Whitney Johnson
Whitney Johnson brings a strategic eye and long-range vision given her multifaceted professional experience. In addition to great success as a Wall Street investment equity analyst, she co-founded (with Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen) and managed Rose Park Advisors–Disruptive Innovation Fund. As a classically trained pianist, she has special insight into discipline, practice, and perseverance.
Whitney is an expert on disruptive innovation and personal disruption and specializes in equipping leaders to harness change by implementing the proprietary framework she codified in the critically acclaimed book Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work. She’s been named a Thinkers50, Leading Business Thinker Globally, and a Finalist for Top Thinker on Talent, 2015. Her guests as host of the Disrupt Yourself Podcast include such luminaries as Patrick Pichette, former CFO of Google, and Garry Ridge, CEO of WD-40.
Whitney coaches C-Suite executives across a variety of industries and has a deep understanding of how executives can create or destroy value. Her approach to coaching is grounded in the disruptive innovation theory, based on the premise that the individual is the fundamental unit of the disruption. Building on this foundation of personal accountability, she works with executives using the stakeholder-centered coaching approach devised by Marshall Goldsmith: Change must come from within, but it is facilitated by the ecosystem.
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Confession: I was a high school cheerleader.
This was a dearly held girlhood dream, an aspiration I worked hard to make happen.
Hard work wasn’t foreign to me. I was a good student, and had, at a young age, been willing to get up early and practice piano. But that was more my mother’s dream for me than my dream for myself.
In fact, I would major in music in college, somewhat unwillingly – mom again, inserting her ambition where mine was inchoate – and exit with a BA that was the culmination of many years of consistent effort. But I didn’t possess any particular desire to perform (much less the drive demanded to be a concert pianist) or any realistic venue in which to do so. At that point in my life, being a cheerleader had been the one passion that I had articulated to myself clearly enough to make it happen.
Post-university life was headed in a different direction anyway; at about the same time I graduated, my husband completed his MS and we transplanted to New York City so that he could pursue a PhD at Columbia University. I found Manhattan intimidating; I would never have moved there on my own. But my husband’s program in microbiology was going to take five to seven years. There were bills to pay and food to put on the table. I needed – and wanted – a serious job, so I turned to Wall Street.
I had never taken a course in accounting, finance, or economics. No business credentials whatsoever. No connections in New York City. Looking back, I’ve often marveled that I attempted something that I felt so singularly ill-equipped to do. I landed a secretarial position, a not atypical entry-level role for a woman on Wall Street in the late 1980s.
It being the era of Liar’s Poker and Bonfire of the Vanities, there was near my desk a bullpen of almost exclusively male, aspiring 20-something stockbrokers. They spent their days cold-calling prospects, enduring frequent hang-ups, trying to persuade prospective investors to pounce on the stock du jour. The pressure was intense to make their numbers – phone calls logged, accounts opened, and dollar amounts sold. The hard sell was always in play. One of the default persuasions I heard them employ again and again was this: “Throw down your pompoms and get in the game.”
I was offended. I was offended as a woman by the blatantly sexist tone of this challenge; quit being womanly and act like a man. But this also offended me personally as a former cheerleader, a woman for whom cheerleading had been a highly sought-after rite of passage. I hadn’t come up in the era when girls’ athletics were commonly available in school or community. Cheerleading was my sport and an important opportunity for extracurricular participation at a time when opportunities for girls were much more limited than they are today.
Then one day, sitting at the same desk, listening to the same routine of cold-calling across the way, hearing “throw down your pompoms and get in the game” yet again, I had an epiphany. Suddenly, the challenge felt personal in a different way and I thought, “I need to throw down my pompoms and get in the game.”
I was, for the foreseeable future, the primary breadwinner for my family. Why would I settle for earning X, if I could earn 10X? Why would I be a Wall Street spectator, bench warmer, or cheerleader for others, if I could, with extra work and discipline, become a game-changing player? Was I looking for a supporting role or did I want to be a star?
This was a pivotal moment.
I enrolled in accounting and finance courses at night, doggedly pursuing the dream of moving from the third (or fourth or fifth) string to becoming a starter in the Wall Street game. A few years passed and the hard work was coupled with the good fortune of having a boss who was willing to build a bridge for me. I moved from support staff to investment banking analyst. From there, I moved into investment research, becoming an Institutional Investor-ranked stock analyst. Then I ventured into entrepreneurship with Harvard’s Clayton Christensen, and now I’m an executive coach, speaker, writer, and all-around thinker about career management. I want to help put others at the helm in driving their own success stories by moving from the sideline of their professional lives to center field.
For a long time, I used the “throw down your pompoms and get in the game” experience to encourage other women and girls to do what I had done and turn a ho-hum job – or no job at all – into an exciting, growing, fulfilling career path. After all, research demonstrates that our cultural norm is still to cast women in supporting roles and that most women still feel more societal approval if they stick to the sidelines, offering support and encouragement to others, rather than leading themselves. I wanted every woman to have the tools, especially the confidence, to make their career dreams a reality. I still do, but with this caveat: Is the dream really theirs, or is it someone else’s dream for them? In fact, is it my dream for them, rather than their own?
Today, women constitute 50-plus percent of both the workforce and the university population, and though we still lag behind men in higher-level positions across most sectors, the demographics over time favor us to continue to improve in career opportunity – for those for whom this is the dream.
But the demographics also indicate a growing loss of dreams among our male counterparts who are unemployed in unprecedented numbers; the United States ranks 22nd in male labor force participation out of the 23 developed nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Almost 32 percent of men 20 and older are without paid work, as reported in Nicholas Eberstadt’s book, Men without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis.1 These are men, Eberstadt alleges, who for the most part are not seeking work. They are occasionally at home as primary caregivers to their children, but not often. They are voluntarily unemployed and for the most part, they are watchers of television and players of video games.
This is a complex problem, heavily, though not entirely, rooted in the consequences of the recent Great Recession. I am concerned that this is a symptom of demoralization in our society and want to issue a new rallying cry to these men: Throw down your joysticks and get in the (real) game. We all need to be dreaming. We need an objective to strive for, a purposeful occupation that gives meaning to our lives.
I began my career as a secretary, a cheerleader of sorts for men who were doing the really interesting work I longed to do. Once I got into the game I wanted to play, I became a cheerleader for women, encouraging them to believe in their ability to become the stars of their own stories. Now I feel compelled to be a cheerleader for men as well, challenging them to be the masters of their own destiny, the scripters of their own leading role, not junkies of the latest role-playing game.
It doesn’t really matter what your dream is so long as it’s something of worth. Career dreams are great. Ditto dreams for your family, your parenting, your children. Perhaps you want to invent something, start a business, or engage in an artistic endeavor. Maybe philanthropy is your avenue to stardom, or volunteerism. I have a long-time friend whose most dearly held dream for retirement is to volunteer with hospice, helping people at the end of life compose their personal history as a legacy for their loved ones and bring the curtain down gracefully on the pageant that is uniquely theirs.
Our dreams may change; they probably should. As we grow wiser and more experienced, inevitably older, we value some things more and others less than in earlier days. But our need for fulfillment, for the mystery of new horizons, the challenge of opportunities to learn and solve significant problems, to contribute to the improvement of our neighborhood or the world, in large ways and small, should never leave us. We may move from one passion project to another, disrupting ourselves again and again as one dream is abandoned or fulfilled and another takes its place. Whatever your dream(s), I challenge you to throw down your pompoms, or your joystick, and get in the game.
Until you take them up again. Because true confession: My first dream will probably be my last. I am a cheerleader at heart.