Access to Innovators Podcast with Chris Ullman

Chapters & Transcript

0:04

Welcome to the Access to Innovators podcast powered by the premier life skills University High Point University.

Hello and thank you for joining us. My name is Megan Hovey. I'm a senior from Rochester, New York majoring in sports media and minoring in social media marketing. Today I'm going one-on-one with Chris Ullman, who is the founder and president of Ullman Communications LLC and High Point University's strategic communication expert in residence.

Chris, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today and joining us. I'm super excited.

Well, Megan, I am delighted to be here. I love High Point University and I'm excited to talk to a fellow New Yorker. I'm from Long Island.

Yeah, a little bit on opposite sides of the state, but we have that bond still. The Empire State.

0:55

So just kind of getting into it, I know you said you love coming back to campus. What exactly attracted you to bring your skills here to High Point University, and what do you think sets HPU students apart?

Well, this is a really special place. We first learned about it when my nephew, who's now a senior, came here about five years ago. We went on the tour with him and learned about the school. Then my son, who's now a junior at High Point, said his cousin Luke is having a great time and just learning a lot. He's in sports marketing, just like you, and thinks it's a great degree.

We learned more and more about the school, about its philosophy, and we were really excited that our son was interested in coming here. Thankfully, he got in. Once our son was here, we started visiting more for parents weekend and were just so impressed with the place.

Interestingly, a friend of mine is in the Experts in Residence program. A gentleman by the name of Bill Canard, an amazing man who is currently the chairman of AT&T, was the ambassador to the European Union, and we used to work together at an investment firm called the Carlyle Group. Bill told me about this program and said, 'Wow, that's really neat. The opportunity to come and lecture and mentor students and help them understand what the real world is like.'

I looked at the array of experts they had and amazingly they did not have a communications expert in residence. So I said to Bill, 'That should be me,' and he said 'I agree.' He went to the administration and pitched me, and they said yes. That's how I got the job. It's a volunteer job and it's part-time, both of which are fine with me.

2:56

What do you think kind of sets High Point students apart from other students you've maybe interacted with in your tenure throughout the industry?

I have met many students here, of course my nephew and my son. I think what sets the HPU student apart is their appreciation for what makes this school really special. There's a very direct link between what the students are learning day in and day out and the real world.

I'm all for theoretical learning and pure knowledge absolutely. But one of the things I really love about High Point, and my son loved about it, and many of the students that I've met here is this almost workforce preparation. You're learning skills and that's really important, but it's the application of it.

You have the Experts in Residence program, you have the internship programs that they make available, and the fact that they take it so seriously. You have to take a course to prepare yourself to do an internship because they want those students to make the most of the internship and represent the school well, which I think is good.

President Qubein, of course, is an inspirational leader who places such an emphasis on getting people ready for the real world. The students I meet, and students like you, they take their study seriously. They are good role models for their fellow students. They are really trying to harness what they're learning today so that it will be applicable in the future.

The mentoring program here is really impressive. Every student has a mentor. Especially when you're a freshman coming to a school with six thousand students, you can feel lost. Having that mentor there is just one part of this larger spirit of how the school takes care of the students and prepares them for postgraduate life.

5:17

Absolutely. Since you've been on campus so much, what's your favorite part of campus?

Oh, I could start with Chick-fil-A. I'm a PR guy so I'm going to rattle through them. I love the inspirational statues. I never get tired of it. I love the international promenade where you see all the flags from countries around the world, the fountains, the little hangout places where you can contemplate life, and the Qubein Arena is just amazing.

I whistled the national anthem there. I'm a champion whistler, which is an unusual talent.

But ultimately, it's the faculty that is really impressive here. I've gotten to meet a number of professors, particularly in the communications department, and they really are passionate. They are smart. They care about their students and they're very welcoming of practitioners like me who have a wealth of communications experience.

I met with a group of about twenty-five freshmen students this morning, most of them communications majors or planning on it. The chance to instill some principles of what it means to be an effective communicator and practical things about how to advance through the profession is wonderful.

It's great when the professors acknowledge that having practitioners come and guest lecture is important. You're mixing the academic and the textbook with the real world, and that's really important.

7:30

I can't say enough great things about the faculty here, especially in the communication school. For me, I've really benefited from people like you coming via Zoom or in person to network and share your experiences because it's so important to just kind of get that exposure to what the real world is like outside of these four walls.

Innovation is in our DNA here at HPU. Can you kind of talk about a time when you innovated your strategies to better serve your clients or people that you work with?

One of the things I talked with the students this morning was the difference between being what I call a message taker and an advisor. Message takers are very good at writing things down, going to the boss and saying, 'Hey boss, this is what's happening. What do you want to do?' An advisor, on the other hand, looks at all the facts, which are important, but then comes up with options. Option A, B, and here are the pluses and minuses of each. I recommend B for these reasons. And then you make the case to the boss and to the client.

My innovation is not some super fancy thing like some new AI technology, which I do think is important and will have a huge impact on the communications profession. It's this simple notion of pushing back against just the normal way of doing things. When you're an advisor, you're almost always pushing back because a lot of times clients will want to do a certain thing, but as the advisor you're saying, 'Well, there may be a better approach.'

I had a client who is a billionaire and really loved helping homeless people. He wrote a five million dollar check to a homeless assistance organization in Washington DC. The PR people at the homeless shelter came to me and said, 'All right, we've written a press release and we need your approval because we're sending it out tomorrow.' I said, 'Well, first of all, what's the rush?' But I reviewed it.

They were focused on the billionaire giving five million to help homeless people. Now that's a good thing. But as an advisor, I looked at this release and said, 'What is your objective?' Because a press release is just a vessel. It's not a strategy. In a vessel, you pour content into it, but they were pouring the wrong content into it. They were just talking about the billionaire giving the money to help the homeless people. But we were missing who benefits. Well, homeless people benefit.

I said, 'That is what we should be focused on.' Since their objective was to get a story in the Washington Post, just taking a news release and sending it to fifty reporters in the Washington area, just talking about the billionaire and how generous he is, it's not going to get you anything. So what I said to them is, 'What we should do is focus on the humanity of it. Let's focus on the outcome that this money is going to help actual humans get on their feet.'

At first the PR people were like, 'Oh no, we have a deadline. We've got to get the press release out.' And I said, 'No, trust me, this will be much better.' I finally convinced them. I made a connection to a reporter at the Washington Post and stepped away. Two and a half months went by and on Christmas morning I went out and picked up my newspaper, The Washington Post, and there is the story on the front page, top of the fold, featuring not the billionaire but the homeless families that were actually benefiting from this five million dollar gift and the housing that they now have in a warm, safe place on Christmas morning.

That is a great way to do PR. You might think the client's upset because he doesn't get all the attention. He didn't even want the attention. But of course, if you're going to make an announcement, it should be effective. The greatest innovation is almost like just doing it the old-fashioned way. Let's get away from mechanics and let's get away from things and let's humanize. I'm constantly injecting the human component into how we communicate, and it makes a remarkable difference in both how the media perceive this news and how the audience reacts. They're much more likely to have an intimate and emotional reaction if they're hearing about a human and what they're going through rather than just some rich guy giving a check.

13:09

And as you know, High Point places a really big emphasis on giving back to the local community. You've previously served as an adviser to the American Red Cross and helped them work through their communication strategy. How are you able to do that knowing that donations are still urgently needed?

I just love the Red Cross. I first got exposed to them when I was eighteen years old and gave my first pint of blood. This is crazy but I just gave my eleventh gallon, not all at once of course. There are eight pints in a gallon, so I gave my eighty-eighth pint of blood. I've actually worked with the Red Cross as a donor for forty-two years.

Then I got named to the board for the greater Washington area, and that was a great experience. Board members for nonprofit organizations typically have several roles. You have to raise money and you have to get the word out among different audiences so that they too will support the organization with their time, talent, treasure, and strategic guidance.

I gave a number of suggestions to the Red Cross president at the time and their PR people, again focusing on humanity. How do we take either a disaster and humanize it, or how do we take the need for blood and humanize it?

That way of humanizing it is much more powerful because if you have blood in your body but you've never given blood, if you actually realize the impact it has on an actual human, that every pint you give can save three humans. Now you'll probably never meet these people, but just the fact that you're able to change a life and save a life by just having someone stick a needle in your arm, which is nowhere near as painful as people think.

I don't actually watch them put the needle in because I kind of critique the technique. You've done it so many times, I think you have pretty good technique. I do have a good eye. I actually couldn't do it because I've never done it, meaning putting the needle in. But I actually know when they're doing a good job. Most of them are very good.

15:52

We talked a little bit about artificial intelligence and all that kind of stuff, but I want to dive deeper. With it being more prevalent than ever, especially in the communications world, especially with things like ChatGPT, how do you think the industry will be able to pivot? And what advice would you give to current students like myself looking to enter the communications industry and looking to compete against these robots?

This is such an important issue. It's both dazzlingly exciting and astoundingly frightening. In terms of the good, AI has a lot of good potential and a huge downside as well. I've been telling my children, I have a twenty-one, twenty, and seventeen-year-old, that this is big and it's going to be huge. So you ignore it at your peril.

The challenge with AI is that it's for the most part not creating things from scratch. It is assembling stuff that it finds. So if there's a lot of junk out there, all it's going to do is find the junk and rearrange it into a different form of junk. That's not good.

The key is how do you harness it so that it will actually help produce good stuff. I try not to be a Luddite when it comes to technology and I am a fan of efficiency. Should we use AI to write the first drafts of documents? I'm not opposed to that. But it should not be the final draft, for sure. Because you will just get an accumulation of stuff that's already out there.

I tend to think a lot of the press releases out there are just not well written. So if the AI robots are out there taking bits and pieces of poorly written press releases and reassembling them, that's bad.

I think some of the lessons for communicators are that you should know a lot about AI, what it can do and what it can do best, and then what are the things that really don't work well. Because if you remove the human component from it, that is just bad because it will take away the creativity.

Any new technology, especially a time-saving technology, is generally a good thing because it frees up our time to do higher level things. As AI starts doing some of the very basic things in the communications world, that's fine. But students and practitioners of communications must make sure that their value-added skills are developed and omnipresent.

When you get that first draft produced by the AI, don't just sign off and say, 'Oh well, that was brilliant.' There's no way it's going to be brilliant. But you can take that and because of your knowledge base about the subject that you're reporting on or doing PR for, which the machine probably doesn't have, machines don't have nuance. They don't understand politics. They don't understand market differentiation necessarily.

There are going to be a ton of areas where AI, especially in this first wave, just can't do what you can do. That's where students must really bone up on their skill sets so that they're always adding value. Figure out how to harness the AI to be efficient because that's good, and perhaps be more thorough in terms of the search for data. But then use that human brain for the creativity and the discernment that AI just does not have.

20:36

So you're known around the world pretty much as the Happy Whistler. Can you explain how you developed and shared your special gift? How did you take up whistling?

I am a happy whistler and I love whistling. I've been whistling for fifty-five years. I just turned sixty and I started when I was five. In the early days I was not particularly good, but I still enjoyed doing it. In a nutshell, some people can whistle. It's a physiological thing. Some people just can't. Thankfully, I'm able to whistle.

I was exposed to it because my father was a pretty accomplished whistler. He wasn't a champion, but he had a very beautiful sounding whistle and just loved to do it all the time. It brought him joy and brought me joy just listening to him. The exposure to that got me into it, and then I started practicing literally, not just randomly.

I would listen to classical music primarily as a child. I'd put on Strauss Waltzes in particular and that's still my favorite rehearsal music because the complexity of the music, the range, and the requirement to have technique that mimic the instruments. That's a core reason why I enjoy whistling.

But what I found is I can use this whistling to bring joy to other people. I have what I call a whistling ministry. I whistle Happy Birthday six hundred fifty times a year. What's interesting about this is that typically when it comes to wishing someone a happy birthday, your family, then your best friends, maybe your coworkers or if you're a student your dorm mates, and that's good. Maybe that's one hundred fifty-two people or so. But I get to inject myself into a happy moment for six hundred fifty people a year and honor their life, bring them some joy in a fun way.

I routinely get notes and it's a great positive feedback mechanism. I happily whistle for someone and then they send me these sweet notes that say 'You made my day. Now my day is complete.' I have friends I've been whistling Happy Birthday for since nineteen ninety-five, so it's been about twenty-eight years or so of happy birthday whistles.

That brings me a lot of joy because I can bring joy to others. I've done a lot of fun things with it. I've performed with symphony orchestras. I whistle the national anthem at events. I'm whistling tomorrow at a High Point women's soccer game. I've whistled at the top of the Washington Monument, on the outside, not in the observation deck, but literally on the outside when they had scaffolding on it five hundred fifty-five feet in the air. I whistled Yankee Doodle Dandy.

I have a CD of performing with a symphony orchestra and I've written a book about it. I've done TED talks. My core message aside from the happy birthdays is, 'What is your simple gift in life and can you find it?' The name of my book is called Find Your Whistle. It's a metaphor for what is your simple gift.

You find the gift, develop the gift, share the gift. I take this counterintuitive approach which is don't try to change the world. It's really not possible. But you can change the world of the people just around you. That means bringing some joy to them and making them feel special because it's easy to just worry about oneself. What's really important is to care about other people and impact their lives.

The whistling has been a completely unexpected big part of my life. I never could have mapped this out when I was five years old trying to figure it out.

25:14

Absolutely. You previously have worked for the White House and helped them develop some strategic messaging. What was it like doing that for such a large organization with so many different policies and guidelines?

In my career, I've worked for some great organizations and institutions. I worked on Capitol Hill for the House Budget Committee. It's a very technical subject. That's where I really learned this humanizing thing. You turn this geeky document of numbers and put human flesh on it. What does this budget actually mean as it relates to humans?

When I worked at the White House Budget Office, it's called OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is the budgeting arm for the federal government and part of the Executive Office of the President. It's similar to the House Budget Committee but the White House is leading this effort.

The goal is to take policy and put numbers to it because governing is all about resource allocation. You get money in through taxes and you spend the money. The goal is how do we allocate those resources? When you come up with policies, ultimately those policies have impact on humans. Our big goal was to communicate effectively about how this or that policy affects actual humans. It could be Social Security, Medicare, the Park Service. The federal government is vast.

I'll tell you a crazy fun story about trying to humanize things. The budget director, a man named Mitch Daniels, who went on to be governor of Indiana and then president of Purdue for twelve years, is a serious guy but he's very funny. When we put out the president's first budget, we had to cut spending because there was a deficit.

Mitch, who's very witty, said, 'All right, this is what we're going to do. We are going to get copies of the Rolling Stones song, You Can't Always Get What You Want, and the refrain is, But if you try some time you might just find you get what you need. So he's trying to contrast wants and needs.'

I made copies of this on cassette tapes, which no one uses anymore. When we handed out the budget to national reporters at the AP, DOW Jones, the Washington Post, etc., I gave them the budget and the cassette tape and they were like, 'What's that?' And I said, 'You've got to listen to that before you read the budget.' They all did, and almost every article referenced this, about how witty it was, but we were trying to make a point that you can't always get what you want but we try to give you what you need.

What ended up happening was that the White House went berserk when they found out what we were doing. The number two press person called me up and said, 'I heard you're doing this thing which clearly is not actually happening.' And I said, 'No, no, it's happening.' She said, 'Oh my gosh, you must stop that right now.' But we had already sent it out to a bunch of reporters. The point is you can use humor to try to make a point and to try to get things done. Mitch was very good at harnessing humor to further his objectives.

We tried to humanize it too. We're not just a bunch of geeky people. We can have some fun. We can use a Rolling Stones song to try to make a point and I think we were effective at it.

29:14

Absolutely. All right Chris, so you have a new book coming out. Tell us about it.

It's called Four Billionaires and a Parking Attendant: Success Strategies of the Wealthy, Powerful, and Just Plain Wise. This is a book about how to be your best, how to be successful. I've learned this through firsthand experience working with fifteen of some of the most successful people in the world. Four are literally billionaires who run investment firms. The governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, is in there. Lou Gerstner, who is one of the greatest CEOs of the twentieth century. Adena Friedman, who is the CEO and chair of NASDAQ, a publicly traded company.

These are all people I've worked with firsthand and I've seen these immensely talented people in action over a thirty-year period. I say, well, if Lou Gerstner or Adina or David Rubenstein or Orlando Bravo, he's another billionaire, if they do X, Y, or Z and it works for them, well let's see if I can do that too.

What's really exciting is that each lesson is told via an anecdote so it's very accessible. You can really get it and they're very doable. If I said, 'Megan, if you can run the Boston Marathon in three hours and thirty minutes, then you can be your best and be successful,' unless you're a serious runner, you'd say, 'Oh my gosh, there's no way I can do that.' But that's not what it is. This is about having drive, about being humble, and about being disciplined. Those are all things that don't require running the Boston Marathon.

I break these fifty lessons into eight strategies such as to be innovative, to be purposeful, to build bridges with people who don't agree with you, to think of others. People might think, 'Oh, there's a book about a bunch of billionaires, why would he have a section on thinking of others?' Well, it's amazing how generous the billionaires that I've worked with are. They've pledged to give away all their money.

I mentioned Bill Conway earlier who gave the five million to the homeless shelter. He would roam the suite at the Carlyle Group with a box filled with hundreds of gift cards for Dunkin Donuts and he would knock on doors and say, 'All right, if you promise to give these gift cards to homeless people you see on the street, I will give you as many as you want.' So I to this day carry those in my wallet and give them to homeless people. I printed up a little card that tells them where to go for help because a ten dollar gift card is not going to change your life, but it will help for a few moments. If you can get to a place that can help with substance abuse, housing, clothing, medical care, etc., that's where you really want to get people.

Bill, this billionaire, could have been just making more money, roaming the halls really helping people, thinking of someone other than yourself in a way that can touch their heart and hopefully make their life a little better.

There are tons of lessons in here about how to be your best. If you want to be a billionaire, that's fine with me. I'm a capitalist, but that was not my goal. My goal was to be the best version of me, to be as strategic and purposeful and generous and a bridge builder in how I live my life day in and day out.

There are just amazing lessons that I'm really excited to share with people. The book comes out in October. I'm hoping people read it, learn from it, and benefit the way I have as well.

33:47

Just kind of wrapping up, what would you say is one piece of advice that you would give to current High Point University students when it comes to building their own personal brand that reflects their own values?

The key is understanding oneself because if you understand yourself, you can then effectively build your brand. Understanding yourself takes time. It's not something that happens in a weekend. To understand what's in your heart, meaning what do you want to do, or in your head, what are you able to do, takes time.

I encourage students to go through a period of discernment. Arguably, discernment lasts a lifetime, but it's especially acute when someone is in their early twenties where you're really trying to understand your strengths, weaknesses, desires, things you like, and areas where you've struggled. The more you understand yourself, you'll have a much better sense of where you should be going because we're all on a journey. Life is just this long journey and you want it to be as fulfilling and effective as possible.

In my new book, the beginning section is all about purpose, having what I call an 'it.' What is your it? Early in my professional life, being the best PR person I could be was my it. Then I became a whistler and being the best whistler I can be was my it. Your it is different than mine, but the key is to have one so that you have purpose.

The more you understand yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, the better able you will be to find your it and then to actually execute on it. It's understanding yourself. The more you understand yourself, the better you will be able to communicate yourself to others and you will have purpose through that.

All right Chris, thank you so much for sharing your extraordinary advice and achievements with us today. We're so grateful for your commitment to mentoring High Point University students and joining a remarkable and innovative program that inspires our students and campus community.

It's a delight to be here, Megan. Thank you, and I wish you well with your studies, with your career, and with your life.

Thank you so much, and thank you all for joining me on the Access to Innovators podcast powered by High Point University.

This is a conversation between High Point University student Megan Hovey and Chris Ullman, founder of Ullman Communications and HPU's Strategic Communication Expert in Residence. Ullman discusses his path to becoming involved with HPU through family connections, what distinguishes HPU students from their peers, and his philosophy of humanizing communications through real-world storytelling. The podcast covers his innovation in shifting from message-taking to advisory roles, his volunteer work with the American Red Cross for over four decades, his perspective on AI in communications and the importance of human creativity, his unexpected journey as a champion whistler and advocate for finding one's simple gift, his experience with strategic messaging at the White House, and his forthcoming book featuring success lessons from billionaires and leaders he's worked with.

Access to Innovators Podcast with Chris Ullman

Intro

Why High Point University

What sets High Point apart

Favorite part of campus

Innovation

Giving back

AI in communications

Happy Whistler

Strategic messaging

Book

Closing advice