Liza Michelle Rivera

The best career advice I ever received came from my first boss on the sales team at Fujifilm, very early in my career when I was about 26 or 27. I used to write the longest emails in the history of the world and send them to everybody, you know, because at that time I had this ego thing and wanted to show off. He told me, 'Lysa? You need to learn to be concise.' He basically taught me how to write a business email. You have no idea how valuable that advice has been for me. Now I'm a bullet-point kind of person, you know, boom, boom, boom. That was so important, because that's how you're communicating, and that's how people perceive you. Now I tell people, if your email is like a dissertation, I'm not gonna read it. I know it sounds like it's not inspirational, like 'achieve on your path,' it was very practical, and I will never forget that.

I would say that marketing is still a function that many companies don't fully understand, and marketing is viewed as kind of like this money pit that people don't know, because marketing is all about the long-term gain. I mean, there's some things you want to do that have successes quickly, but the true success takes time, and that's very frustrating - not having companies that really see the value of that. As marketers, I tell the team all the time, don't send an executive a report that has, you know, 'oh, we had 17,000 impressions,' because that means nothing to them. You need to do an education and tell them what it matters, tell them how that relates to the pipeline. I would also say that when you look at the C-suite in many, many companies, you don't see many women, and that's very frustrating. Another challenge I've been thinking about is ageism in organizations. I just turned 50 a couple months ago in December, and I don't feel 50, I'll forever be young in my head, but I do fear that ageism in organizations after 50. I don't like company hopping and I hope that SK Pharmaceutical is my last home, but if for whatever reason I have to go look for a job, I'm afraid that my age is going to get in the way, and that's not the same for men. In terms of opportunities, well, opportunities are endless, right? It's all about your attitude. Right now, AI is a huge opportunity for everybody to learn it, to apply it, to increase your efficiency. There's this fear that we're all gonna be replaced, but if you understand it from early on and adopt it early on, there's still humans needed, but you have to understand it, so get in front of it. In marketing specifically, right now I'm building a brand at SK Pharmaceutical. That's a great opportunity, and it's really rare that you have the chance to enter a company just when that is happening, so you're really building a legacy, because when I'm gone, it's still there, even if you're not there.