Travels from Tennessee, USA
Susan Packard's speaking fee falls within range: $25,000 to $30,000
One of the strongest voices for women in the workplace, Susan Packard grew cable channel HGTV into a multimillion dollar business. Honored numerous times as one of “The Most Influential Women in Cable”, she provides coveted insights on entrepreneurship, brand building, leadership, and strategies for women who want to advance their career.
After helping build up HBO and CNBC, Susan and her talents became hot assets in the media industry. She went on to co-found Scripps Networks Interactive, the leading developer of lifestyle-oriented content for television and the Internet. Susan created and served as president of Scripps Networks New Ventures, where she oversaw the development and launch of HGTV, DIY Network, Fine Living Network, and online interactive platforms. Additionally, she was president of worldwide distribution for the Scripps cable brands.
Susan’s bestselling book New Rules of the Game is a modern-day business guide for women. As a consultant she has helped companies with branding, talent development, strategic partnering, and organizational design. She is a frequently in-demand speaker at conferences centered on innovation and women in leadership.
Susan Packard has been on the ground floor and helped to build powerhouse media brands like HBO, CNBC, and HGTV. She was the co-founder of Scripps Networks Interactive and former chief operating officer of HGTV. Under Packard’s helm, HGTV became one of the fastest growing cable networks in television history.
Today HGTV is available in more than 98 million U.S.homes and distributed in over 200 countries and territories. Packard helped to build Scripps Networks Interactive to a market value of over $10 billion. She can be found online at SusanPackard.com, Twitter @PackardSusan and at Facebook.com/PackardSusan.
Susan was raised in a family of six, with her first-generation Italian grandparents living two doors down, and aunts, uncles and cousins all on one street in a Detroit suburb. She grew up believing in the importance of hard work, family, and a good education. She worked for her dad whenever she was out of school during high school and college. He sold direct mail to Detroit ad agencies, and one day she wandered into an empty board room at Ross Roy and thought: “this is what I want to do – understand why people buy stuff, what excites them, what they can’t live without. I didn’t have the words for that at the time, but I wanted to build brands.”
She started out in consumer research, and after a short while ended up in television, helping to build cable tv brands that viewers had to have. If she looked at where she has worked – Time/Warner, NBC, then Scripps – you might think “she’s a corporate type,” but Susan was on the ground floor in all of those places creating new business units for those companies. So she’s an intrapreneur, although Webster would tell you there’s no such word.
She left that work a while ago so she’d have more freedom to spend time on projects she finds meaningful. Today she writes, speaks, and works with women in all stages of life, at for-profit and not-for-profit companies.
Offering lessons from her own impressive and lengthy career, Susan Packard shares ways that women can practice gamesmanship, the art of "expressing your competitive spirit in a healthy way." As a young child born with her own unquenchable competitive spirit and little athletic ability, she discusses how she learned to channel her zeal to outdo through quiet games as oppose to her male classmates whose participation in team sports cultivated attitudes and behaviors much more aggressive than her own.
Susan examines how this early social conditioning plays into our lives as we transition from school to the professional world as well as the double standards that make it more challenging for women to reach top posts. "As we move up, it becomes trickier for women," she admits. "I am not suggest women act like men at work...What I am suggesting is that you think like and act like an athlete would."
Susan Packard discusses the strategies she’s used for her multiple accomplishments such as helping build up HBO and CNBC and getting HGTV into 99 million U.S. homes. Susan’s stories and lessons provide powerful lessons on brand building, creativity, and gamesmanship, as well as the skills she implemented to craft company cultures around work/life balance, kindness and collaboration – while growing profitable businesses.
Susan is particularly passionate about preparing women leaders, touching on her experience as a woman at the top of the media industry and the rules she used to get things done.
Advancement Through Gamesmanship
How do employees reach that next level in their career? Baseline talent gets everyone in the game. Then people begin to compete for advancement and factors such as likeability and trust influence who is promoted into senior roles.
Susan Packard, co-founder of HGTV, lays out an approach to help your employees succeed called gamesmanship-a strategic way of thinking, as well as a language of business to help people advance. We are taught that 'winning' at work means collaboration and perfecting what we do. But these two drivers are not always the best way to move forward.
Through a dynamic and down-to-earth approach, Packard lays out the rules of gamesmanship, based on her upcoming book, New Rules of the Game, and illustrates how employees can better compete for promotions and plum assignments by speaking an alternative language, as well as how they can handle the many stresses that come with being in the workplace.
Now What? Creativity, Innovation and Turning Ideas into Icons
So you have a great, innovative idea that is without peer in the marketplace—how does that become a great business worth over $7 billion such as HGTV? Packard shares with the audience her experiences and the lessons learned in growing a multi-billion dollar business which today includes cable networks, books, DVDs, interactive properties and a family of trusted television personalities. A leader who inspired those around her to push the boundaries in innovating products to achieve business success, Packard shares the leadership skills necessary to incubate—and execute—game changing ideas.
The Leader Within: Growing Your Leadership Team
What do leaders need today to excel? Hear from HGTV’s co-founder, Susan Packard, as she shares leadership lessons from businesses she has helped to build, and from the leadership work she is doing today. She will discuss how vision, audacity, and relentless focus are some of the key factors that make great leaders today. She will also share some unusual insights and stories about diversity as a business practice today.
Move Fast, Think Big: Building a Brand Leader
HGTV took a big idea - a cable television network devoted to all things home - into a marketplace dominated by media giants and emerged the leader. Now launched in more than 98 million homes, HGTV changed how we envision our homes and, in the process, established a new model for business innovation and success. Packard shares with audiences strategies for forging and promoting a brand while gaining customers who'll remain loyal to it, and provides ideas for expanding into other channels and platforms to secure even greater market share while maintaining brand integrity.
How Culture Impacts Employee Engagement: Timeless Lessons on Talent
Two of today’s toughest challenges are recruiting and retaining the best talent. Learn how a $7 billion business did it from the ground up, and how these lessons can apply to you. HGTV co-founder Susan Packard will cover critical areas such as team structure, having a sense of mission, and how small, inexpensive things can impact loyalty and workplace excellence. Having the right people in the right jobs with the right amount of motivation is crucial to any successful organization and Packard shares what employers must do to create a workplace that can become the envy of any industry.
“She was excellent! She got your attention and kept it. Now it is just up to us to use her examples and place them in our business and make them work. Thanks for securing her as a speaker!”
– Attendee, Texas Workforce Solutions 2010
“We did want to take a minute to let you know that Susan Packard was just FABULOUS! We had a packed room and sold more than 700 tickets to the event. We could go on and on! She has a huge fan club out here in Columbus now.” – Women for Economic and Leadership Development (WELD)
“Great motivational speaker – makes you want to go and get to work!” – Attendee, Texas Workforce Solutions 2010
“Susan Packard is the speaker you always look for, but rarely find. She is articulate, dynamic and powerful, yet incredibly down-to-earth and approachable. She has a track record as a proven and powerful leader. She brings a keen mind and intellectual curiosity to her continuing studies of leadership. She informed us, entertained us, and challenged us. She took the time and made the effort to perfectly tailor her presentation to the executives and professionals in the audience. Our audience was so impressed by her presentation that we invited her back to return as our keynote speaker at our Annual Symposium, and once again she received rave reviews. Susan delivers a message that is stimulating, inspiring and practical, with numerous “takeaways” that the audience can use to improve their effectiveness as leaders in their own organizations. I wish I could find more “Susan Packards” for every symposium.” – Arizona Women’s Leadership Forum
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New Rules of the Game: 10 Strategies for Women in the Workplace Business is a team sport. Learn how to play.
What would your workday be like if you could understand how your colleagues–especially men–succeed and win at work? And if, in understanding and applying the rules, you could win too?
In New Rules of the Game, Susan teaches you how to cultivate gamesmanship—a strategic way of thinking regularly seen in the video game and sports worlds—and most often among men—that develops creativity, focus, optimism, teamwork, and competitiveness. Gamesmanship is a way of thinking, and it’s an attitude.
She’s sharing my career story with humor and candor, including the successes and mistakes, the triumphs and some personal and career tragedies, and presenting them as teachable moments for you. Each chapter ends with tips and advice on how to practice each Rule and as such New Rules of the Game is extremely useful and practical.
But this book is much bigger than Susan. She also shares the tales of other presidents and CEOs who have become great gamers in their own fields, providing you the insight and inspiration to play the business game smarter, stronger, and more successfully. You will be better able to coach others, inspiring your team to perform at higher levels as you drive them toward the next win.
With this lens you will come to think, and act, more like an athlete. This means showing up with confidence on the playing field and having a winning spirit. It means composure and mental fortitude. It means loving the game called business and being fueled by the raw adrenaline of winning. It means thinking like a winner.
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