Q. Tell me about your early career decisions.
A. I majored in nuclear engineering and nuclear arms control through the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. But when I went to work for an engineering firm, it was the wrong fit. It was terrible, and I had no business to be there.
So I decided I wanted to go into cosmetics, and I went to the phone book, opened it up to the cosmetics and beauty section, and I started with A. The first company I saw that I had heard of was Avon. So I called them up — this goes under chutzpah — and I said: “I’m Pam Fields, I can speak Portuguese, French and Italian fluently. I know you’re a global company. Surely you need me.” As it turns out, they did. They had an opening on the Brazil desk, which is to this day one of their biggest markets. I learned to choose which of their thousand products should go into their little biweekly brochure.
And after doing that very well — no management involved — I was promoted to a job developing lipsticks and picking great shades for blushes and eye shadows. I was then promoted to manager of color, and all of a sudden I had people working under me. There were three people in the group. And I didn’t know anything about management. And I was awful. I made every mistake there was to make.
Q. Such as?
A. I would see what I wanted to accomplish. Let’s say I saw from A to F, but I would forget to tell everybody what F was and what the steps were for getting there, and I was just a bull in a china shop.
Q. So what happened?
A. Fortunately, I had people working on the team who were not shy. And they called a team meeting and they sat me down and they said: “You’re really smart. We know you’re full of energy and passion. But you’re not telling us what you want and you’re not telling us how you think we should get there and why, and you’re doing a bad job and we’re not happy working for you.”
Q. And how did you react?
A. They were older and more experienced than I was, and they had a lot of spine. I was so grateful to them. I mean, can you imagine how lucky I was to have had that experience so early on in my career, that someone could sit there and put the cold washcloth on my face and say, “You have to articulate. You have to tell people what you want. You have to have a reason why, and you can’t operate as an island.”
I also had a director of the department who was extraordinarily generous as a mentor. Every time I thought I had it right, she would turn around and say: “Did you think of this? Did you think of that?” I was used to getting A’s at Princeton, and you think you’re a reasonably smart kid and you get it right the first time. But I was humbled, and I was broken down into little pieces and reassembled as a much more intelligent operator.
Q. What else did you take away from that experience?
A. The lesson I learned, which I think has made a big difference for me, is the importance of telling the truth, and being in an environment where truth-telling is valued, just the way these women came to me and told me the truth about what I had done. I vowed to create an environment in which truth was important. And you know, it takes a lot of spine to tell the truth, especially in a large organization, where obfuscation is a political skill that I don’t have. I see a problem, I see an opportunity and I want to go for it. Business is too fast and we have to move. So everything else was a subset of that lesson, and it was really important; I can even tell you what I was wearing when they laid me out.
Q. You’ve worked at how many different companies?
A. Well, I had my own consulting company for a long time; I was a rent-a-president. My goal was to position myself as someone who could do what was on a president’s list and get it done with equal or better efficiency than the guy who’s busy running the business. I was on my own for a good 15 years, and I worked for about 20 different companies.
Q. You were exposed to a lot of different corporate cultures.
A. Across different industries, cultures, price points and distribution channels. And in no instance — and I say this with pride, and I look for it in people I want to hire — in no instance did I have direct prior experience for the job that I was doing.
Q. So what kind of playbook did you develop for going into these companies?
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2aae17e328af339f2f2078a013bd1c14
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