Skip to content

When It Comes To Your Career… The Best Plan Is No Plan

Have a destination, but stay open to detours – that’s how this executive made it to the top.
BY CHANTAL BRAGANZA

When Margery Kraus talks to younger professionals in the communications industry, there’s one career lesson she often brings up: she doesn’t believe in long-term plans. It may sound counter-intuitive – how do you design, grow and land a career without a plan? – but for Margery, this approach has worked. Today the company she heads is among the largest privately owned communications and corporate strategy consultancy firms in the world. Not bad for someone who started out as a high school teacher barely older than many of her students.

Foregoing long-term planning “doesn’t mean living in the moment,” says the CEO and Founder of APCO Worldwide. “You can have aspirations, but they have to be flexible, because life changes in so many ways. If you’re still tied up in what your own frame of mind is, you’re going to miss opportunities.

Early experiences matter

Born in 1950’s Franklin, New Jersey, a mining town of a few thousand people, Margery grew up working with family in the department store her parents owned “from the age we could see above the desk at the cash register.” Her parents, immigrants from Poland, “put a heavy emphasis on education, like a lot of immigrants do on their children. I grew up thinking that anything was possible.” In her spare time as a teen, that translated into heavy sports involvement, including helping her father promote the Franklin Miners, the semi-pro football team he coached. Margery got the Miners coverage in local papers and in a news documentary as well; the team went on to become one of the best semi-pro teams in the country.

That experience cemented Margery’s sense of the communications industry. “It was more than just getting a taste for PR. I was very passionate about the team. I remember at the time I saw it was telling their story; it wasn’t promotion for the sake of promotion.”

Having skipped two grades of high school for early admission to Knox College, a small school in Galesburg, Illinois, Margery was much younger than her peers studying political science and education—hence the interesting classroom dynamic when she eventually became a high school civics teacher. “I kept getting kicked out of the teacher’s lounge,” she says. After a few years in the classroom, in 1970, she jumped at an opportunity to combine her training in education with the entrepreneurial skills she loved to use. Along with her husband, Margery moved to Washington and joined the Close Up Foundation, a then newly formed NGO dedicated to immersing high school students in the workings of the U.S. government. “They go through, in one week, almost a semester’s worth of work and it’s all based on building their sense of efficacy,” says Margery, who still serves on the board of directors for Close Up. “It might be the first time anybody thought their point of view was important. So they come away with this sense of self that’s very different.”

Recognize when it’s time for a move

For the next 14 years, Margery was involved in Close Up’s development—drawing up the program’s first curriculums, hiring and managing teachers and staff, and getting involved in fundraising—all while working with students.

By the late ’70s, when Close Up had expanded to 50 states, Margery started thinking about how to expand the organization’s presence in classrooms. The simple-but-effective idea she acted on—partnering with CSPAN to bring public affairs channels into classrooms across the country—caught the attention of executives at the law firm Arnold & Porter. They liked Margery’s creative approach to problem solving and public-private partnerships. Arnold & Porter asked if she would consider building a consulting affiliate to take on this type of work within the firm.

“Now, I loved what I was doing,” Margery says of her job at Close Up, so “I found the politest way I could to turn [Arnold & Porter] down.” But the back-and-forth with the law firm went on for months.

“I started thinking about whether what I had learned, helping to build this $50-million foundation, was applicable to the for-profit world, and whether those skills were transferrable,” says Margery. But it was ultimately a talking-to from her son, who was 15 at the time, that convinced her to make the change. “My son really taught me a lesson. It was that good opportunities don’t always come at convenient times.” So in 1984, Margery stepped into the first Washington office of the newly formed APCO (which derived its name from Arnold & Porter), and has stayed ever since.

Margery Kraus with two APCO Board members: Neil Wiesenberg (left) and Ron Boschetto (right).


Identify what matters most to you

She steered the company’s growth from a single office in Washington to over 30 worldwide, a staff of three to more than 600, and oversaw APCO’s management buyout in its twentieth year of operation—an experience she describes as the defining one of her career. “It gave people a chance for ownership in the future of the place,” she says. “People gave a lot to make this place successful—it’s not just about me—and I felt really good that we gave something back.”

But beyond that expansion, she has seen both the PR industry and workforce change dramatically. “We always fostered a culture that was based on transparency, and a lot of collaboration,” says Margery. “In the beginning, some of the older men I hired might have seen this as a type of softness, that I wasn’t a command-and-control type of person…of course now if you operated things by command and control, you’d be thrown out.”

That consultation takes place both at work and at home, and is another lesson Margery has learned about long-term plans. “You can’t build your life around a plan when there are people in your life who are really important to you,” she says. “Life is a team effort.” One example? When each of her three children turned 10 years old, Margery would take them on a business trip to wherever she happened to be going at the time.

“They got to see not only how hard I worked, but that I wasn’t doing fun things to be away from them.” The trips proved so popular that the “10-year-old trip” has become a second-generation tradition; Margery has taken four grandchildren on business trips to places such as London and Rome.

Looking back now, she can see how far she’s come in a career she never could have planned or imagined. “I got married very young,” says Margery. She wasn’t sure that she would work at all “let alone start two organizations from scratch and travel all over the world.” Amazing what you can accomplish when you refuse to plan.


Fast Facts about Margery Kraus:

  • Margery started using the term “glocal” in the early 90s.

“When I started using it, I would always get a moan from the staff. And I felt myself vindicated 15 years later when it was on the big screen.” (It became a popular term when George Clooney used it in the film Up In the Air.)

  • Motherhood stresses While at the Close Up Foundation, she once worked 14 weeks straight—no weekends off—while pregnant. No weekends off.
  • Final lesson about long-term plans “Some people might be lucky enough to have such control over every aspect of their life that they can say, ‘Well this is my plan and I’m sticking to it.’ But I’m not one of those, and I never would want to be one of those.”