From Coast Guard Captain to Leadership Professor: Meet Amy Florentino T’10

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Kirk Kardashian: Hey, this is Kirk Kardashian and you're listening to Knowledge in Practice, a podcast from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. In this podcast, we talk with Tuck professors about their research and teaching and the story behind their curiosity. Today on the show, we have another episode of our alumni in the classroom series, I talk with Amy Florentino, a member of the Tuck class of 2010 and a clinical professor of business administration. Before Amy came back to Tuck as a professor, she was a 25-year veteran of the Coast Guard, retiring as a sector commander who directed strategy and operations for all Coast Guard missions across Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and northeastern New York. At Tuck, Amy teaches core and elective courses in both the MBA and MHA programs, including management, communications, Advanced Management, communications, Client project Management, and Crisis Management. She also serves as faculty director for The Next Step Transition to Business program, guiding veterans and elite athletes as they transition to business careers. And last but not least, Amy delivers executive education programs including Next Step, Tuck Bridge, and Impact Academy, focusing on communication and business strategy. Amy Florentino, welcome to Tuck Knowledge in Practice. Thank you for being here.

Amy Florentino: Thank you. It's a pleasure.

Kirk Kardashian: It's really nice to be able to talk with you. Uh, you have a really interesting career path, and you teach at all levels at Tuck. And I think we have some interesting things we can talk about with regard to how you were. You're a Coast Guard veteran, your Tuck class of 2010 member, uh, you're a clinical professor at Tuck now, and you teach communications to the MBAs, to executive editor, to in the Next Step program and even to undergrads right in the business bridge and Tuck lab programs. So you're doing a lot and you have a lot of experience in communications and leadership. Um, so it'd be great to hear just about your career path. Um, what motivated you to want to serve in the Coast Guard and, and tell us kind of how that led to you becoming a student at Tuck.

Amy Florentino: It's hard to think that long ago, first of all, for what my initial motivations were. But I was always attracted to, uh, life in the military. I liked the idea of structure, and I liked the idea of mission and a group of people coming together and doing something bigger than themselves. That said, I was particularly attracted to the Coast Guard because of their ethos, where it's much more of a Guardian ethos, where the other branches of service have more of a warrior ethos. So the Guardian ethos protecting our oceans, protecting people from the oceans, protecting the oceans from oil spills. That always really attracted me to the Coast Guard. And so it was a nice combination of service to the country, a set of core values, and then an ethos surrounding those core values that was based on being a guardian.

Kirk Kardashian: Is it a well-trodden path from the Coast Guard to the NBA. Or is that is that rare?

Amy Florentino: There are well-trod paths to the NBA program, and much of it is set with this idea in military service that junior members are tacticians, especially junior officers. But they want senior officers to be strategists. And so somewhere in the middle of your career, you go out and you get finishing school, for lack of a better term for officers, which is a graduate degree. And it might be in something quite technical, for example, naval architecture, marine engineering, or it might be in something more general, like an MBA with a focus on financial management. And I chose the financial management graduate degree program, particularly because I could go get my MBA in something that was a little bit more broad, particularly the MBA program at Tuck, and then go back and put it to use in the Coast Guard, not only for my immediate Payback tour for grad school. They call it a payback tour for a reason, because it's probably something you wouldn't want it to otherwise. And then beyond that, to my more operational jobs in the Coast Guard, I wanted something that I could apply across the board. And the MBA program offered that.

Kirk Kardashian: Just a question about the mechanics of being a service member, going and getting your MBA and then going back. Is there a commitment expectation for when you go back into the service?

Amy Florentino: There is. When I was at Tuck, I was required to do a summer internship that was designed by the Coast Guard for my reentry program into the Coast Guard, do some certifications like Government Certified Financial Manager and a couple other things like that. And then after I went back in, I don't remember the exact amount, but it was I think you owe two years of service for the first year of your MBA program, and then one for one after that. So there is a time commitment that you owe afterwards.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah. And I'm sure you planned on going back for even longer than that anyway, right.

Amy Florentino: I, I wasn't sure. I think the MBA program for me was a chance to step away and find myself a little bit. And then it's funny because at the very end of Tuck, I it was on graduation day. I was actually offered a job on graduation day. And obviously I couldn't say yes to it. I don't think people understood the, you know, contractual requirements that I had. But people were like, you're crazy saying no to that. But I knew I had to go back in and finish my my Coast Guard time. And I was on this path of indecision for several years around the time I got my MBA. And then I wanted to surf after I went back into the Coast Guard. I kind of settled back into a more strategic role, saw the impact that I was having and said, okay, I'm going to do this for a while. Then around the 20 year mark in the service, I went back into that path of indecision, of not knowing what I wanted to do with myself.

Kirk Kardashian: Okay. Um, well, I'd love to hear a little bit about your service in the Coast Guard post Tuck at that higher level that that you attained, what did what did you do and what were the highlights?

Amy Florentino: Absolutely. I think quite like my portfolio at Tuck. You listed a few things off before. It's a little bit all over the place. My service in the Coast Guard was also a bit all over the place, and I considered a portfolio of things. The first job that I did right after I left Tuck was to go into our Office of Financial Transformation and Compliance. And realistically, it was an internal consulting role. We had some commercial consultants, private consultants that were helping us, but we were leading a financial transformation. And it was very much like the coursework you would see in my CPM class which this client project management, where you take a really big problem, you try to break it down into different lines of effort, figure out what key question you're answering, and then how you can analyze the data to find an answer to that question. And over the course of three years, we worked from and this is not all my work, right? I was part of a team. Yeah, but we worked from the Coast Guard line saying you'll never get an unqualified audit opinion. No military service is done it. It's just too big. It's not possible to getting that opinion at the the end of my payback tour, which was which was fun. And now, in retrospect, I look back at it and there was this guy, Daniel Shorstein, and he worked for Deloitte at the time. They were our consultants, and he and I were like a match. We always went everywhere together, always did everything together. And it was, uh, it was a tool called Audit Command language that nobody wanted to use. And we decided that this was going to be the way to do it. And it was automated data analysis that helped us get there.

Amy Florentino: And this was in 2013. So way before AI. After that, I really realized that that was fun. But much like any consulting project that you're on, you have the ones that are interesting from an intellectual standpoint, but you can't imagine your life doing that. So I managed to steal myself away from the financial world in the Coast Guard. I went back to another ship again. I was the captain of a ship and it was based out of Florida. We spent a lot of time in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Caribbean doing law enforcement, search and rescue, water waste management activities, and it was fun. It was about 50 people. We cavorted all over the place. And for me, it was a point of all the things I learned at Tuck and then all the operational things I learned as a junior member coming together, and a chance for me to put that stuff into practice because we tried new things. We influenced Coast Guard policy, we innovated new methods of conducting law enforcement. But from there, again, like that portfolio of things, I went back to teaching at Officer Candidate School. I became the school chief for that program, oversaw the staff members and instructors. And again, this moment of Zen where I realized what I really liked in the Coast Guard, although being on the ship was fun and doing all those things was fun, but it was really about the people and teaching people in the classroom, seeing that spark of learning. I saw that again at Officer Candidate School, and so I had this idea of like, oh, I love teaching. I wish I could figure out how to do this full time, but it's never going to happen. But that seed started planting itself somewhere in my head.

Kirk Kardashian: Okay, okay. What size ship were you on in the Gulf?

Amy Florentino: It was a 225 foot vessel down in the Gulf.

Kirk Kardashian: Wow. Um, so that sounds like a, like a big, you know, ship, and you have 50 people underneath you, right? And you're you're out there on the open seas. I mean, that's that's serious.

Amy Florentino: It was. And there were serious missions that we did, too, whether it was border security operations or search and rescue cases where there's not land around you for many miles. There's this one search and rescue case. I remember because we were on our way back from the Caribbean at the time, and it was right before Christmas. We were supposed to come home. I think we were pulling in on December 23rd or something like that. And there was a distress call from a sailboat, kind of between the Florida Keys and Cuban waters. And the weather was very what we call snotty. And I remember having the conversation with the boatswain, who is the the warrant officer who was in charge of the deck and the rigging and really experienced, and we were trying to figure out whether it was safe to put this vessel in tow. It wasn't safe to bring the people from the sailboat onto our vessel. We had a long conversation about how are we going to do it, how are we going to do this safely? And that was just another day in the Coast Guard, right?

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah, just.

Amy Florentino: You just got used to that level of indecision, ambiguity, ambiguity, complexity where you didn't have anyone else around to ask. You just had to sort of figure it out.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah. Wow. Wow. Um, I think I noticed that you sort of finished your Coast Guard career as a sector commander. Is that right? In the in the in northern New England.

Amy Florentino: Northern new England. Overseeing coast guard ops for Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.

Kirk Kardashian: Okay. Wow. Um, and so tell me how you sort of started to transition to Tuck during that time.

Amy Florentino: I think it's all about that little seed I mentioned a little while ago that, you know, started to sprout. But every seed needs water. And that's where my long time mentor, Julie Lang, who is a faculty member still here at Tuck, came into play. She and I met first when I was a student, and I was her teaching assistant for CPM when it was a brand new class. And we forged a friendship. And I kept coming back over the years, and she and I chatted about, you know, what would it what would it look like for me to come back here? And she always said, oh, I'll keep you in mind if something comes up. Everybody always says that. But Julie, you know, makes true on promises. So she hit me up in 2019 of this idea of I'm thinking about stepping back a little bit. Would you want to step into that place where I'm stepping back from? I wasn't quite ready to get out of the Coast Guard yet, so I thought, okay, this is a little bit of a side hustle. I'll give it a try and see if it's a good fit. And you know, you put your toe into the Tuck vortex and it sucks you right back in. And one thing led to another. I ended up taking over the CPM class. Julie stepped back a little bit more, and I was able to kind of fill that wedge in.

Kirk Kardashian: Uh, it seems like somewhere along the way, you you developed a leadership philosophy, right? Uh, tell tell us about that.

Amy Florentino: Sure. Absolutely. It is a living, breathing thing. But every unit that you're in command of in the Coast Guard, and I think many military services, you have to come up with a leadership philosophy or command philosophy. And oftentimes it's just this piece of paper that's on the walls. When I went to northern New England, I remember we had to visit all the units, and there's no straight road in Maine to get anywhere. So there were long road trips. So they assign every command master chief who's a command senior enlisted advisor, and there my assigned friend, I guess is what you would call them, but also represent the enlisted workforce. And we were talking a lot at this time about what would a good command philosophy look like? And I wanted to have something that was memorable, but also reflected our personalities and that we could both sign together and talked a lot about the things that were important to us. And we came up with this idea of was really about creating an environment for people where they would do their best. And then we wanted something kind of memorable. So we figured Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, what watchwords could we come up with for that? And we came up with, we want to create an environment where people are motivated, nurtured and valued. So Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. And that Tuck and people Tuck on to it. But it also was easy to talk about because it felt so genuine.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah, yeah. Wow. Um, so you implemented that command philosophy as a sector commander? I did, yeah. Um, and then how did you think about bringing that into your teaching at Tuck?

Amy Florentino: I think a lot of it is about this idea of creating an environment where people can be successful. And ultimately, that's where the leadership philosophy was born, right? Leaders help people do what they do best. They're not doing it. And that was hard for my command. Master chief and I both talked about this a lot. We like doing things. I like driving a ship. He was a law enforcement guy at the time. He liked leading law enforcement missions. But we thought at some point, like, what is your job as a more senior leader? And it's to enable us to provide the right resources. It's to create this environment. And that's no different here at Tuck. It's the students are all quite capable of doing amazing things, and it's creating an environment where they can excel. And I've found that the coursework that I teach, I try to make it as experiential as possible, as useful as possible of things that they can learn in the classroom, and then apply across whatever they do. I try to teach cross-cutting things, and that's why I keep that same leadership philosophy. Keep the people at the middle of it.

Amy Florentino: Keep them motivated because you want them to be interested. You want them to have the right tools so they can excel. Nurture them. It doesn't mean coddle them, but it means challenge them. I always talk to this one woman, Megan Drewniak, who was my deputy, and we have this thing called Don't Overwater. The basil where we talk about nurturing is not necessarily giving something exactly what it thinks it wants, but maybe the basil does the best if you ignore it. Or if my husband was in the wine business. If you cut the vines back a lot, they end up growing better. And so nurture is not about coddling people, but it's about helping them grow into their best selves. Yeah. And then the value piece, it's a lot about number one, helping people understand the value that they bring. But also creating a place where, you know, you can bring your genuine, authentic self to the table and, you know, become the best version of yourself. So that's the motivate, nurture, value thing. It's funny that it was Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, but it actually really reflects the same things I'm doing here at Tuck.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah, yeah. Well, let's bring another, uh, dimension of your career into the conversation now. And you, you started a company. I did recently, a couple years ago. Right. Um, it's a consulting firm that does consulting on leadership and communication. Is that right?

Amy Florentino: Or it's leadership communication. And then a big piece of it's crisis management, crisis leadership as well. And it's called Wave Top Solutions. I co-founded it with my previous deputy Megan Drewniak, who I mentioned already about the basil. And we have taken our lived lessons and tried to share them with a focus mostly at this point in time on the maritime industry, the port industry. Most of my clients are in that world. I think it's where number one, the network's best there, but the lessons apply really cleanly. I'm currently working on developing a leadership curriculum for the International Association of Maritime Port Executives. So it's the, you know, the managers and the people who run the ports across the country. So that's one of the projects that I'm working on. Yeah, we've just had a lot of a lot of fun, a lot of luck in that space, getting to share the things we've learned over our career. And sometimes, again, I go back to like, why does anyone want to listen to me, right? I often have that thought, but then you take a step back and you realize, wow, like you have a lot of lived experience that you want to share with folks?

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah, yeah. And I'm sure that your experience as a, as a consultant and in the Coast Guard has really informed another course that you teach at Tuck, which is crisis management. Right?

Amy Florentino: It is. That's been a fun little journey in itself. It was again talking about serendipity, approached by, uh, Dean Joe Hall to, you know, consider developing a sprint course on crisis management. And it's been something that Megan and I had talked about for a long time, figuring out, you know, that full life cycle of the crisis on the front end. How can you horizon scan and think about things that are going to come up, but not let it just be about enterprise risk management? And really, like some folks are contingency planners, and they have these like 500 page plans and checklists that nobody ever reads. Right. But how can you horizon scan and think about risk in a way that's meaningful and a mindset that leaders can take. Then when you're in the moment, how can you act? And then after the moment, how can you change and how can you really adapt from that crisis? And we've toyed around with this term, organizational Darwinism, right, that an organization has to change in order to thrive. And it's the whole adage of don't be a blockbuster, be a Netflix. Because if you're the blockbuster, you're not going to survive, let alone thrive. But if you can figure out how to adapt after a crisis, then you know you end up being better prepared. And so we codified our lessons into this framework we call react, which it's R is recognize risk E is evaluate mitigate A is act. What do you do during the crisis. And then C is change and T is thrive.

Amy Florentino: So as this left of boom idea and for anyone out there who's a crisis manager, boom is the point of impact of the crisis, whether it's a natural disaster. It's a market shift. It's a black swan event. Whatever it happens to be, boom is that moment. So there's a piece, the R and the E that's left of boom. There's the A during the boom. What are you doing. That's the leadership piece. And then the C and the T is right of boom. What do you do afterwards to figure out what went right, what went wrong. And then organizationally how do you have to change to survive? And I mean, even some of my time in the Coast Guard when I was the sector commander for northern New England, even at the national level, we got a lot of attention for being innovative and trying new things. And I often thought to myself, like, how are we doing this? And a lot of it was this react model as things would happen and we wouldn't stop when the crisis was over, we would think about, okay, like, how does that affect us? And how can we try to change things to make it better? And. I also think I had a lot of people on the team that had a growth mindset or this kind of locus of control, where we could be told no 500 times and we would still try again. So that's a big piece of it as well.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah, yeah. Um, is there a a position or a role in firms that's called crisis manager. Who, who does the crisis management.

Amy Florentino: This is a cross-cutting function really. There's enterprise risk management. You'd see that in firms quite a bit. And so that's the left of boom. Um, where people are looking at the potential risks that a firm might have. They're calculating the likelihood that those risks would happen. They're preparing plans. But the in the moment the crisis leader, it could be the CEO. It could be depending on the level of crisis. Right. It's the person who's sitting in the chair that's in charge, and not someone who's often thinking about those enterprise risk management things to start with.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah, yeah. Um, so aside from just, I guess, reacting organizationally, um, to crises, do you talk about, like, crisis communication as a piece of that?

Amy Florentino: We do. And I think that that that is, you know, dovetails into Professor Argento's classes. He has a whole course on crisis communication. But where our sprint basically stops is we talk, we do a tabletop exercise for them in the last class where I don't want to give too much away in case any potential students are watching, but we do a crisis that unfolds before them and they have to figure out their objectives, but then they also have to do a press conference, and there's a framework that we teach them for entering the press conference of. I don't have any idea what the questions that might be thrown at me might be, but how can I communicate in a way that's going to resonate and not going to do any more harm? And the framework that we teach them is can can, which is care action. Next steps. It's the same framework I use in the Coast Guard for responding to media requests, from everything from Covid to active shooter event to loss of a crew member. But the first thing is that care showing empathy, understanding that the people who are watching you want to know that you're personally vested in making things better. Action is what are you what are you doing? What are your objectives? How do you prioritize things? And then next steps being able to say in a crisis that you don't have all the answers at that point in time, but you have next steps and you're going to follow up is really important.

Kirk Kardashian: Um, so you have personally transitioned from being a military veteran to being a business school professor and, and a founder. And now one of your roles at Tuck is as the faculty director of the NeXTSTEP program, which is for military veterans and elite athletes who want to transition into a different role, maybe in the business world or something else. But tell me about that program a little bit and and about what you bring to it.

Amy Florentino: Next up is Magical program. And I don't say that tongue in cheek. It really is. It's a three week executive education program. It is aimed at elite athletes and military veterans, as you mentioned. What I will say about every cohort is it is the most accomplished, driven group of people that I've ever met. I had a LinkedIn post a little while ago, and it started out with, do you want to stand shoulder to shoulder with an Olympic medalist, special forces operator, military commander, or an athlete who played at the national level? You know, next step is those things. The course was created and still exists because that community of really high performing people generally shift their careers while they're still fairly young, and they often don't know what to do with themselves. And they might they might have mentors that lead them in some directions, but oftentimes they have these ideas of what they want to do, but they don't know how to get there. They don't know what's open to them. And at some level, there's many of them that don't understand the value that they bring to the table. There was this, uh, Olympic swimmer that was in one of the cohorts, and he and I had this conversation one day, and he was talking about how he measured his value and his successes when he would hit the wall at the end of the swim and look up at the clock. And he didn't see his value beyond that, like if he wasn't hitting the clock, uh, he, you know, at a certain time or setting records or qualifying, he wasn't valuable.

Amy Florentino: And I said, that's, you know, it's a mind shift or a mindset shift for these folks of You going through the experience of training and leading other people, and having the grit and determination to accomplish so many things is what makes you valuable. So that's the first piece is a mindset shift in next step, helping people figure out like, I can do all these things and how do I design that next step of my life? The second piece of it is academic grounding in business principles. It's not designed necessarily for folks that already have their MBAs, but it's a, you know, a full spectrum of business skills from operations management. It is financial accounting, some spreadsheet modeling, but a whole survey set of skills that they might need. And then the last part of it is really about connection and creating community, not only for their cohort, but also with the Tuck community writ large. So two weeks online and then one week residential as a capstone. And again I go back to just such an amazing group of accomplished individuals that just need a little bit of extra guidance to know they can go on and do that next amazing thing, and sometimes forget that everything that they've already done is pretty astounding.

Kirk Kardashian: I'd like to thank my guest, Amy Florentino. You've been listening to Knowledge and Practice, a podcast from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Please like and subscribe to the show and if you enjoyed it, then please write a review as it helps people find the show. This show was recorded by me, Kirk Kardashian. It was produced and sound designed by Tom Whalley. See you next time.

Speaker3: Yo, T-Bone, did you produce this?

Speaker4: Sounds good. Right?