Taking Opportunities: TED's Lisa Choi Owens on the Key Elements of Leadership and Success
By Julia Gamolina
Lisa Choi Owens is currently a Senior Advisor for TED, creating new franchises for TED where she is launching TED Tech. Previously, she was the Chief Revenue Officer and a Director of TED. Before that, Ms. Owens was the GM and SVP of Scripps Network Interactive responsible for all SNI’s digital properties, a $100+ business. She shared emerging technologies with the SNI Board and launched the Ulive brand, an online video network.
Ms. Owens recently served as a board member of Aventri, a PE backed event management software company through its successful merger and sale in 2022. Ms. Owens holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from UC Berkeley. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Ms. Owens talks about cultivating herself as a leader through her multifaceted career, and developing the necessary leadership and communication skills, advising those just starting their careers not to skip steps.
JG: I know you started in finance, which is a very male-dominated field. We talk about the challenges that we see related to that in architecture, but I imagine it can be even more aggressive in finance. Tell me about your time in this world.
LCO: I made the decision to go into finance for a variety of reasons. The biggest one was that this field was the most financially secure. Sometimes having your choices narrowed for you is helpful, and mine was that I didn’t have a strong financial net and the thing that I wanted to do, which was to go into journalism and be a newscaster, paid no dollars. So, I went for something that I thought would be credible, and would be a good stepping stone to understanding some fundamentals.
I stepped into finance without any real understanding of what it meant functionally to be in finance and to do the role that I had. I think that is a failing of our educational system, not exposing our students to what it means to be in sales and trading, and what it means to be an analyst…what it means to be an architect! What that means is that every young person actually needs to go out and speak to people who actually have the job, so that they understand what it means to be in that particular role. So with finance, I had a real deficit of understanding. And you know, I was the one who took all the class notes, and did everything you needed to academically, but none of it prepared me for Wall Street.
What did you learn during your time there?
The only good experience about Wall Street was that it set the bar so low with regard to how horrible and difficult it could be to work on a trading floor. I was in a very prestigious training program, and I felt very fortunate to be in it, but just because there’s prestige and just because there’s a name brand, that’s not an indicator of anything.
Working as a trader turned out to be something that was never going to be a long term lifestyle choice for me. Sales and trading is also a very different beast, and a non-transferable skill — pricing fixed-income derivative products is just utterly non-transferable. That’s something I thought about a lot when making career choices after that, “Is this a skill I will gain that I can bring to other things?”
So what did you do?
I decided to cut my losses because I knew that I no longer wanted to wake up at four in the morning to get to the trading floor by the time it opened, I did not want to be in a trading floor environment, and finally, the skills I was gaining would only exist on Wall Street. Once I realized that, I knew I had the name – I was coming from the J.P. Morgan local trading markets program, and so I knew I had credibility to at least show people that I’m at least analytical, smart, and that I’ve gone through a rigorous process.
My next job was at Tommy Hilfiger, which sounds odd, but my boyfriend at the time was at Lehman Brothers who had just taken Tommy Hilfiger public. I think that step was ultimately more important than I realized, because it was such a departure from finance. I was encouraged to realize though that by working at a bank, that gave me credibility to go into a planning role, which is a much more analytical role inside another business. Overall this was a great lesson in learning how to bring credibility, networking, and being open to interesting opportunities in fields you didn’t think were open to you — I didn’t know I could work in fashion unless I was a fashion designer!
Architecture is similar - there are so many interesting and key roles in the field, but not many young people know this and think that you can only be a designer to have impact.
Right! There are many ways. Then I went to the Harvard Business School, and right as I was graduating, there was the internet. That was it! That became the thing! So whether or not I was actually interested in working for a start-up, or being technical, none of that mattered because I knew that the internet was the future.
That was how I started in digital. All of the opportunities were there. I took lots of different roles over the years – I went through an IPO with The Knot, I went to a wireless software company, and finally there was a moment in time when again I thought, “Do I want to be in this?”
“Looking back, what I’ve done was I’ve somehow either taken the function of the industry and swapped those things out one at a time in order to make moves. But, I didn’t break the link.”
What did you do here?
I realized I had come to another decision tree where I realized I had put too much time and effort into having an advantage and knowing digital and using that to rise through the ranks. At some point, I did realize me being in digital companies in the 90s, was early. I didn’t want to waste away all of that experience that I built. So I stayed in it, and I’m really glad that I did, because it has come to serve me well obviously for the rest of my career. Then I ended up going to a television network, and I ran digital and distribution there, and put our content onto mobile phones in Japan and brought interactive television applications onto televisions.
What I learned over time is that it’s actually important to consider the primary role of the company that you’re working for. What is the primary driver of that business? I always say, you don’t want to be the accountant at a law firm, and you don’t want to be the lawyer at an accounting firm. When you are in the most important driver in a business, you get exposed to many different things — upward mobility opportunities, more visibility, more glory. I wish someone had told me that before, before I was a finance person at a fashion company, or a digital person at a television company.
Being in digital turned into that for you though, didn’t it?
Yes! It turned out that being in digital was the thing and it still is the thing, being in tech and being in digital. I ended up leaving the AMC Networks, and went to Scripps which is the food network and HGTV, and for that period of time, it was ten or twelve years of nothing but straight digital. This is when I first heard of internet-connected TVs; I was at a conference in Las Vegas, and went to work when I was back with my hair on fire, being like, “Guys…internet-connected TVs! Everyone needs to freak out now!” And no one did anything about it! Wrong.
But when you are a woman, and you are younger — because all of these television executives were much older — and you now speak a currency that makes them feel like dinosaurs, that is a very difficult position to be in. That one, I wish I had some great advice on how to navigate. It was difficult to be on the executive committee and be fifteen to twenty years younger than everyone, and being the only person that knew about digital. Which didn’t feel good to other people in the room with me, because they didn’t speak this language and they felt I was talking down to them when I wasn’t — I was just talking the language! But if I dumbed it down too much, I was being patronizing, and if I didn’t, I was being exclusionary. These were the kinds of concerns.
Sallie Krawcheck talks a ton about this too. How did you manage through?
It probably would have been better if I sought out some kind of sponsorship within the organization, someone to smooth that over. It is hard, as an older person in a significant role, to hear from the younger ranks in a currency that you don’t understand. So while it was prestigious to get the jobs that I did at the time that I did, which were these very senior roles, it was a lot of responsibility.
What I also realized through this, is that when you’re junior, you only have to worry about the people senior to you. When you’re senior, you have to worry about the board who is above you, your peer group who is competitive with you, and caring for the people that are under you. It’s not a three-dimensional view when you’re junior; you’re only looking up. When you’re senior, there are so many constituents, and they’re often at odds with one another, and how you navigate that ends up being very tricky and an intensely complicated human skill.
With all of this experience, how did you get to TED?
My journey to get to this place was that I still knew digital, which is important for TED — even though TED talks are on the stage, ninety-nine percent of the people that consume it do so through video. Looking back, what I’ve done was I’ve somehow either taken the function of the industry and swapped those things out one at a time in order to make moves. But, I didn’t break the link. There was always some link that gave me credibility and that allowed me to get more senior with each role.
With the shift to TED, I was at a completely different stage of my life. I had proved what I needed to prove to myself, and I was looking for something with purpose. It ended up being a pretty smooth transition, because at this point, I had a plethora of experience.
“What I learned from TED is to simplify, simplify, and simplify. There is a tendency to want to showcase everything that you know, and every specific detail of a project that you’re working on, and that volume somehow equals knowledge…but it’s always audience before content.”
One thing I’ve really wanted to ask you is that TED is obviously amazing at communications — what I mean by that is that the people up there on stage giving those talks are always so well-spoken and clear, and I have a feeling TED has something to do with that. What have you learned about communications and storytelling from TED?
I will say that communication is by far the most important professional skill anyone can have — it's how I have succeeded in my career thus far, being a good communicator. What I learned from TED is to simplify, simplify, and simplify. There is a tendency to want to showcase everything that you know, and every specific detail of a project that you’re working on, and that volume somehow equals knowledge…but it’s always audience before content.
Audience before content, yes! That’s an exceptional way of putting it.
You have to care about who is listening. You can be a great technical designer, but if you can’t communicate your intent in a way that someone will absorb, it is useless! The simpler that you make your message is always better, because human nature, generally speaking, doesn’t have the capacity to remember forty-three things. It’s more like three things.
We ask our speakers, “Do you want your audience to hear every technical detail, or do you want your audience to hear how your space will affect your business and how consumers will experience the space, and enjoy it, and build brand equity?” Remember, audience before content, and be as tight, and clean, and simple, and have as few points as possible.
Who are you admiring right now?
Dr. Keyun Ruan. I’ve been deeply engrossed in tech and AI this past year, and Keyun is an AI-researcher. She’s working on something called “The Happiness Project.” And what she’s trying to figure out is how to reconcile economic and tech growth with human flourishing, because right now, never the two shall meet. I’m so motivated by her because she’s technical, she’s super academically accomplished, and yet her ability to inspire me about the ways in which she’s trying to reorient our culture to think about how tech and prosperity can actually help with human flourishing and happiness, shows me that she’s emotionally intelligent and that she has purpose. She’s a wonderful example of someone who has applied her technical skills to purpose.
Finally, and I know that this has been a throughline during the interview, what advice do you have for those just starting their careers? And, would you have any additional advice for women?
Don’t skip steps. You have to know those basics and fundamentals, and I also mean the basics of how the business works. What makes the engines run? Why are we getting paid? If you don’t understand these fundamental things that are building blocks, you will be caught. And if that means you need to stay in a job for six more months before you get promoted, it’s actually worth it because you have a long life.
With regard to being a woman in a male-dominated world, and a young woman at that, it is plagued me how hard that can be. But back to the last question you asked me about communication skills – if you learn how to speak simply but confidently, that is key. Learning how to measure your words, to be thoughtful in what you say and how you say it, all of this is important because delivery matters, and presentation matters! You lead with how you present yourself, and one of those things is what comes out of your mouth. Over time, the ability to speak clearly, confidently, and evenly has given me a track record over time. Of course my education, expertise, and track record have too, but you can’t discount that where I have been able to gain respect in very male-dominated situations is where I’ve been able to, in a very sober and confident way, I’ve been able to communicate simply.
And that comes with practice! Every time you have an opportunity to present, take it.
Take it, for sure.
It’s easier to fall from the floor — if you’re junior, you have much less to lose, and you don’t want to wait until you’re forty-five to have your big moment in front of two thousand people. Too stressful. Every public speaking opportunity that you have, to hone in on that skill – take it.