Who Are We?

After almost pursuing a career in medicine, Kim shifted gears to explore the business world, first in a PR/marketing agency and then joining Deloitte as a systems analyst. After getting her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Kim returned to Deloitte. She spent the next 18+ years in a variety of roles, from delivering strategy projects to leading merger and acquisition engagements to defining new customer-engagement models. She now heads the Deloitte Greenhouse team in the United States, a group that delivers interactive experiences expressly designed to shift thinking, activate teams, and accelerate breakthroughs.

Suzanne started out her career focused on health psychology research and program evaluation in various organizations including Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She then shifted her focus to organizational culture and employee engagement, moving on to the Great Place to Work Institute and finally Deloitte. Along the way she has earned a PhD in social-personality psychology from the Graduate School and University Center at CUNY (so she's a psychologist, but more of a researcher than a clinician), and then an MBA from the Stern School of Business at NYU. Now she quite happily lives, eats, and breathes Business Chemistry.

Just in case you thought it's all work all the time for us, we've got lives outside of work too! Kim lives in California and Suzanne in New Jersey (but with strong Minnesota roots). We've each got a couple of kids and some hobbies as well'painting, architecture, and hiking for Kim, and reading, gardening, and walking for Suzanne.

In the Beginning

Now on to our work together. As a reminder, when it comes to Business Chemistry, Kim is not only a Pioneer, but she's also a secondary Driver, and specifically a Scientist. Suzanne is a Guardian and an Integrator, specifically a Dreamer. When Kim originally began architecting Business Chemistry, her team was composed mostly of Pioneers like her. They had all sorts of ideas about what they could do with the emerging system, but they didn't necessarily wake up in the morning eagerly anticipating cross-referencing the various pieces of research or sifting through the data sets. They knew someone needed to be doing those things, so they thought it could be a good move to bring in a researcher. Along came Suzanne, a social-personality psychologist with a love for research and data-sifting. And from the word go, she was definitely a bird of a different feather, especially when compared to Kim.

Since there were many areas of the Deloitte Greenhouse where Suzanne's background and skills were relevant, Kim and team got her involved in lots of projects right away. It should have been good for them and good for her, right? But it wasn't good for her, so in the end it wasn't good for anyone. Being deployed against multiple workstreams necessitated constant topic- and task-switching, which made it hard for her to get traction on any one thing. As a result, Suzanne's frustration levels were rising, as were Kim's.

Then we had our eureka moment. In theory we were trying to take advantage of Suzanne's strengths by putting her on multiple projects that needed her expertise. But by spreading her across so many activities and not providing her opportunities to really dig in, she wasn't set up for success, because that's not how she performs at her best. So we decided to take our own advice and change the model in a way that would better suit her Business Chemistry. Suzanne would stop being a Jill-of-all-trades and would become a master of one. She would work only on Business Chemistry, balancing out the original Pioneer-heavy team with a totally different skillset. The result? Suzanne was happier and more productive, and so was everyone else. Leaning into complementary workstyles meant everyone could contribute to the best of their abilities. Suzanne still won't join Kim in karaoke and sometimes she sequesters herself in a corner during loud social events (where Kim can often be clearly heard, even over many other voices), but there's a lot more great work getting done, as we hope this book will attest.

We Should Write a Book Together. Wouldn't That Be Fun?

Perhaps the first clue to what it's like working on a giant project across this particular opposite-type partnership is that Suzanne has kept an ongoing file of conversations and telling moments that have occurred along the way, in preparation for writing this section at the end. Meanwhile, Kim has no such file. Perhaps because she knew Suzanne had one?

Suzanne's file tells us that one key point of divergence happened early on, when we were thinking about the timeline for the book. Neither of us had written a book before, so in the beginning we were feeling around in the dark a bit. Suzanne built a timeline by imagining every possible step she thought might be required, outlining them in a sequence that seemed to make sense, and including a complicated back and forth process of drafting, reviewing, and revising multiple chapters, in different stages, all at once. As she figured it, the book would take a year and a half to write.

Kim took a quick look at Suzanne's timeline and said “That seems overly complicated. Why don't you draft half the chapters and I'll draft half, and then we'll switch.” She then suggested we could write the book in, oh…let's say…six months. “After all,” she said, “we know what we want to say!”

Suzanne is a big enough person to admit that, OK the original timeline was overly complicated and we did write the book in six months or so, but she spent the entire time just barely containing her anxiety about getting it done.

Here's a typical, illustrative email exchange about our timeline:

Suzanne: “I know it's a lot (I'm trying to keep my own panic at bay) but if we can dig in now to stay on track we can keep things from spiraling out of control. I've attached the most current version of the book plan/timeline.”

Kim: “Thanks for keeping us organized but I think we're making great progress and am not concerned.”

And that's pretty much how it went throughout the writing process. Suzanne was the taskmaster and queen of details. She sent Kim hundreds of very long, elaborate emails about timelines and deadlines, research findings and analyses, permissions and citations, drafts and edits. (Sorry Kim!) Suzanne shared lots of feedback and usually thought a chapter could benefit from just one more revision.

Kim's deep and varied experiences with executives on the ground balanced Suzanne's more research-focused perspective. And she was the enthusiastic navigator with her eye always on the horizon: Where are we trying to go, and is this winding path really the best way to get there? What are we trying to say, and is it really necessary to use quite so many words to say it? She also sent a number of “sorry this is late but something came up!” emails. (Sorry Suzanne!)

You'll get the picture pretty quickly through the following quotes from emails we exchanged while drafting chapters and reviewing each other's work:

Suzanne: “We've got two weeks until risk review. We need to complete the following, listed here in order of priority. I'm sending this now in case you can complete any of them before tomorrow, and also making sure you have most updated versions all in one place in case you want to print anything for our meeting…”

“We need to think about a few (more) things related to the book. Key questions follow. We can discuss on a call, but initial answers now would help with planning. I've attached the most recent book plan and timeline (Gray text means these things have been accomplished. Bright yellow highlighting means currently in process. Light yellow highlighting means we're revising)…”

“I think we will want to work on this chapter a bit more to perfect it. It's the key to everything and I'm not quite satisfied yet.”

Kim: “Ok, I think I may have completed everything on this list apart from what the visual TOC might look like'is that true?? SO EXCITING!”

“Phew. That was the most work I've ever done for 6 pages of output. I explored a number of different directions for this but felt that this was the most non-typical business book direction while still hopefully being compelling for a businessperson to read.”

“Eureka! Well, maybe not QUITE that exciting, but I did start exploring a different approach for the intro…”

“Just an update so you don't worry'I am working on this!!”

As we went along and produced some solid drafts of the chapters, we asked for feedback from colleagues of all Business Chemistry types. That was telling as well. We heard that our writing styles are quite different. In a nutshell, we were told that Kim's writing is more direct and declarative, while Suzanne's is a bit softer, with more qualifications, questions, and citations. Occasionally we heard that a section was too heavy or too long. Some of them maybe still are, but Suzanne drafted those and she simply couldn't imagine robbing you, our readers, of all that important and interesting information! And it's not just Suzanne; some of our reviewers, depending on their own type, indicated that the level of detail or the presence of supporting research was appropriate and helpful, and lent credibility to our work. Others suggested shortening the text. (Kim promises she did not put them up to it.) Still others, we suspect, politely skimmed over the denser parts. And our goal, of course, was to meet the needs of those who like the details without losing the attention of those who prefer things short and sweet.

And did you know, readers, that when you write a book, you need to market it? You probably did know that, and we knew it too on some level, but once it started ramping up we had very different responses to some of the events that put us out there in different ways (webcasts, podcasts, speaking engagements, etc.). Here are our respective responses to a suggestion from our marketing lead that we do a live-feed event:

Suzanne: “I'll ponder it even though it makes my blood pressure rise. I'll look at the one you shared as an example so I can see what it's like…”

Kim: “I'd love to do this.”

We hope our example has demonstrated that making the effort to work with your opposite type can be effective, but can also be fun, if you keep a sense of humor about it. Perhaps one final quote from each of us, recorded along the way, will give you just a little more insight into our partnership.

Suzanne: “I'm already upset about the imperfections of the book we haven't written yet.”

Kim: “Suzanne, you need to write down some of your own quotes.”