Idea Makers

Monkey Business

Barbara Goodstein, chief innovation officer at AXA, explains what an 800-pound primate has to do with planning for retirement

There’s chalk and cheese. Rain and the Sahara. Poetry and corporate annual reports. Some things just don’t go together. And near the top of that list would be insurance companies and innovation, right? Not so fast, insists Barbara Goodstein, chief innovation officer at AXA Equitable Life Insurance in New York. According to Goodstein, the insurance business today is a fertile ground for sprouting innovations — fresh ways of looking at and dramatizing old problems. But then again, this also is a woman who talks with an 800-pound gorilla.

The simian, incidentally, may start talking to you too. “Most of us have an 800-pound gorilla sitting in our kitchen. It’s the retirement we have not really planned for,” says Goodstein. For its part, AXA has created a clever marketing campaign — including TV, print, and online ads — in which the gorilla asks what you are doing to plan for your retirement.

It’s a conversation few of us want to engage in, but it’s one that needs to happen. “The gorilla is a metaphor for what we put off,” says Goodstein. “We decided to put the gorilla in your kitchen and watch the conversation unfold.”

And this juncture of retirement and financial planning is one hot spot for innovation that Goodstein says is triggering a transformation of the once stodgy insurance industry. Seventy-six million baby boomers are rushing toward retirement. Many are just waking up to the new — and perhaps unsettling — idea that their retirement is primarily in their own hands, and they want answers. “It’s up to you. People are concerned about what’s next in their lives, they’re looking for answers, and we see opportunity in helping them find the information they are seeking,” Goodstein says.

Another initiative Goodstein has introduced at AXA Equitable (which has $802.9 billion in assets under management as of June 30) is MyRetirementShop.com, a multitiered Web site that’s designed to provoke innovative thinking about retirement. This site goes well beyond simply providing financial planning insight, says Goodstein. Boomers want to know how to keep busy once they leave the full-time workforce, she explains, and a key function of this AXA site is to give them helpful information on volunteering options, self-improvement classes, and lots more. It’s about living well, not just about funding retirement, Goodstein adds.

If Goodstein’s job sounds like fun, the obvious question is, just how does a person become a chief innovation officer? For starters, she’s always liked working hard. “I got my first summer job when I was 15,” she says. That job was as a receptionist at a textiles company in Manhattan owned by her father. A year later she got a job filing at Chase Manhattan. For Goodstein, work provided instant gratification: “I liked making money and I loved having responsibility.”

After earning a degree in English at Brown University and an MBA from Columbia Business School, Goodstein put in a stint at a packaged goods company. But once she was recruited for a job in financial services, she was hooked. She likes the industry, but she also thrives on being in an environment that prizes creativity, though she’s aware that few people would view insurance as a creative field. “It really is a myth that insurance is boring,” she says. “It certainly isn’t today. At least at AXA we see things differently.”

So does Goodstein have her own retirement planned? “It’s like the shoemaker’s children who have no shoes,” she sighs. “Just the other day, I said to my husband, ‘We really have to start planning our retirement.’”

In fact, Goodstein has been having so much fun working that some things have been pushed aside. But she’s pretty sure her own retirement planning will happen soon enough. “I can’t avoid it,” she says. “Not with the 800-pound gorilla in my kitchen.”

Running It

Mary Wittenberg sets a fast pace for New York Road Runners

Mary Wittenberg has a problem. It’s one she recognizes — and has even taken strides to solve — but it’s still a problem: How do you build an audience for an individual sport whose stars enjoy precious little popular name recognition?

Running has no Dale Earnhart Jr., no Venus and Serena Williams, no Tiger Woods. But Wittenberg, 45, president and CEO of New York Road Runners (NYRR) — which organizes the ING New York City Marathon, taking place on November 2 — believes the sport deserves a much higher profile. “I would love to see crowds standing up and cheering on the great athletes who run in races from the mile to the marathon,” says Wittenberg, whose own resume as a runner includes winning the 1987 Marine Corps Marathon and competing in the 1988 Olympic marathon trials. “I think running should be our national pastime.”

That’s an eyebrow-raising statement, especially with the World Series around the corner. But the numbers lend some hope. Consider:

• More than 20 million people call themselves runners, Wittenberg says, adding that NYRR aims to drive that figure higher with an array of innovative programs. They include such grassroots initiatives as the Mighty Milers and Young Runners, which target kids from poor communities in New York City and elsewhere in the United States as well as South Africa. Those programs have introduced some 50,000 children to running.
• Between 2005, when Wittenberg took over the NYRR top spot, and 2007, her organization’s budget increased from $13.4 million to more than $21 million, a reflection not only of her management skills but also of growing interest in the sport.
• Between 2004 and 2007, the number of television viewers worldwide for the New York Marathon — the biggest single U.S. running event — grew from 224 million to 312 million.

But the popularity of New York’s race — and the Boston Marathon, which is No. 2 in terms of participation and viewership — is a mixed blessing. The fact is, with apologies to Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt and his stunning achievements at the 2008 Olympics, no running event apart from the New York and Boston marathons usually registers on the U.S. cultural radar.

Wittenberg hopes to change that by spearheading an overhaul of the way the major races are organized, both nationally and around the world. That’s a tall order, but Wittenberg has the skill set, full-steam-ahead attitude, and powers of persuasion to get the job done. “Her fresh-faced good looks belie an iron will, fierce determination, and an uncompromising work ethic,” notes a profile of Wittenberg in the October 2001 issue of Running Times magazine.

Her childhood and pre-NYRR professional background instilled these qualities in Wittenberg. The oldest of seven children, she grew up in a Buffalo, N.Y., household where life revolved around sports. Like her brothers and sisters, she played the sports that her father coached — baseball, softball, and basketball.

Wittenberg discovered her passion for running during her senior year at Canisius College, in Buffalo. In fact, she proved to be a natural distance runner and trained with the men’s cross-country team. Wittenberg kept on running while attending law school at Notre Dame — where she also trained with the men’s cross-country team — and began entering marathons in the mid-1980s. In 1985, she placed 16th in the Chicago Marathon, finishing with a time of 2:46. During her 11 years as a corporate attorney, she dived headlong into her work, forsaking competitive running but gaining “a hard-earned background in the art of the deal,” according to the Running Times profile. Today, Wittenberg, a mother of two, lives in New York City and starts each day with a predawn run.

It’s easy to see, then, why Wittenberg is uniquely qualified for her NYRR job — and also why she may just meet her lofty goals. “We need to make some big changes in the sport,” she admits. Taking a giant step in that direction, NYRR has partnered with four other major marathons — Boston, London, Berlin, and Chicago — to create a big-bucks series title for the top runners to chase.

A good analogy for the proposed series is the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup competition, which carries a $10 million prize. Perhaps not surprisingly, Wittenberg also finds inspiration in tennis. “What we’re trying to do now is build a series like the U.S. Open,” she says. “We’ll have a series of events involving the shorter distances and build to the longer distances, so fans can become engaged with these compelling athletes.”

One gets the sense that Wittenberg is just hitting her stride.

Continental is the official airline of the ING New York City Marathon.

Man of Characters

Artist Chris Bancroft of DreamWorks draws from actors’ expressions to bring his animation to life

Sure, Chris Bancroft has worked on successful animated films featuring stars like Jerry Seinfeld, Renée Zellweger, and Steve Carell. But his first stab at artistic creativity was hardly an auspicious one. “When I was 2 or 3, my parents were about to put our home on the market,” Bancroft says. “I took a red marker and drew on every wall in the house.” He doesn’t remember the incident, but when his parents saw Bancroft’s handiwork that day, something must have clicked. “My parents learned to become very supportive of my pursuit of art since then,” he adds.

It’s paid off. Bancroft, who turns 26 this month, is now part of the team of animators at DreamWorks Animation, whose latest new project, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, features the voices of Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Sacha Baron Cohen and is due for release on November 7.

Following his work on the box-office favorites Over the Hedge and Bee Movie, which combined to gross more than $620 million, Bancroft says working with the Madagascar cast has been an animator’s dream. “We watch the actors read their lines on film before we start animating,” he says, taking a break at the PDI DreamWorks studio in Redwood City, Calif. “Many times, they make a facial expression or take a comedic pause that you don’t expect. Or they make a gesture, like a wave of a hand, that really fits the character, and you see that you can create more magic if you capture that in the animation.”

Before joining DreamWorks in 2005 Bancroft pursued his craft with curiosity and exploration. His parents run their own water-purification business in Riverview, Fla., and as a kid, Bancroft would take pads of Post-It notes from their home office and design flip-book animation sequences on them. Later, he attended Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla., which has one of the nation’s top programs for computer-generated design — perfect for a student who longed to be an animator. After an internship at Sony Pictures Imageworks, Bancroft landed a job with DreamWorks, and each project since then has been a learning experience.

“Every project is different,” Bancroft says. “For Bee Movie, Jerry Seinfeld’s approach was that of a stand-up comic. We’d be thinking of all of these wild movements and facial expressions and he’d say, ‘Keep it simple. It’s about delivering a good line and making the audience laugh.’ Then, you do something like Madagascar, where it’s snappier and very high-energy. You’re moving the characters much more and everything must be concise and precise. You think you get used to this, but it’s something different every day. That’s what I love about it.”