Put this one in your book of management axioms: “True leadership is founded on total humiliation.”
That’s what IDG’s Deb Goldstein said after eating a Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkin that had been sitting on a window sill for two years.
The story of that $50 dare was one of several told tonight as Goldstein was presented with the Direct Marketing Association List Council’s List Leader of the Year Award in New York.
And that was as good as it got as Goldstein was roasted and her idiosyncrasies revealed.
ALC’s Fran Green described Goldstein’s obsessive form of shopping as “schmuying.”
Subordinates told of how Goldstein parked her car in a deep puddle, and got her coat caught in the locked car door as she stood in the water.
Don Mokrynski questioned her qualifications and argued that he should not have to give up his title as the 2004 List Leader. ‘From the bottom of my heart, I’ll tell you, I’m not ready,” he said.
Declaring that this was the bas mitzvah she didn’t have, Goldstein donned a pink angora yarmulke to accept the award.
Then things got serious. Goldstein’s old boss, retired IDG president Walter Boyd, said she once took a pay cut during a downturn to keep her staff intact.
And Goldstein, who offered opt-in B-to-B e-mail lists at IDG in 1996, urged her colleagues to confront the “unimaginable challenges” facing their industry.
“The list business is at a crossroads,” she said.
Describing the list industry as “a federation of businesses dependent on one another,” Goldstein added that it is slow to change, and the anticipated recovery “has not been.”
One possible means of recovery? That list companies embrace media integration and offer packages of commissionable services like an ad agency does.
She also encouraged list firms to snare some of the billions expected to be spent on search by 2009.
“That money used to be ours,” she said. “I say we go back after it.”
She added: “I will be glad to personally head up a task force.”
Summing up her life in the list business, Goldstein said: “I never thought this would be my career, but it is. And it is who I am.”
