Pamela Fiori brought down the house at the recent SRQ Hear Me Roar luncheon, the former editor-in-chief of Travel & Leisure and Town & Country magazinesfirst listened intently to keynote speaker Anna Zornosa of Ruby Ribbon detail the inherent challenges in developing a successful women’s shape-wear business in the male-dominated start-up investment arena. Fiori absorbed the speaker’s insights and observed audience reaction, then when she stepped on stage to receive the SRQ 2016 Trailblazer of the Year Award, took a swift and seamless detour from her original speech opening, leaned forward with a twinkle in her eye and a confidential tone as she referenced Zornosa’s topic: “Speaking of bras, I've been wearing one since I was 11, so Anna, if you can help me out (literally), I would be incredibly grateful.” Without skipping a beat, she referenced a classic Seinfeld episode in which the characters concoct a crazy scheme to create bras for over-developed men. “They called it ‘The Bro,’” Fiori recalls. “Unfortunately, it flopped.” The room erupted with peals of laughter, delight and applause, guests nodding furiously in agreement with her warm relatable style as much as her uncanny ability to connect with what will resonate with her audience. Ice broken, the room was suddenly filled with friends. Unscripted, witty, unexpected and brilliantly hilarious, it was the ultimate “you had to be there” moment that every event needs. In short, she nailed it—and did so with perfect delivery and impeccable timing. It was quintessential Fiori—adapting to her environment, listening to and connecting fully with her audience. It’s what she does best and the secret behind her success as one of the most influential and successful editors and publishing executives in the business. 

More than just an icon in publishing, Fiori is a “master connector,” visionary and compassionate leader who has made a career out of thoughtful transformation—creating a dialogue and trusted relationship with her readers and staff while bucking the status quo when need be. Interestingly enough, serendipity largely determined Fiori’s career direction when, fittingly, her travels changed her life. “I had, completely on a whim, quit my job as a high school English teacher,” Fiori recalls, “and with what little money I saved, went to Italy and lived there for four months—until the money ran out. While there, I learned the language, traveled through Europe, became self-reliant and gained the self-confidence that I lacked. I left as an insecure girl and returned as a woman of the world. It was an experience that changed my life for the better. It is the gift that has kept on giving throughout my career and in my life. Still, I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do until I was doing it—in my first job at a travel magazine called Holiday in the late 1960s.” 

A natural, Fiori found success at Holiday and afterwards at Travel & Leisure where she rose to senior editor. When the editor-in-chief there retired, Fiori to her surprise learned that she was under consideration for the position, along with a slew of seasoned publishing veterans—all of whom were men. No one thought she was a contender but she employed the philosophy of “luck favors the prepared” and presented an analysis of the publication complete with an action plan outlining steps needed to make it more relevant to readers. And so the unlikely candidate got the job. “When I became the editor-in-chief at Travel & Leisure, I was a 31-year-old Italian-American female who didn’t go to a Seven Sisters school and had no management experience whatsoever,” she says. “I was not what the American Express corporation had in mind as successor to the patrician gentleman who had held the position for many years. I had to learn to deal with it, toughen up in many ways.” Her strategy was to prove naysayers wrong through excellence. “Jackie Robinson once said that the best way to fight back is to do well,” she notes. “If you do well, no one can argue.” 

She did well indeed, but it wasn’t easy, and Fiori had to learn the hard way in an environment that at times was not welcoming. “In the academic world there is the saying that ‘you learn by doing.’ Well I certainly did,” she says. Having leapfrogged over two other editors and several older, more experienced men for the position, many people rooted for her but just as many were not thrilled with her ascent. “It took a bumpy year and a half to get my bearings and a great deal longer than that to become a leader, not just a manager,” she says. “By leader, I mean someone who your employees will respect, trust and follow. The burden was on me to earn that trust, earn their respect and inspire them to follow where I was intending to go.”

Fiori recently gave a speech at the Cleveland Clinic in which she stressed the importance of compassionate leadership. “Whether you want to be or not, as a leader you’re a role model. Everything you do, say and wear carries an enormous weight,” she tells her audience. “You may think a simple reprimand to an employee or a casual compliment is no more than that. On the contrary, those comments stay with the employee long after they’re made to be chewed on, obsessed over, a cause for sleepless nights. Not yours. Theirs. We live in a world of distractions. So it’s vital as a leader to slow down. Think before you say something. Pay attention. Focus on the person or the problem.” 

When she arrived, Travel & Leisure was losing millions of dollars each year. Fiori had to learn the ropes quickly in order to get things back on track. She looked at the travel magazine market and realized there were a number of readers hungry for practical, implementable advice. Her first order of business became to transform Travel & Leisure from a travel magazine with “lots of pretty pictures and dreamy writing” into more of a user-friendly guide illustrating how and where to travel and what to experience in each destination. “I had a vision but I didn’t quite know how to implement it,” she says. “But I learned, and it was by developing a plan and involving my staff in the execution of that plan that I succeeded and so did the magazine.” Thanks to her vision, the publication became a financial and commercial success as well as a beloved resource for its audience.    

Fiori’s success at Travel & Leisure led to an expanded role as executive vice president and editorial director for all American Express publications including Travel & Leisure, Departures and Food & Wine. Fiori says there were “many mountains to climb” in navigating the tricky waters of this role including supervising former peers, coaching various teams, settling disputes and providing her editorial staff with the confidence to create despite corporate pressures, all while handling the unpredictability inherent in publishing. “There were always events to deal with that you had no control over,” she says. “You might be in the process of covering a country and there would be a natural disaster, political turmoil or a terrorist attack and it might be too late to change the pages because of deadlines.” 

But the biggest challenge was maintaining editorial integrity in the midst of management pressure. “As corporations absorb creative businesses, the person in the creative world has to navigate those waters. Every time a new regime came in at American Express, I would need to explain integrity and independence in editorial and those concepts are two words corporations don't always understand.” She adds: “Connecting with the reader is paramount. You go to Barnes & Noble and look at all the magazines and you have to wonder, who is reading all of these and do they have any connection to their readers? I recently went through many of them and what stood out in my mind was how few articles I connected with. But so very often, it’s about the advertiser instead of the editorial, and when the advertiser is king, you are in trouble. Whenever there is thought to be collusion between the advertising and editorial, the readers don’t trust the magazine.”

Fiori had been at American Express Publishing for 22 years earning her stripes in management when she realized she missed the creative editorial process. So she took on a new challenge in working for Hearst, a family-owned business that operated more in the spirit of a country club than a major corporation. Hearst’s flagship Town & Country magazine, like Travel & Leisure, was also losing money when Fiori entered the picture. She was brought in to stop the bleeding and turn the ship around, but as the oldest continuously published general interest magazine in America since 1846, Town & Country was essentially an old guard institution and changing it was not a painless or welcome prospect. Many wanted to keep things the same even though the publication was in financial trouble; Fiori’s mission was to implement a radically new direction. “My job, as I saw it, was to open the doors to new readers—not members of so-called ‘high society’ or trust-fund babies but highly accomplished men and women who were self-made and not from inherited wealth," she says. I also wanted to diversify the readership, the staff and the editorial content—bringing people of different backgrounds and people of color. I could only do this with the support of the company and the help of my staff. Not everyone bought into the idea of such monumental changes, so I encountered some resistance and once again had to prove that these changes were worth making.” 

Positive transformation through thoughtful and necessary change has become a hallmark of Fiori’s style. “Transformation is both challenging and inevitable. Unless both the individual and the company are open to it, there will be conflicts and clashes,” Fiori notes. “The most forward-thinking of us not only expect change; we must learn to embrace it—most of the time; there are always exceptions when difficult decisions must be made like leaving a job or terminating someone.” Fiori recalls the Chinese proverb: “Change is a dragon: you can ignore it (which is futile); or you can fight it (in which case you will lose); or you can ride it.” At the core of each of these transformations could be found a clear vision of what she wanted to create. That became her mission. “Every editor wants to make a difference. With Travel & Leisure, it was to open the world to more readers and help them travel well and with more wisdom. With Town & Country, [it was about] trying to instill a sense that money isn’t everything, diversity is important, the rich are changing and it’s important to give back. If you don’t give back its not a worthwhile life,” she says. 

Fiori's own transformation from manager to leader was based on first-hand experience. “Everything I know about leadership, I learned on the job and I learned as much, maybe more, from the many inept, cold-hearted and abusive people in power as from those who were generous, encouraging and enlightened,” she says. And what she learned was that good leaders are not tyrants. She notes, “Don’t believe that leaders have to be mean, abusive, arrogant, in-your-face bullies in order to be effective. I have known some of these callous individuals who like to pit people against each other, rejoice in humiliating people in front of others, get satisfaction at seeing an employee grovel. That’s not leadership. That’s sadistic behavior. Not all of these people were men, by the way. I have known women who get a charge out of dominating anyone in their path.” Her universal piece of advice for leaders is one word: empathy. “Put yourself in the place of other people and stand in their shoes. Have an empathetic ear and listen more than give advice,” she says. “It is very meaningful to someone on the other end to have someone pay attention to them and their concerns.”

In summing up her leadership philosophy, Fiori references a quote from Max De Pree’s Leadership is an Art: “When we think about the people with whom we work, people on whom we depend, we can see that without each individual, we are not going to go very far as a group. By ourselves, we suffer serious limitations. Together we can be something wonderful.”

Her success has taken her to the pinnacle of success in publishing, but her view of success is more an internal one: “I would define personal success as the point at which an individual feels both fulfilled and at peace with his or her place in the universe,” she says. “It is a rare occurrence and doesn’t happen in youth, if it happens at all. One of my favorite expressions sums it up: ‘The first part of your life is chasing success; the second part is chasing significance.’” Fiori is not one to rest on her laurels, noting, “I never thought I had ‘made it.’ Once you start to think that you are there, you are not there. Once you reach a summit, you have to keep going until you reach the next one.”

Fiori spends her time writing and giving back. She has written six books, including A Table at Le Cirque (Rizzoli) and In the Spirit of Palm Beach (Assouline). Her latest, In the Spirit of Monte Carlo, was published in the fall of 2014. She is also the co-founder of the annual UNICEF/Snowflake Ball and serves on the board of the US Fund for UNICEF.  But the main focus of her life is her family. “Now I am writing more than editing, which I never thought I would be doing,” she says. “I am married almost 35 years to a wonderful man and have a family I adore. Taking my 11-year-old niece and goddaughter on a Disney Cruise, that’s what means everything in life. That's what counts. They will be there when everyone else has gone away.” 

Q&A with Pamela Fiori

SRQ: As a child, did you have a favorite book? Fiori:I read constantly as a child—not just books but magazines. I also started going to the movies at an early age, like three or four. I guess the book that had the biggest impression on me was The Wizard of Oz. That goes for the movie, too. There’s something about Dorothy’s determination to get herself back home and, in the process, to forge friendships with improbable creatures and have adventures and misadventures she never would have dreamed of that resonates with me in a very deep and lasting way.

Do you believe the glass ceiling has been broken for young women today? The glass ceiling may be thinner and more easily cracked but it is still there, alas. Every once in a while, I will notice a wave of “old boys” holding sway over a department, a company or even a country. I find it incredibly dismaying. On the other hand, we’ve come a long way from the days of Mad Men and the kind of sub-human treatment women routinely received. The best part is that there are many more qualified women in the work place and a good number of men who will be their champions. 

What one destination best captures the essence of Pamela Fiori? I can’t really define myself through a destination—that’s for someone else to do—but I can tell you what country other than America speaks to me in all the important and infinite ways: Italy. It is not entirely because I am from an Italian-American background, although that is surely part of it. For such a small country, Italy contains more than its share of all those qualities that count in life. That said, I am American through and through—and proud to be.

If you could bring someone back from history to spend a morning with, who would it be? Two people. As a music lover, I would like to spend a long and fruitful morning with the famous conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. I’d love to spend a few precious hours with my late father and hear him sing the songs and poetry he wrote and have him recite Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky one last time from memory.

Pamela Fiori’s Leadership Tenets

1. Set standards early on, make your expectations crystal clear and lead by example. If you don’t give it your all, don’t expect your staff to. 

2. Pay attention and stay focused. We live in an age of distractions. I once saw a headline in the New York Times that said, “Multitasking makes you stupid.” I believe it.

3. Be kind, generous and fair. Give credit where and when it is due. It’s so easy to do this. 

4. Never lose your temper. Ever. And don’t be a bully. Bullies are despicable.

5.  Be responsive. Get back quickly to those who contact you, especially if you value them.

6.  Have a sense of humor and keep it. It will take you far and comes in very handy, especially in tough times. And there will be tough times. And don’t take yourself too seriously or act like a diva. Leave that for the opera.

7.  Don’t permit inappropriate behavior. If you do, it will continue and continue and continue until it festers.

8.  Keep a respectful distance from the people who report to you. They are not your best friends so don’t make them your drinking buddies. It never works and usually backfires.

9.  Encourage a diverse workplace. Who wants to spend time with people who look the same, think the same and behave the same as you do? Where’s the fun or stimulation in that? 

10.   Stick to your convictions. As the saying goes, “If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.”

11.  Make time for your family and friends. They will be there for you when others have long vanished into thin air. As for the men in your lives, keep them close. We need them.