It's a pleasure to welcome the author of Breaking Through: Communicating to Open Minds, Move Hearts, and Change the World, Sally Susman. Welcome to the show.
Thanks, Aiden. It's great to be here with you.
It's great to have you with us, Sally. I was telling you off air that I had the great pleasure to read your book during my downtime, during my holidays, which is just great because I get to absorb the book in a different way. It doesn't feel as pressurized because I don't have to balance work and reading the book as well. I learned so much. You weave in your own personal story. You weave in the story of Pfizer battling against the pandemic to bring us the vaccine and so much more. Most particularly, I want to tell our audience Sally imparts so much wisdom about not only how to be the top of your game as a communications professional, but also how to communicate in general. And I thought we'd start with the importance of communication. I pulled a little excerpt here, Sally, that I'd love you to riff on. You say, 'Because of the increased scrutiny and elevated stakes, communication can no longer be considered a soft skill. The ability to lead and drive public conversation is a rock-hard competency. It tests one's abilities as much as any professional discipline, maybe more so in a time when public trust in business, government, and media is at an all-time low.' I'd love you to tell us about the importance of communication, not just in your role, but for any professional at any level of the organization.
Oh, thank you so much. And I really have to thank you for taking time out of your holiday to read my book. I'm very grateful for that. You've landed on probably the most important sentence in the entire book to get us started. The fact that I believe communications is mistaken as a soft skill and really is a rock-hard competency is something I learned from supporting nine CEOs over three companies over more than three decades working with elected leaders, government officials and cabinet secretaries. And what I saw, Aiden, was really that all of those individuals are highly competent people. I mean, because you talk to people at the top of business, you don't stumble into the corner office. People get there because they've worked hard and they have competencies. But the ones that are the game changers that really can shift the paradigm in their field, whether that's Leonard Lauder at the Estee Lauder Companies or my current CEO Albert Bourla at Pfizer, the ones that are the game changers are the ones who put as much effort into how they communicate, into practicing those skills of connection, of thinking deeply about what they want to express. And so I wrote this book to share those insights and to encourage people in leadership positions to really understand the importance. And I have to say it brings me great pride that the Harvard Business Review Press took on this first-time author because I wanted it to really be a book as much about leadership as about communications. And I think the guiding hand of HBR helped me to do that.
I'm going to jump around my notes a little bit here because there's so much in it and particularly you share so much of your own experience and I have to say hats off to you for giving a warts and all experience of your life and indeed your experience of being a communications professional. But there was a piece I wanted to tune into. You mentioned there Leonard Lauder and the humility and the attention to detail of these leaders. You write in the book after time with the American Express company you joined Estee Lauder where you worked with the Lauder family directly and you tell us here Estee Lauder was a master communicator and I'd love you to share the communication story from this little piece 'telephone a woman' where Estee Lauder claimed this was a key element to her huge success.
Right. I mean she's the poster woman for some of the central ideas in my book. She knew instinctively that she had to touch and reach the consumer in very innovative ways. She was the founder of this company and the legend is that she started it pretty much in the bathtub in her apartment in Queens making the products and then hand packaging them and delivering them and she had no money for advertising. So she had to do the very personal skills of 'telegraph, telephone, tell a woman.' This was her mantra. And I always thought maybe she was the first person to go viral before we knew viral was a thing. And also to the point that often authentic outreaches are more meaningful than just broadscale advertising. And that was a lesson that Estee learned by necessity, but one that I think we see very much today in all kinds of areas, including certainly in the biopharmaceutical field, that influencer voices come from everywhere, not just from big flashy advertising campaigns. But I have to say I love my time at that company because they're so innovative and so creative and so committed to their customers and to their employees.
And I'm going to come back to the Lauder family and indeed some of the tactics or skills that you honed from working there including just the very basic thing of saying thank you and we'll come back to that because in the book Sally gives us guidelines of how to be a master communicator in any field. But I wanted to come back to something yourself. So you mentioned there Leonard Lauder, one of Estee's sons, and how he gathered some skills that are inherent in the company today. So they carry through to the company and you too as a mother pass on skills in your family but your own background and your own family had a massive impact on your own mindset. And what's interesting here is when you see somebody as successful as you with such an illustrious career with such great brands of companies etc. people go, 'Oh, it's well for them, etc., etc.' But what I loved about your story was that you reckon your teachers and probably many of your co-students would have voted you least likely to succeed, yet you succeeded nonetheless, including so much of the lessons that were passed on by your parents.
Yeah. Well, you did mention the fact that the book is warts and all. And before I turned it in to HBR Press, I shared it with just a very few trusted family and friends. I mean, as a fellow author, Aiden, I'm sure you do that you have a reading circle of people you trust to help you with your work. And I remember my mom saying to me, 'Sally, this is terrible. You talk about all your most embarrassing mistakes in this book.' And I do and I try to tell them unflinchingly because I think it is through the shared experience of making mistakes and stumbling at times that people can learn. So thank you for saying that. I'm proud to show my warts. I'm also very fortunate and proud to have grown up in the family where I did. My parents were interested in the world. They had a passion for civic issues and they taught my brother and I many things. We had to bring a news fact to the table every night at dinner and discuss it. And this couldn't be a sports score or a weather forecast. It had to be something of the world and we had to talk about it. My brother and I thought this was inhumane, cruel, unfair, but it was actually a great gift, Aiden, because we learned how to observe the world and how to process information and how to articulate things. The other gift that my parents gave me was a practice of writing thank you notes. And mom was very strict about that. Nothing, no gift could be enjoyed until the thank you note had been written. I was surprised many years later to have a conversation with Leonard Lauder about pretty much the same thing. And when I joined the company, I was new to the industry as you mentioned. I came from financial services into personal care and Leonard was kind enough to take me by the hand and introduce me to the top editors across the industry. And I remember very specifically one day and I tell the story in the book as well where we went to meet an editor who was less than gracious. She kept us waiting which more importantly was keeping him waiting because Leonard Lauder is an icon in the industry. She didn't give us a tremendous amount of time. She was rude. She sat behind her desk with her eyes down and then dismissed us shortly thereafter. And as Leonard and I were leaving, he said to me, 'Now, don't forget to write her a thank you note.' And I was, 'What? She was so rude.' And he said, 'No, that's how we roll.' And I realized that writing thank you notes was not a casual affair at the company. Leonard himself wrote many. He had blue stationery was one of the colors of the brand and everyone at the company calls it a blue note. Did you get a blue note to say thank you for this or that? And I realized that again before they had money for advertising, before they could spend a lot on splashy incentives, they took the time to thank the women who work behind the counter, their best customers. And so now I try most mornings to take a moment before I start my day and write one or two thank you notes looking at my calendar for the day before. And it's a tremendous practice because it gives you a sense of gratitude of the good fortune that you have for the people that you know. And people are very touched by it, especially in the age of texting and tweeting and to receive a note through the post with a thank you is still very meaningful and something I take quite seriously. So that's why it's almost a whole chapter dedicated to how to write a thank you note. Remembering that specific is important to not just say thanks for having me for dinner, but thanks for hosting me in your home and the vegetables from your garden were so delicious and my seatmate was a lovely choice. The more specific the better.
We won't have time to cover all the communication tenets from the book, but that one about thanks as you said is a huge one and indeed I learned so much from that. I passed that on. This is where I say it's so useful to read a book when I'm on holidays. I'll give an example. So I read that story about you and this less than gracious person. And one of the beautiful things about doing the show is lots of the content mixes and becomes this marination of a mindset over a period of time. And one of the things that you get from doing the show is huge empathy. So empathy for that person who's less than gracious, not knowing what's going on in their lives. And then I try and pass that on to my kids. So something similar happened where there was somebody when we were checking in into security for the airport and she wasn't very nice at all. And I smiled and my son said, 'Why were you smiling at her?' And I said, 'Well, I just read it in this book that when you smile the other person has mirror neurons. They can't but not smile back. It's really really hard for them and you can unlock them and you never know what's going on in that person's life as well.' So maybe we'll stay on that one, that element of how you show up to the other person being such a key tenet and key theme that's throughout the book as well.
Absolutely. I bet that lady smiled back at you too from the security.
My son was surprised. I was like see. So yeah, it's great to show them and pass on the lessons. Sorry to interrupt you.
No, not at all. I have a specific chapter in the book that I refer to as perfecting your pitch. And I want to be clear to all your listeners and viewers that I'm not talking about the dreaded elevator pitch or a cold call where you're pitching an idea maybe to a cynical journalist but a quality of being in the world. So I tell the story, this one from American Express, and it followed 9/11, which here in New York and throughout the United States was an unforgettable, horrible day. And the American Express headquarters are right down at the World Trade Center where the terrorist action happened and the Twin Towers came down. Ken Chenault was a new CEO, had just been a CEO for a couple of months, who was actually out on the West Coast of the United States, meeting with some people in one of the call centers when the tragedy struck and he knew he needed to get back to the headquarters in New York, had to drive across the country because there were no planes flying for days. And Ken had a leader's instinct that he needed to get people together in one place. So they rented out Madison Square Garden, which is huge, and invited all the employees from the tri-state area, so New York, New Jersey, Connecticut to come together. And of course, Ken's staff prepared a speech for him to give, which he didn't give that speech. He spoke from the heart. He waded into the audience to touch the people whose lives had been impacted. He learned the names of the employees who had perished in the tragedy. And most importantly, he set a tone. And the tone was that American Express's best days, that New York City's best days would be ahead of it. And I write about that. And it goes right back to your story and your education with your son that how we choose to show up is so important at really important moments and also at everyday moments. Greeting people by their name, saying hello. Just these simple things make such a huge difference. And if I turn up in some place that's very aggressive, like maybe a pressurizing journalist or a committee hearing in front of a tough committee, if you start by a smile, kindness in your voice, thank them for having you, it can just take that edge out. And I think that's so important.
That chapter on pitch, you beat me to it because I thought it was such an important chapter in every aspect. So whether it's for a regular listener to this show who's working in innovation, pitching an idea or actually calling something out like you mentioned before, you've had Amy Edmondson in with your company to talk about psychological safety because you want people to have the psychological safety to call things out. But one of the things you call out was the unfortunate example of Hillary Clinton's failed candidacy and how she got the pitch wrong. And this is one of the things you detected from your experience. And I thought we'd just juxtapose the American Express experience with Hillary Clinton's experience and just how subtle the difference is but what a dramatic impact that it can have.
Absolutely. And I first must say that I am an admirer of Hillary Clinton. I think she was a great secretary of state, a wonderful senator. I believe she would have been a very good president. But unfortunately, her campaign did not go well. And I thought a lot about it, Aiden, and I believe it's because she did not have the kind of pitch we're talking about. I think she was well prepared. I believe she worked hard, but it often felt like she sounded that she was going low as opposed to going high in her ideals, in her tone, or she seemed frustrated and angry on the defense all the time. And it was heartbreaking to me really because I do admire her, but she couldn't lift herself up. And of course, she famously called people or infamously called people a 'basket of deplorables.' And that doesn't reach across the divide the way Ken brought people together in a tough moment. It seemed that unintentionally, but nonetheless actually, that Hillary was seen as divisive. The thing that was also a great irony because I love politics. I follow politics very closely is at her concession speech she did have pitch and I don't know if any of your viewers and listeners remember that concession speech but she was actually wearing purple and purple is a symbol to me because we call our political parties here in the United States red and blue. So one side wears blue the other side wears red and purple is the coming together of both sides. She talked very graciously about accepting this outcome, not challenging the outcome, but in the spirit of advancing democracy, accepting this outcome. And lastly, she spoke to little girls across the country and said, 'Don't let this hold you back. You can be anything you want.' And I remember watching it with my daughter, who was at the time right in the age group to hear such a message. And I wished so much she had that pitch throughout the campaign and it was a bit of a heartbreaking thing to me. I want to say one other thing about pitch if I may and that is that in companies today that are struggling with quality controls. I think it is because people on the shop floor, people in the middle ranks of the company are often afraid to raise bad news and problems up. And I don't know the details of what's happening at Boeing today, for example, but I do know that the CEO has lost his position and that is largely seen as a result of the failure to deal with the quality issues at the company. And having really studied companies that have had crisis from British Petroleum to Disney to Boeing. One of the key things is really having a clear line of communication from the junior levels to the senior levels. And you can't have that if people feel they're going to get shouted down or bullied or, as you say, speaking about Amy Edmondson's psychological safety. Psychological safety and pitch go right together in my mind.
Beautifully said and so important. I was reading about the case study of Nokia and people say it was strategic failure etc. etc. but this is the mobile phone division and what they created this postmortem and they said it was dominated by an atmosphere of frightened middle managers afraid of telling the truth. So there was no bad news raising up. So people making the decisions couldn't make those decisions. So you absolutely nailed a huge element of why so many organizations fail ultimately, but they blame it on strategy when so much so it's the softer skills and one of the reasons why I think your book is so important. I just want to say to our audience in the book Sally gives loads and loads of advice, loads and loads of golden rules and I won't have time to cover it. I highly recommend it, particularly if you're working in communications. You have a guru of communications here and I have a copy up for grabs. Just sign up to our Substack where I'll give away a copy of Sally's great book, Breaking Through. But in the book, you give eight golden rules on pitch itself. Now, we're not going to cover all eight, but I'd love you to share perhaps one of your top tips on pitch.
Well, first of all, thank you for sharing the book and for again for giving me this opportunity. I really think one of the first things that's most important about pitch is really to enter a conversation with an open mind and an open heart to the possibility that this will be pleasant that it will be something where I will learn. But I was excited to speak with you today knowing of your past and I really think the mindset that one brings to each and every encounter. I referenced it a little bit, but you know, I've been in hostile environments. I've been places where people don't like the big bad pharma industry or people have a negative impression just of someone from a large corporation. And I think if you can really start with the human elements, share a little bit about yourself, ask a question, these kinds of very humanizing behaviors are really essential to getting on that good pitch at the very beginning of a conversation.
You couldn't have teed us up better for the next one because I've jumped around and I haven't sent a script to Sally or anything like that, but you teed me up beautifully because you devote a whole chapter to humor and humor for me was a difficult one when I worked in organizations because I was always it's in me to try and bring a bit of humor to a situation particularly when it's tense but sometimes that can be perceived as you're a joker or you're the clown, you're the class clown type character when that's not the intent at all. And you share a brilliant story here. I'd love you to tell us a little bit about humor, but also the great story. And to intrigue our audience, I'll say I'll give you two cows for her.
