Good morning. Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell writing from New York. When Thasunda Brown Duckett got tapped to run Fortune 100 company TIAA, it was the middle of COVID. She didn’t meet with her board in person for over a year, and mission No. 1 was to get the company through the pandemic, one Zoom call at a time.
But beyond that, she had a plan to modernize and expand the retirement behemoth’s offerings via a product dubbed “guaranteed lifetime income,” and five years into her tenure, it’s delivering.
TIAA has scaled to over $1.5 trillion in assets under management. Last December, it secured a partnership with Vanguard to put its lifetime income annuities in front of millions of American workers, expanding TIAA’s reach from its traditional nonprofit institutional market into the much broader 401(k) market.
Brown Duckett and I spoke about her CEO playbook on the most recent episode of my podcast, Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry, which is out today. We also covered the leadership and life lessons that have helped her succeed at the highest levels in business. A few that stood out:
Live life like a diversified portfolio. “You only have 100% [of your time] to offer. You do not have 110%,” she says. “You have to allocate it to the things that define who you are. I’m a philanthropist, a mother, a sister, an auntie, a wife, an executive. The reality is, my children don’t get 100%—they get 30%, and I have to divide that across three kids.”
