I grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was the sixth kid (out of eight) in my family. My thing was performing – singing, acting and dancing. When I was eight, my family moved to Montclair, New Jersey. I kept performing, and at the end of 11th grade I moved across the Hudson river to study voice performance at the Manhattan School of Music. I loved my voice teacher, Walter Blazer, but otherwise I had a miserable time at school. I had wildly underestimated the degree to which conservatory (at that time – I understand things have changed dramatically) was not about performance, or the love of music. Still, I credit my two hellish years at Manhattan School as my awakening to the power of frames, a/k/a mental models. In that school, at that time, a conservatory education was an accumulation of skills – things like music theory, sight-singing, dictation, and Italian and German diction. Questions like Who are you, as a performer? were not on the agenda.
Through my roommate, a clarinetist grad student, I met some classical woodwind players doubling as punk-rock bandmates, and I started to sing punk rock. After two years at school, I left and moved to Chicago with my music-friend and mentor Greg. It was a fun summer. I was nineteen.
I waitressed at the outdoor restaurant Melvin B’s for the summer, but when it got colder and the café closed for the season, I learned that I was too young to legally serve alcohol in Illinois. I got an indoor job at a greeting card and giftware company called Recycled Paper Products. (The HR person on the job noted on my application, “Hops jobs a lot.”) They put me in customer service, where I learned something about talking with people on the phone and about how business works. I had temped in New York (I quit the job at Paine Webber by telling the manager I’d been cast in the national tour of “Cats,” a fib that pains me still. But not much.) so the office work was easy. I was interested in the people stuff – why does that guy hate that other guy? Why did Sarah’s cheeks get red in that meeting? Why are we talking about this form and that mailing, when all this interpersonal stuff is roiling, unresolved?
At Recycled Paper Products, I met my husband Michael. One of the questions Michael’s manager, Lee, asked him at the job interview was “Can you play shortstop?” The company softball team was evidently short a shortstop. Luckily Michael is an excellent shortstop, or things might have turned out differently.
I finished my degree at Loyola University in Chicago (their Mundelein College division) and kept singing opera on the side. In 1984, my boss moved me into HR, as the manager of the department. That was pretty funny, but it taught me that our power in a job doesn’t come from knowing the details of HR law or the latest in benefits planning, but how to figure out what’s important and get it done. When I was 28, I heard about a tech startup that was growing fast in Skokie, a Chicago suburb. The company was called U.S. Robotics, and they made modems. I thought modems might be deadly boring, but then again, I’d had fun in the greeting-card business, and I don’t even send greeting cards. So I went to USR and had a blast for nine years, running HR as the company went from $17 million in annual sales to two and a half billion. I wish on every working person a job as wonderful and co-workers as amazing as that job and those people were for me. I got my MS in Communications Studies at Northwestern while I was at USR, and I began speaking and writing about the workplace. I sang opera and musical theater and had three babies.
In 1997, U.S. Robotics was sold, and I stuck around for six days before getting out of Dodge. (Nothing good came of that deal – unless you know something that 3com that no one else does.) As a parting gift to my beloved co-workers, I brought in an opera troupe I worked with, carted in a massive piano and performed scenes from “The Marriage of Figaro” in the conference room. I began writing a workplace column for the Chicago Sun-Times, and I started consulting with a brilliant strategy guru, a University of Chicago marketing professor named Milind Lele. Milind taught me how to look at strategy and how to work with teams of lofty and conflicted people. When I left USR, I was expecting my fourth child, so the consulting schedule (a mix of in-my-house and in-a-client’s-office, never more than a night away) was perfect for me. I kept singing.
In 1999 one of my independent consulting deals started to turn into a full-time gig. My old boss, Casey Cowell (the founder and CEO of U.S. Robotics) was in the mix as a funder. I joined Ucentric Systems as a co-founder. We got venture funding in two seconds, but it came at a high price. The vcs wanted the company based in Boston, where they could keep an eye on us. I lived in Evanston with Michael and our four kids. I had never lived the always-on-planes lifestyle. I tried it. It stank. I was thirty-nine with four kids, not twenty-two and eager to rack up frequent flyer miles. Performing was out of the question. Strangers on planes would advise me to quit my job, and ironically I was writing workplace advice for other strangers. I thought “I’m a co-founder; I should stick it out.” Another voice asked, “Why?”
I had started an online community for professional women in 1999. I called it ChicWIT — Chicago Women in Technology. I had grown the network into thirty cities by 2001 – NycWIT in New York, MassWIT in Boston, and so on. I quit the startup job and moved with the family to Boulder, Colorado in August of 2001. Michael and I didn’t have a network in Colorado, and we didn’t have jobs. The first thing that happened after our move was 9/11. Next, I got pregnant with our fifth child. I moderated the online community and waited for something to happen. It was terrifying.
By 2007 my network, now called WorldWIT, had grown to fifty-five thousand members. We had seven employees, and great sponsors like Deloitte and Merrill Lynch and Tyson Foods and Liz Claiborne. We had gazillions of live and virtual events and amazing members. But I wasn’t interested in being a community host and moderator. I wanted to focus on my own content and my message. I got out of WorldWIT and launched Ask Liz Ryan in April of 2007.
I was already writing for Business Week Online and Yahoo!, so I added other publications and broadcast outlets to build up my exposure and refine my message. I started to write and speak more pointedly about what was wrong with corporate America and its leadership systems, and to teach organizations how to fix what was broken. I started to develop a methodology for job-seekers, to reclaim and amplify their voice and their stories. The process worked. People started to write to us from all over the continent and from Europe and South America. “I wrote a Pain Letter™ and got an interview the next day,” they’d write. People started to get excited about the Human-Voiced Resume™ approach and see its power. Organizations began to contact us, to help them rebuild their recruiting systems to put the human voice and touch back in.
I started to write and speak about fear in the workplace, how to spot it and how to counter it. CEOs started to reach out to us for help with their teams. I began to focus on recreating the recruiting process and how to teach human-voiced leadership™ in corporations. One day, a woman at a public workshop asked me “How did you create this company and build your clientele?” I told her, “I just had to let it happen.” There is a lot more power in the right brain than the business world has traditionally been comfortable exploring. That is changing now. We are happy to be part of that mix.
