When Pillsbury transferred me to the Twin Cities from British Columbia 14 years ago, my boss had the foresight to assign Kathy Vrabeck as a group marketing manager in my division. To this day, I swear Kathy is maybe the smartest person I’ve ever met in my entire life. You could give her anything and she could turn it into something wonderful.
Kathy trained me in Big Company 101 when I arrived here. In British Columbia, I had run a small part of the company, and everybody’s agenda had been exactly the same. That wasn’t always the case at the Minneapolis headquarters with so many divisions and departments, which means that I would walk into meetings with assumptions that just weren’t valid.
On top of that, the Twin Cities is culturally very different from most other parts of the world, and just understanding what Minnesota Nice looks like in the business world was something I didn’t understand. Kathy and I would walk out of a meeting, and she’d say, ‘Here’s who you offended and here are the 27 things that people thought but didn’t say.’ That would surprise me because, after all, we were paying people a lot of money to tell us what they thought. Kathy would patiently explain that it was because Minnesotans were very careful not to offend.
Kathy was a wonderful gift that my boss had given me, and I don’t think I would’ve been successful at Pillsbury Minneapolis without her help. From there, I moved to CNS, and Kathy, who has gone on to do bigger, more wonderful things, remains a friend. I actually believe that one day we’ll all work for her because she’s so damn smart.
