notes that employees take them for travel, volunteering, or simply to relax with family and step back from the intense, accelerating pace of the tech industry.

Spaulding also cherishes his organization’s leadership playbook, a set of principles and real-life examples that highlight what great leadership looks like at Zillow Group.

He credits the directness and honesty of those accounts for the document’s enduring

life. Many executives carry the book with them, and many of their colleagues often return to it as a resource. Still, Zillow’s leadership does not craft the organizations values alone, or even predominantly. “None of us in leadership dictate culture,” Spaulding says. “We create the conditions for employees to dictate culture in the way they show up for each other and our customers. The greatest aspiration I have is to continue to create that environment every day.”

AHT extends our congratulations to Dan Spaulding and his entire team for this recognition. As Zillow Group’s longterm, strategic partner, we are proud to work alongside a truly dedicated visionary and leader.

Dan consistently strives to provide the most compelling, comprehensive benefits programs to Zillow Group’s employees. We look forward to continued collaboration and inspiration from Dan and his team for years to come. Learn about how AHT can help your business at www.ahtins.com.

Zillow Group’s headquarters in Seattle features a foosball table for employees.

Perfect Alignment

By focusing on people, Ann Powell Judge has devised an effective strategy to promote growth at Bristol-Myers Squibb

BY DAVID LEVINE

Ann Powell Judge has committed herself to creating a best-in-class global workforce. To do this at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), where she serves as chief human resources officer, she looks to the company’s culture of inclusion and its mission of discovering, developing, and delivering innovative medicines to help patients fight serious diseases as a guide. For Judge, people are a critical source of competitive business advantage.

Judge has used her experience and passion for people to create a transformative BMS people strategy. The BMS people strategy represents a powerful platform—launched in 2014 after extensive global research and analysis of the company’s workforce—to drive business performance and place BMS at the forefront of the industry by linking its people to a competitive business advantage.

“Our leaders quickly mobilized around the business opportunity of the people strategy,” Judge explains. “They helped craft it so that it is mutually owned and endorsed from the top down. The execution of our people strategy would not have been possible without the progressive, far-reaching vision and business-development focus of our HR leadership team and the executive leadership.”

The strategy focuses on three Es: engage, empower, and enrich. “We engage people with diverse perspectives to shape our future,” Judge says. “We empower people to be decisive, innovative, and collaborative. And we enrich people through experiences, recognition, and rewards.”

The people strategy initiatives are effective because they provide consistent focus on creating a culture of inclusion for employees amid near-constant company transformation, Judge says. “There is a sense of urgency, a sense that our patients can’t wait,” she says. “Our global workforce is high-performing talent that is dedicated and committed to that mission.”

In conjunction with the three Es of the people strategy, the company is also focusing on the

ANN POWELL JUDGE CHRO

BRISTOL-MYERS SQUIBB

At Bristol-Myers Squibb, we are working together for patients

Our mission is clear — we discover, develop and deliver transformational medicines that help people prevail over serious diseases. Our sense of urgency is real — we work every day to push the boundaries of scientific discovery and to make a meaningful difference in the lives of patients.

We are committed to developing a 21st century workforce that is powerfully diverse and broadly inclusive, capable of discovering and developing important new medicines for patients around the world.

It’s what we do. It’s why we do it.

“To get the very best out of our workforce, we have to have diversity. But even more important, we need to have an inclusive work environment.”

five priorities for its long-term prosperity. Of those five, two are of particular importance: global diversity and inclusion and cultivating great managers and leaders.

“In our industry, innovation is so critically important,” Judge says. “To get the very best out of our workforce, we have to have diversity. But even more important, we need to have an inclusive work environment. You can have great diversity, but if people don’t feel they are in an environment where diverse ideas are welcomed, respected, and valued, then they will be quiet, and we won’t get the best solutions.”

A driving force elevating the importance of global diversity and inclusion as a business priority is the understanding that the people of BMS should reflect the patients the company serves. Judge drives this priority through eight People & Business Resource Groups with more than 8,800 members in forty-five countries. “Each of these groups has a robust business plan,” she says. “They execute against these business plans and metrics and report out annually to the Global Diversity Council, which is chaired by CEO Giovanni Caforio.”

Caforio is a wholehearted supporter of Judge’s initiatives and has taken notice of her projects’ impact on the company.

“Ann is a strong business leader with a keen sense of how a well-designed and executed people strategy drives business performance,” Caforio says. “Her forwardthinking perspective, commitment to people, and data-driven and innovative approach ensure that our HR organization delivers strategic value.”

Many companies have similar resource groups, but BMS takes it a step further by having full-time leaders dedicated to this initiative, she says. “For example, in our women’s resource group, B-NOW (Bristol-Myers Squibb Network of Women), we pulled leaders out of other full-time roles,” Judge says. “They complete two- to three-year rotations in these roles and are truly driving business

performance and making a difference.” As a result, the company is seeing stronger retention numbers among women, along with higher promotion and engagement rates.

When it comes to management development, Judge says her team’s analytics showed that employees with stronger managers were three times more engaged, six times more likely to achieve their goals, and three times more likely to feel they can contribute ideas. “Enhancing manager capability is really important,” she says. “By keeping our manager skills sharp, relevant, and competitive, we are collectively strengthening BMS performance. We are currently engaging five thousand managers on a monthly basis in manager development capability sessions.”

Judge has worked across multiple companies and industries, including Wyeth, Shire Pharmaceuticals, Dow Chemical, and Chevron throughout her career. She was drawn to BMS as a forward-thinking, progressive organization—one that was transforming itself from a pharmaceutical company to a biopharmaceutical leader in a highly competitive, complex industry. “I saw an innovative, forward-thinking organization that is all about people—from its talented global workforce to the patients we serve,” she says. “It’s a business-competitive advantage to fully engage and utilize the capabilities of our diverse workforce.”

For aspiring managers and leaders contemplating their own career paths, Judge has this advice: “Find a company with a mission that aligns to your passion because you will drive unparalleled business performance when there is a good match.”

For Judge, that mission is bringing innovative medicines to patients who need them. “We have all been touched by serious disease,” Judge says. “I have the opportunity to help drive an organization that does great things for patients. That mission runs through the veins of our BMS workforce.”

— ANN POWELL JUDGE

Willis Towers Watson congratulates Laura Cushing, CHRO

We applaud her well-deserved recognition as an outstanding CHRO and leader.

LAURA CUSHING VP, HUMAN RESOURCES LOEWS CORP.

Managing the Unknown

How Loews Corp.’s Laura Cushing believes businesses can maximize performance in the era of diversified workers and cloud computing

BY CHRIS GIGLEY

Laura Cushing joined Loews Corp.—one of the largest diversified companies in the United States with businesses in the insurance, energy, hospitality, and packaging industries—as its chief human resources officer in 2016 after spending more than two decades rising in the ranks at JPMorgan Chase. One of the most important lessons she’s learned in that time is that her career path is ancient history—and so is the way business leaders need to do their jobs.

The workforce in the United States now includes people from five generations. At one end, young go-getters want to leverage their talent immediately, not wait years for a promotion. And at the other, there are seasoned veterans who have more that they want to offer.

“You can’t think about the workforce as a collective whole,” Cushing says. “You have to think about it within the context of where

UP.

It’s when your senior leadership team is aligned and reaching its full potential. Congratulations to Laura Cushing and her team at Loews Corp.

people fit in and are coming from, which puts more pressure on managers and leaders. How each generation thinks about their commitment to their employers is different.”

It also means these managers and leaders must change their approaches to enduring human resources initiatives. Workplace diversity is one example. A lot of focus has been placed on diversity and inclusion education and awareness, but Cushing says that’s still not enough.

“I’ve seen managers who are inclusive in terms of ensuring they’re hearing the voices of many different people and that people can contribute ideas,” Cushing says. “I would argue that approach could almost be a check-the-box exercise because the input isn’t always valued. Moving forward, companies need to place more emphasis on manager accountability and measuring the degree to which inclusion and lack of bias in recruitment, promotion, and pay takes place.”

it off due to concerns over compliance issues. “So much is getting shifted to the cloud,” Cushing says. “That means work processes will change and skill sets will be different. As a result, there will be wide-spread disruption to the workforce, but it will also create opportunities at the same time.”

HR professionals are aware of this evolution, however, managing and leading the change will be the challenge. Cushing says that HR will need to play a major role in helping employees and organizations adapt and embrace these technological changes. The real risk with cloud computing isn’t security, according to Cushing, but a failure to respond to the movement fast enough to train and hire the necessary talent. Fortunately, she is already ahead of the curve in that respect.

Korn Ferry is the preeminent global people and organizational advisory firm. We help leaders, organizations, and societies succeed by releasing the full power and potential of people. Our nearly 7,000 colleagues deliver services through our Executive Search, Hay Group and Futurestep divisions.

Career-pathing, along with learning and development, are other areas ripe for a paradigm shift. Again, traditional paths to success don’t apply to younger generations of workers, who tend to prefer jumping from one opportunity to the next versus spending an entire career with one or two employers.

“We need to ask ourselves, ‘How do we create a path that’s not done in a traditional way so we continue to attract and retain the best talent?’ Career-pathing will not be about getting to a certain level. Rather, people want to build skills and competencies through projects, assignments, and tours of duty,” Cushing says.

In Cushing’s opinion, companies need to be more willing to bet on people’s skills. For example, leaders will need to be identified earlier in their career and given increased levels of responsibility at a faster pace. This gives an organization a chance to test people’s capabilities while increasing the likelihood of retaining key talent.

“On the other end, there is a role for the population between the ages of sixty and late seventies, which can be valuable to the employee and the employer,” Cushing says.

Going forward, managing human capital will be about identifying key people—no matter what generation they’re from—and leveraging their skills the right away.

As Cushing and her HR peers grapple with ways to engage all working generations, they are also trying to decide how to address the growing prominence of cloud computing. Its adoption by businesses large and small is inevitable, so there is no avoiding it or putting

“Laura recognizes the importance of leveraging technology to help HR be a stronger business partner,” says Mark Olson of Willis Towers Watson. “She’s focused on using data to create insights that directly support the business in making better, more informed decisions.”

Already, there is a greater demand in the job market for digital and big data expertise, as well as analytical thinking skills. But even those needs may change soon. As businesses put more data into the cloud, new skills may be needed to access and use it more efficiently. The ever-changing workplace and maximizing performance of an increasingly diverse workforce will require a new kind of leader and manager, not just at Loews, but also across all businesses. “Preparing for and building resiliency around uncertainty, adaptability, and strong leaders are critical core competencies for all organizations, coupled with the ability to clearly articulate key messages and interact with people,” Cushing says. “Next, early talent assessment and the ability to swiftly assemble and reassemble teams with a very broad and diverse workforce will be essential. Leading will be more challenging than ever before.”

It won’t be easy, but Cushing understands that businesses really have no choice. They have to adapt, and it’s up to her and other HR executives to show them how.

Korn Ferry Hay Group values our relationship and strong partnership with Loews Corporation. We have worked with them over the years in the areas of executive search, leadership development, executive pay and governance, broad-based reward and organizational design. Korn Ferry is the preeminent global people and organizational advisory firm.

www.kornferry.com

Preserving History, Creating the Future

Alex Lee Inc.’s Robert Vipperman tackles the challenges of honoring the company’s legacy while continually evolving toward the future

BY PORCSHE N. MORAN

As the chief human resources officer and senior vice president of innovation for Alex Lee Inc., Robert Vipperman describes his job as helping build the skills and capabilities that the company needs to compete in the twenty-first century. Although the corporation, based in Hickory, North Carolina, was founded in 1931, it is a modern organization immersed in the world of e-commerce.

“The corporate culture is an interesting balance of trying to be respectful of the traditions of an eighty-seven-year-old company and still being passionate about creating the future instead of being a victim of it,” Vipperman says. “We lean heavily on our innovation teams, which are made up of our best and brightest folks, to continue to push and update our strategies.”

As the parent company of wholesale grocery store distributor Merchants Distributors and supermarket chain Lowes Foods LLC, the company employs about eleven thousand people, and Vipperman is in charge of the HR strategy throughout the company. One innovative strategy is called Authentic and Unleashed, a human capital plan that directs Alex Lee’s approach to human resources and culture.

A thirty-person team took part in working on Authentic and Unleashed for eight months. Its three components include: Growth is the Only Option; Food, Family, and Fun; and Our Work, Your Life.

The program has led to new initiatives as well, such as Third Thursdays, an event where team members leave work early to socialize together. The company has also revised and relaxed the employee dress code. All employees can participate in the new Alex Lee Career Hub, which provides tools, training,

LOWES FOODS TO GO

The Lowes Foods supermarket chain was founded in 1954 and has more than one hundred stores throughout North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. It sets itself apart from the competition by featuring local suppliers and unconventional shopping experiences. In 1997, Lowes Foods launched its personal shopper-assisted grocery service, Lowes Foods To Go. Customers set up an online shopping profile and professionally trained personal shoppers fulfill orders for in-store pickup or home delivery. The website’s Quick Reorder feature gives users access to their in-store and online purchase history to make it easy to create shopping lists.

“The Lowes Food To Go program was started twenty years ago, which was relatively early in terms of online grocery ordering,” says Robert Vipperman, CHRO, SVP of innovation. “In the last decade or so, it has come pretty far. You can now order your groceries on your smartphone. When you return to the website, it remembers what you ordered in the past and makes suggestions for things you might want going forward. It is all about trying to meet our guests in their busy lives with exactly what they want. We strive to make the grocery shopping experience as convenient and quick as possible.”

and planning that help team members grow their own careers. High-potential employees now find themselves more frequently rotating roles to drive development.

“The strategic architecture of Authentic and Unleashed has guided us to implement specific tactical policies that are meant to make our employees more engaged,” Vipperman says. “It’s important to remember that culture building is its own stream of work. It can’t be left on autopilot. It needs to be nourished every single day.”

Attracting and retaining talent is also a priority for Vipperman. What first attracted Vipperman to the company in 2008 was the fact that it was family-owned and operated and that it has a strong commitment to its employees, customers, and suppliers. The benefits package at Alex Lee is also competitive and includes a fully funded,

ROBERT VIPPERMAN

CHRO, SVP OF INNOVATION

ALEX LEE INC.

defined-benefit pension plan. Plus, employees also have the option to enroll in the PeerFit wellness program, which provides access to free workout classes and personal trainers.

“Alex Lee is a company that truly cares about the human being,” he says. “When making decisions, we think about whether it is the right thing to do, versus if it is just the most profitable or the least expensive.”

He says the corporate headquarters are undergoing renovations to help attract talent too. The building’s second floor is being converted into an open floor plan, and there will be a break room with vintage video games and space to unwind. Technology is part of the redesign plan, too, with touch screens in every conference room, noise cancellation technology, and other audiovisual resources.

“We are absolutely concerned about the physical work environment and how that affects productivity and employee morale,” Vipperman says. “We are taking a 1970s style building and making it reflective of the history of the place with details like exposed brick walls. But there will also be a heavy emphasis on cutting-edge technology.”

To that end, innovation is one of the core values at Alex Lee. Vipperman oversees twelve- to twenty-four-person innovation teams who work to solve various company challenges. The teams stay motivated by participating in annual innovation competitions and Shark Tank-style venture pitch sessions.

“Our employees and customers are always changing,” Vipperman says. “We know that we have to keep evolving to keep up with them. We stay innovative by giving employees the tools, training, and technology that they need to contribute.”

In order to help employees contribute, Vipperman relies on what he calls his strengths-based leadership skills. He

Strategic Thought Leadership, Benefits & Financial Solutions Building Effective People Strategies.

Willis Towers Watson proudly salutes Robert Vipperman Chief HR Officer and SVP of Innovation, Alex Lee Inc.

“It is important to remember that culture building is its own stream of work. It can’t be left on autopilot. It needs to be nourished every single day.”

—ROBERT VIPPERMAN

believes that people develop quickly when they focus on their passions, interests, and talents. In fact, all salaried employees at Alex Lee are asked to read the book Now, Discover Your Strengths, by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, and take the corresponding assessment. Vipperman also stays plugged into the needs of his team by having scheduled biweekly meetings and an open-door policy.

“It is much more effective to lean into what people love to do instead of trying to make them a little less bad at what they hate to do,” Vipperman says. “We all know each other’s strengths. In fact, mine are posted on my door. We want it to be part of the daily dialogue. It factors into how we choose the makeup of our teams.”

Outside of work, Vipperman has been practicing martial arts with his stepson for a decade. He says the principles that are fundamental to his hobby transfer into his role at Alex Lee.

“Martial arts has taught me to always be a student,” Vipperman says. “At the corporate or executive level, you don’t have all of the answers. Everyone has something to teach you. It is crucial that we as leaders listen to our employees, especially those who are on the front lines of the business.”

Building Bridges On The Border

Diane Sanford ensures empathy from top to bottom at the casual restaurant chain

BY WILL GRANT

Diane Sanford is someone who employees hope to talk to when it comes to human resources. The chief people officer at Mexican casual dining chain On The Border Mexican Grill & Cantina has a way of making people feel at ease. Although more than twenty years of experience managing and motivating in the restaurant industry has provided her with ample training in the business of people, Sanford says that one lesson in particular has helped form her approach to her work: “It was watching and learning how much people truly care about what they do and coming to the realization that nobody shows up with the intention of doing a bad job,” she says.

Now, Sanford is bringing that approach to On The Border, where she has worked to redefine workplace culture in the restaurant

industry by combining On The Border’s past with forward-thinking emphasis on all members of the team.

Working to redefine and re-emphasize culture at On The Border was one of the factors that first attracted Sanford to the company. On The Border’s commitment to building a culture of what Sanford calls “fairness and fun” reflected her own beliefs in what creates long-term success. “Being part of a leadership team that creates an environment where that is important was really appealing,” Sanford says. “So much research has shown the importance of good culture and how that drives business results.”

On The Border’s president and CEO Ward Whitworth credits Sanford with helping to craft that culture by walking the walk and leading by example. “Diane is a great example of a leader with a people-first attitude and

was an integral part of building out our culture together,” Whitworth says. “Diane has been a true partner in the business.”

Cultivating that culture meant considering the company’s history and highlighting what made On The Border great in the first place. “Defining it meant that we put a focus on people, trust, teamwork, and hospitality,” she says. “To bring it to life, we believed strongly in having a recognition culture.”

Sanford and her team have now created a framework of recognition cards and they practice what she calls “finding someone to celebrate.” Team members in restaurants are highlighted within the company by both interdepartmental emails and recognition cards (written in both English and Spanish) that are physically placed in the restaurants. That recognition culture also includes starting meetings by celebrating team

members. Sanford believes that recognition from a peer-to-peer perspective can be as important as coming from the top. “It helps accelerate good stories,” she says. “And that’s how a culture grows.”

Sanford sees the renewed focus on team members as an imperative step in an admittedly challenging time for all casual dining restaurants. Although the pragmatic reasons for focusing on employee retention remain fairly evident, Sanford also quotes Maya Angelou when describing her emphasis on making team members feel valued and appreciated: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” Sanford says.

Sanford believes that understanding team members’ motivations and incentives isn’t just an exercise in empathy. It’s a sound business decision that helps motivate those at all levels to be their very best. “It’s everyone rowing in the same direction,” Sanford explains. “Wouldn’t it be so much easier to engage an army of brand ambassadors who saw the importance of delivering a great guest experience?”

If the workforce is encouraged and excited, then Sanford believes that will result in a positive guest experience. In fact, she sees the way the company interacts with its team members as the epitome of what restaurant culture should be about. “Our guests will never have a greater experience than the one we create for our team members,” she says.

While seeking new talent continues to be priority, Sanford says that one of her most salient initiatives is remembering those who are already part of the team. “You have to continue to re-recruit the people who work for you,” Sanford says. “It’s as important to stay connected to the people who work with you now as how you’re going to strategically attract people to come work for you in the future.”

With retention in mind, Sanford says On The Border continues to expand its list of programs and tools to prepare future restaurant managers and those looking to expand their horizons within the organization. The brand’s Women’s Leadership Forum celebrated its inaugural year providing support for women restaurant managers in a historically male-dominated field. Sanford says many of the participants have already been promoted and recognized as general managers of the year.

Sanford also headed up creating a safety ambassador program, which educates team

DIANE SANFORD CHIEF PEOPLE OFFICER ON THE BORDER

members in food handling practices and workplace safety. From a practical perspective, it has reduced incident reporting time by about 75 percent. From a cultural perspective, Sanford says the video skits and pictures she’s received from excited participants are worth more than a thousand words.

All of these programs aim at letting team members know their value to On The Border, and Sanford continues to work to make the company a place where they want to work, grow, and stay. “They should walk away learning something about themselves and learning something professionally, or at least look back thinking—as one team member told me—‘that was a pretty chill experience,’” she says.

Congratulations Diane Sanford for this well-deserved recognition of your leadership and innovation in Human Resources. Shankman Leone, P.A. is proud of our longstanding relationship with you and On the Border, and we look forward to our continued partnership and your continued success.

STRATEGY

Dan Troy SVP, General Counsel GSK

Tom Whipps

Embracing the Gray

With a color-coded map and a survey designed to keep GSK’s attorneys accountable to their business colleagues and shareholders, Dan Troy is helping a global pharmaceutical manufacturer keep its employees on the same page

By PAUL SNYDER

Good judgment is critical for a global pharmaceutical company—particularly when applying national and international regulation, managing patents, and when a diverse and at the same time highly specific consumer base is paramount.

Those are just some of the considerations that have legal departments working overtime. Still, Dan Troy, senior vice president and general counsel of global pharmaceutical company GSK, says the most interesting conversations take place when judgment has to be applied.

“It’s not that most questions fall into that gray,” Troy explains. “But most questions that come to the legal department are gray. In the gray, you have to apply judgment. You have to look at the strength of the legal position, the risk of enforcement, and the potential reputational or financial harm of a decision.”

The gray that Troy speaks of is not just figurative. He’s referring to the color of a box that falls between a green colored one to its left and a red colored one to its right. It forms a color-coded tool that Troy incorporated throughout GSK to help its lawyers and its business

Leading the Way

“Different businesses will come to different conclusions about different risks, but when legal says it’s in the red and it’s a no-go, it’s gratifying when everyone understands that. It shows we’ve helped to clarify decision-making.

DAN TROY

partners understand the legal implications of decisions the company wants to make. If the decision falls into the green area, then it’s clearly legal and they can proceed. If it’s in the red area, then it’s illegal and impermissible. So that middle gray ground brings a lot of questions with it.

As Troy explains, the system’s inspiration is two-pronged. On one hand, it’s a way to find that middle ground for a corporate lawyer between being an enabler who allows the business to do what it wants while also protecting it. At the same time, it’s also finding a happy medium between the lawyers who say no too much and those who say yes too often. Troy says to picture Enron and ask where the lawyers were in that situation.

“For a younger lawyer, the easiest thing to do is say ‘no’ or ‘I’m uncomfortable,’ or ‘I wouldn’t do that,’” Troy says. “There can sometimes be a lack of clarity around decision-making.”

In an effort to not only provide accountability but to also make clear to any party why the company would or wouldn’t proceed with a particular idea, the color-coded rectangle formed the basis of a system that also includes GSK’s Business Partner Guardian survey. The company tested the survey in the United States and found enough success with it to take it global in 2017.

The survey also examines eight different capabilities in its attorneys and surveys the company’s stakeholders in order to

identify how its attorneys are performing on a scale of one to five in each of the eight different categories.

“It provides us a basis to say, ‘Your clients think you’re great, but the one thing where they ranked you lower is, say, demonstrating good business knowledge. So let’s talk about that,’” Troy explains. “It’s not that we automatically translate these rankings into a performance rating; that would be wrong, especially since the sample sizes are small. But it’s a good basis for having a systematic, standard way of having a conversation about development.”

GSK’S EIGHT BUSINESS PARTNER GUARDIAN CAPABILITIES

Technically proficient

Effective communicators

Clear in their decision-making

Demonstrate good business knowledge

Act with a sense of urgency

Solution oriented

Respectful of colleagues

Strong guardians of GSK

Instead of being a simple performance review, Troy says the survey provides the company with the ability to share case studies about difficult problems and how the team navigated through them. It not only helps a lawyer’s own development, but it also helps clients understand why lawyers have to say no to certain ideas.

Despite the system’s success thus far, Troy says the legal department can’t sit on its heels. The company frequently hires new lawyers and has hundreds of existing attorneys across more than fifty countries. “The conversation will always have to be on the table to ensure GSK’s legal department gets it right,” he says.

That sense of working toward 100 percent success is a concept Troy says was fostered early in his career when he was counsel for the Food and Drug Administration. His work at the FDA even influenced him to ultimately move to GSK rather than go into a private practice.

“The FDA wakes up every morning and says, ‘How can we promote public health?’” Troy says. “Now, GSK is not a government regulator, but we’re answering questions like, ‘How can we discover new drugs, manufacture them safely, and get them to patients?’ What gets me up in the morning is that I’m not just out there trying to help individual clients. We’re moving toward something like a new medicine that makes the world better. I find that very gratifying.”

Making the world better takes buy-in from all the players and understanding the legal role and importance in putting patients before profits. That all goes back to determining the difference between green and red and knowing how to make sense of the gray. Troy says he’s not the only one who’s making that distinction anymore.

“When senior executives say to me, ‘So this is a no-go or can I make the decision,’ I feel gratified because I see that they’ve learned the difference between a no-go and where they have more latitude,” Troy says. “Different businesses will come to different conclusions about different risks, but when legal says it’s in the red and it’s a no-go, it’s gratifying when everyone understands that. It shows we’ve helped to clarify decision-making.”

Shook, Hardy & Bacon is proud to partner with Dan Troy and GSK. We know that successful resolution of complex legal matters requires comprehensive and creative strategies developed in partnership with our clients. Thank you, Dan and congratulations on this well-deserved recognition.

Piper congratulates our friend and client, Dan Troy from GlaxoSmithKline, on his recognition by Profile Magazine.

Weathering the Storm of Evolving Consumer Taste

Chris Hobson and his team constantly adapt to deliver solutions for worldwide retail and e-commerce brands to meet consumers’ changing preferences

By RUSS GAGER

Despite tales of captains Nemo and Ahab, sailing nowadays is a sport that requires precise teamwork rather than crazed authoritarianism. Each crew member must know their tasks intimately and be able to perform them under any weather conditions at a moment’s notice.

That type of teamwork is remarkably similar to what Chris Hobson and his team at VF Corporation in Greensboro, North Carolina, provide for the company’s brands. And Hobson’s interest in sailing has made that comparison clear to him.

“My main passion right now is sailing,” says Hobson, who is vice president of business systems and CIO of the company’s global supply chain. “I recently gave a presentation to my team about the sailing life. I think it does teach a lot about innovation and creativity in terms of problem-solving and learning new skills. It actually relates closely to the role that we have within the company.”

That same innovation and creativity is constantly required when responding quickly and accurately to worldwide demand for continuously evolving fashion trends. The roughly thirty thousand supply chain employees worldwide use the latest data analytics and

Chris Hobson VP of Business Systems, CIO Global Supply Chain

“Most of our brands have a strong e-commerce presence. But we also see a continued need for brick-andmortar.”

CHRIS HOBSON

enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to deliver finished products to wholesale customers, VF retail locations, and e-commerce customers.

VF Corporation produces and distributes apparel, footwear, and accessories with its roughly two thousand suppliers and twenty-four of its own manufacturing facilities for brands that include Vans, The North Face, Timberland, Wrangler, and Lee. “We are one of the few apparel companies that still has its own internal manufacturing,” Hobson says. VF Corporation manufactures and sources more than five hundred million units a year and has grown through acquisition, most recently with Williamson-Dickie Mfg. Co. in October 2017.

Such growth has required an innovative strategy to obtain maximum scalability across its brands. The VF supply chain leverages the scale and global reach of the company to deliver high-quality products as efficiently as possible.

This is done by obtaining maximum synergies from the company’s distribution centers worldwide, most of which inventory multiple brands. Each brand has access to a wider supply chain with larger volumes than a single brand would by itself, which reduces costs significantly.

For example, products from multiple brands can be grouped into one shipping container going to the same region. This allows the brands to focus on their customer connections and building an authentic brand experience for the consumer.

Maintaining consistency across different brands to realize synergies without affecting each brand’s identity is a balancing act. VF’s supply chain department harmonizes the sourcing of products to realize these synergies without eliminating the brand’s competitive advantage.

One of the ways that VF Corporation has achieved that consistency is through implementing a new platform of about seventy different software systems to act as a foundation to support the company’s future growth. That was a major project from 2012 to 2015, Hobson says.

About six hundred people from VF’s supply chain, technology, and business departments, along with sixty-five external partners, were involved. “We assembled a

great team of people,” Hobson says. The new platform includes rolling out the latest ERP system, which consolidates financial and management systems along with wholesale, e-commerce, and retail orders.

“Having the data consistent across all the brands we see is critical for analytics going forward and for making effective business decisions in a timely manner,” he says.

Data analytics is critical because it gives VF’s employees a more holistic and accurate view of the company’s supply chain, which creates opportunities for improvement. Product forecasting has also improved, Hobson says.

The company is also reducing time it takes to get products to market by using new product-design technology, which requires less back-and-forth between product design and sample approval. Manufacturing and distribution systems are also improving time to market.

The speed required to get products to market is accelerating due to an increase in e-commerce demand. VF Corporation has roughly 1,500 owned and operated stores worldwide, multiple e-commerce presences, and a wholesale business.

“Most of our brands have a strong e-commerce presence,” Hobson says. “But we also see a continued need for brick-and-mortar. They get to see and feel the products.”

Balancing the needs of a complex supply chain has helped honed Hobson’s leadership skills. He stresses the importance of empowering a great team of employees with the right level of guidance and surrounding them with the best resources.

“The key to success is having a great team,” Hobson says. “It’s about setting goals for the organization that align with the corporate goals so everyone knows why they’re doing what they’re doing. I think if you get this part right, everybody wins.”

Wipro is a leading IT, consulting, and business process services company delivering winning business outcomes through its deep industry experience and 360 degree view of “Business through Technology.” By combining digital strategy, advanced analytics, and consumer-centric approach, Wipro’s Consumer Goods practice helps its clients build great brands and re-engineer the way they connect to their consumers. Wipro is a strategic partner to VF Corporation, and Chris has been a great leader and supporter of the Wipro-VF Corporation engagement. We would like to congratulate him on his many successes and wish him the very best in all future endeavors.

To know more about Wipro’s CPG practice, please visit http://www.wipro.com/industries/consumer-goods/

VF Corporation

Always Excelling

Kirstin Gould leads the legal department at XL Group Ltd., helping the company continuously improve as it grows its global footprint

By JONAS WEIR

XL Group, through its subsidiaries and under the XL Catlin brand, sits at the heart of the global insurance industry with a leading presence at Lloyd’s of London as well was being a top-ten global reinsurer with about $62.4 billion in total assets. Serving industrial, commercial, professional firms, insurance companies, and other enterprises throughout the world, XL has more than seven thousand employees across twenty-nine countries. XL Catlin is the global brand used by XL Group Ltd following its 2015 acquisition of Catlin Group Ltd, then the number one underwriter at Lloyds, for roughly $4.1 billion.

As XL Catlin adapts to increasing regulation in the property and casualty (P&C)

industry, Kirstin Gould, the organization’s executive vice president, general counsel, and secretary, has helped lead XL through some of the biggest challenges of the past decade.

Gould joined the company in 2000, when it was known as XL Capital and only had about one thousand employees worldwide. In 2007, just before the worldwide financial crisis, she became the company’s general counsel. Successfully navigating through this critical time for the company is one of Gould’s greatest professional achievements.

In 2016, Gould helped the company redomesticate from Ireland to Bermuda. One reason the company moved its holding company to Bermuda is because of the island’s Solvency II equivalence designation. Solvency II is an EU law that went into effect in January 2016. The legislation affects the amount of capital insurance companies are required to have, which is an effort to help prevent insolvency.

Bermuda is one of only a handful of countries outside of the EU that has been designated as Solvency II equivalent. Solvency II, however, did not only affect the company’s decision to redomesticate to Bermuda, but the law was also one of the considerations that led Gould to separate the legal and compliance functions into two separate teams within XL Group—a decision that Gould spoke with Profile about at length in addition to her thoughts on Brexit planning, overall strategic planning, and staying ahead of the curve in the global insurance industry.

Was Solvency II the impetus for separating compliance and legal into two distinct departments?

No, it was not the impetus. There were a couple of factors. One was looking at what other companies are doing in terms of the compliance function. I got a sense of this by talking with many people from our industry

and the industries we serve. It seemed like this was part of a developing trend, and I wanted to get in front of it rather than be behind it, in particular because of the increasing regulatory burden in our industry.

Kirstin Gould EVP, General Counsel, Secretary XL Group Ltd.

Because we are a global company in a highly regulated space, we have to keep up with the increased demands of legislation and regulation around the world. We also want to ensure that we are adequately resourced and organizationally designed to meet those challenges.

Solvency II looks at compliance as a key function. So, Solvency II contemplates internal audit, risk, actuarial, and compliance as separate key areas for an effective system of governance. Solvency II doesn’t mandate a separation of compliance from the legal function, but I was also looking at Solvency II in terms of what regulatory expectations would be for the compliance area going forward.

So, this was a consideration for me but not a driver. I was thinking in terms of governance, design, and getting ahead of the regulatory expectations for us.

What was the planning process like for officially separating compliance and legal functions into two distinct teams at XL Group?

The new chief compliance officer for XL Group Ltd. was announced in May 2016, and he came on board in October 2016. We rolled out the new compliance function to the teams in December 2016, but it’s something I’d been thinking about and designing for quite some time before I went to our CEO with a concrete proposal.

I have a very good relationship with our CEO Mike McGavick. We’ve been working together for about ten years. The dialogue regarding the future design of the team was very good. Mike embraced the changes I proposed as did the audit committee and we moved forward.

What sort of effect has Solvency II had on XL Group outside of being a factor in your decision to redomesticate your holding company to Bermuda?

Solvency II had a big impact on us and the insurance industry as a whole as it has been a very complex regulatory system. It came into effect on January 1, 2016, so it is still fairly new. We would like to see some aspects of

We congratulate

KIRSTIN GOULD

for her outstanding commitment to excellence at XL Group Ltd .

the unnecessary requirements be scaled back to what is actually needed to appropriately regulate our industry, which is very different than the banking industry, which some regulators have used as a model for the P&C industry. Unnecessary regulation can slow down innovation in our industry.

How has the first year gone with compliance and legal operating as separate functions?

I think it’s working very well. We have a lot of experienced attorneys who have been practicing for a long time and know our business really well. We still have individuals with dual hats, and even if we didn’t, it requires a lot of coordination between the two departments to make it work. We’re still very much connected. We held a global off-site of the legal and compliance functions together earlier this year, and we hold global calls about every six weeks with both teams. As we move forward, we’re also figuring out what works and what doesn’t work. For example, we’re working on the budget for 2018, which is the first time we’re doing a separate compliance budget. It has started a good dialogue about what we’re doing and why we’re doing things. One of the big things that our company is focused on is continuous improvement. Having these sorts of discussions in the organizational and budget areas are very useful in terms of continuous improvement.

People on the teams have been very receptive, and I believe a large part of this can be attributed to the good, collaborative relationship I have with the chief compliance officer. People see that and understand we’re both trying to achieve the best outcome for the company, and I think it’s all working quite well.

What advice would you give someone who wanted to separate legal and compliance?

First, you have to determine whether it really makes sense for your company. Don’t just do it for the sake of doing it. There should be a real rationale behind it. It should make sense for your company and for your shareholders. Do an honest exercise around that, and don’t be afraid of where that could lead.

XL just announced its plans to relocate its principal EU insurance company from the UK to Dublin in response to Brexit. What advice would you give to other companies facing similar challenges?

Well, if they haven’t started planning for Brexit by now, I think they’re a bit behind the ball. One huge factor for us in announcing our

“Because we are a global company in a highly regulated space, we have to keep up with the increased demands of legislation and regulation around the world.”

KIRSTIN GOULD

plans now is giving certainty to our clients and our brokers. I think the sooner you can give certainty to stakeholders, to clients in particular, the better.

Moving forward, what other trends are you trying to stay ahead of?

The data and analytics space is an obvious one. That’s a big area because of the pressure on budgets as well as other efficiencies and insights we can gain. We’re looking at how to drive efficiency in our department, making sure our attorneys are working on the most valuable aspects of what they could be working on. Sharing data with the business leaders helps them understand what the lawyers are working on and why. Informing the business leaders and staying ahead of the curve in service delivery is what we’re focused on.

Congratulations to Kirstin on this well-deserved recognition. ASW is proud to be associated with the XL Catlin organization and to partner with their dedicated and professional team led by Kirstin. ASW greatly values our relationship with XL Catlin and Kirstin and likewise aims at all times to provide the highest caliber of service to meet the needs of our clients. More information on ASW Law is set out at www.aswlaw.com

Navigate the legal risk

ASW Law Limited | 50 Cedar Avenue

Hamilton HM11 | Bermuda www.aswlaw.com | info@aswlaw.com

Debevoise is proud to recognize Kirstin Gould’s commitment to excellence. Well-known for her sound strategic vision, thoughtfulness and careful attention to detail, we’re pleased to support Kirstin in finding smart answers to complex risks.

www.debevoise.com

Debevoise’s award-winning insurance practice is recognized as the top tier law firm by Chambers USA, Chambers Global and The Legal 500 US, 2017.

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The Creative Mind-Set

Having spent nearly two decades in HR at the University of Illinois, Jami Painter has mastered the art of inventive problem-solving

By JOE DIXON

Jami Painter believes that an HR department should do much more than hire and fire employees. For years, she worked in the private sector, where HR departments emphasized improving a company’s effectiveness and efficiency through its human capital. In 2001, however, she brought her private sector approach to higher education when she joined the University of Illinois as an HR specialist. Since then, she has been determined to showcase that HR can be an important business partner for the university, and she has ensured that her department has a seat at the table during critical business decisions.

Today, Painter is the university’s interim associate vice president for system human resources, a role she assumed in July 2016 after her boss left the institution to pursue another opportunity. She spoke with Profile and reflected on her time as an HR executive, how she’s approaching her current role, and Jami Painter

Interim Associate VP for System Human Resources

University of Illinois

how her leadership style and mind-set about HR has changed over the years.

Has your approach to HR strategy changed because you are currently in an interim role?

I’ve been with the University of Illinois for seventeen years. Over that time, I’ve seen a lot of changes in leadership and our approach to HR. I don’t think being interim at this point has really changed my strategy at all because, ultimately, my job is to provide HR services that are going to be a value-add to our leaders and our organization. That doesn’t change whether I’m interim or permanent.

My goal would be—if I’m not the permanent person in this role—that I hand over a department that is in good shape, that is stable, and that is really seen as a strategic partner to our leaders.

How are you trying to position the university’s HR department as a true business partner?

It’s really about building trust and relationships with the employees, managers, departments you serve, fellow HR colleagues, and the leaders you work with in the institution. I think you build trust through credibility, integrity, transparency, and always being responsive. The more that somebody calls you and they get credible help quickly, the more that builds trust over time to the point where they know they’re going to get a response from you, even on a weekend.

When has this approach been useful?

HR has experienced significant changes related to employment regulations and laws that impact our employees. In our department, we have been successful in educating our legislators on the impact that proposed changes to existing laws, or new laws, would have on our employees.

For example, when the Department of Labor proposed changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act in 2016, HR spearheaded a project to identify which employees would be affected and how we were going to address these changes. We participated in providing information to College and University Professional Association for Human Resources

“I think you build trust through credibility, integrity, transparency, and always being responsive. The more that somebody calls and they get credible help quickly, the more that builds trust over time to the point where they know they’re going to get a response from you, even on a weekend.”

JAMI PAINTER

on how the proposed changes could impact our workforce, and in turn, we were able to show legislators in Washington how this change would have impacted employees at institutions like ours across the United States. We are always actively working on protecting our employees and institution from any regulatory change that could impede our mission of research, teaching, public service, healthcare, and economic development as a preeminent public university.

How has your approach to HR changed over time?

My mind-set has significantly changed from early in my career when I thought HR primarily focused on rules and compliance. Now, I don’t believe that at all. I think HR is about being a service to our institution by making it a premier employer, and we need to be flexible, innovative, creative, forward-thinking, and strategic because change is always happening, and we need to be one step ahead to help pave the way.

Can you tell me about some instances where having a more flexible mind-set has benefited the organization?

One area where it’s been helpful for our departments is in workforce and succession planning. Although we have policies on how you can be promoted and when the organization must fill a position through an open and competitive search, there are instances where departments will want to recognize employees who they deem to be rising stars. Their managers want to give them more opportunities and recognition but aren’t sure how to do that, so we are very creative in looking at ways and advising them on how they can develop those employees within our policies and guidelines. Maybe they can’t promote them today, but by the end of that conversation, we have figured out a plan to retain that staff member, develop them over time, and reward and recognize them for their achievements.

Another area is when we are addressing changes to our benefits or retirement plans, or when we do not receive the same level of state funding as in the past. When we are working with leaders to address changes to these plans or how we are going to handle the budget deficit, we have to think creatively about how we are going to offset the impact to our employees because many of our benefits and funding are provided by the State of Illinois. One example occurred in 2016, when we weren’t able to offer a salary increase

program, so we offered our employees three extra days of paid time off over the holidays in December. Before that, they had to use their own vacation time on those reduced service days. That was a result of us thinking outside the box to identify something that wasn’t a high cost to the institution, but that went a long way in terms of employee relations and employee morale.

You were drawn to a career in HR from a young age. What about the field intrigued you?

What intrigued me is the significant impact human resources could have on an organization because its success is really all about its people. I’ve always had a desire to lead and inspire people to achieve at their highest potential, so it seemed like a logical fit to get into the field of HR. I chose business management as my undergraduate major because it focused on HR and would give me a strong foundation in business that would enhance my talents of helping organizations build and maintain their human capital. I recall having a management class where we had to simulate an HR director interviewing candidates in a corporate environment and how to select the right person for the position. I think that’s when I knew I had made the right decision, and this was the field for me.

What are your goals at the university moving forward?

I’ve always been a believer in leaving something better than you found it—even though I stepped into this role in an HR organization that was very strong—both strategically and operationally. Due to attrition related to budget cuts, I’m trying to streamline our operations and identify ways to be more efficient and effective for our clients and customers—whether that’s our departments, employees, external agencies, internal leaders, or fellow HR colleagues on the campus. But I think my primary goal for the department, whether I’m the long-term leader or not, is for us to be a value-add HR organization that helps the university achieve its mission, whether that’s through effective recruitment and retention of talented staff, development of innovative voluntary benefits, or implementation of cutting edge self-service applications that make employees’ lives easier. I want us to be proactive rather than reactive and to be seen as a crucial member of the executive team. I want people to say, “We’ve got decisions to make. We need to talk to HR.”

Forged by Fire

Andy Goodman has experience with companies facing chaos and catastrophe. Transforming OpenLink Financial’s HR department into a business-driven value center has been a task he was well prepared for.

By JEFF SILVER

For Andy Goodman, his career karma has been chaos. It began calmly enough, though, in his first position with GE, where he received extensive human resources and corporate training after graduating from Stony Brook University with a teaching degree.

But then, after seven years with Ernst & Young, Goodman met a series of tumultuous challenges: navigating an accounting scandal at Bankers Trust, helping Merrill Lynch adapt to the digital age, helping CA Technologies survive after its executive team was fired and then jailed for securities fraud and obstruction of justice, and developing strategies at

E-Trade to help turn the company around after a downturn in business following the 2008 financial crisis.

“You learn the most in challenging times,” Goodman says. “The results for me are that now I’m hard to scare, I know how to stay focused on solutions without compromising my integrity, and I always see myself first as a business partner who is delivering HR solutions.”

All of these characteristics, expertise, and experiences have made Goodman the perfect choice for executive vice president, chief human resources officer, when he joined OpenLink Financial in 2014. The company—a global leader in trading, treasury, and risk management solutions for

the energy, commodities, corporate, and financial services industries—had experienced exponential growth since its founding in 1992. However, its rapid expansion in the volatile, fastpaced technology sector had left it without adequate core systems and processes. Additionally, Goodman found that the HR department he inherited was purely an administrative cost center.

“For founder-led companies of our size that have experienced rapid growth, it’s very common to quickly say yes to opportunities and to figure out the details later,” Goodman explains. “That resulted in HR being very reactive. We had lots of manually managed Excel spreadsheets and no one source of truth for making the best decisions. That wasn’t a sustainable model.”

To address the situation, Goodman knew that he needed to get the right team with the right capabilities in place. He also had to define the core processes and operating model that would create an integrated environment to unify activities that had been running independently and without coordination. Those tasks would also be

“You learn the most in challenging times. The results for me are that now I’m hard to scare, I know how to stay focused on solutions without compromising my integrity, and I always see myself first as a business partner who is delivering HR solutions.”

ANDY GOODMAN

the first steps toward defining HR’s mission and purpose.

Because there were no data archives or other formal history to refer to, Goodman initiated a survey to assess the current status. Two important priorities were to find out how employees viewed their work environment and to get them to describe the ideal setting in which they would like to operate.

“Once we fully understood the current circumstances, we could gain insights into the processes needed to align HR with business strategies and create tools and systems to guide appropriate performance management,” Goodman says. “We could also determine whether we had the skills to truly deliver on what we were selling.”

Besides a number of inefficiencies and redundancies, the survey and other data assessments revealed a lack of transparency, communication, context, and purpose, all of which left staff feeling disengaged and confused about how to build a career within the company. Because there was no established hierarchy at OpenLink Financial, employees believed promotions were based on tenure and favoritism and, in some cases, resulted

in titles that were simply made up to put on business cards.

Five key elements were identified as being critical to driving change in the culture: more transparency, effective communication, a unified team that operated without silos, recognition of each individual’s contributions, and accountability for everyone.

Goodman then worked to change job definitions, titles, and hierarchies to bring them in line with market-based norms. This created clarity of functions, opportunities for professional development and advancement, and allowed HR to more accurately determine available talent resources.

Goodman also introduced an innovative reward program called Bonusly. The program gives each employee points that they can award to others in any department or business line to recognize and reward their efforts and to show gratitude for their contributions. Employees can then donate points to charity or redeem them with merchants, such as at Amazon and Starbucks.

“All efforts to implement processes and change the culture were driven by the business and business leaders,” Goodman says. “HR facilitated them, but business involvement was important to show that none were one-time, check-the-box events. They are initiatives that will constantly evolve and adapt to changing customer and market needs.”

Andy Goodman EVP, CHRO OpenLink Financial

These initiatives have already produced tangible results. Employee engagement has increased, and attrition has dropped by about 10 percent. By improving efficiencies and better understanding existing human capital, recruiting expenses due to fee-based sources are lower and headcount within the HR department has been reduced by more than 20 percent.

Aside from providing a more manageable level of challenges than his previous positions, OpenLink is different for Goodman in that it is a smaller, private equity portfolio company. With that in mind, he is still working to increase his department’s contribution to the company’s profitability and delivering value to investors.

“Now that we’ve clarified the company’s purpose and business objectives, we can really contribute to top-line growth and investment strategy,” Goodman explains. “Producing results like that only happen one way—through our people.”

That perspective brings Goodman’s story full-circle because of what he believes to be the most important lesson he took from his training at GE at the start of his career. “If you really believe and invest in developing your talent, then it produces a huge amount of return,” Goodman says.

Mintz Levin is proud of its long-standing partnership with

Andy Goodman and OpenLink Financial. We applaud their leadership and dedication.

Mintz Levin is an Am Law 100 firm with over five hundred attorneys. Nationally recognized for its highly collaborative, cross-disciplinary approach to client service, the firm advises clients ranging from entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 companies across a wide range of industries.

A Focus on Family Atmosphere

Karen Ward puts employee growth and engagement front and center at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee

By DAVID LEVINE

All companies say they want to be like families, but many fall short of the mark. BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, however, is making that metaphor a reality, thanks in large part to Karen Ward and her team.

Ward is the senior vice president and chief human resources officer at the organization, the oldest and largest nonprofit managed care provider in the state. She has been with the company for her entire thirty-four-year career since the days when human resources was still called “personnel,” she says. Ward has been in her current position for about six years, and one of her main areas of focus is maintaining a family-like culture in the face of significant growth and change at the company, which now serves about 3.4 million people through group, individual, Medicare, and Medicaid plans.

She has seen that family focus ebb and flow throughout her tenure at the company. Now, with leadership from a mission-driven CEO, culture is a top priority. Employee surveys show high buy-in, but they also reveal areas for improvement, which Ward is quick to address. “I always read the details in the surveys,” she says. “It helps me see where we need to do things a little differently, and it’s important to make sure our people know we’re listening.”

After graduating from Middle Tennessee State University, she was hired at BlueCross BlueShield of Memphis. “It was a generalist role, and I got to do pretty much everything, including payroll at one time,” she says. When the Memphis plan merged

Karen Ward SVP, CHRO BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee

with BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee about twenty years ago, she had the opportunity to work with members of management at the headquarters in Chattanooga. “I was the point of contact in Memphis, and I drove back and forth for a number of years,” she says. When she was appointed senior vice president and chief human resources officer, she moved to Chattanooga.

HR has always intrigued Ward because she enjoys being a part of an employee’s entire journey with the company. “You are with them every step of the way,” she says. At BlueCross that can last a long time. The average tenure for the company’s six thousand employees is about ten years. In fact, nearly one thousand employees have acquired more than twenty years of service at the organization.

A major reason for that long tenure is the My Blue Path employee development program her team spearheads. Creating a world-class development program is one of the company’s top seven operational goals, along with building its customer base and enhancing its corporate voice to members and the community. When she started as CHRO, the developmental opportunities for employees were few and far between, she says. “We started putting a comprehensive program together, starting with our top leadership,” Ward says. “They all had done their own leadership development, but we wanted everyone educated in the same competencies.”

The program focuses not only on employees’ results, but also on how they are achieved. “That is just as important,” she says. “You may have wonderful results, but if you left a lot of injured parties in your wake, then you really didn’t succeed.” After senior executives participated, it was rolled out to middle management. The organization offers components of that program, along with a wide variety of skill-development opportunities, to everyone because employees expressed their desire for career and leadership development in company surveys. BlueCross also has three mentoring programs that are aimed at different types of employees. Additionally, tuition reimbursement is available to help those who want to further their education.

BlueCross is also working to take the My Blue Path program to the next level. “We are

taking a marketer’s mind-set to let employees know what is available,” she says. Ward is also looking to develop better technologies to help report employee results to senior leadership and to grow the company’s job rotation program, which recently won an award from the Institute for Corporate Productivity. In a typical year, about 30 percent of employees experience positive job movement through either promotions or lateral moves that often provide valuable exposure to different areas of the business.

Another reason BlueCross enjoys such high employee tenure is that family atmosphere she is helping to reinvigorate. A 92 percent engagement rate in the most recent employee survey attests to the company’s success. That is partly driven by the plan’s mission, she says. “We are a not-for-profit plan, and we take to heart what our members are going through,” Ward says. “We like to say we provide peace of mind. When you are using health insurance, especially in a crisis, the last thing you want to do is deal with an insurance company that is not helpful.”

But high engagement is also driven by good pay and benefits, a community relations focus that helps thousands of employees volunteer on a regular basis, a strong focus on open communication from senior executives, a wealth of activities that usually have a wellness theme, and a beautiful campus complete with amenities such as a gym, pharmacy, and a health clinic. “We have a farmers market, we have walking competitions, and we have spin classes in our courtyard,” Ward says.

The company also extends that mission focus to its own people through the BlueCross Family Fund, which was championed by the CEO to provide relief funds for employees and families in need.

Until recently, her free time was devoted to helping plan her daughter’s wedding last May. Now, she relaxes with reading, classic movies, caring for her dog, and “shamefully watching a lot of HGTV.” But she always maintains her focus to help employees reach their full potential. “I am always amazed at the amount of work our employees do and how it makes a difference for our fellow Tennesseans,” Ward says. “If we want them to achieve it, then all we have to do is make it a goal and somehow they get it done. It is an incredible thing.”

Never Stop Discovering

Scott Piering on why he left the research lab for the law firm and how he’s using both science and law to help Spectrum

By ZACH BALIVA

Brands grow

He dreamed of making a dramatic discovery or having a complex theory named after him. He’d work at a university, conduct fascinating research, and win the admiration of students and experts alike. That passion for science led him to pursue an undergraduate degree in chemistry and biology. Graduate school followed. Everything was going as planned. But then, one day, Scott Piering realized that most professors weren’t spending their days doing what he envisioned. Suddenly, the work he romanticized seemed as though it was just another job, so he decided to explore other options. Piering started his new journey by reading famous books about life and career change. The book What Color is your Parachute and other renowned tomes helped him identify some key interests and passions. Careers in medicine, sales, teaching, and law were recurring themes. Piering sought out connections working in those fields and, in the end, it was legal that stood out. He took the LSAT and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin

Law School. Just months after he was sitting in a research lab, he was now enjoying introductory lectures on torts, contract law, and civil procedure.

Upon graduation, Piering joined a large California firm, hoping to be a case litigator and win antitrust or securities cases. But he soon realized that he missed a part of what drove him to study chemistry. “I missed being involved in science,” Piering recalls. “I wanted to find a way to balance science and law.” Seeking to unite his two passions sparked another informal research phase, and that’s when he discovered the world of intellectual property (IP). IP lawyers work closely with scientists and inventors to patent, protect, and support their innovations.

The prospect of practicing law in support of science and innovation excited Piering, so he switched firms and sought training in IP law. Although the work more closely aligned with his interests, it still wasn’t a perfect fit. “I was involved in a lot of litigation, and I would go home every night and crossexamine my two-year-old. My wife didn’t like that,” Piering says with a laugh.

Eventually, he was offered an opportunity to go in-house at Cargill, and he leapt at the change. At Cargill, Piering found his interests, passions, and personality closely aligned. “When you’re in-house, you work directly with the business to grow and develop new products and services. You leverage your legal background to enhance the value of the business,” Piering explains. Additionally, Piering started using another one of his identified interests—sales—to help discover creative ways to add value.

After nearly twelve years, Piering left the agricultural company to work on his own, but soon a recruiter called him to interview at Spectrum Brands. Piering met with leaders at the global consumer products company and thought it would be the right fit. He saw opportunity at Spectrum Brands, where both the trademark and patent areas could work closely together, unlike many other companies.

Scott Piering VP, Chief Intellectual Property Counsel Spectrum Brands

With brands such as Rayovac, Remington, Pfister, and Armor All, to name a few, the company was growing, and Piering would grow IP protection right along with it. “Spectrum Brands is a multinational company with phenomenal brands and strong products,” Piering says. “I knew I could help them, and I knew I would have to use all of my personality and background to get the job done.”

So when Piering arrived in 2014, he was given the chance to build his IP team from the ground up. The efficient team that Piering has built thus far works to protect the brands, trademarks, patents, copyrights, and trade secrets of a company with about 16,500 employees, roughly $5 billion in net sales, and more than one hundred offices worldwide.

Piering believes a company’s IP strategy must always support business strategy. The business strategy around a product—where, how, and how long it will be sold, coupled with the nature of the innovation itself— dictates the protection scheme. For example, if Spectrum Brands will only use the innovation for a short time, it may instead forgo a patent and keep the internal mechanisms as a trade secret, relying on the brands to enhance and deliver sustainable value.

Uniting trademarks and patents is a major aspect to this work. “Many companies innovate and then force their innovations to attach to a brand,” Piering says. “At Spectrum Brands, we look at what a brand stands for and then innovate to that brand.” Russell Hobbs, for example, is a premium appliance brand. Spectrum Brands’ teams may innovate to create a premium appliance or feature and then expand the Russell Hobbs brand to match the innovation. By engaging patents and trademarks on one team, Spectrum builds synergy, and that collaboration allows the team to accomplish things in a quicker time frame.

Piering is also taking other important steps to maximize value in Spectrum Brands’ IP by strategically implementing technology and improving workflow processes between the divisions and departments.

We proudly congratulate Scott Piering and his team on effectively integrating business strategy, science and intellectual property law to help Spectrum Brands innovate and grow. We wish you continued success.

Leydig is honored to work with Scott Piering and his colleagues in protecting and enforcing Spectrum Brands’ valuable intellectual property

Since 1893, Leydig has been fulfilling the intellectual property needs of companies, universities, and institutions around the world

“People here have a passion for excellence, and I get to use business, law, and science to help a growing company. I learn something new every day.”

SCOTT PIERING

“When the company was smaller, a more casual system was reasonable,” Piering says. “However, as we continued to grow and our innovation grew with us, we needed to formalize the process around invention and trademark submission by the businesses, joint review, and ultimately a shared business and IP strategy.”

Although this move to a process-based approach to IP management within Spectrum Brands is a long-term project, the company is already seeing some of the results. More of the innovation is being protected, as demonstrated by a dramatic increase in the number of patents and trademarks filed over the past several years.

Since 2011, Spectrum Brands has grown its net sales from about $3 billion to $5 billion. Piering attributes much of that success in part to the people and culture that make up the company. “People here have a passion for excellence, and I get to use business, law, and science to help a growing company. I learn something new every day,” Piering says. “And that keeps me coming back for more.”

“Scott combines deep knowledge and experience in global IP protection and enforcement with a practical and savvy approach to problem-solving to meet the needs of his clients. He is also a forceful advocate for the clients’ interests. It is a rare combination that serves his clients extremely well.”

-Cara Boyle, Partner, Fross Zelnick Lehrman & Zissu, P.C.

Knobbe Martens

Salutes Spectrum Brands’ Vice President and Chief Intellectual Property Counsel Scott Piering.

Knobbe Martens is grateful for the opportunity to work with our friend Scott in driving Spectrum Brands’ continued success.

Spectrum Brands has been a global leader and innovator in consumer products, and Spectrum Brands congratulates Scott for playing an integral role in its great success.

A Global Leader in Acquisition, Protection and Enforcement of Trademarks, Copyrights and Designs

Fross Zelnick is delighted to share in honoring our friend and client

Scott Piering of Spectrum Brands

Upholstery in Motion and Other Innovations

Rodd Rafieha helps ensure that Abbyson Living is always on the cutting edge of design, sales, and manufacturing

By JEFF SILVER

When Abby Rafieha founded Abbyson Corporation, the company was fueled by his passion for design and creating beautiful products. He began by focusing on handmade Tibetan rugs and antiques. Today, Abby has been joined by his sons Yavar, president; Doddy, executive vice president; and Rodd, senior vice president.

With two generations at the helm, Abbyson has experienced ongoing growth and offers merchandise in twelve different product categories: upholstery and living room, dining, kitchen, bedroom, mattresses, occasional, patio, home décor, entertainment centers, office, children, and rugs. Revenue is expected to reach roughly $250 million within the next two years.

All three sons began working with their father when they were young. Their mother and an educator, Sherri, had built a strong foundation at home and in their schooling that supported their evolution from apprentices to partners. Rodd went on his first trip with his father to visit manufacturing facilities in Asia when he was twelve years old. He was fascinated by the details that went into product design, development, and manufacturing. By age sixteen, he was making his own trips overseas.

“My first trip was like mini-boot camp,” Rodd recalls. “My father and I visited five factories a day. I saw what a great entrepreneur he was and how much he was respected. It ignited my own passion for the family business.”

In his current role as SVP, which includes overseeing many departments, Rodd works with a team of designers to develop 200–300 new products each quarter. One of their priorities is developing features that will make Abbyson merchandise unique. Several years ago, its upholstery group was one of the first in the industry to include power mechanisms, such as power headrests and lumbar support. Rodd calls it upholstery in motion.

The design team is always thinking years ahead to anticipate consumer trends and demand. Part of that focus is shifting attention to millennial buyers, who are replacing baby boomers as the company’s prime customer demographic. Value, smaller-scale living, and a willingness to take more design risks are priorities for these consumers.

“Millennials look for bolder designs that would have been slow sellers in the past,” Rodd says. “Of course, as we add brighter colors and more mid-century modern and

contemporary choices, we’ll keep our established best sellers to maintain a balanced product line.”

As Rodd explains, Abbyson operates on a limited distribution model. This involves a great deal of due diligence to identify the most appropriate partners, which include Wayfair, Target, Macy’s, Amazon, and Overstock, to name a few. The company also operates AbbysonTrade.com, a sales portal for designers, and it currently has a waiting list of thousands of vendors for its separate e-commerce platform.

“We don’t want to overexpand,” Rodd says. “By maintaining a specific, manageable volume, we can stay the top partner for

each customer by consistently providing top quality and service.”

Rodd spends nearly one-third of the year visiting customer showrooms and brick-andmortar stores around the country. To prepare, he conducts extensive research to familiarize himself with the floor lineup of each one. As a result, he is able to provide expert advice on where there may be gaps in their offerings and how Abbyson can fill them.

He also still personally trains each of the company’s fifty salespeople. He views this as an opportunity to share his experience and intimate knowledge of the products.

“A training manual can’t adequately show the amount of work that goes into

Rodd Rafieha SVP

Abbyson Living

“A training manual can’t adequately show the amount of work that goes into developing our manufacturing processes and our products. I like to share our culture, our history, and how our relationships have developed.”

RODD RAFIEHA

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developing our manufacturing processes and our products,” he says. “I like to share our culture, our history, and how our relationships have developed.”

One example he frequently shares is about excess products that remained from a few retail stores in California in 2006. The items were offered to an online retailer that—within a week—sold the entire five hundred pieces of inventory. That relationship grew into $30 million of business with that one partner and was the beginning of Abbyson’s drop-ship model.

“That was an idea that was intended to sell some excess goods, but turned into an entirely new business,” Rodd says.

On the manufacturing side, Abbyson has set up its own upholstery factory and leather tannery in Shanghai, China. The joint venture, called AbbySky, produces about one thousand containers monthly. The facility has reduced the time required to develop new leathers, colors, and to produce samples by 80 percent.

As the company looks toward continued growth and reaching the $250 million revenue mark, it has invested heavily in logistics and recently hired a new vice president of operations. But there is also a new generation of Rafiehas waiting in the wings—three-yearold RJ and six-month-old Emma. “My wife Chelsie brings our son to the office every few weeks,” Rodd says. “Now, he just runs around, but when he gets older I’ll start teaching him about the business—just like my dad did.”

REACHING A HIGH POINT

Rodd Rafieha got a firsthand look at the quality of Abbyson’s products at an early age. Now, even more people can experience it with the opening of a 30,000-square-foot showroom in the International Home Furnishings Center in High Point, North Carolina, home of the largest furnishings and furniture industry trade show in the world. The showroom includes custom white marble, a bar and small restaurant, and space for five hundred products. The space also houses Abbyson’s Product Row, a venue for showcasing one thousand thumbnail images of additional products. Plasma screens also feature the company’s technology and fulfillment services that enable orders to go out within twenty-four hours. “The showroom is a great stage for showing the breadth and quality of our product lineup,” Rafieha says.

One Step at a

In just two years with Virgin Pulse, CEO David Osborne has elevated the company to the peak of success, improving health in individuals and helping companies thrive

Time

Words by DANNY CIAMPRONE

Photos by GILLIAN FRY

David Osborne and his team at Virgin Pulse have just moved into their new headquarters in the heart of Providence, Rhode Island. Located in the vibrant city, many employees are now able to walk or bike to work, use the Virgin Pulse office gym, attend weekly exercise classes, and even take a stroll on the fourth-floor walking track that surrounds the open floor plan.

It’s an exciting time for Osborne, who joined Virgin Pulse in 2016 and became the company’s CEO in June 2017. As he circumnavigates the green, indoor walking track, he’s able to reflect on some of the strides he’s made with the company in his first two years, from his leadership during the integration of two renowned wellness companies—ShapeUp and Global Corporate Challenge—to leading the company’s global expansion and developing its Exceptional Potential Early-in-Career (EPIC) hiring program.

But there’s something else that Osborne brought with him that won’t appear on any spreadsheet or quarterly report. Whether he’s rounding the walking track or in a meeting, Osborne—along with every member of the Virgin Pulse executive team—is carrying a touchstone coin. On one side appears Virgin Pulse’s logo with the company’s values around the edge. The other side is then inscribed with the virtues the company looks for when hiring new team members—hungry, humble, and smart—and the company’s KPIs.

“It’s near and dear to our hearts,” Osborne says of the touchstone coins, which are also handed down to employees as a reward for exceptional work. “Our view is that it’s one of the most valuable honors that you can earn in the company. We’re proud of it, and it’s gone over quite well with employees.”

Becoming the industry leader in workplace health and well-being doesn’t happen overnight, and it certainly doesn’t end after earning a coin. There are several reasons why the new headquarters was designed for collaboration, why there are exercise amenities, and why the coin in Osborne’s pocket symbolizes a unique value beyond compensation. One could look toward the company’s six core values that emphasize principles such as unity, authenticity, and a “saddle-up” approach to taking on challenges. Or they could look toward the team’s collective mission to change lives for good. All of that, though, starts with mastering the fundamentals.

Virgin Pulse, part of the Virgin Group, is the largest workplace well-being company in the world. With personalized programs powered by the company’s mobile-first SaaS platform, Virgin Pulse is not only helping members build healthy habits around wellness goals—such as losing weight, lowering blood pressure and cholesterol, eating better, and improving sleep—but the company’s software and scientifically backed approach to behavioral change is also helping companies significantly improve employee productivity, engagement, and business operations.

By improving health and wellness for individuals, healthcare costs decrease, and some clients have seen an 18 percent reduction in sick days among members participating in Virgin Pulse’s unique well-being and engagement program. As Osborne explains, work behaviors and developing a strong culture are becoming a critical focus among businesses today. Having a daily success platform such as Virgin Pulse allows organizations to cultivate a strong, empowered culture holistically from the bottom-up. Employees sign into the platform and receive personalized tips and information every day designed to help them achieve their health and well-being goals. They can also participate in online challenges with one another. As they build habits and engage with their colleagues in healthy competition, businesses reap positive results.

“At first, I spent a lot of time focusing on how we could operationalize the business, specifically applying a software playbook of best practices and positioning the business to scale,” he says. “Now, we’re working on extending and applying our software to bigger business and HR initiatives. Work and health are now becoming intertwined. With our platform, we can extend and customize our well-being pillars to incorporate culture and values, safety, onboarding, leadership, sustainability, and business KPIs for sales organizations.”

Osborne, a former NCAA Division l golfer, makes the comparison between his team’s approach and mastering the course. Out on the green, it may be an individual sport, but it’s a team game in understanding the course and putting yourself

“We lead the industry because we have the most experience. We’re standing on the mountaintop and saying where the industry should be going. We don’t follow anyone.”

DAVID OSBORNE

in the best position to succeed. “There’s a lot of similarity to how we run our business here,” Osborne says. “We have a bunch of individual players that do great work, and they’re also on a team. What we try to focus on here at Virgin Pulse is enabling people to be accountable and successful for themselves and the greater team. That means designing an office around collaboration as well as providing well-being tools that help individuals feel energized, healthy, and able to do their best work. At the end of the day, whether your office is a golf course, a manufacturing plant, or a bank, people who show up for work happier and healthier and are ready to perform at their peak usually excel compared to those who don’t.”

It’s this same leadership and mentality that Osborne was able to bring over with him not only from his time mastering the greens, but also from his twenty-plus years of experience in business and technology. Starting in global sales at iGATE Global Solutions, Osborne worked his way up the corporate ladder before becoming chief operations officer at Drillinginfo and eventually joined Virgin Pulse after the company’s acquisition of Global Corporate Challenge and ShapeUp. With a successful track record of acquiring and integrating numerous companies, Osborne is now bringing his strategic software playbook to Virgin Pulse.

As Osborne explains, the first step in growing the company was focused on international expansion, a key reason for the company’s acquisition of Melbourne, Australia-based company Global Corporate Challenge. Next, Osborne focused on strengthening the core business, specifically around research and development and recruiting early-in-career, exceptional-potential talent, which is one of the main reasons for the company’s move to Providence.

Virgin Pulse is in a competitive space, but Osborne says that along with his playbook, it’s having a strong clarity and purpose that has made the company emerge as the global leader in workplace health and wellness. “We change lives for the better every single day,” he says. “Many people are very connected to

that purpose. But either way, if it’s changing lives or growth or hitting a sales quota that gets you excited, I want employees to grasp on to their individual motivation and use it to succeed. I know I can’t prescribe culture or passion to people; it’s personal. That’s the culture I’m trying to promote—one of personalized well-being and success on behalf of the greater team and company.”

This enthusiasm among the team also extends to Virgin Pulse’s platform. Using materials from renowned academic speaker Dr. BJ Fogg, whose research emphasizes how daily habits and small actions add up to sustained behavior change, the platform encourages lifestyle changes with healthy competitions and challenges, daily actions, rewards, and the ability to connect with friends and family. With about two million members currently using the platform, Osborne says that 55 percent of members use the Virgin Pulse app five days a week or more, which rivals some of the most popular social media sites, including LinkedIn and Pinterest.

A focus on health and wellness has also been increasing in recent years as businesses take notice of the correlation between a healthier workplace and the bottom line. Improving employees’ well-being can lead to decreased absenteeism, medical costs, and accidents at work. Stock prices have also been linked with investments in employee well-being, Osborne says. While many employers are now catching up with the trend, Virgin Pulse was not only at the forefront of the movement, but it’s also spearheading the next frontier. “We lead the industry because we have the most experience,” Osborne says. “We’re standing on the mountaintop and saying where the industry should be going. We don’t follow anyone. We’re driving the industry’s advancement, and because of that, we’re able to partner with consultants, business leaders, and HR executives and work together to really push the concept: healthier, happier people show up to work more engaged, more productive, and ready to perform at their peak.”

Osborne sees proof of this concept within Virgin Pulse as he rounds the fourth floor walking track every day. Surrounded by a strong team that emphasizes a culture of well-being and engagement, it’s these small steps—whether on a walking track or consistently improving the bottom line—that are changing lives for good, all over the world.

FROM THE OFFICE TO THE GREENS

Before he entered the corporate world and became CEO of Virgin Pulse, David Osborne was already practicing healthy habits. He played nine years of baseball and just about every sport in high school including volleyball, badminton, and basketball. However, it was golf that he gravitated toward and eventually went on to play at the NCAA Division l level competition.

“I like the independence of golf, and I like the fact that it was you against the elements, you against the golf course,” Osborne says. “Every golf course is different, whereas every basketball court is exactly the same. Every football field is the exact same. I just love that fact that it presented amazing challenges over and over again.”

Writing Time Inc.’s

Next Chapter

Greg Giangrande manages HR and communications as the storied company maneuvers through a transformative era in media

By PORCSHE N. MORAN

WWhen Greg Giangrande transitioned from an aspiring journalist to human resources professional, it didn’t seem like a major leap. His first HR job was at book publisher Random House. He then held leadership roles in HR at mass media companies Condé Nast, Hearst Corporation, and News Corporation. Today, Giangrande is the executive vice president, chief human resources officer, and chief communications officer for Time Inc., a leading multiplatform consumer media company. Within all of these roles, Giangrande has found many parallels with his former profession.

“Journalism requires curiosity, communication, and storytelling,” he says. “Those same things are important in HR. When you are dealing with attracting and retaining talent, it requires a curiosity to understand what makes people unique and what will resonate with them. When you are trying to create a company culture, there is a lot of communication and storytelling involved.”

Giangrande joined Time Inc. in 2012 because he found the company’s reputation and history appealing. Founded in 1922, Time Inc. has a portfolio of more than one hundred news and culture brands, such as People, Sports Illustrated, InStyle, Real Simple, and Fortune that reach more than 170 million people each month across multiple platforms. It also has fifty offices around the world, including its New York City headquarters.

“The job offer coincided with a time when I felt ready to think about a new move,” Giangrande recalls. “It was an opportunity to be the head of HR for one of the most iconic and important media companies in the world. Given my background, experience, and interests, working for Time was a very compelling proposition.”

As chief human resources officer, Giangrande oversees hiring, training, and salary and benefits packages for the company on a global level. In 2016, Time Inc.’s president and CEO Rich Battista added chief communications officer to Giangrande’s job title. Giangrande was happy to take on more responsibility because he saw the potential to dovetail the two roles.

“The communications part of my job complements the HR part nicely,” he says. “I am telling stories about why the company matters and why people should want to come work here and remain employed here. I am tasked with putting together an internal and external narrative that will resonate with

Greg Giangrande EVP, CHRO, Chief Communications Officer

Time Inc.

employees, prospective employees, business partners, and clients. This unique, hybrid position brings a lot of variety to each day and makes my work stimulating.”

He also enjoys the complex nature of his job. Yet, there are many disruptions happening in the media industry that present him with challenges. To thrive in that market, Giangrande and his team must execute strategies based on endemic business changes, how people are consuming content and engaging with brands, and where and how people are buying products and services.

“There are big, sweeping forces that aren’t necessarily within our control,” Giangrande says. “Fortunately, if anyone in the space is able to transition, it should be us. We have a distinct advantage given our scale, history, and the strength of our brands and our business.”

A strong corporate culture is another advantage for Time Inc. Giangrande says the company strives to create an atmosphere where employees know that they are respected, that they have a voice, and that their contributions matter. One way the company demonstrates this is by offering competitive salaries and benefits. Leadership also gives employees the freedom to work autonomously. Giangrande says there isn’t a staff versus management mentality. Instead, leaders foster open communication and serve as career coaches to their team members. Giangrande promotes the culture by providing managers with targeted in-house training and development programs.

“What people want is clarity and a sense of purpose,” Giangrande says. “We want to establish an environment where people are comfortable to be themselves and do their best work. That is how you develop a positive workplace and a positive culture.”

Innovation is a key component of Time Inc.’s culture and success. Giangrande says he wants to empower employees to take chances. For example, the company recently launched The Pretty, a beauty content social brand that caters to millennial and Gen Z audiences. The company also

“I believe we are on the right path to becoming the most successful and largest consumer-based media company on the planet.”

GREG GIANGRANDE

created an online series called Homemade vs. The Internet , which streams on Watch— Facebook’s new original video-viewing hub.

“Being entrepreneurial, innovative, and fearless is in the DNA of every creative company,” Giangrande says. “You can’t be successful in media without those traits. Our CEO values those traits and talks about them constantly. We celebrate our people taking chances and thinking outside the box.”

With his focus on the future of Time Inc., Giangrande is aware of the delicate balance between tending to the company’s shortterm needs and staying ahead of the curve. And Giangrande is proud of the role he plays in helping the company navigate through one of the most turbulent points in the history of media.

“To be part of the team that is helping to write the next great chapter of this almost one-hundred-year-old storytelling company is extremely rewarding,” he says. “I believe we are on the right path to becoming the most successful and largest consumer-based media company on the planet.”

Teamwork is what keeps Giangrande moving forward with so much on his plate. He says he relies on the expertise of the people around him to stay on top of industry trends and make informed decisions.

“No one can do this alone,” Giangrande says. “I loved team sports growing up, and I enjoy working as part of the team at Time Inc. I like the camaraderie, the shared responsibility, and the shared winning and losing. It is gratifying to go through it all with a group of talented professionals who are smart, creative, respectful, and love what they do.”

Willis Towers Watson is proud to work with Time Inc. and Greg Giangrande, executive vice president, chief human resources officer, and chief communications officer. Willis Towers Watson offers benefits delivery and administration solutions where every step along the journey is created, managed, and supported by just one company. Our solutions can help reduce administrative burden, mitigate costs, attract and retain great talent, and better engage a diverse workforce.

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Financial Mastermind of Cyberwarfare

In the war on cyberattacks, Judy Bjornaas knows the best defense is a good offense. As CFO of a leading government contractor, her weapons are numbers.

By RUSS KLETTKE

Judy Bjornaas defies convention. She’s the CFO of a Fortune 1000 company, while at the same time women finance chiefs are found in fewer than 12 percent of firms. Her employer is ManTech, a respected government contractor doing the bulk of its work with the Department of Defense and Homeland Security and the Intelligence Community. It’s a company that attracts people with military backgrounds and deep knowledge of technologies such as cybersecurity, which is not one of her areas of expertise.

But Bjornaas is digital in her own right: a master of the ones and zeros essential to guiding her company through the realms of finance and government contracting.

She hadn’t initially planned to become a finance leader. She briefly flirted with going to work in programming while at her first employer, Electronic Data Systems. But her true calling, finance, came shortly after she received an offer from a smaller company.

Now, more than thirty years later, she’s an executive vice president and chief financial officer of a leading government contractor. This is a $1.6 billion enterprise focused on protecting national security and homeland

Judy Bjornaas EVP, CFO ManTech

security. One of its core missions is to safeguard customers’ data, which is subjected to attacks by botnets, ransomware, and malware twenty-four hours a day. ManTech’s winning approach to this dark challenge: a cyber strategy based on the premise that the best defense is knowledge of offense.

Although it may sound like a tough environment, government contracting is right at home for Bjornaas. “The government can be bureaucratic but fair,” she says. “They provide very good debriefs on contracts and transparent evaluations of bids. In the commercial world, such decisions are not always so objective.”

Still, to many, it may seem that government contracting would be volatile territory. But Bjornaas would argue against that, as the business has remained steady even through changes in administrations and fiscal debt ceilings. “We’ve been in business for fifty years,” says Bjornaas, who started at ManTech in 2010. “There will be ebbs and flows. But national security is what we do. Conflicts in the world and external threats are there regardless of who is in power.”

She adds that, even during the fiscal crises and government shutdowns in the past few years, the mission-critical nature of ManTech’s defense and homeland security work minimizes the impact on its business. In some instances, the company moved employees working on-site at government offices to alternative, nongovernment office spaces.

What does affect Bjornaas and her peers at public companies, though, are the Securities and Exchange Commission requirements—specifically Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the 2002 law that raises the accountability of public companies to their shareholders. “The law requires proof of certain actions, including documentation of oral discussion in meetings,” she says. “But as a government

“We’ve been in business for fifty years. There will be ebbs and flows. But national security is what we do. Conflicts in the world and external threats are there regardless of who is in power.”

JUDY BJORNAAS

to recognize our friend and client Judy Bjornaas for her outstanding contributions to the success of ManTech International.

Joseph C. Costa Senior Vice President

a single-minded focus.

Pure valuation means that our well-credentialed professionals concentrate the full depth of their expertise on only one thing – getting to the right value for your business. Our focus goes beyond the typical valuation modeling scenario and deeper into your company’s specific needs and strategic issues to deliver efficient solutions. FIND OUT MORE AT VALUATIONRESEARCH.COM

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Navigating the complexities of the federal marketplace isn’t

easy.

contractor, we’re used to those things.” Bjornaas adds how Sarbanes-Oxley changes the equation for privately held companies that are going public and the reverse—companies going private—which she has some further perspective on.

In her previous position as a CFO at NCI Information Systems Inc., another government contractor, she helped usher that company through its initial public offering. She says that directors and analysts typically like to know that their CFO has worked on a previous IPO. At the time, Bjornaas did not have this experience. She did, however, have a mentor, CEO Charles Narang, who was quite supportive of giving her that opportunity.

“Working with Charles, they were confident in my depth of understanding with the company,” Bjornaas says. “It gave me my first shot at an IPO.”

Public offerings aren’t one-day events, of course. They involve months of meetings with analysts, banks, investors, and communicating what the company’s prospects are on road shows and in other communications. At NCI, Bjornaas had a major role to play in establishing the IPO stock price, and she says investors often have and share their own matrices for how it should be priced. How the price is set also affects the shareholder mix, which she says matters.

The entire process speaks to the various person-to-person relationships that are milestones of success for financial leaders. Bjornaas says a CFO who is externally focused on Wall Street analysts, bankers, and auditors—in addition to possessing strategic acumen—is best qualified.

“Whether you’re a man or a woman, you have to be good at the internal and external stuff,” she says. A constellation of people— from her CEO to shareholders to government clients—evidently agree.

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Capital One Commercial Banking is proud to work with Judy Bjornaas and ManTech as a trusted banking advisor. Our Government Contracting Group is comprised of dedicated experts that have an in-depth understanding of the complex regulatory and budgetary environment and can provide tailored capital solutions to help execute business strategies.

Behind the Lens of a Successful Spin-Off

Last year, Varex Imaging Corporation separated from Varian Medical Systems. Not only was the split a win-win, but Varex Imaging also furthered its footprint with the acquisition of PerkinElmer just three months later.

By DANNY CIAMPRONE

On paper, January 1, 2017, is the date Varex Imaging Corporation was created following a successful spinoff from Varian Medical Systems. But don’t let that date mislead you. To understand the company’s rich history and the path to its successful split, you have to travel back to the 1930s.

Back then, Jack McCullough and Bill Eitel created the original company, Eimac Products. Before long, Eimac earned a reputation for producing high-quality, high-power transmitter tubes and relocating its manufacturing operations to Utah after receiving a large military contract in 1941. With the end of World War ll in sight, Eimac Products began to expand its expertise to include new tube types, such as television cathode ray tubes and microwave tubes for radar applications. Then in 1965, Eimac merged with Varian, and soon Varian became a recognizable name in the world of X-ray imaging.

Today, after decades of success, it became apparent that a spin-off company would be needed to operate and hold the company’s ever-expanding imaging components business. For this purpose, Varian Medical Systems created Varex Imaging Corporation on January 1, 2017. Together, the two companies are now able to concentrate their efforts on the needs of each business and pursue distinct opportunities for long-term growth and profitability in the imaging industry.

That’s the short history lesson. To delve deeper into this extensive process, you need to look toward Kim Honeysett, senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary of Varex Imaging Corporation, who was instrumental in helping to lead the successful spin-off.

With a storied tenure in big law firm and in-house experience, Honeysett has become a valued and trusted adviser to senior management and the board of directors. Prior to the separation of Varex from Varian Medical

Systems, Honeysett served as vice president, assistant general counsel, and assistant corporate secretary for Varian Medical Systems. In that role, she advised Varian’s Board of Directors, executive management, and corporate functions on everything from business development and investor relations to human resources and IT. Honeysett was also responsible for corporate governance, general compliance matters, litigation, and global subsidiary governance.

As a result, Honeysett knew the ins and outs of how to make this spin-off a success. In connection with the separation, Varex made roughly a $200 million cash payment to Varian, according to a news release from Varex Imaging. Varex funded this payment from its roughly

Kim Honeysett SVP, General Counsel, Corporate Secretary Varex Imaging Corporation

$300 million revolving credit facility. As a result, the balance of undrawn funds remain available to fund working capital needs and other general corporate purposes, as stated in the news release.

Varex Imaging Corporation has now established itself as a leading innovator of X-ray imaging components, which include tubes, digital flat panel detectors, and other image processing solutions, which are key components of X-ray imaging systems. To this day, Varex’s components are used in medical imaging, as well as in industrial and security imaging applications.

“Much of our time recently has been filled with meetings, calls, and road show presentations with the investor and analyst community,” says Sunny Sanyal, president and CEO of Varex Imaging, in a news release. “Overall, the past year has been an exciting time for us, and I want to thank all the people at Varian and Varex who devoted so much time and effort to make the separation a success.”

Sanyal, Honeysett, and the rest of Varex’s leadership team didn’t slow down, though, in a task to further evolve the company. Just two months after the spin-off, Varex Imaging Corporation acquired medical imaging business PerkinElmer for about $276 million. PerkinElmer develops, manufactures, and sells digital detectors that are key components in medical and

THE ORIGINS BEFORE THE SPLIT

Jack McCullough and Bill Eitel were two radio amateurs in 1932 when they decided to build high-power transmitters to work some of the twenty-meter overseas stations that were being heard in California. To their dismay, however, they found that the expensive transmitting tube they purchased was not compatible at one thousand volts. As a result, they decided they could build a better tube that would work at a low voltage. That tube ended up being the 150T triode. From this humble beginning, the company steadily expanded. Decades later, it would merge with Varian. Now after splitting with Varian to form Varex, the company that started with a relatively simple tube is now making breakthroughs in everything from medical devices to advancements in X-rays and lenses.

industrial X-ray imaging systems made by global OEM manufacturers.

According to a news release from Varex Imaging Corporation, the acquisition is expected to add roughly $140 million in annual sales, and Varex believes it will be transformative to the company’s digital detector operations. It will also enable the company to increase innovation, leverage its manufacturing scale, and expand its cost leadership position.

“The past year has been an exciting time for us, and I want to thank all the people at Varian and Varex who devoted so much time and effort to make the separation a success.”

SUNNY SANYAL

“We are very excited about the opportunities and prospects of adding this imaging expertise into the Varex organization,” Sanyal says in a news release. “I want to welcome our new employees to Varex, and I look forward to having the combined team focused on integrating our operations to achieve our goal of producing the broadest, most cost-effective portfolio of components for the imaging industry.”

One of the reasons for the acquisition is that PerkinElmer is highly complementary to Varex’s imaging detector business and has a similar financial profile, according to the news release.

“Customer overlap is minimal, and we see revenue and cost synergy opportunities that we expect to achieve over time,” Sanyal says in the news release. Some of these opportunities include: adding new digital detector technology to the Varex product portfolio, significant, new cross-selling opportunities for X-ray imaging solutions, leveraging combined volumes to gain manufacturing productivity, and further expansion in the Industrial imaging market, he adds.

With Honeysett, Sanyal, and Varex Imaging Corporation’s leadership team continuing to make strides, there’s no limit to what the company can accomplish as they further add to the rich history of the evolving company.

Baker McKenzie congratulates Kim Honeysett on a distinguished career

The Leading Cross-Border Firm

Melissa Lessard Operations Director, Western Quebec Couche-Tard

Audrey Anne Godin

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With its recent acquisition of CST, Melissa Lessard explains how Couche-Tard is further expanding its footprint and developing new initiatives for customer convenience

By JEFF SILVER

AA household name in Canada, Couche-Tard is one of the largest convenience store owners and operators in the world. After acquiring one of its largest competitors, CST, in 2017, it now has more than 15,000 stores worldwide, with 9,200 locations in North America. The acquisition also gives the company a significant presence in the southwestern United States and substantial support to expanding fuel offerings to more Canadian locations.

As Couche-Tard’s operations director Western Quebec, Melissa Lessard points out that the CST transaction is part of a long-term strategy that, since 2011, has roughly tripled the company’s holdings, all of which are being repositioned under the Circle K brand.

“We learn more about processes and efficiencies with every acquisition and import the best of the best practices from each,” she says.

To illustrate this, Lessard cites the fact that all Canadian IT systems were completely integrated within eight weeks after the CST transaction was officially closed.

Naturally, the deal not only involved extensive due diligence, but it also included Couche-Tard’s unique practice of extensive

on-site visits. In preparation for potential or pending transactions, top executives and operations teams routinely walk through local stores to fully understand local retail realities and to experience customers’ perspectives firsthand.

“Talking directly to customers provides insights and key information that even the existing leaders might not have,” Lessard says. “You learn about client likes and dislikes and gain a completely different perspective that you can’t get from numbers on a page and analyzing data.”

One innovation that the company is expanding as a result of the CST acquisition is a made-to-order food program that offers alternatives to the usual prepackaged sandwiches and snacks that are typically associated with convenience stores. Participating locations receive investments of $20,000–$30,000 in freezers, ovens, display cases, and additional resources for employee training. So far, bakery sales have increased roughly 300 percent in stores where the program has launched.

Although Couche-Tard has locations across the United States, Canada, Europe,

“We were thrilled to have the opportunity to participate in Couche-Tard’s brand expansion in the scope of their most recent CST acquisition. Partnering to a long-term strategy brings tremendous value to our close relationship with Melissa’s team. Along with our robust POS integration, acquired knowledge of its operations, shared best practices and close coordination, this team effort gave way to a timely and flawlessly executed roll-out. Over the last decade, InComm has transformed the consumer shopping experience with its cutting edge and tailored solutions, as well as its strategic programs helping position CoucheTard as a true prepaid card destination.”

-Marie-Hélène Senécal Director, Eastern Region, Retail InComm Canada

Inventory at various Couche-Tard locations, including in the Laval area of Quebec, is highly customized for local areas and differing interests of consumers.

CHALLENGING PERCEPTION

After five years with Couche-Tard, Melissa Lessard became a working mother. Although she was accustomed to working in the male-dominated convenience store industry, she quickly recognized a number of misconceptions about women with children in the corporate environment.

“Since we are typically the primary caregivers, it’s assumed that new mothers’ priorities will completely shift, and we’ll let our jobs go,” she says. “On the contrary, it’s made me more focused and organized.”

Lessard created a work/life balance that dictates that home stays at home and work stays at work. However, there are moments that require spontaneous adjustments. When unexpected illnesses arise, for example, she recommends being open and honest, staying at home if necessary, and then catching up nights and weekends to deliver the same quality work just as before motherhood.

“There was a morning recently when I had to call my team and colleagues just as I was about to walk out the door to tell them my son was sick,” she says. “But working remotely, I still participated in three meetings while simultaneously entertaining my son. After my husband got home, I went back to work and everything on my schedule got done—just later than expected.”

Mexico, Japan, China, and Indonesia, Lessard believes many people don’t understand how locally focused its operations truly are.

“We want repeat customers, so we have to be sure we have what they want when they want it and that stores and employees develop relationships with them,” Lessard explains. “In many cases, we know customers by name or are so familiar with what they buy that when we see them in the parking lot, we have it waiting on the counter when they walk through the door.”

Inventory is also highly customized for local areas and differing interests. In tourist regions, for example, many stores carry fireworks. If they are near popular fishing spots, shelves may also be devoted to fishing gear.

Additionally, Couche-Tard engages in ongoing efforts to leverage technology to connect with customers and to make its stores as relevant as can be on a daily basis. Its North American mobile app is continually updated and improved with the objective to make payments easier and faster, as well as to increase customer engagement through loyalty programs.

Lessard pioneered the use of mobile technology and social media at the company when she first joined as part of the merchandising and marketing group about six years ago. To this day, the sort of technology she pioneered the use of has become commonplace throughout all of Couche-Tard’s business units. Her original app still has 150,000 users and helps drive up to 8 percent redemption rates when new sales initiatives are introduced—more than double the industry average.

In addition to that accomplishment, Lessard is one of the few women executives in the convenience store industry. However, as evidenced by the recent addition of two other women to Couche-Tard’s executive team, she is quick to point out the overall diversity of the company’s employees.

“No matter what an individual’s age, race, gender, or sexual preference may be, there are no barriers to entry here,” she says. “What we look for is the right attitude, a desire to grow, and a dedication to offering the best customer service. Everything else is irrelevant.”

Dedication never tasted so good.

Molson Coors, founded in 1786 by John Molson in Montreal on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, is North America's oldest brewer.

With more than 350 years of combined brewing heritage, we're more passionate than ever about making great beer.

We're always working to perfect our brands and develop new ones to delight the world’s beer drinkers.

MolsonCoors is proud to celebrate the achievements of Melissa Lessard, director at Couche-Tard, for her strategic vision and focus on consumer satisfaction, which is driving mutual business growth. As a major global brewer, MolsonCoors has the ambition of being the first choice of customers and consumers by leading innovation, quality, and service.

Expert in the Field

GCG brings unprecedented experience and proficiency to administering complex legal settlements and providing services around the world

By JEFF SILVER

The global nature of law is constantly evolving, and it’s critically important that companies stay abreast of any changes to ensure sound compliance with complex laws. That’s where GCG comes in.

The company has provided legal administrative services for more than thirty years. Its primary service areas include: class action settlement administrations, restructuring and bankruptcy matters, mass tort settlement programs, regulatory settlements, and data breach response programs.

Currently, GCG is in the middle of expanding its programs and services internationally to maintain its status as a leading legal services

provider on the forefront of changes in markets. The company is already relatively mature in class action law markets, such as in Canada and Australia, as well as markets where new class action-related statutes have passed in recent years, such as the United Kingdom and Japan.

Leading this immense effort is Scott D. Nader, executive vice president and general counsel at GCG. Nader has been instrumental to GCG’s expansion efforts. Leveraging two decades of experience advising organizations and holding leadership roles in the military, Nader applies his expertise by managing GCG’s legal team in the analysis of evolving international law, critical data, privacy, and administrative requirements across various jurisdictions.

“The majority of the time, the mechanics of identifying, communicating with, or distributing money to claimants is fairly uniform,” Nader says.“The challenge isn’t usually on the operational side. It’s understanding the legal nuances of each jurisdiction and the particular case we are handling for our client.”

A major international issue that GCG’s legal department is focused on is the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is set to take effect in May 2018. By formalizing previously informal data security and privacy best practices, the GDPR institutes stiff penalties for improper management of personal data, or maintaining identifiable information about EU citizens longer than necessary.

The GDPR also represents the challenges of successfully complying with the ever-changing rules of the cross-border digital world. To ensure compliance, companies involved in international interactions must adhere to the most stringent requirements from the involved jurisdictions.

The digital environment has not only expanded the role of GCG’s legal department, but it has also necessitated ongoing and active participation from the company’s operations, IT, HR, and finance functions to ensure appropriate data stewardship.

“Compliance is not an option. The consequences of falling short of compliance regulations raise huge practical concerns, like how and where we store data, what privacy statements we need to send out, etc.,” Nader explains. “As a result, we partner closely with operations and the rest of the business to ensure we stay within all applicable rules and regulations.”

To help support its growing international activities, GCG recently merged its capabilities with the oldest and foremost Canadian class-action administrator, which had been operating separately under the umbrella of GCG’s parent company, Crawford, since class-action law came into existence in Canada. Together, the companies now operate as GCG, providing service to clients on both sides of the border.

“This operational synergy creates a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts,” Nader says. “We have a much broader range of expertise under one roof that can not only be applied to emerging international venues, but also to an increasingly large number of matters that arise from the volume of business between the US and Canada—two of the world’s largest trading partners.”

Along those same lines, GCG is also able to leverage the capabilities of other organizations within the Crawford family to solve client problems. Nader points to a recent product recall project, where GCG was able to work seamlessly with Broadspire, Crawford’s

Scott D. Nader EVP, General Counsel GCG

global third-party claims and medical management administrator; Crawford’s traditional field adjusting staff for insurance claims; and WeGoLook, a recent acquisition that uses an Uber-type network of personnel to help handle field inspections and product transfer logistics.

To illustrate the complexity of managing international claims, Nader refers to a recent settlement administration in which some of the claimants were located in Crimea. Those claims required GCG to navigate requirements set by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), which prohibits payments to certain countries and specified individuals. Before making payments, claimants must be rigorously vetted to confirm whether they are the individuals targeted by OFAC or if they reside in jurisdictions that are subject to OFAC’s sanctions.

“This is one example of the legal and compliance work that must be performed

LESSONS FROM THE MILITARY

Before becoming a lawyer, Scott D. Nader served as a US Army airborne ranger. While in the service, he learned several critical skills that continue to serve him well in the corporate world.

“I learned as a young platoon leader that one person cannot do it all,” he says. “The most successful teams are those that recognize, develop, and groom talent. Good leaders delegate, but great leaders also follow-up, coach, and provide opportunities for those who work for them.”

He notes this is particularly true for professional service companies, where the quality of the team is one of the true market differentiators.

2500 Lawyers. 44 Locations. 5 Continents. www.jonesday.com

on the cases we handle,” Nader says. “Each administration must adhere to the specific details agreed to by all parties involved in the settlement agreement, including how unpaid, unclaimed, or unpayable funds are to be managed, as well as the court orders, the laws of the US, and often the laws of other jurisdictions. This requires a strong team, clear protocols, and close coordination.”

Although many clients are aware of the legal aspects of the company’s work, Nader points out that GCG also handles cases outside of purely legal settlements—such as data breach responses and product recalls—for which GCG provides a range of back-office solutions, including call centers, printed mailings, and data management. In such scenarios, GCG leverages its experience and expertise to help clients respond quickly and responsibly to ongoing events. By doing so, those companies are able to reassure and support their customers and can often address issues before they escalate to the point of requiring legal settlements.

Much of this work is serviced by GCG’s staff, which includes more than one hundred lawyers who work in various departments throughout the company. Although they do not practice law, their training and background will often enable them to identify and address issues before they require oversight from the legal team.

“Proactively implementing best practices, coordinating with operations and other functions, and establishing escalation protocols allows the business to address and respond to problems they can handle and then involve the legal department in complex scenarios that require specialized attention,” Nader explains. “It’s an effective model that works well here at GCG because of the quality of our people.”

Scott Nader was one of the first to recognize the need for project management in the practice of law. Scott saw our LPM solution, BakerManage, as an innovation and collaborated with Baker Donelson to implement BakerManage to improve collaboration between attorneys and clients and ultimately reduce legal spend. www.bakerdonelsonlpm.com

Perkins Coie is proud to support Scott Nader of the Garden City Group. As a full service law firm with more than one thousand lawyers in nineteen offices across the United States and Asia, we provide legal services to a range of clients, from Fortune fifty companies to start-ups and other organizations.

Helping bring progress and promise to communities since 1866.

150 years ago, we opened our first branch. There were no debit cards or mobile apps. Heck, there wasn’t even electricity. All we had were our bankers, their pens and a promise. A promise that we’d help build the community. A promise to communicate honestly with our customers. And a promise to do the right thing. Keeping this promise has led to some extraordinary things over the last century and a half, but none greater than the privilege of helping transform the lives of people right in our own backyard.

All the Right Ingredients

Richard Emmett has loved every minute of a long career in the restaurant and hospitality industry

By JEFF SILVER

Doug Levy

RRichard Emmett has worked in the restaurant and hospitality industry his entire life. Starting as a dishwasher at the Chadwick Pancake House on the Jersey Shore when he was thirteen, Emmett has worked as a waiter, cook, manager, and developer. He was even an owner in a partnership of nearly thirty Papa John’s restaurants located in Indiana and Wisconsin while serving as general counsel for that company. Emmett was also part of the leadership team that helped Papa John’s grow from one to more than three thousand units.

Today, Emmett’s extensive experience is being used in his role as chief legal and human resources officer at Dunkin’ Brands, the parent company of the Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins brands. His legal and HR expertise, combined with his experience as a former franchisee, has helped him identify and implement critical initiatives aimed at improving franchisees’ ability to recruit, hire, train, and retain a quality workforce in an increasingly competitive labor market.

The company’s People First Summit is representative of those efforts. Inaugurated in 2015, the event afforded Dunkin’ Donuts franchisees to network and share best practices to develop a positive and inclusive culture to help them become the employer of choice. The summits have presented practical topics such as “The Importance of a People First Culture,” “Suggestions to Hire Tough, Manage Easy,” “Rewards Strategies to Drive a High-Performance Culture,” and “Ways to Engage Top Talent.”

Employee turnover tends to be higher in the restaurant industry than in the private sector due to several factors, including higher proportions of student- and part-year employees in the workforce. In fact, the turnover rate in the economy’s hospitality segment topped 70 percent for the second consecutive year in a row, according to a data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“There are high costs involved with recruiting, hiring, and training new employees, and it’s an exceptionally important investment for our franchisees,” Emmett explains. “We are an integral part of our customers’ daily lives, and it’s important that the foods and beverages they order and the overall guest experience are consistently positive every single day. Hiring and retaining a quality staff is a key ingredient in achieving that goal.”

On the legal side, Emmett believes attorneys are underutilized. “Too many times, attorneys are sought out simply to check the legal box. In my view, limiting them to that role is wasting a valuable resource. Most attorneys are fully capable of actively participating in the business on a day-to-day basis and at a strategic level,” Emmett says. “For that to happen, both parties must recognize and appreciate lawyers’ value-add to the business. Those on the business side need to understand that attorneys can bring a lot to the table well beyond simply their legal acumen. And attorneys need to step up and take advantage of the opportunity to demonstrate their broader value to the organization. I tell my attorneys the greatest compliment they can receive is to be introduced by the business as a member of the team and, by the way, they’re our lawyer.”

Emmett speaks passionately about the importance of a strong relationship between franchisees and franchisors. In most cases, the two are completely

“In franchising, as with most relationships, it takes years to build trust. As in any other relationship, it’s that trust that helps you get through the tough times.”

RICHARD EMMETT

Richard Emmett Chief Legal and Human Resources Officer Dunkin’ Brands

Richard Emmett

Chief Legal and Human Resources Officer Dunkin’ Brands®

Gray Plant Mooty’s franchise practice group congratulates for his continued success and service to Dunkin’ Brands® and the community.

Gray Plant Mooty is honored to work with Rich and his team.

aligned in their goals, namely to succeed in pleasing the consumer and beating the competition. But there are instances where the parties’ interests may diverge.

“In franchising, as with most relationships, it takes years to build trust,” Emmett says. “As in any other relationship, it’s that trust that helps you get through the tough times. And in business, there will always be tough times.”

He says that open communication is particularly important to building trust between the parties. “Franchisees need to understand what the franchisor’s goals are and why those goals are important,” he says. “Conversely, the franchisor needs to understand the franchisees’ concerns and point of view from both a business and store level. Once that communication occurs, the parties are in a much better place to work together toward a solution. It should never be us versus them. We have to work together.”

In addition to building trust, Emmett emphasizes the importance of constantly monitoring your business and business environment because it is constantly changing. And evolving technological advances have made that change all the more pronounced. He encourages his teams to not only stay current, but to also think about the future.

“Wayne Gretzky said it best, ‘Skate to where the puck’s going to be,’” he says. “Doing so will make them better HR and legal professionals and help add value to the business and stay ahead of the competition.”

At the same time, Emmett takes solace in the enduring appeal of the Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins brands. He says that it’s remarkable that two brands, both of which are roughly seventy years old, are more relevant today than at any time in the past. In fact, he points to one recent event in California, where customers started lining up more than twenty-four hours before a new Dunkin’ Donuts restaurant opened just to be among the first patrons.

“Whether you’re in HR or legal providing services to your corporate clients, or you’re behind the store counter serving coffee, donuts, or ice cream to customers, great products and services are paramount,” Emmett says. “That’s what keeps customers coming back day after day.”

Gray Plant Mooty and its Franchise & Distribution Practice Group congratulate Richard Emmett, chief legal and human resources officer at Dunkin’ Brands, on being honored for his leadership. Gray Plant Mooty is proud of its relationship with Dunkin’ Brands and people like Rich Emmett, who have made the company great.

James Scherer

CULTURE

Keeping Track of Growth

Kristina Palmer Shedd and her team at SapientRazorfish hire hundreds of people and handle thousands of applications and interviews each year. They rely on a transparent, collaborative culture and innovative technology to retain the top talent that is driving the company further into the future.

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KIVEL Photos by GILLIAN FRY

SSince she joined Sapient more than a decade ago, Kristina Palmer Shedd has been involved in talent acquisition at every level of the organization, from executive hiring to staffing technology teams. The company has grown and changed countless times in the interim, always improving its offerings for clients. And Shedd has seen as many changes in the way the company and industry at large seek out the best talent. Now, as the vice president of talent acquisition of SapientRazorfish, Shedd is working at the cutting edge of technology and strategy to continue to help push the organization further into the future.

SapientRazorfish is a digital consultancy that specializes in digital business transformation. Its services include data and artificial intelligence, digital innovation, marketing, IT, commerce, and customer experience—a wide range of capabilities that enable the company to reimagine business for its clients. Shedd ensures that the company has sufficient talent for these various offerings across all of North America. That immense task is made more challenging by the intense competition for talent in the industry. However, as Shedd suggests, SapientRazorfish’s unique culture and ability to embrace the latest trends in technology keeps it ahead of the curve.

“It’s very uncommon, especially in our industry, to see people come to an organization and stay for such a long period of time,” Shedd says. “Our clients may have changed over the years, but the investment that we’ve made in connecting people to the organization and the culture that we’ve created and grown make the difference.”

In 2017 alone, Shedd and her team hired about 450 people and worked with a comparable number of contractors. Beyond hires, the organization has undergone significant growth through mergers, and Shedd needed to develop a strategy by which to integrate the brands together. But even with increased volume and organizational size, Shedd insists that quality is never compromised. “We’re invested in the quality of our hires and making sure that we’re thinking about things like diversity and inclusion and growth opportunities,” she explains.

One innovation that the team has developed to reach that goal is Career Returns—a twelve-week paid program that offers individuals looking to return to the workforce after extended time off an opportunity to more easily make the transition. These individuals may have

“We’re transforming our clients’ businesses, so we need to think about how we transform our own processes to make sure that they’re where they need to be. Our culture thrives on growing, challenging, and developing people.”

KRISTINA PALMER SHEDD

CHATTING ABOUT THE FUTURE

Kristina Palmer Shedd and her team at SapientRazorfish are always seeking new ways to engage with potential candidates. As with any effort in working with millennials, technology has been an essential component. One recent initiative was a chatbot named Billi, which was developed to engage with junior candidates. The program can be accessed through Facebook and interacts with candidates in a highly engaging, personality-filled way by revealing their Snapchat personalities and how that fits within the company.

“The chatbot asks questions about young talent’s use of their preferred social tool and helps make decisions around what roles and careers you might want to think about pursuing,” Shedd explains. “This offers a new level of engagement utilizing social media and mobile technology. This has been a lot of fun for candidates to participate and engage with.”

developed work experience but then took time off to care for a child, aging parent, or to treat an illness. The program offers them the necessary, relevant skills to bring that experience into today’s workplace.

Other important diversity outreach programs have found Shedd’s team working closely with organizations on campuses and partnering directly with universities, as well as working with organizations such as Women Who Code and Lesbians Who Tech. “That has given us exposure and an opportunity to have more conversations with people that we would never have been able to reach out to otherwise,” Shedd explains.

That approach has also paid off in the hiring process, as roughly 56 percent of campus hires and 50 percent of vice

president-level hires in 2016 were women. In the following year, SapientRazorfish will be making further strides in inclusiveness for veterans, offering an apprenticeship program to help individuals transition back into civilian life.

To accommodate other employees, SapientRazorfish offers flexible working arrangements, backup emergency care, and work-from-home options. The company values a work/life balance and approaches each employee as an individual. This extends to the interview process, something that Shedd’s team has implemented in training sessions. “We rolled out a training program to address unconscious bias in interviews to help hiring managers learn how to overcome their implicit biases and make fair hiring decisions,” she explains. The program was

Kristina Palmer Shedd VP of Talent Acquisition SapientRazorfish

so successful that she is now elevating it to workshops across the company to give people an opportunity to share their experiences. “I think that’s made a significant impact in the candidate experience and the folks that we’ve been able to attract,” Shedd says.

In order to validate that feeling, SapientRazorfish carefully measures candidate and employee responses. The team will send out surveys and ask for further feedback in order to provide the best possible experience for the next candidates. In 2016, the team found that about 94 percent of employees reported an excellent or superior interview experience. Validation from other services bolster that reputation, including multiple CandE awards, which recognize outstanding candidate experience.

Shedd credits technology tools from partners such as Avature for helping make that success possible. With the massive volume of

candidates that her team ushers through the various stages of the interview process, CRM and ATS technology are essential for tracking and driving insight.

“Technology is instrumental to creating a pipeline of candidates for futuristic types of needs,” she explains. “Our investment in technology has enabled us to create marketing campaigns, communicate with candidates, and think long-term.”

The industry changes as rapidly as the technology, and for that reason, Shedd values Avature’s agile, adaptive approach. “As they have grown as an organization, we’ve been able to grow with them,” she says. “They’ve been a great partner for us because they’ve really listened to our feedback and questions.” As a company, Shedd adds, Avature values strong relationships and consistent quality—the same ideals that SapientRazorfish aims to deliver to candidates.

“Our clients may have changed over the years, but the investment that we’ve made in connecting people to the organization and the culture that we’ve created and grown make the difference.”

KRISTINA PALMER SHEDD

Achieving this level of success has required buy-in not only from Shedd’s team, but also from the entire organization. But thanks to the results driven in part by the advantages offered by Avature’s technology, that hasn’t been difficult. “Our leaders are really involved in the candidate experience, support the outreach, and promote a culture of a diverse and inclusive environment,” Shedd says. “That trickles through the rest of the organization. It has to be consistent all the way through the journey of an individual’s career within SapientRazorfish.”

That community spirit that runs throughout the entire organization keeps a sense of consistency and empowers every department. The open, collaborative nature of the company has enabled Shedd’s team to drive multiple new programs during this period of rapid change and growth.

“We’re always looking to stay ahead of the curve and improve,” Shedd says. “And that has a lot to do with our culture and organization. We’re transforming our clients’ businesses, so we need to think about how we transform our own processes to make sure that they’re where they need to be. Our culture thrives on growing, challenging, and developing people.”

An HR Veteran’s Guide to Success

Andrew Farnsworth shares his advice on building a company culture on a global scale and being an effective leader

By JONAS WEIR

In the fall of 2017, industrial valve manufacturer CIRCOR International announced that it would be acquiring Colfax Fluid Handling in an $855 million deal that included cash, shares in CIRCOR, and assumption of Colfax’s pensions liabilities. It is a major move for CIRCOR that will nearly double its employees from about 2,500 to nearly 4,600. And as the transition into becoming a sizably larger firm comes to a head, Andrew Farnsworth, the company’s chief human resources officer, is charged with building a company culture and a “one-company” sense of unity across the global corporation.

But Farnsworth is no stranger to building a company culture across borders. With more than seventeen years of HR experience, he has worked in global HR roles in Germany, Switzerland, and France for companies such as Compaq, Temenos, Brocade Communications, and Unibail-Rodamco. Since joining CIRCOR in 2015, he’s ensured that HR has a seat at the table and helped the executive leadership team shape the company culture, mission, and vision.

“It’s a privilege for the Gallagher team to partner with Andrew on Circor’s employee benefit programs,” says Erica DeGeorge of consulting firm Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. “His vision for CIRCOR as a destination employer inspires all of us to make it happen.”

Farnsworth spoke with Profile about the challenges of HR leadership on a global scale and shared his advice for HR leaders.

How did you start your career in HR? It was definitely a serendipitous type of situation. I never thought about HR as a career path at all. After working in finance for ten years, I moved into operations roles and started getting involved with some HR-like topics. I worked closely with senior managers across regions and they started confiding in me on people-related matters.

Then, an HR opportunity came up. I was working in Munich in a strategic planning and sales operations role at that stage, and the leader of the business that I was supporting said to me, “Look, the HR director for this geographic region is leaving to go on maternity leave. She probably won’t come back for a while. Can you step in until we find the permanent solution?” I stepped into the HR role temporarily, and that was seventeen years ago.

What about HR is so appealing to you?

One of the reasons why HR fits so well for me, I would say, is that I come from a family of

have an off-site meeting. At the off-site meeting, the CEO had his homework, and he came with his vision in terms of operational efficiency, growth, shareholder value, HR, and talent. Then, we went from there into a discussion around our strategy as a company. We started connecting the dots between the strategy and the vision. This is just the beginning of that journey, but it’s an essential part. It’s a building block.

Where does HR fit in when the vision and mission have been crafted?

I think HR has to be the catalyst. I did this conjunction with the business development leader. I said to him, “I don’t want to just approach this from a pure HR standpoint. It has to be strategy and culture together.”

To execute on a company vision, what do you believe it takes to be successful from an HR perspective?

journalists: My mom, my dad, my grandfather, my brother—it’s a journalistic family. I didn’t go down that path. However, I think I did inherit curiosity and a love of asking questions. In HR, you have a legitimate reason to go and talk to pretty much anyone. You can ask about what their job is or about what keeps them up at night. It’s just fascinating to ask these questions and get a window into the business and pretty much anything. It satisfies that curiosity that I have.

When building a one-company culture at CIRCOR, where do you start?

It’s a tall order. Not only do we have employees scattered across 20–30 different countries, but we sell in many different markets. There can be many different perceptions of headquarters across the company. The way you bridge those gaps is, one, by asking a lot of questions and by visiting people. You have to get out on the road. You can’t be sitting behind your desk too much. It’s hard to do that, but I force myself to get out and visit our sites and meet with employees across the organization.

What’s your role in crafting the company’s vision and mission?

It starts with a vision for the company, and it has to come from the CEO. What we did is

First and foremost, there’s probably technical skills that are required at some level. You do need to know at a high level the interrelationships between the various pieces of the puzzle. However, you can’t know everything. You have to rely on advisers. I think the real skills are in how you work with and influence your key stakeholders.

You also have to be super customerfocused. Know your customer, check in regularly, get feedback, and represent the function in a strong way. Speak the language of the business. Stay connected to the organization across multiple businesses, functions, and locations.

You need to know the job of the company, the business dynamics, and the challenges of the business. If you can talk business to the people you support, then the better off you’ll be. That’s absolutely critical.

What is your advice for an HR leader working on major M&A deals?

Get into the due diligence process as early as possible. Solicit expert advice on pivotal aspects such as executive compensation, benefits, pension liabilities, and culture. Put the best people on the integration teams on both sides. Focus immediately on hearts and minds and building an integrated culture. This is a long-term effort. Communicate to employees, customers, suppliers, and investors on a regular basis—explaining the vision and merits of the combined companies.

It’s a great career opportunity for HR executives because you learn so much, and it’s a fascinating process.

Randy Brogen

Andrew Farnsworth CHRO CIRCOR International

CHART A STEADY COURSE FOR EMPLOYEE WELLBEING.

Your employees’ physical, financial, social and emotional health are interdependent factors in their total wellbeing — and yours. Thriving employees often cost less in annual healthcare benefits spend, take less time off due to illness and injury, and are more likely to be high performers.

BRING THE WHOLE EMPLOYEE TO WORK. NOW, AND IN THE FUTURE.

The marketplace forecast calls for increased competition to secure the right talent. With a holistic approach to compensation and benefits that integrates total wellbeing, you’ll motivate employees to stay onboard — and grow with your organization.

Shifting Gears

Sonic

Automotive is changing the car

buying experience—and the bold transformation has the company enjoying life in the fast lane

By ZACH BALIVA

There’s the burnt coffee and the stale popcorn. The crowds, salesmen, the test drive, the credit check, negotiations, financing, the trade-in, and maybe, eventually, the deal. Automotive industry experts say the average car sale takes about four hours. But that’s not the case at Sonic Automotive. The auto retailer—with more than one hundred dealerships in thirteen states—is using a mix of culture change and proprietary technology to shorten the purchasing process, remove pain points, and provide an enhanced retail experience designed specifically for today’s modern customer.

Doug Bryant joined Sonic Automotive in 2012. As vice president of talent management, training and recruiting, he’s been instrumental in reinventing the company’s culture. “Most people hate buying cars, and we wanted to change that,” Bryant says. “People don’t come to Sonic ready to do battle. They come here to get a great car at a fair price and enjoy a totally different experience.”

Sonic Automotive is Bryant’s second endeavor with the company’s leadership. In the mid-1990s, Bryant, who completed a doctorate in human and organizational

Doug Bryant VP of Talent Management, Training and Recruiting Sonic Automotive

learning, worked with several key Sonic Automotive players at AutoNation USA, where he designed and implemented strategic business planning work sessions, training, and performance management systems. Together, they took AutoNation from start-up to about $23 billion in a span of several years.

Changing consumer behaviors and expectations in other industries sparked Sonic Automotive’s transformation project. Although the company was making roughly $10 billion per year, its leaders knew buyers would eventually move away from the traditional model. “Everything in the consumer world is changing with technology, and we don’t expect car buying to be an exception,” Bryant explains. “People are buying more products online in almost every industry. Dealerships that don’t get ahead of that curve risk losing business, and we want to lead the way to win customers.”

Bryant and his peers started the process by entering a research phase. They held customer focus groups to discover the highs and lows associated with car buying. “We tried to reinvent the car buying process to enhance what customers like and remove what they dislike,” Bryant says. With data from the focus groups, Sonic internally developed its own

OFF THE CLOCK

When he’s not improving the car sales process, Doug Bryant can often be found at the poker table, or harvesting agave. Driven by their mutual love for tequila—and their mutual hatred for bad tequila—Bryant and several of his friends created Luna Malvada, a highend tequila business. Bryant says there are a few secrets to creating his style of the spirit.

Luna Malvada is known for its complex taste and full flavor, made possible by a unique method. Growers follow an ancient Mexican recipe and harvest Luna Malvada’s agave only under a full moon. The strange approach brings added moisture, resulting in smoother tequila. Luna Malvada has many accolades, including awards from About.com and rave reviews from Nightclub & Bar and BarMedia.

And as a Texas Hold’em pro, Bryant has won several big charity and celebrity tournaments, including the 2012 Aces and Bases Spring Training poker event in Scottsdale, Arizona. Bryant says most of the skills necessary to win at poker (statistics, probability, game theory, reading people, controlling your own emotions, and group dynamics) are skills he’s learned in his doctorate program, business, and most of all, auto sales.

consumer-facing technology systems. At Sonic Automotive locations and Echo Park branded used car locations, customers experience the modern Sonic approach to car buying.

Customers with trade-ins can use Sonic’s app to appraise their vehicle before coming to the dealership. When the customer arrives, they meet an “experience guide” who explains several options. The customer can review cars in person or online. They can do side-by-side comparisons on a large, computer-driven “imagine bar.” They can discuss financing and keep a potential purchase overnight. When the time comes to make a deal, there’s no haggling. Sonic Automotive advertises one locked-in sticker price for each vehicle. The entire deal can happen right on the experience guide’s tablet. The process, which Bryant says takes about forty-five minutes, removes back-office manager approvals, high-pressure upsales, and piles of paperwork.

Bryant and Sonic Automotive leaders knew the transformation would require him to bring in new talent and retrain existing employees. “This was a massive change,” he says. “To do it right, we had to totally rethink our culture and approach.” Instead of simply hiring more people with traditional experience, Bryant retrained more than seven hundred existing managers to do the training for their own stores. He placed less emphasis on sales techniques while underscoring team building and development. Next, Bryant looked outside to complement his existing team. He hired several new trainers, but not from the usual pool of automotive veterans. Instead, he found high performers from other industries and spent three months training them on the “Sonic way of servicing customers” through the company’s new model.

Bryant calls his trainers “change agents” and says they’ve been essential in Sonic’s success. “We’re changing the culture, and that’s what’s making our customers and associates happier,” he says. Salespeople no longer work nights and weekends to compete in the old fashioned, cutthroat dealership model. Instead, they work regular business hours and get at least two days off per week. Instead of commissions, they make flat salaries and work to earn bonuses. The atmosphere is friendly. Leaders are more engaged. Executives visit stores and talk directly to Sonic associates. During Hurricane Harvey, many Sonic executives personally delivered supplies to the company’s nineteen dealerships and two thousand associates working in the affected areas.

Implementing these changes has been a major—but worthwhile—investment. “Sometimes it takes time and money to do things the right way,” Bryant says. “It’s a lot of up-front work, but we’re seeing higher customer satisfaction scores and lower employee turnover in the stores that have been transformed.”

Additionally, the company has seen rises in both profitability and market share since it started the transformation. By the end of 2017, Sonic had completed the transformation in many Sonic Stores and at all Echo Park locations. Bryant expects the project to wrap up by 2020.

“Congratulations to Doug Bryant on his well-deserved success. In partnership with Skillsoft, Doug brings a strong commitment to driving learning innovation at Sonic, which enables the organization to transform the car buying experience for their customers.” –John Crouch, Customer Sales Director, Skillsoft

A Transparent and Color ful Umbrella

Bob Swan and FOCUS Brands align six company cultures into one

By JOSEPH KAY

Bob Swan was twenty-seven years old and in his fourteenth role at JCPenney. He was comfortable, secure, capable, well-liked, and deeply knowledgeable. But something was missing. He had watched people much like him—comfortable, secure, and capable in their work—become disengaged and let years and opportunities slip away. He didn’t want to become one of them. He needed new challenges and a faster pace. Against protests from people who told him to be reasonable and fighting the typical risk-averse tendencies that confront radical redirections, Swan made the move in 2011 to a rapidly growing new company in a new industry.

That company was Susser Holdings, an operator of Texas-area convenience stores. For three years, the company grew rapidly until a climactic acquisition by Energy Transfer Partners. The acquisition prompted Swan to follow his original recruiter to Susser, Steve DeSutter, to FOCUS Brands, a franchisor operating a portfolio of six global food-service brands: Auntie Dave Cohen

Anne’s, Carvel, Cinnabon, McAlister’s Deli, Moe’s Southwest Grill, and Schlotzsky’s Deli.

Bob Swan EVP, CHRO FOCUS Brands

DeSutter now serves as CEO of the company, and Swan serves as executive vice president and chief human resources officer.

His major project at the organization is to integrate six unique brands into one overarching culture, without losing the distinct and idiosyncratic identities of each.

“Our challenge is twofold: we’re mindful that we have six highly recognized brands that have their own cultures, and we don’t want to change or dilute that,” he explains. “But how do we take this umbrella culture, FOCUS Brands, and put that over the top?”

The goal, he continues, is to allow those brands to flourish while developing that umbrella. And human resources leaders have unique advantages when leading an organization through such a transformation.

One of those advantages is what he refers to as organizational neutrality. “Even in an open and transparent culture, which I’m proud to say we’ve worked hard to build, there are always competing ideas and agendas,” Swan says. “We were able to address those openly as an organization, coming in from a neutral standpoint. There was no agenda one way or the other. We were really there to make sure our organization and our structure focused on providing the most value.”

One key to this approach has been the company’s space itself. In 2015, the organization moved its Atlanta headquarters from a drab, exceedingly normal office park to a new innovation campus. As each brand fills out its own wing of the space in its own style— rock music can sometimes be heard coming from Moe’s offices, for example—the space comes to serve as a symbol for the organization itself: distinct identities, united under one umbrella.

“Moe’s stands for ‘Musicians, Outlaws, and Entertainers. Their culture is irreverent. It’s very different from the experience at Cinnabon or Auntie Anne’s,” he says. “Even within our building, you will find very different people and behaviors, but they’re all in tune with what their brand is.”

Throughout the shared spaces, Swan and his team create opportunities for associates to connect with each other and to the overall FOCUS mission. He points out the “Cheers for Peers” walls, writeable

surfaces in the stairways where colleagues commend each other on work well done, and the “Wonder Wall” in the break room, which is where associates practice gratitude, enumerating their blessings under the heading, “I’m grateful for.” That prompt changes each quarter, so team members can continuously renew these spaces with their personal affirmations and positive energy.

The innovation campus further lives up to its name providing opportunities for extracurricular programming such as after-hours yoga classes, networking lunch-and-learns, and “Garage Talk” sessions—a spin on TED Talks where any associate can host a casual, fifteen-minute discussion on a relevant topic, hobby, or personal passion.

Swan and his team prioritize the assessment of their work. They gather feedback by the familiar employee surveys, but they also provide additional channels for engagement, such as the “Lunch with Bob” initiative— an informal opportunity for face-to-face dialogue. “I get 35–50 people at a time for what turns into a lunch hour of really robust, transparent conversations,” Swan says. “The questions have moved from tentative to insightful. These are questions that get to the hard topics and provide the right visibility.” They also maintain a committee called the Social Network, whose charge is to assess morale, generate ideas such as the aforementioned writeable walls, and develop engagement initiatives to maintain their culture of collaboration. Thanks to these, Swan’s confident that the organization is successfully pursuing one common mission in six brand-distinct fashions.

During one recent lunch session, Swan hosted the company’s class of twenty-four interns, fielding questions and sharing lessons from his own experience. He reflected on his final days at JCPenney and how he knew he had to leave that comfort and stability in pursuit of a deeper satisfaction.

“When I began my career, I was looking for an industry or organization where I could learn and grow and advance,” Swan recalls. “But sometimes people look up and they’ve been with a company for ten years, and they come to the realization that they weren’t happy, engaged, or excited. If you’re doing something that isn’t meaningful, you don’t want to look up in ten years and say, ‘I’m stuck doing something I don’t enjoy.’ The titles and the money will come. People who are successful are the ones who have a passion for what they do.”

Willis Towers Watson congratulates Robert Swan Executive Vice President & Chief Human Resources Officer

We applaud his outstanding leadership and dedication to innovation.

We greatly value our successful partnership with FOCUS Brands Inc. and look forward to serving them for years to come.

Igniting a Salesforce

Thanks to a yearlong overhaul of the company’s culture, Dan Best and AutoNation are changing lives and providing unexpected career paths

By LIOR PHILLIPS

Although the days of the stereotypical car dealer in a plaid suit are firmly in the rearview mirror, research shows that many job seekers haven’t necessarily caught on. In fact, a recent survey from Cox found that only about 1 percent of the eight hundred job seekers surveyed would be interested in a sales role in a dealership. That leaves managers and HR leaders in the industry with an uphill battle. As the vice president and head of human resources at the largest auto retailer in the United States, AutoNation’s Dan Best knows these challenges incredibly well—and yet has found ways to not only find and hire top talent, but also provide them paths to fulfilling careers.

Best first recognized the need to revamp AutoNation’s talent approach when looking at the company’s turnover numbers and the accompanying cost to replace those employees. “It was a big number and was only going to get larger, but it would be a bigger problem to not have anyone selling cars at all,” he says. Not only was the business losing

employees, but the number of job applicants was dwindling as well. Best credits the leadership team’s ability to grasp the importance of that information and move quickly, installing pilot programs to begin to find solutions and rethink its hiring model and the sales role from the ground up.

One major hindrance to potential hires, Best found, was the traditional commission structure. “Being a 100 percent commission salesperson in 2017 isn’t that glamorous,” he says. That in part was because of the generational shift taking place in the workforce. In 2016, AutoNation’s employee population was composed of 44 percent millennials, 32 percent Gen X, and 23 percent baby boomers. Those numbers proved AutoNation was doing a better job than its competitors in hiring young talent, but that wasn’t enough. In order to keep increasingly younger talent, Best and his team started to look at every aspect of their hiring and onboarding process, such as: How did they attract people? Once hired, how did they keep them? How would they get people to leave their jobs to join AutoNation? What training would they

need? How could they offer employees security in the first ninety days?

The first outcome from those conversations was that they’d need to a hire a lot of people. “We knew we’d need to hire 8,500–10,000 people,” Best explains. To draw in that talent, AutoNation would need to showcase the advantages the organization could offer.

“A lot of people leave their jobs because of their managers, so we needed to become a learning organization who trains our managers,” Best says. So, the team expanded the leadership operations training program, added eighteen regional training managers, and rolled out field university programs. The number of people that went through the training programs increased from 2015 to 2016 by about 200 percent.

Next, Best and his team developed a pilot program called Pay Plan Plus. The traditional commission model that had driven car sales in the past no longer held any clout, so the newly installed plan involves a salary or hourly component—dependent on the state in which that particular AutoNation dealership operates. That was then bolstered by bonuses

VP, Head of Human Resources

“You want to buy a car and feel good about it. And if you do feel good, you’ll want your friends to know about that salesperson and how much they took care of you.”

DAN BEST

or incentive pay for achievements such as units sold and stellar customer service. The feedback they’d received, from job seekers as well as their own employees, was that even though the total salaries largely evened out, a consistent paycheck was preferable to the volatility of the traditional commission model. “We’re looking for people who are friendly and people who are consistent,” Best says. “It’s a referral business. You want to buy a car and feel good about it. And if you do feel good, you’ll want your friends to know about that salesperson and how much they took care of you.” By offering stability and security to its employees, the positivity would trickle down to consumers, Best says.

Upon announcing the changes, AutoNation saw an influx of talented candidates interested in the role. In addition, many current employees expressed interest in converting to the plan. They’d seen their commissions shrink along with gross margins as manufacturers production increased and dealerships competed, and some salespeople were looking for a more stable, reliable structure. The plan went into effect in the

Dan Best

AutoNation

middle of 2016, and by March of 2017, about 70 percent of the employees had either been hired under Pay Plan Plus or converted to it.

But once AutoNation started receiving more applications, Best needed to develop a way to better vet them. “It’s a good problem to have, but managers don’t always know what to do with all of these candidates,” he says. As a test run, Best assembled a hiring event in Houston and told sixteen local stores that all they needed to do is show up and hire people. Best’s team vetted the pool of candidates, identified the ones best suited to the role, and gave them assignments that would prepare them for interviews. “We sent them to videos on Youtube about how to walk customers around a car and told them about the interview process,” Best says. “We told them, ‘If we like you, and you like this, we’re going to make you a job offer.’”

Millennials were encouraged by the innovations on the interview process, such as how managers and candidates now share highlighted information on a tablet computer rather than a traditional résumé. “Transparency was a promise that we had already made on the consumer side, and now we have that on our candidate side,” Best explains.

The selected candidates would then go through a two-week orientation and onboarding process called Sales Ignition. The program not only details the sales process, but it also

focuses on building customer relationships, a unique focus in the industry.

The next step was to move from the pilot stage into reality and bring these plans to fruition. On January 10, 2017, AutoNation held a national hiring event spread across sixteen cities on a single day, which led to more than four hundred prevetted hires. Those new employees were then quickly initiated in the Sales Ignition program, which put to the test the new vision of the HR department, as well as the many trainers that they had brought up to speed. “It took a ton of effort, but it was all done so that we can have the right people selling cars in our dealerships,” Best says. “We got all of the elements running in a year, which seems like a long time but not when you’re changing the culture of how a dealership has worked for one hundred years.”

These changes have led to many important hiring and retention metrics drastically improving. “A lot of people come on board thinking of this as just a job, but now we can show them it can be a career and that they can become some of our most successful people in this organization,” Best says. “They could come in just because they needed a job, start selling cars, and then become the vice president of sales for the largest automotive retailer in the United States. The most rewarding thing for the HR practitioner is to see the transition from job to career in the life cycle of an employee.”

EFFECT

Haar SVP, General Counsel, Chief

Officer

Katherine

Primed for the Future

At Informatica, Katherine Haar has modernized her legal department to help drive the company’s transformation plans forward

By LORI FREDRICKSON

WWhen Silicon Valley-based software development company Informatica planned to go private and was subsequently acquired by private equity firms Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in 2015, Katherine “Kiki” Haar saw it as a major opportunity. “What I loved about Informatica becoming a private company was the chance to take a step back and look at how to modernize our legal function,” Haar recalls. Having been promoted to general counsel immediately following the acquisition after working for five years as an in-house corporate attorney at Informatica, Haar saw great potential for ways to restructure the legal department to benefit the company’s larger goals, particularly as Informatica began a major shift to operating on a subscription-based model.

Haar had refined her skills in merging big-picture business goals with legal work over the course of her career. Before joining Informatica, she spent nine years as an associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati (WSGR), where she worked on M&A transactions for tech companies. After working as a summer associate for WSGR, Haar officially joined the firm at the end of the tech boom in 2000—shortly before the bubble burst—and learned to take advantage of new opportunities during times of transformation.

READING LIST

On top of revamping the legal department of Informatica, Katherine Haar is a voracious reader. Some of her old and recent favorites are:

The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen: “It’s one of my favorite books about island biogeography and extinction patterns. It’s beautifully told scientific journalism.”

In 2006, Informatica became one of Haar’s closest clients at WSGR. While she built strong relationships with the company’s leadership, she saw Informatica’s potential in enterprise cloud data management. When the then general counsel approached her about joining the company as a corporate specialist, Haar saw it as a natural fit. “All lawyers are risk averse to some extent, but I saw Informatica as having limitless options,” says Informatica’s senior vice president, general

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson: “Seveneves is set in space, and what I love about it is that instead of just skipping to the dystopian future it explains how we get there. It’s a space disaster that develops into a dystopian future.”

Bruno, Chief of Police series by Martin Walker: “I love mystery series set in foreign jurisdictions. I also love the Inspector Gamache books by Louise Penny and the Guido Brunetti books by Donna Leon.”

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: “Set in a post-apocalyptic world, it’s about not losing touch with the arts and humanity.”

Madeleine L’Engle collection: “I reread these all the time, and I’m always struck by how intelligent they are.”

counsel, and chief privacy officer. “You rarely have the chance to transition to in-house with a company you’ve already worked with—with people you know and respect.”

Upon joining Informatica, Haar began by working to maximize the potential of the company’s corporate functions, focusing on corporate securities, M&A transactions, and SEC filings. From there, Haar began looking into adjacent opportunities, which ranged from executive compensation to privacy. By the time the company decided to go private, she’d expanded her responsibilities to an extent that, after managing the acquisition over several months, she was able to work across various sides of the business to be well-positioned to lead the legal team.

Then, after becoming general counsel, one of Haar’s earliest initiatives was to bring in specialists. “With many companies, particularly tech companies, there’s a tendency to start off hiring generalists,” Haar says. “Over time, with software companies, you bring in IP licensing professionals because that’s your business.” She started looking at the organization and began hiring where she saw gaps, starting with an employment lawyer and a dedicated product counsel, as well as other specialists who had the technical expertise needed to target relevant areas.

Haar also started observing ways to streamline the legal department’s work, particularly by implementing technology solutions to speed up processes and finding ways to automate tasks that were previously done manually. She began by implementing a legal entity management solution and went on to formalize other practices, starting with compliance programs.

While implementing technology solutions, Haar also began researching key performance indicators to measure and manage various aspects of the legal function,

Fried Frank

is privileged to work with our good friend and client, Kiki Haar, and her colleagues at Informatica. In her role as Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Kiki embodies the qualities of a great leader and teammate. We applaud her outstanding dedication and service, and ongoing commitment to Informatica. Congratulations, Kiki, on all of your success and well-deserved recognition!

Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP advises the world’s leading corporations, investment funds and financial institutions on their most critical legal needs and business opportunities. The Firm’s approximately 500 lawyers are based in North America and Europe.

Strategic,

Innovative

Practical Legal Counsel

Seyfarth Shaw LLP commends Kiki Haar for her leadership in providing cutting-edge solutions to today’s legal challenges.

“All lawyers are risk averse to some extent, but I saw Informatica as having limitless options. You rarely have the chance to transition to in-house with a company you’ve already worked with—with people you know and respect.”

KATHERINE HAAR

The Seyfarth Advantage: Team strength. Legal excellence. Clarity from complexity. Developing a better way. Leading in our industry. Leaders in our community.

such as how fees for outside counsel could be better managed. Additionally, she focused on ways that the legal department could help accelerate the transformation that Informatica was undergoing as it moved to a subscription-based model. In fact, in her first six months as general counsel, Haar had to make it a priority to focus on ways the legal department could manage increases in transaction volumes and put thresholds in place for contract negotiations.

To accomplish all of this, Haar increased communication and collaboration within her team. “Previously, it was very siloed, even within the legal team,” Haar says. “I’m a big believer in one-on-ones with your staff and your direct reports. I try to build personal connections because I think that empathy is a really important aspect to being a leader.” In addition to advocating for cross-functional working teams, instituting staff meetings, and global team meetings, Haar also worked on more personal relationship building, including a text-message chain where team members can share pictures of their families and their pets.

Having grown in her own career through mentorship and opportunities to increase her responsibilities, Haar encourages her team to take the lead and become primary points of contact for business units they support. “I’m only as good as they are, so their success is personal to me,” Haar says. “If you give people the option to be responsible and accountable, then they will step up, and it will benefit the entire team.”

Haar also keeps a close eye on future opportunities for the company and industry to evolve. One major area of focus for her

team going forward is data protection and the potential of the new general data protection regulation coming out from the EU in May 2018. “That represents a significant opportunity not only for our own compliance, but also for customers and the products and services we offer,” Haar says. “Data is so foundational for organizations now. When you see that, and the fact that the market is so huge for what we can do, you see limitless possibility in areas we can go with our solutions.”

As Informatica continues to evolve, Haar is confident that she has a strong, focused, and collaborative legal team to help support those new areas of growth. “One of the most valuable lessons I learned early in my career was not to get in the way of the business,” Haar says. “We’re here to accelerate that business, and we’re doing just that.”

With more than nine hundred lawyers around the world, Seyfarth Shaw offers its clients a truly global expertise.

It is our privilege to work with Kiki Haar and her colleagues at Informatica.

At Reed Smith, we believe that the practice of law has the ability to drive progress. When working with clients like Informatica we are focused on outcomes and our long-term client relationship. We have deep industry insight that allows us to anticipate and address their needs. We strive to provide purposeful, highly engaged client service that drives progress for all our clients.

Reed Smith is a global law firm with more than 1,700 lawyers in twenty-seven offices throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. We represent leading international businesses, from Fortune 100 corporations to mid-market and emerging enterprises.

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We congratulate Kiki Haar on her accomplishments as a leading general counsel in the technology sector. We are proud to partner with Kiki and her team at Informatica.

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United as One

How Epiq’s Terry Gaylord helps bring together a company with leadership in every position

By WILL GRANT

SSince announcing a merger between Epiq Systems and DTI in September 2016, Epiq’s chief human resources officer, Terry Gaylord, says members of the now united Epiq brand have been working somewhat in two worlds. “On one hand, you’re focused on supporting the business and delivering for clients,” Gaylord says. “On the other hand, you’re living in this world of trying to bring two companies together, both operationally and culturally.”

While Gaylord says this is quite typical with any merger, Epiq was unique in essentially doubling its global footprint, its personnel, and working to unite the culture between two companies at the top of their respective fields. As Epiq continues its transition, Gaylord has been able to reflect on what has made the fundamentals of the merger successful and how growing and maintaining leadership has united the company as it begins to further define itself.

Gaylord doesn’t mince words about the challenges of bringing two large companies together or the realities of daily operation combined with integration. “Ultimately, that means people are working twice as hard,” Gaylord says. “You’re focused on the day-today but also on integrating the operations and best practices of both organizations.” While that work can be daunting, Gaylord

says the workload can have its own payoff in helping to unite the company. “There is the benefit of seeing a tremendous amount of continued progress,” Gaylord explains. “In any merger, I think that is perhaps one of the things that keeps people going: the greater goal you’re working toward and the light at the end of the tunnel you know is coming.”

From an operational perspective, the merger presented a number of immediate opportunities before the ink dried. Epiq would be operating in fourteen different countries with about one hundred locations around the world. Both companies also included unique business groups, which adds another layer of complexity. That, coupled with the sheer additional volume of work, meant balancing thoughtfulness with efficiency. “The businesses truly have to be treated a little bit differently—not necessarily from a policy or behavioral perspective—but sometimes your supporting processes for each business have to be adapted to suit those unique business models,” he says.

Gaylord says that addressing administrative processes is often more immediate. Working to unite company culture has to be seen as a long-term effort, but both companies

Terry Gaylord CHRO Epiq

Gary Rohman

worked to address a united culture early in the process. Epiq and DTI each conducted cultural assessments to identify hallmarks of each company—both operationally and culturally—to find common ground and to create a shared vision of both companies prior to the merger. A senior leadership team that was comprised equally of Epiq and DTI leadership was created almost instantly.

“Having that immediate, integrated leadership team was very critical,” Gaylord says, “in providing the long-term vision for the organizational culture, instilling a belief in people, and giving them a reason to be here: that they want to be part of something new, big, and exciting.”

Leadership is a tenet Gaylord returns to often both when recounting what he sees as early successes of the merger and potential for continued growth at Epiq. “Historically, we have had strong leaders across the two companies, and that provided stability and consistency,” Gaylord says. “In a time of a lot of change for all employees, it’s critical to have some stability in senior leadership and consistency in that regard.”

That belief in leadership goes beyond those at the top, says Gaylord, who has a doctorate in industrial and organizational psychology. “I do believe that leadership exists at every level of the organization and within every position,” he says. Gaylord sees it as imperative to provide a path for Epiq’s employees to demonstrate that leadership. “You’re going to get your best organizational results when you empower people to lead,” Gaylord continues. “If you can provide that path and really empower people to drive change and positive results, then that can have a compounding impact across the whole organization and lead to substantial, positive results.”

Gaylord says it’s an ideal time to not only encourage and empower employees, but also to collaborate with new leadership to help guide the company brand and culture. With a significant amount of what Gaylord refers to as the “operational horsepower” initially required in the early stages of the merger, he believes that Epiq can now focus more on the cultural values and further define what excites both its current employees and prospective employees about being part of the brand. Defining that employment brand is in its early stages, but Gaylord says Epiq is intent on cultivating a dynamic and rewarding workplace that inspires those to lead and grow on all fronts.

The merger also highlights Epiq’s emphasis on developing quality programs

“We’re united in this vision and believe we’re going to be number one, not only from a revenue perspective but also in terms of the diverse set of services we can offer and the quality of service we provide through our people.”

TERRY GAYLORD

around succession management and development planning. Organizational change can spur taking risks on leadership. Building strong leadership from bottom-to-top ensures the organization has more flexibility when this arises. “You have the luxury of moving leaders around to take on new opportunities, and that’s really where you’re seeing the benefit of the investment in leadership development,” Gaylord says.

As Epiq enters the more nuanced period in its development, Gaylord is confident that the company’s focus on fostering leadership and a shared culture will make an already successful situation all the better. “Ahead of this merger, both companies were already leaders in this industry,” Gaylord says. “Now, we’re united in this vision, and we believe that we’re going to be number one, not only from a revenue perspective but also in terms of the diverse set of services that we can offer and the quality of service that we provide through our people.”

Achille M. Bigliardi

Shari Slate Chief Inclusion and Collaboration Officer Cisco

Diversity and Inclusion in the Digital Age

Shari Slate shares her perspectives on what it takes to be a diversityand-inclusion digital disruptor and why that time is now

By JEFF SILVER

Having just begun working as chief diversity officer at Sun Microsystems, Shari Slate got her first glimpse into the implications of digital technology on diversity and inclusion.

Three weeks into her job, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced that he wanted to communicate with employees primarily through his blog and Second Life, a 3-D virtual world where users create avatars of themselves and interact via voice and text chat.

“We were holding job interviews, company meetings, and employee resource organization meetings in Second Life,” Slate says. “Imagine interviewing candidates as their avatars. We were still figuring out how to manage bias in the physical world. Now we had to figure out how to manage bias in the virtual world.”

“Jonathan was a technology visionary. I realized the D&I implications for the work we were about to embark on were huge,” Slate says.

Slate’s point of view on technology and D&I was sharpened when she moved to Cisco, where she is now chief inclusion and collaboration officer. Slate worked closely with CEO Chuck Robbins, who was then in sales to create the company’s inclusion and collaboration function. At that time, Cisco was targeting the $32 billion collaboration technology market. “Chuck realized that collaboration technology was the key to unlocking the true value of inclusion—better and faster business outcomes,” Slate says. “He was instrumental in creating Cisco’s Office of Inclusion and Collaboration, which I lead today.”

At the time, the discipline of diversity was in a state of transition. “In the first transition, diversity was focused on

government compliance—counting people,” Slate says. “The second transition was focused on how employees feel and creating an environment where they could thrive. The third transition, which we are in now, focuses on leveraging digital technology to enable the full spectrum of diversity to participate in the business.”

The Internet of Things is also transforming what is possible in the field, Slate says. It’s estimated that by 2025 the potential economic value created by the Internet of Things will exceed $11 trillion a year. And among the critical success factors that will drive an organization’s ability to harness this value is inclusive business practices, according to a Cisco study.

Digitization is driving the need for new mind-sets, skill sets, and tool sets. What worked in the past is no longer sufficient for the future, she says. Slate believes chief diversity officers (CDO) need to become what she calls “D&I Digital Disruptors.” She offers these five actions taken from her own D&I digital journey to do just that:

1) HAVE A CLEAR DIGITAL POINT OF VIEW

Become an early technology adopter. Don’t be afraid to experiment with technology and get your hands dirty. The more you use the latest technologies, the more you can imagine how they could apply to D&I. Follow technology companies, subscribe to technology news sites, and stay abreast of your company’s digital transformation initiatives through company announcements and CIO updates.

2) MAKE YOUR CIO YOUR NEW BFF CDOs and CIOs need to engage in a new conversation: How can we work together to apply technology to advance diversity and inclusion in our organization? You can’t take this journey alone. Your CIO is a valuable technology partner, collaborator, and mentor. Schedule regular meetings with your CIO to create a shared vision on the power and potential of technology on D&I.

3) HIRE A DIGITAL GURU

D&I digital disruption requires new skill sets and competencies. Slate discovered this when she was about to launch a new solution and realized it was going to fail because it was being rolled out on a spreadsheet rather than as a digitized solution that could be accessed on-demand across the company. She has since hired a CIO with HR expertise

“CDOs who embrace the mind-set of a digital disruptor will survive and thrive. Those that continue with the status quo risk being left behind. There has never been a more exciting time to be a D&I digital disruptor and create exponential value for the companies we serve.”

SHARI SLATE

to lead the solution design and development work in her organization. It’s a nontraditional role in D&I. “The reality is that we will never again innovate, integrate, or improve a D&I solution that doesn’t have a technology component,” Slate says. Evolve your organization to include people with expertise in areas such as data science, business intelligence, analytics, and software-as-a-service, among other things.

4) UNLOCK THE POWER OF DATA AND ANALYTICS

Gathering, analyzing, and leveraging data within our organizations is critical to solving business challenges. Slate cites diverse representation as an example. “Cisco has developed a suite of digital solutions that leverage data and analytics to transform how we solve for diverse representation,” she says. Take an uncommon approach to how you leverage data and analytics in your D&I strategy. Expand your view of existing data to create transformational intelligence—actionable insights that will enable you to drive breakthroughs in inclusive decision-making.

5) FOCUS ON IDEAS THAT LEAPFROG AHEAD

In the digital era, many of the best practices CDOs have applied to move the needle on D&I will no longer be relevant. “We need to break D&I as it exists today and reimagine the D&I practices for tomorrow,” Slate says. Tap into the collective expertise in your organization. Incentivize people to help you innovate new solutions and create new ideas for improving D&I. Leapfrogging ahead doesn’t mean doing it alone and building everything from scratch. There are a plethora of start-ups digitizing D&I systems, solutions, and practices. Expand your strategic partnerships. That’s the approach Slate took when she introduced Glassbreakers, a digitized peer-to-peer mentoring solution that attracted eight thousand users in the first six weeks after its launch.

“CDOs who embrace the mind-set of a digital disruptor will survive and thrive. Those that continue with the status quo risk being left behind,” Slate says. “There has never been a more exciting time to be a D&I digital disruptor and create exponential value for the companies we serve.”

Q2/18

PEOPLE + COMPANIES

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