Season 2 Ep 3 The Marketing Rapport, Joan Woodward, President, The Travelers Institute

Well, thanks so much for having me. What a delightful thing to do. Yeah, and Happy New Year. Can I still say Happy New Year?

Great to be with you. I live and work out of Washington, D.C. That's been my base camp for 35 years now.

Well, I'm definitely the same person that I was earlier on in my career. I'm just a lot smarter, more attuned to listening and learning. I've had a great journey, and I've had some wonderful opportunities in my life. Starting in government was a real foundation for me to understand how governments work, how industries work, how industries work with government, and that partnership is so critical. I mean, government can't do it alone, and certainly corporations can't do it alone. Small businesses are the backbone of the country. So you have this trifecta of larger companies fed by vendors that are from small companies, and the government there to support the industries, not interfere with the industries, but to be that cushion, supporting our industries so they can thrive in the global economy. So I've seen it from all different perspectives, and I'm very blessed to have the career that I was able to have. But I took a lot of risks, and some didn't pan out, and some worked. I've learned from my mistakes. I've certainly failed along the way. As long as you learn something, I think I'm a lifelong learner. I love to read, I love to absorb information, and that's what I try to do with my audience, my clients, my customers, agents, and brokers. I try to share information in a nonpartisan, unbiased way so people can make their own decisions about factual information.

Yeah, so as you said, I worked on Capitol Hill, both the House and the Senate, for 12 long years. They're like dog years. I mean, it's really hard work working on Congress. And then one day I was developing the Roth IRA with Senator Bill Roth from Delaware, the other senator from Delaware for 30 years alongside Biden was Bill Roth, a very humble man. In creating the Roth IRA, I had the opportunity to work with Wall Street companies and Wall Street investment houses. Where should the cutoffs be in the Roth IRA? Should the income limits? Who's going to incentivize behavior to save more for retirement? Where is that sweet spot of tax policy? So working with those investment houses, investment banks for many years, this didn't happen overnight. Goldman Sachs came knocking on my door one day and said, 'Hey, we're going to start a Washington equity research operation, and we think you're the perfect person to run it and to start it.' I was looking at them saying, 'Look, I'm a government person. I don't know anything about Wall Street.' And they're like, 'No, no, no, you're the gal.' I said to my husband, we had four little children at the time. Taking on a global job was really intimidating to me. I wasn't a math whiz. I just looked at myself in the mirror and said, 'I'm not going to get this opportunity again. What's the worst that can happen? I'll fail and I'll go back to Capitol Hill.' So I took that job and I ran and built a global entity. First five years was equity research for institutional investors. What's happening on Capitol Hill and how should investors think about their portfolio? I was able to pass that Series 7 and Series 63 exam, so I was a certified investment analyst. I loved my job. Then the CEO at the time of Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson, who later turned out to be Treasury Secretary in the Bush Administration, asked me to take on another role at Goldman Sachs, which was to start a new organization, a global think tank called the Global Markets Institute. Building on what I learned to build the equity research operation, I turned that over to my deputy, a very capable guy still there today. Then I took on this other role of starting a think tank, a public policy informational educational platform, so governments around the world could understand how efficient, transparent capital markets like Goldman Sachs operate and how they add value to society. Bringing up women in different countries around the world, giving them economic opportunity. I ran that for five years and loved it. Sorry, it's a little bit of a long story. Then I was called one day by the CEO of Travelers at the time, Jay Fishman. So I'm going to stop there. That's how I got to insurance. And of course I said to Jay Fishman at the time, 'I know nothing about insurance. I'm not your gal.' I said that twice.

Yeah, you know, confidence is tough, especially for a woman. I'll say that out loud. Confidence is tough because if you exude confidence in your persona, that's a really good thing. I think a lot of women have a hard time with self-confidence. 'Can I do that job? Am I good enough? Should I even apply for that job?' Because look, there's five ingredients of that job and I only have four. The required job description has five bullet points, and I only got four of them, so I'm not going to apply. It's a mistake that we don't have confidence in ourselves to learn new things as we go. I think a lot of people want to support women and diverse populations in the insurance industry. So one, I say to everyone out there who has a job opening, make sure you have a diverse slate of candidates. That's what we try to do internally. And then take a chance on someone. They may not have every ingredient in the job. On the other flip side of the coin, I'm going to say to some folks out there who might struggle with confidence, have the confidence in yourself to go for it. If you don't get it, just the interview process that you go through is very valuable. You learn a lot through that process.

You know, it's a pendulum. You can't be too hard on yourself either. Sometimes the pendulum swings and I'm more of a work-focused person, and the pendulum swung many times in my life back to being just a mom. Just remember where you're sitting. If you're sitting at home, be a mom. Kids do go to bed at some point, you can go back to being that employee and log on later at night. But I try to be present when I'm at home. It was very hard because I'm an ambitious person, and I did have four kids who are all adults now and turned out just fine. Somehow they turned out just fine. I have two girls and two boys, and the girls look at me and say, 'Mom, you are a role model. You inspired me to strive for excellence.' You may be feeling like I'm not that good of a mom, and I certainly felt that many, many times. The other advice I have is you marry up. Marry someone who, if you're an ambitious person, marry an opposite. Thank God my husband was there raising kids while I was traveling the globe. I had a global job at Goldman Sachs, and that was really tough, but he was a tremendous support and infrastructure for our family. Know where you are in your career and your life. I'm a person that likes to farm out jobs. I had someone cleaning my house even when we probably shouldn't have afforded it. My cars were dirtier than they should have been. Let things go that don't matter. Focus on the things that really do matter. I would say your boys are probably looking up to you as a role model too. It's amazing to have a working mom doing what you were doing at that young age to aspire to. That's awesome.

So I'll pick up on my journey again. I was very happy at Goldman Sachs, although it was definitely a strain on the family, me having such a global job. So I was sort of looking for a domestic company, but I really didn't want to leave, and I really didn't know much about insurance. I honestly thought Travelers was mostly a personal lines business. I didn't know about the commercial and the surety and the bond specialty aspects of it. When I learned more after a few dinners and lunches with not only Jay Fishman, the CEO at the time, but our current CEO Alan Schnitzer, who was Chief Legal Officer and Vice Chairman of the company, they were both visionaries. They had a strategic plan for the company which absolutely panned out with flying colors over the last 16 years that I've been here. I've watched it grow. It's incredible the internal family feel, the culture that we have at Travelers. People stay here 20, 30, 40 years, and there's a reason for it. I liked the culture. I felt very much at home. I looked at myself in the mirror and said, 'This is an opportunity you could certainly take a pass, but I loved the energy of all the people that I talked to.' I talked to many people before I joined. I think that's really important to understand what their vision was. I knew I could build a think tank as I'd done it before, no problem there. But you have to get buy-in from business leaders. The people who are making the money, the P&L people, look at you having an entity that's non-revenue producing. We've all been in these roles, marketing, HR, legal, these are not P&L roles. Certainly a think tank building a public policy reputation-enhancing platform, we knew there would be some benefits to having a thought leadership platform built through the brand. But I think it's turned out better than anyone, including me, expected. So it's been a fun journey. The business folks that I'm working with are wicked smart, and I'm learning every day about the business. It's really been a fun journey.

Yeah, so again, we're a very small team, and I leverage the industry expertise across the 30,000 people at the company. We have several pillars and platforms for our thought leadership. For example, in personal lines, we do a lot around distracted driving and raising awareness through our Every Second Matters campaign. Also, now we're coupling our distracted driving and auto safety awareness with telematics. We have a partnership with Cambridge Mobile Telematics, which is our telematics provider for IntelliDrive. We talk about auto safety, all sorts of things that are now embedded in cars for safety reasons and cutting down on those fatalities. That's our platform for raising awareness with personal lines. With Bond and Specialty, we have a whole platform around raising awareness about cybersecurity risks. Cyber threats exploded during the pandemic. Through our Cyber Prepare, Prevent, Restore, and Mitigate program, we go out and educate agents, brokers, and customers around cyber threats, which of course then leads to buying a cyber insurance policy. That's critically important. On the business insurance side, we have a number of programs as well. Disaster preparedness for home and business. We have a partnership with IBHS, the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, to talk about new products in the market to make homes safer. We also have a partnership with Habitat for Humanity and building safer houses through their Fortified Build program. It's through these public partnerships and public-private partnerships raising awareness around these platforms that we have through the Institute. It's partnering with our business leaders in their respective businesses and then rolling out a thought leadership platform. We do symposiums, we partner with universities and researchers. MIT comes to mind for our distracted driving and autonomous vehicle program with telematics.

Sure. I mean, I believe it's all about opportunity. Opportunity is not guaranteed. Success is not guaranteed once you're given an opportunity. If you're sitting back at your desk saying, 'I don't have any opportunities for showcasing my skills across platforms, across different business units,' I advise people to raise your hand and volunteer for an opportunity. Say to your boss, 'I want to work on X, Y, and Z project.' If your volunteerism is not recognized, ask for an opportunity. First volunteer, and if you're not given that opportunity directly, ask for an opportunity. So I just didn't volunteer for that, now I'm asking to work on this cross-functional team as a stretch assignment. Please assign me a stretch assignment. I'm no longer volunteering, I'm asking. If your ask is ignored, then I just make it happen for myself. I would go to a different entity and say, 'Hey, I want to work on a project or I want to start a new project because I see something that could be fixed or could be done a different way.' I would go and make it happen. I'm not asking permission at this point, I'm going to ask for forgiveness. Some people are very uncomfortable with that. In that doing it yourself, I say to them, 'Be the CEO of your own career. No one's going to make your career happen for you. No one in HR is going to make your career happen. Make it yourself. Be the CEO. Take ownership of your career.' Some people look at me and say, 'That's too scary. I can't do that. I don't have that self-confidence to make my own career happen.' Then you have to say to yourself, 'Then your career is not going to happen because no one's going to come and save you. No one's going to come and make your career happen for you.' So have your eye on that next opportunity. It doesn't have to be changing jobs to have another opportunity. That's my philosophy.

You know, first of all, it's tough. It's tough to graduate college and say, 'What am I going to do?' It's easier now in the hybrid environment, people wearing jeans to work. When I started, it was a suit, a white shirt, and a dress or a skirt. Wearing pants on the United States Senate floor was prohibited. I could not wear pants on the Senate floor. Imagine that. So I want to say we've come a long way, baby, and we have. I think it's easier in today's world, but I think it's harder in today's world because expectations are pretty high of you in that first job. Everyone gives lots of young people the opportunity to learn and to be successful. You have to be serious about what you want to do. Try different things out. If you're not successful in your first job out of college, just recognize it and move on. But you don't want to move on so many times that someone looks at your resume and says, 'Oh my gosh, you can't hold a job down.' You want to have a nice track record of progressive succession, building on what you're learning. Say you've had a couple jobs and you're 25, 30 years old, you may have had three or four jobs. In your lifetime, you're going to have lots of jobs. In my lifetime, I basically had four jobs, and that was it. That's probably going to be it for me. Four different jobs. But not today. In today's society, it's much more acceptable to spend two or three years learning something, spend two or three years learning something else, until you find what you really love. You have to be in a job that you love. Don't be in a job that you like. Be in a job that you love because you spend more time in your job with your colleagues than you do outside of your job. It's just a fact. Find a job you absolutely love because if you don't love it, you're not going to be that good at it. It's okay to move around when you're a younger person to find that job you love. Then don't be so hard on yourself. I think women sometimes can be hard on themselves that they're failures. Just view each experience as a learning opportunity. But again, go back to being excellent. Be excellent at what you're doing even though you may not love your current job. Be excellent at it, and then you can find that next job. That's kind of what I tell young people. I have four young adult kids, so I'm going through this myself and I'm certainly learning along the way. I would say be a good listener. Some of the young people on my team teach me, not just technology, they teach me a lot about society. We have a lot of webinars, and I listen to my young people on my team because that generation, Gen Z, Gen Y, Gen X, those are our customers, our clients, our employees. We have to listen to their feedback. They mentor me. I'm not just mentoring them. I view it as a two-way street. I really want to listen and learn from young people. If you're in your 20s out there, talk to your bosses and say, 'I view this situation or this problem we're trying to solve from a different angle.' Then for those baby boomers like myself, listen to them. Listen to our young people tell us the way they're seeing the world because we have a lot to learn ourselves.

So yes, it's free and open to the public. We've hosted over 100 episodes. We started this when the pandemic hit, summer of 2020, and we've hosted 100 episodes. I break it out like this: 50% of my episodes are deep dives on insurance, the marketplace. We examine every industry that we insure. We have a lot on cybersecurity, a lot on other topics. We just had one on life sciences. So 50% of my webinars are strictly insurance. The other 50% is our sweet spot where we talk to individuals about career development, about golf. We just had a cardio golf. Look, the insurance industry, we're golfers, people. So we talk about core and strength training in the offseason because it's cold out there, not a lot of people have access to a golf course, but what could we be doing to improve our bodies and our souls and our minds to get ready for that golf season? We also talk a lot about personal development. I had a strategy session with Dr. Vicki Medvec on how to negotiate anything, how to negotiate getting your kids to eat their broccoli, how to negotiate that next job, how to negotiate a raise. Who couldn't use a life lesson and skills around negotiation? So I say to viewers out there, if you're not in insurance, sign up anyway at TheTravelersInstitute.org. Just hit Register Now. It takes a few quick seconds. We've had thousands and thousands of followers tune in every week, and we have a very large Zoom license for lots more thousands of people. So join us. It's really quite fun.

Yeah, thank you so much. We'll see you out there. Take care. Bye.