Foreword

I wasn’t surprised when I heard that Joyce was writing a book with the idea of helping younger people deal with this thing called the impostor syndrome. I’ve known Joyce for many years and have always admired her for her compassion, courage, and generosity. I have also been personally inspired by her life’s story, so I was touched and honored when she asked me to write the foreword to this book.

I’ve had a pretty successful life and career by most measures, but there is still many a day when I get out of bed in the morning and feel like I am just not sure I am up to the task. There’s this nagging doubt in the back of your mind that says, “Maybe I don’t know this as well as somebody else. Maybe I’m just a fake.”

I think that most people feel this way at one time or another. It’s just that nobody talks about it. That’s why I was so pleased when Joyce first started speaking publicly about these feelings she’s had, and why I think this book is so important. In my time as CEO of a couple of large corporations, what I’ve become absolutely convinced of is that every business is a people business. And no business can really flourish if your people aren’t comfortable in their own skins.

You are not going to know everything as well as the next person. And in any new job, you’re probably going to feel like you are drinking from a fire hose for a while. But if you relate to people, if you help create an environment where they are important and accountable, they are going to give you all of the education you need and odds of success increase greatly.

When I look at my life, I know that was what allowed me to do the things I’ve done. And if I can do it, anybody can do it. I grew up in Ennis, Texas, a town of five thousand at the time, south of Dallas. My dad was a blue-collar union guy. He drove the trains for Southern Pacific railroad. My mom was a housewife. Dad didn’t finish high school and Mom dropped out of college after one semester. I was a pretty average student and had no idea what I wanted to do, but Mom made sure I stayed in school and went to college.

I went off to Texas Tech, which was a state school, for the best of reasons: I had two or three friends who went there and tuition was seventy-five bucks. I got an engineering degree because I had heard most of my life that engineers get good jobs and I was pretty good in math.

From college, I went right to Southwestern Bell Telephone Company as an outside plant manager. Talk about feeling like an impostor. I was all of twenty-two years old and had this crew of veterans working for me, about eight or ten of them. That was when I learned the most important lesson of my career. Not only did I think I didn’t know anything, but I was shy to boot. All I wanted to do was to hide out in my office and try to bone up on the things I didn’t understand.

Well, the guy who was the manager for my department (he was my boss’s boss) must have noticed. He came down one day and said, “C’mon, I want to look in on your crew.” We drove out to where they were working. We got out of the car and were just starting to look around. I got to talking with the men, turned around, and my boss was gone. The message was pretty clear, but the next day he made sure I got it. “You have to be out with your people,” he told me, “instead of sitting in the office.” I never forgot that lesson and have throughout my career made it my highest priority to get to know the people I work with.

And what I discovered was that it helped me deal with my own self-doubts, especially as I advanced and eventually became a CEO; I wanted a company that was sort of a family. It was just my personality, but it also worked okay for me from a business perspective. At AT&T, it helped me build a company, and at General Motors, it helped me rebuild one.

When I went over to GM, on day one I went down to the company cafeteria, sat at a table right in the middle, and ate lunch. For two or three days, I ate alone in this place with maybe a thousand or two thousand people around me. They just didn’t know what to make of my being there. By the fourth day that changed and I started to get what I needed to know to get the work done. We’d have lunch and I’d say to people, “How are things going? Tell me about what you are doing.” You learn a whole lot more that way than looking at a bunch of slides and numbers all day. And then people start to believe they are a vital part of the business—and they are.

You know, I am an engineer, so over the years as I dealt with challenges, I often would write down my good points and my bad points on a sheet of paper. The bad points far exceeded the good ones for a long time. But no matter what, I always had confidence in my ability to get along with other people. And I guess after a time, I learned to get along with myself as well. It’s not that I didn’t feel uncertain of myself or even like an impostor in new situations; it just took less time to find my balance and to give myself credit.

I never had one great mentor, but I learned from different mentors and emulating people I admired. Eventually, you take all of that, put it in a washing machine, and you come out. You become your own personality.

Learning how to get along with yourself and others to accomplish the objective, I think, is what success is really all about. And it is something you can learn how to do. This great book is going to help a whole lot of people learn to feel successful.

Edward E. Whitacre, Jr.
Former Chairman & CEO, General Motors Co.
and retired Chairman & CEO, AT&T, Inc.
April, 2013