Link to the episode can be found here.
00:00:00
>> CHEN: Welcome to the Excelability podcast. This is a brand-new series of conversations on success with people who happen to have a disability. Together we’ll uncover the attitudes, habits, techniques, and practices that enable these individuals to achieve astounding success.
00:00:35
>> FLAUM: I’m a stammerer, a stutterer, and have been since I was five years old. Because of this problem, adversity that I needed to overcome, I would just have to be smarter than the competition and work harder. You know, I happen to be a stutterer. I have a speech impediment, of course, but then everyone has some kind of disability.
00:01:03
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): This happened to be mine. Stutterers call the telephone the devil’s instrument. You tend to stutter more on the phone.
>> CHEN: Welcome to the third episode of the Excelability podcast. I’m your host, Jack Chen. Today we speak with marketing executive Sander Flaum. Sander serves as chairman and CEO of Flaum Navigators, a marketing consulting firm which he founded and which serves the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.
00:01:40
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): Previously, Sander ran marketing firm Euro RSCG Becker, which he grew to number two in the world. Sander serves on a number of corporate and nonprofit boards and has written several bestselling books on leadership. While others who happen to have a stutter shied away from jobs requiring a large amount of speaking, such as marketing, Sander not only ran towards the opportunities but has achieved extraordinary success.
00:02:08
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): I’m excited to share the wisdom and lessons that Sander has learned in his career on his way to success with you today. You can find information about this podcast and previous and future episodes at www.teamexcelability.com. That’s www-dot-team-E-X-C-E-L-ability-dot-com.
00:02:30
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): You can follow us on Facebook at team Excelability or on Twitter, @teamxlability. Hey, Sander, thanks for being available to chat with us today and to talk about this really interesting area of disability and success. I really appreciate you taking the time out to talk to us.
>> FLAUM: Always good to be with you, Jack.
>> CHEN: Thanks, Sander. All right, well, let’s get started. Can you describe your disability and describe how it impacts your day-to-day life to, say, someone who doesn’t already have your disability?
00:03:03
>> FLAUM: Sure. Well, I’m a stammerer. I’m a stutterer and have been since I was five years old, and frankly, it does impact my life, being in the communications field, having a consultancy in the pharmaceutical industry. You know, you have to be fluent, so I have to practice my targets and stay fluent every day, or else it’s a distraction to my clients, so I think about this impediment in a constant way.
00:03:32
>> CHEN: Can you describe what the personal experience is like for someone who has a stutter? Say, what does it feel like for the experience of someone who has a stutter?
>> FLAUM: It’s always been challenging because if you as a stutterer are interviewing with a couple of other bright people who are fluent and you are stuttering your way through the interview, you’re not getting the job most of the time. They’ll give it to the fluent speaker, so it’s always been a challenge.
00:04:01
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): It’s always been a challenge since I was a kid.
>> CHEN: So the experience is kind of–would you describe it as you always feel like you’re behind the eight ball or there’s something stacked against you?
>> FLAUM: Sure, and there is. It’s this–this is the adversity that I’ve always had to come across. I mean, when I was, you know, younger, my ambition was to get into politics. I’ve always loved politics, but of course, you are a frequent speaker, a public speaker in politics, and having a bad stutter is not gonna make me a politician for sure.
00:04:33
>> CHEN: Can you talk a little bit about how your stuttering began? Did it happen in toddlerhood, childhood, or later on in life, and can you talk about what your experience was like, how you felt socially, emotionally, psychologically, how that process was for you?
>> FLAUM: Well, my stuttering began, actually, when I was five years old. My sister was born. I don’t–that–no connection with her, but as we subsequently discerned from the NIH, stuttering is a genetic disorder.
00:05:02
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): My uncle was a bad stutterer. I mean, he was quite a genius, very successful composer, arranger, but he was in fact a stutterer. I discerned after a lot of research that my stuttering occurred from him. In about 80% of the cases it just disappears. It starts early in life, but within three or four years it just disappears in 80% of the cases, Jack. For mine it did not because my mom, who really tried to help me with it, put a little too much pressure on my speech, and that was it.
00:05:36
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): What we learn about it right now is that no pressure on speech at all if you have a stuttering child, and it’ll go away most of the time, but with me it was always, “Let’s go to a speech therapy program.” I probably went to every speech therapy program known to man, so the stuttering just got a little bit worse.
>> CHEN: And so emotionally, psychologically, how was it for you at the time when you realized that you had the disability?
00:06:04
>> FLAUM: When I was very young, of course, it was very depressing that I had to stutter, and I went to all these different speech therapy programs at school, and my mom just took me everywhere. It really didn’t help, and this one school I went to, this yeshiva, the rabbi would ask me a question, and I couldn’t get it out. I knew the answer but couldn’t get it out, and then I got hit by him, spanked by him with a ruler on my hand.
00:06:33
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): Of course, I couldn’t get it out, and finally I just couldn’t deal with it and told my mom, and she pulled me out of there. I went to public school, and it helped my speech a lot getting out of there. There’s some girl that I met when I was in the sixth grade, I think, and I called her one day, and she says, “You know, a painter came to the house, and he spoke just like you. He stuttered very badly,” and I just hung up on her.
00:07:00
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): That was it, so the impact is always there. You know, the kids make fun of your speech, of course, ’cause you can’t get the words out and all that, and it’s always challenging from both the social and the emotional way, but I still remember that telephone call with that girl when I was in sixth grade about the painter who stuttered. It’s still in my mind.
>> CHEN: Right. So what habits, attitudes, or ways of thinking at the time do you think helped you overcome the challenges socially, emotionally, psychologically?
00:07:33
>> FLAUM: Mentorship really helps a lot. I had a wonderful English teacher at the boys’ high school where I went to high s–I was a baseball player back then, so I had a great mentor there. Richard Rampell, who was my English teacher, you know, really understood the challenges, and he really helped me a lot, mentored me a lot. So the two mentors in my life with my stuttering, of course, was my mom, who was the best mentor, and Richard Rampell, my English teacher.
00:08:01
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): What I learned from them was because of this problem, adversity that I needed to overcome, I would just have to be smarter than the competition and work harder, and that stayed with me all of my life up until this day. Smarter and work harder, and that was it, and that’s been the story of my life since then.
>> CHEN: Yup, smarter and work harder, absolutely. So we may have talked about this already. What were some of the biggest obstacles or pain points for you growing up with a stutter?
00:08:35
>> FLAUM: You know, I remember going to the movies with some of my pals and watching a cartoon called Porky Pig. Now, many of our listeners, they’re not familiar with Porky Pig ’cause they finally stopped doing the Porky Pig cartoon, but Porky Pig was a stutterer, and so I was sitting, you know, in the s–movies with my buddies, and they kind of looked at me at the corner of their eye, not saying anything ’cause they knew how hurtful it was.
00:09:02
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): Of course, if I knew there was a Porky Pig cartoon coming on, I never would have wanted to see this–these movies, but that was challenging, and thank goodness someone finally put enough pressure on Walt Disney Studios to pull the Porky Pig cartoons off the air. The growing up, of course, was, you know, high school, speaking in class, presentation skills. I’ll never forget that.
00:09:28
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): I was running for the presidency of boys’ high against the captain of the boys’ high track team, and you had to get up and speak, of course, and a Spanish teacher who was very cold, Mrs. Roth–I’ll never forget that, very cold, never really associated with any of the kids, when I got up to speak in front of the auditorium, she came in through the back door, arms folded, just to hear me speak, waved at me, smiled at me, and then after I got through, she walked out, but my speech wasn’t very good, and of course the captain of the track team won the presidency handily.
00:10:05
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): I had several blocks as I was speaking, so yeah, that was–that was a little traumatic for me.
>> CHEN: Yeah, and it sounds like that continued to reinforce the fear that you had that your disability would impact your whole life.
>> FLAUM: Exactly, exactly, but I think the advice–when I really got into trouble with my speech, the advice from my mom and Mr. Rampell was, “You just have to work harder and be smarter,” and that’s been the story of my life.
00:10:35
>> CHEN: Can you talk a little bit about in your younger years what impact you thought your disability would have on your future success?
>> FLAUM: If you follow where stutterers went, go on in their career, most of them went into careers where they didn’t have to speak. Engineers became engineers. Biologists became accountants, and I just decided to go the other way.
00:11:03
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): I wasn’t gonna do it, so I went into liberal arts, communications, the PR field at first, became a speech writer a long, long time ago, but I just decided that I was not going to follow the path of what most stutterers did.
>> CHEN: And what led you to that decision?
>> FLAUM: I just decided that, you know, based on all this advice, mentoring, that I wanted to do what I enjoyed whether I was a stutterer or not, and I enjoyed communications a lot, and that’s what I did.
00:11:35
>> CHEN: I love that. That means that what you’re trying to say is that Mr. Rampell and your mom gave you the tool that you needed to be able to go above and beyond your disability and do what you wanted to do rather than what the disability would have you do.
>> FLAUM: Absolutely, and to that point, Jack, you know, I hope that anyone with a disability, no matter what it is, finds a good mentor. Mentorship is so important. I mean, I–that’s what I tell my students, my MBA students.
00:12:04
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): If you don’t have a mentor now, go find one. We all need somebody wise to bounce things off when things get tough.
>> CHEN: And what do you think makes a really good mentor?
>> FLAUM: A really good mentor has a feeling for you, what your issues are, what the world around you is like, and what one has to do to move forward and overcome the fears and disabilities that they may have. How do you overcome it?
00:12:30
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): What do you do? Who do you meet? That kind of thing.
>> CHEN: Support and advocacy sound like the two keys there for a mentor.
>> FLAUM: Right.
>> CHEN: Now, I know it took a lot of work for you to become fluent. Can you describe what that journey was like for you and what you think enabled you to become successful at that?
>> FLAUM: In my late 20s, actually, I was still stuttering, still having problems, the usual problems at work, you know, but moving up within this big pharmaceutical company, not as fast as I wanted to.
00:13:02
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): Then on TV I saw a man who was a very bad stutterer, happened to be a chiropractor, very bad stutterer. They showed the film of his stuttering very badly. Then he spoke during this interview of a place called the Hollins Communications Research Institute in Roanoke, Virginia that he went to, and in a very intensive three-week program, day and night, that after the program he was fluent for the first time in his life, so I took a leave of absence, unpaid, with my family, you know, unpaid with a couple of kids, went down to Hollins for three weeks of intensive, very intensive therapy.
00:13:44
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): For the first time in my life, after the three weeks, I was fluent. The key, though, for stutterers is you have to work on following what you’ve learned at Hollins, the targets that you are taught during this, the telephone.
00:14:00
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): I mean, still right in front of my phone right now it says, “Full breath and antilude [inaudible]–amplitude contour.” Stutterers tend to speak on exhaled breath. Fluent speakers are always speaking on a full breath, and that’s one of the things we learned at Hollins, so yeah, that was the first time in my life I was fluent, but then you find, you know, the fluency sounds good, but then after a couple of weeks, three weeks, a month, if you are not following what you learned at Hollins and how to redevelop your speech patterns, it’ll come back, and many people, I’d say more than 60% [inaudible] go back for a refresher course because they forgot how to use the targets they learned at Hollins.
00:14:49
>> CHEN: You’ve been mentioning a target. What is a target?
>> FLAUM: You learn several targets at Hollins. One is full breath and amplitude contour. Amplitude contour is you start speaking with a softness to the word, and then you go up, and then you go down again.
00:15:06
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): There are several targets, how to pronounce hard consonants, the Ks, Ts, Cs. You always try to skip over that and go to the next word. Like “kick,” you didn’t hear the K, kick, and that’s how you do it. Those are the targets that you are taught to follow, and there’s a list of them right in front of my phone still to this day.
00:15:34
>> CHEN: That brings me to my next question. On a day-to-day basis you still need to maintain, as you’ve been talking about. How do you keep yourself in fluency in a daily practice?
>> FLAUM: Many stutterers have different techniques. There’s still a group that meets every single Wednesday night at a Starbucks on–Starbucks on 39th Street and Broadway, and there’s a practice group, and you work on your targets. There’s, like, maybe five to ten people who are there every single week still to this day and work on practicing targets, speaking to one another in conversation.
00:16:10
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): With me, I have a radio show every week, every Tuesday morning called “The Leader’s Edge” on Public Service Radio, and in order to prep for that, in the gym I–I’m in the gym in the morning at 5:45. I read the scrolls on the TV sets, and I practice my targets reading the scrolls so I am okay for the–I’m okay for the radio show, I’m fluent on my radio show.
00:16:39
>> CHEN: I love it. That practice has enabled you to do something that you may not have dreamed that you could do when you was a child, which is to have a radio show. I love that.
>> FLAUM: Exactly, exactly.
>> CHEN: I love it.
>> FLAUM: A stutterer with a radio show, right.
>> CHEN: Beautiful. Look at that, beautiful. What are some of your daily career tasks on a very practical level that are impacted because you’ve had a disability?
00:17:04
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): I know obviously having a radio show, you have to practice beforehand, but what are some of the other things that are common tasks or challenging tasks that are perhaps your nemesis because of your disability?
>> FLAUM: Well, Jack, you know, stutterers call the telephone the devil’s instrument because you tend to focus more–you tend to stutter more on the phone than you do one on one, so my challenge, really, the biggest challenge I have is pitching a client, getting–convincing a client that we’re the right company for them to go with by phone, very difficult because it’s a lot of pressure on you.
00:17:48
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): You know, you have to really be smart as hell, saying the right thing, focus on the client needs, and you forget about the speech, you know? You focus on that client needs and get the business, so it’s a whole other thing on the phone.
00:18:03
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): It’s very challenging for stutterers on the phone. The people that I help a little bit with their speech impediment have a tough time with being on the phone. That’s why I have them come to my office instead, and we can speak about speech therapy here in the office.
>> CHEN: It’s fascinating that you say that the telephone, it’s much more difficult. In your experience, why is that more difficult?
>> FLAUM: When I–you’re looking at a piece of something. You’re not speaking one-on-one.
00:18:32
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): You’re not looking at the person. You don’t see the smile on the other person’s face. It’s you and this thing in your hand.
>> CHEN: Sander, you’ve been the leader for a number of prestigious companies, including CEO of advertising for Euro RSCG Becker, where you took the firm to number two in the world, marketing director for Lederle Laboratories for ten years, now Pfizer, as a member of the advisory board for Marathon Pharmaceuticals and CEO now of your own firm, Flaum Navigators, where you counsel a number of the top Fortune 500 pharma companies.
00:19:08
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): You’ve written a number of leadership books that have become bestsellers and serve on the board of your alma mater, the Ohio State University. Notice how I did say the Ohio State University.
>> FLAUM: Yeah, I noticed that, right.
>> CHEN: Can you describe how your disability had an impact, say by needing to overcome it or serving as a driver of your work or in some other influence capacity for your success?
00:19:33
>> FLAUM: A disability like this, you cannot let it get in the way of your goals. My goal was to become head of the firm, and I worked very, very hard, and the products that my group handled were always number one. We did a lot of innovative things in the firm. I never let the stuttering get in the way of moving the comp–moving my division forward, and that was it.
00:20:03
>> FLAUM: It never got in the way. I just–we did it. I had some tough times at certain meetings with presentation skills. I didn’t maybe practice enough before I got up to speak. I probably should have. I focused too much on what I’m saying, not how I would say it, and stutterers always have to focus on how, then what, targets first and then what, which I didn’t do, so some days it–were a lot worse than others.
00:20:31
>> CHEN: And you say you didn’t let it get in the way. What does that mean practically for you?
>> FLAUM: My ambition–I come from a working class family, okay? Never had any money. I got to Ohio State ’cause I was a baseball player, and I unfortunately got cut after pitching my third game, but I was a baseball player, and I loved it. Worked my tail off to stay there, had a million jobs, did the “Dirty Dancing” routine during the summer to make enough money to go back to school ’cause my mom just didn’t have enough money to [inaudible], but she never knew I got cut from the team.
00:21:07
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): I never told her. I never wanted to come home again, but that was it. You know, when you grow up in a working class family, there’s no one there to help you. There’s no one to make a telephone call, Jack, to say, “Listen, I want you to hire my son,” or, “I want him to get into Harvard. I’ll–I just wrote a check for 100,000 bucks for Harvard, blah, blah,” you know, that kind of thing.
00:21:31
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): That doesn’t happen for a working class woman or man. You have to do it on your own, and that was it. It was–I knew that it was only me that had to do it. There was nobody making telephone calls for me. I had to do it, period, and that was it.
>> CHEN: In your business career, can you describe an obstacle that seemed at the time insurmountable and how you managed to overcome it, how you managed to tackle it?
>> FLAUM: When I was running the big agency, you do a pitch.
00:22:01
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): You pitch against competitive agencies. Most clients that I had, you know, invite three agencies in, and you pitch for the product, and that was a challenge. You know, sometimes you were standing outside of the conference room listening to your competitor who was there before you with their pitches, and, you know, you say, “Wow, terrific idea. Wow, so articulate, so great,” and then, of course, you had to come in, and you had to introduce your team and give a short bio on each of the members of your team.
00:22:36
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): I had to be good. Not–I mean, more than good, I had to be great. We had to win the business, so that was always a lot of–a lot of pressure because of the adversity. I didn’t want to block or stammer my head off there, but, you know, there’s a lot of tension on you during these pitches, right? You have to be great or you’re not gonna get the business.
>> CHEN: Mm-hmm. When you’re in a situation like that, do you think that others know about your disability?
00:23:05
>> FLAUM: What I do now when–I have been doing since I’ve been teaching. I’m an adjunct professor of, you know, management science. What I’ve been doing at the opening class is say, “Look, the important thing, students, is the following. I don’t care how you say it. I’m focused on what you have to say, so some of you have an accent coming from another place.”
00:23:29
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): “Some of you have–you know, a little shy about speaking, and some of you may have a speech impediment like me. I happen to be a stutterer,” so the first day of class, Jack, I come out and talk about my adversity, the stammer, and that helps me a lot during the course of the class, so the pressure’s now off me. They know I’m a stutterer.
>> CHEN: What’s something that you learned later on your career as someone with a disability that you wish you knew in the beginning of your career?
00:24:02
>> FLAUM: Just come out and talk about your disability, which I never did until recently. You know–recently, the last 15 years. It’s easier for me now to talk about it, being, you know, mature, a leader of an agency, you know, having a major consulting company for the pharmaceutical industry. It’s a lot easier at this stage of my life to talk about the speech impediment and some of the things that I did, some of the problems I had early on and what I did to kind of overcome the tension and fear of speaking.
00:24:38
>> CHEN: So what led you to change, say, your tactic from now coming out and disclosing your disability as opposed to in the beginning and not disclosing it?
>> FLAUM: You know, I think some of the stories that have been written about me being a stutterer, you know, a couple of stories–and that’s helped. Of course, there’s–you know, you try to conceal everything, but then it’s okay later on in life when you’re a little more mature, when you’re more comfortable with yourself, to say, you know, “I happen to be a stutterer.”
00:25:11
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): “I happen to have a speech impediment,” of course, but then everyone has some kind of disability. This happened to be mine.
>> CHEN: It sounds like you just started feeling comfortable because people didn’t have as much of a negative reaction as you might have thought.
>> FLAUM: Yeah.
>> CHEN: Can you describe a memorable situation in your career where somebody treated you differently because of your disability and how you dealt with that situation?
00:25:33
>> FLAUM: I went to work for a PR agency, Ruder and Finn. I’m not gonna mention names of these people. He died recently. Harry is his first name though. I did well, and then I got transferred to another department, and he was the chairman of this other department, and I came in one day late for a meeting ’cause I was at this other meeting, and he was making fun of my speech right in front of the whole group.
00:26:00
>> CHEN: Oh, wow.
>> FLAUM: So I just spoke back to him. I–you know, I think, “I can’t believe this is what you do.” Two weeks later I got fired. No matter how much money you’re getting paid nor how much prestige you get in this particular job, the big title and everything else, if you’re working for a jerk who mistreats you and other people, get out of there. It’s not worth it. You have to enjoy going to work every day no matter how much you–money you’re making. You have to enjoy–you have to be around good people.
00:26:30
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): If you’re not, get the heck out of there. That’s what I learned.
>> CHEN: Now, some people in your career have thought that you had a mental illness because of your disability. Can you describe that situation and what you did to deal with that?
>> FLAUM: Yeah, that was pretty much–pretty horrible, Jack. For the big pharma company Lederle Laboratories, my division was always number one. The job of general manager for the company opened up. I mean, I was sure I was gonna get it. How can they not give it to me?
00:27:01
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): They gave it to a manufacturing guy instead, and I left the company hurt, depressed, angry, left the company and got recruited to this agency in Manhattan. One day, Christmas Eve I get a call from the former assistant GM. He says, “Sander, I need to see you today for lunch.” I said, “George, I’d love to see you, but, you know, it’s snowing out like crazy. It’s just Christmas Eve.”
00:27:30
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): “Traffic is wild,” and he said, “Sander, it’s really important. You know, I have prostate cancer, and I really don’t know how much longer I have, and it’s really important that I see you,” so got in a car, drove up to Nanuet, New York to Chung Li, the Chinese restaurant that all the Lederle people ate in. You had a martini first, which back then, you know, was–you had to have a martini over lunch, and there was George Bywater sitting there with a martini, and he had one for me as well.
00:28:01
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): As I walked in, I see–said, “George, good to see you, and I’m sorry about the prostate cancer.” He said, “The reason I had to see you, ’cause I’m leaving for Florida tomorrow, and I had to tell you why you didn’t get the job.” I said, “Let me take a sip of the martini first.” So he told me that a member of the board convinced the majority that stuttering is a mental illness, a form of mental illness, and, “We can’t give the job to Sander. He can’t be trusted.” I decided that I was gonna be more successful than anybody there.
00:28:34
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): That’s the thing that really motivated me.
>> CHEN: And I loved how you turned adversity into a motivator.
>> FLAUM: Yeah, you have to, sure.
>> CHEN: You face it every day when it’s someone with a disability.
>> FLAUM: Yes, you do.
>> CHEN: So many young people in their jobs struggle with whether or how to talk about their disability with their employer, whether it’s because they feel they’ll be stigmatized or they just don’t know even how to begin.
00:29:01
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): If you’ve been in that situation before, what advice would you give to others who were struggling with that?
>> FLAUM: Now that I’ve been through it and now that I’m a mentor to many other stutterers, what I tell them is come out and let them know at the outset that I’m a stutterer so they don’t have to listen and kind of cringe a little bit when you block on a word. Let them know at the outset that you are a stutterer, and because of that, you know, I just had to work a little bit harder and try to be a little bit smarter than my competition.
00:29:35
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): They love that. They love that. Human resources people or whomever you’re interviewing with love that you’re saying that, “Because of my stutter, I just have had to work harder and be a little smarter.”
>> CHEN: Are there any funny career stories that you can share with us that have happened because of your disability?
>> FLAUM: Well, I don’t know how funny this is, but when I was in the Army, I was in the officer’s quarters with this big former football player from the University of Tennessee, and he really was making fun of my speech–back then I was still a kid, you know, making fun of my speech.
00:30:11
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): I’d never went through this–Hollins, before Hollins, and I went over to him, and I said, “What did you say?” and he, again, right to my face made fun of my stutter, and I hit him as hard as I could. He didn’t move, did not move. He was a big tackle, University of Tennessee football player, didn’t move. Then he hit me, and I went flying across the room.
00:30:31
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): My nose was broken in two different places. It goes to show you can’t pick on big football players anymore, but that was the end of that, so that’s my army story about–not fun, but having to deal with University of Tennessee football–
>> CHEN: Don’t mess with the University of Tennessee.
>> FLAUM: Yeah, right, right.
>> CHEN: Hey, Sander, is there someone with a disability who you most respect, and if so, what can we learn from that person?
00:31:01
>> FLAUM: The number one, Jack Welch. Jack Welch, who, as you know, “Business Week” called him the greatest CEO of the last 20 years, left–he left–you know, he left GE. He took the company from number ten to number one and kept it at number one as long as he was CEO. Jack Welch was a bad stutterer, and Jack Welch, this brilliant CEO who’s still on–you know, you still see him in the morning on CNBC, Jack became an engineer because he didn’t want to speak, and then Jack got his PhD, University of Chicago I believe.
00:31:38
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): That’s my recollection, came back to GE as an engineer in Massachusetts, and then went to a marketing meeting and said, “You know, I really like this marketing. I like the–I would like to get into marketing.” Human resources said, “Jack, come on. You’re a stutterer. You can’t get into marketing.” This–by the way, this is in his book, “Jack Straight From the Gut,” and he quit.
00:32:01
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): He just quit that day. A couple days later human resources called him back, said, “Jack, we made a terrible mistake. I really apologize. If you come in, you will be in the marketing department starting Monday morning,” and that was it, and Jack with his disability grew the company, you know, moved up and up and up and up, never stopped. Again, work harder and be smarter, and did it, he made it, the greatest CEO of the last 20 years. No one has had this record, by the way. No one has had the record of Jack Welch.
00:32:31
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): The next guy, more current, is Clarence Page. Clarence Page was on “The McLaughlin Report” when McLaughlin was alive every Sunday morning. He is the Washington correspondent for “The Chicago Tribune.” He was our emcee at the American Institute for the Stuttering gala in June. He’s fa–and he’s a stutterer, fabulous guy, and remember, he stuttered as a member of the TV show “The McLaughlin Report” every single Sunday morning, another hero.
00:33:02
>> CHEN: Obviously hard work and being better than the next guy, that’s really the key pillar of your success and the strategies that you used. Are there any other strategies that you would mention for folks who are listening that have contributed to your success?
>> FLAUM: It comes down to a matter of focus. If you have a disability, you understand that you’re just gonna have to be better than the competitor. That’s it. You’re just gonna have to be better.
00:33:31
>> FLAUM (CONTINUED): You’re just gonna have to contribute more. You’re just gonna have to make your boss look a lot better, and most importantly, you have to make a bigger impact on the firm than whomever the competition is. That’s how people with disabilities move forward. Make them look good. Make your boss look good. That’s the key thing. A disability, your focus is what can I do today to move the company forward? What kind of impact can I make? What are some of the issues that I can fix?
00:34:00
>> CHEN: I love how you point to someone with a disability and empower them because they are the ones who actually can do that. They’ve had to make a bigger impact just to stay alive.
>> FLAUM: Exactly right, exactly right.
>> CHEN: I love that. I love that. Thanks, Sander, so much for being available to chat with us. Any other thoughts you want to share on disability and success with our listeners?
>> FLAUM: Well, I think the key thing is to remember that it doesn’t go away. It doesn’t go away, and the challenge that people with a disability has, you have to focus on it.
00:34:31
>> FLAUM: You have to focus on–people keep looking at you. People listen to you, so you can’t be ordinary. You can’t be mediocre. For the rest of your life, every minute, every hour, every day, you need to be better than the competition. There’s no letting up. It’s not easy, but there’s no letting up.
>> CHEN: I love that. Don’t be ordinary. Don’t be mediocre.
>> FLAUM: Correct.
>> CHEN: Well, thanks, Sander. Really appreciate you taking out so much time to chat with us today.
00:35:03
>> CHEN: Thank you for sharing your thoughts on disability and success.
>> FLAUM: Always good to be with you, Jack. Thank you for having me.
>> CHEN: Thanks, Sander. This concludes our conversation on success with marketing executive Sander Flaum.
00:35:26
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): Sander has shown us that hard work and demonstrating that you are better than the competition, engaging quality mentors, discussing your disability as a way to take the pressure off, and when discussing your disability, talking about how it has taught you to work harder and smarter than the next guy have enabled him to achieve incredible success. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and that you’ve learned a tip or two for your own life. You can find out more information about this podcast and other resources by visiting us at www.teamexcelability.com, on Facebook at team Excelability, or on Twitter, @teamxlability.
00:36:12
>> CHEN: Thank you, and have a blessed day.