RICK GOINGS (TUPPERWARE BRANDS)

From the first time we were in touch, I knew Goings wasn't in any way like some of the other CEOs I met. He answered my first email to him within 22 minutes, writing a rather long text in a flashy blue font. And even though I had written him out of the blue, he shared information with me as if I were a close friend. “We've got lots to discuss,” he wrote. “I went into the Navy first, quit college, started my own company, and eventually went abroad.”

Tupperware Brands is, of course, an intriguing company in its own right. There is probably no other company that is so intertwined with the post-war economic boom in the America of the 1950s and 1960s as the producer of food storage containers. First introduced to the public in the late 1940s, Tupperware was developed by its namesake founder, Earl Tupper, several years before. It hit the consumer market just as women started entering the labor force, the baby boom came about, and America's economic rise came into full force. From the start, Tupperware was marketed through the famous “Tupperware parties,” where women—the main target for the Tupperware kitchen containers—would invite their friends over for an evening of socializing and buying Tupperware. From the 1950s onward, it was an enormous commercial success, thanks in large part to the sales-savviness of Tupper's female VP of marketing, Brownie Wise.

Today, Tupperware is still mostly sold through the party plan, and its operations stretch almost 100 countries, down a few from its 1990s peak. It is also still a multibillion-dollar company, with more than $2 billion in sales in 2015, $185 million in net income, and more than 10,000 employees plus a sales force of 3.1 million people around the world. Rick Goings has been its CEO for 20 years and has successfully expanded the footprint of the company to emerging market regions such as Asia and Latin America, where it now generates the majority of its sales.

Goings agreed to meet me months after we first exchanged emails, as he was making a trip to Switzerland. As with many of the CEOs I met for this book, we connected at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. But unlike for some other attendants, Goings' sole stated purpose for coming was to improve the state of the world. “I won't take business meetings here,” he told me. “We're here to make the world a better place. I even walked out of a meeting after five minutes, after I realized my counterpart wanted to talk business.” That indeed contrasted with the agenda of some other people I met at Davos throughout the year. While doing good is on the agenda for almost everyone, so is catching up with current or future business partners.

As we sat down, my idea that Goings wasn't the typical CEO in terms of how he got there was confirmed too. At age 17, just as he finished high school, Goings's life looked as though it wasn't going anywhere great. Due to a “troublesome situation at home,” he was living in a rooming house in Wheaton, Illinois, and sleeping in a chair that could be turned into a bed. College wasn't on the radar: he simply couldn't afford it. Instead, Goings was going around Wheaton and other Chicago suburbs selling Grolier Society encyclopedias from door to door. At least that would earn him a living—or so he thought. The sad reality, it turned out, is that he “went around with the books for 90 days, and never sold a single set.” Looking back on this, Goings remarked, “I guess that makes my story interesting… I became CEO of the most respected direct-to-consumer selling company, but I couldn't do direct-selling when I did it myself.”

But if he wasn't successful at direct selling, it wasn't for a lack of trying. During the entire summer, Goings and a handful of other young men would get into a van, drive out to a neighborhood, and canvas out for six hours of uninterrupted door-to-door selling. “Our pitch was: you get the whole set of Grolier Society encyclopedias for free, and in return you commit to purchasing the update book every year for 10 years,” Goings said. “It was like we handed out a free razor, but the razor blades were very expensive.” Some of his colleagues managed to sell, but Goings, an introvert by nature, seemed incapable. “It's something I learned,” he said. “Most people that are good at sales are extraverts. They can take rejections, and can knock on doors. I didn't like knocking on doors and didn't take rejections well.”

Despite the continuous failures, Goings didn't give up. “It is one of the key determining factors of a lot of people that don't succeed: they quit too soon,” he said. So he didn't. He saw fellow young salesmen come and go; some were successful and built entire sales teams, others quit after just a few disappointing days. All the while, he kept knocking on doors. “Those 90 days were an incredible development period,” Goings said. “I kept on saying to myself: I will go to the next one, and the next one, and I never gave up.”

But with just a few bucks left in his pocket at the end of the summer, Goings knew he needed to come up with a new plan. With the last money he had, he bought a loaf of bread and a big jar of peanut butter, which he ate for a week. I asked him how that felt. “Do you know ‘The Rock’?” he replied. “It's the stage name of Dwayne Johnson, a WWE wrestler-turned-actor. He went through something similar. His production company now is called ‘7 Bucks’ in honor of the time when he was desperate. He had a five dollar bill, a single dollar, and 4 quarters. And I felt that way, too. But I still love peanut butter.”

Then, by a stroke of good fortune, a door inside him opened to a different future. “Towards the end of those 90 days, I had a young couple I was presenting the Grolier encyclopedias to,” he said. “They didn't buy, but the man was very nice to me. He had gone into the Navy to find himself, he told me, and then on to university. When I met him he had a nice house, and he was 32, 33. That was a moment, I said: ‘I've done this; I've stuck this out longer than anyone else on my sales team. It's time for something else.’” The Navy seemed like a pragmatic choice. “I could embrace and envision my future there,” Goings said. “I knew I could get education paid for if I joined. I was somewhat of a mercenary.”

Within a week, Goings quit his job and went down to Navy Pier at Lake Michigan to enlist. However, he said, it didn't feel like he was quitting his previous job, even though he was doing just that. “It wasn't that I couldn't take it anymore,” Goings said. “I just had enough of it. I decided I'd go into the military.” Another three months later, Goings was in training. It would prove a life-changer. He would grow into a confident young man, gain leadership skills, and earn a scholarship to go to college at last. “It's interesting, I don't remember the name of that man who recommended I go to the Navy,” Goings said, reminiscing. “But if I could, I would go back and thank him.” Later he added a similar thought. “A lot of people don't do it enough, saying thank you. If we're successful, we don't share it enough with the people that helped get us there.”

It's hard to believe that a man who runs a multibillion-dollar direct-sales company would have the early professional life Goings had—selling encyclopedias and signing up for military service. Or, from the opposite perspective, it's hard to imagine how a young man like Goings, for whom college wasn't an option until his early twenties, would ever lead a company like Tupperware Brands. Yet when I pressed him on the matter, Goings insisted that most of the seeds of his success were laid precisely in his late teens and early twenties, despite his obvious shortcomings.

In high school, Goings was generally the second-shortest kid and had an eye that turned in. “I didn't excel at sports, and was probably the kid that stayed virgin the longest,” he said. But as soon as he entered the Navy, Goings started to grow taller, stronger, and more confident. “I was 5′ 6 when I graduated,” Goings said, “and after a few months I was 6′ 1. I also had eye surgery. It all changed me so much.”

Crucially, Goings already got the chance of a lifetime to gain leadership experience. On the scholastic entrance test, mandatory for all new recruits, Goings did rather well. So well, as a matter of fact, that of the 100 sailors in his platoon, he was offered the position of platoon leader. “It's funny,” he recalled, “I usually never scored well on tests—I joked about it with Condoleezza Rice. She's one of the smartest people I know, yet neither of us ever scored well on scholastic tests. But on this particular test, I did well.”

As a consequence of his being named platoon leader, Goings had to lead the sailors in all the exercise in their training. “It meant I was first among equals,” Goings said. “When we had to do the pool exercise, or enter a house that was on fire, I always had to go first.” It made him a real team player. “Most guys will tell you, if you go into battle, Rick is one of the guys you want to have next to you,” he said. “We had to go through it. We couldn't quit, and we learned that we were all in it together.” Goings later added that he still sees team-mindedness and collaboration as essential to strong leadership and his Navy training experience as laying the foundation for those qualities within him.

As soon as his training period at the Great Lakes Naval Center in Illinois was over, Goings could put his newly learned skills in practice. This was the early 1960s, the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the United States had just nearly faced off with Russia in a full-fledged naval war. Assigned to the USS Power with its base in Mayport, Florida, Goings's main destination was Guantanamo. “In Gitmo, I remember we would go out into a refresher training, and we would be pinging for Russian submarines,” Goings said. “We would go on top of one, and stay on it, until it had to surface. A couple of soldiers would come up on deck give us the finger. And then would go down again.” Luckily, the actions of Goings's ship never led to a real confrontation.

Goings's time in the Navy also coincided with the Vietnam War, the military offense that would traumatize the United States for decades. During the war, Goings was on an anti-submarine destroyer in the Red Sea. Since there were no submarines involved in the war, however, he was never deployed in the region. “I was assigned to the bridge of the ship, the command center. I was what is called the quarter master. I was in charge of knowing where we were. I would look out, plot the course, and share my findings back in the combat information center. ‘Where are you? Where are you going?’ that whole environment has helped me later on.” With those formative experiences, Goings said, “Things really started to change. They were little additive things, but they lead me to the next thing.” Goings managed to stay out of the line of fire on the ground, coming out of his naval service unharmed. However, from an insecure teenager, he had grown into a confident young man developing an awareness and set of skills that would serve him later.

Aged 21, with two years of active-duty Navy service behind him, Goings finally got to go to college, while spending another four years on Navy reserves duty. Thanks to the G.I. Bill,¹ Goings got into Guilford College, a small liberal arts college in Greensboro, North Carolina, founded by the Quakers, and—as Goings was told—“the oldest coed college south of the Mason-Dixon Line in the U.S.” Choosing a history major and religious minor, Goings attended small classes with an average of 16 students. Whereas he loved exploring the topics themselves—and still does today, he added—he found the pace of college to be too slow.

So, once more, Goings reverted back to business, this time as a salesman at Stockton's Men's Clothing & Furnishing store in Greensboro, 40 hours a week. When he looked back on this experience, he saw it as an essential stepping stone to become a leader of a business that is driven by both sales and design, just like Tupperware. Being in direct contact with customers every moment of every working day pushed Goings out of his comfort zone and left his introverted self behind. More importantly, though, he discovered the importance of service and to make customers happy. And here, in the world of fashion, Goings developed an interest in design and a sense of style.

To top off Goings's already packed agenda, a friend from law school came to him with a business idea. He planned to set up a fire alarm company—a novelty for the time—and wanted Goings's help. Goings gladly went for it, combining at first three full-time tasks: attending college, working in the clothing shop, and setting up a business.

It worked out handsomely. He hired fellow students to sell his smoke detectors, which were uncommon in the United States at that time. Goings even quit school in his senior year to pursue his venture full-time—he was making more than enough money to do so. But if Goings hadn't made many future plans before in his life, he surely couldn't predict what was going to happen next. “Within a year, I began to realize that I didn't like the direction from a value perspective from this company,” Goings said. He parted ways with his partner, and set up the company in Charlottesville, Virginia, as Dynamics, Inc., with the help of his mentor and backer, Jim Deter. From here on, interestingly, Goings's career reads like that of the typical CEO. The main difference was his prior experience. For others, that may have been a privileged upbringing and an Ivy League college and MBA career. For Goings, it was a broken home, six years of service in the Navy, and dropping out of college.

But by his mid-twenties, “I was 24, and I was CEO of my own company,” he said. Over the next 15 years he set up hundreds of franchise locations for Dynamics all over the United States, leading the company to great expansion. The success story only came to an end—leading Goings to leave the company and sell his stock—when the federal government made smoke detectors mandatory, and many established competitors entered the field. The latter part of that story is easily understandable. Goings in part had been able to build a direct selling empire because the products he sold—smoke detectors—were new to the market. Once you have such a product that serves a real need, national expansion sure is a possibility. It's harder to understand, though, how Goings managed to evolve from the boy who was the least successful direct seller on the team to one of the country's most successful ones. “As an introvert, I maybe wasn't good with the selling,” he explained, “but my strength was in developing other people and recruiting those that would do the sales for me.” Goings became used to speaking in public, even though he wasn't initially cut out for it. “Nowadays I can have 10,000 people in an audience and I'm fine,” he told me. He liked making references to the pop culture icons of his time. “People used to talk about Johnny Carson, who is also a socialized introvert: when the camera went off, he was private to himself. I'm like that, too,” he said.

“I had great times and bad times throughout my 30s,” Goings said. In part, those good times came from running a successful business. For another part, it came from having offices right next to the University of Virginia. Despite his dropping out of school, he could thus still “go to any class I wanted to,” which he loved. But it also meant that, when Dynamics was sold, Goings didn't have to wait long for a new job. He was already an established name in the direct selling industry, an entrepreneur, and a well-spoken and educated man—the type you could put in front of a board room as well as a group of sales people.

Avon, the behemoth of direct selling, didn't need to think twice. They offered Goings a job, and promised an executive position within a few years. Goings was a rising star. First he took Manhattan (“I first thought my peers there were smarter than me, but then I realized I was smart, too”), then he turned around German operations from Munich (“At first I couldn't even say ‘guten Tag’; after that, it was a magic time”) and finally, after Hong Kong, where he successfully accelerated growth in Asia, becoming Group Vice President and Senior Operating Officer Pacific, he served as president of Avon USA (“We made $600 million already when I arrived, but we made lots of takeovers”). Goings summarized it as follows: “You're like a musician. First you play in garages and bars where people throw beer cans at you. But then you play in stadiums and people are waving their lighters.”

Nothing seemed to stop Goings's ascent as heir-apparent. But at the end of the ride, the chairman fell out of love with the idea of Goings as his successor. “People said he started to resent me,” Goings said. The endgame started at a board meeting at Avon's headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. “We both made a speech,” Goings said, “but no one asked him questions.” Goings knew that wasn't a good sign—it meant he was putting his boss in his own shadow. “You'd rather I'm not here?” Goings asked his boss. After the weekend, Goings got the final response. “Yeah, I'd rather not have you here,” the chairman said. Goings got a big severance package, “because business was cooking,” but basically, he was fired.

After that incident and a short stint at Sara Lee, Goings was recruited to Tupperware in 1992 as president of Tupperware Worldwide, and thanks to a series of successful decisions about its international operations, Goings ended up as the CEO of Tupperware in 1996. Following his focus on emerging markets, the company was soon earning the bulk of its $1 billion revenues from outside the United States. Twenty years later, Goings is still at the helm.

SUSAN CAMERON (REYNOLDS AMERICAN INC.)

“I would be happy to contribute to your book—think it would be fun,” Susan Cameron, a friend of Goings, wrote to me two days before Thanksgiving 2014. But, she asked if we could postpone the meeting until the summer. “I am in the middle of a transaction,” she said.

The “transaction” Cameron was talking about was the acquisition of U.S. tobacco company Lorillard (known mostly for its Newport cigarettes) by its larger competitor, Reynolds American (known mostly for Camel cigarettes). When it closed nearly a year later, the transaction value stood at about $25 billion. Yet Cameron was never supposed to lead the transaction, I learned from an excellent 2014 Fortune profile written by Patricia Sellers:²

Happily retired and in full R&R mode, Susan Cameron was the last person anyone imagined would go back to work and lead a colossal acquisition. After seven years at the helm of the second-largest U.S. tobacco company, Reynolds American, Cameron had moved on to a new life, a new husband, and even a new name. (She had been Susan Ivey before taking husband Russell's surname.)

But one day last October she answered her phone and found an old colleague on the line. It was Tom Wajnert, Reynolds's chairman of the board. “We're about to go through some interesting times,” Wajnert (pronounced WY-nert) said…

In mid-July, 10 weeks after her return, Reynolds announced its plan to buy Lorillard for $27.4 billion. The deal is history-making, and not just for its size: It is the largest acquisition ever led by a female CEO.

But how did Cameron get to be the CEO of a large American tobacco company in the first place? When Susan started her career, tobacco companies were a bastion for men. That's at least the impression I got from watching a series like Mad Men. When I spoke to Cameron in the summer of 2015, she confirmed that. It made the story of her teens, twenties, and thirties even more intriguing.

Cameron was born in Schenectady, a sleepy town in upstate New York that's most famous for being a stop on the train route between New York's Grand Central Station and Chicago. In the past, it was more known for the large General Electric plant Thomas Edison built there. But its history traces further back. Founded by Dutch colonialists in the seventeenth century, the city's name is nonetheless derived from its Mohawk designation, meaning “beyond the pines.” And when entering the city today, you can still feel the old Dutch and native influences; the Dutch because of the place names and family names in the area, and the native spirit because of the beautiful woods and rivers in its surroundings that remind you of times past.

Susan's father had a job with the only company you would expect one to have a job with in Schenectady: he was an advertising executive with General Electric. But Cameron doesn't know much about Schenectady. At age 1, her family moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and she would never live again among the pine trees, the rivers, or the cold winter days of upstate New York. From there, she broke free from her “destiny” on various occasions, at different times, and with different consequences. For example:

1. In her teens, she broke free financially. At age 12, Cameron's father and mother divorced. It was defining, she would later say, because her father “didn't keep his part of the deal” in taking care of the family. Her mom, a secretary, was left “devastated,” and “struggling to get by.” It was a middle-class struggle, she said: “There was no shortage of food or clothes, just no luxury.” But seeing her mother struggle financially and emotionally, her reaction was not to be dependent herself: “I went to work in an office at age 15. I wanted to be a secretary, because that was what my mom was doing, but I wanted to never be financially dependent.”
2. With the money she earned, she could afford to buy lime green belly button shirts and other fashionable clothes—it was the early 1970s, after all—while her parents paid for her education. “I worked so I could afford the things that I wanted, and was able to look after myself,” she said. But the benefits were nonmaterial, too. Upon leaving high school, Cameron was voted as “most likely to succeed” by her classmates. “Forty years later, they were right,” Cameron said, “but back then, I didn't think ahead.”
3. In her early twenties, she broke free from a predetermined career path. In 1980, with a business degree of the University of Florida in one hand and a job at an office equipment company in the other, Cameron had her second defining moment. She had studied business in order to work in sales at a consumer company, but found herself selling Dictaphones, Xerox machines, and transcription material to office managers instead. It put her on the right track to get a master's and switch to consumer companies later, but it just didn't make her feel good about her professional self. “I didn't like the people I worked with, I didn't like the clients I worked for, and I didn't like the products I was selling,” she said. And so, although she had only just started her career, although she needed the money and she needed the experience, she looked out for another job. “I decided that if you don't have a passion for something, you need to do something else,” she said.
4. Cameron's passion in consumer products came down to three things, she said: “cosmetics, booze, and tobacco.”
5. “I was going into one of those fields, so I started calling [cosmetics, drinks, and tobacco companies] up and telling them they needed distribution.” If it seemed like a long shot for a 22-year-old woman in 1981 to cold-call consumer companies and tell them they needed her to sell their product, it worked. Brown & Williamson, one of America's leading tobacco companies, was intrigued when Cameron told them she couldn't find the newly introduced Barclay cigarettes in her region. But Cameron was confident: “I was a smoker, I had been shopping, and I couldn't find them,” she said. But even she was surprised to see her strategy pay: she got a job as sales representative. It taught her she was right to risk it all. “If you don't take risks, you won't be successful,” she concluded. To get your dream job like she did, she said, “you have to be passionate about it, you have to be driven, and you have to differentiate.”
6. In her late twenties, an MBA allowed her to rise in the ranks. Cameron was able to rise quickly in the ranks at Brown & Williamson, where she worked in the Kentucky headquarters. She worked as a sales rep first, calling dozens of retail stores, became a trainer of other reps after a year, and a division sales manager shortly after. To stay on her growth trajectory, Cameron after a few years felt it was necessary to get an MBA. “It would tick the box,” she said, “It was a requirement in order to move into what I really wanted to do: consumer marketing.” Since she lived in Kentucky and wanted to keep working while studying, an Ivy League MBA from Harvard, Wharton, or Columbia wasn't an option. But that wasn't a problem, Cameron figured. After all, she just “needed the piece of paper.” So, she went to Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, and got her executive MBA there in 1984.
7. The strategy worked. By the time she was 30 she was promoted to brand manager, one of the youngest people ever to hold that position, and one of the few women. Her goal? To become head of marketing for the company one day. “I looked up the marketing tree, and would say I could do it,” she said. The dreams she had as a young girl, to be financially independent and be a secretary like her mom, were now a thing of the past. Instead of looking down in fear, she could look up in anticipation.

1. At 30, she broke away from the South. By the time Cameron turned 30, she had shed her humble beginnings completely. She had obtained both a bachelor and a master's degree, become a brand manager at a large consumer products company, and broken through the glass ceiling of her industry. But there was one thing holding her back from ever becoming CEO, and she was about to find out: she had no international experience.
2. As a matter of fact, except for the year of her life in Schenectady, she hadn't even lived anywhere outside the South of the United States. (Not that there is anything wrong with living in the South, or living the United States. But CEOs of global companies who have no international experience are as common as unicorns: if you find one, hold on to it, because it is unlikely you'll ever see one again. You'll meet one such CEO in the next chapter: Barry Salzberg, CEO of Deloitte from 2011 to 2015.)
3. From one day to the next, Cameron recalled, her life completely changed. It went like this: “Brown & Williamson was a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of the parent company, British American Tobacco in London,” she said. Important management decisions thus took place in London, and one day, “there was a decision that some people would transfer from the United States to the global headquarters.” Cameron was one of those people, being offered two possible roles. There was one catch, she said: “I had to decide in 48 hours.” For Cameron especially, the development came at an awkward moment. She had just bought a new house. “It was not fully furnished yet and I was enjoying making a new home,” she said.
4. Still, it took her only one hour to make up her mind, and 47 hours to pack. She would move to London, sell her house, and leave behind her Southern living. Why? “Because if you don't take chances, you will live with regret,” she said. “You have to put fear behind you. I enjoyed my new home, but I knew I could always go back. So I better went and tried, because life is not a rehearsal. You have to be prepared to take risks. I rarely regret things. I am not a person to dwell on negative. I don't find it productive. If I made a bad decision, I would change it or let it go.” So in 48 hours, she was ready to move.
5. Through her 30s, she would learn to manage across cultures and take a gender leadership role. Many things changed when Cameron moved to London, but two things stood out in particular. She learned that the “U.S. and the U.K. are two countries separated by the same language,” and that she had “gender role” to play, breaking through the glass ceiling as one of the first women in a male-dominated industry.
6. The cultural experience was part of a pattern that would repeat itself in other countries she would work in throughout her career. “To adapt to a culture, you just need time,” she later told me. “Americans either travel very well or very badly. There is not a middle ground.” Cameron turned out, despite the initial cultural shock, to travel well. She got used to people in London driving left, people in Spain taking a three-hour lunch break, and people in Southern Europe eating dinner at 10 p.m. instead of 6. “I respected that,” Cameron said. “I wasn't one of those Americans looking for a McDonald's wherever I went. It gave me a much broader perspective. My world view changed, and so did my perspective on time and culture.”
7. That served her well, because British American Tobacco didn't like to see itself as a multinational company with a monoculture; it was a multidomestic company, with a lot of autonomy for local practices and management. If Cameron was to keep on rising through the ranks of the multidomestic company, it was she who would have to change perspectives, not the local companies she worked at.
8. There was one element of some of the local cultures, though, that she couldn't and wouldn't appreciate: if women were treated unequally. Very soon into her international years, she realized she had a gender role to play, whether she wanted it or not.
9. Sometimes, it was about explicitly changing corporate practices. In Mexico, for example, women working for the local company would be fired once they got married. “I couldn't believe it! It didn't cross my mind that this was possible,” Cameron said. “No one had asked about such practices because we just bought the company. But of course that practice was stopped when BAT bought it. Respecting the local culture was important, but having standards and being equitable was important, too.”
10. At other occasions, her gender role was more personal. While in the United States, Cameron had had a fair amount of women colleagues, in the United Kingdom, that was much less the case. “I'll never forget: A woman who worked for me in the merchandising department one day early on told me: ‘I hope you don't blow it, because you'll ruin it for all of us.’” Cameron recalled. Her colleague had been moving up the ladder herself, and she was afraid Cameron, who was brand new and was American, would ruin her chances of success if she failed. It was quite a straightforward thing to say to your boss, but Cameron didn't take offense. “I was just shocked that I was representing a gender. In Europe, in tobacco, there were no women.” Luckily for her colleague though, Cameron succeeded.

After 10 years abroad, including a stint in Hong Kong, and visits to some 60 countries all around the world, Cameron was ready to stay abroad forever. Instead, in 1999, she got offered the chance to take on the job she had dreamed of since she started at Brown & Williamson: that of senior vice president of marketing. But people change, and so had Cameron in her years abroad. The job she once hoped to get now seemed more like a duty than a dream come true—she preferred a similar role on a global scale. “I thought, the company needs me to do it, so I do it,” Cameron said.

But she had come to believe she could take on more than marketing. She had become an excellent communicator, an influencer even without formal authority, and a leader that could “galvanize people to achieve a common goal,” in her own words. So even though it hadn't crossed her mind, she wasn't completely surprised when she was appointed president and CEO of Brown & Williamson in January 2001. She was up to the challenge, Cameron said of herself: “Looking at others who might be considered for the role, I was convinced I was a better choice. I knew the company, the employees, the marketplace, and the brands.” That was the opinion of BAT as well. When in July 2004, Brown & Williamson combined with R. J. Reynolds, Cameron became president and CEO of the newly created Reynolds American, the second largest cigarette company in the United States and a publicly traded company. She retired as CEO in 2011, having become one the world's best-paid women. But in 2014 she came out of retirement, returned as CEO, and led the company through the largest-ever corporate acquisition by a woman.

LESSONS LEARNED

What are the lessons to learn from Goings and Cameron's unconventional way to the top? I'd summarize them as follows:

1. Break your chains before starting your ascent to the top. For Cameron, the road to the top couldn't really start until she broke the chains that were holding her back. When she was in her twenties, she had to break away from the predetermined path many women in those days were on: that of supporting partner, rather than that of the main breadwinner and careerist. That same gender pattern may have largely disappeared in the West today, other (invisible) chains may persist. Do you have any assumptions about what may lock you in to a certain career? It is worthwhile examining, and it is good to let go of such assumptions. For Goings, it was his assumption he would never be able to lead, speak publicly or be the best at something, since he was rather short and never a bright student back in high school. I had such assumptions, too: I once thought it would be impossible for a middle-class Belgian to make a career in the United States, or for a non-native English speaker to write for English-language media. The barriers that assumptions of these kind pose are often imaginary, but hard to break down. Doing so is a first crucial step to break free and build you career.
2. Quitting isn't quitting if you've had enough. “Quitting is for losers,” you often hear people say. And even Goings told me that “one of the key determining factors of a lot of people that don't succeed, is that they quit too soon,” and that “they have to cut my head off before I give up.” That seems at odds at first sight with what Goings actions were though, as he quit his direct sales job, quit college in his senior year, and quit his job at Avon.

   But quitting isn't quitting if you've had enough of something, Going also said. As we've seen, when he quit, he didn't give up—he was simply moving on. That's a very important lesson to remember.

   In previous chapters, we saw people such as Orit Gadiesh and David Kenny “stick it out” at Bain, despite the terrible situation they were in. The reason why they didn't move on is that they felt they weren't ready yet. They had unfinished business to take care of, a drive to do so, and a purpose to guide them. In the case of Goings—and perhaps for many people—there was no such thing left when he quit. He had done what he needed to do, and he moved on.

3. Many roads lead to Rome. Goings will always remember where he came from. At 17, he was a broke young man from a broken home, but he didn't dwell on his opportunity-deprived background. From a young age, he worked harder and longer than anyone around him, and that ultimately paid off many years later.
4. The observations he made while trying and failing at direct selling in his teens helped him set up his own direct-selling business in his twenties. The unknown and hostile waters of Cuba and Vietnam he had to go through in the Navy made him prepared for the cultural and business challenges of working in Europe and Asia. And the challenges he had in attending and graduating from college kept him intellectually curious for the rest of his life—always striving for more knowledge and more ways to give back.
5. Goings is the living example that you don't have to come from a well-off family, you don't need great grades at school, and you don't need to follow the regular corporate track to end up as CEO. Even in his downsides, he found upsides.
6. Cameron's story shows similarities, in that she didn't come from an exemplary family, either, or attend any Ivy League schools. But Goings and Cameron do differ on their perspective on college and graduate school. Though it was something he struggled with for a long time, Goings ultimately made peace with not getting a college degree or MBA. He found other ways to be a life-long learner. For Cameron, the story was different: she felt that she had to get an MBA before being able to rise higher up in the ranks. In the end, both are right: many roads can lead to Rome.

Having heard the stories of Rick Goings and Susan Cameron, you have seen how you can make it to the CEO spot even if the deck is stacked against you at the start of your life. Goings himself knows many of these stories. As a matter of fact, Susan Cameron sits on the board of Tupperware, and it is Goings who put us in touch. Next, we turn to another cornerstone of success, and one that you can decide on yourself: the role of your family in your life and career.