woodrow wilson

Corner Office | Pamela Fields: Pamela Fields of Stetson, on the Importance of Truth-Telling

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

Old Letter Sheds New Light on Joe Hill Murder Case

Hill’s status as a labor icon and the debate about his conviction certainly never died. And now a new biography makes the strongest case yet that Hill was wrongfully convicted of murdering a local grocer, the charge that led to his execution at age 36.

The book’s author, William M. Adler, argues that Hill was a victim of authorities and a jury eager to deal a blow to his radical labor union, as well as his own desire to protect the identity of his sweetheart.

A Salt Lake City jury convicted Hill largely because of one piece of circumstantial evidence: he had suffered a gunshot wound to the chest on the same night — Jan. 10, 1914 — that the grocer and his son were killed. At the trial, prosecutors argued that he had been shot by the grocer’s son, and Hill refused to offer any alternative explanation.

Mr. Adler uncovered a long-forgotten letter from Hill’s sweetheart that said that he had been shot by a rival for her affections, undermining the prosecution’s key assertion. The book, “The Man Who Never Died,” also offers extensive evidence suggesting that an early suspect in the case, a violent career criminal, was the murderer.

Hill, who bounced around the West as a miner, longshoreman and union organizer, was the leading songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, a prominent union that was widely feared and deplored for its militant tactics. He penned dozens of songs that excoriated bosses and capitalism and wrote the well-known lyric “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”

His conviction was so controversial that President Woodrow Wilson twice wrote to Utah’s governor to urge him to spare Hill’s life, and unions as far away as Australia protested on his behalf.

After his death, Hill was immortalized in poetry and song, including the 1936 ballad embraced by Ms. Baez, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson and others: “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.”

In the letter found by Mr. Adler, Hill’s sweetheart, Hilda Erickson, wrote that Hill had told her he had been shot by her former fiancé, Otto Appelquist — someone she had broken off with a week earlier and who had asked her “if I liked Joe better than him.” In her letter, she added, “I heard Joe tease Otto once that he was going to take me away from him.”

Historians say the letter is groundbreaking because it is apparently the first time anyone has stepped forward to explain exactly how and why Hill was shot. Neither Hill nor Ms. Erickson testified at his trial, although Hill did tell the doctor who treated his wound that a rival suitor had shot him.

The prosecution maintained that Hill had been shot by the grocer’s son, even though the police never found any bullet cartridges or traces of blood, other than the victims’, at the murder scene. Prosecutors used Hill’s silence to persuade jurors that he must have murdered the grocer.

Ms. Erickson wrote the letter in 1949 to Aubrey Haan, a professor who was researching a book on Hill. The book was never published, and Mr. Adler found the letter in papers stored in the professor’s daughter’s attic.

“When I first read the letter, it was a ‘holy cow’ moment because all these years people wondered about what happened that night,” Mr. Adler said in an interview.

In his book, which Bloomsbury will publish on Tuesday, Mr. Adler also lays out what historians say is highly incriminating new information about the person police originally suspected of the two murders, Frank Z. Wilson.

The police arrested Mr. Wilson the night of the murders after they found him walking without an overcoat near the grocery. They also found a bloody handkerchief on him.

Mr. Adler said Mr. Wilson had lied repeatedly to the authorities after they arrested him, but they soon released him for reasons that remain unclear. Mr. Adler also discovered that Mr. Wilson had used at least 16 aliases during his many arrests and convictions, several for robbing trains. He was later involved in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929, with a getaway car registered under an alias he often used.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3ddbdc023485a54cb5094075b55276dd

Corner Office | Pamela Fields: Pamela Fields of Stetson, on the Importance of Truth-Telling

Old Letter Sheds New Light on Joe Hill Murder Case

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