Class of 1972

How did Colby impact my life?

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I have sometimes felt jealous of people who can remember their glory days of college because I can barely remember what happened yesterday, let alone 50-plus years ago. But, when I do cast the net of memory back over those years, one incident is always captured: the A+ I received from English Professor Patrick Brancaccio for my essay titled “Who Killed Malcolm X?”

Not only was the A+ notable for being my first A after a series of devastatingly embarrassing and very poorly graded essays, it was notable because I looked beyond the literal question—Who caused life to leave the body of Malcolm X?—in order to answer the real question: Who killed the essence and idea of Malcolm X?

I don’t know if Colby taught me to look beyond the obvious, but it certainly was the first place where looking beyond the obvious was encouraged … and even rewarded. The spirit of “looking deeper” surrounded me—from exploring beyond the dogma of my Catholic upbringing in the widely enrolled Comparative Religions class to seeing the idiocy of paying the cost of transporting water in liquid laundry detergents in my Personal Finance class.

After graduation I got a job working at the headquarters of Connecticut General Life Insurance Co. (now CIGNA). Shortly thereafter, I asked my boss why we were still mailing letters from headquarters to the field offices when we could transmit messages by computer. Data was too expensive at the time, but I was looking beyond to a future of email. This was the first of many “looks beyond,” including corporate fitness programs, paid internet content, and unlocking the science of the smooth gait of the Paso Fino horse.

In 2000, Business Week ran a cover story titled “As Leaders, Women Rule: New studies find that female managers outperform their male counterparts in almost every measure.”

Having worked on women’s leadership off and on for many years, I looked beyond what might have been considered congratulatory messaging and asked myself, “If women managers are so good, why are there so few of us at the top of organizations?”

I looked beyond conventional wisdom to find answers to that question and shared those answers via the company I founded called Leading Women. The answers helped build a global consulting firm and gave me the incredible honor of sharing the leadership journeys of women and men on every continent. Later I more broadly shared the answers in a TEDx Talk for which today I am most well-known. It has had well over 4 million views, many viewings by groups. Those answers led to others on why women’s advancement in organizations has been glacially slow, and to my current volunteer role as co-host of A Career that Soars! — a global network of aspiring women.

There’s no way of knowing if any of this would have happened without Pat Brancaccio’s assignment. But thinking about how my years at Colby shaped my years beyond has been rewarding at this reflective time in my life.

SUSAN COLANTUONO