Cowgirl Power

by Gay Gaddis

  I was devastated by the thought of what it must have cost. I tried to maintain my composure and not embarrass her in front of the crowd that had assembled. Some forty years later I still have that coat. I have taken excellent care of it, but I am always reminded every time I wear it that money doesn’t come easy. That day I took total control of her finances. Within a few weeks, when I better understood her financial situation, I realized that I would have to help support her for the rest of her life. She had gone through all the land, was basically broke, and was living on a teacher’s salary. And she bought me an expensive coat. I grew up pretty fast.

  Here I was struggling with my own finances and yet I was living in a sorority house full of girls from some of the wealthiest families in Texas. Living up to my mother’s expectations, the expectations of my sorority sisters, college professors (and not to mention the high goals I set for myself), I had a tough burden to carry. At times, I almost hit the wall. I found myself driven almost to the point of depression, and it required a deep self-examination about who I was, what I wanted to do with my life, and what it was really all about.

  I tell these stories, good and bad, because all of my values and ethics come from my family, the Dennisons, and all those wonderful characters from Liberty, Texas. When my instincts kick in, they are the culmination of all of these stories.

  College and a Rocky Start on a Career Path

  I had a great time at the University of Texas. I lived two entirely separate lives. As an art major I always dressed in blue jeans and a big floppy T-shirt. When I came back to my sorority house, I changed into much more fashionable attire and lived the Greek life. Many of my Pi Beta Phi sorority sisters at the University of Texas came from the wealthiest families in not just Texas, but the entire South, and I was intimidated by them. After about six months in, I started to feel snubbed by some of the “big-city” girls. They looked down on me as a small-town hick. So, I was determined to show them I was worthy. I took on leadership roles at UT and in Pi Phi. I made top grades and was asked to join several honor societies.

  Through my wit and humor, I won them over. I was invited to their lavish debutante balls, and private parties in their family mansions. I learned so much from these people. It was the first time I walked into a home and saw art on the walls by painters who I was studying in my art classes. I got spoiled staying at one friend’s home in Highland Park, in Dallas, when I was invited for the Texas–OU football weekends each fall. Servants would wake me in the morning with fresh-squeezed orange juice, and freshly baked homemade biscuits and croissants. We had brunch at the Dallas Country Club and took the bus to the Cotton Bowl to be a part of the pageantry and energy of the big game of rivals. My Pi Phi friends were included in so many events and celebrations that I would not have experienced without their kindness. Many of us are still close friends to this day.

  I sat up straight in the saddle, put myself out there, and proved I was competent.

  At the University of Texas, I was considered by my creative advertising professor to be one of his top students—one who could land a job at any of the best New York advertising agencies. He thought anyone in the advertising business who was not in New York was a loser. Instead, I chose to take a job at The Richards Group (a smaller, boutique creative agency on a fast track) in Dallas, where my fiancé was in dental school. My UT professor was furious when he learned of my decision. He never spoke to me again. I always wanted to ask him why he was teaching advertising in sleepy old Texas, but I couldn’t because we weren’t speaking.

  I was the second woman at The Richards Group ever hired in the creative department. The catcalls and razzing I had to deal with in those early days make Mad Men look pretty tame. The first day on the job, I was shown to my little cubicle and given my first assignment. This went pretty well for a few months, but over time I felt more and more isolated, and the creative muses got harder and harder to call upon. I felt like I was almost brain dead. At the time, I was working on Air Florida mechanicals (the manual way we had to put together ads in those days) that were both tedious and something I was not trained to do in the first place. Life became so miserable that one day, Stan Richards and I came to the same conclusion. It just wasn’t working and I needed to move on.

  Devastated that I had failed, I couldn’t figure out why I had been so successful as a teaching assistant at UT, where I would brainstorm with other students about great ad concepts. I would later come to understand that my personality type doesn’t do well at all in isolation.

  Finding a Better Place to Be

  When I left The Richards Group I only had two weeks’ severance pay, and I had to get a job pronto to make ends meet because my husband was still in school. Thankfully, I landed a position at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, the largest health-care facility in the Southwest. My role was in media relations, and I thrived. I quickly became accustomed to the drama associated with hospitals. I sat in on a surgery to repair a hand almost completely cut off by a band saw—the first successful procedure of its kind. I was there in the early days of rapid advancement in heart surgery. I was in and out of the emergency room, and while I never became callous to the blood and gore, I learned how to deal with it like any cowgirl would do. I honed my writing skills, did hundreds of interviews, and made friends with almost everyone.

  Within the year, I was promoted to assistant public relations director at the ripe old age of twenty-two. This was 1978. Boone Powell, Sr. was chairman of the Baylor Foundation at the time, and he and I worked on several fund-raising projects together. He took a real interest in me and became my first mentor. Several months later, the director of public relations had to leave due to a troubled pregnancy. Instead of going outside to find a new director, Mr. Powell and my boss tapped me for the role. I couldn’t believe the responsibility they gave me, but with their help and the help of a great staff, we achieved some true milestones. Later when I told Mr. Powell that I wanted to get my MBA in marketing, he asked, “Why?” I tried to explain and then he interrupted: “Forget it. You could sell ice to Eskimos.”

  One early morning I woke up in Dallas to a phone call from the US State Department informing me that Baylor would be receiving a very high-level international political prisoner. They planned to “move in” to my office to help manage the surge of national press reporters. The patient was Benigno Aquino, Jr., who was jailed in the Philippines by Ferdinand Marcos, but was allowed to travel to Dallas to undergo a coronary bypass.

  As soon as I could get to the hospital, I went to Mr. Powell’s office and told him I was scared I would make a mistake or misstate something. He looked me in the eye and said, “The very fact that you are going to be so cautious makes me know you will not screw this up.” I didn’t screw it up. And I got a huge boost in my confidence and in myself because of the unconditional faith Mr. Powell had in me that morning. And I learned that I was completely capable of dealing with the press.

  I got to spend some time with Senator Aquino while he was recovering. I remember him telling me that he would be assassinated if he went back to the Philippines. I assumed he would seek asylum in the United States. But he did go back in August 1983 and was shot at the Manila International Airport (which now bears his name) while disembarking the China Airlines plane he flew in on. I am still stunned today by his bravery.

  Learning More about Myself

  My husband was accepted to the orthodontics residency at Emory University, so off we went to Atlanta. It would be my first time to live outside of Texas. In an interesting twist of fate, I passed up an opportunity to work at a large advertising agency and instead took a job working with Leadership Dynamics, a management consulting practice owned by a couple of Harvard MBAs. They specialized in business consulting, mainly in the areas of leadership development, team building, motivation and strategic planning for Fortune 500 companies. Again, I thrived because it was a people job. They taught me about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and how to use it to build more eff
ective management teams. That experience in learning to understand people based on personality type was one of the biggest influences on my future career. Those guys were so smart. The knowledge I gained from them and the case studies I was writing was worth far more than that MBA I wanted.

  I learned about the intricacies of the MBTI and the DiSC Model of Behavior and really started to understand my own strengths and weaknesses. I learned that, to be successful, I had to surround myself with people who I could collaborate with, people who would share ideas with me so we could make them better. I remember that when I understood that, it was like a lightbulb going on. Again, at an early age, my career was catapulted because I was realistic about my leadership style and learned to be able to see myself objectively. And I had already learned through painful lessons about my weaknesses.

  We saw challenges with personality types come up over and over again in our consulting work with corporate management teams. People tend to be drawn to people who are like-minded. Introverts tend to flock with introverts. Feeling people love to be with other feelers. But allowing teams to be type-heavy one way or another is a recipe for disaster because the teams will consistently be blind to other ways of thinking and doing. The MBTI assesses personalities along four mental functions—sensing, intuition, thinking, and feeling. It also examines four attitudes—extraversion, introversion, judging, and perceiving. The combinations yield sixteen possible personality types. I was hooked and became a lifelong student, champion, and teacher of the intricacies of personality type.

  Lessons Learned: The Early Days

  If you can open your heart and treat each person who comes into your life with respect and genuine interest, you will touch people in a way that lifts them up. You will make their day better, and maybe their life better. Each act of kindness will give you the strength to do more tomorrow. And you will always be delighted when someone surprises you, perhaps years later, and returns the act of kindness or support. My mother always loved the phrase: “Practice random acts of kindness.”

  When you are young, test yourself. Try lots of different things. Be completely honest with yourself about what you do well and what you don’t. Pour your energy into your strengths. Find others who can shore up your weaknesses and learn that great teams are built this way.

  Florence LaDue circa 1912

  (Historic Photo Archive/Getty Images)

  Chapter 3

  Finding My Own Power—The Advertising Business

  You might say that Florence LaDue (born Grace Maud Bensel in 1883) had a difficult childhood. Her mother died from childbirth, and her father, who was a criminal lawyer and later a judge, could not care for her, so he sent her to live with her grandparents, who worked on a Sioux reservation in Minnesota.

  In those early days of her life, Florence could be seen alongside her Sioux brothers and sisters riding horses bareback, swimming in the creeks, marveling at the stars, and basically learning the ways of the Sioux.

  Her father feared she was becoming too much of a tomboy, and took her back at age twelve to attend school. Although later in life she stressed the importance of education for women, at age seventeen she ran away from home and school to join a Wild West show, where she performed roping stunts and tricks that she had learned on the reserve.

  While roping upside down on a horse in Chicago in 1905, she caught the eye of itinerant cowboy Guy Weadick. They soon become a couple, performing for audiences across North America and Europe. They even had a stint on Broadway in Wyoming Days and did the vaudeville circuits and Wild West shows alongside Will Rogers. LaDue performed solo, but also with her husband.

  Less than five feet tall, she could lasso five galloping horses at one time and retired undefeated as World Champion Lady Fancy Roper after performing for thirty-one years! Accounts of those who knew her said she would often say, “Look your best, do your best, and be your best.” As tough a competitor as she was, she was elegant and ladylike and always wore a dress or skirt unless she was on horseback.

  But Florence knew more than just trick roping. She learned the business of the business she was in. Her husband, Guy, was credited with starting the Calgary Stampede in 1912, but history tells us that she was the businesswoman behind the Calgary Stampede, which today is an annual rodeo, exhibition, and festival. This ten-day event held every July in Calgary, Canada, attracts over 1 million visitors annually. Guy and Florence came to Alberta from the United States to not only start the Calgary Stampede, but also to instill their values, creativity, and eye for talent. Because of her childhood experience on a Sioux reservation, she insisted when they started the Stampede that the First Nations people should be an active part of the exhibition.

  As I was writing this chapter of the book, I could only admire what I have learned about Florence. Her tenacity for learning the business she was in inspired me, as I believe it is so important for each of us to get down to the nuts and bolts of how to run a sound, ethical, and profitable business.

  Florence was a talented athlete, businesswoman, wife, partner, and cowgirl. When she died in 1951, Guy placed these simple words on her gravestone: “A Real Partner.”

  After dental school my husband and I returned to Austin, where he joined an established orthodontic practice. I had wanted to be in a bigger city because I thought moving to Austin was probably a career disaster for me. Back in 1982, Austin was a sleepy, laid-back university town. But I quickly got a job at a local advertising agency—The William Lacy Company. The agency was founded by an early Austin advertising pioneer—Bill Lacy. Bill had a nice big office, with a huge ficus tree in the corner that had two leaves on it—because he chain-smoked all the time, filling the room with a cloud of smoke that left that poor ficus tree barely clinging to life.

  In those days, Bill ran the entire company on several yellow pads. He had a pad for expenses and a pad for income. After a few weeks with the company, I went in and asked him to teach me the basics of agency finances. He was thrilled, because no one had ever shown any interest before. He would point out key ratios to watch, profitability targets, people costs, and the all-important process of getting paid—collections. When he saw that I was catching on, he got so excited—sometimes he would have two or even three cigarettes going at the same time. I’m not kidding.

  Bill called me his beehive girl because I was always involved in everything, networking and buzzing around. I remember him calling me into his office one day saying that Texas American Bank had a last-minute project and I was going to have to run like a spotted ape to get it done. I did.

  The agency was full of characters. The production manager was an old Army drill sergeant. I’ll never forget that when you went into his production room, the carpet actually stuck to your feet because of years and years of spray mount residue on the floor. The biggest innovation of the day was slide shows. We had a guy who produced multi-projector slide shows where images moved and slides appeared in sync with the music. We watched his shows and thought we had seen it all.

  Soon after I went to work for The William Lacy Company, one of the partners in the firm, Lee Gaddis, told me he would introduce me to my first account, so we drove out to the Texas Hill Country and I met Murry Burnham, founder of the famous Burnham Brothers Coyote Calls. His store was full of archery equipment, traps, knives, and gun safes. But Murry’s real claim to fame was his homemade coyote calls. He was shrewd enough to have become the most famous coyote caller in the country, a fact that he promoted prominently in his annual print catalog. Coyote callers all over the world waited with bated breath each fall for the catalog to arrive in the mail. My job was to update the last year’s catalog with new products and get it printed. Some of the products were pretty strange, especially something called “Buck Magnet.” I read the label and the main ingredient was doe urine!

  Murry always had a wild look in his eye and sometimes he just disappeared for days. I guess he was calling coyotes.

  I was horrified by the whole thing. I was even more horrified whe
n I learned that Murry kept a collection of live rattlesnakes in the storefront window. I was a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Texas, and here I was hawking doe urine to hillbillies. But I pulled my cowgirl boots on and we got ’er done! Guess what Murry’s son was named? Hunter, of course.

  I had some other less colorful clients and I learned how to work with them all. I learned that it was critical to build trust at the highest levels of clients’ organizations as was possible. It takes time, but if you can build real trust, it can last for a lifetime. When I could build relationships at the upper-management levels, then our direct clients that we worked with on a day-to-day basis could relax a bit because they were not ultimately responsible for our success or failure.

  Learning to Brainstorm

  By this time, I had hit my stride at the agency and was really learning to be a player in the advertising business. Doyle Fellers, president of the firm, taught me how to make ideas—how to brainstorm. Doyle was a talented presenter and spoke professionally all over the country. His favorite problem-solving technique was what he called “Brown Paper Sessions.” He would cover the conference room walls with butcher paper, almost from floor to ceiling, using every available surface. He would invite clients in and we would help them define their goals, find market opportunities, and solve problems for their companies. Doyle could have been a great snake oil salesman, because he was fearless. He’d walk into the room—with maybe twenty people attending—stare at the blank walls, and say, “This is going to be so much fun!” He would start to ask questions, probe, write, and laugh. People loved it.