Three high-profile regional and national CEOs who, combined, bring to the table decades of experience managing trillions of dollars worth of business and more than a million employees shared their insights at the third annual CEO Evolution panel on June 15 at UConn Stamford.
For more than an hour and a half, Margaret Keane, CEO of Synchrony Financial in Stamford, Scott Gillis, co-founder and senior managing director of Galt & Co. in Manhattan and William “Bill” Simon, former president and CEO of Walmart”™s U.S. operations discussed their work, predominantly focused on the topic of  increasing shareholder value.
“There is not an executive team in the fortune 500 that is not out there managing for shareholder value,” Gillis said.
His  firm works exclusively with Fortune 300-level clients providing advisory services for chief executive and board-level management.
“Shareholder value is driven really by the decisions and actions taken by hundreds if not thousands of people every day,” he said. “How you get all those people rowing in the same direction takes an enormous amount of communication and if you will, education about what drives shareholder value, how to manage its growth and what role each individual plays in doing so.”
How to define and effectively communicate a company’s goal and culture was a topic Simon was particularly comfortable speaking on from his experience at the helm of Walmart from 2010 to 2014.
“If you know what you want to be, what you want to be famous for as a company, it makes it much easier to communicate,” he said. “And it needs to be short, it can’t be 100 items.”
“At Walmart in the U.S. we have 1.2 million people that work in the company,” he continued. “At any given time there are 10,000 people doing something that you don”™t want them to do. How do you stop them or point them in the right direction? It comes from leadership behaviors and clarity of message. It is about higher purpose.”
Simon presented the example of employees who perform mundane tasks that may seem far removed from the overall success of the company, but in fact play a vital role in the transmission of culture from the highest corporate level  to the consumer.
“If you talk about that all the time with a simple clarity it eventually trickles down throughout the organization,” he said. “If it doesn’t your message isn’t clear enough or your leadership isn’t living it the same way you are expecting your employees to.”
In regards to understanding and meeting the needs of clients and consumers, diversity was a long-discussed factor and one of the few topics to generate differing opinions among the CEO panelists.
At Synchrony, a consumer financial services firm providing digital banking and financing for retail credit cards, diversity is a measured asset and intentionally incorporated into the makeup of the company, Keane said.
“It isn’t great because it is the right thing to do,” said Simon. “It is great because it is statistically the right thing to do for your business. There is no statistical way you can have the best people if you have 80 percent men and 20 percent women.”
Gillis, whose company does not operate on the same diverse, global level as Synchrony or Walmart saw the issue of diversity in his firm through a distinctly different lens.
“We are anything but diverse,” he said. “In fact we are intentionally not diverse. We are intentionally agnostic. We are geared to provide the best talent for you, however that comes out.”
While Keane acknowledged Gillis”™ perspective, as a female CEO in the financial services industry she said she was still surprised to see the stark lack of diversity in not only ethnicity, but gender and among the disabled as well.
“I go to meetings where I am the only diversity in the room” she said. “The more diverse you have your organization the better you can serve your customers and it is diversity of thought, diversity of culture ”” it helps you be a better partner with other companies.”
The evening was presented by the Fairfield County Business Journal, the University of Connecticut School of Business and Citrin Cooperman, a regional accounting, tax and business consulting firm.
“We are very pleased to be a convener of important conversations and to do so with Citrin Cooperman for this event,” said John A. Elliot, dean of the UConn School of Business. “Each of us brings deep relationships to the evening. Â As a result we again brought three distinguished CEO”™s together for what promises to be the largest event in the series.”
The panel  was moderated by CEO Evolution founder, Mark L. Fagan, CPA and managing partner of Citrin”™s Connecticut office.
“This year”™s CEO Evolution panelists captivated the audience with a wide array of topics,” said Fagan. “The perspectives and experiences that Scott, Bill and Margaret shared with us was exceptionally valuable.”
