The Success Project: Life changing advice from the c-suite

By Bruce Brodie

The Success Project is for people, particularly twenty, thirty and forty-somethings, working their way up and dealing with success, what it means, and with the fits and starts, bumps and bruises that accompany success. The book asks three things - 1) What does success mean? 2) What words of wisdom do you live by and/or offer to others? And 3) What part of your story tells us something about success? The result are perspectives on success, competition, money, career, work-life balance, women, diversity, introverts, bluffing, failure plus 171 pieces of advice culled from the years.

Well known CEOs, c-suite executives, senior leaders and consultants are the mentors you wish you had - they gathered to share their stories and practical career advice. Two dozen people contributed to The Success Project; eleven are women, six are minorities, two are openly LGBTQ, four are or have been CEOs, thirteen are c-suite executives, six are partners in global consulting firms, eight are MBAs, three are CPAs, two are PhDs, and two are lawyers. All have worked for or with Fortune 500 companies, some in the Fortune 100.

This is advice you'll want to hear. Read the book from cover to cover, find the topics that most interest you, or single out the participants whose voices most resonate with you. You might read with friends and with a yellow highlighter. The 171 Pieces of Advice are for browsing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667816197

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THE SUCCESS PROJECT

Life changing advice from the c-suite

© 2022, Bruce Brodie. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 978-1-66781-6-180

eBook ISBN: 978-1-66781-6-197

Table of Contents

Prologue

Success

Competition

Money

Career

Work-life balance

Women

Diversity

Introverts

Bluffing

Failure

Elements of success

It’s just business

Vicissitudes

Family matters

Standing firm

Brave new world

Conclusion

The road traveled

Introducing the roundtable

Acknowledgements

Author’s bio

Prologue

The Success Project is for people dealing with success, what it means, and with the fits and starts, bumps and bruises that accompany success.

Twenty-three people contributed to The Success Project; eleven are women, six are minorities, two are openly LGBTQ, four are or have been CEOs, thirteen are c-suite executives, six are partners in global consulting firms, eight are MBAs, three are CPAs, two are PhDs, and two are lawyers. All have worked for or with Fortune 500 companies, some in the Fortune 100.

My career began in New York in the year of the Bicentennial with pick-up jobs, living in the front room on the second floor of a brownstone on thirty-sixth street, which was soon condemned, and I was evicted. My journey from there to the c-suite with a view of the great lady of the harbor is to some extent, told in the stories you’ll read, as the people who contributed are friends whose wisdom I gathered along the way.

I asked pointedly for perspectives and sought out experiences different from my own speaking to men and women of color, LGBTQ people, young-and-old-white-men-and-women, liberals, and conservatives, who are in a position to offer firsthand experiences. I gave each a pseudonym so they would feel free to be open and candid, so the names are not real, but you will hear their voices. Each is clear-eyed about what success takes, the tradeoffs, and with perspectives on the road not taken. I asked three things - 1) What does success mean? 2) What words of wisdom do you live by and/or offer to others? And 3) What part of your story tells us something about success?

Every hero has their own journey and yet the lessons are similar. There are pervasive threads. Hard work leads to success. Loving what you do helps fuel the hard work. If you’re not happy, you’re probably not in the right place. Competition is how you know how good you are. Money is how you keep score. Be the best you can be, and good things will follow.

To borrow from Claude Levi-Strauss, the reader should know what is expected from him/her on opening these pages. You can use the book a few ways, read the book from cover to cover, find the topics that most interest you, or single out the participants whose voices most resonate with you. You might read with friends and with a yellow highlighter. The 171 Pieces of Advice are for browsing

Success

Making a difference

Success means making a difference in the world, having an impact on the world you encounter. You can have a positive impact on your own family or a small number of work colleagues or a small portion of your own community, and you’ve had an impact on the world. So, success for me is defined in that smaller world; leaving the company a better place, making the work environment better, having an impact on the clients we serve, having an impact on the community that I live in, being a good and supportive family member. All of those are the ways I define success.

Arch Meyers

Happy Life

My definition of success is happy life. Happy life. Success to me doesn’t mean money. You have three parts of your life. You have your business life, your personal life, and your family life. Pick two because you can’t do all three. You have to pick what are the things you’re going to do in your life and if you achieve happiness, it’s because you were successful in your chosen two out of the three. Choose three and you’re going to have an unhappy life because you won’t do any of them well. In my case, my two were work life and family life, not personal life. Success means pick two and do them well and achieve your objectives. Almost everybody I’ve ever met wants to be good at what they do. They want to be good at their job, their family, etc.

You have to decide what you are trying to achieve – I often tell people; you need to think about what you want. What do you want to be said on your tombstone? And then here’s the test. Think about your own personal characteristics and write down the three words that describe you and that embody who you are and what you want to be. Show it to your significant other and if your significant other starts shaking their head no, it means you have no idea who you are. Once you get the three words right, that becomes your definition of success and defines what you want to do, because those three words characterize you. The three words that define me are ethical, analytical, and giving. Those are my three and I try to do everything around them.

David Mamoulian

Be the person I was put on Earth to be

What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul? My desire is to achieve the most that I can, to be the person that I was put on the earth to be and, in the process, impact my family and my community in the way I inspire others to be their better selves. 

I heard from a former associate who’s now the CEO of a company. I know this is coming out of the blue, he said, but one of the people who shaped my life, influenced me the most in my career was an African American woman who encouraged me to follow my dreams – you. I want to let you know I never forgot that. Hearing that from him is more important than any promotion or any title. How do we inspire? How can I touch this world in a way that makes it better? I believe that we have been put here to do something important.

Frances Harper

Nobody else is going to do it

I used to think about my position, title, authority, how much money I was making. People would look at me with envy and would have described me as successful. That’s not how I define success now: now I ask, am I genuinely having an impact; am I making a difference in other people’s lives? Recall Dicken’s Ebenezer Scrooge talking to the ghost of his longtime partner Jacob Marley, But you were always a good man of business, Jacob. Business! cried the ghost, Mankind was my business, charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!

I’ve made that evolution. How much impact can I have, as opposed to how much can I accumulate? What do people think of me? Can I be more genuine? Can I be more helpful to people on the road that they’re on? Faith, family, friends, and impact, that’s more important to me now. I’m successful if I think I’m helping a few people. I’m at a point in time, where having an impact is more important than being important. This afternoon I’m going to deliver some size fourteen triple width shower shoes to a guy who’s living in a homeless shelter. I’ll spend about an hour with him. And why do I want to spend an hour with him? Do I want to spend an hour with this guy? OK, no, but nobody else is going to do it.

Rob Martin

You can find meaning if you are making things better

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it. That Maya Angelou quote reminds me of my grandmother. Every time I saw her, from the time I was little, she’d say to us, have you left the campground cleaner? Make sure that whatever you do, you leave things better than you found them. We have an obligation to be useful, to improve things, to be helpful to one another and shore each other up. If you can discover meaning in your work that is connected to that obligation, that, to me, is success. You can find that meaning if you are making things better.

Elaine Cowles

Freedom to choose

The most important thing is to live your best life. Do you feel good about what you’re doing? Are you making the best possible choices? The more successful you are, the more freedom you have to choose what your next steps are. It’s about having the ability to control or at least having a say in what the next steps are. Success is the freedom to choose. Freedom to choose where, how and what you do is the ultimate success.

Kate Wolfe

Success is getting alignment

I survived a life-threatening illness when I was a teenager. I was seventy-four pounds when I left the hospital. I had a lot of work to do physically and was depressed. At one point, my mother said, look, you have two choices. You can sit in the corner and feel sorry for yourself or you can accept what you have and put out the effort and succeed. And so, the message of accept what you have is central to my view of success. Put out the effort and that will drive success. There I was at rock bottom and she connected the dots for me that to get past where I was, to get out of that place, I needed to aim higher, aim for success. Success is getting alignment. It is the struggle of figuring out what matters to you and aligning it to what you are doing. You have to set your definition of success internally and get alignment with money, career, family and when those things are in alignment,