Kim Droege

I attribute my success to my mother and father, without a doubt. I was raised by depression parents, and from the time I was old enough to understand what college or higher education meant, I was constantly reassured and reinforced the idea that I would be pursuing higher education. But the one thing that my parents told me from the time I was a little girl, and they never stopped my whole life, is 'you can be anything you want to be as long as you want it badly enough. There's nothing you can't do. You are as good as anybody else in the world.' These were the positive messages that my parents constantly told me and reinforced all the time. So not achieving was not an option. But even if they hadn't done that, I think I have that kind of personality. I had a boss at IBM who told me during a performance review, 'Kim, I never worry about you, because no matter what the obstacle is, you will either find a way around it, under it, over it, or you will eliminate it.' Those words describe me in a nutshell. I've always been that way. That's my personality, that's who I am. For me, no is where we start negotiating, and I don't really take no for an answer. I'm pretty driven.

The best career advice I’ve ever received comes from two sources: my parents taught me that I can be anything I want if I truly desire it, and an IBM manager once told me I always find a way around or through obstacles, which reinforced the value of perseverance and creative problem-solving.

My advice to young women entering this industry is to take your personal brand and social media seriously, protect your professional presence online, and be relentless about preparation and networking.

The biggest challenge to my industry now is that everyone can produce a podcast, and podcasting is no longer just audio, it's video too. The competition is amazing. When you compete in a Telly, you're competing against the big people like Paramount Studios, Al Jazeera, Disney, all the big names, plus all of the people with video screens everywhere across the world. If you just look at the submissions to the Telly Awards and the growth of them over the years, you will see that is the biggest challenge to the industry. This year they'll receive way beyond the over 13,000 submissions from last year, because everybody's podcasting, and they keep having to expand the categories they're considering. The quality of the content is the biggest threat. When you have your own podcast, you can control the content very carefully. Another very big challenge is the hate and vitriol. You think you're posting something very innocuous, you think you're posting something that's not controversial, but everybody today can sit behind their keyboard or their phone and post whatever they want. There's really nothing you can do about it other than blocking them and deleting it. You can't escape it. You think you're doing good stuff in the world, but there may be very many people out there that don't think you're doing good stuff at all, and they're gonna share that. If they don't like the guest you had on your program and they have some animosity towards that guest, they will share that. The amount of hate and discontent and vitriol that exists today is alarming.

The values most important to me are persistence, continuous learning, and curiosity; being trustworthy and authentic in my work; and engaging meaningfully with my community. I also believe that true success includes family, balance, and leaving a lasting legacy, as shown when I paused my show to spend time with my 97-year-old mother.