Bonni Theriault went to business school and then as a business analyst at McKinsey for a few years, where she worked with consumer products for companies and marketing. After working at Pepperidge Farm for a couple of years, she decided to build her own company and joined forces with a woman who was the head of advertising at Campbell Soup, and together they launched a brand strategy company where they worked for companies like Cadbury Schweppes, Johnson and Johnson, and Stryker.
From Marketing to Coaching to Global Emergency Care
After 13 years at the company, Bonni found herself tired of constantly pitching to employers and sought coaching roles. She had previously worked closely with the McKinsey assessment team, coaching candidates and helping them improve their interview skills. And so, with the experience under her belt, she returned to McKinsey as a professional development manager. When her oldest son turned 14, she took two years off to spend more time with her children and also volunteered with Global Emergency Care, an organization that trains emergency medicine nurses in Uganda. She worked with Global Emergency Care’s marketing and fundraising for two years on a volunteer basis.
The Role of Chief Partnerships Officer at Generation
When Bonni decided to return to work, she wanted to stay in the social sector but was offered a position at McKinsey. She worked there until an opportunity at Generation was presented. Generation is an independent non-profit that works with unemployed individuals. Bonni has now worked there for seven years. Bonni explains that her responsibility as chief partnerships officer includes global fundraising and employer partnerships for Generation, a company operating in 17 countries worldwide. They train across 40 different professions, based on labor dynamics in each country. They conduct extensive research before starting a training program to identify job vacancies and bring learners from historically underrepresented groups, and they focus on employment in five different industries: tech, green jobs, customer service and sales, skilled trades, and healthcare. They also teach behavioral skills and the importance of having a growth mindset.
The Impact of AI in Job Forecasting and Training
AI has been a topic of interest for Generation, as it impacts the skills needed to train learners in specific roles. Bonni explains that they have analyzed various roles, including entry-level roles, which may go away entirely or be significantly impacted by AI, and roles that might have a different set of skills. Jobs such as solar panel installation or healthcare, are likely to be more resilient over time in the face of AI. They are also considering more jobs in the data center technician category, where tech roles are more hands-on and dealing with equipment than providing coding or IT support.
How Generation Is Using AI
The organization is using AI to deliver training to learners and alumni, ensuring they have the necessary skills for their jobs. They have created AI modules for learners and alumni to help them upskill and remain relevant in their work. AI is also used to help develop the curriculum, with chat bots helping learners answer first-line questions and focusing on more complex material. This helps streamline the curriculum creation process, as it often involves research and talking to subject matter experts. Operational efficiencies are also being used to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
Working as a Professional Development Manager
The conversation turns back to Bonni’s as a professional development manager at McKinsey. She mentions that a lot of time was spent negotiating with partners and consultants to find the right balance between professional growth and client needs. She built relationships of trust between consultants and partners to influence decisions in a way that was best for everyone involved. She also focused on performance evaluation, helping people understand their strengths and areas for improvement, and helping them find ways to build skills through studies, formalized training, coaching, or mentorship.
Marketing Goldfish and Chocolate
Bonni shares her experience working on marketing Goldfish, a product that was initially marketed as a snack for adults drinking beer in bars but later was marketed to moms as an appealing snack for children. She also discusses her experience working with Cadbury, a chocolate brand that had over 150 chocolate brands worldwide. She worked on a brand architecture project to help consolidate these brands and increase their advertising dollars. She was sent boxes of chocolate bars from around the world to analyze packaging and brand identity and helped create seven mega brands for Cadbury, which led to a significant increase in their chocolate market share.
Influential Harvard Courses and Professors
Bonni mentions a course taught by Professor Dominguez where he focused on critical thinking. He presented different perspectives on events, presenting different sides as the truth. This skill has been passed down through her life and has become essential in today’s world. She wishes more classes would take this approach, as it helps students analyze and think critically about various situations and perspectives. Bonni’s experiences with Professor Dominguez’s course and her critical thinking skills have shaped her life and career.
Timestamps:
02:29: Transition to Coaching and McKinsey
05:41: Role at Generation and Impact on Workforce
09:43: Impact of AI on Training and Roles
15:02: Learners vs. Students and Personal Time Management
20:55: Professional Development at McKinsey
22:59: Goldfish Marketing Strategy and Cadbury Brand Architecture
28:29: Travel Experiences and Language Skills
32:06: Influence of Harvard Courses and Critical Thinking
Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bonni-theriault-710b79/
Website: www.generation.org
Featured Non-profit:
The featured non-profit of this week’s episode of The 92 Report is recommended by Juliana Koo who reports:
“Hi. I’m Juliana Koo, class of 1992. The featured nonprofit of this episode of The 92 report is Kaya Press. Kaya is a publisher of Asian diasporic literature, and I was the managing editor for nearly a decade in the 1990s and now serve on the board. You can learn more about Kaya’s work at WWW dot k, a, y, adotcom, and now here’s Will Bachman with this week’s episode.”
To learn more about their work, visit: www.kaya.com.
92-132 Bonni Theriault
SPEAKERS
Will Bachman, Bonni Theriault
Will Bachman 00:02
Will Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Bonni Theriault, who many of you may have known in college as Bonni Grant. Bonni, welcome to the show.
Bonni Theriault 00:21
Thanks Will for having me appreciate being on
Will Bachman 00:25
So Bonnie, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.
Bonni Theriault 00:29
Well, it’s been a long, perhaps unusual journey, as I’ve done many different things since I graduated. When I first left, I joined McKinsey, which probably is not too atypical as a business analyst. And then at the time, you were required to go back to business school, so I did do that out on the West Coast, and then came back to McKinsey for a couple of years. In my work there, I had spent a lot of time with consumer products companies, and really loved marketing, even though I had sort of shunned it in business school, which is kind of funny, I was a finance major there, but decided I really loved all the creativity that’s involved with marketing. And I went to work at Pepperidge Farm for a couple of years. I was in charge of goldfish, so I’m sure many people are familiar with those, and also worked on things like chocolate covered Milanos. And so during that time, my husband gained probably about 10 pounds. It’s like, you need to leave. I don’t think I can. Can take too much more of all these goodies entering the house. And then, ironically, right before, like, a month before I was pregnant with my first child, I decided to build the company from scratch, and I joined forces with a woman who I had worked with, who was the head of advertising at Campbell Soup. Pepperidge Farm was a subsidiary of theirs, and we decided to launch a brand strategy company together, and we did that for over 13 years, working for companies like Cadbury Schweppes, Johnson and Johnson and Stryker. And so had a wonderful range of opportunity to travel around the world with our clients to really work on some fun products, I would say my kids favorite one was Cadbury, because I got tons of free samples and so plenty of chocolate in my house at all times, and that was really wonderful. But after 13 years it I found that I was at a bit of a crossroads, and was tired of what I would call like selling myself in terms of, you know, constantly pitching to employers, and I was looking for something that was a little more along the lines of coaching. And I had spent some of my time while I was running my own company, working closely with the McKinsey assessment team. And so I would coach candidates who were applying for jobs. I would do interview days, where I actually interviewed people who wanted to work at McKinsey, and I would help them with training people colleagues at McKinsey to actually how to how to interview others, because they have a very standardized way to do it, to try and minimize bias. And I found that I really loved coaching people, and I enjoyed that opportunity to work more closely with others. When I had my own business, it was mostly working just with my partner remotely, and then going to a client site maybe once a quarter. And so I ended up going back to McKinsey in the role of a professional development manager, and working with consultants on their career development and their training, and making sure that they were doing things that they enjoyed, and were and were growing. And then when my oldest son turned 14, I had a little bit of a, I would call it a midlife crisis, where I realized he was going to be off to college in four years, and it just hit me incredibly hard, and I said, I need to spend more time with my children. I was actually like a work from home pioneer. I’ve been working from home now for, I think, 25 years, but I didn’t feel like I was spending as much quality time with them as I wanted to. And so I took two years off, and during that time, I was able to spend a lot of time with them, and I also volunteered with an organization called Global emergency care, that is a organization that trains emergency medicine nurses in Uganda, because they, at the time, do. Not have any medical professionals that specialized in emergency care, and it’s a wonderful organization. I recommend that people check it out. They’re still in existence. They’ve expanded the work that they do, and I did basically their marketing and fundraising for them for two years, just on a on a volunteer basis. But I loved it. I loved the opportunity to give back. I love the opportunity of being in the social sector. And I decided when I went back to work that I really wanted to try and remain in the social sector. If I could. I did end up going back to McKinsey. Someone had reached out to me about a hard time role. It’s like, I constantly, I mean, I guess it’s a value of not burning bridges, but I figured I would just do it part time, and of course, eventually led to a full time role. But the beauty of it was, is that about a year and a half in, there was this opportunity to become a fellow at generation, and generation is an organization that spun out of McKinsey. It’s its own independent nonprofit, but that works with people who are unemployed, trains them into a profession, connects them with employers for a job, and then mentors them for the first three to six months on the job to ensure that they can successfully transition into the workforce. And this was such an amazing opportunity. McKinsey very generously donated my salary for two years to allow me to work there, and then at the end of those two years, generation made me a job offer. So I’ve been here now for the last seven years, and really love the work that we did. We do so very long, windy journey. Didn’t necessarily know that I was going to end up here, but I’m really happy that the path has sort of led me to where I am today.
Now you’ve had, I think you said two, two kids, and they were both young kids at 1.3 Okay, three kids. I’m sorry, so three kids and they’ve all been young at one point. I’m curious to hear if you are allowed to share, what you’re allowed to share. Who buys goldfish from pepperidge Farm? Is it like, what percent is for kids, or roughly, what are the customers? What’s the customer segmentation for gold? Yeah. IYeah, so I think the course that most resonates, and I think about all the time, was a course taught by Professor Dominguez in I was a Latin American History major within the history department. And what stood out most of me about this course was it was all about critical thinking. And I’m embarrassed to say that I used to be someone who, if I read something, I just believed it was true, like you it’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s in paper like you know, they would, they would imprint it if it weren’t true. And, you know, and in a history major, I just assumed it’s all about the facts, right? Okay, this is what happened. And I would take it at face value. And his class was so great around teaching critical thinking, because what he would do is the class on one day would be, let’s say, about the Cuban Revolution, and it would be from Che Guevara’s perspective. And then the class the next time would be about the Cuban revolution, but it would be from the other side’s perspective. And he would do this with every sort of event. He would present different sides as the truth. And it really was so eye opening of that you really need to think about what is the perspective of the person who’s telling you the history, and does that influence what they’re saying and how they’re saying it, and actually, whether or not it’s even true? And I have carried that with me for the rest of my life, and in everything I read, I now, you know, read it with some thought, as is this true? What’s the perspective of the author that’s bringing it to me? And I think nowadays that’s even more critical of a skill that we need to be teaching everyone to do. And I wish more of my classes has actually taken that kind of approach.
Will Bachman 34:22
Yeah, it’s, it’s one thing to kind of just have it in one lecture, like, oh, there’s this side, there’s that side. But I, I can see how it’d be so powerful to have one class where you just focus on this one perspective, and then the next class, it’s like the other side’s perspective, exactly. After a while, you would start to anticipate, wait a minute, there
Bonni Theriault 34:42
might be another side to this right. Someone else might think differently about the same topic. Exactly.
Will Bachman 34:48
Wow. That’s very cool. What a cool class. And did he also sort of lecture, and almost presenting as that here is almost sort of a, you know, here’s, here’s the sort of the story and kind of. Giving it from that, that one side’s perspective. I don’t ever
Bonni Theriault 35:02
recall him going, and this is the actual, you know, it was more. He really was trying to show that people can take the same exact set of circumstances and look at it in very, very different ways. And then it was up to us to kind of come to analyze it and think about it and come to our own conclusions about what happened, what’s right or wrong, or, you know, maybe in most cases, it’s Shades of Gray, right? And so understanding that nuance is really
Will Bachman 35:35
critical. Wow. Very cool class. Yeah. Bonnie, for listeners that want to track and follow up what you’re doing, what’s the best place for them to find you online or follow you? So
Bonni Theriault 35:49
LinkedIn is a great way to find me. I will say my last name is hard to spell, so spell it just in case, because if you look me up under grant, you’re probably not going to find me, but it’s Terry O T, H E R, I, a, U, L T, or people can feel the free to reach out to me. Bonnie, B O n, n i@generationdotorg I’d love to hear from classmates, as I said earlier, like I am trying to get back in touch with people that I haven’t maybe connected with in a long time. I live in the Boston area. If anyone’s around wants to do a little mini reunion or whatever, please reach out. I’d love to connect with my classmates.