Endicott College, Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, Honorary Doctorate Awarded to Patricia E. Moody - Commencement Address, June 2004

A Mother's Day Remembrance, and a message for the  graduating class...it's that time of year again... milestones 

First of all, let me say thank you!

 Thank you to the faculty and students of Endicott College for extending an invitation – no, it was a CHALLENGE – for me to speak to you here on this perfect day.

And thank you to some other people whom you will never meet:

First of all to my mother.  Thank you Mumma.   My mother had an 8th grade education.  She worked in a shoe shop for 7 years until she married – she picked up a heel, brushed cement on it, and tapped it in place. Pick up a heel, slather on some cement and tap in in place.  Pick up a heel….for 7 years.    She knew education was going to be important for me.  She didn’t understand the how or the specifics, but she knew it was for survival.

You see, I have a hard time learning new things – I was born blind and I stayed that way for about a year or so -  and learning to read was the just the first in a long series of frustrating first failures.  I always fail in my first attempt – my first pass at Dick and Jane, my first driver’s test, my first accounting exam, my first typing test, my first marriage, my first attempt to learn tennis, my first book – it’s a long list, and we only have 15 minutes.

 I usually don’t describe these ….   EVENTS as failures, I tend to blur them into ……GETTING THE HANG OF IT.

I remember looking at my Dick and Jane book and seeing these letters that did not make sense.  My mother noticed that something wasn’t working, and she worked out a deal with my first grade teacher, Janie Maynard, at the Clara M. Shattuck school in Pepperell,  Mass. for me to bring my books home every day in my lunch box.  So every day after school when the other kids were out playing I was inside drilling on Dick and Jane.   Well, by the time the snows melted in the spring….. something finally clicked, and all of a sudden the letters made words and the words made sense.  Something about the wiring?  I don’t know, but I like to say I am a “fortunately undiagnosed dyslexic”.  Whatever.  SO THANK YOU MUMMA! AND THANK YOU MRS. MAYNARD.

AND THANK YOU CHARLES ADAMS.  Charles Adams was my freshman English teacher at the University of Massachusetts.  One day I was hitch-hiking down Pleasant St. into town, and a man in a British racing green Porsche with tan leather upholstery picked me up.  It was Charles Adams, and he was  SO COOL.  He was married to a professor at Mount Holyoke – oh yes, that was another first failure, I so wanted to get into Mt. Holyoke and YOU KNOW THE DRILL, THAT WAS ANOTHER ON MY LIST OF FIRST FAILURES, NOT GETTING INTO MT. HOLYOKE. Charles Adams later became head of a writing program at UMass.  He is a WRITER.  I IDENTIFIED.

AND THANK YOU TO SYBIL BLOOD RAMSEY.  When the fifth grade boys were downstairs making their industrial art project – a wooden lamp emblazoned with a wood burning motif of a deer – we girls were herded into Mrs. Ramsey’s classroom for an hour of parsing sentences and  grammar.  IT WAS AN INSULT!  I WANTED TO WORK WITH TOOLS AND CUT UP WOOD AND FIGURE OUT WIRING.  And here I was diagramming sentences on the blackboard.  HUH! 

WEL-L-L-L, THANK YOU MRS. RAMSEY.

AND THANK YOU TO ARNOLD KENSETH,  poet and Congregational minister who mentored me in poetry.

So, as you have probably guessed from the introduction, I am a non-traditional business guru. I don’t have a Harvard MBA,  I AM OF THE FEMALE PERSUASION.  I WEAR WHITE SOCKS.  I HAVE driven a fork truck, although dangerously.   I have a degree in French!  - (plus an MBA and a lot of miles) So what happened?

Well, TWO THINGS HAPPENED - relationships, …… and opportunities. 

FIRST, Relationships are hugely important.  When I graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1968 with five thousand other students, I didn’t know how to read a balance sheet, but I surely knew how to read someone’s personality, and character, and agenda and methods.  And I was a pretty good communicator.  Write that one down, communications. 

Every project that I have ever had get into trouble was missing the face to face relationship  communications piece.  And my best work has begun with a great working relationship.   Phones and e-mails are second to face-to-face.  Now, that’s going to be a problem for our global economy, don’t you think?  Not only do we not see or meet our partners in person, but we probably don’t speak their language – how many people here speak Chinese or an Indian language? 

And the SECOND thing that happened is…. opportunities.

Sometimes, especially for non-traditional business gurus, opportunities come at the wrong time – HOW COULD THAT HAPPEN?  You might be working on a new marriage, or you might be getting four hours of sleep because of an infant, or you may not look like the perfect candidate.  But opportunities come, and sometimes you HAVE TO JUST SAY YES!

The foundation – the relationships, your credentials – your degrees, your internships, your rolodex, your address books – all those tools must be in place so that you are ready when the opportunities happen. 

Let me tell you about my one of my first failures – It was a book on supply management for Prentice Hall.  I tried for a year to write this book.  It was un-writeable, at least at that time.  Finally, I called my attorney and asked for a divorce.  I did this the day before leaving for Sandy Island family camp on Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire – I always do this on the day before vacation.  If Molly, my attorney doesn’t hear from me on Friday by noon time, she calls.  She needs to know. 

Anyway, Molly negotiated my exit from this first book, I gave the advance back to the publisher, and I dropped the unfinished manuscript in the bottom of my file cabinet.  Later, an editor from another press, WHOM I DID NOT LIKE, and who had approached me to do a book, called, and asked whatever happened to that Prentice Hall thing I was doing?  Dead I said, never again.  Well, how about writing about affirmative action.  No.  How about writing about contracts.  No.  Well, why DON’T YOU TELL ME WHAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO WRITE ABOUT?  And so I did, and that was the first of 14 book deals with great publishers such as John Wiley and Sons, Amacom, Simon and Schuster and Free Press.

Being there

Opportunities pass if you aren’t there!  First rule – be there!  I had a client in Philadelphia, McNeil Consumer Labs, a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson.  We were called in by the marketing folks to address a “manufacturing problem.”   We constructed the company’s first business plan, basically a roll-up of the critical numbers – forecast, orders, headcount, backlog, etc. – that would allow management to make sense of all the numbers that were being spit out of various dis-aggregated systems.  After we had designed this little system, the first Tylenol poisoning incident happened.

My client called to cancel, and said “don’t get on the plane." They said there was nothing we could do – BUT I WENT ANYWAY!  The company froze – management scrambled to recall all pipeline inventory - $8M of it – and to design tamper-proof packaging.  President James Burke was on the lawn doing his breakthrough press conference, the one where he portrayed McNeil also as the victim of the poisoning.  No one moved, everyone was paralyzed with uncertainly, NO COMMIT.  Would the company regain its $450M position, or would it fold, or slowly come back to $240?

The competition KNEW it. They snapped up market share.  I jumped in and took the opportunity – I took the opportunity and I WAS READY. 

I posted a white board that the leadership passed on the way to the cafeteria, updated it hourly. The white board showed the order backlog climbing, and shipments frozen. Next, my partner Mark Smith, an annoying little-brother geek type, and I presented our little business plan to the executive team – a Visicalc spreadsheet.  THEY WENT CRAZY!  You mean we could, what if, but let’s try it this way.  IT WAS A FRENZY OF WHAT-IF SCENARIOS!  And it unlocked the process.  I knew management had to open the valves again, and after a few dozen iterations of the business plan they did!   It saved the company. 

CONCLUSION

So, thank you to all for the opportunity to be present at this important event in your lives.  We are all so lucky….

I have one more story.  In 1968 I was sitting in the same seat you all are now, on the football field, with a couple thousand other graduates.  One of my best buddies, Phil Day, tall, curly brown hair, dark twinkly eyes, sardonic, turned to me and said, “Patricia, say goodbye to me now, because we will never see each other again."

"No, that’s not true!"

And you know, he was right.  We never did see each other again. Phil graduated, got addicted, got unaddicted – WE ALL HAVE A STORY - and now heads up an addiction program at a big Massachusetts hospital.  I tracked him down a month ago and told him the story, AND THANKED HIM, and told him how right he had been that day in June 1968! 

So, I do have some advice for all the graduates here today. 

Turn to the person on your right, and say goodbye.  Because you really may never see them again.

Now turn to your parents, even if they have passed on, and say Thank you!  You may not even know why you are thanking them, but it will make sense later.  Trust me.

Patricia E. Moody