MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers

Leonora Zilkha Williamson on Crafting a Career That Echoes Beyond the Boardroom

• USC DMM • Episode 4

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When Leonora Zilkha Williamson, founder and CEO of Platinum Rule Advisors, and lecturer at Vanderbilt University, speaks, you can't help but be drawn into her world—a tapestry where the vibrant threads of business, media, and the human spirit intertwine. Our latest conversation with this Vanderbilt sage takes you from the halls of liberal arts to the hustle of Wall Street, revealing the way mentorship can sculpt a career and the undeniable mark we leave on society through advertising. Williamson's narrative isn't just her own; it's a shared journey of aligning personal values with professional aspirations, showing us how our work can echo beyond the office walls and into the very fabric of the communities we serve.

Transitioning careers is no mere change of scenery—it's an odyssey of purpose that can lead from the executive suite to the heart of angel investing and nonprofit dedication. Listen as we unfold the story of a former Estee Lauder executive who saw opportunity in challenge, embracing both the resilience of women fighting for venture capital and the wisdom of impactful figures like Stacey Abrams. Their experiences teach us that strength comes from listening to our inner guide, and that sometimes, the most profound growth emerges from the ashes of old endeavors.

In today's fast-paced business environment, diversity isn't just a buzzword—it's the cornerstone of innovation and a reflection of the multifaceted world we live in. Through Professor Williamson’s insights, we examine diversity's true breadth, going beyond race and gender to encompass the rich tapestry of human experiences. We also address the rallying cry of Generation Z for authenticity in corporate responsibility, proving that the pursuit of a meaningful career need not be separate from the desire to enact positive change. Tune in for a discussion that celebrates the synergy between personal fulfillment and societal impact, bridging the gap between who we are and the difference we aspire to make.

This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.

Joseph Itaya:

Welcome to Media Escape insights from digital changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world. Good morning everybody and welcome to Media Escape. My name is Joseph Itaya. I'm a professor at the Digital Media Management Program At the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and we are very blessed this morning to have a friend and colleague who's coming to us from another university, and that is Professor Leonora Williamson from Vanderbilt. Good morning.

Leonora Williamson:

Good morning, Joseph. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast.

Joseph Itaya:

Thank you so much for joining us. We love to talk about media, we love to talk about business, we love to talk about education and legacy and fighting yourself and then synthesizing that into an actionable plan, and those are all the things that you're about as well.

Leonora Williamson:

I love every one of those things. These are the conversations I love to have, and you and I are both in university environments. I have to say I get special juice having these conversations with people who are early in their careers, figuring out how they're going to make sense of all of these big consequential thoughts you just outlined.

Joseph Itaya:

That's amazing. Well, let's get started, if we could, by getting to know you and your background and your story just a little bit. So why don't you take us back to when and how you first became involved in thinking about business and how business fuses together with media and then life purpose, the human and the business side of things. How does that get started for you?

Leonora Williamson:

Yeah, what a great question. And it's really kind of a luxury to be able to start at the beginning and telling a story of one's work, because for so many of us the origins of what gives meaning to our life are actually present early on, and so to go back and tell those stories I think really helps clarify what a person is doing later in life. So thank you for asking so. For me, business was not the obvious career choice by any stretch of the imagination. I was a committed reader, liberal arts person, art history person. I majored in Russian language and literature in college. So if there's anybody listening who's wondering if a liberal arts major is precluding a career in business, the answer, at least from my seat, is absolutely not. So I majored in Russian language and literature and loved it. I studied with amazing, cool, crazy professors and I had a lot of attention and mentorship in writing my thesis because there were so few students in the department. My thesis was on the role of advertising in post-communist Russia and the Berlin Wall had just come down, eastern Europe was opening up. I graduated from college in 1996. And I spent a lot of time in Russia looking at primary sources and talking to people about what was the role of advertising in a system that had been used to propaganda, and I began to realize in that moment that business wasn't this thing, that was separate and apart from a society and the different things that happened in a society over the passage of time. Then business was almost like holding up a mirror to what was happening in a society and in that regard it's very closely tied to the human experience. So that's where those seeds were first planted.

Leonora Williamson:

After I graduated from college, I actually went to work on Wall Street, which, again not obvious given what my major had been, but I think most at least investment banks at the time when I was applying to them Recognize that the important attribute of a successful person in their firm, and I really want those listeners who are thinking about their careers to take note of this. It wasn't that a student had studied economics or finance or whatever it was. It was that the person had learned how to think, reason, communicate, know what was important to them, express themselves and be able to translate that into a career. So I went to Wall Street, I worked in investment banking. After a year in New York, I got sent down to live in Santiago, chile, and that was really immersion by fire in business, because, working for JP Morgan in Santiago, chile, there were only five investment professionals in the whole office and we were meeting all the time with the CEOs of big public companies. And so at age 25, I would be sitting in boardrooms with six people in them, and one of them would be the CEO of the entire banking system of Chile, or all of the telephonic system of Chile, and I began getting really interested in questions like what does it feel like to wake up in the morning and know you're responsible for that? What does it really need to lead at that scale without many lives dependent on you? And so again, here was showing up this theme that I had already distilled in writing.

Leonora Williamson:

My thesis, which was the human intersection of business or the intersection of humanity with business, is really profound, has a lot of different manifestations, and I feel interested in understanding that. But I also knew I didn't want to be a career investment banker, so I went back to business school. I did my MBA at Harvard. When I graduated from Harvard, I went to work at the Boston Consulting Group, which is a top tier management consulting firm, and I actually didn't love that role, not for anything to do with BCG or for the work, but it was the first time I had never had a mentor, and you know, in college, at JP Morgan, in business school, I had had wonderful mentors, and BCG I didn't really have one, and for me, the experience of being a relatively junior person working in an organization with no mentor kind of made me feel like I was out at sea. So if I'm thinking about data points, a matter along the trajectory of my career, if the first one is writing my thesis, the second is working in Chile, then the third is realizing that I really looked for relational aspects to my work and that having a mentor was really important to me, and so I left BCG.

Leonora Williamson:

I went to work at Estee Lauder, which is a big marketing behemoth. They have a whole portfolio of brands. The flagship brand is, of course, estee Lauder, which is named for the company's founder. Clinique is their second big brand, and then, when I worked there in the late 1990s and early 2000s, their third brand in terms of revenue is MAC Cosmetics, which is a really cool, hip, edgy brand. And so I worked for MAC in a variety of different roles. First I started with the professional products line, which is a series of products that MAC maintained, even if some of them sold very few units per year, in order to be relevant to the professional market. So, for example, at the time I don't know if MAC still has this contract, but at the time we sold all the blue face paint for the blue man group, right. So we didn't have many other buyers for blue face paint, but it was important to us to be the person of choice for someone like blue man group.

Leonora Williamson:

So the next thing I did with Estee Lauder was go to London to open MAC Cosmetics first e-commerce site outside North America, and that was really interesting. For those who've never experienced working across cultures, it is a wonderful thing to try at some point in your career and even though in the UK, of course, they speak English and many things about it, it feels similar to the United States Underneath it all, it's really really different, and so working in that cultural context to do this launch and make it successful was really interesting, really challenging, really fun, and the focus on the cultural differences I would count as data point number four for the intersection of humanity and business, right. So after getting that website launched, I moved back to New York with MAC and I ended up running international marketing. So at the time MAC had about 60 countries and I was lucky enough to get to travel to many of them and that was fascinating, because the concept of beauty is really different in different parts of the world, and if the concept of beauty is different, then you market differently in different parts of the world, to say nothing of some of the regulatory differences that exist country to country. For example, I helped open MAC in China, where the regulatory environment was much more stringent than anywhere else MAC operated. So this challenge of doing marketing for the international division was one of both logistics the regulatory stuff figuring out the right retailers but also human differences and human similarities. Right, it's a human desire to feel beautiful, but what beauty is differs by culture, and so I was really lucky to travel around the world and be with human beings of all gender identities and all nationalities and worshiping all different gods, to come together and try to put more beauty into the world, and it was joyful. So to me that felt like a very positive experience with looking at how humanity and business can intersect. Right, because there were a lot about math values that aligned with my personal values, and that's something that we'll get to in a second. It's very important to have that. Values alignment or else work is a nightmare every day, and I don't want that for any one of our listeners or any human in the world.

Leonora Williamson:

After working for Estee Lauder, I entered a part of my career which is totally different than what I've described up till now, because what I've described up till now is sort of a straight upwards climbed through corporate America in some pretty competitive firms to work it. But then I left Estee Lauder, I got married, I moved to Maine, I became a mom, I ended up moving to Tennessee for my now ex-husband's job and I began a portfolio of approach where I did some angel investing in female and companies throughout the Southeast. So at the time in 2013, and I'm sad to say, not much has changed women were receiving about 7% of available venture capital funds. In the United States, women are more than 50% of the population. That is a crazy disparity and one that some friends and I came together as business partners to try to address.

Leonora Williamson:

The other thing I did was went on the board of my family's company, so I began to learn about governance and sort of the inside baseball about how companies are actually run, and I did a bunch of nonprofit work.

Leonora Williamson:

So I have real passions around children and the arts actually, and also conservation, and I went on the board of our children's museum where I felt that I was able to serve the children in our community while also being present with my own children and doing some interesting work. So a kind of mile marker number five that were counting mile markers was in that chapter of life. I learned something really important, which I had always heard this truism that you go through life in three stages you learn when you're in school, you earned by working, and then you serve when you retire. And that never made sense to me because I kind of always wanted to do all at once. And I realized in that moment that I was learning because I was working in environments that were new to me, I was earning and I was serving, and that was such a powerful moment of realization.

Joseph Itaya:

Professor Williamson, what you just said resonates so strongly with what we're all about and what we're talking with our students about here at USC, which is this idea of impact. And it gave me chills and I want to jump out of my chair just now when you said you know, it seems out of order or maybe a little too sequential, that you'd learn, then earn, then serve, when you really want to do all three things at once. And at our program we believe so strongly in the power of impact, being impacted but then having the courage, the selflessness and the magnanimousness sorry, that's a tricky word- to say to go out and do it for others, no matter what age you are.

Joseph Itaya:

And for our students who are in college, they're thinking well, I'm only in college, what do I have to give? You know, I still need to be fed, and what we tell people all the time is no, you can always think about how you can go and give and share and make an impact into somebody and into another person's life and to their career, and see what you can do for them. And we believe that that is the core of what great networking and relationship building is not what you can extract, but what you can contribute. So I was very excited when I heard you say that.

Leonora Williamson:

Well, thank you, it's so good, joseph. I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, really having a balance between the things that matter to you in life is so important, and I'd like to pull one of my heroes so, the Georgia-based politician, stacey Abrams. I don't know if you're familiar with her. Stacey Abrams came and spoke in Nashville a few years ago and she was talking about her family story and she talked about how she grew up very poor, but still every Sunday after church her parents took her and her siblings to feed the less privileged people in their community. So my hero, senator Abrams, was talking about how she grew up poor and her parents said even if you have nothing, does it mean that you give nothing? And I really took that to heart and hopefully that will resonate with some of your students that even if you think that your bank balance is low or you don't have a lot of time, or you're feeling unwise or whatever the scarcity you're experiencing is, there's still something in you that you have that can be of service to another human being. And for many people, the process of the light turning on in terms of their personal purpose in the world begins with serving just one other person, even in the tiniest of ways. So living in Chattanooga and doing board work was really meaningful. But in 2017, I got one of those phone calls that robs your world. At least everybody RAH has one of those, and in this case it was a head hunter from the beauty industry who was asking me to move to Nashville to take over marketing for an upstart beauty brand that was affiliated with a famous musician, and I got really excited. I took that job.

Leonora Williamson:

I moved to Nashville very, very quickly I was living two hours away in Chattanooga and after four months on the job, I got fired for reasons that should have been obvious to me and I chose to ignore warning signals. So mile marker number seven really listened to your instincts and I ignored my instincts at my own peril, and I ended up getting fired very suddenly. I was living in a new city with two kids, so at this point I was divorced. I'm still a single mom, two kids in a place where I didn't know anyone, and I really felt like I had to start over. So in the moment, it felt like the worst thing that ever happened to me. But of course, life is long and many of us learned that events we attribute as being the worst thing that ever happened can often end up being the best. That was the case with me.

Leonora Williamson:

From that firing, I gave myself a year to figure out what did I really want to do with the rest of the time I had left on earth. I was about 45. So I figured I was around the halfway point and then I really wanted to be bought into what came next. So I didn't update a resume and I didn't apply for jobs.

Leonora Williamson:

I spent a year talking to as many people as would let me buy them a cup of Starbucks to say do you love what you do? And if you do, how did you figure that out? What was interesting is in the responses when people loved what they did. They were usually operating from their natural gifts, and most of us know that. But the insight that really ticked for me was that people who loved what they did didn't always have an easy time figuring out what that was. Because we're so used to being good at the things that come to us naturally, we don't realize they're special. And if we don't realize they're special, we cannot package them up as gifts and take them out to the world, and that's what the world needs from us. So it was almost like I realized I have the responsibility to figure out the gift I am to the world so I can go give it. That was on a confident day. There were other days that I wasn't so confident, but on the confident days that's what I thought. And at the end of 10 months I was like well, the thing I've always loved to do is teach, mentor, coach, guide. So that's the good news. The bad news is I'm not trained to do any of that. So what do I do now? And I went and got an executive coaching certificate and, as I've seen happen with so many clients since this time, when people get clear on their purpose in the gift they are to the world, then the world lines up to receive that gift. It's so cool. It's one of my favorite things about being a human VA.

Leonora Williamson:

And once I had this clarity on what my gifts were and I had gone through coaching school, I came out of coaching school and my practice grew really quickly with exactly the kind of clients I wanted to serve, and that was no accident. It was the direct result of doing the work to become clear on what my purpose was and if that weren't enough evidence that it's really worth undertaking this process to gain internal clarity. Around that time the phone rang and it was somebody I had met in my networking, who was running the undergraduate business minor at Vanderbilt, who said we have a professor who is supposed to start teaching negotiation in two weeks. Can't do it, can you take the class Now? I would be lying if I sat here and told you that my imposter syndrome was not activated. My imposter syndrome was having a field day, being like you and a Vanderbilt classroom as a college professor. There's no way you're not trained for that.

Leonora Williamson:

And the higher V, who had done all this work on purpose, came back and said if you've just done all this work to figure out that your thing is mentoring, coaching and teaching, how can you say no to the phone call of going to teach at Vanderbilt? So I said yes and just to run through this part quickly, that was in fall of 2019. It started with one class and, like many wonderful things, I kept heaping more on my plate. I'm still waiting for the time when I feel like too much of a good thing is too much. Right now it feels like an honor and joy. I'm a full-time professor at Vanderbilt, teaching, esg and corporate social responsibility. And then I also still have a full load of coaching clients.

Joseph Itaya:

Could you tell us really quickly what ESG is for anybody who's listening, who might not really be familiar with that field or that term?

Leonora Williamson:

Yes, thank you for asking. So in the world of investing, people have often thought of seeking financial returns, and there is a whole school of thought in the world of investing around the globe, not just in the United States, that says maybe we should also look at a company's impact on the environment, on the way it treats the people it encounters, whether as employees or in the supply chain, and how companies are run. And that's not actually a political class, because these questions of how to run a company responsibly and then how to disclose them are really across the political spectrum in the US and around the world.

Joseph Itaya:

As we think about the fusion of human capital and business capital. I want to ask you, please, about diversity and about what that means in the world, especially of international marketing, which you were just talking about. Is diversity an altruistic feel good just do it because it's the right thing to do, ideal, and does it serve the bottom line? Yeah, and is it a fiscal positive? Is this actually good business sense and how can we think about that when we're trying to market, not just to people who look and live in places like we do, but when we now live in this global community?

Leonora Williamson:

Yeah, what a beautiful question, joseph, and I think it's one that a lot of really smart and caring and compassionate people are spending time thinking about. So my answer is my answer, as opposed to some, you know, item from the like canon of business wisdom. But I'll give you my opinion on it, and that opinion begins with first defining what diversity is, because it's one of those terms that people throw out a lot, and I think again, if you ask 10 people, you would have 10 different definitions of diversity. So, first of all, the lens on diversity that's getting the most attention these days, particularly in college, right in the wake of the end of affirmative action, is, of course, racial and ethnic diversity, and I think that matters a great deal, particularly because we do not live in a post racist society in the US yet. Hopefully we'll get there and there are differences of lived experiences with populations that should probably be taken into account when we're thinking about access to opportunities, right? The same thing is true in businesses and, like I said a few minutes ago, if you take the example of women in business, for example, that we would be 50% of the population but attracting 7% of venture capital, something is wrong there, something's not working. The inflow of capital to businesses doesn't mirror the demographics of the population of this country, right? So diversity, in terms of making sure that you get people of different identities be that racial, be that gender, be that sexuality to the table, is very important. And if you get people to the table and you don't tap into the richness the diversity offers, then why bother? So the richness the diversity offers comes from much more than just a person's identity. It might also have to do with age, it might also have to do with experience, it might have to do with wiring introvert or extrovert, that kind of thing, and so diversity is actually a much bigger concept than we sometimes treat it as today in academia and in the business world. So that's the first thing I'd say.

Leonora Williamson:

The diversity takes a lot of different forms, and I'll just give you a quick example. I have a class at Vanderbilt right now. That's a seminar with 18 students and on paper it looks very diverse, but there's a career coaching component to this class. We did a personality assessment and the class is incredibly homogeneous in terms of our personality makeup, almost to the point where they're by wiring only two people who are ever likely to give me a dissenting opinion, because they're wire, just like me, even though our gender and racial and ethnic and religious identities are different, right? So, first of all, diversity is complex nuance and does not have the uniform definition.

Leonora Williamson:

And, to answer your question about the bottom line, that's what gets to the second thing I said, which is you want to make sure that you assemble a team of people thinking about a problem that represent all sorts of different lived experiences and viewpoints and wiring, and if you don't have the systems within a company or an organization or a school to harness that, then you know you're leaving a lot of value on the table.

Leonora Williamson:

And there are a lot of studies that show, without any shadow of a doubt, that diverse teams, be they gender diverse, be they diverse by race, be they diverse by gender identity, outperform heterogeneous teams, or sorry, homogeneous teams, almost all the time, and so that argument would support saying that there's a good bottom line reason to have diverse teams.

Leonora Williamson:

I would also say from my just empirical evidence with talking to students and clients who think about diversity in their work, that it's more than just something that shows up on the bottom line. A lot of people believe that it is a moral imperative, right and whether businesses can and should have moral imperatives is a question of a lot of debate, but a lot of people right now believe that diversity, equity and inclusion are moral imperatives. And, just from taking this out of science and research perspective, it's more fun and you get better outcomes when you work on diverse teams, as long as you know how to hold space for diverse opinions. And if a person or organization or institution isn't willing to do the work of creating and holding space for different opinions, then they're never going to reap the beautiful fruits that diversity yields us in this life.

Joseph Itaya:

You said something wonderful very early on when you were talking about the how business can hold up a mirror for society. You talked about your studies in Russia and I want to ask you how you're seeing that happen in the world today and especially as we look forward, because, as professors, as students ourselves and then speaking to our students who are thinking how am I going to get a job in this new ecosystem, how am I going to find my own place in the world? Bring it back to that sense of like where business is going and the fusion of business and society, and how important or maybe not so important it is for businesses to be thinking about how to do social good, no matter what industry they're in. Yeah, how can our students position themselves to find a place within that market?

Leonora Williamson:

Yeah. So it's a great question that I'll answer in two parts. One is just a little bit about the state of thinking in terms of the intersection of humanity and business and then second some tactical thoughts that higher students can wrestle with that question for themselves. To answer the first question, what is the state of affairs with the intercession of business and humanity today? If you look at Gen Z, right, so Gen Z are people who I think are ranging in age right now between 10 and 25. I think that's the band, that's a group of people who tends to view their role in the world much more expansively than generations that have come before it. In general, the Gen Zers that I know are really interested in the purpose of a business, how it treats its customers and employees, how it treats its supply chain partners, and not just in whether it's making financial returns for its investors, and businesses are aware of this.

Leonora Williamson:

So many businesses are putting into place DEI programs, publishing sustainability metrics, buying carbon offsets, a lot of things that might contribute to mitigating climate change or systemic racism or some of the other issues that plague us, and this is sort of a US focused comment. To be clear, not every business is doing that Not every business that says they're doing it actually is. That's greenwashing. Some businesses that are doing it, like BlackRock, are being asked not to talk about it. That's green hushing, right? There are a whole bunch of different rules around disclosures and what a company has to share that are coming out Because I always ask my students okay, you care about the environment and you also want to wear clothes. How do you know who to buy clothes from? Right? So the disclosures really matter and in fact, a lot of the trusted brands for people who care about sustainability, as an example, are trusted because of the stories the companies themselves have told about their sustainability efforts. So we're living in a time when the intersection of humanity and I would put what we do to the climate in that bucket right, because it's a planet with finite resources that more and more people have to share every year, every minute.

Leonora Williamson:

So those considerations, I think for the younger you do skew demographically, the more important those considerations become. Businesses are aware of that and they're working to catch up, Some from a place of deep authenticity and conviction that it's the right place to do, some just because of market pressures that they should right. And we could have a debate about whether the reasons matter. Right. What do we deem as being pure reasons versus mercenary reasons? But the state of affairs is that most people are trying to do something, whether they like it or not. In terms of how a student can think about where they fit into that.

Leonora Williamson:

You know, joseph, one of the things that I say to my students all the time is that as you begin to look at the world around you and figure out your place in it, you have got to look inward before you look outward, because if you just start looking around at what's available to you without having done the work to put into place any criteria or guardrails for what you want to care about, you may end up in a situation that doesn't fulfill you.

Leonora Williamson:

And so there are things that you can do. The Ikegai is one concept you and I both love We've talked about this where you can put some processor and asking yourself what gift am I to the world? It comes back to this concept that we've talked about before and lets you know what gift you are to the world. You can't go match yourself to what the world needs, and jobs that are available is literally the manifestation of what the world needs right now. So the biggest thing that I can advise students is do the work to figure out who you are, what you care about, where you wanna have impact, and then talk to people who are having impact in those fields, whether or not you think you wanna work in their field. Do not say, oh well, I think I wanna be in marketing and this person's in finance, if I won't talk to them. No, and don't even ask them about marketing and finance. Ask them about the impact they're having on the world and how they got there, and you will open doors for yourself of what you had never dreamed.

Joseph Itaya:

Professor Williamson, thank you on the bottom of my heart for coming and spending some time with us today as we talked about communication and business and your story and inspiring our students and students around the world to be thinking about what their stories might be and how to turn that into something that is profitable both for your wallet, but also in your heart and soul, something that creates more prosperity for yourself and for others, by thinking about what you were put on this earth to do, what your utility is and how you can unleash those amazing powers and opportunities for yourself and for others. I really look forward to our next conversation. You have so many gifts to share that we haven't even touched on yet. So hopefully this is the beginning of a Professor Williams and series that we can begin to work towards. So thank you very much for joining us today and giving us these great insights into identity, into purpose and into communication, and we will see you next time.

Leonora Williamson:

Thank you for the gift of the invitation to talk to your listeners. I really appreciate it and I will always jump at any opportunity to talk to you. So thank you so much.

Joseph Itaya:

To learn more about the Master of Science in Digital Media Management program, visit us on the web at dmmuscedu.

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