How do you become president and CEO of a major subsidiary of a Fortune 500 company right in your hometown? If you are Richard J. Mark, president and CEO of Ameren Illinois, headquartered in Collinsville, it went something like this.
You come back home after graduating from Iowa State University, where you benefitted from a football scholarship, because the economy is in the dumps. You get a teaching job at a private school in East St. Louis, with the help of your old high school principal (Ron Woods), because your degree is in early childhood education.
You go watch football practice at your old high school, because you miss the game, and your old football coach (Lloyd Dunne) drafts you to help coach the team.
Helping to coach the team, you are told by a player that his father, Collinsville Police Chief Nick Mamino, needs someone to help him run a new grant-funded youth program. So you go to work for the police chief and soon become his assistant.
Working for the police chief, you come into close contact with Collinsville Mayor Gene Brombolich. He likes the way you work, so he poaches you from the police chief and you become assistant to the mayor. Suddenly you are working on large budgets, putting together tax districts and buying large chunks of real estate.
Working for the mayor, you come into close contact with chairman of the St. Clair County Board, Jerry Costello. He likes the way you work, so he poaches you from the mayor, first as division manager of employment training and then as executive director of the grants department.
Working for the county chairman, you come into close contact with all sorts of decision-makers. Many of them like the way you work, so you get recruited to join St. Mary’s Hospital in East St. Louis as vice president of government affairs.
Six months on that job, the hospital’s chief operating officer and financial officer report that the hospital is projected to lose $5 million per year – and are fired. With virtually no hospital administration experience, you are promoted to chief operating officer of the hospital and then, five years later, to chief executive officer.
You quickly prove yourself as someone who can turn around a struggling public-service business under dire circumstances. You turn the only hospital in East St. Louis, which had been projected to lose $5 million per year, into a profitable venture. You oversee the construction of a new medical office building, the first in the city in decades, the formation of a physicians’ group and the development of a Medicaid managed care program.
This gains you the attention of the governor, who appoints you to chair an oversight panel with the mandate to perform a similar turnaround job on East St. Louis Public Schools. Over 10 years of volunteer service on this oversight panel, you achieve just that. After the panel’s commission is allowed to expire by the state Legislature, you have helped to take a district that was more than $4 million in debt and left it with $20 million in reserves and a $100 million building fund.
That puts you on the radar of everyone in the region who follows the news, including then-Ameren President and CEO Chuck Mueller, who hires you (in 2002) as vice president of customer service of the Fortune 500 company. A year later, you are moved to vice president of governmental policy and consumer affairs. Within two years you rise to senior vice president of Ameren Missouri energy delivery – becoming the first African American to hold this position. In 2009 this position is expanded to senior vice president of customer operations.
Then, in 2012, you are promoted to president and CEO of Ameren Illinois, a major subsidiary of the 373rd largest Fortune 500 company. Your promotion is accompanied by a jobs boost to the St. Louis region and, indeed, your hometown, as the Ameren Illinois head office is moved from Peoria to Collinsville, where you grew up. You are now responsible for electric and gas distribution to more than 1.2 million electric and 806,000 gas customers across three-quarters of the state of Illinois.
Reading, credibility, giving back
How, again, do you do all that – starting with an education in early childhood development?
Mark said there are three keys to his success. The first and most important is – surprisingly, perhaps, for a business executive – reading.
“I know it sounds weird,” Mark said. “But you have to read – constantly. You have to learn. If you can read and comprehend and are curious, then you can teach yourself anything you need to know.”
His parents, Joseph and Cleola Mark, encouraged his education from his earliest years, and his mother used to read aloud to him as a boy. He was a successful student throughout his formal education, but still found himself unprepared for “the flood of mail and stuff to read” that hit him as a hospital CEO.
“So I took classes to improve my reading comprehension and would take more classes every couple of years,” Mark said. “To this day, people will say to me, ‘How did you know that?’ And I will say, ‘I read it. You put it in your email.’”
Ameren recently sent him to MIT to attend nuclear reactor school for executives. Reading got him through that, too. “It was challenging for me, as a non-engineer,” Mark said, “but what got me through was reading, researching and figuring it out.”
But understanding is not enough. You also must act. You must do things – in particular, the things you say that you will do. That is his second key to success.
“Credibility,” Mark said. “Do what you say you’re going to do. You hear so many people say, ‘I’ll get back to you.’ If I say I am going to do something, I do it. And if I realize that I can’t do it, I get right back to the person and say I can’t do it. If you go around saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll take care of that,’ and you don’t, you lose credibility.”
Finally, Mark said, to succeed you must realize “it’s not all about you.”
“You have to try to help other people and give back,” Mark said. “Some people get so focused on moving up in their career, they lose everything else around them. It’s as if people think it will stall their own career if they help other people. Actually, if you help other people to become successful, it will come back and reward you also.”
