From picking potato bugs to becoming the Chief Global Growth Officer of Kellogg

If there were ever a person who embodies the saying “with knowledge comes power,” it would be Monica McGurk. Her deep love of learning and intense intellectual curiosity led her from rural Minnesota roots to earning degrees from Harvard and Stanford, and rising through the corporate ranks from McKinsey as a Management Consultant to Chief Global Growth officer at Kellogg.?

The odds were against Monica to reach such heights in the corporate world—with just 21% of women in the U.S. workforce reaching the C-suite level—and it by no means has been a smooth journey for her. But she has been a hard-working, unstoppable force with an “I'm willing to try anything” attitude.?

I spoke to Monica about her early influences, career trajectory and family life. One thing that stood out about her personality is that she is seemingly able to extract a lesson from any event in her life, grow from what she’s learned and not lose sight of its importance. It’s one of the reasons that—on top of being an executive, wife and mother—Monica reignited her passion for writing and became a novelist.??

You, too, will be inspired by her incredible journey. Here are the highlights:

Early Influences

• Monica grew up surrounded by family in the small, semi-rural town of Hugo, Minnesota. The population at the time was around 5,000. Technically Hugo is a suburb of St. Paul, located about 20 miles away, but there is farmland as far as the eye can see. It’s a place where practically all the locals know each other and where one slip-up would have the whole town talking.
• There are farmers on both sides of Monica’s family and, as a result, she was immersed in agriculture during her childhood. Some of her most treasured memories involve those very farms.?
• One memory that stands out is about the roadside stand that her grandfather ran to sell his produce. To be able to join him, Monica had to prove herself for years, working her way up from picking potato bugs and scaring crows away from the cornfield. She remembers it being “a real treat, an honor, a privilege” when she reached the age that allowed her to sell at the stand with her grandfather.?
• This close connection to food unwittingly shaped her career path. Monica didn’t actually set out with the intent to be an executive in the food industry, but she says she's even more passionate about it now than she was a decade or two ago.?
• Coming from a family of small-scale farmers, one might think that working for a CPG is akin to crossing to the dark side, but Monica says that isn’t quite so. Her family members are all consumers, too, and partial to certain brands—just ask her daughter what she thinks of Cheez-Its. And the farmers in her family appreciate having outlets for what they grow and raise, even if they have mixed feelings about the general state of agriculture in the country.

The Impact of Education?

• When it came time for Monica to consider her future, her parents were fully supportive of whichever route she wanted to take—whether it be following in her dad's footsteps as a sprinkler fitter or going to college. She applied to just a handful of schools and ended up getting accepted to Harvard. Monica’s parents, who at the time had not attended or graduated from college themselves, recognized what an invaluable opportunity this would be for their daughter and told her there was no question about it—she’d be attending Harvard.
• Although her parents and grandparents weren’t college grads at the time, their thirst for knowledge had an outsized impact on Monica’s own intellectual curiosity and dedication to education. Her maternal grandmother, for example, was pulled out of school in 8th grade so she could stay home and work on the family farm. She was an avid, voracious reader and always expressed her disappointment in not being able to complete her education.?
• Given that Monica’s immediate family didn’t attend college, she didn’t receive much guidance on how to select a major or career path. A priest in her local parish played a hand in influencing her decision. He told her that if you’re going to go to Harvard, you should become a lawyer, which means you need to study political science (called government at Harvard). Monica was interested in political philosophy and related topics, so it seemed like a fitting choice.
• By the end of her junior year, though, Monica made the decision not to pursue law school after all. She wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to do instead, so she spent that summer exploring a different passion: architecture and design. Monica joined a summer program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design that was targeted at career switchers, which was quite perfect for Monica given the doubts she was having at the time. She described it as an intellectually challenging and engaging experience, especially because the other students brought a passion to the program that made it worthwhile.
• One of the most meaningful experiences that influenced Monica to continue pursuing educational opportunities happened during her early 20s. In rapid succession, her grandmother got her GED, her mother completed her associate’s degree and then Monica earned her bachelor’s degree. She described it as a “really cool series of celebrations” where her family was able to honor their commitment to education.

Early Career and Continuing Education

• Monica racked up student debt at Harvard and thought that going straight into a master’s program wouldn’t be the most financially responsible decision for her life. So she decided to jump into the workforce.
• She started her career at McKinsey, and what’s funny about it is that she went into her consultant role thinking that consulting was “kind of a sketchy job.” From her point of view, she was just this recent college graduate with a BA in government who never opened a spreadsheet in her life, and here she was consulting on important projects.?
• She eventually found her “sketchy job” to be intellectually fascinating. The learning curve in consulting is steep, but each engagement is challenging and memorable in its own way. “You're not ever asked to come in as a consultant and work on easy things,” she said. “It's usually highly problematic things where there's lots of misalignment and disagreement or super, super strategic things that require a balanced view of how the future could play out, risk management, things like that.”
• During her first years at McKinsey in its Cleveland office, Monica worked in the commercial space on such things as mergers and acquisitions, sales force design and portfolio strategies for R&D efforts. She found that she had an incredible depth of knowledge in certain areas but blind spots elsewhere. With this realization, Monica thought she would benefit from formally rounding out her business education.
• She was accepted to Stanford’s dual degree program, which allowed her to simultaneously work toward both an MBA and a Master’s in Education. Monica was excited about the multi-disciplinary approach that Stanford was promoting. Although she didn’t foresee a career in education, it’s a topic she feels strongly about, and so she wanted to prepare herself to participate in some way if ever given the opportunity.?
• Now back at McKinsey with her master’s, Monica’s focus turned to retail and consumer goods. This path eventually led her into innovation. At that time, to become partner, McKinsey required a functional expertise and industry expertise. Monica wasn’t interested in specializing, though. In fact, it was antithetical to her belief that great innovators take a general management approach—because it forces them to think about every aspect of the business, not just one.
• This roadblock led Monica to innovate, and she and several colleagues ended up founding McKinsey’s first version of the consumer innovation practice in the Americas, which became the basis for her election to Partner.

Advice for Navigating Work and Mentorships

• No meaningful career is without its ups and downs. Don’t expect it to be a breeze.
• Feeling confidence in this way doesn’t just happen by accident. Monica gives a lot of credit to her mentors and support network. “You can't take a risk,” she said, “if there's not someone on the other side to help you find the place to take the risk.”
• To help navigate career moves and personal life decisions, Monica and her husband share the sentiment that a job serves your life, you don’t serve the job. This viewpoint has empowered Monica to consider all of her options so long as she is comfortable with the consequences.
• It’s important to have both mentors and sponsors in your life. Mentors give you advice and perspective, while a sponsor creates opportunities for you.
• When searching for mentors, seek out diversity in experiences and perspectives. Your mentors are there to supplement you, providing other viewpoints and giving you the benefit of what they've learned along the way.?
• Remember that some mentors’ experiences will be more relevant at different points in your career or for different problems, which is another reason it’s important to diversify your network of mentors.
• Be observant and open-minded. If you take the time to watch and listen, you’ll notice that everyone has something they are good at that you can learn from, even those who you may not like working with or for.

Learning From Work Experiences?

• Nothing is permanent. After Monica had her first two children early in her career, many people assumed she wouldn’t come back from maternity leave. She did her best to create a work-life balance, hiring nannies, trying daycare, working part time, etc. Monica was willing to try anything in order to find something that would work. But really, what allowed her the flexibility to continue searching for that “something” was her outlook on the situation: “The worst that will happen is that it doesn't work, in which case I quit. Which is the same option I have right now, so I might as well try. ... I’ll make a different opportunity or find someone who can help me find that opportunity. And I'm no worse off.”
• One thing Monica learned after leaving McKinsey was the importance of prioritizing focus and simplification over bandwidth. At McKinsey, given that clients paid a lot for each engagement, Monica was inclined to take on as much work as she could. Looking back, she believes she would’ve been a more effective consultant had she kept focus on the most important things instead of overextending herself.
• A really interesting (and honestly funny) learning experience happened when Monica was at Coca-Cola, shortly after leaving McKinsey. For context, the organizations’ structures and cultures are very different. McKinsey is network-based, while Coca-Cola is a top-down corporation with one-way communication. At Coca-Cola, Monica was in a leadership position, but she didn’t realize that people would take her hypothetical, “thinking aloud” questions literally. After saying in a meeting one day, “I wonder what…,” Monica found out just how literally her verbal musings were taken. About a month and a half later, those who were at the meeting presented Monica with a 40-slide deck from a project they launched with consultants to answer the question she had posed. Whoops!?
• It’s ok to veer from a prescriptive process if it isn’t the best method for the job. For example, a traditional stage gate process follows a sequence, where you might not answer the open question pertaining to the biggest risk until you’re three quarters of the way through. When you’re looking at something big like new product development, if you’re savvy enough in your understanding of the business, it’s ok to jump ahead and determine the question that needs to be answered as well as the fastest, cheapest way to answer it.From that experience, she learned to be purposeful in communicating so that each time she posed a question or forwarded an interesting article, the recipient wouldn’t wonder, “What’s the ask?!”?

The ‘Amazon Failure’ Story

• I asked Monica to let us in on some failures she experienced during her career. Her response was not surprising at all: “I don't think of things as failures if you learn from them.”?
• Even so, she obliged by sharing a story from her early days at Coca-Cola. At the time, she was building the company’s e-commerce business for North America. The person leading the sparkling category got excited to test a reintroduction of a product that was discontinued some time in the early 90s, and they wanted to run the test on Amazon and its grocery platform.?
• This particular product had a fanatical following: there was a dedicated and highly active Facebook fan page, and those consumers wrote letters to the CEO and even bought a billboard outside of the Atlanta headquarters asking for the company to bring the beverage back. These hardcore fans were even paying exorbitant fees to ship in the product from other markets around the world.
• Monica and team knew it would take careful orchestration to reintroduce this product, and there would be many risks involved. Importantly, though, Monica had the support of her leadership: “I worked for someone who believed in me, believed in what we were trying to do, believed in the strategy we were taking, believed in taking risks.”
• The team got the go-ahead to move forward, but it was not without hiccups—including launching during the holiday chaos and working with a new Amazon employee who was still learning the ropes.
• Once the sale went live, it seemed like a great success from the outside. They sold out in just 2-3 hours! The story got picked up by the press and was buzzing on social media.?
• But being out of stock on e-commerce leads to an operational nightmare. Amazon’s algorithm started working against them. The product was yanked from the site. Amazon was rejecting their trucks. Meanwhile, the corporate tower kept calling asking what was going on.
• Monica admitted that in the moment it was a disaster, but when she recalls it now, she views it as having been an excellent learning experience. “I love this one because I still work with some of the people who were involved,” she said. “Whenever any of us tells the story, we each have a slightly different take on this and how much we lean on the failure versus learning part of the story.”

Life Principles

• The summer architecture and design program at Harvard taught Monica three important lessons. First, if you don’t want to do something, stop doing it. Explore your passions instead. Second, if you’re doing something you’re passionate about, push yourself to do the work to get the most out of the experience—no matter how hard it is. Third, be brave enough to suck at something to expose yourself to a learning opportunity.?

• It’s worth expanding on the third lesson a little more. Monica admitted to not being manually dexterous, which clearly makes it difficult to build architectural models. Despite thinking that she was likely one of the worst students in the program, she was interested in this complex art form and was committed to trying and pushing herself. Had she been unwilling to take a risk, or worried about not being the best, or concerned about protecting herself from criticism, then she would have missed out on a life-changing experience.
• Monica’s approach to schooling is to take advantage of every available experience in order to broaden your perspective, foster innovation and prepare yourself as much as possible for future opportunities. As such, it was a natural decision for her to enter the dual degree program at Stanford, versus only getting an MBA. “You're in this environment anyway, and you're supposed to be here completely to dedicate yourself to learning. Why wouldn’t you,” she said.?
• In your home life, you may feel the need to do everything from cooking to cleaning to mowing the lawn. If you can help it, don’t put so much pressure on yourself. Consider the personal benefits of outsourcing those tasks, whether they are mental health benefits or freeing up your time so you can spend it elsewhere.
• Monica described a conversation she had with her husband that opened her eyes to how important it is to focus on the essentials. One night, he said to her: “When you come back from your work trip, I can have the house spotless for you or I can spend hours at night playing with the kids. Which do you prefer?” The answer to her was obvious. Monica’s advice to others is that if you’re able to afford a housekeeper or other help you need, and it will mean the difference between you feeling insane or sane and having more time with your partner or kids, absolutely do it if you can.??

How She Became a Novelist?

• When Monica’s youngest child was still a toddler, a colleague of hers passed away. It was sudden and unexpected. They weren’t very close, but they stayed in touch and led what Monica calls parallel lives. They were analysts together, went to business school together, he married the former roommate of her best friend from college and they were elected partner at the same time. Then one day he was gone.
• His tragic passing was eye-opening for Monica and led her to do some soul searching. She wondered, if she wasn’t guaranteed another 40 years or even another decade, will she be happy with the experiences she’s had?
• Through a series of circumstances, Monica realized that while she was all in as a wife, mother and partner at McKinsey, she had left out the things in her life that one does for their own joy and pleasure—mostly for the sake of efficiency.
• At first, she wasn’t quite sure what she could do that would be fulfilling and just hers alone. One of her mentors suggested that she think about what gave her pleasure as a kid and try to re-discover it. Since Monica travels often for work, she considered what kind of activity she could do on a plane, and she landed on writing.?
• “I made a deal with myself that I would use the time that I would typically be on a plane catching up on email or memos or something and just let myself write, as a gift to myself,” Monica recalled.
• To ease herself back into writing, she focused on fan fiction and submitted two novel-length works and several short stories to fanfiction.net under a pseudonym. After winning an award in the UK for her work, Monica’s husband urged her to write an original novel.?
• Monica went on to author the Archangel Prophecies, a three-book young adult/fantasy series, without putting a pause on her career. After hearing her discuss what drove her to work on the series, it is clear that writing is more than just a passion. It has changed and improved her life, both personally and professionally. “I get a lot of energy from it, and when I don't do it, I feel its absence,” she said.
• The time Monica is able to devote to writing ebbs and flows based on the demands coming from other aspects of her life. She admits that she’s unable to focus on it with the same discipline as a full-time author, but she tries her best and her family is 100% supportive, which helps her keep at it.

Monica’s incredible achievements are due in part to her ability to take risks without fear of failure, and she has proved that time and again. “Be brave enough to suck at something to expose yourself to a learning opportunity.” Wise words. We all have to start somewhere with every skill we learn, topic we explore or new journey we start. This is where growth comes from. What will you be brave enough to suck at today?