Top exec credits St. Catharines teacher
He says Miss Masters honed public speaking skills he’s used throughout career
In a few minutes, Jeff Henderson was due to speak to students and faculty at Brock University about business success in 2020.
He grew up in St. Catharines, in the north end, but for more than 25 years he’s been a toplevel executive, adviser or board member at some of the biggest North American companies — Qualcomm, Eli Lilly and Co., General Motors.
Rather than going over his notes one more time Tuesday, though, Henderson was thinking back to his early years in Niagara.
If his public speaking skills helped advance his career at all, some credit should go to Miss Masters, his teacher at Parnall Public School on Geneva Street for Grades 5 and 6.
“I remember her very vividly. She went out of her way to teach us how to speak in public,” said Henderson, 55, just in from three weeks in Singapore and bound soon for his home in Naples, Fla.
“That was probably one of the most useful skills I ever developed at a young age. That and typing.”
While he was in high school at Governor Simcoe, he worked at McDonald’s on Ontario Street. That’s where he met his wife, Lynn (they became engaged there, and now have two grown daughters).
In his mid-20s he attended Harvard Business School for his Master of Business Administration degree, and is still an adviser for the school.
Officially, he retired four years ago when he left Cardinal Health Inc., where he was chief financial officer for the Fortune 500 global health care firm. He’s still a member of five corporate boards, though.
Until August, he was chairman of the board at Qualcomm, a semiconductor and mobile technology giant based in California that employs about 30,000 people worldwide.
Qualcomm is a major partner with Apple and its work with 5G technology, and he’s still a board member.
Instead of the 80- or 90-hour work week he said is typical for corporate executives, retirement for him means 30-hour weeks. And a lot of business travel.
Over the years he has been based in Boston, New York, Singapore, London, Toronto and Indianapolis.
“It’s an interesting time in America now,” said Henderson, who now has dual citizenship. “From a political standpoint it’s probably a little more polarized than ever, but in many ways the country is doing very well.
“The economy is doing well, unemployment is near historic lows … so it’s an interesting paradox that we have so much political debate and polarization at the same time the country is sort of chugging along.”
Politics, he added, has impacted “virtually all the companies I work for to a pretty significant degree” — the States’ ongoing trade war with China, the debate over private versus public health care.
For all the travel and time his career demanded, though, Henderson has been rewarded well.
He and his family have three residences — their primary home, in Naples, Fla; another in Columbus, Ohio, and a summer home near the water in Port Dalhousie.
He said he never planned for a career that hopscotched between engineering, auto production, finance, pharmaceuticals and high-tech sectors.
“Virtually nothing in my career has gone according to the way I planned it,” he said. “When I speak to young people and they ask me about career planning, my personal experience is that long-term career planning is a waste of time…
“At virtually any point in my life, if you had asked me what I wanted or expected to be doing five years later, I would have been wrong.
“And quite frankly, I’m glad I was wrong.”