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Susan Packard
Co-Founder of Scripps Networks Interactive & Former Chief Operating Officer, HGTV
Susan Packard
Co-Founder of Scripps Networks Interactive & Former Chief Operating Officer, HGTV
Biography
Susan Packard has been on the ground floor and helped to build powerful media brands like HBO, CNBC, and HGTV. She was the second employee at HGTV, its co-founder, and its former chief operating officer. HGTV became Scripps Networks Interactive when we created new brands and platforms. She helped build these businesses to a market value of over $15 billion.
Susan left the corporate media world to become a writer, mentor, and a leadership speaker. She has an established platform as an author today. TarcherPerigee (Penguin Random House) published her first book NEW RULES OF THE GAME: 10 Strategies for Women in the Workplace in 2015 and her second book FULLY HUMAN: Three Steps to Grow Your Emotional Fitness in Work, Leadership and Life in 2019. Both of these books explore how practices of good emotional health can help us to create better lives and careers. In NEW RULES she touched on grit, resilience and team trust. In FULLY HUMAN, she wrote about emotional fitness, a practice she teaches today to leaders, which was at the core of their success at HGTV. Susan gave a Tedx talk about emotional fitness at UCLA. In 2020, she was named one of the top 40 women keynote speakers by RealLeaders, and continues to be an active speaker at organizations and universities like Stanford Business School, Carnegie Mellon and University of Alabama.
Susan was the first woman elected to serve on the board of directors of Churchill Downs, Inc., the owner and manager of the Kentucky Derby.
Susan has done many things in her career others might consider “brave,” but the most courageous thing she’s ever done was to ask for help for an on-going substance use disorder. In 2019, she gave a Commencement address at Michigan State University, her alma mater, and shared with the 5,000 graduates and their families some of my addiction and recovery journey. There she was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor in Humanities.
She was so moved by the sober college students she met at MSU’s Collegiate Recovery Center that she decided to write a third book, called THE LITTLE BOOK OF COLLEGE SOBRIETY, LIVING HAPPY, HEALTHY AND FREE. This book also focuses on good emotional health for those in recovery and their families.
Susan has practiced a form of meditation called Centering Prayer for over ten years, and now teach this wisdom practice at various venues, and incorporates it when she facilitates leadership and mindfulness retreats. She’s also done podcasts, where she teaches meditation practice together with the audience.
Susan is married to a great guy named Bill, and they have a wonderful son, Andrew, and two girls, felines named Diva and Dart. They make their home in Knoxville, Tennessee and all travel up to Michigan each summer, to sit by the lake and take in Michigan’s perfect summer days.
Speaker Videos
New Rules of the Game: 10 Strategies for Women in the Workplace
On Leadership
Young Entrepreneurs Dinner
TEDTalk: Whose Am I?
Staying Connected
Thinking Outside the Box
Speech Topics
Fully Human: 3 Steps to Grow Your Emotional Fitness in Work, Leadership & Life
Susan Packard shows you how to increase your personal satisfaction and productivity —in work and life—via her three-step path toward EQ Fitness.
Emotions can sink us, or they can power us like fuel to succeed. Many of us show up for work, and life, feeling lonely even in a room full of people, or bringing unproductive emotions into work, like anger or fear. You don’t have to feel this way. Susan Packard offers an accessible new guidebook to grow your emotional fitness, and it’s arrived just in time, as technology is quickly becoming our main interface for communication. Packard lays out how to develop supportive work relationships, and for leaders, how to build healthy company cultures. No matter where you are in your career, success is an inside job.
Packard introduces us to successful people and companies that are rich with “connector” emotions like hope, empathy, and trustbuilding. She tackles unconventional topics, like how workaholism keeps us emotionally adolescent, and how forgiveness belongs in the workplace, too. Packard shares her EQ Fit-catalyzed success at HGTV and the stories of the executives she coaches in mindfulness and other emerging techniques, and she teaches an inside-out practice of self-discovery, which helps you uncover unproductive emotions, and dispel them.
The best leaders balance power and grace, and everyone can effectively use resilience--an ability to endure tough situations and make tough decisions, and vulnerability, a willingness to open up, change, and admit when we need help. She offers new tools to bring our strongest emotional selves to work each day.
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) for Today
Based on her new book Fully Human: 3 Steps to Grow Your Emotional Fitness for Work, Leadership and Life, Susan Packard outlines why EQ is more important today than ever, and offers practices that help us to grow our EQ and leadership skills. She shares cautionary tales of workaholism, and how to avoid getting stuck in power and ego traps, and inspiring ways to build honest, morally courageous cultures. Moments of reflection can strengthen EQ skills, and she shares stories of business leaders, how they actively practice great EQ everyday, and how we can too. As a certified meditation instructor, if a group is interested, she can lead a meditation exercise too as part of this discussion.
New Rules of the Game: 10 Strategies for Women in the Workplace
In this brand new presentation, Susan reveals the findings from her new book, New Rules of the Game: 10 Strategies for Women in the Workplace which provides insights, tips and direction to women in business, based on experiences from Susan's own 30 year career, along with a dozen other prominent executives. Packard advocates for a revolutionary new perspective for businesswomen, which she calls “gamesmanship" – a strategic way of thinking that cultivates creativity, focus, optimism, teamwork, and competitiveness.
These strategies are seen in the gaming and sports worlds and often among men, but women can utilize these skills as well to learn to compete outwardly instead of inwardly, provide the necessary tools and techniques to succeed at work by thinking tactically, step up with more grit to get the next win, and level the playing field by understanding how male colleagues think and win at work, and add excitement to their careers. The information within New Rules of the Game will become a handbook, and playbook, for the future of women in business. The message is to think like a winner and act like an athlete, but at the same time don’t be afraid to use a little humor in the workplace.
Now What? Creativity, Innovation & Turning Ideas into Icons
So you have a great, innovative idea that is without peer in the marketplace—how does that become a great business worth over $7 billion, such as HGTV? Packard shares with the audience her experiences and the lessons learned in growing a multi-billion dollar business, which today includes cable networks, books, DVDs, interactive properties and a family of trusted television personalities. A leader who inspired those around her to push the boundaries in innovating products to achieve business success, Packard shares the leadership skills necessary to incubate — and execute — game changing ideas.
How Culture Impacts Employee Engagement: Timeless Lessons on Talent
Two of today’s toughest challenges are recruiting and retaining the best talent. Learn how a $7 billion business did it from the ground up, and how these lessons can apply to you. HGTV co-founder Susan Packard will cover critical areas, such as team structure, having a sense of mission and how small, inexpensive things can impact loyalty and workplace excellence. Having the right people in the right jobs with the right amount of motivation is crucial to any successful organization, and Packard shares what employers must do to create a workplace that can become the envy of any industry.
The Leader Within: Growing Your Leadership Team
What do leaders need today to excel? Hear from HGTV’s co-founder, Susan Packard, as she shares leadership lessons from businesses she has helped to build, and from the leadership work she is doing today. She will discuss how vision, audacity and relentless focus are some of the key factors that make great leaders today. She will also share some unusual insights and stories about diversity as a business practice today.
Move Fast, Think Big: Building a Brand Leader
HGTV took a big idea – a cable television network devoted to all things home – into a marketplace dominated by media giants and emerged the leader. Now launched in more than 98 million homes, HGTV changed how we envision our homes and, in the process, established a new model for business innovation and success. Packard shares with audiences strategies for forging and promoting a brand while gaining customers who'll remain loyal to it, and provides ideas for expanding into other channels and platforms to secure even greater market share while maintaining brand integrity.
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