If you were picking a team for a playground game of kickball, the young Marti Morfitt would have been your first pick—smart, team player, competitive. All of these traits came into play during her tenure at Eden Prairie–based CNS, maker of the Breathe Right nasal strips that were made famous by NFL football players. Morfitt joined the publicly traded company as president and chief operating officer in 1998, became CEO in 2001, and oversaw a turnaround and eventually CNS’s sale to GlaxoSmithKline in 2006 for $566 million.
Her win at CNS put Morfitt in a position to pick her next challenge and to wait for the right thing. In the meantime, it’s given her a chance to think about what shapes leaders and careers for better and for worse. Serious about business issues, Morfitt is also irreverent and even a little profane in putting her finger on what works and what doesn’t in running a company.
Her career began with a stint as a market analyst for Houston-based Tenneco Automotive, where “I worked with some incredibly smart businesspeople who were direct, and every time you made a mistake, they’d grab you by the hair, and say ‘We love you, but you made this mistake.’ I was lucky,” Morfitt says. “I received those ‘gifts’ over and over again.”
A self-described Canadian Air Force brat, she moved every two years during her youth, finishing high school in the Black Forest region of Germany. (She can still “eat and drink in German,” she says.) She returned to Canada for college and her MBA, which she earned nights while working days for Pillsbury. Morfitt joined Pillsbury in Canada in 1982 as an assistant marketing manager, eventually moving to the company’s Twin Cities base in 1992.
A strong believer in a culture of ethical leadership, Morfitt also stands for winning. At CNS, she says, we were “really clear about our external priorities. If we did what was right for our consumers, then that would result in what is right for our shareholders.” In the CNS culture, people “focused on kicking butt in the real world, always did what’s right, and went home.”
Richard Perkins, a longtime director of CNS and the founder of Wayzata-based Perkins Capital Management, says, “Marti’s success can be attributed to her people skills. She just knows how to find the right person for the job, create a challenge, supply motivation, let him or her do their job, and then grant a reward. Sounds simple, but it is not.”
