If I think back to COVID, you were at a job that got very busy. Do you think that it was just you responding to that moment, or do you think it was sort of like you were always meant to be that person and the calling showed up?
Such a good question and a little bit of both or maybe all of the above. I had purpose. I mean, I had a reason. I was lit up with this feeling that I was, you know, saving lives. And part of it was the roll of the dice that I happened to work at the place that was going to possibly make the difference. But the other piece of it, and I think it's something important for your listeners, is be ready.
Because you don't know when it's coming for you.
Today on The Messy Parts, we're having on Sally Susman. Sally Susman has had a storied career in corporate communications. Most recently, she was the head of corporate communications at Pfizer, but before that, she was at Estée Lauder and Amex, and she started off in the public sector working in government. When she was in her 20s, she came out and her dad said, 'You're never going to have a spouse, a child, or a career.' Sally has turned every 'you can't' into 'watch me.' We're going to not just talk about her career, but we're also going to talk about her reinvention as she now goes into a new chapter. Well, Sally, I'm so excited to have you on the blue couch.
I have a blue couch at home.
See, there's a magic about the blue couch. I don't even know how you and I got to know each other just through the industry, I guess, because we've both been in the world of marketing and communication.
Exactly. I know you've worked for nine CEOs of big companies, so there's a lot to cover, but I do want to start with the young Sally, right? Because you grew up in a conservative part of the world in a pretty prominent family where your father went on to become an ambassador. And I think it would be interesting to get just a little bit of an insight into what young Sally was like.
So, I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, which is about as Midwestern as Midwestern gets. And little Sally was a lot.
I look back and I think I put my parents through a lot. You know, skipping class and just I was a handful. As I was thinking about talking with you today and the whole messy mantra thing, I was a mess. My room was like a bomb blew up in it.
I am not seeing that at all. So, this is such an interesting insight because I would have seen a perfect, totally organized...
The rest of the house. Okay. Because my parents were very ambitious. They were very connected. They were very hardworking. They had big plans for themselves and for my brother and me, but not me. I mean, I was just really running wild through the neighborhood. I mean, let me just say, my family's great, and they still are great, but it was a lot of pressure. We were people on the move, and we did politics. We had senators and governors come stay at the house. You know, my father who, as you mentioned, was really a big part of my life. And I sometimes refer to him as to me, he was the tallest tree in the forest of the dads. You know, I just loved him. I love him still. He was then a lawyer, very self-made. Ultimately, my parents moved from Missouri to Chicago. And then as you mentioned they lived in London when he was ambassador of the Court of St. James. We used to laugh. We used to call my dad the ambassador when he was a young man because he always had that ambition and my parents were really this well-oiled team. But this was a family very in check.
But that feels like so much pressure.
It was. It was so much pressure. So much privilege and so much pressure.
Yes. It's an interesting combination, privilege and pressure. When I graduated from college, my first job on Capitol Hill in the mail room of the home state senator Tom Eagleton from Missouri, I got it because my dad was his friend.
And you know that's a great opportunity. It comes with some shame that you know you were a Nepo baby. Did you have shame then or is that now just a thing we've learned to have shame about? I had pressure for sure. Yeah.
And I certainly kept it on the down low that dad and the senator were besties.
But it made me anxious, you know, that I was going to have to really perform. Now, as it turns out, I love to work. You know, school, not so much. I didn't understand why we went to school. So, I did not do well in school. Young Sally used to intercept the report card coming home in the mail.
Because it was so bad. I was really a handful.
But it's interesting because I also know I read the story and listened to the story of you going back home to tell your parents that you were gay. And again, it's such a vivid memory even in reading it. I can't imagine what the memory is like. But take us back to that moment where you call home with this very ominous 'I need to come home and tell you something.'
I had just graduated from college. My parents were still then living in St. Louis. And because we were this tight-knit, close, you know, working together sort of family, I knew I had to tell them. I mean, to not tell them would be essentially removing myself from...
But you hadn't told them all those years. You knew as a kid.
Well, you know, maybe in hindsight, I see that. I really knew for sure in college. And when I graduated from college and moved to Washington DC and it was a whole gay world, which I hope we get a chance to talk about today, it was very clear that I needed to tell them. So I booked a seat on TWA, if you remember TWA airlines. It was the only direct flight from Connecticut back to St. Louis. I got on the plane and I passed out. I literally, you know, was so nervous and scared to tell them because I knew this was going to be bad. It was not.
Why did you know it was going to be bad?
Well, because this family was a family on a mission, you know, we were headed for big things.
And being gay wasn't part of it.
Being gay was not a part of it. And it's funny to talk about it now because this was 40 years ago. It was the heart of the AIDS epidemic. People were dying. Most professionals lived in the closet. Or when people came out, they gave up being professionals. It wasn't compatible that you could be a high-performing professional and be an out lesbian. So, you know, I go home. I remember my dad picking me up at the airport, my mom and I preparing dinner, and finally at the end of dinner, my mom said like, 'Oh, you know, what is it? We need to know what's happening here?' And we sat down. My mom and I were on the sofa, my dad in a chair. I had rehearsed thousands of times walking to work, in the shower. I really prepared. This was my first major communications, crisis communications work. And then you know the two words that change everything: to say 'I'm gay.' And it was a big disaster. My father started to cry. My mom was furious. And I remember my dad saying to me, 'You'll never have a spouse. You'll never have children. You'll never have a career.' Those words, they hurt me a lot. But that was not his intention. And I need to say that this was parental fear speaking, that I was just going to be sidelined.
It felt both gutting, but also it crystallized a life plan for me. And in the discussion of mess, it was probably the messiest moment of my life. It took years for my family to recover. And lots of things led to the recovery. I have a wonderful wife, partner then wife. We have a beautiful daughter.
You've had an amazing career.
My parents are, you know, they're like my PR machine. They're so proud and they're great. But in that moment, I didn't know if we would recover. You know, I didn't know if that tall tree of my father was going to bend or snap.
So they have a reaction that you kind of expect. How did you even like get back on that plane and leave? Like, were you despondent?
Totally despondent. I don't know how I got back on the plane. I don't know. I don't remember if my father drove me to the airport or I took a cab. I don't remember what day of the week it was. I was just trying to survive.
And so it's so interesting because you talk so much and one of the tenets in your book is all about authenticity and being an authentic leader. And so here you are in this moment where you take the courage to be authentic. It backfires at least for a period, but you begin to find your way.
It's the best thing that ever happened to me. Nothing scared me after that. I mean, I had risked my relationship with my family. And since then, when I'm in work or in politics and something is scary or awkward, you know, the types of moments, I'm unafraid because this was the very best thing. It gave me strength. It's an advantage in my life that you know when people know you, they there's this human thing. They sort of want to help you. They get behind you in a way. I don't talk about my private life day and night, but I have a picture of Rob, my wife, and me on my desk. You know, we talk about my daughter. People get behind you. And so it was the greatest thing. And again, in the cauldron of this horrible moment and this terrible thing my father said to me, that was my life plan.
And if I was going to have nothing else.
So, by the way, you leave and go back to a job. You actually were still working.
I was still working in a pretty junior job. And you said something. You said Washington. There was a big gay scene in Washington. Not something I really think about.
Well, the 1980s was the time. And I don't know if it's a chicken or egg with AIDS. Did AIDS create, you know, this kind of political motion or if it just coincidentally came together? But many of us, myself included, we were still in the closet at work.
But in the weekends, in the night time, we were dancing, we were marching, we were meeting each other. We were creating a very powerful network. My two closest friends to this day, Hillary Rosen and Lisa Sherman, who maybe you know, I met them then. We met in Washington in the mid-80s. We were all active in the early gay civil rights movement. And if you had told us then that we would be living the lives, we're all married, we all have children, we all have very successful careers.
Being a part of this hard time, it was a hard, hard time, really strengthened us and gave us a backbone.
So, I mean, there's still people who are in the closet, whether about their sexuality or other things. You clearly lived through the mess and made it to the other side. For somebody who's sort of struggling with being their authentic self at work or in other parts of their lives, what's the advice you would give them?
In my role in various companies, you know, I am supposed to help people tell the company story, tell their story. And one very senior, very successful executive called me into her office, closed the door, and said, 'Sally, I need you to hire the best PR firm there is for me.' And I said, 'Well, okay. Why?' And she said, 'To make me authentic.' What? I need to hire someone to make me authentic. I can't just be authentic.
She wanted a deck and a presentation about how to be authentic.
And you know, of course, because you do this so well and you are this way yourself, authenticity resides in us. I often feel that secrets are corrosive and so getting out of that closet, whatever it is, is so important. I know people who've done it different ways, but I don't know anyone who regretted it.
Even people who had really tough things. Well, I mean, I think we all know that you have to go through the mess and the only way is through. The growth comes from the messy parts. But let's go back. So, you switch over. You decide to take a job in corporate and you join Amex.
But this is an important decision I made and I just want to say it was another example of things didn't pan out the way I thought they would because I always assumed I would work in government. It was a noble profession. It was embedded in my family. I thought maybe I'll run for mayor of my hometown. But I found government slow, frustrating, bureaucratic, personality dominated, and not the easiest place in the world from which to do good.
Are you going to tell me that you were like, 'Not the easiest place to do good. I'm going to go to corporate America.'
Yes. This is what I'm gonna tell you. This is what I'm going to tell you. After many months of working on a piece of legislation, I achieved changing an 'or' to an 'and.' Legally, that can be significant. Emotionally, it was completely empty. You know, this is this kind of micro work. I knew one person at American Express, a very lovely man who would occasionally come down and lobby the senators that I worked for. And finally, he gave me a like a 7:30 a.m. coffee spot on a Monday morning. He and I are talking and he tells me I'm a nice girl and I should stay in my nice job in Washington because it's such a nice job. And out of nowhere, I said, 'I'm leaving the Hill and I've come to see you because you were my first choice, but I have an appointment later this afternoon with your competitor. And if you're not interested in me, that's okay. But then I'm going to go to Mastercard.' Where did this voice come from?
I don't know. Okay. It was totally a lie. I guess you would say it was a lie.
But it was a... No, that was a bold move.
Okay. It was a bold move.
Thank you. But this is what work became for me. I understood work. One foot in front of the other. There's a pretty straightforward equation in work. You know, you give it your all and they will give you compensation and opportunity.
I don't know. That's not totally true, right? I mean, we know people that don't have that at work.
Of course. And of course, you're right. But for me, work was magical. Okay. Work was magical. And my theory proved correct because corporations were moving ahead of the government.
Well, they definitely move faster. And you know, there's a whole issue around trust and how people don't trust a lot of things including government today.
They trust companies more, not totally, but more. So, it's an interesting thing. So, you go to Amex. You talk your way into Amex.
I talk my way in. I find the little gay group in American Express, and we decide we're going to go for same-sex partner benefits. The CEO at the time was a man named Harvey Golub.
Harvey was a very successful CEO, but he was a very gruff man and a bit intimidating, you know, very sort of foreboding presence. So, we rehearse and we rehearse and we do our deck and we do our deck and we go in and it was actually a pretty, I don't want to say easy, but straightforward analysis with him because it was put in 'this is good for your business' terms.
Were you nervous going in?
Oh, yeah. I mean, there were about six of us who went in, you know, and it was like one of those things. Mikey will do it, Sally will go. I don't really know how I ended up in that group, but I was excited to be in that group. I have a saying that my friends know that I'm happiest when my heart is in my throat. And that was a heart was in my throat moment.
Well, that's change. Like, you were actually interested in making change and here you are in fact making change through Amex. Like, that's not every single job in corporate America.
No, but Amex, you know, it's a company like any other. And we were a group of activist employees that exist in others. And I'm pushing back on you a little bit because yes, I've had, you know, fortunate opportunities and I've tried to make the most of them, but there's a lot of opportunities out there.
But you made the opportunities. You went and sought them out. I mean, my point is that sometimes people go and it's sort of a clock in, clock out experience that they're not looking to become an activist at Amex, right? So that's a choice. You have to find that. You have to lean into that. I mean, we know plenty of people who take corporate jobs, at least I do, where the motto is, 'I just don't want to get fired. So, I'm going to operate with that.'
That's tragic. That's so tragic.
True. I know it's true. Most of my friends don't work in corporate America. Most of them, you know, hit the exit at some point along the way because they tired of the overlay, the cultural demands, the politics.
The politics. I kind of loved it. I really loved it. And as you know, we're sitting here today just as I'm concluding it. And it's, you know, rooted in the mess, right? It was rooted in the coming out and the AIDS epidemic and probably one of the fastest civil rights movements we've ever experienced for LGBTQ plus people. And that is where I thrived. So I want to go... I know you went to Estée after that, to Estée Lauder, but then you decide to go to Pfizer at a time where there was really not a lot of love for big pharma and I don't know if there's always love for big pharma but I so remember you saying that your friend group was like, 'What are you thinking?'
Yeah. So, one of the key things to finding purposeful intersections in big companies, I believe, is finding the companies that sort of live on Main Street in the public mind.
So, America, what does that mean?
That they're leaders in their field. They want to have high visibility. Like, you know, American Express had Annie Leibovitz taking their photographs for their ad campaigns. And they had celebrity CEOs like Ken Chenault. Estée Lauder, it has this big New York family at the center of it, the Lauder family. One brother is chairman of MoMA. The other was chairman of the Whitney. Pfizer, you know, right here in New York City, one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies there are. I chose those places for that reason. It wasn't about the lipstick or the lipitor. It was about companies that wanted to set the pace and really had a place in the public mind. And I was very happy at Estée Lauder, a great company, great family. But when a recruiter called about Pfizer, I thought, well, this is like the worst job in the world. I have to take this job. Not the worst, the hardest. That's what I mean to say because Pfizer makes life-saving medicine and nobody likes them.
And I thought, well, you know, I'm pretty good at this stuff. I can tell their stories. I can come up with new ideas and fresh approaches. And I got in and I ran into a brick wall. It was so much harder than I thought. So much regulation, so much complexity, regulation which dictates who you can talk to, what you can say, but more than that, a pervasive cynicism. And I'll never forget listening to a focus group from behind the glass. And they were talking about insulin, which Pfizer doesn't even make. But they said these pharma companies, they have a cure for diabetes, but they won't bring it forward because insulin is so profitable. And literally, I shed a tear that day because I mean, nothing could be further from the truth. These companies are not deep-sixing cures so that they can make money. It's very wrong. But I realized what I was up against and I wasn't sure. We just had somebody who shot the head of UnitedHealthcare. Like, the perception around pharma and health has improved some, I would say, during COVID, but it's very tough and again, I knew I was not making enough progress and I contemplated stepping away from Pfizer before the pandemic because I thought this is just, you know, maybe I can't do it. But the pandemic gave me a rare and very unique opportunity and it was a game changer.
It was a game changer because the whole world was paying attention and the stakes were so high that I could do things differently. For example, I embedded media, both the Wall Street Journal and a documentary film crew, into our labs and our...
They would never have done that otherwise. We put our clinical trial protocols, which is our treasured intellectual property, up on the website because we didn't have three years to fill these clinical trials.
Okay. So, let's talk about that for a second because it's so interesting. You picked jobs where they had a big presence. I picked jobs where I could fix things like turnarounds, right? So, we went into things different ways, different directions. But here you are and there's a moment in time, I mean, we go back to COVID, it was like, oh, there's a virus, next thing you know we're all in lockdown, you know, everybody was wearing masks, right? It was a really dark time not just in the US but globally. And so take us back into like a messy moment where you were able to convince somebody to do something that was not culturally the norm.
Well, nobody forgets where they were in March of 2020. I was in New York City. Robin was away on a ski trip with her friend and I remember calling her and saying, 'Just come home.' Because it was weird and scared and dark and, you know, the shelves were thinning and the refrigerator trucks were lining up at the hospitals. I just remember calling a colleague of mine, a Pfizer colleague who led our business in China just to see how he was doing because you remember China was the epicenter and he didn't sound good at all and I thought this is just going to be terrible and yet my boss Albert Bourla, Pfizer CEO, he flew to Greece to give a speech and when he landed the conference had closed. He comes back. He's got a little piece of paper. It's got three things on it. We're going to take care of our 85,000 employees. We're going to make sure the steady supply of medicine continues. And we're going to make a vaccine before the end of the year. And everything changed. And the truth is, I didn't have to fight to bring the reporters in. Nobody was paying attention to me. And I ran through that opportunity at full speed, you know. There are definitely risks that come with doing that. I mean, I'll think of Gary Ginsburg, well known in the world of corporate comms, and he brought in people into Murdoch's world, as we know, Michael Wolff, and it went sideways. I mean, I joke like, you know, it doesn't always work. So I do want to talk about that.
The risk factor was on a whole different scale than normal because if Pfizer failed, I mean, first of all we put a billion dollars of our capital at risk. We didn't take government money. One billion grew to two billion in unexpected costs. And I'm filming the whole thing and I think, wow, Sally, you are filming what could be one of the greatest corporate debacles of all time.
But I also thought if Pfizer fails, the world's over. Bad news day for Pfizer is the least of it, right? The world is over. We would still be in quarantine. Our children wouldn't be educated. Our businesses would close. I mean, talk about a mess. This worldwide mess led to three very important things to me. The first was a massive scientific breakthrough. mRNA technology is a game changer. It's a once a century kind of leapfrog innovation. Two, at least for a time, it transformed the reputation of Pfizer. We became a top 10 global brand for several years. You know, we were much admired everywhere we went. You know, people thanked us. I was in an event last night and people were thanking us. So, it created an amazing reservoir of goodwill for the company, but it also changed me.
