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| The Art and Science of Managing the New Global Corporation |
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SPEAKER:
Marilyn Carlson Nelson
Chairman and CEO, Carlson Companies
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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.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
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.
Carlson Companies website
NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 59:09.
Dave Weber, Head of Corporate Relations introduces Gabriel R. Bitran, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph Professor of Management.
At 2:59, Bitran introduces Marilyn Carlson Nelson.
At 7:10, Carlson Nelson begins.
At 32:30, Carlson answers questions from the audience.
The information on this page was accurate as of the day the video was added to MIT World. This video was added to MIT World on 2006-06-07.
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