Giving Back Never Stops

You took over the Red Cross in 2008, as the country entered the Great Recession. The organization was suffering annual budget shortfalls that ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars. That seemed to be a pretty big departure from your prior successful corporate career, including as president of Fidelity Personal Investments. So I'm wondering what were the top values that guided you as you thought about whether you should take this risky step of heading an organization that was facing very, very serious deficits.

So this is a bit of a story. First of all, even as a kid, I volunteered, I was a candy striper when I was 16 years old. And from that point on, I always did something. I tutored underprivileged kids in the inner city in Philadelphia. I was a Girl Scout leader for seven years. I always tried to figure out a way to give back. There was always a volunteer part of what I was doing. And then at corporate, when my job was all consuming and I was raising a child, I would give back by raising funds for charities that meant a great deal to me. So I've always served on non-profit boards and so on and so forth. So I have that give back gene and I inherited from both of my parents. They both had that same desire to make sure they made a difference in their communities. And basically what happened was I started climbing the ladder at AT&T and then I went over to Fidelity Investments because I'm intellectually curious. And I felt like I had achieved what I could achieve at AT&T. When I went to Fidelity, I was there for four years and then the newspapers were just being littered with corporate malfeasance and Enron and WorldCom. And the events of the day were just so discouraging. So I got in my head that I was going to try to influence tomorrow's leaders. And so I left Fidelity and I went to the Harvard Business School teaching marketing, and I loved it. But the truth of the matter is those kids are so smart that I don't know if I was really teaching them anything. I think I was learning as much as they were. So when I got this phone call from a search firm and they said, would you consider this role? It was like, everything clicked in my head. I thought, this is an opportunity for me to really make a difference. And we had eight CEOs in five years at the American Red Cross. And so there was some part of me that was attracted to the challenge. And another part of me that thought this is an American treasure. The world is a better place because of the American Red Cross. And I thought if I could just make it a little better every day at a time, it would be the capstone of my career.