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From Resource, December 2004
Copyright by LOMA
Steps
to Success:
Industry Leaders Share Examples
Ever wanted to know how some
of the leaders of the industry got
to where they are today? What advice
would they give you? What pitfalls would they tell you to avoid? Four LOMA
board members recently participated in a panel discussion at LOMA’s 2004
Annual Conference & Conferment, in which they looked back on their
respective career paths and the lessons learned along the way.
By Stephen Hall
“Learning
is not attained by chance; it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with
diligence.” —Abigail Adams
So
how did they do it? How did some of the top executives in insurance and
financial services go about braving the obstacles and challenges of corporate
life to achieve success and career fulfillment? During LOMA’s 2004 Annual
Conference and Conferment in Boston,
Mass., four members of LOMA’s board of directors took the stage to answer that
question as part of a panel discussion whose theme was “Steps to Success.”
And it turns out their recipe for success includes a wide range of ingredients:
Keep reading and learning. Try to be open to new tasks and experiences.
Challenge yourself and expand your comfort zone. Remember who helped you get
where you are today while looking to the future. Form and maintain good
relationships. And whenever possible, give back to your profession by
participating in committees and industry groups.
The four panelists were David
M. Holland, FSA, MAAA, president and CEO of Munich American Reassurance Co. and
chairman of LOMA’s board of directors; James W. Zilinski, chairman, president
and CEO of Berkshire Life Insurance Co. of America; Susan D. Waring, CLU, ChFC,
senior vice president and chief administrative officer (CAO)—Life affiliates,
State Farm Life Insurance Co.; and John H. Jacobs, CLU, chairman, president and
CEO of The Union Central Life Insurance Co. Thomas P. Donaldson, FLMI, CLU,
president and CEO of LOMA, moderated the panel discussion.
DAVID M. HOLLAND, FSA,
MAAA, President and CEO, Munich
American Reassurance Company and Chairman, LOMA Board of Directors
Holland
said the story of his career path began at college, when he was attending
Georgia
State
University
as an actuarial science major. “After I had finished my first actuarial exam
at school,” he recalled, “a friend came to me and said, ‘Wouldn’t you
like to have a job as an actuarial student at a consulting actuarial firm?’”
Thinking this sounded like a good place to get some experience in preparation
for life after college,
Holland
interviewed for and got the job, which he said taught him three things.
“First, an education pays off; it was good to be at
Georgia
State
, getting a college degree,” he said. “Second, the professional designations
help; passing an actuarial exam was a tremendous help getting a good job. And
third, I learned the importance of networking—of having friends who can make
recommendations that help you move along.”
Holland
said he later discovered that his willingness to learn new skills paid huge
dividends down the road. “During the interview for my first job, they asked me
if I knew anything about computers or computer programming,” he said. “My
answer was, ‘No, but send me a book and I’ll see what I can learn.’ So
they sent me a manual on how to program in AUTOCODER, which was a very early
programming language. The computer took up about half the space that’s in this
auditorium, and it had 8K of memory. I learned to program mostly by reading a
book, so self-study is an important way to learn. This got to be quite a nice
job; I would request data for a pension valuation, write the program for when
the data came, do the actuarial analysis, and work with others to develop a
final report.”
Later,
when he finished his undergraduate degree,
Holland
wanted to get some experience in life insurance. “So again, a friend
recommended that I talk to the people at a certain consulting firm, and sure
enough, they wanted a young actuarial student to come on board,”
Holland
said. “And surprisingly, not long after I was there, they asked me what I
knew about computers. So that self-study initiative of learning skills outside
of my normal background was really helpful, even in the second job. The person
who hired me for that job moved to Munich American Reassurance, and he later
asked me, ‘Would you like to come to work at Munich Re? What we need is
someone to develop a general reinsurance administration computer system and to
do actuarial work as well.’”
Holland
took up the offer and got to work developing the system, adding that it was one
of the most challenging tasks he’s ever done. “The system had to be
compatible with all of the financial and administrative operations of the
company,” he explained. “If we didn’t send out the bills, people
wouldn’t get paid, so I felt it was a pretty important job. But I also learned
a lot about what goes on within the company, how it works, and how to get the
systems developed and things accomplished during that period of time.”
Over
time,
Holland
’s job expanded, moving from a focus on general actuarial work to broader
issues. He became a member of the ACLI Actuarial Committee and was invited to
join an NAIC Standing Technical Advisory Committee. Eventually he was put in
charge of all things pertaining to business development, marketing and sales …
and finally, he was asked to be president of Munich American Reassurance Co. But
shortly after he took the job,
Holland
got a bit of a reality check.
“After
I became president, the former president came to me and said, ‘We almost
didn’t hire you when you first applied for a job at this company,’”
Holland
recalled. “I said, ‘Really?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, we didn’t know what
we were going to do with you once you finished the computer system.’ So I’m
glad they found something for me to do.”
In
addition to continually broadening one’s professional horizons and maintaining
industry contacts,
Holland
emphasized the importance of giving back to your profession in return for all
that your former supervisors, mentors and colleagues have done for you.
“The
motto of the
Institute
of
Actuaries
comes from Sir Francis Bacon, who once said: ‘I hold every man a debtor to
his profession,’” noted
Holland
, who was quick to add that in our modern age, this proverb clearly applies to
both genders. “For me, I got involved with the Society of Actuaries’
education and examination (E&E) committees as soon as I completed my FSA,
which is how I repaid my profession. I worked on E&E for about 12 years and
expanded my involvement to the reinsurance section, publications, and a number
of other areas. Eventually I was elected as president of the Society of
Actuaries, too. I didn’t realize that paying off a debt could be so much fun
and so rewarding. I made many friends among my professional colleagues, and I
got to go to many places and see different parts of the world. It was a great
continuing education experience.”
Holland
concluded his turn on the panel discussion by addressing the audience, most of
whom have recently earned a professional designation from LOMA. “We really are
all debtors to the professions that have brought us along, and the reason I’m
mentioning that is that I think there are a lot of things you can do for LOMA,
and a lot of things that LOMA can do for you—whether it’s working on the
Education & Training Council, working on the many committees that LOMA has,
or serving with your local LOMA Society,” he said. “You could call it a
debt, but it’s really a great opportunity.”
JAMES W. ZILINSKI
Chairman, President and CEO, Berkshire Life Insurance Company of
America.
As a boy, Zilinski observed that one of
the things his father, a small business owner, was most influenced by when it
came to running his business was what his accountant had to say. The lesson he
took from that observation was that it’s very important to “know the
numbers”—a lesson that later inspired Zilinski to choose an accounting major
in college.
“I
was slated to go into the accounting profession in my junior year of college,”
he recalled. “I got a job as an intern at Owens-Illinois, a manufacturer of
glass and plastics packaging in
Toledo
,
Ohio
, as a cost accountant. And I spent a great deal of time with a calculator doing
bottle quotes; the internship involved working mechanical calculating machines
all day. And I learned something about myself: I learned that I wasn’t
particularly great without getting a lot more involved with people. So I made
the decision in my senior year that even though I was graduating as an
accounting major, I was not necessarily interested in accounting as a
profession. But I decided to use accounting as a framework that I would utilize
in progressing through my career.”
IBM
recruited Zilinski out of college to work in sales of data processing equipment,
and he began his tenure there with the assumption that he would stay for about
five years, learn what he could, and move on. “I ended up staying there for 18
years, so I guess you could say I was a little bit of a slow learner,” he
joked. But he added that his experience at IBM helped him to gain a deeper
understanding of technology, business processes and methodology, and the
concepts of logical workflow—a foundation that Zilinski said has served him
well. Eventually he was given the opportunity to become a “people manager,”
as the position was known at IBM. “I consider that to be one of the most
important foundations I had in my professional career: to really understand the
disciplines of people management,” he said.
Not
long after his fifteenth anniversary with IBM, after having served in a number
of management capacities, Zilinski was given the chance to move to IBM Corporate
Headquarters in
Armonk
,
N.Y.
, to run a corporate management development program. “It was the best
experience I’ve probably ever had, because it took me out of my original frame
of reference—sales and marketing—and put me into another function
altogether, which everybody should do,” he said. “This position was
particularly good, because a lot of it really made me think about and hone my
people management skills. If you have a good foundation in people management,
then you understand something about human resources function. In most
businesses, 60 to 70 percent of the money is spent on people. People are,
fundamentally, what make up companies. So you can have balance sheets and income
statements and can understand the numbers and can analyze data all day long, but
it’s people who make the difference. So that was a great lesson.”
In
1983, Zilinski embarked on his career in insurance and financial services when
he was recruited by New England Life Insurance Company—one of his customers
through IBM—to help start what was then a little-known business: personal
financial planning. “That was kind of the introduction of the insurance
company to financial services,” he said. “And they wanted somebody that knew
absolutely nothing about the way things used to be. Well, I was a perfect
candidate in that regard.” This also represented a great career opportunity,
Zilinski said, because it gave him the chance to be a general manager and to
start a business from scratch. “It gave me a great foundation in this
industry,” he said.
Shortly
after joining New England Life, Zilinski was sent to LIMRA’s annual
meeting—and got a hearty dose of culture shock. “In IBM, if you even talked
to a competitor, you were subject to being fired,” he recalled. “But now I
was in the life insurance business, and I walked into the LIMRA meeting, and I
found that everybody was sharing everything with everybody. It was the
antithesis of 18 years of experience at IBM. I found that networking enables
people to learn about what opportunities or ideas are possible. What I learned
was that we’re in an industry that has a great mission, and while we compete
with one another, we’re also striving toward a common cause—a cause of doing
some very good things, as well as prospering from a business perspective. It’s
a great opportunity, to be able to pick up the phone, call somebody at another
company, and just ask, ‘Well, how did you handle this? What do you think about
this particular issue or challenge?’”
After
an 11-year tenure at New England Life, Zilinski left to work at Bisys as the
President of its Investment Services Group—a job that lasted only six months.
“A merger came along, and the CEO of the merged company acquired my job as
part of the negotiation. From that, I learned that mergers and acquisitions are
a very real thing.” Meanwhile, Berkshire Life Insurance Company was searching
for a CEO. “Through the network I had established, I had the opportunity of
being a viable candidate for that position, and so I’ve spent the last 10
years as chairman, president and CEO of Berkshire Life.”
A
few years after Zilinski joined Berkshire Life, he said, it became clear that
the many shifts and changes that were sweeping through the industry would
challenge the viability of the 150-year-old company. He realized that if
Berkshire Life didn’t take control and make some changes on its own, the
marketplace would take control and make changes for them. “Through the
network I had established, I had built some relationships with some other
companies and found an opportunity to put together a very positive merger with
Guardian Life Insurance Company,” he said. Through this merger, Berkshire Life
became focused on disability insurance and was now a subsidiary to Guardian.
“We consider it to be one of the very best mergers in the industry,”
Zilinski said. “We did it as the result of lessons learned about how to put
relationships together.”
Summing
up the many lessons he learned from these crucial points along his career path,
he advised conference attendees, first of all, to “Read a lot. You can’t be
in these kinds of situations—whatever job you’re in—without trying to
inform yourself about the environment, the risks and the opportunities. Second,
you need to have a plan and think a little bit about the future. I didn’t
necessarily think I was going to run a company in high school or college, or
even in my days at IBM; it wasn’t the goal that I had then. But I always had a
goal to understand what ‘two jobs in front of me’ meant, and what it took to
get two jobs in front of me. And third, take care of the relationships that
you’ve built over time. It’s very important to be forward-looking, but
don’t forget the past and the people that got you where you are.”
SUSAN D. WARING, CLU,
ChFC
Senior Vice President and CAO—Life Affiliates, State Farm Life Insurance
Company.
Waring described the journey that led her to State Farm as a long and winding
road that took her to places and experiences that she never dreamed awaited her.
And for her, the journey began in the unlikeliest of places: a college
admissions department.
“I
was a history major in college, and after college, I went into admissions and
recruited students,” Waring said. “I did that for a few years and then went
on to get my master’s in counseling psychology. And from there, I worked for
the next 15 years in college administration on campuses and universities, and I
ended that stint as a dean of students.”
During
the last few years of her career in college administration, Waring entertained
thoughts of starting her own business. “I looked at a lot of different
business opportunities and settled on becoming a State Farm agent,” she said.
“We are primarily a property and casualty insurer, and once we get the auto
and fire, we multi-line and sell the life and health insurance. As a State Farm
agent, I had to know a lot about how to sell these products. And I thought at
that time that I would be an agent forever.”
But
State Farm had other plans. “I was busy doing my agency job and loving the
relationships and the people, when State Farm asked me to go into management,”
Waring said. “And that meant that now I was going to go out and hire and train
agents. And so I did that job thinking, ‘OK, that’s going to be my job for
the rest of my career.’” As if on cue, State Farm then moved her into
different agency leadership positions, until finally, she ended up in
New York
state, Waring’s birthplace. At that point, Waring said, “I thought,
‘They’ve sent me home. I’m going to retire here; what an
opportunity.’”
Then
came a phone call from State Farm’s corporate headquarters in
Bloomington
,
Ill.
They were now asking her to move there, so that she could go from the agency
side of the business to the operations side—to launch mutual funds. “The
company was asking me to come in and learn things that I had never paid
attention to before,” she said. “But I didn’t need to know all the pricing
and the risk behind a mutual fund. What I needed to know is how we were going to
connect this new product to the agency field, how we were going to sell it, and
how we were going to get our agents engaged. That was the rationale for State
Farm wanting to bring in an agency person to head up this new product line. So I
said yes.”
It
was now March 2001, and once again, Waring assumed that within State Farm, she
had reached her final destination. “I thought, ‘OK, we’ve launched this
product, and now they’ll keep me here to see how it works and make it better.
And I’ll be here for probably five years or so, and then they’ll send me
back out to the field to continue to work on the marketing side.’” Of
course, the usual change of plans came in July, when State Farm asked Waring to
take over the entire life insurance business. “Now, you may think that life
insurance at State Farm is kind of small, because we are the largest property
and casualty insurer,” she said. “But we have over 7 million life and
annuity policies in force and over $530 billion of life insurance in force, so
we’re a pretty big player in this market.”
Upon
being asked to take on this latest role, Waring said, she wondered why they were
asking her. “What did I know about pricing?” she recalled asking herself.
“What did I know about risk management? What did I know about all those areas
on the operations side?”
In
the end, Waring said, she has learned many things from her wildly unpredictable
but ultimately satisfying career path with State Farm. “First, focus on doing
the job that you’re in,” she said. “Looking a couple of jobs forward is
good also, but I think you need to do the job that you’re in and do it
extremely well, because otherwise, future opportunities may not come.” In
addition, she said, never stop learning and growing in your career.
“Oftentimes your company sees things in you and will ask you to take on
assignments that you may not have thought about before. And you may ask, ‘Why
me? Why is my skill set suited for this?’ But they often do it for a good
reason. In our world, it’s about taking skills into consideration: What do you
see in this individual, and what are the needs at this time?”
Waring
agreed with Zilinski’s advice to read constantly, adding that “I also
encourage asking lots and lots of questions. I found that each time I moved,
there were lots of people who knew much more than I ever would know. I needed to
find them, and I needed to depend on them to guide me and help me to make
decisions. I hadn’t come up in the operations side of the business, and a lot
of people were well-educated and experienced in that area, and I needed to find
them.”
Finally,
she told conference attendees, don’t be afraid to take a job that’s not
necessarily a step up from your current job. “Oftentimes we think that when it
comes to our careers, we need to always be promoted up,” she said. “Well,
there’s a lot to be said when your company asks you to take a lateral
position, because it’s an opportunity for you to learn more about another area
of the company. At the time you may think, ‘I don’t get any more money, and
I don’t get a bigger title.’ But I would tell you that oftentimes, when we
are asked to do those things, it’s because there are other plans for us.”
JOHN H. JACOBS, CLU
Chairman, President and CEO, The Union Central Life Insurance Co.
Jacobs began by welcoming
the opportunity to go last because, he joked, “Everybody’s already said
everything.” He went on to explain that because his father was the owner and
sole operator of a retail store, his initial career objective during his college
years was “to have a job where I didn’t work weekends. Of course, as
chairman, president and CEO of The Union Central Life Insurance Co., now I give
about half my weekends to the company.”
Jacobs
admitted that when he was first asked to participate in the panel discussion and
talk about his career path, he was afraid that he wouldn’t really have one to
speak of. “But as I thought about it, I realized that one thing I learned
along the way was the importance of always taking advantage of doing the best I
possibly could with whatever job I had at that point in time,” he said. “I
had also learned not to worry too much about where I would be in two, three or
five years, but to take maximum advantage of whatever opportunity I had at any
given point in time, and doing the best possible work I could.”
Another
valuable lesson that he realized along the way, he said, was the importance of
constant learning. “I took advantage of every single program and seminar that
I could,” Jacobs said. “I focused on earning professional designations and
constantly trying to reach out and learn more—not just about something
pertaining to our industry or a technical skill, but about myself. Understanding
who you are, what motivates you, what your skills are, and most importantly,
what skills you don’t have, is absolutely critical to making you capable of
handling additional responsibilities within your career. We all have
limitations, and we all have things that we’re good at. And probably the best
education I got throughout my career was learning what my limitations were,
because then I could rely on other people to make up for those limitations.”
And the learning doesn’t necessarily have to pertain strictly to a
professional environment, Jacobs said. “Any chance that you get to take a
leadership position is helpful, whether it’s serving on the PTA, coaching your
kid’s soccer team, or volunteer work in a neighborhood environment. But I
would say that learning the skills of leadership are absolutely critical to
preparing yourself for whatever the next opportunity is.”
Jacobs
wrapped up his turn in the panel discussion by encouraging conference attendees
to be willing to take risks. “Don’t be afraid to take on that tough project
that has a good chance of failure,” he said. “Don’t be afraid to volunteer
to get involved in something that puts you outside your area of comfort, because
that’s how we grow and learn. From my own perspective in our company, I know
we look for people who are enthusiastic, excited, and willing to reach out and
do things that are outside their comfort level. So you should constantly improve
your skills, constantly work to take advantage of opportunities, do the maximum
with what you have, know yourself, and most importantly, do what you enjoy
doing. Be comfortable with what you’re doing and whatever part of the company
you’re in. Throughout my career, I’ve seen people who thought they should
move up a step or aspire to something in which they knew they would be totally
and absolutely miserable. Work is a large part of our life, and it’s an
absolute waste of our life if we’re spending it doing things we don’t enjoy.
So that’s why I think being comfortable with yourself and being comfortable
with the kinds of things you like to do is absolutely critical. If a lot of that
happens to be in terms of a title or pay, that will take care of itself over
time. Just make sure that whatever you do, you have fun doing it and that it
adds to your life instead of detracting from it.”
Thomas
P. Donaldson, FLMI, CLU, president and CEO of LOMA and moderator for the panel
discussion, brought the discussion to a close by thanking the participants for
their contributions. Turning to the conference attendees, he said, “I think
you can see that while they all came from many different points and places and
had different routes to the top, there were some very common themes throughout
all their comments. One of them, obviously, is that you need to do additional
work, whether that’s networking, reading or education. You also have to do a
good job where you are, because if you do that, then you’ll get a chance to
move on. You also have to be flexible with upcoming assignments, because while
you don’t always know why your company moves you to a particular position,
sometimes your company has plans for you that you’re not aware of. So again, I
want to thank the panel for the messages
that they’ve brought us.”
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