Even though she sat across the dinner table from Curtis Carlson, her ultra-entrepreneur father, Marilyn Carlson Nelson didn’t envision herself in a corner office. Female CEOs were rare in the 1940s and ‘50s.
But she did see herself as a leader. She graduated from Edina High School after being captain of the cheerleaders, editor of the school paper, president of the thespian club and class valedictorian. “I think that even as a young child, I had an emerging sense that leadership was a quality that I would want to develop,” Nelson says. “Whatever I did, I ended up in some role of responsibility.”
She also recognized that one day, she and her sister, Barbara, would own their father’s business, which had begun in 1938 as Gold Bond Stamp Company, a trading-stamp purveyor, and eventually grew into a global hospitality firm, changing its name to Carlson Companies, Inc., in 1973. The company acquired and built dozens of small travel and restaurant chains, including T.G.I. Friday’s, Ask Mr. Foster travel agencies, Country Inns & Suites, Radisson Seven Seas Cruises, and Wagonlit Travel. It also created Carlson Marketing Group.
After high school, Nelson began to prepare for the future by studying economics at Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts, and attending the Institute des Hautes Etudes Economiques Politiques in Geneva, Switzerland. There, she says she fell in love with international economics, and became deeply interested in policymaking and governance.
After graduating from Smith in 1961, she married Glen Nelson and worked as a securities analyst for two years at Paine Webber in Minneapolis. The firm asked her to sign her correspondence as “M. C. Nelson,” to mask her gender until clients were comfortable with her abilities and had benefited from her advice.
Was gender an obstacle for Nelson? She regards it as an advantage: “It’s been a blessing to have a family and to bring a kind of caring and sense of fairness that you need to develop as a mom into the business world. As a parent, you learn to take joy in someone else’s success, and one of the great qualities in a leader is that same ability.”
She joined Gold Bond Stamp in 1965, working on the Group Projects program. By 1968, she was director of community relations for Carlson Companies, and by 1989 senior vice president of the parent company, Carlson Holdings, Inc. They were high-profile positions, but she also devoted a great deal of her energies to volunteer projects.
Her community efforts included the Junior League and United Way, where she became president. In 1982, Nelson, whose ancestry is mostly Swedish, chaired Twin Cities’ nine-month-long “Scandinavia Today” celebration.
When her daughter Juliet died in an automobile accident in 1985, “it was a turning point in my life,” Nelson says. “I found myself at a point where just getting up in the morning became a choice. When that happens, you just feel like you’re not sure you can go on, not when your heart is broken like that.”
But she did go on. She put her formidable energy into bringing the Super Bowl to Minnesota. Luring the NFL to the Twin Cities in January wasn’t exactly a snap. She lobbied hard, and the night before the site selection vote by team owners, she sent each one a rubber duck sporting the message: “For a great game and wildlife, play indoors in Minnesota!” Whether that cinched it or not, the state won the bid to host the 1992 Super Bowl, which generated more than $100 million for Minnesota’s economy.
At Carlson Companies, Nelson found a seat on the board of directors in 1990 and became vice chair of Carlson Holdings in 1991. She arranged a merger with Wagonlit Travel in 1994, extending the Carlson Companies reach to 140 countries.
“At the time, we felt like we’d found a twin for our travel network,” she says. “Putting together such a major merger was exciting, but it has also been a very interesting lesson in complexity. We’ve been learning how to create a global corporate culture while balancing local interests and expectations. It’s taken a lot of patience on my part.”
In 1998, at a gala to celebrate the 60th anniversary of his business, Curtis Carlson officially handed over the reins to Nelson in front of 5,000 guests including former president George Bush. “It was a thrill beyond words,” she says, “just extraordinary.” Carlson had been letting Nelson step into the role gradually, and only when he died a year later did Nelson feel the full weight of taking the corporate helm.
“I think that his passing impressed on me that my sister and I were no the keepers of the flame,” she says. “We’ve had to focus ourselves on creating a multigenerational corporation, one that will last until the fourth and fifth generation.”
The children and grandchildren will have quite a company to run. It currently employs approximately 190,000 people around the world and has gross sales of more than $7 billion. Nelson has increased the company’s travel-agency business substantially, and she has plans to expand its restaurant and cruise-ship holdings as well.
“In the end, leadership takes a great deal of energy,” says Nelson, speaking quickly and directly, as if to illustrate the efficiency her job requires. “Whoever said, ‘Part of winning is just showing up,’ wasn’t kidding. Sometimes, given the vicissitudes of life, there’s great value in just being there, as long as you also believe in what you’re doing, believe that things are possible. As long as you show up and then never, ever give up.”
Timeline
1941 – Born in Minneapolis.
1961 – Graduates from Smith College.
1965 – Joins Gold Bond Stamp Company as a representative for group projects.
1968 – Becomes Gold Bond’s director of community relations.
1982-1983 – Chairs “Scandinavia Today” celebration.
1984 – Chairs Super Bowl Task Force.
1989 – Becomes Carlson Holding’s senior vice president.
1991 – Becomes vice chair of Carlson Companies; joins board of Exxon-Mobil.
1994 – Engineers international merger to create Carlson Wagonlit Travel.
1998 – Becomes Carlson Companies CEO.
2000 – Becomes national chair of the Travel Industry Association of America.
2002 – Appointed by President Bush to chair the President’s Advisory Council on Women and Business.
