Vanessa Allen Sutherland is pushing the boundaries of possibility through her legal work at Norfolk Southern P12
Victoria Lazar drives diversity and talent for GE P25
Carving out corporate learning opportunities for SAP P62
Kevin Fiur’s high-flying legal strategy P152
Can your people adapt as quickly as your strategy?
Navigate the Transformative Age with people solutions from the better-connected consultants.
Beyond legal expertise, the value of these exemplary lawyers is in leading businesses and industries through times of change. Their leadership involves protection, guidance, and security in navigating somewhere new, improving the status quo, or growing bigger than ever before.
Lora Dikun has sharpened Giant Eagle’s team focus through a variety of human resources initiatives.
HR in the Driver’s Seat
McCulloch positions the HR department as an equal business partner at Waste Industries.
Tanika
HR Steward
Catherine Peterson leads by example at Steward Health Care Network.
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CORPORATE
CEO
Pedro Guerrero
Managing Vice President
Marc Jerbi
VP, Hispanic Division
Vianni Busquets
VP, Business Development
Kyle Evangelista
Senior Director, Finance
David Martinez
Director, Client Services
Cheyenne Eiswald
Senior Client Services Managers
Rebekah Pappas
Katie Richards
Client Services Manager
Skylar Garfield
Director, Talent Acquisition
Elyse Schultz
Director, HR & Operations
Megan Thorp
Executive Assistant to the CEO
Jaclyn Gaughan
Senior Directors, Sales
Ben Julia
Sarah Jameson
Director, Sales
Rachel Miller
Associate Director, Strategic Development
Kara Thomas
Director, Strategic Partnerships
Krista Horbenko Director, Business Development
Jenny Vetokhin
Business Development Managers
Erin Malone
Elif Negiz
Strategic Account Manager
Taylor Frank
Content & Advertising
Managers
Angela Reeves
Ashley Watkins
Brandon Havrilka
Christina Brown
Brad Schwind
Jackson Woods
Alex Tomalski
Alexa Johnson
Justin Davidson
Be Better, Work Harder
It’s hard not to feel inspired when reading this issue of Profile Story after story highlights extraordinary leadership across a variety of industries and executive titles.
But what makes this issue special are the exemplary legal leaders we honor in our annual legal issue. From Alex Liberman’s continuation of a fifty-year tradition of growth at Medline Industries (page 49), to Nathan Vitan’s tireless work in sharing the value of the legal team at Public Storage (page 38), to Shirell Gross’s relentless pursuit of excellence for herself and her team (page 68), these leaders motivate and humble me to be better and work harder.
Speaking of working hard, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you to our cover story showcasing Vanessa Allen Sutherland, VP, Law at Norfolk Southern. Prior to her current position, Allen Sutherland served as the leader for the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, an appointment by President Obama. The CSB was going through a rough patch, but that didn’t faze Allen Sutherland for a moment. In fact, she loves a challenge. “I also loved the Board’s safety mission and thought I could provide leadership, structure, and predictability, and create a culture that would be ethical and compliant,” she says in her feature on page 12. I invite you to read more about her impressive career and uncrushable spirit as she pushed through a challenging workplace to lead with incredible stamina and drive.
The legal issue is one of my favorites, mostly because it spotlights, even more than usual, the amazing range and breadth of experience and tenacity of the leaders within our pages. I hope that as you read, you are able to recognize familiar best practices and discover compelling new ideas in these stories.
Cyndi Fecher Director of Creative
TALENT
From Calculators to Company Culture
Lora Dikun shares her journey from accounting to becoming the SVP of human resources and chief people officer at Giant Eagle
By REBECCA ROBERTS
Lora Dikun’s journey from accounting to human resources initially progressed at a steady pace. While working as a controller at Duquesne Light Company, she expanded her role by helping with executive compensation. Soon she was tackling myriad projects on the financial side of human resources, which included handling trust fund investments, designing benefit plans, putting together incentive plans, and working with subsidiaries on their own executive compensation plans. By the time Lora left Duquesne Light to spend time caring for her two newly adopted children, she had carved a unique position for herself that was half traditional finance, half human resources.
Two years later when Lora was ready to reenter the workforce, she faced a choice:
finance and accounting, or human resources? The balance between the two that she had created at Duquesne Light was unlikely to be found in a typical job description. Ultimately, Lora dedicated her job search to the human resources realm. “Rather than analyzing the past, I wanted to be part of the future and make a real impact,” she says. She accepted a position as manager of benefits at Giant Eagle, a multi-format food, fuel, and pharmacy retailer spanning Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, and Maryland. Fifteen years later, Lora is now the senior vice president, chief administrative officer, and, fitting with Giant Eagle’s team-focused culture, the chief people officer, where many of her initiatives are focused on improving the experiences of Giant Eagle’s 32,000 team members. In addition to her role as chief people officer,
she also oversees the safety, legal, and compliance functions of the company.
One of Lora’s recent projects at Giant Eagle has been putting in place a new system to automate and simplify the employee assessment process. Lora explained that the prior annual performance review system was so cumbersome that it took too much time for the managers to execute and, as a result, employees (referred to as team members at Giant Eagle) weren’t getting feedback to help them move forward in their careers. Lora also realized that Giant Eagle needed to step away from numerical performance ratings. “People were too concerned about the number. They were missing the feedback,” she says. She cited an exchange between a manager and a team member where the team member received a low numerical ranking on one of their
“People are what it’s all about. I want to make sure that I’m helping remove whatever roadblocks I can so that my team can make the impact that they need to make.”
LORA DIKUN
Lora Dikun SVP, Chief Administrative Officer & Chief People Officer
Eagle
Giant
objectives. Even though the team member had the self-awareness to acknowledge that a certain area needed improvement, the poor rating incited a sense of failure and derailed a conversation about improvement.
The new assessment system centers around leadership skills and professional development. Team members themselves first identify two skills that are their strengths and two that they’d like to improve upon. Then, managers can discuss the skills that a person at their level should exhibit as well as what skills to further develop to move forward in the company.
Giant Eagle has a strong track record for team member retention, so making these
reviews productive over the long haul is paramount to maintaining Giant Eagle’s culture of extended family.
Another initiative that Lora has worked on with her team is inclusion and diversity. Lora specifically notes the order of these words, stating that “Inclusion has to come first, because you can be diverse without being inclusive.” At Giant Eagle, one major focus of the Inclusion and Diversity initiative is accommodating team members who have differing abilities. Lora explains that this has been a part of Giant Eagle long before she joined the company in 2003, and currently plays out in many different roles. “In distribution centers, we look at the flow
process and how we can change it so that someone who is not as mobile can do some of the work,” Lora says. Giant Eagle has also managed its workplaces to accommodate team members with visual impairments, which encompassed everything from magnifying a computer screen to how the deli space in a supermarket is organized. To reach out to the community, Giant Eagle has partnered with United Way and many other organizations to help individuals of varying intellectual and physical abilities transition to full-time employment when they age out of the school system at twenty-one.
Lora’s human resources umbrella also includes loss prevention, which is tied
Left to right: Kelly McCormick, Kyle Gibson, Lora Dikun, and Michele Guy at Waterworks Market District, O’Hara Township, near Pittsburgh, PA.
directly to safety at Giant Eagle. With a vision of a zero-incident workplace, Lora references Giant Eagle’s emphasis on accountability. “We have a philosophy toward safety of any kind: you see it, you own it. If you see a spill, you make sure it either gets cleaned up or blocked off. The same goes for safety of any kind,” she says. Over the course of her time at Giant Eagle, Lora has pulled the many facets of human resources into one, centralized function. Where her background in accounting and finance comes into play the most, though, is with labor relations and negotiations. When she initially joined the company, her role focused on benefits and expanded to include total reward packages. Lora received a master’s degree in taxation while she was working at Duquesne Light, and this knowledge helped smooth her transition to human resources at Giant Eagle. “With labor negotiations it’s a give and take, and you have to know what the financial impact to the organization is going to be,” she explains. Ultimately, being part of the vehicle that drives the people-oriented culture at Giant Eagle is what motivates Lora the most. Lora describes an extended family tree in the lobby of the corporate office composed of team members who have been a part of Giant Eagle for more than forty years: “It’s running out of space and going down the hallway! People are what it’s all about. I want to make sure that I’m helping remove whatever roadblocks I can so that my team can make the impact that they need to make,” she explains.
United Concordia Dental, a leading dental solutions company focused on healthier mouths for healthier lives, applauds Lora Dikun for creating a world-class, modern-day HR department.
We are proud to have a strong relationship—built on a shared commitment to improving oral health and overall well-being–with Lora and Giant Eagle, Inc.
Congratulations, Lora Dikun. Did you know that seeing a clinician is as easy as strolling the cereal aisle of the grocery store? UPMC is now partnering with Giant Eagle, the region’s largest supermarket chain, to offer UPMC AnywhereCare kiosks in the pharmacy area of several Giant Eagle stores.
LORA DIKUN A career of caring.
United Concordia Dental proudly congratulates Lora Dikun for her remarkable achievements in caring for Giant Eagle’s team members and customers.
From prestigious in-house roles to heading government agencies, Norfolk Southern’s Vanessa Allen Sutherland tackles every assignment with a unique can-do attitude
Words by Bridgett Novak Photos by Cass Davis
“Many are called, but few are chosen.”
Vanessa Allen Sutherland was not just called, she had what it took to be chosen.
While working as a senior counsel at Philip Morris/Altria in 2011, she was called about an opportunity at the US Department of Transportation. “Working on acquisitions and restructuring at a Fortune 15 multinational like Altria made me a much better attorney, and I wouldn’t trade those years for anything, but the DOT offered a chance to work in a historic administration and to lead a legal department,” she explains.
Vanessa Allen Sutherland VP, Law
Norfolk Southern
Allen Sutherland is excited at the prospect of using data analytics to operationalize efficiency at Norfolk Southern.
She was named chief counsel for the DOT’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which gave her top-secret clearance to oversee a new area of law—the safe transportation of hazardous materials throughout the country. “It was extremely important work,” she says. “And I liked interacting with and balancing the interests of so many different parties—i.e., Congress, government agencies, environmental and industry groups, public and private companies, unions, and the public.”
While at the agency, she addressed culture change and novel policy matters. She represented the United States before the UN International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and was named a 2015 DOT Inspiring Leader for her work helping to establish standards for the international transportation of hazardous materials and for finding areas of consensus among varied, often opposing, viewpoints. Her stellar performance was recognized, and in 2015, President Obama nominated her to head up
the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB). After being confirmed by the Senate, she was named CSB chairman and CEO, where she oversaw a staff of 40 and an $11 million budget.
The CSB was experiencing a tumultuous time. The then-chairman had just resigned amidst claims of mismanagement, whistleblower retaliation, disenfranchisement of fellow board members, low morale, and possible violations of the Federal Records Act. So why did she want the job?
“I love a challenge,” she laughs. “I also loved the Board’s safety mission and thought I could provide leadership, structure, and predictability, and create a culture that would be ethical and compliant.”
First, she spent time with each employee, letting them get to know her and vice versa, to build rapport and trust. “I told them I needed their help, that their expertise was essential to accomplish our goals,” she says. “Then I identified the ‘sticky’ people, the ones that have positive outlooks and who others are likely to
Celebrating excellence. We congratulate Vanessa Allen Sutherland and wish her success as Vice President, Law, with Norfolk Southern Troutman Sanders, with an integrated network of offices across the U.S., works with our clients to navigate their most complex legal issues, including corporate, litigation and environmental matters.
follow, and I made sure they understood and agreed with our mission. Lastly, I focused on resolving backlogged investigations. I assigned people to project teams to help rebuild relationships and enabled them to return to the high-impact work of chemical safety and accident prevention. This resulted in a renewed sense of purpose. As one employee told me, ‘Nothing builds morale like getting important work done’.” After her first year, a government survey named the CSB as one of the top five most-improved federal agencies.
Yet, in March 2018, she was told by the Office of Management and Budget that the Trump administration had proposed funding the CSB only to the level needed to shut it down. “That was a disappointment and marked the second consecutive attempt to eliminate the agency,” she says. Despite the fact that she had two more years left to her five-year appointment, she resigned.
Her illustrious career and CSB achievements were well-known, though, and she
caught the attention of several headhunters. One called about an opportunity as vice president, law, at Norfolk Southern. Reporting to John Scheib, the company’s executive vice president of law and administration, Allen Sutherland oversees legal matters affecting the company, including litigation and claims, labor and employment, real estate, corporate governance, insurance, marketing, and sales.
“The challenges vary daily,” she says. “We’re constantly working to improve our service, whether that means technology upgrades or enhancing our infrastructure.”
One of the federal mandates they’ve been responding to lately is called Positive Train Control, designed to ensure that trains operate within safe parameters and accidents are avoided. Norfolk Southern has installed the required equipment on 2,900 locomotives with on-board computers and trained more than 18,620 employees and their supervisors. The company is also using technology to improve the customer engagement experience.
As Allen Sutherland puts it, “We’re starting to see ourselves less as a railroad, and more as a technology company that happens to run trains.”
On the list of new high-tech initiatives, automation could be one of the biggest game changers. “Just like driverless cars, there is excitement about automating commercial transportation systems, like trains,” she says.
“In fact, railroads, which run on separate fixed tracks, are one of the easiest applications for many automated technologies. Automation could have a tremendously positive impact on the safety, reliability, and efficiency of rail service. We need to attract bright minds with the skills and passion to help us get there.”
Allen Sutherland also notes that Norfolk Southern is furiously working to unlock the insight—and foresight—within big data. “Data
analytics enables a more nimble, resilient operation by allowing us to predict and correct issues before they happen,” she explains. “Collecting the data isn’t difficult, but having people who can analyze and translate it into actionable results requires highly-trained individuals with an aptitude not only for data science, but also for railroad engineering. We need people who can see trends and then operationalize them to proactively resolve problems—from battery failures to rail wear— before they impact service.”
“This is all part of Norfolk Southern’s goal to ‘reimagine possible,’ to constantly question the status quo and think creatively and critically about everything we do,” she says. The same theme underpins the company’s new three-year strategic plan, which will include a focus on growth, productivity, and service.
Allen Sutherland has been challenging the status quo and pushing the boundaries of what others consider possible throughout her extraordinary career, starting with her education. In the late 1990s, she earned both a JD and MBA from American University, the latter with a focus on the relatively new fields of IT and e-commerce. The dual degrees served her well in her first in-house position, as corporate counsel at Digex, a subsidiary of MCI/WorldCom, which was an early leader in corporate web hosting and outsourcing. In the early 2000s, she was a recipient of the Certified Information Privacy Professional designation, and she has been tackling progressively difficult and specialized areas of knowledge ever since.
“I have my brother Sterling to thank,” she says. “He holds computer science and electrical engineering degrees. He recommended I include technology in my education, because it was a nascent, important field. Boy, was he right.”
Charting Courses
Craig Mundy helps map a career trajectory for all Ingersoll Rand employees
By WILL GRANT
Craig Mundy has walked a fortuitous career path to his current position as vice president of human resources, strategic business units at international manufacturing heavyweight Ingersoll Rand. Mundy’s first career experience came from a small family-owned geotechnical environmental engineering firm where he was in charge of not just HR, but accounting as well. “I had a unique start in that I had a good sense of how business works, especially the financial part of it, before deciding to go to a larger company,” Mundy says. Mundy’s thirty years of experience is impressive not just in its longevity, but in its breadth. He recently leveraged that experience into a year-andhalf project at Ingersoll Rand that focused on helping those rising through the ranks to better define their own career paths.
What ultimately became known as Career Progress started more than three years ago when Mundy was still in the enterprise learning and talent management role. “We started looking at a compensation project where we were going to look at potentially going from
a standard grading system to broad bands,” Mundy says. “Our CHRO, working with our head of total rewards, said, ‘If we’re going to take this on, let’s not just look at the career framework side, let’s look at the career management side, too.’”
Mundy and the head of total rewards teamed up to begin charting Career Progress in the form of two buckets: career framework and career management. “From the career framework standpoint, we had maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine job grades for all of our salary positions. When we were done, we had seven broad bands for the entire organization,” Mundy says. “The intent there is to create a more flexible framework that allows an employee to focus on their career development and career advancement and think about the experience they need to achieve their definition of career success.”
The career management component was an entirely separate beast. “We don’t know the exact number, but we had something around 7,000 distinct job descriptions in the company,” Mundy says. “We took on what was the near impossible task of saying ‘Can we reduce that to a much lower number of
Craig Mundy VP HR–Strategic Business Units Ingersoll Rand
Deborah Young Studio
“If you play it safe your entire career, safe is where you’ll end up.”
CRAIG MUNDY
plish, and can we create detailed success profiles for each role?’”
Mundy and his team were able to radically reduce the number of job descriptions by defining multiple similar jobs by core competencies and not simply by title. “You might have anywhere from two to eight jobs within a role family,” Mundy says. Those 7,000 job descriptions now sit at around 800 defined roles.
Even more importantly, in partnership with the firm Fuel50, Mundy’s team helped create My Career Navigator, an online platform for employees to examine their own career planning. Each position in the company includes feeder roles in and out, so employees are able to more accurately plan their own trajectory accordingly. “Before this, if an employee went to five leaders with a question about career advancement, they’d probably get at least three different answers,” Mundy says. “We’ve been able to create some consistency around how one can succeed in our company.”
The “near impossible” task took HR around a year and a half. “It was hundreds and hundreds of sessions . . . a huge endeavor that I don’t wish on anyone to go through again,” Mundy says with a laugh. “But it’s fantastic and critical that we have it.”
Mundy says that one of the key components he’s found in HR is that maintaining a mind-set of the function as an evolution means not waiting for perfection. “With
this project, it was important to think about hitting the 80/20 rule and realizing you can use continuous improvement after the fact,” Mundy says. “If I would have waited for perfection, we never would have rolled it out.”
Regardless of its imperfections, the rollout has been an unmitigated success. “We have set targets for how many employees and leaders have used My Career Navigator. We’re on track with around 80 percent of our salaried professionals having logged in so far.” That’s big news for HR, which has a goal of 95 percent of all professionals having an official career development plan on file. “It was less than 80 percent when we started,” Mundy says. “We beat that 95 percent every year now.”
Mundy says the disconnect that used to occur between management and employees regarding career advancement has largely become more of an anomaly than a regularity. “There’s enough process and rigor around development planning not only in current roles but in development planning from a career standpoint,” he says. In short, from beginning to end, everyone is on the same page.
When it comes to his own career planning and advice after nearly thirty years of professional experience, Mundy says that one who is intent on making progress should never shy away from stretch assignments: “If you play it safe your entire career, safe is where you’ll end up.”
Are you simply irresistible?
Creating the experience employees crave
The employee experience has proved itself to be at the core of how organizations can find and retain the talent that they need to not only survive, but thrive in today’s world of disruption. A simply irresistible experience not only puts the employee at the center, but keeps them there.
www.deloitte.com/us/SIO
A Work-Love Connection
As chief people officer at Cortland, Priscila Mattingly is changing how human resources works by pushing people to explore what they truly love about their jobs
By JOAN LIVINGSTON
By her own admission, Priscila Mattingly is not your traditional HR professional.
She’s the chief people officer at Cortland, a title that fits its corporate culture and changes in human resources, which she says is generally a department with a bad reputation—the department that make things more complicated. But that isn’t the case at Cortland, and her title reflects it.
Mattingly says Cortland, which owns and operates apartment complexes nationwide, has a people-first mentality, whether it’s toward the company’s associates (the preferred name for employees), clients, residents, or investors. Likewise, her department, called the talent team, takes a proactive rather than reactive approach, including a new review process and an innovative mentoring program for high performers.
“The talent team solves a lot of problems at Cortland—it’s still a big part of who we
are and what we do,” she says. “But we have a larger mission to be the protectors and cultivators of the company’s culture, which is very different than the usual HR department reacting to problems.”
Mattingly’s path to her current position was accidental. In March 2004, she arrived in Georgia from her native Brazil—where she worked in communications and marketing for a software company—to study English. She planned to stay three months while working remotely—but then she met and fell in love with her future husband, Mike, and decided to stay in the United States.
With very limited English at the time, she took a job delivering pizza. “I could drive and I could count money,” she says.
Eighteen months later, a mentor at Pizza Hut promoted her to trainer. There Mattingly became keenly interested in training after seeing how knowledge can make a positive difference in the way people perform their jobs.
“I’m really passionate about helping people figure out what they love to do and do more of what they love to do,” she says. “I think that’s the secret for happiness at work and for high-performing teams.”
Mattingly is certainly grateful for her mentors. “What was important to me, especially in my early career, was to have people who believed in me before I believed in myself,” she says.
Training for Pizza Hut launched Mattingly’s US career. She became a training manager at Arby’s Restaurant Group, and then a learning and development manager at Hospitality Staffing Solutions. Now at Cortland since 2014, she heads a forty-seven-member talent team that oversees areas from recruitment to engagement.
She admits to being an oddball in the real estate industry—younger than the typical executive, female, and a Latina.
“We are here as a company to challenge the status quo–certainly about housing,” she
Priscila Mattingly Chief People Officer Cortland
Colleen Frey
support your on-going employee benefits needs.
“Everyone hates performance reviews, but then again, everyone loves to do a good job.”
PRISCILA MATTINGLY
says. “My personal mission is to help people understand we can challenge the status quo in every point, including the fact that this is a male-dominated industry.”
Mattingly’s focus is to simplify HR at Cortland, which has 2,000 associates handling every aspect of the multi-family apartment complexes it owns nationally and is now developing in London. The company has also expanded to manufacturing components for its living spaces for better control on quality, time, and cost to build.
Through her initiative, Cortland is midway through a three-year process to replace the annual performance review, which Mattingly says is not a high-performing practice, with real-time feedback and coaching.
“Everyone hates performance reviews, but then again, everyone loves to do a good job,” she says.
Rather than dwelling on what happened a year ago, associates are continually kept apprised of how they are doing their job and what they have accomplished by managers and their peers via check-ins and meetings. Goals can be set. And there are opportunities for public recognition.
As for training, Mattingly says it must go beyond the basics. With that in mind, she is leading a mentorship program in 2019 in which high performers will have opportunities to learn what interests them. Say a high-performing associate who is passionate about hair styling would like to start a business in the future. This program would link that person with someone who knows how to run a business.
Creating such learning programs will help retain high performers who might otherwise
seek challenging and more interesting opportunities elsewhere. After all, she notes, the average person only stays two and a half years at a position.
Mattingly’s efforts have not gone unnoticed by Cortland’s outside partners. “Priscilla’s drive to innovate and move programs beyond the basics to retain high performers is evident in all areas of HR planning. This makes Priscilla an ideal client, always asking what more can be done to differentiate Cortland and create a great employee experience,” says Camry Blaising, chief operating officer at Northwestern Benefit.
Outside of her hectic work that includes travel to Cortland’s various locations, Mattingly lives a calm life. She and Mike dedicate Friday nights to movie dates. Her family in Brazil frequently visits.
Her advice for young professionals? Find your passion instead of chasing a dollar amount. That, she says, is key to being happy and fulfilled at work, as she is in her position at Cortland.
“Take as much time as you can early in your career—say the first five or seven years out of college—to figure out what you love to do, because that’s a time when how much money you make is not as important as it is after you are forty,” she says.
Northwestern Benefit is proud to call Priscila Mattingly of Cortland a valued client. Priscila’s commitment to innovative solutions for employee development is evident, and Northwestern Benefit is honored to be a part of these efforts through our comprehensive employee benefits services. Learn more about how we can drive your employee benefits engagement at www.northwesternbenefit.com.
Nearly thirty years in the oil and gas industry has taught GE attorney Victoria Lazar the art of building bridges and making deals
By Bridgett Novak
Victoria Lazar’s parents escaped communist Romania in 1960 to make a new life, ultimately landing in Houston, Texas. They came to North America equipped only with education. The subsequent success of two immigrants in America fostered her “lifelong interest in diversity and advancement of people from different backgrounds,” Lazar says.
Victoria Lazar Executive Counsel, Mergers & Acquisitions
Sheryl D. Thomas, PlusCorp Photography
After studying Russian and government at Cornell University, Lazar earned a JD from the University of Chicago. Though scheduled to work at the US Department of the Treasury, she decided to look for a job in Houston to be closer to her father, who was seriously ill. She had clerked at Baker Botts and joined the firm in 1990. During her six years there, she specialized in mergers and acquisitions, securities, and corporate finance, working primarily with clients in the oil and gas industry.
Did Lazar encounter prejudice in what many would describe as two patriarchal worlds—Big Law and the Texas petroleum business? “I’m sure there was some, but I chose to ignore it,” she says. “My father raised me to believe there was nothing I couldn’t do and instilled me with lots of confidence.
If you’re smart and capable and encounter people who throw obstacles in your way, you need to trust that you know what you’re doing and that you’re not the one who needs to change. You can’t eliminate bias; you can only control your response to it.”
She advanced quickly and was given increasingly crucial roles, including in the 1996 split-off of Electronic Data Systems (EDS) from General Motors, a $25 billion transaction.
“EDS was an important client of ours and, at the time, this was the biggest corporate split in US history. It was a highly complex deal that ended up greatly benefiting EDS,” Lazar says.
EDS awarded her with a job in their mergers and acquisitions group. She helped complete $4 billion in domestic and global deals during her eight years there. “We had ventures all over, including in Israel, France, and Russia. I got to combine my love of deal-making and international business,”
she says. In 2008, she joined General Electric’s oil and gas division as associate general counsel, which meant she needed a much deeper understanding of the industry. So, she started visiting workers in the field. “I asked them to explain things to me and show me schematics,” she says. “They were shocked because no one had ever been interested in what they do.”
This led to considerable bridge building between the legal department and the rest of the company. “I established some fabulous relationships and gained a level of expertise that proved invaluable to my ability to represent the business.”
This expertise has not gone unnoticed by outside counsel. “Victoria has a broad yet deep expertise with an exceptional insight and ability to draw on that knowledge in all situations,” says Andrew L. Fabens, partner at Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher. “She is supereffective and highly skilled when engaging in complex transactions.”
When GE’s oil and gas division merged with Baker Hughes, one of the largest mergers in GE’s history, Lazar was appointed integration manager. This meant she oversaw the combination of the two legal departments, involving more than 250 people and a $90 million budget. “The GE-Baker Hughes deal was huge,” she says. “It required that we harmonize over thirty legal policies and 200 implementing regulations.” Lazar’s work was honored with the Texas General Counsel Forum’s Magna Stella Award for Best Major Transaction of 2018.
In May 2018, she was promoted to executive counsel for mergers and acquisitions for GE corporate. As Lazar’s stature continues
“You can’t eliminate bias; you can only control your response to it.”
to rise, she is often asked to write and speak about what women attorneys should do to succeed. “Don’t ever let gender be the biggest issue in the room,” she says. “You are there for your professional expertise, so that is what needs to be emphasized.”
For women who want to be corporate attorneys, Lazar recommends gaining business experience and admits that if she had it to do over again, she would have combined her JD with an MBA. “You need to understand how a company works, what the various departments do, and how to read financial statements. If you work for a public company, you need to familiarize yourself with the cadence—i.e., the timing of required reports,” she explains.
She says lawyers also need to know how to make things simple. “There’s really nothing CEOs and other busy executives
dislike more than complicated legal theories and long memos,” she says. “You need to explain things in a way that helps their decision-making process. List options, provide pros and cons. Yours is not the only input they’ll be receiving.”
Lazar advises those just starting out to introduce themselves and be friendly to everyone they meet. “Too often, I see younger attorneys hanging out together in the back of the room, not interacting. You need to put yourself out there, to meet people and let them get to know you and see what you’re capable of.”
As proof that she walks the walk, Lazar established GE’s Law Student Internship Program in Houston; has been an executive sponsor of the company’s Women’s Network, which encourages the hiring, retention, and promotion of women; and is active in the Houston chapter of the Women’s Energy Network, which promotes the advancement of women in the energy industry. GE also sponsors STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) programs for high school girls.
“To get in the door, you have to have the technical qualifications, so I am incredibly proud of GE’s involvement in the STEM program,” Lazar says. “But it takes more than smarts. There will always be smart people around. You also need drive, discipline, focus, and to know how to sell yourself. And to really distinguish yourself, you need to be able to get along with others and to show sincere interest in them. In all this time, I’ve found very few people who don’t like it when you ask about their life and work, and it helps you build personal and professional connections.”
A New Face for HR
Catherine Peterson leads by example and cultivates an efficient work environment
Words
by ABHINANDA DATTA
Photos by WEBB CHAPPELL
Catherine Peterson SVP, HR
Steward Health Care Network
While working in hotel management in New Zealand, Catherine Peterson discovered her true calling. During one of her rotations, she got the opportunity to work in human resources, and realized that was what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. The transition was easy for her as her background had already imbued her with a strong customer service focus.
“Everything that I do today is what I learned during my career in hotel management. The candidate experience I provide to employees today is very similar to the customer experience I provided at the hotel,” Peterson says.
When an opening at Steward Health Care presented itself, she was selected to be in charge of talent acquisition and infrastructure.
“When I saw what they were doing with the ACO (accountable care organization) and the cutting edge work they were doing, I applied. And now, what I thought would grow has definitely been growing and it has been a very exciting time,” she says.
Today, as SVP of HR at Steward Health Care Network, Peterson leads the talent acquisition, training, and the human resources team nationally. Peterson and her team have come up with goals and strategies for this year in each of these key areas. The overarching goal is to be a valued business partner, change agent, and steward in each of the three focus areas.
“Within training, our focus is on creating and delivering impactful programs that drive employee performance, enhance customer satisfaction, and promote employee development. Within talent acquisition we provide the highest levels of service in quality candidates to our internal stakeholders in a timely and proactive manner while ensuring a superior candidate experience,” she says.
The other areas that she looks into are engagement and retention, and infrastructure. Engagement deals with development and implementation of initiatives that optimize employee experience, generating and supporting ongoing employee engagement, and making sure they think of Steward Health Care Network as the employer of choice.
“Within training, our focus is on creating and delivering impactful programs that drive employee performance, enhance customer satisfaction, and promote employee development.”
CATHERINE PETERSON
“As we continue to grow, I want to make sure that we introduce support scalable initiatives that position us for growth and support ongoing development in our best HR practices. We want to secure the institutional knowledge that we have—it is critical as we continue to scale and grow. When people feel they can acclimate into an organization quicker and smoother, it helps increase our retention rates,” Peterson says.
Peterson is currently working with talent acquisition and human resources on making onboarding more effective using a walk-transfer process. This will ensure that when the candidate becomes an employee, they still feel connected to the organization and experience a smooth transition. This method is fast-paced, promises high-touch responsiveness, and the candidate receives the same consistency through every aspect of human resources.
“We are transferring the touch that they get from talent acquisition specialist to the related HR business partner, and that’s making a change in terms of how they feel settled. It reduces the learning curve, as well as the normal anxiety that any person might have when they come to a new organization,” she says.
As a leader, Peterson believes that people are important and that creating a healthy culture is a team effort. Transparent communication is key, along with regular meetings and newsletters. Since the company has been
going through mergers, the culture is constantly evolving, and it is important to train leaders who can understand the employment needs of the company.
While interviewing members for her team, she asks them what they want to achieve in that role and makes sure they get that. She also makes sure that her management style works for them and she is very transparent about her expectations.
“I provide a very realistic preview. There are some things I’m very particular about and I will tell candidates right up front about it. I make sure that the new hires get to be with other team members so that they can tell them candidly what it’s like to work as a part of my team. So that way that person’s making the decision on an equal footing just as I am if I’m going to offer them a job,” she says.
One thing that Peterson strongly believes in is treating people as adults who are accountable for their own actions. This way, individuals are much more productive and engaged.
“My team members have said that I am a good listener and I lead by example. I communicate often and I don’t hesitate to give praise. Since I also have a teaching background, I like to try and teach whenever I can. When we’re rolling out new initiatives, I provide training, so they are not lost. I certainly make sure that I’ve given enough information to support them, but I don’t micromanage and have them check in with me frequently,” she says.
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Lead the Way by Helping Others
Maya Bordeaux has grown her HR experience into a role that cares about each individual at Tribune Publishing
By LIOR PHILLIPS
No matter how well a person feels they know a city, there’s nothing quite like standing at a window forty-one stories up. The perspective is dizzying: random dots of experience and memory suddenly pulled together in arcs and lines. After spending her childhood in Chicago, Maya Bordeaux now spends every day at the office hundreds of feet above it—offering a new vantage point from which to view her own remarkable career, as well as the careers of hundreds of others. Just as important, though, is the love, care, and passion that it takes to look closely, to stand face-to-face with people in times of achievement and suffering alike. As chief
human resources & communications officer for Tribune Publishing, Bordeaux uses both perspectives to engage and empower employees across the country.
Born and raised in Chicago, Bordeaux left Chicago at the young age of eighteen to move across the country to California. She got married, transferred to San Diego State University, and also took her first job in HR. “I was a teenage bride. We were poor and I needed to work,” she says. While scouring the local newspaper want ads, Bordeaux found an HR assistant role. She’d never considered the field, but knew she had the administrative skills that the posting required. However, after gaining a first-hand look into what the role could actually accomplish for others,
Maya Bordeaux Chief HR & Communications Officer
Tribune Publishing
Bordeaux knew this would be far more than a temporary job to make ends meet. “The primary focus is helping people, and that is truly at the core of who I am,” she says.
After finishing college, Bordeaux considered a career as a lawyer, looking for the best way she could help others. But after her first year of law school and working in the field, she found herself drawn to an HR role at a law firm. For the longterm, the legal field wasn’t the right fit, but Bordeaux knew she could take her experience, academic background, and passion for people and find a way to make them work together to help others. “There's so much about the law and the workplace that intersect, which you must know in human resources,” she says.
In 2002, Bordeaux joined the University of Chicago Medical Center, spurred on by her constant drive to learn. In addition to leveraging her legal and HR background, she gained a new understanding of unions and labor relations. In just seven years she was promoted multiple times, eventually becoming vice president of HR. “I came in with the plan to negotiate labor contracts for the hospital, but my role kept expanding,” she says. She then spent nearly seven years at NorthShore University HealthSystem, utilizing those skills in support of ten thousand employees across four hospitals, three hundred medical offices, and home health services. “In addition, during my time there, we acquired thirty-five different private practices and integrated them into our healthcare system,” she says.
Bordeaux next took on a role at the McDonald’s Corporation as senior director, US human resources, expanding those perspectives to an even larger organization. However, McDonald’s conversely was looking at divesting parts of the company by selling corporate-owned franchises. “I learned the bulk of what I know at those two
“I’m named after Maya Angelou, and there’s a quote of hers that I use as my life mantra: ‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’”
MAYA BORDEAUX
employers about acquisition and divestiture processes. And each time, I was focused on the people,” she says.
While diversity and inclusion had been an aspect of her HR work at every stop, she first served on a diversity council at the University of Chicago Medical Center. It first became an official part of her title and job responsibilities at NorthShore, where she was named chief diversity officer in addition to VP of HR. In that role, Bordeaux designed and led the company’s first systemwide diversity and inclusion strategy and programs. Because of the massive scope of the company—both in number and project
type—Bordeaux immediately made diversity and inclusion a major part of her work at Tribune Publishing. “People joke and call me the queen of diversity. There is no demographic that I cannot connect with,” she says. “The primary reason that people leave companies is because of their manager, but it is always my top priority that employees feel valued, rewarded, appreciated, and inspired. I’m named after Maya Angelou, and there’s a quote of hers that I use as my life mantra: ‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’”
One month into her tenure at Tribune Publishing, Bordeaux met with the CEO and board to set ambitious goals around diversity and inclusion. As a primary benchmark, the executive team determined that the company should increase its recruitment of diverse talent by 20 percent. That begins, she explains, far earlier than the standard journalism school recruiting programs; instead, Tribune Publishing is reaching out to high schools with racially diverse students to encourage them to consider journalism as a career. As for college-aged students, Bordeaux is ensuring that recruitment efforts go beyond the standard scope and additionally look at historically black colleges and universities, and she works closely on recruitment with groups such as the National Association of Black Journalists, National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and National Association of Asian-American Journalists.
Rather than merely recruiting, Bordeaux is ensuring that all of the properties in the Tribune Publishing network can offer the best and bring the best out of a diverse population of employees. Diversity and inclusion in and of itself, she adds, is a big part of retention. “It’s critically important for people to understand the power and importance of diversity and inclusion,” she says. “It’s not about quotas and numbers; diversity helps create the most high-performing and innovative teams, and that just makes good business sense.”
As a whole, the diversity and inclusion strategy that Bordeaux designed for the executive team and board was based on four strategic pillars: communication, education, audience, and infrastructure. In order to bring the entire company together behind the importance of diversity, they had to first make sure everyone understood exactly what diversity means at Tribune. Bordeaux strives for diversity to become a part of the
organizational DNA, to bring the topic into every business decision through continuous discussion and education.
“We are very intentional about celebrating diversity,” Bordeaux says. For example, her employee communications team rolls out companywide monthly correspondence about diversity, such as a memo about the contributions of Martin Luther King Jr. on his January holiday and a celebration of women journalists in March for Women’s History Month. Moreover, she wants to make sure that regularly sharing this information shows how those achievements relate to the company’s day-to-day work, to make it personally relevant to all employees.
That mind-set, paired with a wealth of experience and knowledge, has made Bordeaux a sought-after expert for speaking engagements far and wide. She’s spoken at the American Health Lawyers Association’s national conference, addressed the Senate’s Workforce Development Committee on Capitol Hill, and completed other high-profile appointments. But Bordeaux always remains focused on the people more than the grandiose headlines. While proud of her achievements, Bordeaux is forward-focused, most excited to discuss the diversity and inclusion strategy at Tribune Publishing—the mentorship, internship, and buddy programs, as well as the D&I ambassador-led employee resource groups.
“I am constantly thinking of ways to help employees, making sure that they feel we are invested in them and in the successful progression of their career,” she says. “We are committed to a good work-life balance for our employees and have flexible time off policies, but if I can’t sleep, I’ll get up at 2 a.m. to respond to emails. There are always emails waiting for me and something I can work on to support our employees.”
DEDICATION AND RESILIENCE
When dreaming of a career in human resources, most people picture hiring the perfect talented person or implementing a great new program. But early in her tenure at Tribune Publishing, Maya Bordeaux had to quickly step into a matter that you’re never quite prepared for, and provide stability and resources in a time of incredible tragedy. In June of 2018, a shooter entered the offices of the Capital Gazette , a Maryland newspaper under the Tribune Publishing banner, and killed five employees.
“I cannot adequately describe to you the stress, pain, and trauma employees felt going through that,” Bordeaux says. “Our CEO and I were on a plane to Baltimore within two hours of the shooting to lend our support. We were all very sad and anxious, but some journalists came into the office where I was working and they said they still had to get out a paper and they did just that.”
Bordeaux and the leadership team were quite impacted by the employees’ dedication and resilience, and committed to bringing together the resources to help the Gazette employees in any way they could. “I love all of our employees; this obviously struck a chord deep within me,” she says. “It left me even more inspired and invigorated to take care of our employees. These are exceptional professionals, incredibly committed to delivering their journalistic talents. Their courage and dedication came through even more powerfully then. After that amount of trauma, they actually got a paper out the next day.”
By Jeremy Borden
Public Storage Chief Litigation
Counsel Nathan Vitan uses metrics to show the legal department’s value.
Attorney Nathan Vitan knows business executives often measure legal department success, like performance in other company functions, according to the company’s bottom line.
Vitan is vice president & chief counsel–litigation & operations at Public Storage, the largest owner and operator of self-storage facilities in the United States. Working at a company with thousands of locations across the country, Vitan’s team handles complex and potentially costly litigation and, on any given day, may be asked to provide advice on a variety of other operational issues, from marketing standards to privacy regulations.
Of course, not all of those efforts are reflected well in reports to business executives that focus on legal spend. So, Vitan and general counsel Lily Hughes began to think about better ways to measure what the legal department does and demonstrate its productivity and value to the company.
Although important, legal spend on outside counsel is just one data point. Dollars don’t provide a full picture of how well in-house lawyers manage legal risk, Vitan said. In-house legal teams should give their internal clients the information they need to understand the return on the company’s investment in legal resources.
“We have to provide the business more nuanced metrics that demonstrate our value,” Vitan said. “We really pushed our team to show that we are husbanding the company’s resources responsibly and managing legal risk
effectively—for example, that we’re settling cases that should be settled, and spending money on cases we should fight because we didn’t do anything wrong and we need to send a message that no one can just sue us and expect us to roll over.”
In other words, Vitan knows that showing the legal department’s value can’t simply be reduced to dollars and cents, and business executives shouldn’t simply see legal department dollars in isolation.
“My sense is that many legal departments are focused on one thing—legal spend,” Vitan said. “But, viewed in isolation, legal spend can’t tell you whether the money was well spent or what you got for your money.” The challenge, according to Vitan, is in showing how legal department spend helps the company’s bottom line.
The first step for Vitan and Hughes was to track a more robust set of metrics on the matters their team handled. Even though it took some time for other attorneys to understand why collecting more data on their matters was important, things have gotten a bit easier as it has become a more natural part of the process. “Over time they’ve seen how valuable this information is and we have full buy in,” Vitan said.
The approach is paying off, with Vitan now able to show his business clients how the legal department helps the company avoid legal exposure, saving company dollars.
“Now, for instance, instead of just saying we spent $1,000 on legal fees, we can show how spending $1,000 saved the company $10,000.”
“It’s showing that we spend money when we need to spend money and don’t spend money when we don’t have to,” Vitan added.
Better metrics have also helped the company improve its practices and identify where it could be vulnerable. “It really opened our eyes to our ability to influence how we manage risk at the company,” Vitan said. “When we have deeper insight into our matters—for
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example, the types of cases are we seeing and when and where are occurring—we can start thinking about potential causes and whether we need to change our processes. That then facilitates legal’s partnership with the business, where operational decisions are made with a full understanding of their effect on legal exposure.”
The new approach clicked with the business. “I think it’s an imperative in a corporate environment,” Vitan said. “I do believe in the adage, ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.’”
The department’s new emphasis on metrics has had another added benefit: highlighting team members’ accomplishments. “We can say, ‘this team member handled X number of cases, resolved Y number of disputes, and avoided Z dollars of risk,” Vitan said. “That quantifies how productive and valuable our team members are to the company.”
Now, when Hughes and Vitan present on legal department performance, the picture they painted is a more complex one than number of cases and dollars on the ledger line. When it comes to in house legal departments, “the goal is to show your value as opposed to your profitability,” Vitan said.
“The goal is to show your value as opposed to your profitability.”
Growing Leadership Skills, Growing Leaders
As the chief human resources officer at Shearer’s Foods, LLC., Lisa George draws from her family background and diverse workplace experiences to help associates grow their careers
By ARIANNA STERN
It surprised no one in Lisa George’s family that she chose to work in the business world. From a young age, George, now the chief human resources officer at Shearer’s Foods, LLC, showed an interest in business—more specifically, her parents’ work. She recalls a time during her childhood when her father, who worked for Airstream at the time, was planning to make a presentation in front of the board. She watched her father think through the presentation carefully ahead of time, and she noticed how he felt after it had happened, knowing that he stuck the landing.
“I remember him coming back and being excited because it went really well,” George says. Her father’s growth opportunity was also a learning opportunity for her, since she loved to ask questions and chime in with discussions about her parents’ work. Both her mother and father encouraged her curiosity.
“My father said, ‘Hey, I think you’ve got good business acumen and that’s something you should think about pursuing.’ He was always very supportive in that way,” George says. Her mother, meanwhile, always emphasized the building blocks of character, like ethics, hard work, and honesty, that would later serve George in the workplace and throughout life.
“If my mom said anything, you knew it was 100 percent honest and sincere,” says George. “I also saw my mother help build a couple of businesses from scratch—it takes a lot of tenacity and risk tolerance to do that well.”
The values that her parents modeled for her early in life became the pillars of her leadership philosophy in the workplace, where she emphasizes self-awareness, continuous growth, and high performance to this day.
George received her undergraduate degree in marketing from The Ohio State University and began her career in an operations role at Sherwin Williams. Though she had a positive
experience at the company, George realized her talents and passion aligned more closely with human resources than with operations. Once she had that realization, the next step was getting credentialed and honing her expertise in a graduate program, so she went back to Ohio State for a master’s degree in labor and human resources.
As she pursued her master’s, George enjoyed her first major opportunity for career growth: working as a recruiter at her father’s executive search firm.
“I resisted working with my father initially, because I wanted to go out and do my own thing, and be independent,” George says with a laugh. “But then I thought, OK, I have the opportunity here to learn from a master. My father taught me how to recruit very successfully and also how to become a highly valued partner to our client companies.”
At the search firm, George put into practice one of the values she held most dear—learning. She came to understand how different companies assessed talent, and how unique company cultures and leadership styles affected those assessments.
Her next career milestone came when she went to work for L Brands, where she started as a recruiter and, over the course of her time at the company, filled three different HR generalist roles. Having in-depth exposure to many different facets of the company gave George the opportunity to help develop her three pillars— self-awareness, growth, and high performance—in different types of employees, from IT to accounting to fashion design. In particular, her work as an HR generalist in the distribution center stands out in her mind.
“I think I have such a passion for teams in manufacturing, distribution centers, and the supply chain in general because my first generalist role was in the distribution center for L Brands,” she says. “These are the people who make things happen for the customer, and their engagement is so important.”
In her next role, as vice president, human resources at Cardinal Health, George partnered with leadership to design and build a complete cultural transformation that rewarded innovation. In the space of two years, George and the Cardinal leadership team ensured that Cardinal employees had the necessary training and opportunities to introduce cutting-edge ideas for the healthcare space. The transformation also included a sponsorship initiative focused on diverse talent, to reinforce the company’s already-strong hiring and talent-development practices.
Lisa George CHRO
Shearer’s Snacks
“It is critical to cultivate self-awareness, learning, and growth in people throughout the organization.”
LISA GEORGE
Today, George leads the HR function at Shearer’s, a leading co-manufacturer and private-label supplier of salty snacks in North America and the world’s largest manufacturer of kettle potato chips. The company has about five thousand associates working in sites across the US and in Canada.
Starting in this role in June 2018, George is back in the manufacturing world she loves.
“Shearer’s is a great place for people to build great careers, as the organization continues to grow,” George says. “Our associates make all the difference, so it is critical to cultivate self-awareness, learning, and growth in people throughout the organization.”
To encourage self-awareness, George makes sure that company leaders talk with high-performing associates throughout the year regarding performance, development, and career progression. These conversations encourage associates to better understand what they do well and where there’s room for improvement and growth.
“Our associates are committed to making high-quality products for our customers, who serve global retailers reaching customers around the world,” George notes. “We consider this a big responsibility, so we examine our own work carefully and continuously look for ways to improve.”
George ensures that associates have ample opportunity to learn new skills, whether they want to move up or grow in their roles. If associates have their eye on another role at the company, they may have the option to shadow someone in that position to gain a
greater understanding. A formal training program also offers a valuable chance to learn: In November 2018, her team launched a core skills training that helps associates polish their managerial and supervisory skills.
“When you've got really great front-line leadership, the interactions that they have with the associates are much better, and they're better able to help other people grow their careers as well,” George notes.
Finally, George ensures that employees have the chance to grow professionally. She and her team help create development plans for high-performing individuals and hold leadership accountable for implementing them. This approach gives employees hope about their futures at the company. Shearer’s is currently expanding, proving that employees’ career growth benefits the company’s overall growth.
George’s passion for the HR function and the meaningful conversations she has every day make her a bit like her father was during her childhood. Now, she has two sons of her own—her youngest son is taking after her and studying business in college, and her older son is an actor and entrepreneur. While time will tell whether there will be three generations of HR experts, both share the family’s drive to learn and grow.
Throughout her longstanding career, Lisa George has built strong teams and partnerships. The Karcher Group is proud to be part of her legacy with a shared commitment to doing better together. Learn about our digital-first approach to integrated marketing at TKG.com.
www.beneschlaw.com
The Gold Standard in People-Driven Culture
As senior vice
president at Red Gold, Tim Ingle
furthers the business goals of the company by focusing on the well-being of its people
By ABHINANDA DATTA
During his college years, Tim Ingle received incredible internship opportunities at Walt Disney World in Florida. However, when it was time to choose a career after graduating, he defied expectations, and instead of joining the folks at Disney, he joined a small organization in Indiana. This was in 1991, and since then, Ingle has been an integral part of the seventy-five-year-old tomato processing company Red Gold.
“I took the path less traveled,” he says. “I chose this small company where I could have a big impact and learn a whole new business. Back then we were not the biggest, but we focused on being the very best.”
Ingle started as a production supervisor and was given the opportunity to learn about many different areas of the company.
Within two years, he was asked to run Red Gold’s new plant in Ohio. This was the springboard for the rest of his career, as he was able to truly learn about people and the value of having loyal, dedicated employees.
“The company was growing so fast that at that point, I thought I would become a plant manager and subsequently would be on a pure manufacturing path. But, I liked the whole focus on developing people, and so I became the director of human resources at the age of twenty-six,” he says.
In 2012, as he got involved with corporate planning and strategy, he was promoted to the vice president of human resources, responsible for setting the company’s highlevel goals and the long-term planning process. Having appropriate metrics to measure their ability to develop talent internally is important to Ingle.
“We want to be able to recruit and retain the best folks in the tomato industry and set ourselves apart from our competitors. Making talent an advantage is key to the company. Being able to develop people is a priority. We also look at ways in which we can manage our employee benefits and make our employees happy and healthy, whether it is their actual physical health or their emotional health, and also invest in their retirement and financial well-being,” he says.
Ingle, as a leader, is known to set lofty goals while believing in the power of persistence. He likes to surround himself with talented people and wants to create opportunities for them to create their own legacy accomplishments someday.
With this in mind, he has partnered with high schools and vocational schools, as well as with the Anderson statewide campus of Purdue University. “We really have a huge impact in terms of developing the local workforce, and we invest in their future. We allow those communities to be very viable and have kids coming out of high school or college and have opportunities for them to make a great living,” Ingle says.
The culture Ingle has cultivated at Red Gold is very employee driven. He mentions he is lucky to have self-motivated employees who invented the company’s mission statement to produce the freshest, best-tasting tomato products in the world. And so, he follows the motto of Walt Disney about dreaming big, but still knows you need people to make that dream a reality.
Tim Ingle Senior Vice President Red Gold
We’re proud to have Tim Ingle in our town!
No matter how you slice it, Tim Ingle puts the heart in the Heart of Hoosierland. His tireless dedication to employee development at Red Gold and his commitment to community service have made Red Gold and Elwood stronger and healthier.
Thanks, Tim, for making Elwood an even better place to live!
“We can have big, lofty goals but we need a lot of people excited and engaged to make those goals a reality,” he says.
Apart from focusing on the welfare of the people working with him, Ingle is also involved in giving back to the communities in which the company operates. Alleviating hunger is important to Red Gold, and its annual “Run to Crush Hunger” program has donated more than a quarter of a million dollars in the last six years, along with millions of pounds of food across the United States. Ingle has also served on the board of directors to support the Migrant Head Start program to help migrant children with education.
Under the leadership of Ingle, the human resources department of Red Gold has always created an impact in the education sector. They are currently working on a career center to fuel economic growth and prosperity in the Midwest.
“Whether students end up working for us someday or working for another great company, we want to basically put the technical career and technical education back into some of the opportunities for young people coming out of high school. If they are not sure what they want to do, where they want to go, or may not be able to afford a particular university, Red Gold can offer the key to their success. This will be great for economic and workforce development, while providing a great model to follow nationally,” Ingle says.
“We really have a huge impact in terms of developing the local workforce, and we invest in their future.”
TIM INGLE
By revamping company offices and promoting interdepartmental communication, Alex Liberman helps Medline Industries hold onto its half-century growth streak
By Clint Worthington
Liberman General Counsel Medline Industries
Medline Industries has done something almost impossible in the business world—it has experienced growth every year for the last half century. On top of that, the last ten years have seen new acquisitions and international expansions facilitate that growth into nearly $12 billion in revenue each year for the largest privately held manufacturer and distributor of healthcare supplies in the United States. As general counsel for Medline since 1999, Alex Liberman is a crucial part of these initiatives, contributing to improvements in the company’s corporate culture and facilitating partnerships between departments.
While the company’s growth is a “pleasant fact of life,” says Liberman, it also comes with its fair share of challenges. For instance, addressing bursts of rapid growth often makes it difficult to create efficiencies and improve operations, he says. “Everybody contributes so much individually, there’s little time to catch our breath.” As such, Liberman works hard to ensure his team takes time to work on inefficiencies by creating new workflows and adopting new technologies.
Medline offers managers at his level a great deal of discretion to take on efficiency projects like these, he notes, but “it takes courage to convince your senior colleagues to buy in, while making sure you get your day job done.” With the leeway granted to him by Medline’s management, Liberman ensures that his department does more than routinely perform its duties; they are constantly working to improve their operations.
Much of this comes down to Liberman’s leadership style, which he says centers around listening to the needs of those around you. “You have to be a good listener,” Liberman says. “Not just with your team, but also to clients within the company.” While lawyers and compliance professionals sometimes “get a bad rap” for thinking they always have the answer, Liberman extols the virtues of being willing to change your mind and admit when you are wrong. “In the long run, people have more respect for you,” he says.
As general counsel, Liberman has been approaching Medline’s many growth initiatives with a focus on teamwork and collaboration. “So many of these things we’re doing for the first time,” he says. In addition to getting the right people for your team, Liberman says, it’s important to remember that no one person has the right answer, and that egos should stay out of the way. “If you create that environment, these projects go so much better,” advises Liberman.
To facilitate that level of communication and cooperation between departments, Liberman has been more internally aggressive about identifying opportunities for cross-functional projects, bringing other managers onto projects they may not normally undertake. He has also facilitated company-wide email training that focuses more on culture than policy, as well as training in employee dispute resolution and communication techniques.
So far, Liberman is pleased with these initiatives, as the company has been underserved in this kind of
Alex
Timothy Carlson
interdepartmental communication. “Sometimes softer priorities like corporate culture don’t get taken up as causes; they’re often seen as secondary,” says Liberman. However, he’s seen that these initiatives have led to greater consideration of how culture affects the company’s operations, contributing greatly to Medline’s continued success.
“Medline is certainly a good place to work for a lot of reasons, but that’s improved dramatically over the last few years,” notes Liberman, due partially to his efforts to focus on improving the company’s corporate culture.
Medline recently moved its headquarters to Northfield, Illinois, enhanced its work transportation program, and created an office in downtown Chicago to entice younger people living in the city to work there. Much of this change is driven by the changing priorities of millennial workers, who have a different view of the workplace than previous generations. “They’re motivated, but not exclusively by money the way we were,” says Liberman. By catering to those needs, Medline hopes to attract younger hires and improve retention of workers seeking a more fulfilling career experience.
As for Liberman, he has also found himself personally benefiting from the more communicative, collaborative culture that Medline has cultivated. “I feel a lot more pride and a higher level of energy the last few years,” he says, thanks in part to these modernizations. Whether improving the daily experience of working at Medline, or fostering communication between departments, Liberman hopes to continue Medline’s fifty-year growth spurt.
“You have to be a good listener—not just with your team, but also to clients within the company.”
VP of Human Resources
Tanika McCulloch
Waste Industries
Becoming a True Business Partner
Waste Industries’ Tanika McCulloch has spent the last year turning its HR department into an equal partner in the organization, which will come in handy after its $3 billion merger with GFL Environmental Inc.
By WILL GRANT
by NATALIA WEEDY
Photos
SSince its humble origins as a mom-and-pop organization in 1970, waste management firm Waste Industries has grown into a respectably sized operation, with 3,000 employees across the southeast United States. In October 2018, Waste Industries (WI) announced a merger with GFL Environmental, turning WI into one of the largest privately owned waste companies in the United States. For vice president of human resources Tanika McCulloch, this presents a thrilling challenge to continue her strengthening of WI’s corporate culture, and to ensure that her department is treated as a true business partner within the company.
As she tells it, McCulloch fell into human resources by mistake. “I didn’t know that’s what I wanted to do, as much as I’d like to tell you otherwise,” she says. Graduating from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a degree in psychology and an unfulfilling sales job in Atlanta, her career in HR began with an unexpected call from a recruiter. “She calls me in the middle of the day and says, ‘Hey, I have an opportunity for you. I can’t tell you the name of the company, I can’t tell you what the job is or how much it pays, but you have to be here by 1 p.m. today.’”
That interview led to temp work in the HR department at payment tech firm Global Payments, where McCulloch quickly excelled. Two weeks into the job, the company bought out her contract and took her on full time, promoting her to human resources generalist. Eventually, she left Global Payments to further build out her HR portfolio, becoming the human resources manager for Sara Lee and PepsiCo–Frito-Lay and a host of other companies, before landing at Waste Industries in late 2017.
While WI has grown into a medium-sized company, McCulloch says, the company still has the “warm, family feel” of its small business origins. This is an atmosphere McCulloch has worked hard to cultivate and
maintain over the last year. When she first arrived at WI, McCulloch saw many opportunities to improve the company’s sense of focus and add a level of sophistication to its HR work that was previously missing. The department was already running smoothly when it came to the administrative nitty-gritty of HR—payroll, benefits, etc.—but McCulloch saw a chance to take that expertise to the next level.
Using her wealth of HR experience, McCulloch immediately set to work improv-
ing the department. She guided her HR managers to focus more on strategy than administration, making better use of their resources. On top of that, she reorganized the HR department in order to show the operational leaders the true value of their department as an equal partner in the business.“We do administrative stuff, but that’s a really small part of who we are,” she says.
For McCulloch, it was important to structure the department in a way that put HR managers more in lockstep with general
management. “We bring training, discipline, consistency, all the things we need to operate and grow successfully,” she says to her managers, all in a successful effort to give her department a seat at the table. In this way, McCulloch could teach her fellow department heads that HR was “the conscience of the organization.”
After firmly establishing HR’s new, vital role at Waste Industries, McCulloch went to work undertaking initiatives to maintain that presence in the company’s culture. “There’s a level of consistency that we hadn’t
had before in how we hire, how we issue discipline, things like that,” she says. Before she arrived, each region of WI would handle internal investigations in a different way; under her management, there is now a consistent set of protocols for these practices that helps smooth over previous complications. This consistency is “one of the most profound things” she has changed about WI’s human resources practice, McCulloch says, “because they didn’t have that before.”
As Waste Industries continues to grow, McCulloch has been working diligently to improve the department’s headcount, so HR managers aren’t overwhelmed. This frees up those managers to become true partners to management so they can settle issues before they escalate. “Before, managers always called HR right as an issue was blowing up; now they know to call before it blows up.”
In addition to these structural and cultural initiatives, McCulloch has also been hard at work creating diversity and inclusion initiatives at Waste Industries. As the first and only African American executive at the company, and the only VP who is a person of color, she feels a particular responsibility to cultivate a more heterogenous workplace. In 2019, she plans to introduce what she’s calling a “water drip” of initiatives intended to slowly introduce the company to D&I concepts, including a calendar that would highlight pertinent events and activities each month that would fall under that umbrella. While the firm’s merger with GFL leaves some of these D&I programs up in the air, McCulloch is confident that her work to cultivate greater diversity at the company will continue.
As Waste Industries moves on to its next stage of life as an acquisition of GFL, McCulloch feels proud of the work she’s accomplished thus far. “There’s a level of respect toward the department now that there wasn’t before,” she says. “The other managers understand that we can’t just be the HR team—we have to be part of the business.”
Congratulations to Tanika McCulloch on being recognized for her proven leadership skills. At Marsh & McLennan Agency [MMA], we value our partnership with Tanika and the entire leadership team at Waste Industries, LLC. We are proud to celebrate her success!
To learn how MMA can make a difference in the moments that matter, visit
An Accounting Perspective Toward Teamwork
When Thierry Deleger meets new colleagues, he takes in what he can learn from them just as an accountant takes in financial information
By REBECCA ROBERTS
Thierry Deleger’s love of finance stems from the viewpoint it affords toward a business as a whole:
“Finance is everywhere.
Everything you do in a company will have a financial impact. In finance you look at the horizon in the distance, you take a global view in terms of where the business is going and where it came from,” he says. Deleger sees finance as a strategic support function for any business, and enjoys being in a financial role because it exposes him to everything that goes on in the company.
Deleger began his career working in accounting, explaining that he appreciated the structure and technical aspects. When he rose to the rank of CFO at RATP Dev, a multinational transportation company, his role became more global in nature. As CFO, Deleger’s duties focused mainly on strategy and legal procedures, but he always maintained a deep respect for the accounting function. “Everything you do eventually relies on the quality of the accounting information. It’s what you publish. It’s the company’s foundation and past. You need to understand your past in order to know where you’re going in the future,” he says.
Also essential to Deleger’s outlook on business is his multinational experience. Deleger was educated in France and began his career there. While working for Sodexo in Paris, he accepted a transfer to a recently-acquired subsidiary in the United States, where he has lived for the past eighteen years. Deleger emphasizes being mindful of the business and life lessons he encountered over the course of his career thus far, both in terms of being a successful financial manager and in terms of acclimating and respecting a team’s culture in order to foster strong professional relationships.
At Deleger’s first stop in the United States, one of his responsibilities was developing and implementing group reporting tools post-acquisition. These requirements
(forms, data points, and deadlines) were very new for the local team, according to Deleger. He devised a methodical and inclusive approach to educating the local team and to brainstorming with them on how to better implement given their existing systems and processes. Because Deleger deeply values teamwork, he doesn’t lead via top-down mandates. “When you ask people questions about the organization, its structure, and the work, and you’re interested, they are super responsive because you’ve paid attention to them.” Deleger focused on learning how things were done at the subsidiary and took care not to brutally impose Sodexo’s methods. “My approach is to arrive with an open mind and ears, to ask questions and look at
documents like an auditor would do,” he says. With this approach, the exchange of information and procedures between Deleger and the local team was reciprocal.
In his most recent role as CFO at RATP Dev, Deleger remained focused on sharing his knowledge with colleagues while also keeping an open ear toward others’ areas of expertise. One of the challenges he took on was making sure everyone from non-financial backgrounds understood the significance of the company’s financials. “They needed to understand not just how the numbers are calculated, but how to influence the numbers, as well as the root causes of the numbers we have and how to implement plans to change future outcomes,” he says.
Thierry Deleger Former CFO RATP Dev
DELEGER
Duane Morris LLP, a law firm with more than 800 attorneys in offices across the United States and internationally, provides clients innovative solutions to today’s legal and business challenges.
“Finance is everywhere. Everything you do in a company will have a financial impact. In finance you look at the horizon in the distance, you take a global view in terms of where the business is going and where it came from.”
THIERRY DELEGER
Deleger was also tasked with setting up human resources at the RATP Dev New York office. He took on the technical aspects of this such as payroll and administrative processes, as well as led efforts to produce the employee handbook. However, he was also a strong advocate for hiring a vice president of human resources. He describes that having an expert in this role was essential: “Human resources is your best asset. You don’t have a machine, you have people, and you need to retain and grow talent or the company’s growth will be limited.”
When Deleger needed to negotiate with banks on RATP Dev’s behalf, he treated the banks like a partner. He described the importance of being upfront and transparent, and pointed out that the banks were another entity that he could learn from. As RATP Dev was moving their United States headquarters from New York City to Fort
Worth, Texas, working with a local bank proved to be an asset in terms of grasping the market dynamic in a new location.
Aside from looking for the lessons in his professional experiences, Deleger’s outlook on his international exposure is also poised toward personal development and growth. He explains that one of his most surprising take-aways is that the relationship to authority can differ drastically between cultures. For someone who values team-building as inherently as Deleger, these differences are paramount to determining an appropriate management style. Some teams expect precise direction, and others see over-explaining an assignment as an affront to their capabilities.
As Deleger looks toward his next project, one thing that is certain for him is the team component. “I want to find a team where I can play a role and contribute and learn.”
Kerry Davidson’s labor, employment, and legal expertise have helped fuel Scrap Metal Services’ extraordinary growth
By Bridgett Novak
Kerry Davidson VP HR & General Counsel
Metal Services
Scrap
Dan Lopez
When Kerry Davidson first started working with Scrap Metal Services (SMS) as its outside labor and employment counsel in 2008, the company had one scrap yard and fifty employees. Davidson, with more than twenty years of law firm and corporate labor and employment work under her belt, was officially brought on board in 2013 to be the company’s first vice president of human resources and first in-house legal counsel. “They hadn’t had either of those roles in-house before. We were in the process of moving the headquarters from a double-wide trailer into a new building,” she recalls. “My first office was the conference room.”
The Illinois-based company was founded in 2005 by brothers Jeff and Rick Gertler. By 2017, it had become the fourth-largest ferrous scrap processing company in the US, handling 3.7 million tons of ferrous metal. It has nearly thirty different entities, with 650 employees and twenty locations, not including its operations in Mexico and Belgium. In addition to handling ferrous scrap, it also supplies nonferrous scrap commodities, offers ship, intermodal, truck and railcar dismantling, and provides scrap management, consulting, and purchasing services. It also owns 50 percent of Fe Trading Group (FTG), one of the largest and fastest-growing scrap/commodity trading companies in North America.
“Jeff and Rick had a vision from the very beginning,” Davidson explains, “to expand through carefully targeted mergers and acquisitions.” Davidson joined SMS soon after an early coup—the acquisition of All Star Metals (ASM), one of the largest ship recyclers in North America, and All Star Shredding (AS), both located in Brownsville, Texas.
The strategic growth at SMS has not slowed down. In August 2018, SMS was the winner of a hotly contested battle for the scrap management and processing contract at the Aperam steelmaking facility in Genk, Belgium. With customers in over forty countries, Aperam shipped 1.9 million tons of steel in 2017. SMS will work in conjunction with its new Belgium affiliate, Scrap Metal Services Belgium (BSBV).
Davidson was involved in all stages of the deal. “I was there for the courting, the formulation of the contracts, the setting up of the Belgian entity, and the actual taking over of the employees, assets, and operation,” she says. “The goal was to have little, if any, disruption of their ongoing operations, so we worked hard to make it go as smoothly as possible. This was our first involvement with an international union contract, which made it especially interesting. We hope this will be the first of many deals with other European and South American businesses.”
To help manage the breadth and growth of its operations, in late 2018, the Gertler brothers formed a management board, naming themselves as chairman and cochairman, and appointed a new CEO, Jeremy Kirchin, and CFO, Keith Rhodes. “This is part of their succession planning and will enable us to better chart our continued growth, while handling all the important daily strategic issues,” Davidson explains.
“The establishment of the board and naming of a new CEO is a reflection of the growing sophistication of not just SMS, but of our entire industry,” she continues. As part of the change management and transition team, Davidson is in the process of visiting all of SMS’s locations to explain the new developments to the workforce and answer their questions. “We want everyone to see these changes as we do, i.e., beneficial to both the company and the employees. We’re not getting rid of any of the things that made us successful, we’re just adding to and improving upon them.”
Though Davidson continues to wear both the HR and legal hats, that is about to change, too. “We are actively looking for a vice president of HR,” she says. “We’ve gotten too big to have just one person overseeing both areas.” In the interim, the company has partnered with an HR consulting firm that handles some of the more basic tasks, like pay scales, job descriptions, and employee surveys.
“Online programs have also been immensely helpful,” she adds. “They’ve allowed us to expand our bench strength and improve our recruiting and onboarding. Without these new technologies, we wouldn’t have been able to manage HR with so few resources. When I came aboard in 2013, no one really knew what an HRIS system was. Now we don’t know what we’d do without it.”
Technology also plays an increasingly important role in SMS’s core business. “We’re continuously looking for ways to improve the machinery, the actual shredders, etc., to increase the amount of scrap we recycle,” Davidson says. “That’s the name of the game, to recover as much as we can. The more material we can keep from going to a landfill, the more profitable we will be, and the greater our contribution will be to the world.”
“Kerry’s leadership has helped launch Scrap Metal Services on a domestic and international growth trajectory that is industry leading. Gallagher values Kerry’s partnership and ability to develop forward-thinking risk management strategies that allow for continued expansion in all aspects of their business.” -Matt Bogue, Producer, Arthur J. Gallagher & Co.
A Strategy of Development
The path for present and future talent success grows clear under Jenny Dearborn’s watchful, experienced eye
By KELLI LAWRENCE
Executive VP, Chief Learning Officer
Jenny Dearborn
Former
C“Companies need to be very smart about understanding themselves,” says Jenny Dearborn of SAP. “They need to ask, ‘What do our employees need to know? What do they currently know? What is the gap between those two things? What is the right way to close those gaps?’”
“Companies can’t let the world evolve and change without them,” she adds. “They’ve got to be strategic about their employee learning and development.”
It’s an understatement to say she speaks from experience. Years before Dearborn took her first job as chief learning officer (CLO)—a role she’s held at five companies, and at SAP since 2014—she found herself teaching high school English. She also found she wasn’t very good at it. “It fit neither my personality nor my needs,” Dearborn says she realized early on. “And because I have ADHD, I have a hard time sitting still—I need to work in a very fast-paced environment of constant change—so the idea of teaching Romeo and Juliet over and over for the rest of my career— much as I love Romeo and Juliet —it just wasn’t for me.”
So she stepped back, looked at the bigger picture of what she hoped to accomplish in her career—which was to create social change through education—and reset her sights on the corporate side of the education world. “I really grew to love the education business,” she says. “It was a very natural fit with my communication skills and deep empathy for the human learning experience.”
Getting a toehold in corporate education proved a bit more challenging. Since she was already situated in Silicon Valley, she aimed to work at IT giant Hewlett Packard—so she arranged informational interviews with different HP staff members. A grand total
of forty-six informational interviews, to be exact, were all completed while she was still teaching high school. But by the end of the 1994-95 school year, her tenacity paid off when she was hired full-time by HP as a classroom instructor in the employee learning and development department.
The “learning and development” part of Dearborn’s job remained, more than twenty years later, when she was installed as the first-ever CLO for enterprise-software giant SAP. As she learned new skills in making the role her own, years of human resourcerooted experience helped Dearborn and her team create individualized development opportunities for all 95,000+ SAP employees as well. They lean heavily on an inside-out comprehension of the different roles within the company—both what’s expected of them currently and where they are headed. “Every company needs to understand the knowledge, skills, and abilities of their current employees, what they need from their future workforce, and how learning and development can close the gap so today’s humans can become the humans a company needs in the future,” she says. “This is a company’s strategic workforce plan.”
Unsurprisingly, technology has an ever-increasing hand in this process. Surveys and other traditional assessment tools, for example, are giving way to artificial intelligence (AI), which allows Dearborn to use real-time analysis of an employee’s performance to support highly personalized development plans. “AI is about very prescriptive, precise, dynamically changing, learning gap recommendations according to the demonstrated skill gaps and strengths of every employee,” she says. “Learning should be about prescribing what you need,
“Learning should be about prescribing what you need, not what those around you with similar job titles might need.”
JENNY DEARBORN
not what those around you with similar job titles might need.”
Sean Farrington, senior vice president of EMEIA for enterprise technology skills platform Pluralsight, Inc., a SAP partner, shares Dearborn’s belief that you need to develop tech talent from within. “These days your technology strategy is your company strategy, and if you aren’t committing to upskilling your teams with the latest technology skills, you will be left behind,” Farrington says. “Jenny is an incredible leader and true visionary who knows that for any organization to succeed there needs to be a commitment to empowering team members to keep pace with the rapid pace of technological change by learning new skills that support innovation.”
To be certain, those whose strengths include a command of technology stand a better chance of job market success. Department of Labor statistics quoted by Dearborn show that of seven million jobs currently open in the US, 500,000 of them require a computer science degree—yet only 45,000 computer science graduates join the workforce annually.
“Given this imbalance, corporations need to know how to grow their own technical talent from within and source from non-traditional education paths. There are so few new graduates from technical majors, companies will not be able to afford them if they find them, or they just won’t find them at all,” Dearborn says matter-of-factly. “We talk about a war for talent, but it’s really only a certain type of talent. As a country, our problem isn’t a lack of jobs, it’s not enough workers with the right skills to fill all the open jobs. It’s time for companies to grow that talent from within their existing workforce.”
Wherever the tech expertise comes from, the value goes even higher for those able to combine those skills with what she calls “fundamental human skills”—qualities that technology can’t duplicate. Critical thinking, problem-solving, empathy, creativity, innovation, emotional intelligence, and
collaboration—what the World Economic Forum calls twenty-first century skills—fall into this category.
“We need to be able to identify the ethical implications of technology in our society,” Dearborn cautions. “What won’t be outsourced? What won’t go to AI? It’s not always about knowing what the right answer is, it’s about knowing the right question. We need to make sure we do not lose sight of those fundamental people skills.”
Those skills are critical to CLOs and their teams as well, and Dearborn cites, as proof, a corporate strategy goal from early in her tenure at SAP. The goal was to increase the number of women in people management jobs from 18 percent to 25 percent. The action taken by the HR team prior to Dearborn’s arrival was a one-day training class called “Men and Women Leading Together”—“Kind of like the book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus in action for a day,” she explains. It was fun, informative, and full of cocktail-party ready factoids about how men and women’s brains operated differently. But Dearborn didn’t see the class translatin g into more women in management.
So they did an analysis of women with management potential, and found a critical commonality: they didn’t feel ready or supported for upper management roles. Then, in studying the actual job descriptions provided by SAP, they identified a clear reason why women considering these positions might feel unsupported: the descriptions in question used only masculine pronouns (“he” and “him”).
Dearborn’s team canceled the training class, rewrote the job descriptions, trained recruiting staff to make sure there was at least one woman in every final group of candidates for open management positions, and prepared those candidates for their interviews. They also identified topperforming women and matched them with sponsors who encouraged them to apply for promotions. When there weren’t enough
qualified women in line for management roles, Dearborn’s team created development programs, like the award-winning programs LEAP and SPARK, for aspiring leaders. And if there were qualified women who then lost the job to a man, the team sought to find out why.
“If we were told ‘all the women I interviewed didn’t have enough financial acumen skills,’ I said, ‘Well, let’s go find all the high-potential women ready to hire, give them financial acumen training, and then coach them for the interview process,’” Dearborn reports. “Three years later, that goal of 25 percent women in people leadership roles had been met.”
While her team takes pride in such achievements, Dearborn admits one of the biggest challenges a CLO faces today is a basic one: finding the most efficient use of ever-shrinking training time. “What continues to accelerate is the amount of knowledge, the volume of information people need to learn, the increased level of distractions in society, and less and less time dedicated to learning in the corporate environment,” she says.
But rather than fight this trend, Dearborn’s team thinks it out strategically—what skills need to be practiced in person with others, what can be learned online at an employee’s leisure, and so on. Dearborn credits SAP’s culture, fueled by an entrepreneurial spirit and sense of empowerment, for much of her team’s ongoing success with issues like this.
“It’s a very involved employee base here, with a lot of initiative at the local level,” she says. “And that’s a huge part of why my team has had such an impact. I don’t feel like I have to convince anyone that what we do is important.”
Strategic partnerships lead to learning and HR technology success. Jenny believes in utilizing technology to drive performance in human resources and learning. “Our partnership enhances the services and technology to meet the unique global learning goals of the company.” -Michael Reedy, OutCons - Managing Partner
Bayer’s Shirell Gross is determined to grow herself and those around her
By Will Grant
Shirell Gross VP & Head of Law for Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Radiology
Bayer
Krysti Sabins
Shirell Gross says she understands her shortcomings. “I tend to think fast, move fast, and act fast,” she says. “I have to be cognizant of it and try to make sure that when it gets in the way of productive development, I stop and get more feedback.”
The former vice president and head of law for Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Radiology, isn’t talking about the latest round of feedback she’s received, or about being named one of 2018’s “Most Influential Black Lawyers” by Savoy magazine. Gross is talking about what she feels like her overarching goal should be in her work, to lead by empowering and developing others. And while her career success includes back-to-back-to-back promotions at her first lawyer gig as an assistant district attorney in the Bronx en route to achieving a personal goal to gain new and diverse experiences, Gross has always been sure she can do better. And she is intent on finding new ways to grow both herself and those around her.
Gross says her early law experience as a prosecutor continues to inform her later jobs, both in her firm work and later in-house roles. “I’d wanted to be a lawyer since I was a little girl, and, somewhat naively, I think I thought that because prosecutors have all the power, that’s where I could have the biggest impact to achieve justice,” Gross says. “But while the rest of the world tends to focus on the position and the title in terms of power, I really learned that it’s not the position. It’s in the ability to get people behind you.”
In her early work, that meant getting witnesses to understand that Gross was working on their behalf and letting police know that she empathized and related to them. In other capacities, it’s meant being clear and honest with clients and coworkers. “They have to know
that you understand their concerns and want to make them successful,” Gross says. “That was foundational for me.”
While her experiences have been varied, Gross says inefficiency and complacency are usually what end up in her crosshairs if she’s left to her own devices. “I’m always thinking of a new way to handle a process or problem,” Gross says. “If you tell me this is how it’s done, you might as well put a bullseye on it. I’m going to find a different way, especially if it means making it more efficient.”
At Bayer, that has meant revamping the contract management process in an effort to keep legal doing the highest value work possible. “We did a significant amount of customer interviews and assessed what value legal was bringing to the process,” she says. A significant amount of lower-tiered work was able to be handled by more appropriate parties and allowed Gross’s team to focus on more business-partner-oriented work.
When it came to the trainings to accompany legal’s shift, Gross says giving paralegals the chance to lead the trainings is an essential part of her leadership approach. It also fits in line with what Gross considers her strengths as a leader. “I love to start new projects, but I have to empower my team to execute it. That’s how you grow and that’s how they grow,” Gross says.
The betterment of others can often mean losing good talent to new and diverse opportunities, but Gross says not exposing your employees to all available
Morrison & Foerster congratulates Shirell Gross, Vice President and Head of Law for Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Radiology, on her accomplishments and recognition by Profile Magazine. At Morrison & Foerster, our commitment to excellence begins with the understanding that each of our clients has unique needs. We are dedicated to finding creative solutions that ensure our clients achieve their business goals.
mofo.com
opportunities is ignoring a fiduciary responsibility. Gross’s legal team is extra lean at the moment because an inordinate number of her team members and direct reports keep getting promoted. “That’s what my job is,” Gross says. “Getting those people developed with the skills to be available for those promotions.”
“Lawyers become lawyers because they want to help people get where they want to be.”
Gross’s focus on empowerment goes outside of her day job. She speaks about and conducts leadership development. She teaches a nontraditional women’s Sunday school that works to remind women that “there are people at church who want them to be healthy and happy,” Gross says. “People don’t do a good job of letting people know they value them, and I hope to help underserved communities to remember how important they are.”
The desire to work for the betterment of those around her might also be in Gross’s blood. Her mother was fourteen and in the eighth grade when she gave birth to Gross, but she did everything she could even at that young age to make sure her daughter was exposed to programs and activities that she might not be able to provide for her outright.
Between fellowships, scholarships, and a college dean who made it their mission to make sure Gross was always able to register for classes, Gross says she feels it’s her duty to give back. “Lawyers become lawyers because they want to help people get where they want to be,” says Gross, who is currently working on a book chronicling her life experiences. “I have an obligation to be part of the fabric of society.”
CULTURE
Financial Leadership Means Putting People First
Mike Neller’s people-first approach is developing the next generation of leaders at Aon
Words by LIOR PHILLIPS Photos by CASS DAVIS
Mike Neller SVP, Global Controller & Chief Accounting Officer Aon
TThough his role as global controller and chief accounting officer for massive global professional services firm Aon might suggest a single-minded focus on numbers, Mike Neller understood from an early age the importance of putting people first. His parents were teachers who always stressed curiosity and empathy. “They raised my brother and I to always be ethical, direct, and kind to everyone, regardless of status,” he says. Upon graduating from Trinity University with a degree in accounting and finance, Neller began his quest to find a role that could fuse his myriad passions. In his seven years at Aon, Neller has found the perfect outlet for his business acumen, math skills, and people-first nature.
Before finding his way to Aon, Neller put in time at Arthur Andersen, and then established many of his strengths at KPMG. There he focused on client service and delivery, putting his people skills into practice. “Mike cut his teeth at KPMG and made a profound impact on the professionals that he worked with. Mike creates a work environment that is both supportive and developmental for his people and he’s brought that same perspective to Aon,” said Tim Buikema, partner in KPMG Chicago’s audit practice. “Mike makes you feel comfortable talking with him, whether it’s about specific business issues or the general business environment, and he enables you to think differently about how you are making a difference in business and in the organizations and communities that matter to you.”
Neller spent his final two years in the firm’s national office, partnering with engagement teams to find solutions for complex financial reporting problems. “When I was just beginning my career, I thought I really wanted to be a ‘finance guy,’ not an accountant, even though I didn’t know what that meant at the time. But I quickly realized that I enjoyed solving problems and helping other people, which my career path has allowed me to do,” he says.
Neller found that the right role would need to fulfill three key criteria: he’d need to always be learning, to add value to his team and organization, and, most importantly, to have fun. The industry and other specifics of the role could change, but those three
Collaboration. Dedication. Vision. Grant Thornton congratulates you.
Grant Thornton appreciates that success is built on more than just talent; it’s about a culture of passion, aspiration and teamwork that moves the boundaries of organizational achievement. On behalf of Grant Thornton, we congratulate Michael Neller of Aon on his leadership that inspires his teams’ accomplishments.
“Mike Neller exemplifies best-in-class leadership and brings Aon’s values to life. His ability to listen and put others first cultivates a strong culture of trust and collaboration. His approach is helping shape Aon’s next generation of leaders.”
JOHAN JOSEPH
values were non-negotiable. Even working as a busboy at a wine bar at fourteen years old, Neller saw that the harder he worked, the less stress everyone else felt, the more successful the restaurant could be, and the better he felt about his work. “Even though I’m not busing tables, I still feel that my job is to serve others: specifically our shareholders and my colleagues, regardless of title or position,” Neller says.
Another important lesson learned at an earlier age was that leadership has nothing to do with a title or position in a company. “Real leaders start leading long before they’ve got people reporting to them,” Neller says. And then once a more senior position is reached, a good leader will continue to see their role as one of service and support. “People are always going to learn more and be more fulfilled in their lives and in their roles if you’re allowing them to figure out their own path,” he adds. “My job is really to keep people learning, developing, engaged, and motivated.”
And his colleagues are taking note. Akshay Arora, client partner for insurance at Genpact, puts it this way: “Mike is a well-rounded leader with broader sense of
ecosystem partnership, knowledge of how to bring in the mechanics of team of teams, creating a virtual ecosystem to support the business and partner in the growth and strategy of the business.”
Neller first joined Aon as vice president and head of technical accounting and policy in 2011, but was promoted to his current role in February 2018. Even early in his tenure he found that the company’s culture and mission fit perfectly with his three criteria. Additionally, he noted that Aon had recruited a vast spectrum of excellent talent over the years. That diversity, he adds, is essential to the success of a good leader and a good organization. To make the right decision, leadership needs to see every side of the story—but that’s not possible with a single viewpoint. By building a team with a variety of strengths, talents, and perspectives, Aon had assembled the perfect platform to help Neller and the controllership team to succeed in helping the company reach its goals while protecting the company from undue risk.
“We’re asked to be creative, but first and foremost, we have to stay within the rules and make sure everyone else is doing the
same,” Neller explains. As for most accounting departments, acting as a collaborative business partner and balancing that rule set with other departments eager to move quickly and grow can be a challenge. A former soccer player, Neller relies on the sport for analogies that explain the best way forward on that path. “On one hand, our job is to be the referee: We have to hold the line and ensure the rules are followed,” he explains. “But then sometimes we also need to be the coach.” In other words, the department needs to be proactive in its work with other departments and business partners, training them to understand the rules of the game and work collaboratively to develop creative solutions that are within the rules. And equally as important, it’s critical that the team is always on the field, so they will know the players and can understand the strategy of the business and other functions and serve as global connectors.
In one of his earliest experiences at the organization, Neller went to his supervisor for advice on a colleague problem he’d been facing at work. “My former boss, Laurie Meissner, listened to me blab for a solid five
minutes, and then instead of having her own solution, she wanted to help me find the best path forward,” Neller says. “I distinctly remember her stating, ‘What can you do to help this person be successful.’ It helped me realize that nothing is more important than helping others.” In addition to providing the best results, that approach ensures that people like Neller will be able to develop and advance in their careers. “That may sound soft coming from the accounting department, but I truly am grateful to work for Aon and to have incredible former and current bosses, both of which value our shareholders, people, and our clients above anything else,” he adds.
Neller is now ensuring that he passes this same mentality down to the members of his team. All of the department’s work is done to continue to improve the position of Aon and the success of the company’s clients, so thinking critically and working entrepreneurially is essential. “That provides a support mechanism to try new things, to come up with new ideas, to continue to make our company better,” Neller says.
In turn, Neller credits his two Aon supervisors as helping develop his mind-set of servant leadership and strong people-first culture. He learned firsthand the value of listening from Meissner, his first boss who retired in 2018, while he gleans myriad lessons from current CFO Christa Davies, every day they interact.
“It takes time to change a company’s culture, and the longer that I’ve been here, the stronger I’ve been able to see it become,” Neller says. “Even in my very early days I knew this was a very special place, and it all started from the top, from Greg and Christa.” But just as important, he adds, is being open to learning from customers and team members. Everyone has something they can teach, and a good listener makes a good leader.
“Mike Neller exemplifies best-in-class leadership and brings Aon’s values to life,” said Johan Joseph, Aon’s lead relationship principal at Grant Thornton. “His ability to listen and put others first cultivates a strong culture of trust and collaboration. His approach is helping shape Aon’s next generation of leaders.”
Only months into his tenure at Aon, the organization decided to move its
headquarters from Chicago to London. That’s a major move for any company, but one that Aon was making boldly and confidently, again relying on communication and a wide span of perspectives. In every stage of the move, leadership brought together a diverse, cross-functional group to brainstorm solutions to any challenges that might arise. “I loved it.” he says. “It was such an energizing process, and I knew at that time that I’d be here long-term.”
Major projects like these can be incredibly stressful, but another important responsibility of a leader is to manage stress—both for themselves and for their team. Yet again, good preparation and enthusiastic teamwork are the basis for success; to Neller, that comes down to another set of three important factors: having the right people, finding ways of connecting them on the right opportunities, and developing a balanced execution strategy. “We often get so focused on the execution part of our daily tasks and projects that we forget about the people side,” he says. “The people need to come first, because without them you won’t be able to determine or execute the right strategy.”
Most important to Neller is the long-term success of his colleagues and his company. On one wall in the accounting department, Neller has posted a quote from entrepreneur and author Sheryl Sandberg: “Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” Day in and day out, walking past the quote brings a refreshed focus to his team’s work. “It can be so easy to get caught up in less important questions: What’s my role? How do I get promoted? What comes next?” he says. “But that’s not what really matters to our company, nor to my team and my colleagues’ success. I want the ability to have an impact on others. And most of all, as Ms. Sandberg so eloquently states, an impact that will last in my absence.”
Duff & Phelps congratulates Michael Neller and wishes him continued success
By Clint Worthington
brings his considerable knowledge of technology to bear in the complex field of automotive electronics IP law
Visteon’s Dalpreet Saluja
Dalpreet Saluja
Tejasvir
“Ever since I can remember, I’ve had an interest in new things, new technologies,” explains Dalpreet Saluja. “I wasn’t a tinkerer, I didn’t build things, but I was always interested in what tech does, how it works, what its purpose is.”
As associate general counsel and chief IP counsel for automobile technology company Visteon, Saluja oversees all the IP concerns for the nearly $3.2 billion company, from patents to trademarks, open source, copyright, litigation, transactions and more. “Anything that relates to IP for the company falls under my responsibility,” Saluja explains. It’s that interest that sustains him and keeps him passionate in his IP work, allowing him an opportunity to learn about new automobile electronics technologies that are happening three or five years down the road.
Saluja’s current passion for IP law is partially borne from his background in computer science, which has frequently interwoven with his primary line of work. Starting his career in the public sector as a patent examiner for the US Patent Office, Saluja sees this initial
work as a solid foundation for the rest of his career––he got to see the ins and outs of how the patent office works, gaining a solid grasp of the rules and processes behind patent law. From there, he worked at IP boutique Brooks Kushman and automotive electronics firm Harman International Industries (acquired by Samsung Electronics in 2017) before settling into his current role.
This breadth of experience is particularly useful for Visteon, which recently changed direction from its history as a Tier 1 automotive supplier of traditional mechanical and electro-mechanical automotive parts into focusing strictly on cockpit electronics and technology solutions for connected and autonomous vehicles, as well as in the burgeoning autonomous driving space. “My expertise comes into play every day,” he says, helping
him to better understand the products and patents he is called in to protect. Due to this understanding of technology, Saluja finds it easier to have conversations with engineers, ask the right questions, and push the conversation in ways that allow him to fight for stronger IP protection.
In an arena as vast and complicated as automotive electronics, Saluja must navigate many complex issues regarding IP in his work as chief IP counsel. “I have to ask, “What is it we’re doing here?’” he says. “Are we just protecting the algorithm?” In some instances, it may make sense for Visteon to look outside of patent protection for a new property – making these kinds of determinations is where Saluja’s understanding of technology intersects perfectly with his IP work. “Dalpreet’s strategy is to maximize the value of Visteon’s IP while minimizing costs,” says Matt Mowers, shareholder at Quinn IP Law. “With Dalpreet’s leadership, we are able to deliver high quality, cost-controlled IP rights that reflect Visteon’s standing as a global technology innovator.”
Saluja is often engaged in more than the pure IP function; he also does a great deal of
cross-functional work for Visteon. “As chief IP counsel, my role is to interact with engineers,” he admits. “But really, it’s a role that encompasses multiple stakeholders across all levels.” He considers his role one in which he works with several groups at a time on any given project, whether it’s the engineering team, IT, human resources, management, or others.
This diversity of work within the role is part of what attracted Saluja to Visteon in the first place: “I have the opportunity to roll up my sleeves and work on other areas than just IP.” In addition to his primary responsibility as Visteon’s head of IP, Saluja also counsels the company’s other functions such as marketing and communications, IT, and purchasing. He also gets the chance to formulate and implement risk mitigation strategies for the company. Saluja relishes this chance to be more of a generalist: “It helps me think outside the box, keep other skills fresh and active, and gets me out of a pure IP focus.”
When he does focus on IP, however, Saluja works hard to elevate the visibility of IP within Visteon’s corporate culture. To achieve this goal, Saluja is implementing a number of
Fueled By Legacy
For Dalpreet Saluja, working in Visteon’s Detroit headquarters keeps his work grounded in the city’s storied history as the mecca for the US auto industry. “Detroit is the city of cars,” Saluja says proudly. Even as his work at Visteon is focused more on cockpit electronics and autonomous driving, he still feels the history and innate knowledge of car building and manufacturing the city generates. “Sure, other cities know [car] software backwards and forwards, but you need to know how a car still works,” says Saluja. “That’s where Detroit has its impact—its success in the auto industry and its ability to push the needle forward.”
PROTECTING CREATIONS OF THE HUMAN MIND
Humans are extraordinary. Our ability to create makes us distinctive from other beings. And when we invent something incredibly exceptional, we should protect it. That’s where we come in.
Dickinson Wright provides strategic guidance in portfolio protection and the full-range of intellectual property prosecution and litigation services.
To learn more, reach out to one of our intellectual property law leaders: Richard
and recognize him for his innovative work and leadership.
programs to foster greater awareness of his department’s role in the company and a better understanding of how IP works. “It’s important to recognize the stakeholders who are most key to a robust IP program: innovators,” Saluja notes. “Without them, you don’t really have an IP program.” As associate general counsel and chief IP counsel, Saluja feels he must be proactive in his role at Visteon, doing as much as he can to increase visibility within the company. To do this, Saluja frequently engages in outreach initiatives, including training sessions. When it comes to accomplishing these goals, Saluja recognizes that he and his IP team cannot be everywhere, so “you have to be creative about how and where you’re proactive.” Through his existing work, Saluja has strived to improve employee engagement throughout the company.
DICKINSON WRIGHT PLLC: “We commend Associate General Counsel and Chief Intellectual Property Counsel Dalpreet Saluja for his outstanding leadership at Visteon Corporation. We are pleased to work with someone at the forefront of innovation, inspiration, and possibilities.” –Jonathan D. Baker, Member
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Benchmark our abilities and achievements against other law firms to understand why global innovators like Visteon Corporation select Quinn IP Law to deliver intellectual property services.
We are proud to work with Dalpreet Saluja and the Visteon team, and are honored by the trust they place in our firm.
Creating a Toolbox for Continual Learning
Innovative instruction and relationship building help shape Malissia Pendleton’s award-winning team at BrightSpring
By KELLI LAWRENCE
Chief learning officers are a relatively new addition to the C-suite—the position first began popping up in the 1990s. Malissia Pendleton was new to the workforce back then, finding her way forward, starting in field operations in the quick-service retail industry via Louisville-based Yum! Brands, and finishing a double major in business administration and business management. “CLO” wasn’t yet in her career alphabet. However, “ops” and “IT” both were. By the early 2000s, she was finding success in field operations before moving to corporate as an IT field systems group lead/technical analyst. But a mentor saw skill sets within Pendleton that would bring all the different letters together for her soon enough.
“My mentor asked me if I’d ever considered a career in project management,” she recalls. “And I remember thinking at that time that I had no idea what I wanted to do. However, I knew that I needed some guidance to help navigate me through determining the next step in my career path.”
Malissia Pendleton Chief Learning Officer
BrightSpring Health Services
Nick Bonura Photography
Pendleton got busy “filling up her toolbox,” as she calls it, with learning about things like having crucial conversations, developing critical thinking skills, and being a team player. By the time she was deeper into project management training, she’d decided to learn more about marketing as well, since she supported marketing projects at that time. “I wanted to understand more about the business and what they were discussing in project meetings and leadership roundtables. I wanted to learn more about making key decisions about price points, consumer data, forecasts, product development, and so forth,” she explains. “I didn’t want to just keep up with the project management piece of driving timelines; I wanted to have my own voice—a seat at the table. But I didn’t know what exactly a seat at the table truly meant at the time.”
She learned what it meant soon enough. As part of a centralized project management office (PMO) team, she put a great deal of effort into making sure important employees were coming to the proverbial “table” and that their insight and feedback was heard. “My job was to ensure key decision makers have the right information at the right time to make the best decisions for the company,” she says. Leading a PMO team came next, as it became clear that she had much to give in that capacity.
“It was one of those things where you’re providing support to someone and they see you in a much bigger role, believing in you and seeing a competency and strength in you that you didn’t see in yourself,” Pendleton says. “I was extremely lucky to have access to great leaders who served as mentors in my career, who had global foresight and were willing to invest time in me. I learned a tremendous amount in a very short time span by having exposure to leaders who shared how they have dealt with strategic business and people issues and how they go about solving them.”
After more than a decade of accumulating and honing her skills, a previous mentor and confidant informed Pendleton about an opportunity at BrightSpring Health Services (formerly known as ResCare) that she couldn’t refuse: a chance to build a training department from the ground up with a new CEO at the helm.
“Everything I had heard about BrightSpring and the opportunity was ignited when I heard that a new CEO was coming on board,” Pendleton says. “I did not want to pass up the opportunity.”
BrightSpring Health Services is one of the largest providers of diversified home and community-based health services to complex populations. The company provides both nonclinical habilitative services and clinical rehabilitative services for people of all ages and skill levels. Its primary businesses include: behavioral health (including autism services); home health care (including personal care, home health, and hospice); neurotherapies; pharmacy and telecare ancillary technologies and services; and job placement and vocational training. Each service line has its own business processes, innovations, and fundamental challenges requiring training, to say nothing of the necessary field testing, implementation, and oversight. But in realizing BrightSpring’s employees to be its most valuable asset, Pendleton uses her “operator lens” at every turn in hopes of generating the best growth and development experiences possible for every employee.
“Whether we’re onboarding new employees or training our workforce on new system platforms, tools, and/or processes, it’s important that they have what they need to know to do their jobs well,” she says. “We want the experience we’re providing to be not only welcoming, but an extension of our culture.”
“With our rapid pace and agile development, everything is done in three to five months. Normally for an instructional design team, you’re lucky if you can develop and launch a new program in eighteen to twentyfour months!”
MALISSIA PENDLETON
In 2017, BrightSpring introduced a new chief human resources officer, ushering a new era in HR for the company and a new mentor for Pendleton. Pendleton credits her CHRO for helping expedite a new vision that has put an extreme focus on people, training, and organizational development and effectiveness and for creating the chief learning officer position, further emphasizing the company’s investment toward learning and innovation.
BrightSpring now invests heavily in its culture and people. It has fueled the launch of its new values and core behaviors: LEGACY (Leadership, Environment, Get going, Attitude, Communication, and You be an example). These behavior expectations
ensure that the company’s forty-five thousand employees across forty-plus states and thousands of locations are always striving for teamwork, quality, and operational excellence in everything they do, every day.
Of course, developing an understanding of BrightSpring’s culture is just a fraction of what Pendleton and her team set out to do for employees. “As soon as I was able to get a hold of what our company’s strategic road map was—to understand and visit each division’s operations, speak to each president, and know what needs work—not only were we working on a new culture training and defining leadership training, I drew out what type of organizational structure I needed on my team in order to support
and deliver those programs,” she says. “You must always know how your strategy, structure, and culture are to be organized for the future. It’s important that you don’t get caught up in the ‘now,’ but what you will need to solve for the future and to ensure successful growth.”
As those structures came to pass and Pendleton cultivated a regular dialogue with BrightSpring’s CEO and other top executives, her “new” team quickly became a leading learning and organizational development team. As she witnesses her team of highly educated and experienced learning professionals, she takes pride in the innovative strides they’ve already made.
“With our rapid pace and agile development, everything is done in three to five months,” Pendleton says. “Normally for an instructional design team, you’re lucky if you can develop and launch a new program in eighteen to twenty-four months. Most training teams use third-party vendors to design for them, but this can be inefficient due to lengthy vendor timelines along with extensive costs. It also makes it difficult to prove your value to the organization if you’re always in a bottleneck to the operation’s success.”
Appreciation and value for BrightSpring’s learning and organizational development team took a more literal form this past fall, when the Kentucky chapter of the Association for Talent Development named it the recipients of 2018’s IMPACT award. But for Pendleton, the best reward comes with watching her team continue to grow as they learn first-hand how to gain an “ops lens” from Pendleton while developing new skill sets beyond the typical “instructional designer” or “organizational development” job role, and in Pendleton’s continued ability to see things through her own “operator lens” while appreciating the strong interpersonal relationships she builds along the way.
Pendleton recognizes her CHRO as being fundamental in implementing the company’s new vision that emphasizes people and training.
Nick Bonura Photography
By Chris Gigley
How a sudden confrontation with reality changed Kimberly Kauffman’s career plans and led her to University of Phoenix
Law degree in hand, Kimberly Kauffman left Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law in 1999 with her career all mapped out: she would work her way up at a big law firm and eventually become partner.
Kimberly Kauffman VP & Deputy General Counsel University of Phoenix
That’s not exactly how things went. Now, as vice president and deputy general counsel at University of Phoenix, Kauffman is helping the university become a customer service ace for its employees. This is a pivotal time for the university, which was hiring new staff at an incredible rate when she became senior corporate counsel for parent company Apollo Education Group in 2009.
“When I arrived, the company had been expanding so rapidly that there were growing pains with that,” Kauffman says. “The new people coming in hadn’t been in the trenches during the start-up phase, creating a sort of identity conflict.”
Over the past few years, the university has scaled back on personnel, creating even more angst in the workforce. Kauffman downplays her role in reshaping the university’s culture, but she is undoubtedly a key influence.
“As an attorney, I wouldn’t say my goal is having a direct cultural impact,” she says.
“My largest client is the human resources department, and one of its primary focuses now is reshaping employee culture and making this an even better place to work.”
Few are better advisors on that subject.
Kauffman’s career is marked by unforeseen circumstances and opportunities she’s made the most of. But in the beginning, everything was going just as she’d planned. Kauffman spent three years as a labor and employment litigator at Snell & Wilmer in Phoenix. Lewis & Roca LLP hired her in 2002 for commercial litigation with an emphasis on construction. The firm put her on the partnership track.
A year later, however, life happened. Her husband, a US Marine reservist, was activated and deployed to Iraq for the second Persian Gulf War (Operation Iraqi Freedom).
“That was the Iraq war where you had all the embedded reporters,” Kauffman says. “You
“We want to offer great opportunities for employees so that even though it may take longer to get to that director-level position than it used to, they can still grow as employees.”
could flip on any station and see battles happening in real time.”
She was working late preparing for a trial when a television news station broke the news that the war had officially begun.
“It had an extraordinary effect on me,” Kauffman says. “All of a sudden, I was confronted with my husband’s mortality. It made me reevaluate everything. When he returned, I thought it was time to step back and focus on us as a family.”
That didn’t stop Kauffman from pursuing her career. In 2005, the city of Scottsdale, Arizona, hired her as an assistant city attorney, a position she still looks back on fondly.
The job got Kauffman back into labor and employment litigation, which she says she missed as a commercial litigator at Lewis & Roca. It also gave her the chance to expand into other types of litigation, primarily defending the city from court claims. She spent most of her time, however, advising the police and fire departments on HR issues.
In 2007, Kauffman’s brother, also a labor and employment attorney, recommended her for a job he was leaving, an in-house role as assistant general counsel for US Airways. As much as she enjoyed city government, Kauffman thought about her future and took the job.
“There are not an extraordinary number of large companies in Phoenix with in-house legal departments,” Kauffman says. “It was great opportunity to get my foot in the door in an in-house role.”
A year later, Kauffman landed at Apollo Education Group, where she took the initiative to broaden her experience. She asked her manager if she could learn what he did in executive compensation and benefits.
“He had been a labor and employment lawyer, learned compensation and benefits, and segued into those areas,” Kauffman says.
“I wanted to expand my expertise and learn more, so I asked to start shadowing him and cross train in those areas. He was extremely amenable to it.”
Kauffman earned more responsibility as her manager neared retirement. When she took over for him last September, she was ready to help the University of Phoenix HR department strengthen employee culture and staff relationships.
Her input has shaped a number of initiatives that help drive employee engagement and satisfaction. For instance, the university has increased on-the-job training opportunities and created employee interest groups. The staff cafeteria has become more robust, regularly featuring different food themes and choices.
“We want to offer great opportunities for employees so that even though it may take longer to get to that director-level position than it used to, they can still grow as employees,” Kauffman says.
Kauffman is an ideal case study. All of her prior changes in plans helped lead her to the university and the experiences she gained along the way helped shape her for her current role there.
“Barring an amazing opportunity, I’m not going anywhere for the foreseeable future,” she says. “I’m learning new things and I’m really happy.”
But as Kauffman’s legal expertise continues to grow, so do her horizons. If her career has taught her anything, it’s that even the best laid plans can change at any time.
Littler Mendelson would like to congratulate Kimberly Kauffman on this well-deserved recognition. Kim is a skilled attorney and an asset to her organization and the legal profession. She serves her company extremely well and is a great legal partner. Thank you, Kim, for all that you do.
Collaboration is Key at Kodiak Building Partners
Kodiak’s CEO and founder, Steve Swinney, has mastered the art of unifying the companies he has acquired over the past eight years
By ABHINANDA DATTA
As the founder and CEO of Kodiak Building Partners, Steve Swinney focuses on casting a vision and strategy for the company, as well as reinforcing the culture.
“It’s all about communication and talking to our team about our work as we grow both internally and through acquisitions,” Swinney says.
Swinney started his career in public accounting, and went on to receive an MBA at the University of Texas. He has worked in finance in the distribution space for renowned companies such as Target Corporation.
Along the way, he got the opportunity to build a finance team for ProBuild Inc.—a large lumberyard chain—which sparked his interest in the building and housing industry.
“We went through the housing downturn during my time at ProBuild,” Swinney says. “A couple of folks on my team and I wanted to start a new company with a vision of constructing a building distribution company a little differently than what we had experienced before.”
And thus, Kodiak Building Partners was born. Kodiak is building an organization with a diverse customer mix including new residential, repair and remodel, and commercial materials distribution. The company is owned by a combination of the management team and private investors, many of whom have been invested with the company since its founding in 2011.
“During my time at ProBuild, the industry got cut in half and many companies went out of business. Every company was struggling. At the tail end of 2010, we saw there was a tremendous opportunity for recovery and growth that was coming for the industry. We felt like it was an opportune time to start placing investments in this industry,” he says.
The founders invested their own money and gathered capital from investors to buy a struggling company in the industry in Denver that had about eighty employees and $20
million in sales. It was right on the edge of being able to stay in business.
“We rolled up our sleeves and, along with the local team, turned that business around in 2011 and 2012,” Swinney says. “We started attracting new capital and continued to acquire businesses. We are entering our eighth year now, and in addition to twenty acquisitions, we have also seen 15 to 20 percent annual organic growth in our existing businesses,” he says.
According to Swinney, in his industry, talent is a premium concern and the challenge they are facing is labor shortage. One of the things most important to him is the company’s focus on engaging and retaining key employees. His aim is to provide employees with a familyoriented organization and autonomy in their work environment. Another goal of Swinney’s is to foster a collaborative culture.
“We want to reinforce a culture that people want to be a part of so we don’t have people leaving the organization. We want to attract the best people in our industry to be a part of what we are doing,” he says.
Kodiak is not a command and control organization, Swinney says. Rather than giving orders, he prefers listening to his employees and supporting them. Yet it’s a challenge to maintain a decentralized environment when the company is a result of acquisitions.
“Our industry is one that historically has been very fragmented and dominated by family-owned companies,” Swinney says. “So most of the time when we’re acquiring a company, it’s one that has a legacy of several generations. We try to be the stewards of the culture they have built, keeping the local brands and names, not changing the name to Kodiak.”
CEO & Founder
Steve Swinney
Kodiak Building Partners
“We try to integrate those cultures and bring all these twenty companies into one collective team,” Swinney says. “We’re highly focused on being decentralized and keeping decision making and leadership very close to the customer,” Swinney says.
Andrew Roise, territory manager at Epicor Software, couldn’t agree more with Swinney’s assessment of Kodiak’s culture. “Kodiak has built a culture of trust; they trust each other, they trust their partners, and they focus on results—which we see firsthand through their implementation of business processes that put their employees and customers first. It’s a pleasure to work together in that way,” says Roise.
Swinney also focuses on rewarding his employees and including them in the ownership. People who are involved in the
leadership of the business collectively own about 20 percent of Kodiak. This helps them maintain an entrepreneurial culture.
“This way, when people make decisions on behalf of the company, you know they’re not only making decisions for the company but also for themselves,” he says.
Communication is imperative for a company like Kodiak, and Swinney and his team talk about their culture and values during the very first conversation with a potential acquisition.
“Once an acquisition is complete, we try to culturally unify the company,” Swinney says. “We do this through location visits and communication in our newsletters. We have an internal app that all our employees use; we use social media to reinforce the culture we’re trying to maintain, and bring together
key employees at our annual Leadership Summit,” he says.
With Kodiak achieving great success, Swinney is involved in making positive contributions to the communities in which he operates. He pays attention to the construction industry and is particularly drawn to Habitat for Humanity. Kodiak Building Partners has sponsored several homes for the organization over the last few years.
“More than the financial growth of the company, the thing that has been most fulfilling for me is seeing people thrive in the culture we have created,” Swinney says. “It is especially meaningful to see the impact we have on our companies and communities and to be able to attract the best and brightest people and companies in our industry to become part of the growing Kodiak family!”
Team members at Kodiak Kent Youngblood
IBM’s Christina Montgomery finds new ways to inform investors about the company’s diversity and environmental accomplishments
By Peter Fabris
Christina Montgomery VP, Assistant General Counsel, & Secretary IBM
More than a decade ago, a series of prominent corporate accounting fraud scandals—Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco—shook the investment world. The incidents prompted accounting and reporting reforms and changed the approach investors took to monitoring corporate governance.
Today, major institutional investors that own significant stakes in most large, public companies want more information than that contained in quarterly and annual financial reports. They want assurance that the business is managed well; its culture and values, approach to human capital, environmental performance, and social responsibility record all impact the bottom line. Increasingly, shareholders want a voice in company governance and the ability to influence business practices, according to Christina Montgomery, IBM’s vice president, assistant general counsel, and secretary. Montgomery leads the IT stalwart’s corporate governance team and is a key link to its investors.
innovative ways to provide that assurance, highlight the company’s accomplishments, and communicate its goals.
In this climate, blue chip corporations have boosted efforts to reveal more about themselves to investors. Companies need to clearly spell out what makes them sound components of an investment portfolio. “Investors and asset managers hold your company for the long haul if you are on an exchange,” Montgomery says. Prominent shareholders, especially those who manage index mutual funds, want to make sure their investments will be stable, strong performers over many years. Working with the board of directors, investor relations, and marketing and communications teams within IBM, Montgomery has developed
Public corporations are obligated to provide investors with certain information—quarterly reports, annual reports, and proxy statements—at various times throughout the year. IBM has become more proactive when it comes to informing its investors about governance matters in recent years. “We were always an open conduit but would only actively reach out on governance matters during proxy season,” Montgomery says. “Now we reach out formally at least twice a year, once during proxy season and once in the offseason.” And when the company announces a major business development initiative, it takes pains to explain the philosophy behind it in depth.
For example, one key concern for shareholders stemming from the corporate fraud scandals of the last decade was to ensure that boards of directors were independent minded, not rubber stamps for C-suite decision makers. So when IBM announced an agreement to acquire opensource enterprise software company Red Hat, IBM’s largest
Dan Nelken Photography, LLC
acquisition ever, for $34 billion, the company explained in detail how the board was involved in making the decision.
IBM’s annual environmental report, released for twenty-eight consecutive years, provides shareholders with updates to corporate environmental policy and risk mitigation. The document chronicles progress toward various goals including CO 2 emissions reduction, recycling, and use of renewable energy, and highlights recognition by environmental groups. This initiative has established the company as a leader in corporate environmental responsibility.
Investors also want to know how environmental strategy impacts financial performance. For example, the annual environmental document recently covered how IBM’s blockchain technology is being used to track the flow of plastic in oceans, providing an example of how the technology can be applied toward new business opportunities. Proxy statements have also become an outlet for distributing environmental updates such as the company’s increased use of renewable energy in the supply chain. Communicating IBM’s accomplishments to shareholders demonstrates the company’s commitment to environmental matters and sustainability.
Montgomery also ensures that IBM’s efforts to broaden employee skills and make the workforce more diverse are well understood. A central concern: Will the company have workers with the skills to support longterm growth? One recent example is how the company nurtures workers for “new-collar” jobs through the Pathways in Technology Early College High Schools (P-TECH) program that it sponsors with technical high schools. P-TECH students combine study and apprenticeships with a two-year college degree program in a STEM field at no cost. The company helps fund the curriculum at 200 schools around the world.
Studies have shown that a diverse workforce results in a more successful company, and investors have taken note. In fact, State Street Global Advisors demonstrated its interest in gender diversity through the Fearless Girl campaign, which featured a statue of a young girl facing down the famous Wall Street Bull statue in downtown Manhattan. The campaign was not just a publicity stunt. The investment giant’s Gender Diversity Index tracks stock performance of large US companies with the most women serving in corporate leadership, an indicator of how seriously large investors take this issue. With a female CEO and several female C-Suite executives, IBM is a leader in empowering women leaders, Montgomery notes, and investor relations efforts make that point clear.
Her colleagues have taken note of Montgomery’s leadership as well. “Christina Montgomery brings an invaluable perspective to IBM, and always finds novel ways to tackle complex problems,” says Cravath, Swaine & Moore partner Steve Burns. “Her combination of intellect and common sense make her an extraordinary business lawyer, and it is a pleasure working with her.”
Investors can peruse a summary of multiple programs in IBM’s annual corporate responsibility report. In 2018, the company also held an investor webcast for social responsibility that Montgomery said was well received. Both outlets covered how the company protects data privacy. A critical principle: “Client data and the insights produced on IBM’s cloud, or from IBM’s AI, are owned by IBM’s clients.”
Such policies help demonstrate that the company has thought through the risks of new technologies and has taken steps to reduce those risks. Montgomery will continue to champion such policies and assure investors that top management and the board will stay focused on social responsibility so investors can confidently consider IBM a solid long-term investment.
When Shortcuts Are a Bad Idea
By RUSS KLETTKE
Unconscious bias can be a drag on companies that want to succeed in diverse markets. Legg Mason’s Regina Curry, with wholehearted backing by her CEO, is working to change that.
Regina Curry played the numbers three and four positions on the basketball court while on a full-ride academic scholarship at Northern Kentucky University. That may have led to her being the chief diversity officer at Legg Mason today, but you have to understand a little about basketball to know why.
The third position, also called the small forward, is played by the overall most versatile of the five women on the court. Quickness and strength are the chief assets. Position four—the power forward—usually
goes to the team’s most versatile scorer, able to earn points close to the basket but also someone who can sink midrange jump shots up to eighteen feet away.
“Sports absolutely played a role in my development,” says Curry. “It taught me discipline, teamwork, and humility.”
She applied those skills while working in different industries. Prior to Legg Mason, she served in similar and adjacent functions in consumer packaged goods (McCormick and Company Inc.) and chemical manufacturing (Millennium Chemicals). These are widely divergent workplaces serving very different customer/consumer markets. The
business value of diversity and inclusion was adopted earlier in the CPG world because they recognized the demographic changes taking place and the increased buying power of diverse groups.
What’s noticeably different about her current position is that asset management is historically a homogenous place; the archetypal Wall Street investor is male and white. But growing awareness of the need for formal diversity efforts, together with recognition about the expectations of its clients, led Legg Mason CEO Joe Sullivan to create the chief diversity officer role. Curry was the first person to take the job.
“It’s true that consumer packaged goods companies are further ahead with this,” says Curry. “In asset management, we are catching up. It helps that the next generations entering the workforce are more diverse, and there’s broad consensus that diverse workplaces are positive.” In fact, she says that younger hires simply expect diversity and inclusion (D&I) as a matter of course.
In June 2017, Sullivan was one of more than 150 CEOs who signed up to support the creation of CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion, founded by the US chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Tim Ryan. This business coalition is dedicated to advancing D&I in the workplace.
Curry, who joined the firm in early 2018, immediately set out to assist Legg Mason with a range of D&I initiatives, including addressing unconscious bias and engaging in CEO Action activities.
To fully appreciate what these efforts are about requires understanding what unconscious bias is. “It’s about shortcuts in the brain,” says Curry. “Unconscious bias creates blind spots as we unknowingly, over time, build perceptions (about people) to make decisions.” By way of example, she mentions how we categorically discuss different ethnicities in limiting ways and how any mention of transgender individuals oddly and immediately involves concerns about bathrooms.
Acknowledging bias and working to overcome it starts at the top, she says, and Legg Mason’s senior leadership is clearly helping accomplish that. “But while D&I is leader led, it’s carried out by the middle layers,” she adds. “They make the most day-to-day decisions, so having everyone on board is crucial.”
Curry says her role is to constantly communicate how bias is inherent and needs to be rooted out. The company is engaging in a multitude of new initiatives: developing D&I goals into actionable strategies; analyzing data to identify key levers for improvement; partnering with clients in D&I activities; and creating a D&I governance structure with an executive D&I council and an employee resource group steering committee, to name a few.
If anyone says this is about being good corporate citizens, the “right thing to do,” Curry is quick to amend such thinking.
“We need different kinds of talent to meet our business goals,” she says. “We need diverse perspectives at every level of the firm. While asset management has not been known for diversity, investment diversification has always been core to mitigating risk and creating value in the industry.”
It’s also about diversity in its customer offerings. The firm’s products—mutual funds,
money market funds, 529 college savings plans, etc.—are designed for a broad crosssection of the population. Having a diverse employee base brings strength to those products and solutions. “Inclusion for us means growth,” says Curry.
As the financial services industry in general, and Legg Mason in particular, are dealing with a period of disruption, it’s no surprise that Curry is coaching the team through it. She knows how to win this game from experience.
Regina Curry
Chief Diversity Officer
Legg Mason
www.LeggMason.com/Together
STRATEGY
Structuring New Global Partnerships
Tony Pepper’s thirty-two years of experience in corporate law, governance, and public company compliance has led him to a key role in the $90 billion merger between the US company Praxair and the German company Linde AG
By LORI FREDERICKSON
Assistant General Counsel, Assistant Corporate Secretary, Chief Governance Officer
Sandra Costello
Tony Pepper
Praxair
IIn Tony Pepper’s corporate legal career, he has become an expert in navigating extraordinarily complex transactions and challenges, particularly in the midst of evolving, profound changes in laws and regulations. That expertise became increasingly valuable in his career, particularly since the explosion of corporate governance and related reforms that began with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. “There have been huge catalysts for additional regulation and oversight, including the response to corporate scandals such as WorldCom and Enron around 2001 and the 2008 financial crisis. These events led to far more comprehensive and complex corporate governance and public company laws and regulations,” Pepper says. “In order to do the job effectively, you have to be an expert in key legal disciplines such as securities laws and corporate governance, all of which are combined and are inextricably linked.”
Pepper learned that early on, as those reforms were being enacted. When he joined The Travelers Insurance Company in 2002 as corporate legal counsel, he was tasked with structuring its public company compliance and corporate governance functions in the multibillion-dollar spinoff of Travelers from Citigroup. In addition to handling the many challenges of structuring corporate governance and board practices—expertise he’d developed previously in a similar role at The Hartford Financial Services Company, which was spunoff from ITT Corporation in 1995—Pepper needed to build an entire new compliance structure for Travelers during a time when, as he puts it, “all of the rules were being rewritten.”
“There was a huge challenge at that time to structure compliance and corporate governance at Travelers as a new, large public company because numerous legal and corporate governance reforms were occurring as the Citigroup spinoff was occurring in
2002,” says Pepper. That experience taught him how to think fast and dig deep during large, complex corporate transactions, and to build a deep well of knowledge of underlying rules and regulations in order to create a smooth transition even when in the midst of evolving reforms and changing laws.
This expertise is part of what led Pepper to being recruited to Praxair in 2006, where a senior corporate attorney and assistant secretary was planning to retire, and Pepper was being groomed to assume that role. And this experience has served him well throughout his Praxair tenure, particularly when the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 was adopted in response to the 2008 financial crisis, which ushered in increasing levels of corporate governance and public company regulation. “In addition to these laws and regulations, even the private sector pressure from large investors and proxy advisory firms for better governance and accountability of boards of directors has ramped up significantly,” Pepper says. And this means that when any changes occur, attention to corporate governance structures and policies becomes even more important.
At Praxair, the legal challenges ramped up in 2016 when Praxair and Linde agreed in principle to a merger of equals. “There were enormous complexities and challenges to the corporate legal and governance structure of the merger of equals between Praxair, as a US public company, and Linde AG, as a German public company,” Pepper says. “Linde PLC, the new public holding company arising from the merger, is incorporated in Ireland with shares of stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. This resulted in a blend of US and European public company compliance and corporate governance standards. This was a cutting-edge deal with very few structural precedents.”
Pepper was able to take his previous experience with the spinoffs at The Hartford and Travelers, and a 2004 merger of equals between Travelers and the Saint Paul Insurance Company, and apply it to the Praxair-Linde merger, taking on a critical role in formulating and structuring corporate governance and public company compliance. “The challenge was, how do we integrate and make sure that we have a successful governance and board of directors structure that reflects the underlying laws, rules, and governance principles, while at the same time being sensitive to each board’s respective different practices and priorities?” Compliance was particularly important, he adds. “We have to be able to meet the governance standards and expectations of large institutional investors that own our company, and advise the board on key matters and developments,” Pepper says.
Because the new company is incorporated in Ireland but has stock listed in the US and in Germany, Linde PLC is subject to three sets of public company laws, rules and standards: those of Ireland, the US, and the European Union. This structure has created various new legal compliance challenges for which Pepper is providing leadership. While researching and learning about European standards, Pepper worked with a large team of in-house and external lawyers, accountants, and other professionals in preparing and filing extensive disclosure documents with both the US SEC and EU regulators, and also distributing them to shareholders. “I had the pleasure of working with Tony Pepper on the Praxair merger of equals with Linde AG to form a global industrial gases giant,” says Cian McCourt, partner at Arthur Cox. “Tony is a pragmatic and innovative leader with outstanding judgment and considerable experience in corporate governance.”
“As a result of Linde PLC’s two stock exchange listings, we became subject to
both US and certain EU public company rules,” Pepper says. Pepper led legal integration planning for the Praxair-Linde merger in two principal areas: matters related to the board of directors and corporate governance, and public company compliance (SEC and EU reporting and related compliance). “I had to make sure that there was a proper structure in place so that on day one, as soon as we closed the merger, we would be compliant,” Pepper says.
As board meetings have continued since the closing, he’s worked further to establish best practices, addressing issues related to public company and board compliance, as well as making further filings and disclosures. And as the new company continues to move forward, so will the compliance challenge. “It will remain a challenge because there are many rules and laws that will apply from Europe in addition to the US, and we will have to continue to successfully manage compliance,” Pepper says. “There’s also a learning curve for the directors of Linde PLC because the board is comprised
of twelve members: six former Praxair directors and six former Linde directors.”
It is, Pepper says, likely the greatest career challenge that he’s faced so far. But, he adds, it’s an exhilarating one, as Linde PLC now has approximately 80,000 employees worldwide, with a revenue of $27 billion and a stock market capitalization of $90 billion. And he considers himself equipped for the task with both his years of legal and working education, which he furthers as a member of the Society of Corporate Governance. “This is what I always dreamed about, managing the corporate governance and public company compliance of a company of this size and stature,” Pepper says. “I’m excited for what comes next.”
As the global leader in global registry services, Computershare congratulates Tony Pepper and Praxair-Linde on their successful merger. Tony recognized the complexity of this multi-jurisdictional transaction and the global expertise required to meet Linde’s cross-border registry needs. Tony’s partnership, ongoing leadership, and guidance helped make it a success! Learn more about Computershare at computershare.com
“In order to do the job effectively, you have to be an expert in key legal disciplines such as securities laws and corporate governance, all of which are combined and are inextricably linked.”
TONY PEPPER
Tech for Growth
CEO
Ron Nersesian
leads
electronics company Keysight
Technologies through continuous change toward its mission of providing a safer, more productive world
By KC ESPER
Within the ever-changing structure of technology is a network of chameleonic sub-teams that maintain and keep up with the flow of change. From the tiny glowing screens we monitor daily to the life-saving devices housed inside hospitals and government buildings, this invisible ecosystem runs our world with impeccable precision. Among the companies responsible for keeping this cycle moving is Keysight Technologies. Settled in Santa Rosa, California, just north of Silicon Valley, Keysight has managed to maintain
and heighten its versatility despite several company adjustments.
Originally part of Hewlett-Packard, and then later absorbed by Agilent, Keysight served as each company’s electronic test and measurement division. Within Agilent, Keysight functioned as the more quantifiable portion of the company, developing analyzers, calibration systems, and software programs, while Agilent focused on developing technology to advance life sciences. In 2014, however, Agilent announced its plan to separate the two sectors of the business, thus creating the current, freestanding Keysight Technologies. Along
with the change came the appointment of Ron Nersesian as president and CEO.
Since the start of his career in 1984, Nersesian has watched Keysight progress from a seed within Hewlett-Packard into the enterprise it is today. Nersesian, along with many other tenured employees, has developed Keysight into a company that has succeeded in assessing the needs of its audience and working to meet them.
“I’m not the only one with deep roots in HP and Agilent,” Nersesian explains. “Many, if not most, of our employees have been with us for decades and share a similar foundation of uncompromising integrity, measurement expertise, and passion to work as one to create value for customers, investors, and employees.”
An infrastructure of dedicated, experienced employees places Keysight at quite an advantage. The people who make up the company are key players in ensuring that the company keeps up with the ebb and flow of technology. Because Keysight started as a small sector within a massive company, it did not recognize its ability to grow. As it made its transition into an autonomous entity, it quickly realized the extent to which growth was necessary in order to succeed independently. Nersesian targeted this recognition to change as one of the greatest challenges the company faced when it moved away from its mother-brand.
“The biggest challenge was stimulating growth,” he says. “Because test and measurement was such a healthy revenue stream within the Agilent portfolio, the business had not received adequate investment for growth, and therefore had not grown for decades… Once we were established as a separate entity, it became very clear that growth was crucial if we were to create value for customers and shareholders.
“Today,” he continues, “Keysight is 100 percent focused on helping companies tackle the toughest electronic design, test, and measurement challenges through a
Ron Nersesian President & CEO Keysight Technologies
“Many, if not most, of our employees have been with us for decades and share a similar foundation of uncompromising integrity, measurement expertise, and passion to work as one.”
RON NERSESIAN
combination of trusted hardware, innovative software, and our own global team of industry experts, [making] our world more productive and a safer place to live.”
While Keysight continues to fulfill its goal of paving the way for innovative measurement technologies, it has never lost sight of the people who have helped make their goals a reality—often prioritizing its employee’s well-being over maximizing the company’s profits. In October of 2018, a wildfire destroyed portions of Keysight’s headquarters, and displaced several employees. Keysight responded swiftly, keeping its employees’ well-being at top of mind.
When leaders within the company learned of the fires, they immediately considered the ways in which they could maintain their employee’s safety and well-being. In addition to contributing over $1,190,000 to provide temporary housing, mend time or money gaps in their insurance, and set up emergency relief centers, they also focused on bolstering
mental health by hiring counselors and psychologists to help employees and family members who were coping with their losses.
The initiative of Keysight to sustain long-lasting, healthy relationships with its employees has created a strong company culture that has worked to ensure the roots of its semi-young company remain secure and nourished. Nersesian hopes that, collectively, his team will continue the growth of Keysight into a leading measurement technology company.
“We will achieve superior value creation by thinking and executing bigger and bolder. Around the world, the need to improve the lives of citizens, increase the productivity of businesses, and raise the competitiveness of nations is leading to ever higher expectations for connectivity and security,” Nersesian says. “These expectations are creating opportunities for current and future Keysight customers, for our company and all our employees.”
Ron Nersesian has watched Keysight progress from a seed within HewlettPackard into the enterprise it is today.
At Avon, Richard Davies finds ways to align mindsets, foster teamwork, test innovation, and then execute rigorously
By Arianna Stern
Richard Davies VP of Legal and Compliance Avon
Avon is a global cosmetics and social selling brand that is just about as iconic as any. At the heart of the business are millions of independent Avon representatives, the driving force behind the company for more than 130 years. Founder David H. McConnell was a pioneer of women’s empowerment long before women’s rights were widely recognized. Today, this legacy is supported by over 25,000 associates in more than fifty markets across the globe. But this legacy can also challenge innovation, especially in today’s fast-moving business environment.
So how, as a senior legal executive, do you transform a culture to drive innovation across a global organization with this rich history? Richard Davies, the former vice president of legal and compliance at Avon and its recently appointed global chief compliance officer, takes this challenge head-on and makes real innovation in legal and compliance his mission.
“I’ve learned that it’s very hard to drive change within a legacy culture, but it’s absolutely possible,” Davies says. However, when a company is faced with legal and business challenges like Avon is, and seeking to turn the business around, Davies notes the importance of the company’s top leaders maximizing the opportunity to adjust the behaviors, processes, and expected results that will lead to change.
In this environment, Davies likes to move carefully, but quickly. “Let’s just say that, here, I don’t believe that patience is a virtue. It is actually a vice in a turnaround,” he says, “because as you wait around, the world can change before you.” Davies continues that “true change can only happen with the right individuals, in the right roles and then truly unleashing them to deal with the toughest challenges.”
True to his word, Davies has introduced innovative ways to fully utilize the individuals in the legal and compliance team who are at the forefront of his change agenda. He
has balanced the need for market-based internal resources with a process-driven global legal and compliance function, including driving consistency through new Centers of Excellence in London and São Paolo to handle compliance processes. “I think we’ve had a lot of success in retaining key talent, in a competitive environment, through giving team members real growth opportunities,” Davies says, as he continually benchmarks Avon’s team and organization, “and building for the long-term through smart use of technology and selective legal process outsourcing.”
Yet even with the right individuals and processes, Davies argues, effective leadership is vital for long-term progress against the most complex challenges. Last year, Davies and his team took inspiration from Avon’s CEO, Jan Zijderveld, who asked his senior leaders to be “change agents” in support of his “Open Up Avon” strategy for Avon’s turnaround. Davies also cites Eric Ries and his book, The Startup Way, as a key source for helping him on the journey to drive the right mentality within his team.
So, Davies used Avon’s turnaround as an opportunity to evolve “task forces” his team had been previously leading into a set of “agile light” innovation teams, which are cross-functional teams that are set up to find solutions to critical challenges, using testing to find the right endto-end solution. “We may not have used all the formal
trappings of agile methods, but we were close,” Davies says. He notes that “think big, start small, and scale fast” became his team’s new mantra.
In the process, Davies closely aligned his team with Avon’s “must win battles” and set the stage for new ideas to emerge and innovation to take root. “I believe strongly in the fast-start mentality, and so we got right to work,” Davies says. The sense of urgency and the alignment to the current business challenges provided a renewed sense of purpose for the legal compliance team, Davies notes, but also an avenue to drive more cross-collaboration with the markets and other functions, like finance, HR, supply chain, and audit.
Davies launched one agile team to reconnect the legal compliance function and brand to the company’s broader mission to empower women, and another team to help the business drive growth through capitalizing on the competitive advantage of the legal compliance program, including to activate sales in the field. Avon general managers acted as liaisons and advisers. The deadlines for results were short, and they were real. Davies jokes that he “struggled just a bit” with the right role of the function leader, including the balance of giving these teams the freedom and flexibility they need to innovate with what Davies calls “executive guidance.”
These teams have since launched a completely rebranded, simplified legal compliance program, tied closely to the company’s mission to empower women, and a series of initiatives that have supported Avon’s business turnaround in the markets through innovative ideas such as linking Avon’s long-standing focus on integrity in its sales efforts. “It’s been a successful effort and it’s really attributed to the process for driving change using the start-up mentality,” Davies says.
“In multinationals, a key learning for me is that internal functions must act as if they are part of a startup, or they risk losing the buy-in of their business partners. Legal and compliance should be as focused on the endconsumer of their services–usually the company’s employees –as would a sales or marketing team,” Davies says. He adds that he and his team “have become laser-focused on our internal consumers, on winning their hearts and minds, on teamwork, and on understanding that our performance and the results we deliver really impact the bottom line.”
Rule Limited congratulates Richard for his outstanding leadership at Avon and is proud to be his trusted partner. Compliance risk management is not complicated and need not cost the earth with the right process and partner.
To find out why chief compliance officers trust us, please contact us at info@ruleltd.com.
Brandon Poe VP of Content Operations
Raising the Bar for Content
By JACOB WINCHESTER
Before going behind the scenes to help with the heavy lifting at Bodybuilding.com, Brandon Poe found the camera trained squarely on him. “I was actually one of the very first people to have a video series on the site many, many years ago, and I started off one hundred percent as a fitness user of Bodybuilding.com,” Poe says.
“I’ve competed in eight different natural bodybuilding shows. I’ve done the diet. I know the mind-set. I know the impact fitness can have on your social life and work life. I’ve lived it,” he says. “And I think that’s what’s helped give me an angle on our users in really understanding what they go through—and not just the challenges but the successes, the outcomes, and how good it can feel when you achieve something.”
Now vice president of content operations, Poe helps Bodybuilding.com provide its ever-swelling user community with the tools and information it needs to achieve a diverse body of goals. “Fitness is personal and everyone’s journey is different. Our motto is ‘we tell stories.’ We want to be able to bring emotion and bring those stories to life,” he says. “But our main mission is to really, truly help people change and, in some cases, maybe even help them to save their lives.”
But he’s quick to add there’s no magic bullet. “Everybody has a body. Everybody wants to be healthy. But there’s not a prescription for developing the right content to help them do that. We can’t just say, ‘Hey, do [the ketogenic diet]’ and think everyone will have the same results. That’s not how it works,” Poe says. “So, for us, it’s about personalization. It’s about understanding our
“Fitness is personal and everyone’s journey is different. Our motto is ‘we tell stories.’ We want to be able to bring emotion and bring those stories to life.”
BRANDON POE
customer and being able to serve them the content that best suits them—not just for where they are currently, but for where they want to go.”
That same spirit of service also carries over to Poe’s approach toward team leadership. “I like to preach and practice what I call servant leadership. How I look at it with my team is that they don’t work for me; I work for them,” he says. “At the end of the day, yes, I’m in charge of digital publishing, but I’m really more of a master facilitator. My real job is to make sure my team is fully equipped, that they have the information they need to make informed decisions, and that they understand how
things align with both their role and the business perspective.”
Since coming to the company nearly eleven years ago, Poe has worked tirelessly along with his team to infuse the fitness platform with innovative media. Having first joined Bodybuilding.com in 2008 when sites like YouTube were gaining prominence, Poe realized the company’s need for an evolved strategy around premium video content, which he set about pitching in every meeting. “Fast-forward to today, and we have over twenty people on our video production team alone,” Poe says.
“And it’s not just video. We also do editorials, tutorials, and have expert contributors
and photographers. We’ve been able to build a team of the right people who are very smart and the best in their field.” These, he says, can be trainers, doctors, nutritionists, scientists, and other well-known industry gurus and professionals.
Poe’s team also draws on data gleaned from site interaction to help steer content in the right direction. “Our competitive advantage is that we have twenty years with an average of thirty to forty million unique visitors every month on our website,” he says. “Eighty percent of our traffic comes to engage in our content. They come to read articles about how to lift weights, lose weight, build muscle, take certain supplements, understand certain diets, or find expertise about training modalities. Based on how they’re engaging, we can make meaningful decisions and do everything we can to create content we know they’re asking for and not what we just think would be cool.”
And just like bulking up at the gym, Poe says the secret to successful content is actually not a secret at all. “It’s all about routine, repetition, and listening. At the end of the day, we’re a publisher. We’re a resource and, in a way, a library—one of the largest libraries of fitness information in the world. But we weren’t always the experts at it, and when we first started, we didn’t really know what worked well, so we did everything,” Poe says.
“We didn’t publish one muscle-building article. We published thousands of them in different ways, with different titles, different imagery, and different writers,” he says. “Over time, we were able to identify our audience and the best way to do something. And that’s how we’ve been able to grow to where we are today.”
By Arianna Stern
As the head of its legal department, Liz Moore helps the Ladies Professional Golf Association support the game and character development of women and girls
Liz Moore decided to work for the Ladies Professional Golf Association for two reasons: one, she jumped at the chance to work in the athletics industry, being a sports fan and an amateur player herself. Two, she felt a kinship toward female athletes, viewing them as fellow women in business.
But her top reasons for staying at the organization as chief legal officer and corporate secretary and taking pride in her work are not the same as her reasons for joining in the first place. Once Moore got her foot in the door, she realized that the organization had a range of activities and services she hadn’t previously understood, which made her all the more excited to work there.
“I realized that the LPGA is about more than golf,” says Moore. “Really, it's a bit like golf as an incubator for leadership.”
The professional touring players of the LPGA are some of the organization’s most visible leaders. In addition to being top athletes, the players work as independent contractors, meaning that each is like a one-woman business. The LPGA helps them take the lead in their own careers by supporting them with practical matters, like on-site childcare and on-site physical therapy services.
“When you're playing thirty-two or thirty-four weeks out of the year, you don't get to go home often for PT and other services,” Moore says. She adds that the LPGA will
Liz Moore Chief Legal Officer & Corporate Secretary
Ladies Professional Golf Association
Courtesy of LPGA
also introduce an expanded maternity policy in 2019, “so that women who are professional athletes who choose to have a family have the opportunity to have parental bonding time with their kids.” As head of LPGA’s legal team, Moore plays a key role in supporting these touring athletes by keeping up with international law in the places where they travel: thirteen countries, at last count.
The touring athletes not only lead by example, but also have a seat at the table at the LPGA. The organization’s board of directors includes touring professionals as well as business leaders from outside the organization. That balance of perspectives makes the LPGA more diverse and democratic.
“Our touring players are directors on our board,” Moore says, “so there is a member perspective in the room.” In her role as corporate secretary, Moore advises the board, giving them the insights they need to make informed decisions.
In addition to helping touring professionals advance their careers, the LPGA’s 1,800-member Teaching and Club Professionals helps amateur players of all ages, whether they’re adults working to improve their swing or young girls just learning the game. The LPGA Girls Golf program, in particular, has proven very popular: more than eighty thousand girls between the ages of six and seventeen went through the program in 2018, Moore notes.
For girls between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, the LPGA Foundation offers the Leadership Academy, which allows them to build life skills through golf instruction and to meet with a panel of women business executives. The Academy has seen some remarkable successes, including a participant whose entry into an essay contest landed her on The Today Show, and 70 percent of program participants have ultimately received college scholarships.
For adult amateur players, the LPGA Amateur Golf Association creates local opportunities for women to play golf with others. On golf courses across the country, members of the association not only enjoy exercise, but also benefit from strengthened social ties with each other that can pay off professionally. “Using golf as a vehicle for
“The LPGA is about more than golf. Really, it's a bit like golf as an incubator for leadership.”
business and relationship development—I think that is a huge opportunity,” Moore says. She has played a significant role in supporting these programs, as she helped to revise the Foundation code of regulations and led the acquisition and integration of the amateur association.
Moore thinks back on the origins of the organization often, as do her colleagues. In fact, the mandate to “act like a founder” is painted on the walls of LPGA’s headquarters. To Moore, acting like a founder means providing support to the businesspeople at every turn—in addition to acting as chief legal officer and corporate secretary, she manages the IT department. She adds value wherever she can to drive toward the organization’s longtime goals of growing the sport of golf and helping the women within it take the lead. Acting like a founder also means putting forth her best effort at all times.
“We recognize how much work our members have put into the LPGA to make it successful, from the founders all the way to today. We keep that top of mind in everything we do and make sure we're really representing them. We're mission-driven, but also member-focused at the same time,” Moore says.
The founder mentality extends to conveying the organization’s larger-than-golf significance to outside audiences, including business partners, which Moore calls the hardest part of her job. The sports industry is very crowded with many larger organizations, so it’s hard for the LPGA to break through the noise with media outlets. Once it does capture someone’s attention, though, the company is able to sustain it, thanks to the integrity of the players and the organization’s focus on life skills and leadership.
“The athletes’ diversity in terms of cultures, age ranges, and experiences, and their personal stories are as inspiring as their golf play,” Moore says. With those women on the front lines, it’s not difficult to move the audiences that do listen.
“All we need is our chance. And when we do have that chance, we create loyal relationships, loyal followers, and committed fans,” she says.
Adding Value through Taxes
Paul Caja and his department save MTD Products valuable tax dollars by staying informed on ever-changing laws while engaging in the operations of a successful manufacturing business
By RUSS GAGER
Paul Caja VP of Taxation
MTD Products Inc.
Emily Bobrowicz
Unless they want to overpay taxes every year, corporate leadership teams should consider the tax function much more than just a compliance function. As part of senior leadership at MTD Products, a global manufacturer of outdoor power equipment headquartered in Ohio, Paul Caja calculates the tax implications of business decisions in advance. The vice president of taxation, Caja works with his team and other key leaders to mitigate potential additional costs with the correct tax advice, which, ultimately, is a key contribution to the continuing success of this eighty-six-year-old Cleveland-based company.
“When people are making a business decision, taxes should be a consideration, not the driving reason,” Caja says. For example, he recently advised MTD’s senior leadership about the tax implications of selling its award-winning outdoor power equipment directly to consumers online in a new venture. The challenge, according to Caja, is properly calculating, collecting, and remitting sales taxes for these purchases in potentially thousands of state and local tax jurisdictions where the customer is located.
Due to Caja’s leadership at the private, family-owned company, his department has contributed real tax savings into the millions that have freed up cash for further growth of the core business in the twelve years he has been the vice president of taxation. These savings were driven by advanced
planning to make sure business decisions made the most sense on a local, state, federal, and even international tax level. Proper tax planning and open communication with key executives remain an integral part of Caja’s philosophy.
Today the tax department continues to play a crucial role in MTD’s senior leadership group at the international company. Caja’s latest move is converting MTD to cutting-edge tax software, improving the ability of the four-person tax department to respond quickly and provide quality information at a moment’s notice. The modernization of the tax department makes the year-end closing process highly efficient and reduces preparation time dramatically.
Caja reports directly to the CFO, which grants him access to key personnel when needed.“Our CFO, Jeff Deuch, is very tax-savvy,” Caja says. “In other words, he understands the importance of the tax function, and not all CFOs do. On the rare occasion I reach an impasse with a particular executive in a particular area, Jeff provides the support I need to ensure we’re managing the tax portion while working to satisfy the business need.”
Caja arrived at MTD in 2006 after a decade at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Prior, he served tax teams at the world's largest greeting card producer, American Greetings, and the multinational professional services firm EY. He earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting and business from Indiana University Bloomington as well as a master’s degree in taxation at the University of Akron.
MTD’s products are sold throughout the world, spanning the United States, Canada, Australia, Europe, and Asia. Its family of brands includes Cub Cadet, Troy-Bilt, WOLF-Garten, Rover, Robomow, and Remington, among others. Caja contributes to the growth at MTD by assisting in deriving transfer pricing policies and procedures. Transfer pricing is the method of sharing value when selling products across the world through related parties.
“Transfer pricing is one of the more highly contested areas of the tax world,” Caja explains. “Most governments look at multinationals and make sure they are getting their fair share of the profitability of a product. So that is one of my bigger responsibilities. My biggest role is to make sure the transfer pricing is in place in all jurisdictions.”
Caja’s leadership and the tax department’s efforts have resulted in MTD receiving two consecutive no-change audits of its tax returns from the IRS. “For a substantial and complex company, that is very unusual,” says Caja, who praises his tax director’s efforts in particular. In fact, a key part of Caja’s leadership role is to keep the company’s relations running smoothly with agencies such as the IRS, along with the outside auditors, tax firms, and consultants that collaborate with his department. Caja emphasizes the importance of maintaining good relationships with everyone his department works with, including internal MTD departments. “I believe you treat people the way you want to be treated,” Caja says.
At KPMG, we never underestimate the power of passionate people. That’s why we want to recognize Paul Caja for his outstanding contribution to tax leadership, his people and MTD. You’ve exceeded expectations. And made a positive impact in the lives of so many.
kpmg.com
That philosophy extends to his leadership style, which Caja describes as hands-off but caring. “I want to make everyone feel that they contribute,” he explains. “The more you work to do the right thing by the people that work for you, the better off you will be.”
Caja also has adapted his leadership style from several important mentors throughout his career. He credits his mentor at EY, Moses Awe, for his technical training. He also points to his mentor Mark Stevens, a partner at PwC, who Caja cites as a major influence on his life, management style, and how to treat people in the workforce.
Yet Caja learned teamwork from a more personal source: his ten brothers. They formed an amateur softball team that has been playing together for years. He applies that same dynamic of learning to work together through sports for business purposes in smaller groups, like golf foursomes.
“Golf is a great social mediator,” Caja says. “I only play golf with people I’m interested in getting to know. Playing golf is a good environment to learn what people are about. For twenty years, I’ve used golf as an opportunity to meet and get to know customers and providers.”
Finally, Caja credits Deuch as a great mentor for managing his expectations for the tax function. “A good mentor puts their needs aside for the development of their people,” says Caja, who adds that he also tries to empower his own tax staff.
“My goal is to elevate the tax department within the organization and develop people that can replace me when it’s time for me to retire,” he says. “To a certain extent, I’ve reached that goal of elevating my department, but there’s always room to do more. I strive for continuous growth.”
him success.
Stepping Down To Step Up
A credit card breach brought Josh Siddon to Fred’s, Inc. The potential for technological transformation made him want to stay.
By RANDALL COLBURN
Josh Siddon is known in the IT industry as a transformational leader, but he’ll be the first to tell you that he didn’t set out to transform his teams so much as the teams themselves demanded to be transformed.
“It's just dumb luck,” he says with a laugh. “Every job I've had in the last fifteen years I've fallen into teams that were in disarray in one way or another. Maybe they were behind on technology, couldn’t pass audits, or didn’t have the right talent, but I came in and cleaned them up.”
Now, having worked as everything from a PC technician to a department director, he welcomes the challenge. The twenty-year IT veteran is currently lending his transformational touch to Fred’s, Inc., the $1.3 billion Memphis-based company behind 600 general merchandise and pharmacy stores. There, Siddon serves as the senior vice president of information technology, a position that finds him overseeing the IT services for Fred’s corporate headquarters and all of its retail sites.
As he always has throughout his career, Siddon has rapidly climbed the ranks in his three years at Fred’s. Siddon came to the company in the midst of a security incident in 2015, and a look at the organization’s inner workings made him want to stay. Siddon saw opportunities in the organization’s approach to IT, as well as a place for him to step in and offer “a swift kick in the rear” to the areas in need of improvement. When they asked him to join the company as the director of technical services, he took it, despite the position being a step down for him.
“There was such an opportunity to learn,” he says, noting that he also welcomed the challenge of shifting from a PCI focus to a security one. “There's more to it than just the security piece that a lot of people just don't understand. Working with attorneys, working with the banks, working with actual customers—I had just never been a part of it, and I knew it was going to grow on me even more.”
As he envisioned his own personal growth, he did the same for Fred’s. “I want to grow this,” he told management during his early meetings. “Let me make this team awesome.”
He’s doing it, too, having immediately demonstrated his transparent, team-focused leadership style by breaking down the silos surrounding the IT department’s different arms and empowering the teams to foster a culture of collaboration. Since then, he’s instituted an open-door policy and encouraged his team to provide alternate solutions. When security measures change by the day, he says, it’s good to keep an open mind. “These guys
are working on this gear day in and day out, and my advice may be old, outdated, or no longer used anymore,” he says.
He also developed short-term and longterm strategies for not just Fred’s security arm, but also for IT overall. Currently, he’s shepherding the company off of its legacy technology to a cutting-edge, cloud-based system. “It’s going to completely revolutionize the business,” he says, noting that he and his team are on the fifth month of what he hopes to be a sixteen-month project. It’s a massive endeavor that entails upgrading each individual network for Fred’s 600
Josh Siddon SVP of IT
Fred’s Inc.
“There’s more to technical services than just the security piece that a lot of people just don’t understand.”
JOSH SIDDON
locations, many of which will see their bandwidth quadruple.
Siddon’s greatest achievement at Fred’s, however, may be in demonstrating to leadership how IT is as much a business partner as it is a department. One point of pride has been reinforcing how important it is to continue to invest in security and to always stay on top of the latest trends and solutions.
Part of that process is in Siddon cementing himself into the company’s grander culture, where he can assert his value to the actual business. He routinely meets with different departments, takes their feedback, and returns with solutions that not only make their jobs easier, but reduce costs. “That's what it's all about, developing tools and helping the business make money,” he says.
Being in the thick of it with his team is what Siddon considers most satisfying about his work. By opening a dialogue and breaking down the walls within IT and outside of it, he’s built a team around him, not under him. Real transformation always comes from within, after all.
By Russ Klettke
The legal implications of a multinational joint venture are daunting, to say the least. But Royce Warrick has a team, and a company, that allows ethics and compliance to be their North Star—which enables everything to work everywhere they work.
When Solenis, a global producer of specialty chemicals for water-intensive industries, announced its plans to enter a joint venture with BASF, the pending union of forces was a clear win for both companies. It would provide enhanced offerings of complementary products to customers of both companies.
But as anyone who has gone through such corporate unions knows, even just the pro forma legal requirements are significant. Add in how these are competitors in highly regulated industries, working in scores of countries, and the complexity of the deal multiplies. Royce Warrick, senior vice president and general counsel for the Delaware-based Solenis, could probably write a book about what it took to pull this joint venture off. But if she did, the theme would be about her team of ten legal professionals, and more broadly about the company’s culture of ethics and compliance.
“Ethics and compliance are ‘table stakes,’” she says, meaning that they are must-haves in all business conducted by the company.
But while that may sound familiar (how many companies don’t at least give lip service to being ethical?), the Solenis-BASF joint venture itself shows how to thread the needle on being competitive (the point of the JV) even while adhering to fairness practices in commercial transactions. More specifically, they figured out ways to ensure a smooth and productive transition for the combined entity, one where not a day would be lost to disruption.
Taking a highly unusual approach—which, Warrick acknowledges, carried risk—the two companies figured out ways for their IT functions to merge in advance of the closing of the deal. She explains that this enabled a seamless transition to customer ordering and service from day one for the combined venture. But so much had to be kept confidential from each side of the transaction, lest either or both be accused of collusion. They had to ensure that
no bad actors could use customer data and knowledge in unethical, non-compliant, or illegal ways.
So how did they pull it off?
It’s evident this is a company that values ethics and compliance from A to Z. It’s embedded in the official company core values—integrity, respect, and accountability—but it’s about more than words. “We walk the talk, and it starts at the top,” says Warrick. “It’s about consistent actions and statements.” Put another way, she describes it as “being intentional about what we do and do not do. We make clear our expectations, and that includes hard lines not to cross—even if the competition does.” The folks in IT had a clear picture of what was allowed and what was verboten.
The multinational nature of business at both companies, Solenis and BASF, make this ethos of ethics even more challenging. Lawyers in the US are well versed in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which basically requires, adhering to accounting transparency and anti-bribery laws while doing business outside of the country. That’s not always easy, and there likely are many infractions that go unseen. “There are gray areas,” says Warrick. “But we have one standard.”
The approach that Warrick, her team, and the company at large take is in a formalized structure they call the Ethics and Compliance Program. It is composed of three overarching initiatives: train employees as needed and on an ongoing basis; conduct an “Ethics and Compliance Week” as a means to raise awareness on an annual basis; and orchestrate a compliance-focused team of “ethics
Royce Warrick SVP & General Counsel
Solenis
Cozen O’Connor is proud to work alongside Royce Warrick, general counsel and senior vice president for Solenis. We congratulate Royce on her exemplary leadership and many accomplishments.
Raymond A. Kresge Member (215) 665-2128 rkresge@cozen.com
700 attorneys 28 offices
ambassadors,” people in various departments of the company who serve as both advisors and feedback gatherers.
“The job of the ethics ambassadors is to raise concerns before they get hot,” she says. “We’re not interested in being front page news. We want our people to be proud of what we do.” Their work is supported by a dedicated app and the company intranet.
During Ethics and Compliance Week, a video is released to company employees that features key executives discussing what is expected of people throughout the enterprise. Among the key messages is how everyone has a responsibility to produce results in their jobs, but at no time should those be achieved in ways that are inconsistent with their core ethical values.
It’s these relationships between ethics, regulatory compliance, the law in general, and business overall that drew Warrick to being a corporate attorney in the first place. She jokes it’s because she didn’t want to be a doctor, but in fact her post-law school career started with three years as a litigator. “But I liked the idea of being a business partner,” she says. Today in her role as general counsel she is the lawyer in the room—but one who thinks like a customer.
“Law needs to be part of strategic development,” she says. “There’s always a need to factor in legal ramifications. Then it’s my job to craft solutions.”
“Royce’s commitment to the highest ethical standards and her skill at finding insightful solutions to complicated challenges make her a superb lawyer and counselor,” says Michael Diz, a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton. “She raises the bar for everyone. We are proud she is our colleague and friend.”
For lawyers entering the profession, Warrick advises that they follow their passion, whatever that may be. “Be authentic, stay curious, and be willing to engage. If you want to work in business law, get a foundation in finance because you need to understand the impact on profit and loss and how to read income statements. And read books— or listen to them on tape.”
She shares this same advice with teens and young adults in her church and community, including her own three children. “Work is really a long, hard part of life,” she says. “Find the environment that works for you.”
Given how the Solenis-BASF joint venture includes a robust team of legal professionals in Europe, Asia, South America, and in the United States—serving customers in many countries—it seems Warrick’s environment has few limits.
Shoring Up Collaboration and Bringing Down Complexity
With an open-door policy and ninety-day plans, Jamie Santagate leads a focused and cooperative finance team at Clarks Americas, Inc.
By ARIANNA STERN
Jamie Santagate’s colleagues don’t have to wait around for answers to their questions.
As the senior vice president of Americas finance at Clarks, a UK-based footwear brand, he makes himself accessible and encourages people to talk through problems face to face.
“I'm definitely not one that just sits at my desk and emails things out. I get up and walk around. I think people appreciate that, when you walk by and have a conversation with them, and say ‘Hey, what's going on?’ or ‘What can we do differently?’” Santagate says.
For him, frequent and personal communication is an essential ingredient in a culture of collaboration, which he’s worked hard to develop at Clarks. In his eyes, workplace collaboration means “aligning on goals to drive success and working together seamlessly.”
To boost collaboration (and therefore success) at Clarks, Santagate organizes alignment meetings, ensuring that his team forms a consensus around key performance indicators (KPIs). Teams are more likely to reach their goals, Santagate says, when each member is driving toward the same KPIs. Beyond taking a close look at metrics, Santagate seeks feedback from his colleagues on processes and how to improve them. His
openness to feedback from coworkers at all levels helps him foster collaboration.
“I've enjoyed improving processes. Sometimes I make people's jobs easier. I like being innovative and thinking differently and just throwing something out there,” he says.
Soliciting feedback and improving processes takes complexity out of the Clarks finance department—an overarching goal of Santagate’s. Instead of running super-dense reports every time they present to management, Santagate encourages his team to simplify and present only the most useful data. He also reduces complexity by saving time for himself and his charges, which is especially helpful given the lean staffing of the finance department at Clarks. At the same time, Santagate stresses that efficiency and simplicity does not mean squeezing more hours out of every employee.
“Even if someone works twelve or thirteen hours a day, that doesn't mean they're efficient,” he says. “Maybe they take longer to do something or maybe they're not doing it the best way possible.” When people in his department overextend themselves, he finds ways to improve processes or spread their workload around. Both are possible because of the collaborative, communicative culture Santagate helped to design.
Thanks to their thoughtful processes and smooth communication, finance department employees can achieve a lot, in spite of their lean numbers. Right now, Santagate and his team are tackling a few critical initiatives, like weighing inventory against sales, and helping to capture more market share relative to Clarks’ competitors. Additionally, finance department leaders like Santagate have to present data to the Clarks board and senior leadership. Santagate takes his penchant for simplification and communication to lead the team in crafting a narrative out of the raw data.
Jamie Santagate SVP of Americas Finance
Clarks Americas, Inc.
“Sometimes I make people’s jobs easier. I like being innovative and thinking differently and just throwing something out there.”
JAMIE SANTAGATE
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“I'm not a big fan of just throwing a bunch of numbers on a page. We do that, but we have to create a storyline about it. What are the numbers telling us?” he says. By creating a narrative out of the statistics, the finance department empowers senior leadership and the board to make informed decisions.
As a department head, Santagate suffuses his team with structure, making each individual’s role clear so they can collaborate effectively and without duplicating efforts. Santagate delegates responsibilities and gives employees freedom to develop their own working styles rather than micromanaging.
Santagate has a favorite tool for holding himself and others accountable: ninety-day plans. They help his teammates prioritize, he notes, and eliminate the possibility of competing priorities. He works from ninety-day plan to ninety-day plan himself, and sends out his plans to his colleagues to set expectations.
Establishing and communicating ninety-day plans, like Santagate’s open-door office policy, is another way of keeping roles and objectives clear throughout the finance department. Those shared objectives remain a pillar of collaboration—as does the cooperative team, which Santagate calls his favorite part of his job.
“I work with amazing people and feel a sense of accomplishment every day,” he says.
iabllc.com
“I'm very clear with expectations,” Santagate says. “I think my employees know what I need and what pushes my buttons.” On the other hand, giving employees autonomy also means holding them accountable, he notes.
“If we're going to say we're going to do X, then we need to deliver X,” he says. “In our job in finance, we need to minimize surprises, always looking at risks and opportunities.”
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Parts of the
Wh le
Dedicated to Parts Town’s core values, Lori Sherwood and Chelsea Fitzpatrick oversee the development of company culture during massive growth
By KATHRYN KRUSE
“Listen,” say Lori Sherwood and Chelsea Fitzpatrick. That is the key to good leadership. As chief financial officer and vice president of culture and talent for Parts Town, the leading OEM parts distributor in the commercial foodservice equipment market, both use this strategy to answer questions of hiring and retaining talent.
Sherwood, CFO, has her hand in most elements of the company. This includes Fitzpatrick’s talent team, especially as the company experiences tremendous growth. In 2014, when Sherwood came to Parts Town, it had 150 employees. In 2018, the company hired 180 people, including the 500th team member. For the last fifteen years, the company has achieved more than 20 percent organic growth in sales, year to year.
Sherwood and Fitzpatrick understand the importance of partnering finance and talent, of listening to each other, and they are using that collaboration to keep the employee team steady through this growth. “Talent and culture are huge strategic strengths. We must be in sync,” says Fitzpatrick. Sherwood, deep in the nitty-gritty of the business end, understands what the company can bear. Fitzpatrick, with a longer tenure and greater proximity to employees, understands more of the team’s concerns and culture sensitivities. “Together,” Sherwood explains, “we balance the needs of the business with what the business can afford.”
With their varied specialties, they both attribute much of Parts Town’s success to investment in company culture. Fitzpatrick came to Parts Town in 2011, as the fortieth employee and the only one working on talent. She now heads a team of eight and identifies culture-building tools in places that many companies do not, beginning with the hiring process. “Bringing someone on is a big task. It is an opportunity to reinforce core values and culture,” she says.
Such culture reinforcement also comes through leadership’s dedication to the company’s values: Safety, Integrity, Passion, Courage, and Innovation. Sherwood says, “We don’t act against our values. As a leader it is my responsibility to act with integrity.”
At Parts Town, they explain, innovation is
“We don’t act against our values. As a leader it is my responsibility to act with integrity.”
LORI SHERWOOD
Lori
Sherwood Chief Financial Officer Parts Town
Courtesy of Parts Town
“We have to understand the practical, the bottom line, and also how the bottom line impacts the team.”
CHELSEA FITZPATRICK
Chelsea Fitzpatrick VP of Culture and Talent Parts Town
successful because leadership is focused on hearing and living the core values.
Using a holistic and long-term approach to talent, honed after several years of working together, they have several projects underway. “Growth comes with the need to put more practices in place to ensure equity. We need to identify tools to help managers be objective,” says Sherwood. They also need their core culture to survive a transition through massive growth. One of their key strategies is hearing from the team during these changes.
Currently the talent team is drawing on the larger company to help revise employee titles. As Fitzpatrick explains, titles provide clarity in teams and also help demonstrate career paths and opportunities. Parts Town, a traditionally flat organization, needs to develop agility and clarity without hierarchy.
New tech is another focus of the executive team. Just as Parts Town works to make buying OEM commercial kitchen parts “fast, easy, and kind of fun,” its leaders hope to do the same for employees engaging with HR functions. They launched an internal Parts Town app and are exploring new HRIS and applicant tracking systems that can efficiently address employee concerns. Sherwood and Fitzpatrick will team up to look at price, experience, and culture influence, and of course will invite feedback from the employees.
Sherwood has overseen ten acquisitions since arriving at Parts Town. In 2018, it acquired a company with locations in New York and Texas, making it a multi-site organization. She knows that after the diligence ends and contracts are signed, much of the real acquisition work, integration, and incorporation starts. She must ensure that employees several states away feel connected to the large, open-space Chicago office. Fitzpatrick works
Parts Town is the leading OEM parts distributor in the commercial foodservice equipment market, and has achieved 20 percent organic sales growth year over year. As such, the staff count has more than tripled since 2014, thanks to
Parts Town’s HR team (top right photo, pictured left to right): Beck Vraga, Chelsea Fitzpatrick, Sasha Repnikova, Candice Payton, Matt Benkowsky, and Maggie Sweeney.
to share Parts Town culture and learn from the New York team. As for getting to know each other, both offices recently telecommuted into a charitable-giving chili cook-off.
Guided by the core values, the two work to align financial concerns with policy and bring a human component to all actions. They understand, for example, a current reevaluation of employee time off as something that matters deeply for team members and also has important financial implications for the company. “We have to understand the practical, the bottom line, and also how the bottom line impacts the team,” says Fitzpatrick. As always, to find solutions they will engage team members and listen to their experiences.
Parts Town is always looking to increase employee engagement and recognition. Fitzpatrick is pleased to report that often ideas about how to achieve this comes from team members themselves. To introduce the core value of “safety,” a talent team member suggested a Safety Shark. So, to great acclaim, Parts Town launched a shark blimp around the office. An employee wanted to have “May the 4th Be with You” Day to commemorate Star Wars, and got the thumbs up to dress as a Jedi knight. Employees so enjoyed wellness-week Zumba classes that they put together a plan to offer it every other week. “We are very growth oriented and we work hard, but we want people to be excited,” says Fitzpatrick. This fun comes out of a serious commitment to building a financially successful company. Sherwood knows that a supportive, growing culture leads to empowered and hard-working employees. “Increase energy and [you] increase transactions,” says Sherwood. To achieve this end they create policies
and tools geared to a cycle of increased culture buy in.
“I support people’s courage in becoming what they can,” says Fitzpatrick. She talks proudly of an employee who, five years ago, started at entry level and now holds a leadership role in a different department.
The company embraces agility. Individuals shift roles and departments frequently. Such agility does not come without potential pitfalls, especially as the team expands, and, in the midst of Parts Town’s impressive growth, Sherwood and Fitzpatrick work to get the fundamentals right and build a solid foundation as new roles emerge. “People are agile and move roles quickly. So the organization needs an equitable structure,” Sherwood says.
In the small and large projects underway, Sherwood has clear instructions for anyone entering the field: “Develop relationships for trust. Be open to learning. Roll up your sleeves and work. Keep your ear to the ground. Ask questions. Move out of your role to learn and be well-rounded. Learn how and why.” Coming out of a sporting goods background, she has followed her own advice at Parts Town, learning new methods around pricing and inventory. Beyond the accounting, making numbers work, she overcame her initial trepidation about selling parts as she discovered an unexpected enthusiasm at Parts Town. “Parts might not excite, but the way we go about it does,” she says.
Fitzpatrick echoes much of Sherwood’s advice. “Get a mentor,” she adds.“I had good mentors that challenged me, including Lori,” she says of Sherwood. The two will continue this cycle of support as Parts Town grows and looks to new markets, and as they continue to empower team members across the business.
Transforming to Drive Innovation
By JOSEPH
St. Louis University’s David Hakanson and Kyle Collins share how to turn a support operation into an innovation destination
KAY Photos by ASHLEY GIESEKING
On their resident advisor’s birthday, a floor of Saint Louis University undergraduates propped open their doors and hushed each other. One uttered a command, and the students laughed and cheered as a chorus of Amazon Alexa devices sang “Happy Birthday” together.
“That’s probably the most unique usage we’ve heard of so far,” laughs Kyle Collins, assistant vice president of technology transformation. The thrill of innovation is in those unforeseen discoveries—and, vice president, CIO, and chief innovation officer David Hakanson points out, staff and students at SLU are uniquely suited.
“The students we attract are highly driven to achieve success in and out of the classroom,” he says. “There’s a lot of excitement about this technology and we’re having open conversations about what we can accomplish.”
Hakanson and Collins have led a transformation of the university’s IT sector. Previously an operational support organization, it’s now a complete innovation center, where experiments and demos can drive changes in how the whole university functions. They give residents new ways to engage, students new ways to learn, and staff the tools they need to strategize toward the university’s future.
One marquee story has been the Alexa at SLU initiative, by which every student room is now equipped with a Billiken-branded Amazon Echo device. Administered through Amazon for Business, the devices have SLU-specific functions: students can ask Alexa about the library’s hours, or about upcoming campus activities. To date, it’s the largest single deployment of such devices.
The last eighteen months have been a comprehensive cultural evolution for IT at SLU. Inside a nimble, startup-like laboratory environment, staff and students can demo new technologies and experiment with potential futures for the university’s infrastructure. Curiosity drives change, student voices are taken seriously, and feedback from stakeholders guides the ongoing mission.
The continuing acceleration of tech integration made this change necessary, and the whole team is excited to report on real-world results and upcoming possibilities. Here, the IT innovation team at SLU join Hakanson and Collins for a Q&A.
How do you describe SLU’s approach to innovation and technology?
Leslie Williams, Assistant Vice President, Chief of Staff: Our team takes an “anything is possible” approach with innovation at SLU. We pride ourselves on working hard, staying focused, and pushing the limits with new concepts. It is exciting to be a part of a team that is willing to test the boundaries and the higher-ed norm.
How have you integrated Amazon Alexa technology in your company quickly? Break down some of the steps you’ve taken.
Peter Juan, Assistant Vice President, Enterprise Architecture: I partnered with multiple ITS teams and led the proof-ofconcept (PoC) review between Amazon Alexa and competitor devices. The data told us which Internet of Things (IoT) devices work best on our campus and how best to deploy and manage them. That effort proved our strategy of using very focused, data-driven PoC to confirm the appropriate architecture and to enable fast delivery.
Megan Greathouse-Gause, Director, Customer Service: My primary focus was on the end-user experience: designing the pilot, developing how-to guides, administering feedback surveys, organizing user test sessions, and working with the students to integrate different skills and accessories into their testing. After the test pilot, my focus turned to curating questions and answers for the SLU Alexa skill, assisting with setup, deploying the units, and training on support for the devices once the program launched.
Lucas Guffey, Portfolio Analyst: For a deployment, I like to identify how the user will most enjoy interacting with the technology and what they should be able to produce from it. From there, I involve stakeholders and gather input so that insights and ideas from our community are taken advantage of and concerns are addressed.
SLU’s IT Innovation team members (from left): Joey Pieper, Robert Day, Neil Smarko, Kevin Carr, David Hakanson, Megan Greathouse-Gause, and Gentry Sanz-Agero.
SLU’s IT Innovation team members (from left): Peter Juan, Kyle Collins, Angela Schubert, Dave Maddox, Leslie Williams, and Lucas Guffey.
What’s the overall vision for SLU’s relationship with and deployment of innovative consumer technologies?
Joey Pieper, Technologist II: I find it best to view the finished product through the eyes of the end user—in this case, our students.
“Will this help me in my everyday life?”
“Will this improve my ability to gather information?” “Does this product add value to the overall experience at SLU?” Gaining the ability to get campus information and complete tasks in such an informal/on-demand way is a great addition to the education students already receive.
Rob Day, Technologist II: Since coming to SLU, it has been my goal to not only keep technology current in our academic environment, but to be innovative in our technology development for our students and faculty. I developed this vision through years of being stuck in a break/fix cycle. I really found that staying ahead of problems was much more efficient—it takes a little more upfront effort, but requires significantly less maintenance moving forward.
What were some of the major challenges?
Rob Day: A major challenge we faced was the actual implementation of Alexa into a secured, corporate environment. As we move forward, I feel that it is best to continue to test new things and think about the evershifting wants and needs of our students and faculty. The most unassuming technology may turn into the next big thing (with a little tweaking).
Dave Maddox, Associate Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer: From an information security and privacy point of view, it was our team’s responsibility to ensure the Amazon Echo Dots were deployed in a secure manner and that our students felt confident their privacy would be protected when interacting with the device.
Kyle Collins: We use the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Alexa for Business platform for central management. The device doesn’t know who’s talking, and there are no granular details reported to us. We’ve made the opt-out very easy; students can simply unplug the device and leave it in a drawer, it just has to be there when they check out. Most every concern has been defused.
What have you learned so far—how has your approach evolved, and how are you continuing to grow?
Angela Schubert, Graduate Assistant, Department of Innovation: I have learned the power of great partnerships, especially when it comes to achieving lofty goals. In addition to meeting our goal on schedule, we broke records and had a lot of fun! When people are having fun and feel free to bring their ideas to the table, they stay engaged and improve processes. I have been on other projects (outside of SLU) where orders were handed down and suggestions ignored—that is the quickest way to turn people off.
Kyle Collins: Good IT people are curious. We’re continuing to work with university staff to try things quickly, check how they work, and move on—there’s a spark of excitement here.
David Hakanson: I am very proud of the work that the Saint Louis University IT team has done in helping to transform us from solely an operational focus, to an innovation engine and technology enabler. Innovative projects, such as Alexa at SLU, have been the spark that brings great minds alike and creates excitement not only in the IT organization but throughout the university. We will continue to find new and innovative ideas where we can bring different groups together to look at the unimaginable and explore how we can continue to lead in innovation.
By Jacob Winchester
The multifaceted CLO draws on his extensive business experience and exceptional team to keep the innovative indoor skydiving and consumer entertainment company at the top of the game it created
Pictured left to right: Kevin Fiur, Bri Gungoll, Jeff Schwingendorf, Janet Garcia
Al Gawlik Photography
Complex litigations, high stakes negotiations, global patent enforcement . . . and free fall, indoor skydiving?
If you’re Kevin Fiur, executive vice president and chief legal officer for iFLY Indoor Skydiving, it’s all in a day’s work. When he started out as a lawyer, inspired in part by fastpaced legal television shows of the late 80s and early 90s , Fiur was interested in litigation. But he soon found himself drawn toward the business side of things. “I grew up in the L.A. Law era, so I saw being a lawyer as cool and fun, with a lot of chaos and drama,” Fiur says. “I always thought I
wanted to be a trial lawyer and make the big closing argument, but I became a litigator, doing a lot of discovery and motion practice that young lawyers know and love, and made a very conscious effort to transition from that to a more business-oriented negotiation and deal lawyer.”
After rounding out his skill set and joining a public company in a heavily business-facing role, Fiur headed back to school for an MBA, eventually entering the venture capital game. From there, he worked for—and founded—a couple of start-ups, and worked across the Asia Pacific region for a decade before ultimately landing a dream role with iFLY. “Over a period of fifteen to twenty years, I made a successful transition from being a lawyer to being a full-time international business guy with experience in finance, marketing, and business development,” Fiur says. “When I started my career at Baker Botts, I wanted to be just a lawyer. Then I started to get involved in transactions and gain some business skills, and years later, after a lot of successes and failures, and learning equally from both, I evolved into a business executive with legal skills, which is the role I play today.”
“Kevin brings to iFLY an extraordinary combination of entrepreneurial business acumen, strategic thinking, and legal expertise that I have seen him hone in the trenches over the past two decades,” says David Weaver, a partner at Baker Botts.
As iFLY’s CLO, Fiur leads global legal operations across the nine countries where the company does business, while overseeing the myriad activities that accompany that role, such as litigation, employment law, intellectual property, and complex transactional work. But his impact on the business doesn’t stop there.
“We’re a complex company. We design, manufacture, and sell vertical wind tunnels to fly human beings; we build and install those wind tunnels for ourselves and own and operate close to forty retail locations; and we have a large global licensing and franchising operation,” Fiur says. “My team provides cover and support for all of those activities.” The other major part of his role, Fiur explains, is “to work across the C-suite—and really all departments in the US and globally—to make sure those clients and colleagues are well served by both me and my extraordinary teammates.”
He also devotes time to business development, pitches in with sales, and helps negotiate the company’s larger deals. “We are an innovative, deal-oriented company, constantly entering into new areas such as virtual reality and gamification of our product and looking at strategic partnerships to enhance our customer experience. We also
Kevin Fiur
EVP & Chief Legal Officer
iFLY Indoor Skydiving
Al Gawlik Photography
“My team and I also spend a lot of time thinking and talking about risk and helping our company manage those risks as we continue to rapidly grow around the world.”
Yetter Coleman is proud to work in tight formation with Kevin Fiur and his great team, who have earned wall-to-wall success in a free-flying business.
have a big appetite for third-party sales—where we sell and license our wind tunnels and technology to entrepreneurial individuals and a variety of entities,” he says. “My team and I are regularly involved in the sales process and helping our salespeople close deals. We have a complex contracting process, so I’m often engaged with my team at various steps of that process as well.”
Depending on the nature of the transaction, Fiur is further involved in the franchise and licensee relations aspect after each deal is sealed. “Part of that is being a senior leader, and this is a high-touch business,” he says. “People who get into our business spend a lot of money to be involved, so they expect a certain level of access to senior management in relation to their position as a franchisee or licensee. Because of that, I spend a lot of time interfacing with many of our business customers around the world, particularly in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.”
And he’s also involved with the retail customers. “I still read every incident report, from someone who bumps an elbow to someone who breaks a pair of glasses while flying, and, when it makes sense to do so, I’ll call them up to see how they’re doing and try to make sure they are ultimately satisfied with their iFLY experience,” Fiur says.
Given the industry, and the fact that iFLY has flown almost nine million customers worldwide since its creation in 1998 as SkyVenture, the company is heavily committed to safety. And this is an area in which Fiur himself is actively involved. “The number one concern here is safety, so I provide a lot of input in that arena,” Fiur says. “Fortunately, we have a very limited injury history because we take safety extremely seriously. I visit our company-owned wind tunnels. I meet with our instructors and general managers. We consistently talk about safety, debrief about how to do things better, and
We represent technology, energy, and finance companies in high-stakes business litigation.
BAKER BOTTS CONGRATULATES IT’S HIGH FLYING ALUMNI, KEVIN FIUR, AND
As Chief Legal Officer, Kevin keeps iFLY at the forefront of the indoor skydiving adventure it created.
” ...the coolest
adrenaline rush
you’ll ever have in your life.”
—Kevin Fiur, CLO of iFLY
innovate as needed to best serve the customer. My team and I also spend a lot of time thinking and talking about risk and helping our company manage those risks as we continue to rapidly grow around the world.”
Of course, his position isn’t without its challenges. “Our inventions created the global indoor skydiving market. And because we have extensive patents and trade secrets protecting our significant investment in R&D, we work hard to protect our rights and the expenditure of time and resources by our employees and owners. A lot of people have tried to use what we’ve created and own the rights to, and we have a sophisticated team to deal with those situations. We like to solve things on the front end by adhering to our contracts and the relevant laws, but we aren’t afraid to litigate if we have to,” he says.
For Fiur, however, the challenges are worth the opportunity to see iFLY grow from one wind tunnel to seventy-five wind tunnels globally as well as the thrill of sharing this unique experience with people around the world. In fact, Fiur encourages new members of his own team (as well as his outside lawyers) to take the plunge—and it’s something he did when he first joined the company. “I got in that wind. The instructor was able to let go of me, because I had a good, stable body position, and I was flying,” he says.
“There’s something that happens to your brain when you suddenly realize that you’re actually flying—it’s the coolest adrenaline rush you’ll ever have in your life,” he says. “Compared to skiing down a black slope on a mountain or jumping from an airplane, it’s even cooler, because I wasn’t falling; I was flying.”
Rise and Fall
Realogy survived the real estate recession, emerging as a major player in the industry. David Sandomenico was there through all of it, but he’s still forced to grapple with the realities of workplace instability.
By RANDALL COLBURN
David Sandomenico knows what an unstable market looks like. Shortly after joining Realogy, the residential real estate services company landed on a list of the ten companies most likely to go bankrupt. It was 2008, and the recession was digging its hooks into the real estate industry.
“We were definitely struggling,” Sandomenico says, adding that the company was forced to lay off a third of its staff in addition to closing a number of offices. Every week, he sat in on meetings in which Realogy’s leadership discussed how they planned to make payroll. “We were rationalizing every single nickel.”
Sandomenico proved himself vital to Realogy’s survival, however, rising through the ranks as the company weathered the recession. By 2011, with the company in a much better spot, he was serving as its vice president and assistant treasurer, a position he holds to this day. Realogy, meanwhile, has emerged stronger than ever, scooping up 18 percent of market share after undergoing a successful IPO. Currently it owns and franchises several prominent real estate brands, including Century 21, Coldwell Banker, and Corcoran Group.
Realogy is thriving, but Sandomenico hasn’t forgotten what he learned during that period of recession.
David Sandomenico VP & Assistant Treasurer
Realogy Holdings Corp
Courtesy of David Sandomenico
In fact, a recent endeavor forced him to again confront some of the hard truths of the workplace. Roughly five years ago, Sandomenico was tasked with building a department from scratch, which was a herculean endeavor with which he had little experience. After four years of developing processes, building workplace infrastructure, and bonding with his staff, Sandomenico saw the department unceremoniously shuttered due to outside factors. It was a heartbreaking moment for him, but one he continues to remember fondly.
It began with Title Resource Group, a Realogy affiliate that handles the majority of the company’s title work. After Realogy’s internal audit department began seeing some recurring themes in its audit reports, Sandomenico was dispatched to a number of Title Resource Group’s central hubs throughout the country to investigate how each was moving its funds.
“A lot of money moves in residential real estate,” Sandomenico says. “Every time you buy or sell a home, that can be a couple hundred thousands of dollars, if not millions. They all add up at the end of the year to very big numbers.
“We began to identify certain trends in certain regions and presented our findings to the audit committee,” he continues. “This was a fairly big deal for Realogy as a whole, because this was the first time Realogy reached into a business unit and pulled out a very key part of their process. But, at the end of the day, the movement of funds is extremely important, especially for a title company, because you’re essentially handling the closing.”
It was decided, then, that the movement of funds would be brought into Realogy’s headquarters with Sandomenico leading the charge. “I swallowed hard,” he says with a laugh. “I had no previous experience
“Don’t take the thing that’s right in front of you for granted.”
DAVID SANDOMENICO
running a wire center, which is pretty much what this was.”
Slowly but surely, though, the department came together, with each different region’s funds coalescing into one centralized process at Realogy’s Madison, New Jersey, headquarters. As processes came together, so did a staff that eventually reached a count of twenty-four. Regions were introduced slowly, with staffers learning the peculiarities of each state’s particular process.
What the department amounted to, in Sandomenico’s words, was essentially a primary data processing center, one that demanded accuracy and intense focus. His staff, after all, was in charge of processing thousands of wires each month. One year he remembers containing a total of 85,000 wires amounting to just over $10 billion dollars. Also, he points out, “a wire is very different than a check” in that “it moves instantaneously.” Getting a recall is no easy feat. On top of that were the intricacies of each state’s laws, as well as the processes
of the eighteen different financial institutions with whom they were collaborating. Still, Sandomenico assembled a great team, and he recalls very few mistakes across the department’s four years.
Some challenges, however, went beyond mere process. “The biggest challenge,” he says, “was winning the hearts and minds of the people who had been doing this for years to get them to cooperate with us.”
They eventually did, as Sandomenico’s team soon proved themselves to be a positive, reliable force. After four years, though, Title Resource Group decided they wanted another crack at handling the wiring themselves. Just like that, the fate of Sandomenico’s department was written on the wall. “I was very crushed and very teary-eyed,” he says. “Everybody hires and fires in their career, but it’s extremely difficult to look into those twenty-four sets of eyes across the room when you announce that they’re going to be losing their jobs.” The department soon ceased operations, dismantling itself as it had previously built itself up: one region at a time. Now, that work is handled at TRG’s office in southern New Jersey.
When asked what he took away from the experience, Sandomenico says, “Don’t take the thing that’s right in front of you for granted.”
To this day, he keeps the talking points from that day atop his desk. “I keep it there to remind myself that things can change at a moment’s notice,” he says. “You never know what’s around the corner and, at the end of the day, the decisions you make impact people’s lives.”
J.P. Morgan congratulates David Sandomenico on this well-deserved honor. Your integrity, intelligent direction and skillful execution are admired by all. We thank you for your partnership and wish you great success in your future endeavors.
GTreasury congratulates David Sandomenico of Realogy Holdings He is recognized for his impressive career within the treasury func�on with Realogy. For
GTreasury.com
Marke�ng@GTreasury.com 847-847-3706
By Peter Fabris
At Ocean State Job Lot, Tracy Baran works closely with real estate, human resources, purchasing, and other departments to drive ambitious multistate expansion
In the four decades since its humble beginnings selling goods at flea markets, Ocean State
Job Lot has transformed into a widespread enterprise. The first permanent store opened in Rhode Island in 1977, and the company has expanded steadily to become the largest closeout retailer in the northeastern United States.
Tracy Baran General Counsel Ocean State Job Lot
“A lawyer shouldn’t be involved in a real estate deal unless you see the real estate. So, I visit as many stores as possible.”
Today the discount retail chain comprises 133 stores in eight states, soon to be nine states, with sales exceeding $700 million annually, and now looks to its legal leader Tracy Baran to spearhead future opportunities for growth.
OSJL’s history is a classic entrepreneurial effort that turned a strategy of helping people save money by acquiring lower-cost inventory and selling it at bargain prices into a thriving business that appeals to a wide range of consumers. While the business plan sounded simple, growing the company to what it is today required a well-coordinated effort with leaders from several business disciplines collaborating across their areas of expertise.
Baran, general counsel, joined the company in 2011, when it encompassed about ninety stores. The attorney plays a key role in guiding Ocean State Job Lot’s expansion efforts. Her work includes supporting real estate deals; assessing how varying state regulations impact the business; developing and updating workplace policies for more than 4,000 employees; and ensuring compliance with intellectual property laws and authorizations to sell closeout merchandise. All of these tasks are essential to growth.
The legal leader cites her deep curiosity to learn as much as she can about the business,
a trait that has served Baran and OSJL well, as one reason for her success. For instance, she is eager to get out of the office to get a feel for how conditions at potential expansion sites could affect the business. “At the firm where I worked prior to joining Ocean State Job Lot, a partner told me that a lawyer shouldn’t be involved in a real estate deal unless you see the real estate,” Baran recalls. “So, I visit as many stores as possible.”
Her oversight of leases and property purchases has been critical to expansion. Baran partners with in-house and outside real estate professionals to reduce risks related to a property’s infrastructure such as heating and cooling system flaws, the condition of the roof and the parking lot, and special restrictions that could impact the business.
A leaky roof or poorly functioning air conditioning should be the responsibility of the landlord in lease agreements, Baran says, so that the company isn’t burdened with high repair costs after taking control of the property. On purchases, maintenance issues can be used to negotiate a lower price. As the real estate professionals hash out these important details, Baran works to secure the best possible terms in the contract language.
Most expansion locations are within retail plazas, according to Baran, and some of those have grocery store tenants. In some cases, the location may have an allowed-use restriction that forbids another food retailer from moving in. OSJL does sell food items, so any such restriction has to be waived for the deal to go forward. Typically, after explaining the company’s retail approach, supermarket
tenants tend to see Ocean State Job Lot more as a complementary vendor than a competitor, according to Baran.
“It’s a matter of getting people comfortable with our business model,” Baran says. “More often than not, we find a way to get it done.”
Another area for Baran and her three-person legal team to impact financial returns of new locations is state labor and employment regulations. “States have been more active in lawmaking in this area in recent years,” she says. For example, five of the eight states where the company does business have enacted mandatory paid sick time laws. These laws vary significantly by state. Some require one hour of paid sick time for every thirty hours worked; others require one hour for forty hours of work. Some states require an employee to work ninety days before earning sick time; others mandate 120 days. Such variables cause complexity in employment policies, since the company has had to decide whether to have a single companywide sick leave policy or vary it by state. For a companywide policy to work, Baran says it would have to adhere to the state regulation with the most generous terms. OSJL has had a sick leave policy in place for many years, and it decided to keep that policy in place with adjustments for state laws when needed. “We expect all states will have mandatory sick leave at some point,” says Baran, adding that the company’s policy may have to change accordingly.
Baran works closely with the OSJL’s HR chief on labor issues, especially on controversial topics such as sexual harassment. For example, a recent law in New York State requires all employees to undergo training on this issue within thirty days of the start of their employment. When opening a new store in New York, managers must schedule training for all store associates within that time
frame. Baran’s team ensures that managers follow through with that requirement. It’s the kind of compliance assurance duty that reduces risk for the company.
Risk management extends to other areas of the business such as purchasing. Baran’s team sometimes modifies terms on agreements from vendors that are having financial difficulty to ensure OSJL doesn’t make payments on goods until it takes possession of them. This prevents a scenario where a creditor puts a claim on merchandise after the retailer pays for it.
Regular interaction with business leaders is vital for Baran to reduce such risks and keep the company on a fast-growth path. Coming to the company from a law firm environment, it took Baran a little while to figure out how to navigate optimally on the corporate side. One important lesson is collaboration. “You have to make sure that you have all of the right players at the table when holding meetings,” she says.
Whatever the task, Baran sleuths the pertinent information from the area of the business most in the know. Although one of her chief roles is to protect the company from risk, she’s not one to quash new ideas and initiatives. “My role is to advise on risk and find a way to get things done,” she explains. OSJL is a privately held company that has maintained an entrepreneurial spirit as it has grown through the years, and Baran adds that for continued success, innovation within legal and across the business must be encouraged.
Developing Both People and Properties
At Beztak Properties, Elizabeth Carlson McCririe works within a culture centered on developing both properties and team members’ careers
By REBECCA ROBERTS
Elizabeth Carlson McCririe credits her entry into commercial real estate to the amazing mentors she had shortly after finishing college thirty years ago. Now, as the president and chief operating officer of Beztak Properties, McCririe embraces the ability to help others grow their careers. “The best careers are made when someone wants others to succeed,” she says. In fact, one of the aspects she has most enjoyed about her nine years at Beztak is the firm’s emphasis on guiding team members through their own advancement, which in turn benefits the company. “I was drawn to Beztak because of the excellent sixty-year reputation of its
partners and their impressive portfolio. I also felt a great symmetry between my goals and interests and those of the Beztak partners.”
Since McCririe joined Beztak in 2010, the company has expanded significantly to over twenty thousand units across fifteen states that include both owned properties and third-party fee management. As Beztak continues to grow, McCririe cites Beztak’s approach to real estate development as well as its culture that champions personal development as a means to continued success.
In terms of its owned and developed properties, Beztak caters specifically to local demographics and also ensures that a property’s design is appropriate for the context of its site. By keeping the design and construction
in-house, “Beztak creates properties that complement the neighborhoods. Nothing is cookie cutter. It’s all about blending into the area with the right materials and design,” McCririe says.
In 2020, Beztak’s luxury senior living brand, All Seasons, is set to open two new properties: one in Oro Valley, Arizona, and one in Ann Arbor, Michigan. All Seasons provides custom programming to engage sophisticated residents. Residents’ tastes and preferences, McCririe explains, vary by location. “We sit down with focus groups to see where the residents are coming from and what their expectations are,” she says. “In Ann Arbor, we are creating a campus for folks who are academically minded and partnering
with universities in the area to create the types of activities the residents want.”
With Beztak’s property management also done in-house, service is the backbone of the company. “We make a difference by serving people in one of the most intimate places they will experience: their home,” says McCririe. To provide high-quality service, Beztak embraces technology. Tenants in multifamily buildings have access to a maintenance app, where they can communicate directly with maintenance staff to schedule a work order. Staff use an online platform to control purchasing and automatically reorder site-specific inventory when necessary. “The real estate industry has been consistently lagging behind other
industries when it comes to technology, and we want to provide ease and convenience to all of our residents,” McCririe says.
Throughout their period of recent growth, Beztak has remained mindful of the scale of their organization, both regarding new developments and fee managed properties. According to McCririe, Beztak develops only three to four projects at a time, focusing on quality over quantity. Similarly, as the fee management side of the business expands, Beztak keeps each regional manager’s oversight at only a handful of properties so that each one can receive an adequate level of service.
Growing the business also means growing the team. McCririe explains that at Beztak, the culture champions mentorship and
Elizabeth Carlson McCririe
Beztak Properties President and COO
“The real estate industry has been consistently lagging behind other industries when it comes to technology, and we want to provide ease and convenience to all of our residents.”
ELIZABETH CARLSON MCCRIRIE
opportunities for employees to grow with the company. This culture is what accounts for Beztak’s more conservative approach to the scale of their expansion. “We can’t expand too quickly. The amount of human resources necessary to ensure a successful lease-up or transition needs to be trained, seasoned, and in place for the property to be successful,” says McCririe. She also stresses the importance of ensuring new team members are excited about Beztak and the company’s mission, because a great culture is what keeps good people at Beztak after they’re trained. When looking to add to their team, McCririe and the senior leadership at Beztak look more for attitude and a willingness to learn than prior experience on a résumé. McCririe explains that Beztak is ready and willing to provide additional training to anyone looking to move up within the organization. “I love taking someone from a site position and bringing them into a corporate position. We do this routinely,” she says, “and send them to training so they know what the business is all about.” Associates are encouraged to design their own career path within Beztak and work with their supervisors to put it into place. McCririe describes an opendoor policy inherent in Beztak’s culture and emphasizes that all employees have access to executives for mentorship.
Another aspect of Beztak’s culture that McCririe applauds is Beztak’s long and sustained history of charitable giving. It has endeavored to support educational institutions, such as the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, as well as medical care and research organizations focusing both on pediatric and adult medicine, such as the University of Michigan, Children’s Hospital of Michigan, and Friendship Circle. Beztak has also supported the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the Chamber Music Society of Detroit in its endeavor to support cultural institutions both in Detroit and the suburban communities that surround Detroit.
At this point in her career, both giving back to the to the community at large and to others at Beztak is what motivates McCririe the most. “The partners at Beztak have fostered an extremely nurturing culture,” she says. “What I’m loving in my current role is identifying people’s strengths and helping them become who they want to be for the benefit of the company.”
Modern Drywall Inc congratulates Elizabeth Carlson McCririe, President and COO at Beztak Properties for her well-deserved recognition. We greatly appreciate our longstanding relationship with Elizabeth and the entire Beztak team. We are proud to be part of their many amazing developments and we look forward to many future projects together.
Moving Cable Forward to New Dimensions
To maintain Harmonic’s place as the global market leader in video processing technology, CFO Sanjay Kalra works diligently to lead his team through the company’s transition to revolutionary new cable access software
By CLINT WORTHINGTON
Since its incorporation in 1988, video and networking product provider Harmonic Inc. has been working to give operators faster internet services in the most efficient and costeffective ways possible. Today, this means moving beyond cable hardware to their new CableOS virtualized cable access solution, the industry’s first software-based solution for operators who need to manage the delivery of IP-based data, video, and voice services around the globe. Companies with such a strong portfolio of services require comprehensive, experienced financial leadership and a strong corporate culture, tasks that chief financial officer Sanjay Kalra happily takes on.
Before joining Harmonic in 2016, Kalra developed decades of accounting and finance experience, particularly in the technology sector. Spending nine years at professional services firm Ernst & Young auditing public and private tech companies of various sizes, Kalra then went in-house in progressively larger roles at public technology companies in the Bay Area. These include companies like Silicon Image, Model N, and TiVo; now, at Harmonic, he brings this considerable experience to bear in his current role at CFO.
Kalra’s work comes at a fascinating time for Harmonic, as their virtualized cable access solution CableOS is gaining traction in the industry, and as Kalra asserts, “leading the way in defining the next generation of cable access networks.” To date, the cable network management of most IP traffic is hardware-based; CableOS permits operators to have a software-based solution for cultivating improved data delivery and broadband supply with higher quality of service. In February 2018, Harmonic announced their first CableOS deployment at Com Hem, Sweden’s leading provider of television, internet, and fixed-telephony services, and is currently working with companies of numerous sizes to deploy the technology—whether Tier-1 companies such as Comcast or Tier-2 and Tier-3 companies such as Buckeye Broadband.
This technology has the potential to provide incredible value for cable providers and customers alike, says Kalra. “Cable operators have an existing footprint that they continue to grow and improve,” he notes, “and they can do a much more effective and efficient job at driving growth
Sanjay Kalra CFO
Harmonic
by deploying our technology.” With CableOS, he says, companies can expand their system capacity only when needed, which is practically revolutionary for an industry that often relies on preemptive building out of cable hardware before companies can improve on their performance.
Of course, none of these advances would be possible without the company’s strong business environment. Kalra takes great pride in Harmonic’s “people first” culture, one focused on the professional development and motivation of its employees. Harmonic gives existing team members many opportunities to promote to the next level rather than hiring from outside; Kalra himself was promoted from within the company to CFO in 2017 (having come to the company as chief accounting officer the year before). “In order to retain and attract top talent, we need to treat our employees as our customers,” Kalra remarks, resulting in a culture that takes a sincere interest in not just what everyone on his team can do, but what they want to do.
One of Kalra’s biggest priorities in helping to cultivate this people-first culture is establishing high standards of transparency for his work and that of his department. “Sharing our vision for the future helps everybody in the company be an essential part of the team,” Kalra notes, “with a deeper connection to the work.” Executives like Kalra regularly update the entire company on strategies and current events and organize quarterly all-hands meetings to answer employee questions. Harmonic also shares its quarterly results, as well as its strategic and financial goals, with the entire employee base. These attributes are of great interest to Kalra. “Transparency and employee happiness are part of one chain that leads to the company’s success,” he says.
Transparency and putting people first are just a few tenets of Kalra’s overall leadership philosophy, one that places trust in his team to think creatively and rise to meet
new challenges. “I’m a big believer in strong cross-functional collaboration and believe that taking some reasonable business risk in some decisions is important,” notes Kalra, who often works closely with his teams and with other departments such as sales and R&D to find the best pathways and solutions to issues that arise. Kalra values his team’s ability to change the traditional structure of processes or methodologies if the need arises, based on the evolving demands of their business.
Kalra also prides himself on setting tough goals for the company, such as when he sets up annual budgets, or bonus and compensation plans. He takes a very structured approach to monitor the process of pre-set goals, and drive his future decisions based on their progress to date.
Despite these strict goals, he also encourages new ideas and input from his team with an open-door policy, which often results in greater opportunities for their professional development. He consistently checks in to ensure that his team is taking relevant training and courses for either professional development or the required credits to become licensed CPAs. This way, Kalra can take advantage of his team’s skills while also encouraging them to properly steer their career growth.
With the advent of the CableOS system, and his own role in perpetuating Harmonic’s strong corporate culture, Kalra believes the future for the company is bright. “We are the leaders of world-class video streaming solutions,” he stresses. Harmonic’s innovative video solutions power everything from high-efficiency video encoding compression of ultra HD video, to cloud media processing for OTT delivery.
Given these advances, and Harmonic’s continued emphasis on solving its customers’ biggest challenges, Kalra sees Harmonic maintaining its dominance as the global market leader in video processing technology for years to come.
Congratulations Sanjay Kalra, Senior Vice President, CFO at Harmonic, for your leadership and promoting a more personal level of connection to drive success within Harmonic. ADP is deeply honored to partner with Sanjay and Harmonic to help achieve their human capital management vision.
To learn more about ADP and see what our clients are saying about us, visit adp.com.
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Her husband’s experience with fraudulent business practices led Julia McGuffey to law school and eventually to her role as corporate counsel at Papa John’s
Words by Bridgett Novak
Photos by Clay Cook
Malcolm X said, “There is no better teacher than adversity.” There may be no better example of someone who took that to heart than Julia McGuffey. After earning an undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Kentucky, McGuffey enrolled in a doctoral program in clinical psychology at Florida State University, but soon realized it wasn’t a good fit. Her husband, Keith McGuffey (aka Trey D), was working as a singer-songwriter, so she decided to stay home and take care of their two young children.
Along the way, Keith signed with Lou Pearlman and Trans Continental Records, the same manager and record label as the Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, and several other popular bands. However, Pearlman was embezzling funds and ended up being sued by all the bands for misrepresentation and fraud. He lost all the cases and was later convicted of money laundering, conspiracy, and running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors out of more than $300 million. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison in 2008, and died in prison in 2016.
The experience was a wake-up call for McGuffey. “To see someone get cheated out of money he deserved was very upsetting. The contracts were so shady that [my husband] ended up not owning any of the songs he wrote or even his stage name.” She decided to go to law school at the University of Louisville’s Brandeis School of Law, and focus on intellectual property, copyrights, and trademarks.
McGuffey clerked at the Louisville Gas & Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Company during and after law school, and then landed a job as an associate at Middleton Reutinger, where she continued her focus on IP and trademarks. “We helped a young man trademark a video game, called Terraria. It became insanely popular, turning him into an overnight millionaire. That was really exciting,” she says.
Though she wasn’t looking, one day she received a LinkedIn notice about a job opening at Papa John’s. “The job description read like it was made for me,” she says. It was a no-brainer and she applied right away.
She started in August 2014 as an associate attorney. Six months later, she began supporting the marketing department. “We handle all of the department’s legal needs, which includes reviewing commercials and print ads, managing and protecting our trademarks, reviewing contracts, and negotiating sponsorship agreements,” she says.
The knowledge required is not just legal. “There are lots of regulations you must adhere to in the food industry,”
“Everyone needs to tread very lightly in this new digital age.”
McGuffey explains. “For instance, if you want to use the words ‘taste’ or ‘better’ in an ad, you must have conducted actual taste and comparison tests. If you want to use the word ‘fresh,’ you must meet certain standards established by the FDA.”
“‘Natural’ is another tricky one,” she adds. “The FDA hasn’t come up with a good definition of what it means, so I advise our people not to use it until they do.”
To illustrate the seriousness of word choices, McGuffey recounts a case a few years ago when a company claimed to use 100 percent cheese in a newly introduced menu item. The company ended up losing a class-action case when it was found that the cheese included a starch additive or filler. “They probably didn’t intend to mislead anyone, but the court ruled against them because they had used another ingredient. All sorts of things will raise red flags, so it’s best to err on the side of caution,” McGuffey says.
To stay on top of the latest rules, McGuffey attends conferences, many of which are designed specifically for lawyers involved in the advertising industry, and turns to seasoned outside counsel whenever necessary. “I also get summaries of court cases and FTC rulings and letters. I don’t know how people practiced before the internet,” she laughs.
These days, McGuffey is also busy helping with the overhaul of the company’s public image. Ever since its founding in 1984, the company has featured founder John Schnatter in all of its marketing materials. With his
Julia McGuffey Corporate Counsel
Papa John's
We wanted to say, “Our Pizza is the World’s Best .” But our attorney, Julia McGuffey, wouldn’t let us.
resignation as CEO in December 2017 and as chairman of the board in July 2018, the marketing department has redesigned almost everything.
“We’re creating a whole new voice for print ads, TV commercials,” McGuffey explains. “Now we’re focusing on lots of people—employees, franchisees, vendors, and customers. In fact, one of our new slogans is ‘Better Together.’”
Of the company’s 5,200 locations, 70 percent are franchisee-owned. “Most of the franchisees have owned their stores for years and are big philanthropists in their communities,” McGuffey observes. “It’s been exciting getting to know their stories and helping publicize the good that they do. It turns out that our best ingredients are our people.”
To further strengthen the company’s relationship with franchisees, McGuffey has helped develop company-wide social media guidelines. “It covers what you can and can’t say, but we have to update it regularly because things are constantly changing. One company, Duane Reade, posted a photo on Twitter and Facebook of actress Katherine Heigl carrying one of its shopping bags. She sued them for $6 million, since they used her image without her permission and implied her endorsement. She withdrew the claim after agreeing to a confidential settlement with the company. Sometimes seemingly innocuous things can cause big problems.”
To make it as simple as possible, McGuffey and the social media team have color-coded the guidelines. Green means go/okay; yellow means you should get legal’s input first; and red means you should never do this. “People have to be careful what they post,” McGuffey says. “Everyone needs to tread very lightly in this new digital age.”
Heartland Dental’s purchasing chief, Brandon Belford, has ignited a strong movement to cut costs in the dental supply industry
By PETER FABRIS
In 2016, a single request for bids from a small, rapidly growing firm that supports dental practices shook up the dental supply industry. The document requested bids for the largest contract that the industry had ever seen for a wide array of commercial supplies and equipment. Representing several hundred dentist offices in the US, Heartland Dental was using its market clout from a growing stable of clients to secure better prices on dental office necessities.
“Suppliers were taken aback because this was something completely new,” says Brandon Belford, Heartland Dental’s vice president of procurement. “It put suppliers on notice that the dental industry needed to change.”
Indeed, Heartland Dental’s action echoed upheavals in other industries where major buyers leveraged their market heft to obtain better deals from suppliers, which in turn drove changes in the customer-supplier equation. The prior decade had seen such a phenomenon in the medical industry. It was now dental’s turn.
“Suppliers had to figure out how to be more efficient,” Belford says. Heartland Dental’s gambit paid off, resulting in competition among the industry’s two major suppliers. The result was long overdue.
Constant pressure for dental offices to operate more efficiently drives initiatives to cut costs without sacrificing quality of care. “Insurance companies are always looking for ways to compress margins on what dental practices are being reimbursed for,” Belford explains. “Anything we can save can be passed on to patients. Overall, the industry is stronger as a result.”
Brandon Belford VP of Procurement Heartland Dental
“Anything we can save can be passed on to patients. Overall, the industry is stronger as a result.” BRANDON BELFORD
the way for such initiatives. Formerly a manager of supplier management and procurement at Boeing, Belford was attracted to Heartland Dental by a considerable professional challenge. At that point, Heartland Dental, on a sharp growth path, had not devoted much attention to refining purchasing tactics and processes. Belford had the opportunity to build a procurement department from the existing team which was providing tactical clinical operational support to Heartland’s supported practices. This would be a much different experience than working at Boeing, which had an entrenched, regimented purchasing operation.
and clinically trained and experienced dental hygienists and assistants who provide industry expertise that is especially critical when assessing new products.
Heartland Dental is now the largest dental support organization (DSO), and the largest US commercial consumer of dental supplies, services, and equipment. As such, it is able to catalyze new developments in dental care. A recent example: the company ordered 1,000 intra-oral digital scanners, a new technology that improves the way crowns and bridges are measured and processed.
The machines take digital images of a patient’s tooth for fabricating implants. The digital process replaces a more cumbersome method in which the patient bites down on a gel-infused mouthpiece that creates a physical model. That model has to be mailed to the lab for production of the implant. When this process is performed by a digital scanner, the images can be transmitted instantly to the lab. This cuts out several days from the process, and produces more accurate results. The old way results in about an 8 percent error rate, requiring a second visit for measuring; the new way cuts the error rate to 2 percent. Heartland Dental is accelerating adoption of this more efficient technology by offering it to its dentist clients at a reasonable price, and has created a team of dentists and dental assistants to advise and train dentists how to best use them.
With support and guidance from Heartland’s leadership, including Dr. Rick Workman (founder and chairman), Pat Bauer (CEO), and Mark Greenstein (EVP of strategy), Heartland has been instrumental in paving
One of the team’s first accomplishments was the institution of a “spend cube”—an analytical tool used to track spend and indicate where the procurement team should concentrate. “We first looked at the largest areas of spend, which told us where we should first focus ,” he says. It was “a bit of an unconventional approach,” he adds, as this activity preceded the usual first step of putting operational systems in place for day-to-day activity. But, it made sense when they saw how much money could be saved by putting the largest categories of purchases out for bid.
The effort has enabled the company to acquire “brand name products at private label or generic prices,” Belford says. “By driving healthy competition, our team ensures Heartland is realizing our scale and receiving market-leading price, quality, and service,” he says.
Another critical initiative was, in strong partnership with Heartland’s legal team, implementation of a contract management system that tracks Heartland’s contracts including costs and expiration dates. This was essential for the company to monitor its various procurement deals and scale up purchasing operations as the company continued to grow quickly.
Over the past four years, Heartland’s Procurement team has added talent from a wide array of backgrounds, some with industry experience and some from other industries. Anneliese Werner joined Heartland in 2016 bringing strategic sourcing muscle; Angelina Davito, a project management professional, came from IT in a university setting. They were joined by a CPA, a former police officer,
Belford’s move from the bureaucratic, slower-moving government contractor, Boeing, to a more freewheeling, less risk-averse culture was refreshing. “Mark Greenstein and really all of our leadership have helped me learn how to be more entrepreneurial,” he says. The formation of a partnership with the company’s main supplier, Patterson Dental, to train dental practice team members, proves the point. “Instead of a traditional vendor-customer relationship, it’s more of a true strategic partnership,” he says.
While Patterson works with Heartland’s supported dental office teams to save money by implementing more cost-effective purchasing practices, Heartland Dental will reinvest the savings in growing its business, Belford says. “That will translate into more business for Patterson.”
It’s a unique arrangement in the dental industry, and one that Belford is proud and excited to have been a part of launching. It’s just the kind of opportunity he envisioned when he signed on, and there will be plenty more of them, propelling more robust growth for Heartland Dental.
“3M congratulates Brandon on his successful career at Heartland Dental and wishes him continued success in his role. We’d like to thank Heartland for their strong partnership as we continue to work toward our mutual goal of helping to improve patients’ lives through promoting lifelong oral health.” —Shawn Gregg, 3M Oral Care, Director of Strategic Accounts and Channel
Vision, leadership and dedication are the driving force behind Heartland Dental’s digital transformation. With a fully digital workflow, including the combination of Align Technology’s Invisalign® clear aligners and the iTero Element® intraoral scanners, Heartland Dental is paving the way to a new future for orthodontists, dentists, and patients.
National Dentex Labs congratulates Brandon Belford and Heartland Dental on this well-deserved recognition. We share in Heartland Dental’s commitment to quality dental care for patients all around the country, and we sincerely appreciate the opportunity to work with such a high-performing group of dental professionals.
The best clinical outcomes happen outside your office.
3M Oral Care solutions help you deliver faster, easier, more effective oral care. Whether you’re a dentist or an orthodontist, we help you get your patients out of the chair and back to their lives as soon as possible. After all, 3M technology is a wonderful thing, but only if it does something important. Like helping people live healthier, happier lives. And that’s the best outcome of all. For more information, visit 3M.com/dental.
INNOVATION RISES IN THE WEST
By Arianna Stern
Bonnie DePasse VP and General Counsel, HomeVestors of America Inc.
“In 1996, one of our first independently owned and operated franchises bought the first house,” says Bonnie DePasse, vice president and general counsel of HomeVestors of America Inc. “And in 2018, now with more than 1,000 franchises in the network, one of our franchisees bought the 95,000 th house.”
Kathy Walden
Those figures define the upward trajectory of HomeVestors, a company that trains entrepreneurs to buy, rehab and sell, or hold for rent houses, generally from distressed homeowners who have found themselves in an “ugly situation.”
DePasse has worked at HomeVestors full-time since 2003 as its first in-house lawyer. During her fifteen-plusyear tenure with the company, she’s done more than just protect its growth with her legal expertise. She’s helped to make the legal team—currently composed of two lawyers, two paralegals, a legal assistant, two auditors, and a collections specialist—into a team that focuses on keeping the company’s brand identity well-defined, establishing its ethical code, and sustaining strong personal ties among all of their teammates.
One of the first milestones on the road to HomeVestors’ current success was the development of its now-famous national marketing campaign slogan, “We Buy Ugly Houses,” which DePasse helps to protect every day. She shares that the slogan wasn’t an instant hit when it debuted in 1999. The late Ken D’Angelo, HomeVestors’ founder, had been brainstorming ways to help the franchisees attract the right types of qualified leads. He came up with the slogan, “We Buy Ugly Houses,” which he planned to use on billboards across the country, and he brought it to various advertising agencies for feedback.
“They all told him, ‘You can’t use this. No one responds to negative advertising. This won’t work. You’ve got to think of something else,’” DePasse says. Undeterred, D’Angelo trusted his instincts and paid for the original billboard with the slogan. It increased the quality of leads available to franchisees almost immediately. In fact, it’s had such demonstrable success that DePasse and her team
registered it for federal trademark and have continuously spent considerable time defending it against infringement.
“Ironically now, everybody wants to use it,” DePasse said. They have trademark protection down to a science: Typically, a potential trademark infringer comes to the HomeVestors legal team via a franchisee in the field or through a web crawling service. DePasse or her cocounsel will review the material and decide whether it legally qualifies as infringement. If so, the legal team investigates the infringer, including all of the infringer’s advertising. While the legal team handles infringement take downs of social media and advertising website posts in-house, a prolific infringer is sent to outside counsel at Wilson, Elser, Moskowitz, Edelman & Dicker LLP, who sends a cease-anddesist letter and, if necessary, files a lawsuit.
At any given time, HomeVestors and Wilson Elser are managing multiple lawsuits in federal courts around the country. “We will lose our trademarks if we don’t defend them, so we have to defend them,” says DePasse. It’s her way of protecting the company’s name and “ugly family” of trademarks.
Like any functional family, HomeVestors has a set of shared values, which DePasse helped to define early on. In the late nineties, when DePasse was still working at the Harmon Law Firm P.C., where HomeVestors was her first client, she had a pivotal values-related conversation with D’Angelo.
“He said, ‘I’m noticing the same mistakes being made repeatedly by new franchisees that come into the system, and we can’t afford to have these kinds of mistakes being made,’” DePasse recalls. D’Angelo proposed that they work on a set of proprietary, in-house rules that they could teach during initial training.
Within an unlicensed industry, D’Angelo set out to create “a moral and ethical code to establish the best standards in the industry.” In short order, the two of them created and continue to update a document called HomeVestors of America Inc. Systems and Standards, which markedly decreased the types of errors that prompted its creation. The HomeVestors team has taught variations on that document to all new franchisees ever since.
HomeVestors’ Systems and Standards got a major update in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. The crisis forced HomeVestors to downsize considerably, and through that painful experience, the team learned what not to do so they could protect the company and help ensure that this severe a financial crisis did not impact the company again. Both the written Systems and Standards document and DePasse’s teachings now reflect the lessons of that moment.
“I teach several of the lender fraud schemes that helped to cause the financial demise in 2008. I teach them in every new training class so that they are aware that this type of
Kathy Walden
Bonnie DePasse (center) stands with the HomeVestors team.
behavior is against the law. It’s a felony. It’s mortgage fraud,” DePasse says. She notes that team members hold each other accountable for sustaining the company values, thereby ensuring one another’s success and compliance with all laws.
Teamwork is one of the core values that makes HomeVestors successful, DePasse says. The close professional and interpersonal ties between her and her teammates, and throughout the organization, have lent it its family feel. She speaks with pride about how well the legal department collaborates to keep trademark infringement cases, contract review, franchise document preparation, audits, collections, and litigation running smoothly. DePasse also has a literal family connection within the business: her daughter entered a blind submission to design the original HomeVestors mascot, UG, when she was fifteen years old, and her entry won.
Perhaps most significantly, DePasse had a formative friendship with D’Angelo, whom she characterizes as kind, principled, and charismatic.
“Ken was described to me by a franchisee as someone who had the charisma of a Disney character,” DePasse says, noting that the description rang true. When D’Angelo passed away in 2005 at the age of fifty-five, the whole company felt his loss deeply.
“We’re carrying on Ken’s legacy,” DePasse says, “and I’m very proud to do it. I think he would be very proud of the company and the entire HomeVestors franchise network to this day.”
As HVA’s premier investor insurance provider for over ten years, Arcana Insurance Services has had the pleasure of working with Bonnie DePasse in addressing the many market challenges within the real estate investment sector. Her professionalism and leading-edge knowledge have allowed both organizations to move quickly in addressing pertinent matters to ensure the on-going success of the organization. We join all of her colleagues at HVA in celebrating her achievements and leadership.
As demonstrated by its WAVE (Women Attorneys Valued & Empowered) initiative, Wilson Elser takes a progressive approach toward advancing the professional and personal well-being of its women attorneys. We are fortunate to work with like-minded organizations such as HomeVestors of America and salute Bonnie DePasse for her efforts on behalf of her company and the greater legal community.
Women’s Role In The Legal Profession
Wilson Elser salutes Bonnie DePasse, General Counsel of our valued client, HomeVestors of America. Those who have had the privilege of working with Bonnie know well and appreciate her high professional standards and enlightened leadership. Her legal prowess – and the efforts of her team – are evident in the company’s enviable stature as one of the country’s fastest growing private franchisors. We look forward to Bonnie’s continued contributions in advancing HVA’s ambitious objectives.
A Bold Strategy for a Bold Company
As SVP and CHRO for Mercury Systems, Emma Woodthorpe helps bring in and retain the best minds in engineering and technology
By BETTY HORACE
Mercury Systems has pioneered the production of some of the most crucial pieces of defense electronics.
The Andover, Massachusetts-based organization’s secure sensor and safety-critical processing subsystems are utilized by a variety of defense, intelligence, and aerospace programs. In order to ensure it remains at the cutting edge and provides essential value for sensitive industries, Mercury Systems needs to recruit and retain the highest quality employees in the incredibly competitive technology sphere. As senior vice president and chief human resources officer, Emma Woodthorpe helps drive a strategy for Mercury Systems that brings all of that top-tier talent together.
Woodthorpe began her career after earning a business degree in her native England. After developing experience and building a knowledge base in other fields, she learned that her passion truly lay in building strategy and culture, hiring the right people, and then watching as they thrive and drive the business. In 2000, she was lured to the United States, taking on her first technology-focused role with Silicon Valley-based Display Research Laboratories. There she played a role in the full life cycle of a company—Woodthorpe came in as the fifth employee in the start-up, hired a full workforce leading up to the dot-com crash, and then had to lay off employees until the company closed two years later. From there, Woodthorpe moved on to a role at industrial giant Dupont, developing more experience in acquisition strategy and integration.
After a stop at water-focused technology organization Xylem, Woodthorpe took on her first CHRO role, joining Mercury Systems in 2016. The organization offered intense new challenges—it’s currently in a high-growth phase, doubling size in the last two years, including revenue, profitability, market cap, and stock price. It’s also made seven
acquisitions in the last two years, and fell at number twenty-seven on Fortune’s list of the fastest-growing companies. With all of that growth in capital and demand, of course, comes an extreme growth in personnel; Mercury Systems has also doubled its employee total in that same stretch of time.
To be able to keep up with that rapid change, Woodthorpe and the rest of Mercury Systems’ leadership team needs to build a proactive HR strategy, constantly building for the future and anticipating upcoming roadblocks as much as possible. But equally key is developing a culture that can also proactively bring together the vast span of talent spread throughout the organization. Woodthorpe took on that massive challenge boldly, confident because she knew that she had an incredible team supporting her. “I realized that aspiration was possible with Mercury a year ago and then built what is quickly becoming one of the best HR teams I have ever worked with,” she said in a post on the company’s website. “Seeing the impact they are having on Mercury has made me very proud.”
"It's essential that I can rely on my colleagues to have my back because otherwise, I wouldn't be successful,” Brian Sutton, senior manager of embedded systems engineering, explained in a recent post on Mercury Systems’ LinkedIn page. In an organization with needs spanning engineering, computer science, and other highly technical spaces, building trust and reinforcing teamwork is paramount.
Mercury Systems’ recruitment efforts include participation in microelectronics boot camps and career fairs in the revered academic institutions in the surrounding Massachusetts area. Mercury System representatives are also mainstays at conferences such as those run by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association. At these and other events, Mercury Systems recruiters draw in top-tier talent by extolling the organization’s unique position within the defense industrial base and
the opportunity to tackle some of the world’s most innovative technologies.
In addition to teamwork, Mercury Systems provides a gratifying workplace through a commitment to offering opportunities for learning, growth, and enrichment—both personal and professional. The organization’s mission of supporting American troops manifests in corporate activities, while leadership also organizes blood drives and other charity events. The other core values shared throughout the culture include working with integrity, a sense of urgency, and a focus on the customer. The spectrum all comes together in a commitment to bringing the entire Mercury Systems community into a sense of unity.
The organization’s dedication to diversity helps add to its deep talent pool, tapping into often overlooked groups to provide new perspectives and leadership. Mercury Systems’ focus on women in leadership is particularly strong, as they highlight seven director and executive-level women leaders on a dedicated page on the company website, hoping to inspire further women into leadership positions.
Despite all of the recent successes in recruiting and retaining talent at Mercury Systems, Woodthorpe is continuing her proactive streak and already looking to the future of the organization. In a recent post on the company’s website, she has committed herself to a goal of continuing to drive growth and focus further on women in leadership and engineering. “Mercury is a fantastic company that I think can provide wonderful opportunities for young women and we need to help show that internally and externally,” she says. And as in her leadership values for the entire organization, Woodthorpe also remains determined to grow and develop new strengths in her own career. “I am a great believer in always continuing to learn...I aim to continue that, as it has been a big part of my journey in getting to this role and will continue to be,” she says.
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