By Brian Trompeter
From decades of helping organizations either get back on the right track or work collaboratively with competitors toward a broader goal, Lisa Gable has garnered plenty of wisdom – and war stories.
When working for computing giant Intel decades ago, Gable learned how to use process engineering to review an organization’s purpose and past, analyze what had gone wrong and set three top priorities to right the ship.
Leaders also should visualize an ideal future, identify available assets, create a decision tree that forces hard choices and move forward with both force and diplomacy, she said.
“Choose the one thing you do really well,” Gable advised. “Find like-minded people and run as fast as you can to make it happen.”
Gable, who lives in Middleburg, spoke Jan. 4 at a meeting of the Vienna Business Association’s Health, Wellness and Fitness Committee at the Vienna Community Center. The committee’s chairman, Karen Kerrigan, interviewed Gable about her career and the knowledge she had accrued from her experiences.
Arrayed at tables in front of Gable were about a dozen highly fit people whose occupations included sports, physical rehabilitation and health care. Each table had copies of Gable’s book, “Turnaround: How to Change Course When Things Are Going South.”
In 2005, Gable served as a U.S. ambassador and led the country’s World Expo efforts in Aichi, Japan. The hitch: None of the previous U.S. participation in what had been known as the World’s Fair been done within budget.
“The World’s Fair financially has been a train wreck since the Eiffel Tower,” she said, referring to that landmark’s unveiling at the 1889 exposition in Paris.
Understanding the urgency of the situation, Gable quickly and cheaply arranged to get herself notarized at a local Kinko’s copy store. She relished telling how the store’s manager, wanting to add a bit of pomp and excitement to the ceremony, found three small U.S. flags and had customers gather around to witness and cheer the notarization.
Gable analyzed the U.S. situation, dispensed with her predecessors’ predilections for expensive, sumptuous meals designed to impress and focused instead on building economic opportunities and international relationships. She succeeded and the U.S. effort that year did not go over budget.
Gable subsequently founded the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation and brought together 16 major food-and-beverage manufacturers, which worked with the public-health sector (their usual enemy) to find ways to trim 1.6 trillion calories out of U.S. consumers’ diets.
That initiative tried to make a dent in the country’s growing obesity crisis and resulted in major changes to the food supply, including the use of flash freezing to preserve nutrients, she said.
“The reality is, food has improved,” Gable said, noting that half of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo’s portfolios now consist of sugar-free products. “The sodium content in food has gone down a lot in the last 10 years,” she added.
Later, as CEO of Food Allergy & Research Education (FARE), she helped make the organization financially stable and expanded its reach and effectiveness.
Gable, who since last March has chaired the think tank “World in 2050,” also is focusing on health issues. She noted not only the rise in food-allergy cases, but also increases in rare diseases and exponential rise in unhappiness and anxiety, some of which is fueled by ubiquitous social media.
“We have put a lot of money into extending people’s lives,” she said of the current health-care system. “We need to invest in helping people live life well with disease.”
Gable also is a distinguished fellow at the Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity and is intrigued by the possibilities of using artificial intelligence to improve people’s health. After being fed the patient’s symptoms, artificial intelligence can analyze the information, diagnose health problems early, suggest treatments and tailor diets to individual patients.
Gable is optimistic about AI’s ability to bolster people’s health, including those in under-served communities.
“I think we are on the cusp of some of the most dramatic inflexion points in medicine,” she said. “I do believe we will see a complex, major evolution of health and wellness.”
Interviewer Kerrigan said AI has become a familiar topic of conversation.
“Some of the fear has been taken out of it,” she said.
