Roxanne Decyk '73 LAS is the kind of person who makes extraordinary excellence look easy. As senior vice president of corporate affairs and human resources at Shell Oil Co., she is part of the creme de la creme of the corporate world. One might imagine that Decyk got there by majoring in business and working her way up the corporate ladder. One would be wrong.

"I majored in English because I intended to be a professor of English. I never intended to go into business; it never occurred to me to be educated in business," said Decyk, 51. "I am passionate about words and communication."

Roxanne Decyk

But after double majoring in English and advertising and becoming a Bronze Tablet scholar, all in three years, Decyk turned away from university life ("The prospects for a woman becoming full professor tenured at a prestigious university were poor, and, professors, frankly, got paid really badly") and em-barked on one of the more unusual corporate career paths. Although some have described her career as "meteoric," Decyk has, more accurately, performed like a mountain goat, always at the highest peaks, and leaping gracefully from one breathtaking mountaintop of corporate responsibility to another.

Decyk, whose family was composed of mostly doctors, lawyers, professors and artists, did not discover the corporate world right away. Instead, she co-founded her own advertising firm during college, went to law school and practiced law in a major firm. It was at Foley and Lardner, where most of Decyk's clients were large corporations, that she first glimpsed the business world. And then she decided she wanted a piece of that action.

"The intellectual content [at the law firm] was right," she said, "but as lawyers we were in the role of consultant. I wanted the responsibility to make things happen; I wanted to be a manager in a big corporation."

And by the early 1980s (Decyk was only 28), she got her wish. Having made herself an expert in strategic planning as well as crisis communication, she was hired by International Harvester. Decyk eventually led part of the team that helped extricate the company from what would then have been the largest corporate bankruptcy in history.

"I had an almost unbelievable opportunity to step into a major company near the top at an incredibly young age with no experience," she acknowledged.

"I was recommended through an executive recruiting firm," Decyk said of that opportunity. "It was a combination of a CEO who was quite willing to think outside the box and who was looking for someone who might represent a new way of thinking. Plus, I had the serendipity of knowing a number of senior people in either the legal community or the business community who interacted with that CEO and gave me very strong endorsements and said, 'If you're ever going to take a risk, this is the person to take a risk on.'"

Two years later Decyk became the highest-ranked woman in Navistar, the new name for International Harvester.

"Don Lennox [the then-CEO] promoted me to senior vice president level. That was a big risk to take — I was only 30, still not from the industry and the only woman at that level," Decyk said. "Don got a lot of criticism for that move, but he was wonderfully courageous in saying, 'This is what I think is the right thing to do,' and then gave me wise advice and nudged me along the path."

"I think of the early and mid-'80s as a time of really great dynamism, not just because of women entering the work force but because we were beginning to shatter a lot of barriers having to do with age," Decyk said. "I sometimes think being a woman was, frankly, less of an issue than being a lot younger than other people. We have a lot of myths about time and grade — if you don't punch your ticket at every station, you can't move to responsible positions."

Decyk is most definitely not a ticket puncher. She is more like a chess player, thinking strategically and able to see the long-term impact of moves in the here and now.

From Navistar, Decyk was hired by Amoco as vice president of commercial fuels. Once she arrived, she realized the division needed to be turned around, so she set to it, developing a new operational strategy and restructuring the leadership team. The division became a moneymaker. Next she moved on to senior vice president of sales and marketing polymers, where the division went from losing money to making a profit. From there Decyk leaped to vice president of strategy to help guide the corporation's big picture. After a while, however, she quit.

"I didn't think the company was on the right track," she said bluntly.

Decyk, perhaps still yearning for the ivory tower, headed to Oxford University in England, where for two years she pursued a doctorate in business with a specialty in corporate governance. Shell Oil Co. lured her away with an offer to guide the organization as it developed its first-ever global strategy.

For Decyk, the corporate world of big companies has been a perfect fit.

"I like big, complex things to grapple with. You don't usually get big, complex things in small institutions. As I got involved with international companies, I like the complexity of playing on a global scale, considering differences in cultures and even differences in laws from country to country and how you implement something that can thread the needle and be practical in many, many, many venues around the world. And I like the interplay of geopolitics and fundamental services, like energy and transportation and so on.

"For me it's the big, global themes that make me most excited about my contribution and I find the most intellectually stimulating."

So what is Decyk's secret? How has she succeeded, with calm and poise, in so many different and precarious perches?

Decyk shrugs this question off, as if anyone could have done what she has done. When pressed, she suggests that her philosophy could be summed up like this:

• Be aware that you are the one who will make a difference in your career. Avoid lapsing into a self-defeating victim role.
• Be courageous. Playing it safe limits opportunities for personal and career growth.
• Be curious.

This last item may be Decyk's strongest quality and one that is as intrinsic to her as her love of complexity.

"Even as an undergraduate, Roxanne had a great deal of intellectual curiosity and a tremendous sense of humor," said Emily Stipes Watts '58 LAS, AM '59 LAS, PHD '63 LAS, UI professor of English and one of Decyk's undergraduate advisers. "She had a lot of presence; she was incredibly well-organized and very self-directed," said Watts, who remembers Decyk as a daring personality.

Decyk agrees, at least about the curiosity part. "I'll try about anything," she said. "I would like people to think of me: 'She was a good sport.' People have commented that it seems like just about every job I've undertaken, I've had zero background. Every industry I've entered I've known nothing about. My view is — it's a good challenge!

Ultimately, however, Decyk would argue that what she did in her career was not all that unusual.