Unpacking NVIDIA, smart innovation and what’s to come in 2025

Heather Stern: Today’s guest is the amazing Dawn Hudson. She’s been CMO at the NFL, President and CEO of Pepsi North America, twice named to Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Business list, and currently board member of NVIDIA. She’s a legendary marketer and business leader and I am so excited to have a far-ranging conversation about her career, journey to get there, and the impact that she’s made.

Hi Dawn. Thanks for being on the show. How are you?

Dawn Hudson: Great, how are you, Heather?

Heather: I’m doing well.

Heather: So you’ve had quite a career journey building and transforming world class brands. You’ve made various pivots along the way. But innovation is something that you speak about being the red thread to everything that you’ve done. So talk to me. What do you mean by smart innovation?

Dawn: Well, I guess my DNA comes from being a marketer. And what do marketers grow? They don’t manage declines in businesses, they grow things. And they grow things through insight and through understanding who loves them, how to reach more people like that, where there’s white spaces for innovation. That’s my root philosophy. And then as I changed and went into general management, I took that philosophy of where’s there opportunity. And there’s lots of opportunity, but strategy is around, as you know, picking, picking one or two and making a bet. So innovation is the lifeblood of business, I think. And smart innovation, I mean to say informed by insight where trends are where population and different demographics are going. And if I added a word to smart innovation, it would be choiceful smart innovation because companies always, in my opinion, try to do more and maybe then is ideal to drive their growth. And I think doing fewer things really well leads to greater success. And then you can sequence, follow on improvements to the business. And I think it also helps employees focus more than having too many balls in the air.

So I’m a great believer in innovation drives business, innovation in everything you do and if you think your business is operating well today, I promise you there’s an area that can be innovated. And of course with my background on NVIDIA, I know what technology can do to help you improve that and do it efficiently. So I hope that answered your question.

Heather: It did, absolutely. And I guess just to stay on that line of thinking, AI is like every other word coming out of everybody’s mouth and it is obviously one of the most seismic changes to not just business, but humanity. Tell me about how you came upon the role of being on the board of NVIDIA and just what that experience has been like during this time. It’s really fascinating to me.

Dawn: So I’ve been very fortunate and I’ve learned as much from NVIDIA, more than probably what I’ve given to them. But I was fortunate because if I look at my career, I started my career in advertising focused on working with Procter & Gamble. Then I went to the client side and I worked at Bristol-Myers on the Clairol haircare business and I happened to work on it internationally. And so my career for the first 15 years was defined by packaged goods. Then what did I do? I go client side with one of my packaged goods clients. I go with Frito-Lay. I then become Head of Marketing of Pepsi. It leads to President and CEO. So the majority of my, if you will, the first half, first three quarters of my career was defined by packaged goods and what I could do to innovate and bring change to packaged goods.

So in a beauty care perspective, it’s often the packaging and new ingredients. And in soft drinks and beverage, it’s new offerings, and packaging, and functionality and imagery, not actually that dissimilar. But I succeeded, I believe, in that space because I brought innovation to it. When the soft drink industry started to be viewed by consumers as cause of obesity, not good for you, phosphates—we could talk an hour about the reality of that, but the perception was soft drinks are not good for you and they started to decline. And that’s when I left PepsiCo, to seek areas where I could still not be a manager of holding volume or how to manage slight decline in volume, but I could be again, back to growth.

And as I looked at the picture at that time, which was about 10 to 15 years ago, I felt that no longer were packaged goods and the big packaged goods companies—as much as I love them today—they weren’t the hotbed of innovation anymore. And innovation was happening in entertainment and personal devices, technology and sports and so I tried somewhat overtly, somewhat by instinct to refashion my brand. And it’s when I went on the board of a pharmaceutical company called Allergan. It’s where I was asked to join the board of NVIDIA. And at the time, NVIDIA was a component company that made graphic chips. Everybody was focused on computer chips and it made graphic chips handle a lot more data because you’re doing visuals and you have many more points of data to give a good visual experience.

And at the time, the biggest thing in gaming was latency, was having the picture immediate when you click a button and when you’re playing the game. So I knew that NVIDIA was on the forefront of technology, but from my experience at Pepsi, we were somewhat innovators back in the day and we were one of the first to do product placement within video games. So I really like, personally, video games, and I liked the marketing opportunity of video games. And so when I got the opportunity to interview for the board, I viewed it more as getting experience in gaming, which was a form of technology and broadening my experience base and I think Jensen Wang, the CEO, liked the fact that I was sort of born out of the Cola wars because there’s a scrappiness and there’s a, we’re number two, we try harder.

And NVIDIA was a brand name no one could pronounce. People didn’t know what they were. I can’t tell you how many times I said to this commissioner of the NFL, “I think you’d be really stimulated to bring your team when you do your Silicon Valley tour. Go to NVIDIA. They’re working on things that will be here in 10 years that you won’t believe.” And nobody ever took me up on it because it was a sleepy little company that did gaming. So I joined, as I do many things, because I fell in love with Jensen Wang. I just thought he was so non-ego and a visionary and able to see around corners, and I wanted to help him be successful. So what I joined had nothing to do with what really the company is today and I was lucky, and there are many board members who are on from that time period.

In fact, there are a couple of the venture capitalists who are on when the company was founded almost 30 years ago and were part of funding it that did not know what it would become. But something called Moore’s Law was a theory that you could put an infinite chain of computer chips in a row and every single computer chip would give you 100% more computing power and have the same energy utilization as the first one. And for a long time, with the size and scale of what we needed for computing, that was true. And then there was a point in time when Moore’s Law failed. This was about seven, eight years ago, and all of a sudden incremental chips didn’t give you incremental computing power. So all of a sudden, it was inefficient and it was taking more energy and it clearly wasn’t the solution from the amount of data and complexity we needed computer systems to handle.

And people turned. They didn’t turn to NVIDIA, they turned to a graphic chip because a graphic chip is designed to handle a lot more data on the chip and to do it with great energy efficiency. So NVIDIA was exactly the solution of the time. And what I credit NVIDIA doing is they didn’t just say, “Okay, I will continue being a component manufacturer of graphic chips and I will supply them to people.” They said, “I can become an integrated system because critical to use of a graphic chip is the software, the hardware, how it’s cooled. I will start to build full systems.” And today we build supercomputers. But it’s been a tremendous learning experience for me to be part of something. And to watch the uniqueness of NVIDIA, for me, is that despite their enormous size now, they still have a culture and a way of working that’s very entrepreneurial and I think that’s very hard to do as companies get large. Anyway, that’s how I came to be on it and it’s been a fabulous experience.

Heather: So obviously as you’ve shared that you’ve learned so much. I’m sure a lot of it is about the technology itself and certainly now AI and the power that that has. But give us another tidbit of something that you’ve learned either about how they’ve maintained that culture or their way of thinking about innovation that you have taken away through that experience.

Dawn: So one of the things that would give me pause if I went back to PepsiCo now is they make today same as they ever did. Innovation’s everybody’s job. And they don’t have a department of innovation. They don’t have a bunch of people. They have people that are scientists and do skunk works on what could be possible in technology, but when it comes to seeing an opportunity and wanting to create something for it, they borrow people across the organization and it gets into how people are rewarded for the whole. People think about the whole of the company. So whatever you’re doing, if you’re happy to be working in the gaming division or you happen to be working in the supercomputing or the desktop division—technology to help people who design at their computers—you might be called on to work on the development of the medical division five years ago, and you would do it. Wouldn’t be like you have to work 80 hours a week. They’d find a way to ease you up, but you keep doing your job, but you’d contribute and two things happen as a result of that.

One, you get people who think differently to come together. And how many business school studies have shown that if you put people in a room with very different backgrounds, they’ll come up with better, faster solutions than people with the same experience? So you’ll get that diversity of experience naturally when you do that. You’ll get tremendous access to Jensen and the senior leadership and engineering staff of NVIDIA. And that’s how they’ve created multibillion dollar divisions, by listening to what a need is in the marketplace and then swarming it with people around their company who do other things to think about what’s possible and to create something. And then when something is created and it’s tested and starts to scale in a given industry, then we’ll put specialized staff on it, but we don’t have an innovation department. And I think that’s been good learning for me that I would apply where I’d run another company.

Heather: You mentioned Roger, just before. And I wanna ask. When Roger Goodell offered you the job of CMO at the NFL, how did that come about and did you know right away you wanted to take it?

Dawn: So a little bit of background on my relationship with Roger Goodell. When I was Chief Marketing Officer, the contract to be the national sponsor for the NFL came due and Coke’s tenure was up. And at the time, I wasn’t running food service yet for PepsiCo, but I knew that in the food service world where Pepsi had a third of the business and Coke had two-thirds of the business, whenever a restaurant or a sponsor in sports were up for grabs, Coke and Pepsi would both bid and whatever that sponsorship or that restaurant, they wanted both to bid because you would get a better deal from one of them. But you’d have to be choiceful, particularly Pepsi with less deep pockets than Coke, on which ones you did. So sometimes you would go into it engaging as a spoiler to drive the other guy’s price up, not expecting that you were going to get the deal. And other times you went in saying, “I’ve got to really protect this,” or “I’m going to go get this.”

So in the case of the NFL, we had relationships with soccer, basketball, NCAA, tennis. We had a lot of relationships. We had more sports relationships than Coke. We didn’t have football. And I think the senior management team at PepsiCo, which would’ve loved to be the national sponsor for the NFL, didn’t really think it would happen. So I went in to be the spoiler, but I don’t do anything to be a spoiler. I go in to win everything. So the person that was running a large chunk of the NFL—which included sponsorships—was Roger Goodell, and he was trying to prove to the NFL owners and leadership—the board—that he could think differently and bring innovation to the NFL as well. And I really just quickly went to school. It was about a three-week process on what’s going on with the NFL. Where are they trying to go? And worked with the head of sports marketing in [the] marketing department and our outside sports marketing agency.

And we settled on the fact that sports is becoming more and more entertainment and people don’t want just the sport presented to them. They want to know behind the scenes, they want to know what’s going on. And we felt that the roots of Pepsi were in sports and entertainment and in fact, Pepsi is known for association with musicians, actors, and actresses. It sort of has that entertainment in its DNA. So we took a notion of let’s bring our entertainment expertise, marry it with the NFL, and made a presentation that said, “We think you can do more with the kickoff of the season, with the halftime show. You can make the draft in it. You can make these occasions during your year into bigger things and here’s how we at Pepsi can help you.” That was just our simple philosophy. And I probably didn’t appreciate as much behind the scenes that Roger was looking to do something different to show that he was capable of being the next commissioner of the NFL.

First of all, the bid, I had to take through the board because it was such a sizable bid. So we got the bid through the board, but again, people didn’t think we were going to win it, so they approve it. I remember calling my boss and then the CEO, “We’re going to win this.” “Oh, Dawn, Coke’s going to come in over the top with money. We have to announce this today.” And I called Roger and I said, “This is what they want to do.” And Roger said, “You have to just trust us. No, not going to do that. I’m going to tell it the right way. I have to tell Coke and we will announce it tomorrow.” So I went back and I said, “This is a relationship based on trust. This is how we need to play it,” and it was announced.

So Roger and I developed a relationship before he ever became Commissioner when I was Head of Marketing of Pepsi and he was Commissioner. I then got promoted to President and CEO of Pepsi. And when you’re doing that, you get to be the national sponsor. You can’t activate on a local level if you can’t pour your product in the stadiums. So as soon as you become the national sponsor and people like Jerry Jones, because we poured Pepsi at the Cowboy Stadium, they supported us, but I had to go out and prove to the others and try to win about 60% of the business over the course of the next five years. So I would work closely with the NFL, Roger, and then I got to know all the team owners. So I was pretty comfortable and knowledgeable with the infrastructure of the NFL.

Then I left. I went to Parthenon. Roger happened to be a neighbor of mine, but I did not want to be somebody that hung on his coattails after he became Commissioner, just let him do what he did so well. And literally, we had decided to sell Parthenon to Ernst & Young, and I was deciding what to do, but I was going to stay for a transition period, help my team assimilate into Ernst & Young, but I wasn’t going to go long-term with Ernst & Young.

And I was sitting at my desk and my cell phone rang on the desktop and I turn it over and I see Roger Goodell’s name come up. And I literally hadn’t talked to him in five years. “Hi, Roger. How are you doing? How things going?” And he said to me, he said, “Dawn," he said, “I know you know us and you know the brand really well, and I want to bring a senior leader onto my senior staff, a female. I don’t have a female in my senior staff.” And he said, “I have no idea what you’re doing.” He said, “And it’s to run marketing and to run events, the Super Bowl, international games.” That was a throwaway. It turned out that was maybe one of the most fun parts of the job, but he said it’s for that. He said, “If you’re not willing to think about it, I would ask you, since you know us so well, will you help me recruit the right woman to my senior team?”

And so I said to him, “Absolutely, of course I will. I’d be honored to and I’ll think about it.” And he said, “Good. Call me in a couple of days.” I put the cell phone down. I don’t think the cell phone is even down on the desk and I’m thinking, God, what a great next step of my career this would be. It’d be fun. I had been on the board of the LPGA for nine years and I chaired it for two, so I knew something about the business of sports and my father came from a baseball family and I’ve been involved. Oh, baseball was another real big sponsor of Pepsi. So I’ve been involved with sports and I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to work on the other side, not as a sponsor, but work actually for the league? And this is really entertainment and exciting. It’s the biggest sport. My instinct was they needed to introduce football to the next generations of talent, which is what I had done at Pepsi, introduce Pepsi to the next generations. I felt like it was in my wheelhouse.

We had some friends over and I ran down from my office and talked to my husband and they were there and said, “Oh, my God. You’d be great at that. What a great job for you.” So I called up Roger the next morning. I think he was shocked to hear from me so fast, and I think he called me at six o’clock at night. So I called him. I’m like, “All right.” I said, “I’m willing if you want to consider me. I’d be very excited to think about joining the NFL.” And so I went through a process. Had dinner with Roger, and then met with the senior staff, saw if it was a fit, and then went.

Roger was a really good person to work for. It was September and he wanted me to join as fast as possible. And I said, “My dad’s long deceased. My mother’s birthday. I’m taking her to Africa on a two-week safari and I can’t join until the fourth week in October. And I know it’s in season, but I won’t…” And he said, “Absolutely not.” He said, “Will you do me a favor? On your way to the airport, stop by so that you’re not a name on a piece of paper and let me just introduce you to the marketing staff, then go to Africa and come back.” So that’s what I did. And during the time I was in Africa with no cell service, limited internet, that’s when the Ray Rice video went viral and the NFL players got perceived to be these tough guys on the field who went home and took it out on their loved ones, which was not true. And I came back to a firestorm, but it ended up being a great experience, hopefully for both of us.

Heather: Yeah. Well, it sounds like the two of you had just a great working relationship and frame of mind in terms of, again, continual innovation. But to build on that point and wow, what an onboarding experience that must’ve been. But I think you were quoted as saying, “My philosophy is that you can learn the most and contribute the most when there’s a crisis.” So that was a crisis and that was day one on the job. What did you learn from that whole experience and how did you navigate that?

Dawn: I learned a ton. I learn in everything I do. I’m still learning constantly every day. But I think that one, you navigate those things by relying on those around you. You take a team approach. You cannot do it as an individual.

Secondly, you have to think differently. There’s muscle memory in organizations and there’s knee-jerk, we don’t do that, we do this. And at a time of crisis, often you have to decide to do something differently. Right? We don’t, we don’t do this. We don’t use our advertising for this. We don’t go out and admit a problem. We don’t do this. Well, maybe you do have to do this. You have to think about differently. And why, as much as it is painful to go through a crisis, why I like a crisis is that it gives and people an opportunity to change and out of crisis, if you come out of it well, often you build muscles for an organization. You break patterns of behavior and you could do things new that can be applied to other things you do and as an individual building your career, you can really make your career in a time of crisis by how you handle it.

Heather: Wow I love that idea of the building of the muscles and the breaking of the patterns. Sometimes even subconsciously, organizations can become complacent or can do things that are considered sacred cows or legacy things that just never were challenged. And I think it’s hard, but if you…thoughtfully with integrity make the changes that need to be made, it could be incredibly powerful, but it’s hard for sure.

Dawn: This is what you asked me earlier about NVIDIA.

Heather: I did, yes.

Dawn: This is what I love about NVIDIA. It has not gotten complacent and that could be one of your biggest worries. You’re that big. Everybody wants your chips. You can’t make them fast enough. You’ve got 18 months of orders. But it would be easy to sit on your laurels and say that’s fine, that’s enough. Let’s keep delivering those chips. When in fact, the NVIDIA senior team, not the board, it’s the management team, they’re looking at what’s possible, what’s around the corner. I mean, AI has only started of the capability. We could talk about AI for an hour or two in terms of its application. And by the way, marketing is one of the first most obvious places of application. But it’s keeping that muscle or that ability to say what’s next, even if I’m successful? Because that’s where I think companies can run into trouble. When you are successful, you can start to get lazy and sleepy.

Heather: Yeah. So love the idea of what’s next and continually challenging your organization, your team, yourself with that. I think a lot of people right now are thinking about 2025, building out strategic plans, priorities, trying to determine what’s next. As we look ahead, what are the things that you think marketers need to be focused on? What do you see on the horizon? You mentioned AI and its application. So putting your future trend cap on, what would you share with us?

Dawn: So I think if I step back and I look at marketing, the DNA of marketing has always been about understanding a brand and what it means to the consumers that are the biggest users of that brand, and understanding where you can take it and what is the competitive set? What is the competitive landscape? And to me, that’s the strategy of building a brand. And then there’s the execution and the detail of how you then tell that story and how you do it in as efficiently and as much return on investment as you can. The field of marketing has been plagued for many years by a difficulty of accountability. The old adage used to be, “I know my marketing’s working. I know 50%’s working. I don’t know what 50% isn’t working, and yet I’ll still do it if I have the money to grow my business.”

Now you have a lot more data points with digital marketing and with one-to-one social interaction. And I think that it’s driven a growth in analytics among marketers and it’s driven specialists, and it’s driven the use of AI to help identify moments and targets and to target the media to the right person more effectively. And certainly, that’s how it’s being applied today. I think in the future, there will be the opportunity to use AI. It’s not cost-effective to—on a one-on-one basis—customize and tailor your marketing to each individual. If you think of making the visual highly relevant to them, using the language that’s relevant to them, using, if they have a dog or a cat in the scene or not. All these things you can do to tell your message in the most relevant way. AI will allow you to do that.

So I think the next round of innovation for marketing will be the addition of AI and technology to not create an idea, not tell you what your brand is about. I think marketers still need to do that, but interpret and take the tool book that a marketer can create and apply it to the right individual more quickly and more targeted than an individual could ever do. So I think while AI is really focused right now on the targeting and the media delivery, I think it will come to be focused as well on the message delivery. That’s in the short-term.

The other thing I think about marketing and worry is too strong a word, but I hope that marketing still builds a muscle of knowing a competitive landscape and how your brands should be positioned because as people grow up in the field as specialists. And a lot of my daughter’s friends are digital media analysts and they learn a lot about that and they get smart about that, but where do they get taught how that singular interaction that is effective in messaging to that individual with the right promotion strategy layers up to build a brand whose value is in its perception and its growth and its ability to take market share?

And I do worry because I see now in Chief Marketing Officer searches, people have to choose do I want somebody who’s really got the data skills and grew up through digital analytics, or am I going to pick somebody who’s favored more in how to be a storyteller and how to strategically build a brand? And I think ultimately, marketers will have to be both and organizations will need to not just have, here’s my analytics division and here’s my marketing division, but in fact have people that appreciate both and appreciate how to leverage technology with an eye toward what the brand experience is overall.

Heather: At its core, the CMO and the marketing team, they should be the voice of the customer. They should be deeply connected to the market and be creative in how they go to market. We’ve now been tasked with so many things from... Again, things around the overall experience to ESG and talent. It’s like all the various things that we can touch and influence have grown, and so I think the idea is not taking that in a siloed approach, but embracing all sides of that, which can be challenging. I’m sure people are continually coming to you for advice. One of the things I hear often is leaders wondering, gosh, I would really love to serve on a board of directors team. How do I do that? Where do I start? Any advice for those people?

Dawn: I do. You’re right. I have a lot of people coming asking me that question, and I’ve been fortunate in my board career. But what I tell people is when someone’s trying to select someone for a board, they’re looking at two aspects of the person. They’re looking at what is their executive experience. What’s their CV? What’s their hip pocket skill? Are they finance? Are they marketing? What have they done? Have they elevated within organizations? Have they run organizations? And then they’re looking at: Are they team players? How are they going to fit?

You want, ideally, in a board to have different sets of backgrounds, but you want a culture where people feel free to express a point of view that might be different than the person sitting next to them, and to be not attacking with that point of view, but to be throwing it out there for others to respond to, but still being helpful and not disruptive to a board. So if you take the first, which is the functional skillset, I first say to people, just know that you have enough skills, that you have led something and that you have the right to go on a board.

Secondly, understand that if you’ve had financial experience and you have the ability to sit on an audit committee for a public company board and even a private board, you’re going to be more interesting because boards often run through their committees and you have a[n] audit committee, financial, you have a compensation committee and you have a governance committee, and maybe you have other committees. But ideally, a person wants to be able to sit on many of those so that a chair of a board can rotate people through and have the maximum utilization of talent. So just think about what people are looking for and how your background fits. So it might say, “Hey, I need to go get another experience before I try to get on a board.” If your background fits and you’re ready to get on a board, then they’ll look for…have you had board experience where you can demonstrate that someone could talk about conviviality, if you want to call it, talk about contribution to change, having impact on a board.

And so I often say start with a not-for-profit. You can often get responsibility in a non-for-profit ahead of a job you could get in the for-pay world. And be careful, don’t do too many because my experience is not-for-profits take more time than boards of for-profit. But if you pick a good not-for-profit that has a meaty strategic conversation... So for me, how I got my first board is yes, I was succeeding in my career, but I had gone onto the Beverage Association. It was called Softdrink then. We renamed it Beverage. Think of a room with Coke and Pepsi in the room and Dr. Pepper trying to ride between the two and how you get that to work and even have Coke and Pepsi talk to each other. So I rose to be Vice Chairman of that before I left. I was supposed to take over as Chairman before I left Pepsi, but I think people saw in that, oh, she’s had the experience.

I also did the LPGA and I started as a board member and I became Chairman. So that said to people, she obviously has worked well in teams and has showed ability to have impact, and I think that’s why I was able to get onto my first public board. So carefully choose a nonprofit that you can have impact on, and that can be the first demonstration. Secondly, try private first because getting on a private board’s a little bit easier than a public board. Again, gives you some of that experience that allows people to take a leap. For some reason, it can be very difficult getting on your first public board and as soon as you do, your phone rings off the hook. It’s like you’re in the club and now you can go work with others that know your skills and capabilities, so it’s hard. You got to get the first one and my recommendation is to get it through other board experience. It could be your university that shows how you can have impact and work with others.

Heather: That’s great and very tangible advice. Speaking of which, people are coming to you all the time given the experience and the kind of vision that you’ve demonstrated throughout your career, but I’ve also read that you have said that you have to be your own mentor. So what’s the best advice that you’ve given yourself, or when those moments come for you to mentor yourself, what does that look like?

Dawn: I think what I mean by that is you have to be able to step back from what you’re doing and look at yourself and your success honestly. Am I succeeding where I am? You could be frustrated. I didn’t get that promotion, whatever, but am I a good fit? Am I succeeding where I am? Sometimes it’s hard to ask yourself that. And secondly, the others who are getting ahead for me, what do they have that I don’t have, or what do I think could build me?

And I’ll give you a tangible experience of where I didn’t do this and if I went back, I would’ve done it differently. And that is, I was working at Clairol and I was a brand manager responsible for importing a brand of shampoos and conditioners called Klorane from France into the U.S. And it was really…the purpose was to create a relationship with this company so that one day we could take our hair colorings in the U.S. and put them through a better distribution system in Europe to better compete with L’Oréal. So it was a project that had greater strategic importance to Clairol. But I got married during this time frame and my husband had a great job opportunity to move to Chicago, and we decided as a team that was the right thing for us, to go to Chicago.

And so I had to tell Clairol, “I’m loving it here, but I’m sorry you’re New York–based and I’m moving.” They said, “Look, Dawn, we have a sales office in Chicago. We don’t have a marketing office. We’d love you to stay with us. Would you consider going and interviewing and seeing if there’s a role for you with our sales office?” “Oh, that’s an awful idea. I’m not a salesperson, I’m a marketer.” And now I realize marketing is just efficient selling. I’m a salesperson when you’re a marketer. If I had stepped back and mentored myself, I would’ve said you’ve shown what you can do in marketing. Maybe getting experience with another line of management will help you in your pursuit of general management, but I couldn’t get that perspective.

But I think when your phone rings and a headhunter calls you, it’s a great time to not just say yes, I’ll talk to you, or no, I won’t. Stop and pause. What are they asking me to do? Where’s my career at right now? What do I think my future is at my current company? And I always advise people, stay longer if you can with your current company because there’s always a learning curve and there’s a prove it for yourself, and a current company, you often can get more run in your career. But if you feel like you’ve stalled or there’s something that’s being offered you that’s different, use it as an opportunity to analyze your career the way somebody that’s not you would.

I’ve talked to football players trying to transition from football to outside football, and they say, “Well, I only know football.” And I said, “Yeah, but you’ve got character and things that you’ve done in your life that are signals of where you could succeed not in football. Talk to those closest around you in the locker room. Talk to your friends and family and ask them what your strengths and weaknesses are. And they won’t just tell you about blocking or tackling, they’ll tell you about character things that could lead to where you could go. Well, you have to be your own mentor and step back and think about yourself in that regard.”

The other thing, I think if I can talk a little bit about the distinction between sponsors and mentors. So mentors can be easy to come by. They’re people at the organization that want to help you. Sometimes they’re friends that you sit in the cafeteria with who are working at other functions who kind of give you advice, sometimes they can be more senior than you. But there are people that are advising you that is different than somebody who’s sponsoring you to go out on a limb and recommend you for a job or a promotion or something in the organization because they’re willing to go an added mile, not just tell you an example of what you could do better or how you could advance in your career or how you could hone your skill. They’re willing to go out on a limb for you and so you should think about in your network, who are your sponsors, not just your mentors, or who do you want to sponsor you and how do you get to know them better?

Heather: That’s great. And I think that those words get thrown around a lot, and having the clarity of how to think about them in a meaningful way, I think is really helpful. So as I close each episode, I ask my guests the same question, and it harkens back to the title of the podcast, “Icons in the Making.” Who is your icon?

Dawn: So you gave me this question ahead of time and I thought about it. If you asked me who was my icon, earlier in my career I would’ve told you it was Roger Enrico. And why I would tell you Roger Enrico. He was the CEO of PepsiCo when I first joined as head of sales and marketing for Frito-Lay outside the United States. And the reason that he was my icon is he is someone who has a love of marketing, who grew up through the marketing channel, who had a love of advertising and entertainment and some of his best friends were people like Phil Dusenberry, who was a creative genius behind BBDO. And I would’ve said here’s someone who has sort of my background, but who’s made it to run a huge Fortune 100 company, and yet he’s maintained how he’s done his job innovatively.

And Roger is always also someone who asked PepsiCo to take a sabbatical for a year, and he wanted just to work on a better way to develop executive talent, and he took that sabbatical and he did it. He was a CEO of Frito-Lay at a time when the company had downsized the amount of product in their bags, had taken cost out, the product wasn’t as good. The company was struggling. And he did a whole reset, put quality back into the product, did a huge organizational downsizing to afford it. But he’s somebody who was bold and was smart and did that smart innovation that I speak of. So I would’ve told you it was Roger Enrico because he was good to me. He supported me for my first job and he was very good at giving me opportunities within PepsiCo.

But as I have gotten older, I think my icon is actually my mother. And my mother is someone who graduated from Wellesley College, who wanted to go to Wellesley when she was 14 years old and it was an ultimate place to go for someone at the time. Ivy League schools didn’t let in women. And she went to Wellesley when she was 14 on her own and asked, “What can I do to get in here?” And they told her, “You’re going to a Cape Cod school that is not good. You will not get into Wellesley at that school. You need to go to a different school.” And her parents managed somehow to afford her going to a prep school for two years that Wellesley recommended so she could get in.

She was a math major at Wellesley and when she got out of Wellesley—I only learned this recently— she was the highest paid graduate of the class because she was hired into Lincoln Labs to be a programmer, just like the people on Hidden Figures. And she was programming defense missiles for our country with a security clearance. I had no idea she had that background. And she did it for a year-and-a-half until she got pregnant with me, and when she was eight months pregnant, they forced her to quit. And she had such a great career going and luckily, my father was able to support us and so she didn’t work for the next 22 years. But in that time, she gave birth to two more daughters, my sisters.

My second sister has major kidney ailments and was very difficult to raise. My next sister was born with major congenital heart disease, and in fact died before her 16th birthday. And my mother was able to juggle all that and raise us. And then when she was 47 years of age, my dad died suddenly of a heart attack at 54. So here’s this woman who’s such a dynamo forced to leave, has quite a difficult time raising three tough kids, and she might tell you I’m the easiest then. I think she’ll tell you I’m the hardest now. She lived through a lot of strife in her life and yet at the age of 47, she had to figure out a career. She had to support her family.

She took her math background and she took some extension courses at Harvard in how to manage the little money my father had left her. And through that, the head of the firm said, “Oh, you’re really good at this,” and he mentored her, but he also sponsored her, gave her a job. She went back to school and so she became a financial planner for another 25 years. And so someone who can, kind of, take on adversity and come out of it stronger and be able to flex and change as they need to is why she’s my icon today.

Heather: Oh, that’s a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing, and thank you for your time and insight. I have no doubt that if we reconnect in a few months or in a year, you’ll have amassed that much more experience and learning because as you said, being a continual learner is essential. So again, congratulations on all of your successes and thank you for being a guest, and I look forward to staying in touch.