How to Build a Meaningful Career

How did the former executive business partner for Jeff Bezos at Amazon and Marissa Mayer at Google, and Google’s first-ever Chief of Staff, advance her career? Listen to this inspiring conversation with APC keynote speaker Ann Hiatt.

Recorded at APC 2024 and produced by the American Society of Administrative Professionals - ASAP. Learn more and submit a listener question at asaporg.com/podcast.

Leah Warwick: Hi, everyone. I'm Leah Warwick, and you're listening to "The Admin Edge." We've arrived at the final episode of this season, recorded at APC 2024, and our guest is one of our keynote speakers, Ann Hiatt. Ann has worked with Jeff Bezos at Amazon as his executive business partner; Marissa Mayer at Google as her executive business partner; and Eric Schmidt as Google's first ever chief of staff. Now, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Ann at APC.

Hi, I'm Leah Warwick, Editor for ASAP, and my guest today is Ann Hiatt, leadership strategist at Hypergiant, LLC, and a keynote speaker at this event, APC. Welcome to the podcast, Ann. 

00:00:53                     

Ann Hiatt: Thanks for having me, Leah.

Leah Warwick: It's such a pleasure to have you here.

Ann Hiatt: I'm having a great time. What a great event.

Leah Warwick: I'm so glad to hear that. We love to hear that. And I am, too. So yesterday you did an amazing keynote session here on the main stage. We all learned so much from you. It was about lessons that you've learned in your career. So you've learned a lot from Silicon Valley elite in your career, though you were born and raised on Air Force bases, first in Florida and then Alaska. How did your early life prepare you for a career in Silicon Valley?

Ann Hiatt: It's so funny, as Steve Jobs said in his commencement address at Stanford. He said, "It's often only in retrospect that the dots connect." And looking back, I can see how my early life as an Air Force brat really did prepare me for this in ways that I'm sure were not even intentional on my parents' part.

00:01:46

My dad was a fighter pilot in the Air Force. I was born just months after his first assignment, when he was assigned the F-4 Phantom fighter jet, and I was born on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. I think watching my dad's career, he had reinvented himself from – I'm from a long series of farmers. I'm first-generation non-farmer. For my dad to dare enough and be bold enough to go after a really big dream, like becoming a fighter pilot, I think you absorb that as a kid in ways you don't even appreciate until later. And then I saw him reinvent himself for the third time when he retired from the military and then went to law school and set another really big, audacious goal for himself clerking for judges and then settling in Seattle. The way that he was very much in the driver's seat of his career I think inspired [me], and I tried to model my life after what I had seen.

00:02:36

And then also my mom was the other half of our family – her emotional intelligence, her creativity, her approach and thoughtfulness to collaborations and projects and always being really involved in the community. I think both sides of that, that drive but also that EQ in addition to the IQ was something that really formed me as a human and the way I approach my career. 

Leah Warwick: You balance that so well, the ambition and the drive with the emotional intelligence, the soft skills that make someone a great administrative professional. So in 2002, you applied to work at Amazon and started as the most junior person at the company. You sat three feet from Jeff Bezos' desk, and you describe this as the beginning of your unconventional, bespoke business school. So what happened next?

00:03:24                     

Ann Hiatt: Well, we would talk for hours to do justice to that question. When I joined Amazon, it was 2002. The company wasn't yet profitable. Jeff was really just trying to invent a future that had never existed before. The biggest challenge ahead of us was: How do you get people to believe in a vision that you haven't yet realized? That includes everyone from our shareholders, our board of directors, hiring executives and employees who believed in that vision, even when success was very, very far off in the future, and working for somebody who has that kind of vision was just an incredible business school for me. To learn, how do you make and then approach and then accomplish really, really difficult things?

00:04:03

Watching him model that, for me, was such a gift because I not only used that when I then went on to work at Google for 12 years, but also in my individual life and career path. Learning the formula for risk-taking: seeing a vision, knowing what you want, and then being able to reverse engineer the steps between today and where you want to be is just an incredible life lesson. Jeff really did that to the fullest. He's an incredible visionary. We made a lot of mistakes in early Amazon, but I think you almost learn more from making really big bads, pivoting and trying again, than you do if it works on the first try. So I'm really grateful for that early education. 

Leah Warwick: Yes. And you shared in your keynote a few mistakes you've made, which was really empowering, because haven't we all? And we do. I'll speak for myself. I've learned a lot more from my mistakes than I have my successes, because the success tells you "do more of that." A mistake tells you not only "don't do that," but "how can you be better and how can you innovate?"

00:04:58                     

Ann Hiatt: Exactly.

Leah Warwick: And so after three years at Amazon, you spent 12 years at Google, and you worked directly with Marissa Mayer and Eric Schmidt. What was that experience like, and what did you learn there?

Ann Hiatt: It was a beautiful continuation. It felt like the next chapter after working at Amazon. If I had to pick just a couple of top things I learned in early Google years, it was first around team building, being very, very thoughtful of the talent, the ambitions, the grit level of the people that you need to bring on to accomplish really difficult tasks, and really had to come together as a team. Google had the incredible privilege of being able to hire literally some of the smartest people in the entire world. But getting all of these people who were used to being best in class, valedictorian, to then collaborate with people who are also at that level, that took a lot of time.

00:05:47

I think that's the thing I'm extremely grateful to Marissa for teaching me. On the product team, we were bring together engineers, UX/UI designers, policymakers, communication teams, people with very different skillsets and also different approaches to their work, and have them come together in these little pods to launch a product that we knew was going to be really useful in fulfilling the mission of Google, which is to organize the world's information and make it universally useful an accessible. It required all of those different expertise to come together as a cohesive whole. That's an incredible art, especially after having left Google and working with startups and scaleup founders, again, I can see how essential that is. 

I've seen mediocre ideas with a stellar team really take over the world. And likewise, I've seen incredible emerging tech and patent-worthy tech evolutions not reach their greatest potential because the team didn't come together quite right. And honestly, that's why I think I loved being the hub in that wheel of those teams. As executive business partner to Marissa and then as chief of staff to Eric, that was a big part of my responsibility was to make sure we maximized the potential of all of the parts in our team to really produce exceptional results. So that's probably the thing I am most grateful for learning from Marissa. 

00:06:59

And for Eric it was really about insatiable curiosity. He was CEO of three major tech companies, then he became executive chairman when Google had never had one before, and so he really taught me to lean into seeing opportunities and utilizing your skillset in new ways. He was a very different executive as chairman than he was as CEO, because that's what the company needed from him, and so he modeled for me anticipating what your organization is going to need from you, leaning into learning new skillsets. We were visiting artificial intelligence researchers before that was a household word. He was like a decade ahead of the general tech understanding of where tech was emerging, because he was insatiably curious and did the really difficult thing, which was to always carve out time for deep thought work, for following curiosities and just meeting new and interesting people. 

00:07:48

And so I've tried to glean all of that from him, and I'm trying to replicate that now in my work with incredible founders who have this vision that they don't yet know how they're going to accomplish, but they're leaning into it anyway. I could talk for hours on this topic. It's my favorite question. 

Leah Warwick: Well, that leads right in because at Hypergiant, LLC, you work with clients. How does your background as an executive business partner, as a chief of staff, and all your lessons learned as you've described, help you not only in consulting but also in being an international keynote speaker and a bestselling author? How does that inform your work?

Ann Hiatt: The admin skillset is my greatest asset at this point in my career. I think it leads so naturally into being an entrepreneur because the way I approached my career across 15 years at Amazon and Google was very much as an intrapreneur. Within the confines of an organized company, how can I use the principles and best practices of an entrepreneur within this organization?

00:08:43

So I always approached my work as following their models, like the risk taking, the anticipation of what my organization, my executive is going to need from me, and that leads so naturally into being an entrepreneur myself now, being a founder of something. 

That was a rough transition, I have to say, after 12 years at a well-run company, and then you're wearing all the hats. I went right back to my admin roots of project management, prioritization, being very careful, running experiments of: Which model works best? What are the right kind of offerings for my clients? How can I anticipate what they're going to need? It's the same core skillset, honestly, so it's given me such an advantage to then replicate the principles of entrepreneurship that I've seen both at Amazon and Google and beyond. 

Leah Warwick: I love that. You're crushing it, which we love to see. We have a listener question for you. They wrote in: "I've been in the administrative field for several years, but sometimes feel like I'm stuck in a rut. What are some actionable steps I can take to ensure I'm building a career with purpose and not just going through the motions?"

00:09:43                     

Ann Hiatt: First, I want to congratulate this listener for this question, because I think there's so much wisdom behind this question of: How can I put myself firmly in the driver's seat of my career and really decide who I want to become, the skillset I'm evolving, the reputation I'm building, the many skillsets that I want to become known for? And so I think just in asking yourself that question, that's the majority of the battle.

The first step is know what you want. Know what is meaningful to you. As an administrative professional, you give a lot. You're give, give, giving. And the way that I didn't burn out in extremely demanding environments was making sure that my work gave as much to me in return as I was giving to it. That's always, for me, been a decidedly high bar. I am going to give a lot. I am going to out care everyone around me. I'm going to try and be ten steps ahead of some of the smartest and most ambitious people in the world. That's not a low bar. 

But I always knew what I wanted in return. What I wanted in return was skillsets, access to different networks, different rooms. I wanted to see the way that the best thought makers in the world really approached difficult problems. So what I wanted in exchange was really this world-class education. That really helped me know: How can I volunteer for different projects? I call this "engineering serendipity." 

00:10:59

How can you see opportunities within the organization or with your executive that aren't the way that you've been utilized in the past, but accomplish that? It will teach me something new. It will allow my executive to be more effective, and we'll accomplish our greater company-wide goals. And so I would say: Start with yourself. Know what you want. Look for opportunities for that to be delegated to you, and always keep in mind the larger strategy of the organization. That really involves picking our heads up from our individual responsibilities or even our team and thinking globally and organization wide. That's when you get some incredible opportunities that otherwise would have just passed you by because you wouldn't have noticed the opportunities in their infancy, and I think that can be a really big differentiator. 

Leah Warwick: Absolutely. Think bigger. Think beyond because you can do you it. That means a lot coming from you. Thank you so much for being here, Ann. Please tell our listeners where they can find you online.

00:11:48                     

Ann Hiatt: Thanks, Leah. Yeah, I am very active on LinkedIn, so Ann Hiatt, A-N-N H-I-A-T-T. I'd love to connect with you there. I publish several articles every week, and I have a newsletter there. My website is annhiatt.com. I look forward to – yeah, if there's an opportunity within your team for some consulting or speaking, I do a lot of workshops, both for executive teams and C-suite optimization, but also for – we know the engine of any good workforce is their administrative professionals, so I do that as well. I'm looking forward to hearing what people would like to hear about most, so submit some questions. I'd love to write some articles to it.

Leah Warwick: Yes, definitely follow Ann on LinkedIn. She's quite a treasure. Thank you very much.

Ann Hiatt: Thanks, Leah. Thanks for having me.

[music playing]

Leah Warwick: Thank you for listening to "The Admin Edge," produced by the American Society of Administrative Professionals, original music and audio editing by Warwick Productions, with video and audio production at our events by 5Tool Productions. If you like this podcast, please leave us a nice review, five stars, and subscribe. If you'd like to submit a listener question, you may do so on our website at ASAPorg.com/podcast.