Our Top Highlights: Spilling the Teath with Christine King, CEO of Henry Schein One

Dr. Ryan Hungate: 

Can you share your journey to becoming the first female CEO of a semiconductor company and some of the key challenges you were able to overcome? 

Christine King: 

Sure. Well, first of all, my journey starts when my hippie husband left me. I'm left in a trailer park with an 18-month-old son. It was a really decrepit trailer park with really yucky people. I had a high school education. That was it. I could not get a job anywhere because back in the 1970 timeframe, people didn't want to hire someone that was a single mom whose kid was going to get sick, and you wouldn't come to work. So, it's my journey from that point of having 66 cents in my pocket, which I put in my 1965 Mustang, to becoming the first female CEO of a semiconductor company. 

Actually, I'm on my fourth CEO gig right now. But how did I navigate that? My whole point is you don't have to have an Ivy League education, you don't have to come from privilege, you don't need connections. You can do it. People can do it and make their own success. 

I go from there to how did I get on welfare to how do I go to college, why I switched to engineering, my first job at IBM, then taking off to become an entrepreneur for a few years, to finishing up an IBM career where I was pretty much always the only woman in the room. 

Dr. Ryan Hungate: 

You highlight these 12 life lessons in your book. Could you share some of your most impactful life lessons and how have they shaped your career along the way? 

Christine King: 

Sure. Well, first of all, my first lesson was that without education skills or knowledge, you’re nowhere. And when I was in the trailer park, I had none of that. So that has to be going for you. The next thing is do the work. People think they're going to run through the executive ranks really quickly. You have to do the work because that's what gives you the gut instinct to make decisions going forward as a good executive. One of the other lessons that I learned is look for the white space. It's like when there's something that no one else is doing-- and in my day, it was the first microprocessors because I built a computer at the same time Steve Wozniak was building a computer. And I learned so much from that. And then I became an expert on microprocessors, and I was recognized for that. 

Same thing today. Technology is always moving. If you can be on the latest things, there is a lot of white space. You get to leapfrog everyone that's been around for years. That's another trick that I try to use. And then the final one that I really like, you talked about the situation I had where I built a billion-dollar business and they didn’t put me in charge, and I'm thinking, "I don't think I'm going to make it right here in this." If you can't go through, you have to figure out a way to go around. You don't give up. You find another path. 

Dr. Ryan Hungate: 

How do you prioritize doing the right things for the right reasons in your decision-making process? 

Christine King: 

To me, there are no priorities, Ryan. You always have to do the right thing. Whether we're working with customers at Henry Schein, whether we're working with colleagues, I always have to do the right thing, because if you do the right thing, you're never going to lose. That's really important. Because I was able to navigate my career, many of the naysayers who had said, "What is this Chris King doing?" They would actually ridicule me. Well, they all ended up working for me at a certain point. And a lot of them were PhDs from MIT or wherever. I could have gotten some comeback right there, but I didn't. I did the right thing, and I treated those people like I would treat any other person that's on the team. If you always do the right thing, you're never going to lose. 

Dr. Ryan Hungate: 

Can you talk about a specific time when letting go of ego helped you or your company avoid crisis? I can think of one very specifically, but I want you to shout out your favorite here. 

Christine King: 

Well, I'm kind of a “what did you do for me today" kind of person. So there's a lot of things in the past, but when someone makes a commitment to a customer, and that commitment could have been misplaced, it could have meant that we were not going to make as much money as we perhaps deserve to make, and maybe we're not getting the value out of that customer than we should have. But if we tell a customer this is what we're going to do, we better do that. We better fulfill that promise. And so that's happened to me multiple times. Probably the hardest one is when there were all kinds of shortages of technology in the industry, and Cisco was a big customer of mine but we had to allocate the scarce supply fairly across all the customers. It has to be the commitment to do what we said we're going to do. 

Dr. Ryan Hungate: 

You talk about starting off in the trailer park. How has your personal journey influenced your approach to championing inclusion and diversity? Because there's so many moments that you've had where you could have really hardened up and just really been upset from how you got scolded in the past, and it never really stopped in your journey. How has it really influenced your approach to championing inclusion and diversity? 

Christine King: 

I would say I just never give up. I am very persistent. And if one were to read my book, you'll see that I did a stint in dairy farming, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, and that was really hard. But I wanted to win this painting that was awarded to the best cow, and I had never even touched the cow before. I love having a goal and then getting everybody on board to achieve that goal. And at Henry Schein One, sometimes we're known as kind of a sleepy legacy old company, but we're turning that around with entrepreneurs like yourself. And so that's a hard journey, and we have to turn the whole culture on its ear so that everybody is fast moving and committed and has passion about pleasing the customer. 

Dr. Ryan Hungate: 

What message or lesson do you hope readers take away from breaking through the silicone ceiling? 

Christine King: 

The message I really hope that I convey is that it doesn't really matter where you come from. It can be a trailer park or you name it. You can start from zero, but with the right attitude, the right mission, persistence, always doing the right thing, anyone, I think, can succeed. I think people just give up too easily. So, my hope for the book is that people read it, they see what can be done, and they live it. 

------ 

Christine’s book Breaking Through the Silicon Ceiling follows her path from the trailer park to the boardroom and highlights the 12 essential principles that guided her along the way. Christine’s principles are hard-earned truths that have been proven time and again in her professional, avocational, and personal lives. Breaking Through the Silicon Ceiling is now available for pre-order on Amazon or you can learn more about Christine and her incredible story.