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The Art and Science of Managing the New Global Corporation

Marilyn Carlson Nelson: March 9, 2006; Running Time: 59:09

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

In a motivational talk aimed at the next generation of business leaders, Marilyn Carlson Nelson utilizes her history with the sprawling, family-owned Carlson hospitality empire as a case study.

Her father began the business during the Depression, with the ambition of “building a company to last.” He ruled with what she describes as a “command and control” style. As the company moved into the travel and hotel business following World War II, her father organized the different divisions to compete against each other. After 50 years, he relinquished the company to his daughter—a “pretty innovative” decision, she calls it.

Carlson Nelson determined that the challenge of taking the company global required diverging both from his management style and organizational structure. “I told people we were going to be more democratic, consensual and collaborative. Some people thought, ‘Ah-hah, this is predictable, it’s a woman.’” But she believed the business model and corporate culture had to change. “We would remain stewards of financial capital, but we had to add stewardship of human capital.”

She emphasized integrity and loyalty among managers and interdependence among divisions. Above all, she stressed “respect for the long-term,” so that profits never outweighed sustaining human or natural resources. Carlson Nelson came to believe there could be a “positive application of business in addressing problems of the world.”

Her values seem to have taken hold. When the World Trade Center towers fell on 9/11, a nearby hotel manager turned his ballroom into a rescue station. And more recently, the manager of one T.G.I.Friday’s restaurant hit by Hurricane Katrina rigged up a truck engine to keep the restaurant’s refrigerators running, and served up food and drink to desperate citizens.

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

About the Speaker

Marilyn Carlson Nelson

Chairman and CEO, Carlson Companies

Marilyn Carlson Nelson is co-owner and leader of one of America's largest privately held companies, with systemwide sales under its brands totalling $20.9 billion in 2003. Those brands include Regent International Hotels, Radisson Hotels & Resorts, Park Inns and Park Plaza hotels, and T.G.I. Friday's and Pick Up Stix restaurants. Carlson brands are present in more than 140 countries and employ more than 190,000 people worldwide.

Carlson Nelson is a member of the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum and in 2004 co-chaired the forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. In 2002, she was appointed by President Bush to chair the National Women's Business Council, which serves as an independent source of advice to the White House and Congress on issues affecting women in business. In 2004 and 2005, Forbes magazine selected Marilyn as one of “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.” She currently serves on the boards of Exxon Mobil, the Mayo Clinic Foundation and the Committee to Encourage Corporate Philanthropy, and is a member of The Business Roundtable.

Carlson Nelson graduated from Smith College with a degree in international economics,and then attended the Sorbonne in Paris and the Institute des Hautes Etudes Economiques et Politiques in Geneva, Switzerland, to study political science and international economics.

Marilyn Carlson Nelson

Carlson Companies website

About the Host

About the Host

MIT Sloan School of Management

The MIT Sloan School of Management, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the world’s leading business schools — conducting cutting-edge research and providing management education to top students from more than 60 countries. The School is part of MIT’s rich intellectual tradition of education and research.

MIT Sloan began in 1914 as engineering administration curriculum in the MIT Department of Economics and Statistics. The scope and depth of this educational focus have grown steadily in response to advances in the theory and practice of management to today’s broad-based management school.

A program offering a master’s degree in management was established in 1925. The world’s first university-based executive education program — the MIT Sloan Fellows — was created in 1931 under the sponsorship of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., an 1895 MIT graduate who was then chairman of General Motors. A MIT Sloan Foundation grant established the MIT School of Industrial Management in 1952 with a charge of educating the “ideal manager.”