SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Job Market : PART TWO: GETTING AHEAD : The Path to the Top : Four executives recall how luck, good timing thrust them up the ladder
The formula for a successful career often consists of equal parts accident and luck.
Consider the former Marine who decided to join a prominent California aerospace company after being stranded in an East Coast snowstorm--and went on to become chief executive. Or the college dropout who complained about a situation at Berry Gordy’s Motown Records, only to be invited to come on board to fix the problem.
Or the prominent Los Angeles retailing executive who got his start thanks to a persuasive neighbor. Or the Southland banker who attracted the chairman’s attention with her deft handling of a crisis while a colleague was away.
In other words, the image of the determined executive climbing steadily up the corporate ladder, rung by well-planned rung, doesn’t always conform with reality. Career choice--and advancement--can be as much a matter of timing as of skill and experience.
“Luck is being in the right place at the right time,” said Rudy Dew, vice president in the Los Angeles office of Hay Career Consultants. “That ‘accident’ (of succeeding in a career) comes to the person who prepares himself for what he wants to do.”
Robert O. Snelling Sr., president of Snelling Inc., an employment service, speaks from experience about “accidental” careers. He studied to be a chemical engineer before being “tapped to help out in the family business” that he now heads. “Look at (Chrysler Chairman Lee A.) Iacocca,” Snelling said. “He started as an engineer, moved into selling. At least he knew he wanted to be in transportation.”
Here are the stories of how some executives close to home happened into their lines of work.
LAWRENCE O. KITCHEN, LOCKHEED
For Lawrence O. Kitchen, 63, the decision to join Lockheed, which he now heads as chairman and chief executive from offices in Calabasas, was made somewhat reluctantly--and all because of some nasty weather.
“I guess it all started out of high school. I went into the Marine Corps after Pearl Harbor in January, 1942. I wound up in an aviation technical school down in Florida. From there, I spent 20 months in the South Pacific with a Marine aircraft fighter squadron. Aviation got into my blood.
“When I got out of the Marines in January, 1946, instead of going back to my hometown of Shelby, N.C., which was strictly a textile and farming area, I decided to take my chances and go to Washington, D.C., to try to get into the Navy aeronautical business as a civilian.
“Jobs were scarce. (To be) closer to the opportunities, I took a job as a clerk-typist while going to night school. I wound up getting my first opportunity as a technician.
“I waited and worked hard and went to school at night. . . . After about 12 years, I was designated an aeronautical engineer by the Civil Service. By that time, I had been asked by Lockheed several times to go to work for them but had always turned them down.
“But life has its funny moments. We had a miserable snowstorm in D.C. in 1957, and I was stranded on the George Washington Parkway. I abandoned my car, walked home, got home about 9:30 and said, ‘Who needs this?’ ”
In 1958, Kitchen started with Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. in Sunnyvale, Calif., where he held various posts over the next 12 years, taking time out for an executive training program at the University of Pittsburgh. He was named president of the corporation in 1975 and chairman in January, 1986.
Of his success, Kitchen said: “You could probably sum it up by saying that I happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
His advice to job seekers: “The one thing I really look for in people is being a self-starter. Too many people wait for direction. I’d rather have someone who’s overzealous that I have to haul in now and then.
“The basic thing that I keep stressing is integrity and a sense of ethics. The other thing is that, once you set your goals . . . just never give up. Set milestones and (devise a) plan that will get you there.”
SUZANNE DE PASSE, MOTOWN PRODUCTIONS
Patience and persistence have paid off for Suzanne de Passe, who 20 years ago “joined Motown in a rather unorthodox fashion” and is now president of Motown Productions, the Hollywood-based film, television and theatrical division of Motown Industries.
It all started when Cindy Birdsong, a friend of De Passe who had just joined the Supremes singing group, came out of the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York one evening and asked whether Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. could share the limousine that she and De Passe had rented.
“I said, ‘Fine,’ ” De Passe, 40, recalled. “I was very young, working in Manhattan, and it was difficult to get taxis in Manhattan at peak hours, so I’d rented a limo. At the time, I was talent coordinator of a very large dance nightclub and was just kind of getting into the entertainment business.”
A year later, she ran into Gordy again at a Supremes party in Miami on New Year’s Eve, 1967.
“I got his attention when I criticized his company and told him I was having difficulty booking Motown artists into a theater because the people in Detroit were derelict in returning calls,” De Passe recalled with a chuckle. “He said: ‘I don’t know what the problem is, but maybe we need someone like you to straighten things out.’ ”
So, at 20 and a college dropout, De Passe found herself working for one of the most exciting entertainment companies around. It has never been easy.
“I cried every day for the first 10 years. It didn’t seem I could do anything really right and get unqualified praise. Then I stopped looking for it.
“I think I was blessed with a certain combination of patience and persistence. Whenever I felt like it wasn’t going to happen, I persisted, and whenever I felt it wasn’t happening fast enough, something in me got patient.”
At Motown, de Passe has helped sign such talents as the Commodores, Lionel Richie and the Jackson Five. She also has written and produced TV specials and, in 1972, was nominated for an Academy Award for co-writing the screenplay “Lady Sings the Blues.”
For those with stars in their eyes, she has one piece of advice: “Never lose your sense of humor and perspective.”
Does she regret dropping out of college? “If I had my choice, yes, I’d like to be sitting here with my degree. (But) entertainment is not an industry that demands a lot of alphabet after your name. In my case, I knew I was destined to do something in entertainment.”
PHILIP M. HAWLEY, CARTER HAWLEY HALE STORES
No one in Philip M. Hawley’s family had ever been in retailing, until a neighbor who was a department store executive inspired an interest in the young man from Portland, Ore.
“I got started really strangely by virtue of having grown up next door to a man who was like a second father to me,” said Hawley, 61, chairman and chief executive of Los Angeles-based Carter Hawley Hale Stores. “He was in the department store business . . . and persuaded me to come to work for (his) store.
“He gave me a job which was essentially kind of an assistant to a merchandise manager, with everything to do. It was a marvelous way to really learn retailing.”
That first job, starting in 1952, was at Lipman Wolfe & Co., a fine, carriage-trade store that was the oldest in Portland. By 1958, he was president of the firm and had drawn the attention of a Los Angeles company called Broadway-Hale Stores.
Hired at the Broadway division as a sportswear buyer, Hawley soon impressed his bosses and advanced quickly. In 1974, the company was renamed, with his moniker in the middle. Hawley added the titles of chief executive in 1977 and chairman in 1983.
Along the way, he learned some key lessons.
“The thing that you have to be conscious of is to be willing to put in long hours, to go through a learning process, to develop a sensitivity to people, a tolerance for other points of view.
“When you’re thinking about retailing as a career, you have to be prepared to adjust your thinking. It’s very much a partnership kind of business. It takes that kind of a mind set to do well and advance.”
LINDA JUDD FOSS, SECURITY PACIFIC
Linda Judd Foss, who at 38 is a senior vice president and corporate secretary of Security Pacific Corp., grew up in Tennessee, where the choice for most career-minded women was teaching. But Foss decided to try something else.
“I wanted something that involved more doing than teaching,” she said. “A law degree seemed to me to be a very good ticket.”
Berkeley law degree in hand, she moved to Los Angeles and sent resumes to a number of corporations “because I was always interested in business. I saw that as more attractive than a law firm.”
In October, 1975, she went to work for Security Pacific.
“That certainly was a good move because Security has really grown in that time. There weren’t a lot of old men to block me, not a big number of lawyers. So there was room. I could’ve gone to work for other companies that didn’t grow or had large legal staffs, and I could still be working on documents. It was the luck of the draw.”
About four years into her time in the legal department, the corporate secretary asked for some help in preparing a proxy statement. Soon after, he left on vacation at a time when the company’s general counsel was also out of town.
“We had it all wrapped up and ready to file, but I got a call from one of the clerical people in the corporate secretary’s office saying that the chairman had called to say one of the directors had died and he wondered whether there was something we needed to do.
“I called up the chairman, Carl Hartnack, and said: ‘Hi, you don’t know me, but I’m working on the proxy statement.’ He said: ‘Come up in 10 minutes and tell me what to do.’ I ran around like crazy and decided we had to have a board meeting to reduce the number of directors to avoid having a vacancy. It took about 15 minutes.”
When she got to the chairman’s office, he barked: “You’re late.” She replied: “I thought you’d rather I be five minutes late and have the information you needed than be on time without it.”
Foss “ran around until midnight gathering papers so that he could sign them the next morning. When I delivered them, he said: ‘Gee, this is great. We don’t need those other guys, do we?’ ”
The next week, her colleagues returned, but the chairman didn’t forget her performance. When the corporate secretary’s post came open, Foss got the job. Later, she was named the first woman senior vice president of the Los Angeles-based company.
Based on her own experience, she has advice for the promotion-minded: “It was luck that I was presented with an opportunity, but then I seized on it. You have to seize on opportunities when they come along. And, when you go to seize on them, you need to have done your homework.”
