Sally Susman — Breaking Through - with Arianna Huffington

foreign welcome to politics and Pros I'm uh Brad Graham I'm the co-owner co-owner of the bookstore along with my wife Melissa Muscatine and we're very pleased to be hosting Sally Sussman this evening she's here to talk about her new book breaking through communicating to open minds move hearts and change the world now Sally has worked with nine CEOs across three companies American Express Estee Lauder and for the past decade and a half Pfizer where she's Executive Vice President and chief corporate Affairs officer so she has seen firsthand the importance of effective Communications and how it can impact business her book has uh has 10 chapters each devoted to a different Communications or or leadership principle on how to break through the noise around us and get across a message effectively and as you'd expect given the critical role Pfizer played during the covet pandemic and Sally's own key role at the pharmaceutical giant she draws significantly on that experience throughout her book because in addition to the scientific challenge that Pfizer faced in developing the vaccine and also confronted Communications challenge it needed to earn the trust of many Skeptics at a time not only a deep political division in the country but also widespread negativity toward a big Pharma indeed one of the strengths of of Sally's book is her ability to reference a number of real world situations that she's dealt with another case she recounts right at the start of the book is the Dilemma that Pfizer faced when Russia invented Ukraine in early 2022 on the one hand the company was allowed to continue providing essential medicines to Russia because of the humanitarian exception to to sanctions granted drug companies on the other hand Pfizer didn't want to appear to be supporting Russia's aggression so what did it do it announced that all profits from its supply of medicines to Russia would go to direct support of the ukrainians now of course most of us aren't ever likely to face such high-stakes politically fraught situations but Sally explains in the preface of her book that the principles and strategies she writes about are intended to help in a wide range of personal as well as professional moments in conversation with Sally it will be someone who is herself a quite an accomplished Communicator Ariana Huffington founder and CEO of Thrive global global a Founder also of The Huffington Post and the author of 15 books among them most recently Thrive and the Sleep Revolution so ladies and Gentlemen please join me in welcoming Sally Sussman and Ariana Huffington thank you thank you so much Brad and thank you Sally for writing this book which I absolutely loved and have learned so much from it and the way you combined your passion your weight and your vulnerability is what for me makes the book unique so I'm so happy to be having this conversation with you so let me start your life has covered so many spaces and places from the Midwest to New York from beloved consumer products to divisive Pharma and what is the thread that connects everything sure it's a pleasure to tell you that I I just first Ariana uh want to thank Lisa and Brad for creating this venue for authors it is a dream to be here so thank you and what a joy to come here with you and I'm really grateful to you as a friend and someone I deeply admire to do this with me this evening so thank you um so as a kid like most kids I wanted to do good in the world I grew up in St Louis Missouri and I thought maybe I'll be the mayor of my town or maybe I'll be a journalist because these felt like the most noble professions one could be uh that led me to work in Washington uh right out of college I came here and and worked on the hill and then later for President Clinton but candidly I I found government a little bit slow and I had an idea a theory that maybe if you worked for a good big well-resourced public-facing company you could do a lot of good from business and so I worked for three companies American Express Estee Lauder and for the last 15 years for Pfizer and it's been a great joy and a great pleasure and privilege to be doing that so your book has really touched the nerve like people love it people speak about how much they've learned from it but of course when you sat down to write it you didn't know that so nobody knows that when we write a book and so what was it that made you want to tell the stories and want to put them all together in breaking I felt I had to write this book um you know I I always wanted to be a writer I wrote a lot as a kid and you know little pieces here and there but it was during the pandemic when I was locked away like the rest of us and I was in the middle of one of the greatest scientific stories of our time it was actually the busiest time in my career that all of the ideas crystallized and what those ideas were is that there is a direct line an immediate connection between really breakthrough leadership and Communications and as Brad mentioned I've worked for nine chief executive officers in my career along with some cabinet secretaries and senators and they're we're all smart they were all hard-working but the ones that were game changing were the ones who really valued and practiced Communications so for me that was Ken Chenault at the American Express Company Leonard Lauder at the Lotter companies Albert borla my boss our friend and people like Ariana who who see this as and as important to their success as any other part of their business as important as sales manufacturing and when I was working on the pandemic and trying to convince a very nervous Nation to have confidence in the vaccine I realized that we needed Communications as much as we needed science and so after all those years of wanting to write the book I sat down in the middle of the pandemic and did it which is kind of amazing and you sum up that idea in one of my favorite sayings in the book which is that communication is not a soft skill it's a rock hard competency and I love that because so often we think of communication as a soft skill as an afterthought as an afterthought and you show in the book again and again how it's not how you could have the best ideas and even great execution which you definitely did in bringing the vaccine to the world but if you can't communicate and if you can't communicate effectively the way you did um there's trouble ahead so what made you realize just how much of a rock hard competency communication is well when I was you know in the In the Heat of the pandemic so let's go back in our minds to March of 2020. I don't know where you were but I was in New York City in Greenwich Village and I was really scared um you know I went into my corner store and the shelves were thinning out I walked home at night and I heard the thrum of refrigerated trucks that were doubling as morgues and I you know I was working at Pfizer and my boss had flown to Greece to give a speech and by the time he got there the conference had closed and he had to immediately fly back to New York and on that flight Albert borla my boss wrote on a small piece of paper that he had to do three things he had to take care of our employees around the world he had to ensure the steady stream of medicine because cancer didn't go on a break during the pandemic and that he would make a vaccine we would make a vaccine by the end of the year and that's when I thought oh no it's a global pandemic and my boss has lost his mind because this isn't it was an impossible thing it takes 12 years it doesn't take eight months you know Albert then did something I've never seen any of the other CEOs do and he looked around for someone to assign as project manager and he assigned himself and that's when I thought well maybe just maybe we are going to do this thing but I also knew that having a new vaccine with a novel technology that had never been used before made in record time during a scary and politicized moment had a very good chance of failing if we couldn't build confidence so we did some things very radically different we took all our most precious intellectual property and put it up on the website so our clinical trial Protocols are on the website we embedded media with us along the way to document what we had done and I assure you there were many scary nights sleepless nights when I thought I am documenting the greatest failure in Corporate America but I knew that if we had failed that the world would have bigger problems than a bad news day for Pfizer if we have failed we might not be all sitting here together right now I also knew if we succeeded that this would be an epic story that myself and my colleagues would want to share for the rest of our lives so it was really then Ariana that it came to me that this scientific transformation needed to be matched with a communication transformation to try to take big Pharma with all that that can bring in terms of reputation and raise the the Specter of trust and credibility and today Pfizer is a top 10 Global brand for the last two years and you know we had 85 percent of the people in this country get vaccinated which is extraordinary and what I love is that you set out to write a leadership book but in the process you decided to be vulnerable about your own life to talk about triumphs and failures and not to make it just a dry leadership book but you tell stories and as you can tell she's a great storyteller and it was clear that you believe that was important in order to actually communicate yourself what the key messages of the book were well I I am very vulnerable in this book when I turned when I was getting ready to turn the manuscript into my publisher I asked my mom to read the manuscript and she said this isn't a business book it's a memoir and it is a bit of a memoir I detail a lot of my mistakes and there's some really good juicy vulnerable embarrassing mistakes in the book so if you buy it you can find those out but I think that people learn from their mistakes and that it was a way for me to really tell my story in very human terms so maybe just to give one example Ariana the book is 10 chapters each is a principle that sounds simple but is hard to live so the second chapter is about having the courage for Candor and I tell in the opening bit the story of um in the mid 80s when I was just graduating from college starting my life here in Washington when I realized that I'm gay and that I needed to go home to St Louis and tell my parents and I have great parents but I knew this was going to be a really tough conversation and please remember 40 years ago in gay life is like a hundred years I mean I know today it's not such a big Revelation but back then it was so I went home to St Louis and I told my parents that I'm gay and my mom was really angry and my dad was really sad and through his tears my dad said you'll never have a spouse children or a career and that hurt me a lot it wasn't his intention to hurt me he was expressing his parental anxiety but in The Cauldron of that candid moment I suddenly had a life plan if I have nothing else in my life I would have a spouse a child and a job and my wife Robin and I next month are together 35 years we have a beautiful 29 year old daughter and I love the work that I do so I tell this story in the context of a business book because I believe that Candor and authenticity is essential to any message that you make and I want people to have the courage to to really speak out whether you need to make an apology and you're worried that the person is too angry make the apology if you want to say I love you but you're afraid that the rejection might follow give it a go and so in my work both as a person but also as the head of corporate Affairs at Pfizer I try to inject my messaging with as much humanity and vulnerability as possible I love that and I also love your chapter on intentionality um which obviously is key for you the priority that you put on in clear intention as being essential to brilliant Communications well I know you're a very intentional person as well so we relate a lot on this um you know as I mentioned um Albert the leader of Pfizer Albert borla had this intention about the the vaccine and then I had this intention to try to change the public fortunes of the company in the in the public dialogue that that really worked and I try to be intentional before absolutely every communication that I make so if I'm talking to my parents I say I need to be patient I'm going to be patient in this conversation if I'm talking to that adult daughter who I love I say I need to not be judgmental just listen and even you know before coming here tonight I thought what is my intention this evening and you know my intention is to try to spark your curiosity about the work that I do and the passion that I have for it this is so great and you know you are under playing in what you are telling us how significant your role was in the um in bringing the vaccine to the world but for those who've read Albert borla's book moonshot um you know just how much credit goes to you and how a lot of the themes that um you weave into the book including including intentionality and Condor were really essential in the way you worked with Albert and the Pfizer team to bring the vaccine to the world so I know we all feel that we are in a post-vaccine world but or a past covered world but the truth is that these were very dark times and sometimes we forget how much darker they could have been without everything you and Albert and the team did so thank you much gratitude for that and another theme in the book that really resonates with me is everything you say about the erosion of Civility and the fact that we don't just disagree with people now but we demonize people I I feel this is one of the very important themes in the book because the truth is that um in every spiritual and philosophical tradition and it's critical to listen to understand people you don't agree with to see if there is room for forgiveness or Redemption and we seem to have lost that scale yeah we have we have um I'm thinking in listening to you I'm thinking back to the fall of 2020 and the presidential election um our vaccine was coming out of the readout right around the time of the U.S election and I promise you that when Albert wrote that list coming back from from Greece about the things we needed to do and why we had to get the vaccine by the end of the year the U.S election was nowhere in our minds we were thinking about the next flu season to tell you the truth and um on that night of that debate the presidential debate in in the fall of 2020 president Trump then former Vice President Biden they're they're starting their their debate and I love politics I really love politics and this was like the Super Bowl night for me and I was going to take the evening off I had a big bowl of popcorn and a big glass of wine and I'm settling in and the first thing the president Trump says in his opening remarks is I talked to that guy who runs Pfizer and he told me we're going to have a vaccine before a very special day wink and you know he was intimating that we were going to bring the vaccine forward uh as part of you know the election plan I spilled my popcorn I dumped my wine and I started writing a letter that I hope that Albert would place in in the Washington Post or the New York Times and that night he and I went back and forth on this letter and we were very proud of it it said things like we would only move at the speed of science that we wouldn't move at the speed of politics that we had a legacy to live up to of 150 year old company founded in Brooklyn so we were very proud of this letter and I sent it to all of these papers the post the times the Wall Street Journal and nobody would publish it why because we wouldn't throw mud back we wouldn't say that the president had lied or that you know we wouldn't engage in the name calling and so we couldn't get our letter published in the end we put it on our website and it went viral and we got more pressed than if we had put it in one of those papers but I realized that the world was deeply deeply divided that Health had become political that wearing a mask was a political statement or not wearing a mask was a political statement that social distancing was causing people to break out into fist fights and so the final chapter of my book is trying to answer the question why are we all so angry and isn't advocating for harmony and um Adam Grant who's a friend of yours and a friend of mine writes that Harmony is the arrangement of pleasing but different sounds and his point is is that we're never going to just strike a one note everybody's not going to sound the same but as a society we need to harmonize that you and I can disagree agreeably that maybe just maybe you're right and I'm wrong just to hold open the possibility of that in our minds and to try to create a more harmonious world and find common ground and and even if we are sure we are right and the other person is wrong the amount of Rage at the moment and demonization is what um makes it really hard um to to live a life that is full of everything we want from each other for our children so I'm so glad that you bring this into the book because of course also this is another communication skill which starts with listening listening so another um very fun but important thing in the book is the concept of scratching so I know you're wondering what is scratching it's not what you think but it kind of also indicates for me your playfulness which is another a part of communication you know being playful bringing humor into your communication which is really hard to get right really hard and if you are not sure you're getting it right I would suggest avoiding it but if you can get it right as you definitely do in the book um it really works Wonder so tell us about scratching so scratching is an idea that I picked up from the choreographer and Dancer Twyla Tharp she's written a very important book many years back called the creative habit and her idea is that creativity is not like a divine intervention a lightning bolt does not come down from the sky and hit you in the head it's done by living a life of scratching and what she means by that is to scratch the surface of the world around you do something different go to a cafe you've never gone to and sit and listen to people walk a different path on your way home from work to explore neighborhoods you've never been and I had a very profound experience of scratching one time I was flying home from a business trip and I was tired and I was too tired to read or to work so I reeled up a movie and had a glass of wine it seems like wine is a big part of all of this and I saw the movie The Intern and can I just ask who knows what the movie The Intern is more or less about so Anne Hathaway plays a young female entrepreneur starting a business running a business and feeling frustrated and alone Robert De Niro plays the part of a older recently retired man who is feeling marginalized and misses the workplace and he signs up to be an intern at this company and he becomes much beloved and the staff loves him and Anne Hathaway has that partner and that that shoulder to cry on and the ear to listen to her and her work so I'm watching the movie maybe I have a second glass of wine and by the time I land I'm crying because I want what Anne Hathaway had I wanted that person so the next morning I went into the head of HR at Pfizer and I said I want to hire a senior intern this summer and he's like okay whatever just do what you want to do and I went to see a friend of mine who had my job at Merrill Lynch Bank of America he ended up as Vice chairman Paul critchlow he was retired and I knew he was feeling a bit on the margins and a bit board and I I took him to lunch I was nervous and I popped the question Paul would you be my summer intern and he like tapped his ear I think he was checking his his hearing device um because it was a crazy question and he said let me think about it he went home and talked to his wife and he called me the next day to say that yes he would be my summer intern he showed up I said please let me give you a a a a Consulting contract you're a very senior how much do the other interns make he asked me 18.25 I told him he said I'll take it I said well let me at least give you an office where do the other interns sit I said in the bullpen he sat in the bullpen and he became like Robert De Niro this deeply beloved person in our company and he was meaningful to the interns to the staff of my department and very much to me as having someone there who had no agenda other than to to help me but the craziest part of the story is that Fast Company magazine caught on to this and they started following him around with the camera and they made it a front page cover story at Fast Company magazine I had been trying to get Pfizer in Fast Company magazine for years on you know the Brilliance of our pipeline or the you know the wit of our people but it was this crazy idea that I got from scratching from saying let me watch this movie let me think differently let me try something new and you know as I think as long as you give full credit like the idea was from the intern if you give credit it's yours and you should run with it but what I love here is that you didn't just like the idea you acted on it and you didn't just act on it you went and asked the former Vice chairman of Mary Lynch Bank of America quite a senior guy and it wasn't just his seniority it was the fact that somehow you picked somebody who was going to do this right who was going to go see it with the other interns who didn't want a Consulting contract and and I love that I love the fact that you're inspired you're inspired by this and you acted on it because how many times have we been inspired by something and dropped it there right so I want to underline this because I think it's about you're very much this way I mean with everything you're pursuing with health and wellness and science you're acting on it so I love that that's one of the ways that we're kindred spirits and so let me just remind you that I have two more questions and then it's up to you so get your questions ready there is a mic here and that we would love it if you could come so that everybody could hear you were also recording this so you will be heard um if you come there but my next question is about curiosity which is related to scratching but also different in that it's how do we make connections among different ideas and I love that one of your recommendations is to read real books right Brad this is Brad didn't ask us to say that but it's also one of my recommendations I tell everybody if you want to have a good night's sleep never go to bed with an iPad um Kindle anything go to bed with real books and what is wonderful about it you know this great feeling when you are reading a book and you are engrossed in it but you are getting tired and it's that kind of Twilight moment and I've so often just let the book drop and turned off the light and went to sleep now you can't do that with your iPad right so it's one more reason who I am we both highly recommend real books not just before you go to sleep but at all times so tell us about the role of books in your life books have a huge role in my life I'm just remembering when I was here living in Washington the first time and I had a date and that date is now my wife but she showed up on the first date with a book and she gave me a book Marge Piercy gone to soldiers and I thought I left um you know books say so much about who we are and what we think about and I just recently reread are you there God it's me Margaret crowd pleaser um and you know I love seeing the Renaissance that the author is having and Judy Bloom was somebody that I I felt I knew her I mean I've never met her um you guys probably have met her but I had never met her and yet I feel like she's a friend of mine and um the great derailer for powerful Communications is multitasking you know if you're talking to me but you're actually texting I know it right we know that when people are doing that if you're trying to say something to your kid but you're really cooking dinner at the same time people know that focus is essential to brilliant and breakthrough Communications and reading sharpens our Focus not texting not scrolling not LinkedIn but reading long form builds the focus muscle and it's really that absorption and that is so key and that we are losing but books like that places like this can really help us recapture it so what's next another book um another big breakthrough scientific and um I I hope for lots of of breakthroughs um we're advisor now riveted on cancer one in three people in this room will receive a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime so it will impact a lot of us or certainly all of us in terms of people that we know personally I'm staying monogamous to this book right now um I'm not thinking about what's next not multitasking I'm not multitasking as I said it sometimes when people ask me how long did it take you to write the book about 40 years I've been thinking about it and it you know it came together quickly because I'd been thinking about it for decades and so I'm really enjoying opportunities like this to speak with people like you and just kind of roll around in it you know that's one of the things I noticed and one of your cultural values advisor is joy and one of the things I've noticed about you is how much joy you are bringing and to the communication about this book that's not true of all authors right some authors has published a book and they don't want to have anything more to do with it but you love communicating about it it's true one of our Pfizer one of our four values is joy and I challenge anyone here to find another Fortune 50 company that has joy as one of its four values we like to laugh we take our work seriously but not ourselves in terms of the joy that I'm getting by doing this book um when I was talking to different Publishers I asked the publisher what is it that makes a book fail because if you've gone through the process if you have a literary agent you've written the book you've been through the editor but then they book fails and he said to me it's an author who's unwilling to get out and be behind their book and it's not hard for me to be behind this book because I'm really passionate that these are 10 simple ideas that can help you to break through in whatever you want to break through and it doesn't have to be leading a big company it doesn't have to be solving a global pandemic it can be the things that are meaningful to you in your life yes it can be communicating with your children or your spouse and we all know how wrong this Communications can go so um who has a first question and yes Sally so much of what you're talking about seem to follow the themes of empathy relatability genuineness what do you do when the CEO you're working with or the boss or the parent or whoever it is you're communicating with lacks lacks all of those that's a tough thing and that that can happen my go-to thing to do is to start asking questions because usually if you ask thoughtful questions you can chip away at this defense that the person has um most people in my experience who are unwilling to be candid or authentic or empathetic are usually you know locked down from something that has happened to them a basic insecurity and if you start asking people questions and then follow the path you know what what sparks them is it discussing their kids is it talking about their parents and and being sort of a reporter and probing into understanding a person because I don't believe people are actually fundamentally unwilling to be empathetic or kind or gracious they just either feel they they don't have the interest they don't have the time and and you know kind of questions are are really great things thank you for your question hi I work here so I'm kind of cheating um as somebody who is in corporate Communications for a long time and really loved it I'd love to hear about your path um and sort of a couple of the moments that really stand out for you as you know I love what I do and here's how I can take the next step great question thank you um so the the job that I have now head of corporate Affairs and Communications it did not exist when I graduated college in 1984. um you might have had a press person who did a p did a press release and worked for marketing or maybe there would be a lobbyist who worked for the legal department but there were not these large powerful departments I have 500 people in my department doing what I'm doing two things changed everything for my profession the first was the rise of stakeholder mindset and I saw it first here in Washington in the 1980s with the HIV crisis and the the AIDS you know epidemic and that the people who were suffering with AIDS did not just sit quietly they they started act up they spoke out they said silence equals Death and and they were saying we have a say we want to have a say and they banged on the door of the pharmaceutical companies I then watched many other activists happen environmentalists people with breast cancer all kinds of people had a feeling like I deserve a say at the same time around the 80s social media digital communication sort of exploded and people could organize agitate easily quickly for free and these two things coming together created a need for people like me to build Bridges between companies and their publics and so I feel really fortunate to be in a field that is growing and needed and relied upon and seen as very necessary so those were the trends that made the difference thanks for the question hi Sally hi all right I'm cheating also I'm the owner one of the co-owners of the store but um it's not that often that we get to talk to two experts in Communications and I just uh wanted to ask both of you actually if that's okay a little bit about how you view the role of Civility in conversation and communication why it's important to be able to hear other points of view and have a kind of discourse where people actually listen to each other and aren't just disruptive and making noise and we see our country so divided it's very hard even to have a civil conversation on so many issues and you have experienced that I'm sure through Pfizer and Ariana you have you have chronicled a lot of this through journalism and other forms of media and you know I just would love to hear your comments on how we instill a kind of respect for one another and a respect for different ideas and different points of view we're a big country we have a lot of different ideas and different points of view it's what makes our country great and I assume you both have thought about this at some length we're so civil to each other but we want each other to go first I think um this question is at the heart of what is the most troubling thing to me right now we are through the emergency phase of the covid pandemic so that pandemic is behind us and we are now in a pandemic of disinformation Destruction uh incivility lack of kindness and what I feel has to happen you know I grew up in the midwest I am an optimist and I believe that the rest of us have to stand up and make a case for civility it is why it is the you know the ultimate final chapter in my book that without civility you know I'm not sure that this is a world that we can continue to recognize I don't know that democracy will necessarily continue to Prevail but I I fear that there's many of us probably lots of people who come to a place like this who have sat quietly and let rudeness aggression rage win and I think that it is incumbent upon all of us to kind of rise up together and not let the bully have the pulpit and that actually for me includes allowing people to speak with whom you profoundly disagree and I think what is happening is that privately people will say that privately will say oh it's absurd that you know students disrupt um speakers with whom they disagree but they rarely say it publicly so I completely agree with you I think the next challenge is for people to speak out about these issues and I mean I'm talking about people who have really nothing to lose nobody's going to fire them uh you know nobody's going to make it impossible for them to earn a living even people like that um are reluctant to speak out and of course now we have um a lot of Brave voices who are saying that and for me that's kind of the moment now when we can listen we can profoundly disagree with somebody but remember what are some of the key principles on which the country is founded and I agree with you Sally completely that this is a pivotal moment and and we can't afford to see it idly by so I'm so glad that there seems to be agreement in this room I think we need more independent bookstores thank you thank you thank you good evening I profoundly disagree so maybe I'm the distance in the room but for three years we have studied the covet 19. and we don't agree with Sally sussman's assessment in the Obama Administration he tried to end the gain of function research that NIH was doing in Aid with with um fauci he overruled the Obama Administration and continued again to function with the Wuhan laboratory so we don't know for sure whether it was released on purpose or by accident from the Wuhan laboratory but that's what the conclusion of everybody is now right now there's some kind of release from Wuhan and we have said that not 85 percent of people have taken the vaccine it's probably close to 68 to 70 percent it's the numbers way high assessment I went to my physician at MedStar and uh they said Joe have you put have you take taken effects no ma'am I would go to jail first he said I agree with you but I can't say that publicly so many of the Physicians and many doctors disagree that you could put a vaccine together in such a short time when you have said 10 to 12 years I participated in some of the NIH and Bethesda naval Medical Hospital functions over the past years malaria for one is I studied malaria Rogaine for my bonus and it takes a long time and I'm sorry to disagree with you but I I'm just profoundly disagreeing with you that it is not correct that Pfizer was giving a healthy vaccine to everybody there's a lot of myocarditis Strokes heart attacks deaths disabilities and a lot of things that have happened to that look at the virus so my question is have you looked at the vares which is reporting of the incidence of the disabilities the people that have taken the vaccine well uh I thank you for for your comments you're welcome and I respect uh your opinion and um I certainly am aware of of the point of view that you're making thank you I can assure you that Pfizer does never would never do game of function I'm not sure that everyone knows what what we're referring to weapon yes excuse me to weaponize a virus to kill people and I assure you that we would never do game a function um you know all I can say at this point is that I would be happy to speak with you more um I think you have a lot of technical expertise we take any kind of an adverse event very seriously and you know I I just thank you for for expressing your view you're welcome first I want to say that both of you are extremely inspiring and I'm visiting from India and you Ariana are a big hero to many of us in India and I just want to ask how much of the communication principles that you talk about which it seems very sort of basic and and something that is cuts across you know various demographics but still we need some really good communication across cultures because so much of what is happening what the anger and so on you're talking about is really because you know we don't understand the Middle East or the Middle East doesn't understand southeast Asia and so on and so forth there's just so much of it can you shed some light on what about your communication principles that can be really modified adapted or even adopted the way it is it's such a great question and I I think about it so often because on the one hand I feel strongly about these principles and I like to think about them as universal principles and even in a world with as many diverse cultures and countries and geographies um you know it's a small world in the same way because we are often always looking at the same social media or seeing the same stories circulate around the world but at the same time I do recognize that cultures vary customs and rituals of communications vary and I can give you an example which is um this is June which here in the United States is pride month and many large companies like mine are very much supporting their lgbtq plus colleagues but there are some countries in which we operate where homosexuality is illegal and so what I need to do and what I try to do is have a good network of leaders around the world who give me straight talk about how what I'm saying lands or doesn't land and try to learn from it it's really um it's a balancing act I don't know do you want to and I just want to say that India is my favorite country in the world and I I went there when I was 18 and started comparative religion and I absolutely love everything about it the country the people the food Greece is my second favorite I second that thank you hi well I sort of disagree with the gentleman who spoke earlier I want to thank Pfizer for the work and I have a couple questions not a couple questions um what do you think the future of vaccines for mRNA technology and the platform is because I was shocked that they were able to come up with it until I heard that they were working on this platform for years and when Tony fauci said that it's like Paul of course you know it didn't just happen overnight so what do you think for future vaccines with this platform thank you um and you're absolutely right that mRNA technology is something that we had been working together with bioen tech on for many years before the pandemic to try to fight pneumococcal pneumonia and other diseases um I I should have a disclaimer that I'm not a scientist um but I I work with a lot of great scientists and they tell me that they think it can impact other respiratory illnesses like RSV that it might even have applicability for cancer and when I was in the conference room when we got the word from the FDA that this vaccine worked and at very high levels our chief scientists said oh my goodness it's the greatest medical advance in a century so I am really hopeful that it's going to make drug Discovery much quicker and that it will do many things for other viruses and other illnesses possibly even cancer yeah and communication has been such a problem even um I think it was today wolinsuke took down Marjorie Taylor green because she was complaining about theirs and all the reports and she said we look at everyone we want people to report even the littlest thing do you want us to send a group out to educate you and merger Taylor green says we don't want to educate it and so we are facing that yes um I mean it goes to the question that Lisa had about how divided we are um you know in our research we find there about 15 of the people who deeply disagree with us and will likely never feel differently there are 15 of the people who are big supporters of what we're doing and believe wholeheartedly in the science and the work what my job is is to really talk to all the people in between and try to help them as best I can to understand what we're doing to answer their questions and to create a consensus about how we can move forward in health care but anyway I want to thank Pfizer because we need big Pharma to do all these things thank you hi I um I'm a former journalist I worked with you are Ariana years ago when the NewsHour and Yahoo got together and I had an opportunity to um actually asked any lawyer who had just become the leader um about gay rights and because people from Yahoo were interested in that but recently I um wrote a case study using the mask of the Red Death to talk about the pandemic Business Leaders could look at that and think about what leadership will often be or what not not to be and so I'm I'm meeting with my editor tomorrow and I was thinking since you read so often um both of you what fiction has influenced your communication very good question I have to admit I'm a pretty devoted non-fiction reader um but you know I mean Ann patchett's work has has motivated me a great deal I'm trying to think what other fiction can I get a lifeline on fiction [Laughter] you know The Secret Life of Bees I absolutely love that and I also love um books that I read as a child and can re-read and see um such more depth in them like The Little Prince and Antoine Centric rubary of course Alice in Wonderland is just an amazing book I think we should be rereading once a year and I was just rereading a lovely reading books I was re-reading um part of it and I love the thing about the queen asking Alice how old are you and she says seven and three quarters and and then she asked the queen how old are you she says 101 years and three months and 25 days and Ali says I don't believe that this is impossible and the queen says well when I was your age I would every morning try to believe and at least 10 impossible things before breakfast [Laughter] the thing of believing impossible things which in a way the vaccine was you know you had to believe that something impossible would be possible so anyway I love free reading old classics those are beautiful stories I read The Little Prince to my son who's now graduated so it I really appreciate it thanks hi um question for the both of you I'm a cognitive scientist I'm just very curious if you ever use Behavioral Science research to frame how you communicate things especially given your background and Behavioral Science work with thrive you have to answer this one all right okay Behavioral Science and how it plays into the work that that we do to communicate you know I I really I gotta defer to you on this one you're the expert I can't answer it in front of you there is so much amazing work now on Behavioral Science and we have a great scientific Advisory board that Thrive and the chairman is BJ Fogg from Stanford who has done tremendous work on Behavioral Science and and some of the things that he um stands for that we've introduced into a Thrive is first of all how do you communicate around accomplishment and success how do you celebrate little victories whether they are in companies or science or personal Behavior you know we are passionate about improving daily habits around sleep and food and movement and stress and connection but do it through small micro steps and we know in Behavioral Science that sometimes it takes 60 to 90 seconds to course correct from stress to move us from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system so that's kind of one of the causes for optimism that to have these tools and we know so much more now through science and one of the things I love is that modern science is really validating ancient wisdom that a lot of these principles were known whether in Japanese culture or the tower stoic philosophers across the world but now science is validating them and I know that unfortunately we have to end here because oh we have one more question if I can Grace absolutely yes yes yes hi um so often I think in the world we think of how things are going to land how we're going to sell something that a company's doing or that a government's doing or something like that and I think we often think about how do we not have the communications run the work that's being done or the good work vice versa you know the the port the cart before the horse or something like that and I think I would ask you like how do you make sure the work is leading how you're going to communicate what you're working on that is a great question and it is really the role of a great Communications advisor whether you're inside a company or outside and a lot of my colleagues are here my friend Alan Fleischmann who is one of my advisors and a good advisor will tell people if they are trying to sell something that is not real and it is a big danger to try to do it you'll end up likely looking foolish but the mistake some people make if they're maybe not experienced or insecure is they just sort of take notes and start drafting without any real reflection on the authenticity of what they're being asked to advocate for and people are smart they they see through those things and so even if you do it it's a short-term it's a it might be a short-term success but it is inevitably a midterm long-term failure well I want to first of all thank you so much for um bringing Sally here to this iconic place in Washington I want to thank you all for coming and Sally I want to thank you so much for writing the book and for communicating about it so passionately and eloquently and with a lot of joy and humor thank you thank you Ariana foreign

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 1,488

Keywords: books, book, politics and prose, bookstore, author, author talk, author video, book talk, new books, book store, indie bookstore, independent bookstore, book tube, booktube, reading vlog, annotating books, book annotations, reading vlogs, journalism, journalist, Washington DC, DC, bookworms, bookworm, book worm, book worms, book chat, @politicsprose

Id: -shDFT4YoVQ

Length: 58min 45sec (3525 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 14 2023