As if prior experience hadn’t taught us that this is a serious conference and not some BS golf junket to Florida mid-winter, after brief welcoming remarks from BIFMA Board Chair, Hank Menke and BIFMA Executive Director, Tom Reardon, the first session got underway almost immediately after many of us arrived at the venue.
The first speaker was Nancy Koehn. She is both a tenured professor at the Harvard Business School and a historian, which is a highly unusual combination. But she does research into effective leadership – both past and present, so it seems less strange in that light. She said she’s not interested in the past for its own sake, but rather for what it can teach us that we can apply in our own leadership roles.
Specifically she said she wanted to talk to us about the kind of courageous leadership that is forged in crisis. To help define courageous leadership, she cited a quote from the celebrated author, David Foster Wallace, “Courageous leaders are individuals who help us overcome the limitations of our own weaknesses, selfishness, laziness and fears to get us to do harder, better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.”
She believes courageous leaders are made, not born and that the making of them consists of three elements:
- A combination of nature and nurture (endowments and experience)
- A moment arises that the individual recognizes demands their leadership
- A person’s choice to embrace the cause and get in the game
She chose Sir Ernest Shackleton, the early 20th century Antarctic explorer, and President Abraham Lincoln to illustrate several key attributes of courageous leaders. I’m pretty sure everybody knows who Abraham Lincoln was, but you may not be familiar with Shackleton. He led three and participated in a fourth expedition to Antarctica when “discovering” the south pole captured the imagination of the world in the way that landing a man on the moon did in our time.
There are many books on Shackleton’s exploits and it is not my intent to dwell on them here. But if you want just a taste of what amazing perseverance means, just type Earnest Shackleton into your Wikipedia search bar.
Ms. Koehn stated that, “What is understood in retrospect is that Shackleton understood that in moments of great turbulence when the stakes are high, the fate of a particular enterprise comes down – briefly and critically – to the energy and actions of the individual leader.”
Some of the leadership lessons to be gleaned from studying amazing leaders such as Lincoln and Shackleton can be summarized as follows. Great leaders:
- Keep perspective. They cultivate the ability to see the big picture and then keep their eyes trained on it.
- Lead from their humanity. Real leaders build trust by constant communication, consistent empathy, and regular attention to the stakes of the change process.
- Embrace crisis. Crisis is a powerful classroom in which deep personal transformation is possible.
As has become a tradition at the BIFMA Conference, we were treated to a book signing by Ms. Koehn. While signing her latest book, Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times, she was exceptionally accessible and warm. She stayed on for dinner with the conference attendees, who benefitted from the extra time in a relaxed atmosphere.
Not that anybody did, but if you happened to drink too much Wednesday night it wasn’t a problem, because Thursday morning we were treated to a rousing presentation by Rebecca Messina. Coming up through the marketing ranks at Coca Cola, and serving as the Chief Marketing Officer at Beam Suntory, parent of the brands Jim Beam, Makers Mark, Courvoisier and Yamazaki Whiskey had prepared her for a stint and the Chief Marketing Officer at Uber.
She offered powerful advice on marketing and also on career building based on her extensive experience as a marketing executive for some of the best-known brands in the world.
David Epstein is a New York Times science writer and the author of a best-Selling book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Mr. Epstein was a very engaging speaker who brought to bear his background as an 800-meter track athlete at Columbia University, his science education and his research into how early specialization compares with early exploration and later specialization in the development of exceptional athletic performers.
He started his research by looking at whether exceptional athletes specialize early (think Tiger Woods, who started imitating his dad’s golf swing while still in diapers) or explore other sports before taking up the sport in which they ultimately reach the very top ranks (think Roger Federer, who refused to play tennis at all until in his teens, despite being pushed in that direction by his tennis pro father).
For any of you wondering if perhaps a career change is possible but lacking the courage to try, Mr. Epstein’s book might just push you in a positive direction.
This is the third year in a row that the organizers have invited practicing designers to address the audience, which is composed primarily of suppliers to their specifications. Tara Headley is a Barbadian MFA from SCAD and an award winning interior designer at Hendrick, Inc in Atlanta. Jim Williamson is the Director of Practice Area for the Southeast Region of Gensler and a member of the Gensler Board. He works out of the Washington, DC office.
Their presentation dealt with the importance of sustainability in how they evaluate products for specification. They encouraged the attendees to not only adopt sustainable practices a much as possible, but to also improve their communication of how those practices manifest themselves in their products. Ms. Headley in particular was passionate about the importance of recognizing and eliminating carbon to the greatest extent possible from all manufacturing processes. Being originally from Barbados, she said, “ If we don’t do as much as we can about climate change, my whole island nation is going to disappear.”
Conal Byrne could be the poster boy for David Epstein’s thesis of why generalists triumph in a specialized world. A graduate of Georgetown University in English, Mr. Byrne is a podcaster extraordinaire. He was a founder of the podcast How Stuff Works and is now President of iHeart Media’s Podcasting Division. He spoke with conviction about how podcasting will change the world.
Dr. Chris Kuehl is an economist and corporate intelligence specialist. He holds advanced degrees in Economics, Soviet Studies, and East Asian Studies. He is currently the Managing Director of Armada Corporate Intelligence. There is always an economist on the program at the BIFMA 3600 Conference and Dr. Kuehl delighted this year’s audience with both his economic knowledge and his sense of humor. He presented all the numbers one has come to expect from the economist on the agenda, but he did so in a self-deprecating style that was most welcome near the end of the conference. The bottom line is that the economy should be okay in 2020, unless the politics get in the way.
Chuck Reece and three partners launched The Bitter Southerner, a publication dedicated to telling the stories of the new South. It has been so successful that Georgia Public Broadcasting has picked up some of its stories as the Bitter Southerner Podcast. Mr. Reece has spent his career telling stories – first as a writer for Ad Week magazine and then as an in-house public relations executive for 25 or so years for various companies, located primarily in New York City.
The success for the Bitter Southerner is based on telling the exceptional stories of ordinary people of the new South, so Mr. Reece has a great deal of confidence in saying that companies can build brand loyalty by telling the stories of their own ordinary employees. He believes that more and more customers want to identify with brands they can look up to and that companies that celebrate their people convey more about the integrity of their brands than they do by publishing jargon-laden “marketing-speak” about their products.
He closed saying, “My message to you today is this: when you go home, look at your regular folks. See what kind of stories you can tell about them. Go home with this question in your mind, ‘Whose eyes am I going to look through?’ There are lots of stories out there – pick a few and see what happens.”
Every year I come away thinking this was the best BIFMA 3600 Leadership Conference ever. For sure this was the best attended with more than 225 attendees, and it seems there are more women represented every year – a healthy sign for our industry.
