How Did I Get Here?

Lisa Baird

Chief marketing officer, U.S. Olympic Committee
from
  • Education
  • Manhasset High School, Manhasset, N.Y., class of 1979
  • Pennsylvania State University, class of 1982, MBA 1984
  • Work Experience
  • 1984–90
    Brand assistant, director of brand management, Procter & Gamble
  • 1990
    Marketing director, Johnson & Johnson
  • 1990–92
    Marketing director, Bristol-Myers Squibb
  • 1992–93
    Category director, Warner Lambert
  • 1993–99
    Brand manager, Pontiac Grand Am, marketing director, E-GM, General Motors
  • 1999–2005
    Vice president for advertising, senior VP for worldwide marketing communications, IBM
  • 2005–07
    SVP for marketing and consumer products, NFL
  • 2009–Present
    CMO, USOC
  • Life Lessons
  • “You’re always coming to the table trying to convince or compel someone.”
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  • “The journey of the athletes is more than the games, and you need to tell that well if you want to engage people.”
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  • “Conflict and debate happen, but you can always find that common ground.”
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  • In Aruba, 1968
    “I was born in the Caribbean, then we moved to Venezuela, then we came to New York. We traveled all over because my father worked for Exxon.”
  • “In the first stage of my career, I went the classic marketing path. Procter & Gamble wanted me to move to Cincinnati, but I had just met my now-husband, and we decided to stay East. It became more of a cow path than a career path.”
  • With the Olympic torch in Vancouver, 2010
  • “Being at IBM was enormously intellectually challenging. We were working with Nobel laureates and transitioning IBM into the world of e-business. There were a number of transitional moments. Remember Y2K?”
  • With snowboarder Sage Kotsenburg in Sochi, 2014
    “I had no idea how hard it was going to be [after the recession]. We lost at least 14 domestic sponsors. The key was putting the focus back on the athletes and building up Team USA as a brand.”
  • “As a kid, I played tons of sports: field hockey, lacrosse, volleyball. I tried out for teams at Penn State and was promptly cut. For good reason—they were national champions.”
  • On vacation with her family in Connecticut, 2014
  • “E-GM was a startup internal business unit to begin the process of doing business on the internet. The auto industry was fascinating. You deal with capacity, distributor issues, raw materials. In marketing, I got to work with every division.”
  • “You can argue with a lot of things about the NFL, but you can’t argue with their success as a business.”
  • At the USOC Media Summit in Los Angeles, 2016