The AMA Leadership Luncheons are back!
It’s been a couple of years since the AMA Triangle offered a series of luncheons to members and non-members. COVID-19 certainly played a role. During that time, it became obvious that large gatherings of people in a luncheon setting was not only financially risky, but dangerous from a public health standpoint. As a result, we backed off presenting dynamic and thought-provoking speakers in a comfortable and friendly setting.
That’s why we’re excited to announce our return of the Leadership Luncheons and our special guest speaker.
Besides having founded and ran her own management consulting firm in the Triangle for more than 20 years. — assisting CEOs and other senior leaders in a variety of industries and non-profit organizations, Grace is also a leadership coach and an expert on incorporating the latest science on happiness and well-being into the fabric of an organization’s pursuit of top performance. In her presentation — Leading with Happiness: The Science of Thriving in Work and Life — Grace will share her thoughts on the impact of happiness on leadership and success, while she also provides hands-on strategies that attendees can use for themselves and with their teams.
We thought it would be helpful to learn more about Grace and why this topic of well-being is so important in this day and age.
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Tell us a little about yourself. Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? What was your first job out of college (undergrad or graduate)?
I grew up in Atlanta as my dad was a professor at Georgia Tech. His unspoken hope was for me to go to MIT, so as a good Chinese daughter, I did. My first job out of MIT was working as an associate consultant for Bain & Company in their Boston office where I had been part of their pilot internship program and loved it. I was the Bain “ambassador” my senior year at MIT!
While I learned a ton at Bain about how to look at businesses, strategy and overall frameworks, I decided I wanted to work inside a company before going to business school. I had applied to Harvard Business School when I was a senior at MIT and was lucky enough to gain a deferred admittance. So after my tenure at Bain, I moved to NYC and worked in consumer marketing at Sports Illustrated (SI), sort of a dream job for a sports fan. Though I hadn’t read a page of SI in my life! But I loved the spirit of the SI team and it was an easy decision to join them. My bosses at Bain were envious when I resigned and told them where I was going!
Out of HBS, I wanted to follow a training ground for consumer packaged goods brand management and chose to join General Mills as an assistant marketing manager. Their focus on “General Mills standing for General Management” was compelling as was their vibrant and innovative culture. I still keep up with my sponsor who has become a dear friend, Marc Belton, who was the GM of the Snacks Division, later serving as President of the Big G cereal business and Executive Vice President for Global Strategy, Growth, and Marketing Innovation.
You have a pretty extensive marketing background. Tell us about some of the marketing work you’ve done over the years.
Yes, I love Marketing! My first love was consumer marketing. My first encounter was as an intern at Coca-Cola in regulatory affairs, not doing marketing, rather applying the organic chemistry courses I had taken at MIT. I looked fondly at the magnificent branding at the company and knew that is where I wanted to be instead! I had the opportunity to intern at IBM and then Bain, where my client was a leader in the beverage industry, and I was helping them with their portfolio strategy.
After General Mills, I continued my brand management career at Clorox where I was recruited to my first consumer technology company, an educational software company that had just gone public, MECC. I was hired to take their flagship Oregon Trail series and other titles that were successful in the school channel into the consumer channel.
I loved that job so much; our tagline was “for the love of learning.” I also had the opportunity to apply all that I had learned at the big marketing companies to edtech, which was a category growing at triple digits, which made the role super exciting for me!
A memorable moment from our exit is my Mr. Wonderful story, as Kevin O’Leary and his partner bought MECC and our competitor, The Learning Company for a billion dollars, before turning around and selling our combined entity to Mattel for $3.8 billion shortly thereafter. Fun details here: Mr. Wonderful on Women Entrepreneurs.
From there, in a move to the Triangle, I continued in consumer software leading business development for Interactive Magic, through their IPO. Then Kip Frey came calling to ask me to head up marketing for OpenSite, a startup that had a fresh round of funding and was competing in the nascent category of online b2b auctioning infrastructure software, accelerated by the popularity of eBay on the consumer side. That was a wild ride where we grew incredibly quickly and had a successful exit a couple of years later to Siebel Systems, the fastest-growing software company in the world at that time.
I was vice president of marketing for a couple more B2B plays in the Triangle, TogetherSoft (on leadership team with Pendo founder, Todd Olson) and then SmartPath with Mike Doernberg, before starting Savvy Marketing Group.
With Savvy, I’ve had the privilege of working with many, many companies in the Triangle and around the world with the first decade focused exclusively on marketing strategy engagements.
You eventually moved into management consulting. What prompted that move?
It was a natural evolution as I was hired in the first many years to leverage my marketing know-how and playbook. As time went on, clients engaged us for the overall business expertise we had accumulated from helping so many companies through their growth and challenge trajectories over the years.
One client that we helped over a multi-year process really triggered the rebranding from Savvy Marketing Group to Savvy Growth. A financial services client referred me into a healthcare company as the Founder/CEO wanted to beef up their marketing. When we met and he got to know me, he said, “I want you to come in and figure out how we can double in size quickly.”
Within months as the category in which they competed had macro shifts, he redirected our work together to be focused on EBITA in order to prepare for the exit process. My firm’s next assignments, operational efficiency studies and more reminded me of Bain days. In the end, we got involved with the overall strategy and inner workings of the company and helped partner with them through a successful exit.
The CEO called me his “strategic weapon” and his President gave me the moniker “corporate therapist”. We had regular meetings, the 3 of us, talking through people issues and strategy and I was a coach available to all the leadership team as well as the clinical team. It was a very fun time for me as a consultant, coach, and most importantly, a trusted partner. What I love to do!
And now you’ve embarked on a journey to share some of the ideas, research, and insights you’ve learned about happiness and well-being. What has that evolution been like for you?
It’s been a natural evolution that started for personal reasons. A decade ago, I started studying positive psychology and happiness as “preventative medicine” as I feared I would fall into despondency with my only child leaving the nest to go to college. I realized that this personal study could also benefit my clients, so I pursued my coaching certification from the Whole Being Institute which was co-founded by Tal Ben-Shahar, the creator of Harvard’s groundbreaking course, Positive Psychology 1504, which set records in the number of students enrolled.
A few years ago, I went through a very difficult depressive episode, and I told myself that if and when I got better, I wanted to help people to not be in that dark place. When I got better, I restarted my happiness studies in even a deeper way than before, earning additional credentials in the field. I’ve created a body of work, HappinessWorks, the science of positive psychology works, but it takes ongoing work. For the last 3 years, I’ve also penned a regular column for WRAL TechWire that readers can subscribe to receiving content on how to be happier, and therefore a more effective leader at work: Happiness & Leadership@Work – click to sign up. I’d love readers to join this growing community to learn ways to be happier and flourish at work.
I want to help individuals develop their own Happiness Hygiene and ways to keep up their wellness. By teaching, I stay accountable to keeping up with the latest research and science on happiness in order to share what works. Helping others with their happiness journey brings happiness back to me.
There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about happiness and well-being. Do you agree? If so, what are some of the biggest ones?
Some people poo poo happiness content and workshops thinking it is all smiley faces or they think of toxic positivity. What many don’t realize is that happiness and well-being relies on being in touch with our negative emotions and learning to express them in a healthy way. In other words, having emotional regulation.
Why do you think achieving happiness is so difficult for some people?
The hedonic treadmill makes many of us not satisfied with what we have. We always want more. Humans are also wired with a negativity bias, to look at the negative before the positive.
In the upcoming presentation, what do you hope to share with the audience that will help them improve their pursuit of happiness?
I hope to have the audience walk away understanding the equation of satisfaction, that is, to want what we have. And to understand the fundamental science behind happiness and have experienced a few exercises and perhaps pick up an accountability partner to continue to work on their happiness in 2025 and beyond.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Subscribe for free content on how to be happier and a better leader. Sign up here to embark on this journey with our growing Happiness & Leadership@Work community.
I’ll be launching opportunities to join cohorts of like-minded individuals for ongoing accountability and community to build wellbeing and healthy cultures at work and life. Sign up here to be notified!
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You can learn more about Grace’s luncheon presentation here.