How to become a strategic partner to the business

How to become a strategic partner to the business with Susan Burnett

Accelerating your career and business through strategic partnerships

I am excited and grateful that you're joining me. I have a special conversation with my friend, Susan Burnett. Susan has dedicated many years of her career to developing great leaders and healthy organizations where businesses and people thrive and grow. She started her career at HP where she eventually rose to CLO and integrated 75 decentralized learning organizations into a federation designed to produce the most competitive workforce in the world at half the cost. As a Marketing Vice President, she led the PC businesses to go to market redesign being the number one position in the PC business. Later, Susan joined Gap Inc. in talent management and then Deloitte to lead the design and development of Deloitte University, which opened in 2011. Eventually, Susan ended up as Head of Talent at Yahoo! before a short stint working with me at BTS, which is where we got to know each other.

Susan focuses on developing leaders at every level, especially women leaders. She is leading an initiative in collaboration with BTS to achieve gender parity at executive levels and organizations through an innovative high impact six-month leadership development journey for hypo women. She's also an Adjunct Lecturer in Stanford's Designing Your Life Lab, teaching designing your life to students and leading the Designing Your Life for Women in business. Susan is the author of a Commentary on Executive Education for Harvard Business Review and co-author of Hewlett-Packard Takes the Waste Out of Leadership for the Journal of Organizational Excellence.

Susan, welcome to the Talent Development Hot Seat. You have accomplished a lot of things. When you have that many accomplishments and you've done as many things as you have, they need to be out there. People need to know about it and how many things you've accomplished, therefore how much you have to share with others. Why don't we start with a little bit of your background? Working at BTS, I always knew of you because we had done a lot of work together as partners, but then you came over to BTS after your career in corporate. You and I got to work with each other and get to know each other well, which is awesome. I'm grateful for that experience and glad to be connected. Why don't you share a little more of your background and fill in some of the gaps of whatever maybe I missed?

You mentioned the part about marketing leadership at HP. I spent twenty years at HP when it was highly decentralized. I worked in the PC business, enterprise business and test and measurement business. I played multiple roles, but half of my career at HP was in marketing and sales enablement. That gave me a different perspective than most talent leaders. It gave me a perspective on customer’s business, strategy, growth, scaling and offering, and how to be fast, agile and nimble to meet business requirements as they change.

I learned a lot about business restructuring because I helped restructure the PC go-to-market for HP. All that led to me seeing talent as a competitive advantage. A lot of HR people will say that. In marketing and sales enablement, I saw how to push different levers that would, in fact, have talent be central to getting a deal and executing a strategy, and leadership be central to the success of a transformation. It got me committed to developing competencies and capabilities for the business.

I always come at it through a business lens. You asked me, “What do you think is the secret of success?” Honestly, it's got to be that intersection of business and talent where you are almost ruthless about your priorities. Unfortunately, all the jobs I had after HP, I came into organizations that were failing and they were seeking a new leader. You say, “What happened here? Why is the CEO interviewing me and saying, ‘Come in and transform my talent organization?’” The answer is they were totally disconnected from the business and they weren't driving the initiatives that were central to the business agenda. They were driving a lot of stuff and they had a good catalog. When you look at Deloitte University or you look at Gap and transformation of Gap, it always was taking that CEO agenda and figuring out, what could I do that would accelerate that strategy or transformation for the firm? Does that make sense?

Yes, and it's central to what I talk about a lot here and what I asked a lot of talent leaders about. I find that much like when you were doing it then, even more so now, the talent leaders that are the most successful, first of all, they have a knowledge of the business. Second of all, they are looking to connect the talent strategy back to the business strategy versus just having a box of different offerings and reacting to things and saying, “This will be cool.” It’s saying, “What is our CEO saying? What is our company's strategy? How can we build a talent strategy development plan that is tied back to that strategy and helps the company advance that strategy?

Andy, everybody you talk to, every HR person is going to say to you, “You’ve got to connect to the business.” There's this wonderful moment where I go, “If you all know that, what's the disconnect?” Let me give you a tangible example. I came into Yahoo! It's a small budget and small organization. People say, “How could you go to a place where you left a $150 million budget to go to a place where you got $1 million?” I find out that in that $1 million, about $500,000 is being spent on a vendor who offers online learning. The team has invested half of their budget in this online learning so that they could have programs for everyone at Yahoo! and scale. The library had thousands of offerings and isn't that wonderful for students? I'm doing a review because I've come into the organization. I go, “How many people utilize it and what’s our cost per head?” They did not know. We go in and we find out that over the last three years, a whopping 100 people have used it.

Of the thousands of courses, about ten have been taken. When you dig in, because I asked, of that 10, only 6 have been completed. You know that when you do online learning, if you just trigger it, it counts as participation. That is the most expensive learning on the planet. That is about $8,000 per head for an online course and there’s nothing to do with our business strategy. It's half the budget. These are the people that are telling me they're connected to the business and the business wanted this. When I say ruthless in priorities, when I had that $1 million, the CEO and the exec team have a strategy. I'm meeting with each of them and I'm talking about what would be the most relevant to driving this. If I'm gambling in Vegas, I put all my chips on two spots. I don't put one on every spot, and that is hard for people because that means you say no to stuff. It means you prioritize and you say, “I have a finite set of resources and I'm going to do this with it.”

Don’t do emails during meetings but actually listen and understand what is going on. Click To Tweet

I've talked with other people before too about not only connecting back to the strategy. Are you digging in? Are you measuring what people are doing and looking at, “What is our ROI? We're investing $500,000 in this. What are we getting out of that?” You're saying oftentimes that that's what you were doing and that was differentiating you from other people.

People will say to you that you can't measure this and I totally disagree. Of course, you can measure it. For example, at Deloitte, that Deloitte University is going to prepare people to be client-ready faster and better than ever before. I can measure faster because I can say, “It used to take us this long. It now takes us this long.” I can measure better by having partners assess the skillset of the people coming out of the university. We had schools that prepared new hires and those schools produced a client-ready person and we had a profile of what it meant to be client-ready. We could say, “Following up with partners in the field, we produce 98%, client-ready people,” and then we looked at the 2% and said, “What did we miss?” You can measure this. I start with the end in mind and work backward versus start with the solution and then figure out how to measure it.

This is the other deal. Whenever you're going to be a leader in one of these organizations, you have to meet with the executive team and you have to know them. You have to know their business strategies, priorities, and care-abouts. You know this from BTS. How many times did a BTS person go in an interview an executive learn more about the company than the HR people in the company? Here's the telling moment. When you say, “By the way, I'm interviewing your CFO. Would you like to come along?” How many said yes? They don't always do it. How would I miss meeting the CFO, for heaven's sake? These are the tangible behaviors that say, “I'm a business partner. I'm in the room. I'm working on the agenda. You guys are working on marketing. You're working on a product and I'm working on people.” To me, as soon as you take that stance, people pay attention to you in a different way, and you are part of the team.

Becoming A Business Partner

You're answering the next question I was going to ask you. I've always seen you as being strategic and business-focused. Having that background and working in the business on the marketing side serves you well. Probably you got hired for these other jobs because the CEO saw you as being much more strategic than the typical HR person. I'm wondering, for someone that has been rising through the ranks in HR talent development, they come from a more traditional background, studied Organizational Psychology or something like that, and are passionate about it, but don't have as much of the business experience. What advice would you give them to get that business experience? Taking the opportunity to sit in those meetings with the CFO, what else can they do to be seen as more of a business partner?

It's funny you said that because I was in a forum with a CEO when I was young. When I was at HP, I was probably in my late twenties. We were meeting with John Young, who was the CEO. The HR person raised her hand and said, “How can I become more of a business partner?” He looked at her and said, “Find a business problem and help me solve it.” I still remember it. It was like, “That's obvious.” To me, you get in the business. Because I was in marketing and the enterprise, it didn't mean crap for the PC business. They didn't care that I knew that. To understand a new business model, PC is a totally new business model and a totally different leadership team. I'm parachuted in to help so they don't even know me, so that's another problem. Honestly, in HP, those businesses were so different. It would be like joining a new company because they have their own CEO at the time. I'm there to help from corporate. How lovely is that?

You get in and you learn. You meet all the people, ask for the strategy and have to learn the strategy. You look at the P&L. We knew, for example, that our SG&A for PCs was three times that of Dell’s SG&A. At the time, Dell was the number one PC supplier and HP was number four. You may have remembered this lady, Carly Fiorina, who came in and sat down with Duane Zitzner, the head of the PC business, and said, “If you can't be number one, I don't know why we keep you.” She's right in a lot of ways. In that business where the margins are razor-thin, you can't sustain being the number four player, so our job was clear. We had to be number one. Dell was number one, so we have their cost structure on the wall in a war room. When you realize that our SG&A is three times higher because we have general partners and they don't, you have a strategic choice to make.

BTS is brilliant at this. They understand business and financial acumen. As soon as you read that P&L of Dells and the P&L of HPs and the SG&A cost structure, Sales General And Administration, you realize you have to fundamentally rewire this business and you have to make some strategic choices. What are you going to do with general partners? They carry so much cost. We decided we would go direct, but we also decided we would have a preference model where we would still have general partners because we were the number one partner to partners. You don't want to give that position up, but we had to make some strategic choices. First of all, here's the big thing I would say to HR people, “When you're in the exact staff meeting, don't do your email.” How many times have I been to the exact staff meeting and the HR person is sitting there doing her email? I’m like, “What are you doing here?”

That's the first big hint. Don't do your email, listen and understand what's going on but think about, as John Young said, “Is there a business problem you can help solve in a way that will propel the business forward or will get it unstuck or will remove obstacles?” The other thing I did because I didn't know sales, and you know that about me, and here I am in sales enablement, is I went out on rides with salespeople. I went out on deals and I ran a customer visit center as part of my sales enablement. I began to go into the customer visits, listen to customers, and learn more about what were the issues facing the field. Getting some firsthand, it's like when I was at Gap. When I first got to Gap, I landed in the stores. I went in with the merchants and they showed me what to look for. “You’ve got to get on the ground floor of this stuff and you have to understand it. You have to be genuinely curious about how you make money. You have to be curious about cost structures.”

When I look at cost structures, I'm dispassionate. It’s like the example of the $500,000 for online learning. I always look at the costs and go, “That's interesting.” They tell you what previous priorities were and now you want to understand, “Why did we bet on that? What was our strategy behind that? How does the strategy drive what we invested in?” You have to find ways to get in and I don't think it's just having one-on-ones with an exec. It's also that constant follow-up and figuring stuff out. I would end up doing pilots with people. They had concerns and issues and the easiest, fastest thing for me to do is to just prototype something with them and see if it works. In doing fast pilots, you build relationships because you build relationships with people when you're working together. You don't build relationships in meetings. You’ve got to find something you're going to work on with somebody and you’ve got to care about what they care about.

Strategic Business Partner: Becoming a leader means meeting with the executive team and knowing them.

Strategy Alignment And Business Simulations

Have those conversations, spend some time in the business, look at the financials and look at the costs. Where are they going? What are we spending money on comparing to the competition? It's interesting that you bring this up because coincidentally, I was in Houston one time at HP Enterprise at the old Compaq headquarters there. They're running a business simulation for part of their organization for the top leaders to help them better understand how the company works, know what the customers care about building a value proposition, and all the costs that go into running the business. You mentioned BTS a few times, and of course, I used to work there and they're my biggest partner. I still build and run these business simulations. I know you brought BTS in a lot and use this for strategy alignment, and you're a big fan of business simulations. Why are you such a big fan of that? Why was that something that worked well for you?

I'm a fan of simulated experience. I want to be clear. It's not just BTS business simulations. I believe deeply that the research shows that experiences help people grow. One of the things that I did when I was doing succession. Deloitte, by the way, is brilliant at this assignment management where you get people new stretch assignments so that they can grow and build experience and skills in areas they haven't been before. You can't always do that with 60,000 people. How do you do assignment management for 60,000 people? You can't. This notion of 70-20-10 where HR people go, “70% is experience and it's happening.” It's not happening. If you don't design the experiences, every job doesn't give you great growth or people wouldn't leave them and be dissatisfied. Almost 57% are dissatisfied with their jobs in McKinsey’s study. That's a lot.

On-the-job learning has to be designed, so I'm a big fan of can you simulate an experience so that somebody would learn how to run a P&L? When you don't have 65 P&Ls like HP used to have, you only have two, few people are going to get experience running P&Ls. Can you simulate that? If the Army can simulate a war engagement, I'm sure we could simulate running a P&L. That's why I would bring BTS in. The other reason I would do that is to simulate a new strategy. Often, people are not bought into new strategies. You know this. It's like, “Another new executive, a new strategy for how we're going to win.” Yes, I heard it before.

“Let's have a Town Hall. We'll tell them and I'm sure they'll go off and do it, right?” No. Of course, they won’t.

They do a roadshow with slides and everybody goes, “This too shall pass.” If you want to engage people in the strategy, I would simulate it and I would simulate running this new thing. What does it look like when Gap is operating differently, the supply chain is operating differently and our customer interface is different? What does that all look like and feel like? If people can be in an environment where they can touch it and play with it, it's awesome because it builds commitment and alignment to the strategy. I also simulated leadership experiences because often, you don't get all the challenges that I want you to have and know how to handle as I run executive development and talent management. We knew there were ethical people and strategic challenges. We wanted leaders to make good, effective choices based on a model of how we saw the world and what our culture was.

Leadership simulation was where I came to BTS to push them in the leadership challenges and choices model where leaders would not have to deal with the ethical dilemma that Gap had to deal with around India factory burning and people being hurt. What's the aftermath of that? What do you say to the press? How do you handle it internally and externally with partners? Rather than have to deal with that in person, why not have a simulation that can all be managed and you can deal with all those difficult dilemmas?

You can practice in a safe environment like the military.

You can practice in a super safe environment where nobody's home.

It's funny because I was running that simulation one time and I was introducing that concept and saying, “Take roles outside your comfort zone. This is a chance to practice in a safe environment.” I looked over at the senior leader in the room and I said, “I don't think anyone's getting fired today.” He went, “Maybe.” He was joking though, because it is a chance to practice in an environment like the military.

You have to design the experiences of your team to bring them growth and satisfaction. Click To Tweet

People learn a lot from mistakes and I'd rather make mistakes in a simulation than make mistakes in the real world. We know people make mistakes in the real world. You can simulate experience and experiences need to be designed in order to create growth and development.

Susan Burnett’s Biggest Accomplishment And Mistake

I appreciate that endorsement. I'm a huge fan of experiential learning and I'm glad you clarified it too, not just BTS. I offer a whole portfolio of different experiential learning solutions to my clients. If anybody's reading this thinking, “I need to bring something like that into my organization,” feel free to reach out to me. I want to touch on some of your accomplishments and also what mistakes you may have learned from. What is maybe your proudest moment or biggest accomplishment in your career? You've done a lot of things.

I don't know if it's my proudest moment, but my biggest accomplishment is going to be Deloitte University. It's not going to be for what you think. It's not going to be because it's an incredible place. If anybody ever wants to go to Westlake, Texas, it’s a beautifully designed thing. That wasn't the accomplishment to me. The accomplishment was designing a strategy for learning that is still being used in a way now. Shifting them from death by PowerPoint to believing in radical collaboration, learning as experience just in time and performance support. Shifting them into a new world and a new paradigm of learning. Building a new business model for learning where there's chief learning officers in every one of the units that didn't exist and almost all of them are still there. That's a leadership legacy I'm super proud of and I'm proud of them. They've only grown and done better work.

Deloitte is pushing the edges on learning and it's pushing the edges on leadership development, and the university was a catalyst for that. It was also quite candidly the hardest job I've ever had in my life and there was the most adversity for me personally in that. Probably the other reason why we call it a proud moment is I did it. I was able to come into an organization that had antibodies against people from the outside. I look different than most of the people in leadership and I had a different set of expertise. I was driving a radical change and I had all the money. Barry Salzberg gave me all the money. One of my strategies when people didn't want to do the new strategy that was approved because of Deloitte, every partner is an owner, so I wouldn't fund them. I did some tough stuff. I went head-to-head with some partners, and it was hard. It was personal adversity and it was building a new team that I'm super proud of. There's good work.

One thing I've learned about you is you're not afraid to butt heads with people to get things done. When people talk about legacy, there's a physical multi-million dollar building with a learning strategy that is there and is still in place. It's not even just Deloitte because KPMG is building a university down here in Orlando near me. Other companies are getting on board with this idea and following suit. That's a big accomplishment. You mentioned that you think people learn a lot from mistakes. I also want to ask you what do you think was your biggest mistake or failure in your career? What did you learn from it?

I made a lot of mistakes, so I don't know what the biggest one is. You either go too fast or you go too slow when you're driving change. There's this nice middle ground where you're going fast enough, that there's momentum and there are all these lovely checkpoints. You're moving, you're going and you pull people with you. If you go too slow, you are in trouble and the change or transformation that you are leading begins to start to lose faith, lose weight and all that good stuff. All my jobs were around change and transformation, so I learned a lot about that pace of it. I erred on the side of sometimes going a little too slow and going fast is better. The other place I made mistakes, and it's human, is when someone isn't a fit for a job, especially because I was trained in HR. I will spend a lot of time coaching and helping and what you ought to do is get in and say, “This isn't working.” Let's get you in a role where there's a better fit and do that quickly.

Most leaders I know would all say I took too long. A mistake of speaking truth to power and knowing, “Should I have told Carly that she was going to lose her job?” She wrote a whole book about being surprised. I wasn't surprised. I knew she was losing the confidence of the board and the exec team. I didn't talk about that with her. When and how do you speak truth to power? Does it always work? I don't know. I've done it and it's worked. I've done it and it hasn't worked. You have to have your own moral compass on that and be who you are and be clear about where you're going to take a stand. For HR, it's hard because you are speaking truth to the people who evaluate, select, hire and fire you. You have to be able to do it in a way you can be heard, and that's tricky.

I've heard and read that. As people rise higher in an organization, it's harder for them to get feedback. You know that it could be valuable to speak that truth to power, but you also know it's a big risk because if they're not open to it and they decide they don't want to work with you anymore, they can fire, block or unfollow you.

When it does not work with you anymore, then you're ineffective.

Strategic Business Partner: Understanding the company structure and team means getting on the ground floor and activating your curiosity on how things work.

Take your budget away or whatever it is.

I wouldn't be that Machiavellian. They stop working with you and freeze you out, and that makes you ineffective. All those are areas where I continue to learn. I've made mistakes with people. I haven't made a ton of mistakes in the strategies I've driven, but some of the how maybe I could have gone better.

Designing Your Life

I'm going to shift gears and talk about what you're doing. You're still doing some exciting stuff and background at least from my perspective. While you're doing all this, your brother is a professor at Stanford, Bill Burnett, and he came out with this book with Dave Evans in 2016 called Designing Your Life, which is a great book that I've read and I've recommended to many people. You've gotten involved and working with women leaders, at least in the Valley. Tell me more about that and what you're working on.

A couple of things happened. One, as I started my own consulting business, I decided only to focus on women. I decided that because we had an election that I wasn't happy with. For a long time, this world has been run by men and I'm curious about what it would look like if the world was run by women. Sorry, Andy, but that's what I'm curious about. We're 51% of the population. What would it look like if 51% of the leaders of the world were women? It doesn't mean run by women but more balanced. It’s gender parity. 4.8% of the Fortune 500 are women. That's a whopping 24 and that numbers have been consistent over decades. When you look at the government, 4% or 5% are women and yet 51% of the population is women. I wonder what would happen if I had a consulting business and I didn't focus on talent strategy? I focus on coaching women, women's leadership and then this Designing Your Life for Women.

They're separate things. Designing Your Life was a ten-year course at Stanford and my brother teaches it. He has a Designing Your Life Lab at Stanford. Believe it or not, it's in the engineering school because it comes out of the design thinking, product design methodology, and it was designed to help Stanford seniors figure out what to do when they graduate. That's what it was designed for. I taught that class with him. I spoke it and then I taught it because I wanted to, after Yahoo! designed my life, and I couldn't take it because I'm not a Stanford student, so I taught it and I teach it. That always happens. I got interested in it because it's such a wonderful way to take a methodology that has no judgment. There's no right or wrong to it. There's no self-help in it that you have one path and one purpose. We started it. The book hit, which was a big surprise to Bill. It was on The New York Times Best Seller list.

People asked for the workshop and he didn’t have a workshop because he's a full-time Stanford professor. He goes, “Susan, build me a workshop.” He paid me. I built a corporate workshop and we did some sessions at tech companies in the Valley because an engineering guy said, “Would you come in and do this?” What happened in those programs is a woman came to me and said, “Will you do one just for us please? We can't have the conversations we want to have with these guys in the room. They will judge us, peg us and they will think we're not serious about our careers if we start talking about balance, family and when to have kids and these concerns about how to design a job with some flexibility.” I don't think that's totally true because I've seen that young male professionals want balance and flexibility as well.

"I'm a father of two and I want to be home with my kids as well." 

It shows up in the LinkedIn research that has come out from their members, but I was interested so I did a prototype with women and it was highly successful. The conversations and the community that's created is compelling to me, so I run Designing Your Life Retreats for Women. They’re commercial. You can go on DesigningYour.life and you can click on the Women tab. We have open enrollment kinds of things. I thought I would do 1 or 2 and just call it a day. What's been stunning is we get waiting lists and people go, “You're going to do another one, right?” We scheduled one at a time our whole first year because we weren't sure we're going to do anything with it. We decided we're having the retreat every other month because there are women in the world that want to come together and collaborate on this thing called “How do I design a life of fulfillment, joy and balance?”

My brother does a one-day intensive that's co-ed and now he's not doing that. I have guys calling me up going, “I'm kind of a woman.” I’m like, “I know but you’re not.” I will probably start doing some co-ed ones as well because it's not fair. I'm not trying to just do it for women. That's one piece of what I do. I'm also interested in accelerating women to the C-suite. I became an executive and I was the only woman in a room of marketing and salespeople for ten years. That's crazy. Imagine you're the only guy in the room, Andy. It's weird. I'm doing a lot of work in women's leadership development and we've built an accelerator because we know what it takes to accelerate the development of people. We're trying to accelerate women and you’ve got to work through some stuff because women have their own derailleurs. What I love with the work I'm doing with BTS is we've identified twelve derailleurs for women and things that they do that will not serve them well. Some are conscious and some are not.

If you really want to rise in companies and take risky assignments, stretch yourself beyond what you know how to do. Click To Tweet

Can you give an example?

The classic one that all the research will tell you about is there will be an opening for a big challenging assignment. I had this experience myself, “Susan, we want you to move to Grenoble and redesign the PC business.” My first answer is, “No, I'm not qualified. I've never been on PCs. I've never been to Grenoble. Here are all the reasons why you don't want to pick me.” Andy, I know you well. If somebody said that to you, you'd be like, “Put me in, coach. What's the job?”

I’d give it a shot. Early in my career, no. I definitely wouldn't, but I've developed a lot more confidence and I'm willing to try anything. I know what you're saying. Sheryl Sandberg talks about this in her book, Lean In, that men are more likely to say, “I'm not qualified but I could probably do it. I'll give it a shot.” Women that are qualified are likely to say, “I'm probably not as qualified as other people, so I’m not going to try.”

It's this thing that stems from, “I have to be perfect. I have to have all the qualifications. I have to have everything nailed then when I'm all buttoned up, I can apply.” That's not how the world works. If you want to rise in companies, you want to take risky assignments and stretch yourself beyond what you know how to do. There were three women executives at HP when I left and all three would be on a stage and tell you, “They declined the role they were offered.” Their boss said, “You can't decline. You're going to be the head of the printing business, Carolyn Ticknor, whether you like it or not. Ann Livermore, you're going to run services, whether you like it or not.” They declined those jobs because they didn't feel that they were 100% prepared. That's a big derailleur and it shows up in a lot of ways.

The third part of my life, which I want to talk about, is non-profit. I'm the chairman of the board of Rising International, which is a nonprofit dedicated to helping women rise out of poverty. You asked me about my favorite TED Talk and that is Carmel Jud talking about Rising International. It's a unique global-local model because what Rising does is it helps women in the poorest places in the world and dangerous places like refugee camps commercialize a craft. In Afghanistan, they make dolls and they make them from materials that are accessible from clothing. They make these dolls for their daughters. We teach them how to commercialize the stall. We buy the stall and then what we do is have a home party in the US that is run by a resident national rep, who is a woman in poverty in the United States.

We've trained to sell crafts at a home party. Since she's in poverty, she doesn't have a home. A person like me will offer the home. I will invite my friends. This young woman will come in and she will tell the story of the stall and the artists who made it. She will bring crafts from Darfur and other places in the world. People will get online, they'll hear the story and then they will purchase. The percent of those purchases go to the local rep. I'm doing a big project in the Bay Area to train homeless women to be Rising reps. What it's done for me is it's shifted my view of what a homeless person is because the twelve women we are working with all have degrees and all were derailed in their lives by illness or abuse. When you have a job and you get cancer, you get medical benefits and then you have to keep going for treatments. Your benefits run out at a certain point, but you're still sick. No job, no money and you're living in the car because you can't afford rent in the Bay Area, which is tripling.

We're teaching them how to be entrepreneurs and run their own home party business. What's fascinating to me is they're coming into this program because they want to help women in poverty around the world. They don't get that they're living in poverty themselves. It’s amazing. I know I'm working with a subset and all that goodness, but all I'm going to tell you is how many people in the Bay Area are three paychecks away from being homeless. All they need is their rent to triple, get sick and but for the grace of God to go us. I am passionate about that. Please look at the TED Talk and learn a little bit about this because in a simple way, you can make a huge difference.

Accelerating Your Career

I appreciate that you're doing things like that. That's a cool trend of social entrepreneurship and making a business out of it to make the nonprofit more sustainable than just relying on donations from rich benefactors. I like the movement. I'm glad you mentioned the TED Talk. For anyone reading who is earlier in their career and talent development and looking for ways to accelerate. We already talked about the importance of learning the business, connecting back to strategy and building relationships. What's one more piece of advice you'd give?

I did this to a 26-year-old. You are young in your career. The data says you'll probably work until you're 70 or 80 years old, and you'll probably live to be 100. That's what the data says for the generation coming up. I'm sorry, but you’ll work until you're 80 years old. Given that you have time, early in your career, I would switch functions. I would get into a revenue-generating role called sales or sales enablement or I would get into a marketing role, which is easy. I coached a woman and she's now leading global programs.

Strategic Business Partner: Concerning feedback, speaking the truth is valuable yet risky.

She was an L&D person and she's leading global programs and marketing. She is learning so much about the business and the customer. She's still leading global programs, which is what she was doing. In LinkedIn, she was leading all of their global onboarding. She's leading this thing called Rock Your Profile, which is a global program that connects that external world to LinkedIn. She's learning about scaling, customers, cost structures and managing through influence because she's creating ambassadors all over the world.

She's got time and she loves L&D. She can go back and she can go back strong because she's got a new set of skills and experience. I would shift. I would get out of HR for a while. You can always go back. Change and transformation is another great segue. There are many organizations that are trying to do this. I worked for the CEO on a change and transformation project for 1.5 years. It was just an assignment. I remember people saying to me, “You're killing your career. You're going off track.” How could you kill your career working for the CEO for 1.5 years on a big transformation called Splitting the Company? I would recommend early in your career that you don't just go straight up in this vertical motion of HR function, but get multifunction experience and even multi-geography if you can.

It's unique advice and a great perspective too. If you're in your 20s or 30s, you've got a long career ahead of you. You have an opportunity to take some chances and get some different experience because you're going to be working for a while and you want to leverage that later. Susan, this has been fantastic. Any links that you want to share if people want to find out about Designing Your Life?

I want to share the Designing Your Life link and the TED Talk. Thanks, Andy. It's been fun.

You're welcome. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your experience, wisdom and advice. I am grateful for all of that. I appreciate you, Susan. Thank you for coming to the Talent Development Hot Seat.

• Susan Burnett
• BTS
• Designing Your Life
• DesigningYour.life
• Women tab – Designing Your Life
• Lean In
• Rising International
• Carmel Jud - TED Talk