There's a theme, says Jeanie Daniel Duck, in her life that goes like this: Everything she's done in her career is by accident. "If I tried to do things in the traditional way," says Duck, a soon-to-be-retired senior partner at The Boston Consulting Group, "I don't think any of it would have worked out the way it did." For starters, Duck says, she never expected that she'd be in business in the first place. "I thought I would graduate school one day, get married the next and live happily ever after," she says. Well, it didn't work out that way.
Today, Duck is one of the profession's most accomplished women with more than 30 years' experience in change management and more than 20 years with BCG. She is also a best-selling author, and her 2001 book The Change Monster has been translated into nine languages and is still widely read and used by global corporations and nonprofits. Her 1993 Harvard Business Review article "Managing Change: The Art of Balancing" has been included in every HBR edition on change. And in 2002, she was named one of Consulting 's Top 25 Consultants.
But the road to BCG and a Lifetime Achievement Award wasn't always straight and narrow. It was, as she likes to say, an accident. "When I decided to become a consultant, it really was just a flying leap into oblivion," Duck says. "It was just launching myself without knowing what I was doing. What I did know was that I was a very good speaker, and I knew that I could hold an audience. So, I figured that was good start."
Those qualities were developed early in her career. After growing up in Montgomery, Ala., and graduating from the University of Georgia, where she studied art, she headed to New York in the late 1960s and ended up—again almost by accident—attending the Pratt Institute and earning a master's degree in sculpture. "I certainly didn't have the credentials that Pratt usually requires," she says. "I applied on the first day of classes and got a spot in the class when someone dropped out."
Soon after, she was student teaching transactional analysis, a form of social psychology, in New York. "It was really useful because I would go to the most upscale private schools in the morning, and then some of the city's worst schools on the same day," she says. "What I discovered was that I could change environments and adapt to new ones better than most people."
After a marriage, a baby and a divorce, Duck found herself in St. Louis teaching art to adults—and having to support a 1-year-old daughter. That's when she entered the business world as a management trainee tasked with the role of teaching customer service representatives how to deal with the public.
Her next job, however, would be one that would set her on an eventual career course in consulting—she was hired to assist people who had experienced a major life-changing event. "This is where I really realized that I enjoyed helping people who needed help," she says. "I also discovered that people just didn't know how to organize. When someone dies, for instance, there's a whole lot of stuff you have to do. So, I wrote a workbook called The Life Planning Workbook and created worksheets that listed everything these people needed to do."
This was, she says, where she began to think more like a consultant. But just as she got rolling, the company was forced to lay off her entire department. But in a shrewd business move, she had made a deal with the company where it would own the copyright to the workbook, but she would own any consulting contracts generated by sales of the book. The company agreed; "probably because they didn't think I would do it, but I did," she says.
"I've always believed that companies go through major life events just like people, but companies never acknowledge them, and they don't deal with them very well," she says. "So, I started to think about the major life event of companies—mergers, layoffs, reorganizations—and how they impacted the workforce."
It was at this time, in 1980, that she launched her own consultancy, burning through her life savings to get the business off the ground.
Her first big break came at Honeywell where she turned a 30-minute after-dinner speech into a series of two-hour workshops on the human side of change. "I had figured out by this point that the human side of change was my niche and, quite frankly, my only niche because I didn't know about manufacturing or anything else," she says. "In business, I saw people's emotions as important and something that should be considered, and that was a very different approach, actually."
Eventually, fate would have Duck bump into Carl Stern, who was the head of BCG's Chicago office. Stern had heard Duck speak and admitted that he thought most people in her line of work were "charlatans or psycho-babblers," but was impressed because "she actually made sense." Then he asked her to join BCG.
"I was stunned," Duck says. "My image of BCG and my image of me were not compatible, but BCG had gone through a transition a few years before that where leadership realized that if a business strategy is dependent upon thousands of people implementing a strategy correctly, then how one deals with people is critical."
She joined the firm in 1988 as the first specialist ever hired at BCG, and she came in as a partner. She admits the culture shock—for both—wasn't always easy. "When I came in to BCG, I didn't have the credentials, the background or even the vocabulary the other partners did," she says. "I salute both BCG and myself for hanging in there together when it wasn't always easy, but BCG always forced me to move outside of my comfort zone and that kept me learning and growing." For example, Duck says she began to understand the value of data and numbers. "Once you explain something in numerical terms, it becomes real," she says. "That got me thinking about how I can take my insights about people and put them into numbers so a CEO or a CFO would see them as real."
These types of discoveries led to the collaboration and development of a variety of tools, approaches and methodologies about change behavior that are tested and repeatable. Those approaches and methodologies became the material that ended up in The Change Monster .
"I absolutely loved writing the book," she says. "I loved being able to help people understand the underlying phenomenon of change and then help them calibrate their reactions and experiences. And it has been translated into nine languages. "That just blows me away. It's very humbling to know that something you wrote could be helping someone, somewhere whom you'll never meet, or even speaks the same language that you do," she says.
And now that she's retiring, Duck says she's looking forward to writing some more. "I want to write another book," she says. "I just don't know what I'm going to write about."
That answer will probably come to her soon enough. And if history proves anything, that answer will probably come to her by accident.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.