Weinberg College
of Arts & Sciences

Waldron Career Conversation with Steve Preston '82 & Aimee Resnick '26

In this episode of the “Weinberg in the World” podcast, student host Aimee Resnick, a senior at Northwestern University, interviews Steven Preston, CEO of Goodwill Industries International. Steven reflects on his time at Northwestern, highlighting his major in political science and his transformative junior year in Munich. He also shares how his unexpected passion for statistics influenced his career in investment banking and leadership roles. 

Transcript:

Aimee Resnick:
Welcome to the Weinberg in the World podcast, where we bring stories of interdisciplinary thinking in today's complex world. My name is Aimee Resnick and I'm your student host of the special podcast episode. I am a senior studying social policy at Northwestern University who plans to pursue public administration in my home state of Colorado. Today, I'm excited to be speaking with Steven Preston, who is the CEO at Goodwill Industries International. Thank you, Steven, for taking the time to speak with me today.

Steven Preston:
Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to it.

Aimee Resnick:
Me too. To start us off today, I was wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about your time at Northwestern as an undergraduate in terms of what did you study and what were the most impactful experiences for you that led you to your current career path?

Steven Preston:
Yeah, so I was a political science major. And Northwestern, it was kind of a big thing for me. I kind of grown up in a medium-sized town up in Wisconsin and going to Northwestern kind of introduced me to a whole new world that I didn't even know existed of people from different places and that type of thing.
I'd say there are two things, a couple of things that were really important. Number one is I was actually a poli-sci major with an international politics focus. So number one, it gave me a perspective on the world and how the world operates, which is something I didn't have as an 18-year-old coming to college. Number two, I took that further and I actually did a junior year in Munich program, and this was before the wall had come down, so east, west. International relations were what really defined kind of the global dynamic. So it was just a remarkable opportunity to study with different people in a different language right on the border of what was kind of definitional for international politics. And that year, I felt like I kind just burgeoned intellectually and academically and personally.
The other thing I would say, that may not be what most people would expect, but I took a statistics class and I loved it. And I took more and I took more and I took graduate statistics classes and I became kind of like a quant poli-sci major. And that really was valuable for me because it was a way through which I could marry a topic that we think of as not being very quantitative and do a lot of research within political science using statistics, whether it was voter trends or national expenditures and how that relates to different government structures.
And that became really important to me when I went into investment banking. I got an MBA in finance and [inaudible 00:02:38] Wall Street, and the ability to connect data with what felt like qualitative issues was really definitional to my path forward. Later, I became a CFO and a CEO and for the rest of my life, I really connected those two concepts in a way that was really powerful for what I was able to do professionally.

Aimee Resnick:
Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing your response. And I think it's really fascinating how you were able to take a lot of the skills that you gained at Northwestern in your more non-traditional courses like statistics and apply them to a more impactful career pivot later in your life like we typically encourage at Weinberg. So thank you for sharing that experience.

Steven Preston:
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, it's one of the requirements I have for my kids is they all have to have some proficiency in statistics now. So yeah, it's become multigenerational.

Aimee Resnick:
I'm sure they love that requirement. I say as someone who's not the biggest math person ever. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about your current career right now as well, as the CEO of Goodwill Industries. And I noted in your video introduction to the 2023 annual report for Goodwill, you mentioned that Goodwill is about possibilities of hope for the people who receive services. And in that same report, you described how over 140,000 people found new employment after receiving services through your organization in workforce development. So I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit more about how Goodwill promotes economic opportunity across the United States and why that mission particularly resonates with you.

Steven Preston:
Yeah, so the people we serve are not the people that you're going to college with right now. 83% of the people we serve are people with a high school degree or less. In fact, about a third of the people never finished high school. And many of these people have other challenges in life. Some of them have gone down very difficult pathways, people coming out of incarceration, people who are experiencing poverty, even people who are experiencing homelessness. And what we often do in society is make assumptions about those people and make assumptions about what's possible. And we sort of relegate them, in many cases, into a category of, well, that's kind of who they are and that's what their life is going to be like.
But the truth is that embedded in every one of those people is a massive amount of potential and talent. And in most cases, and I really say in most cases, those are people who, because of opportunities they've been given or not given, because of their circumstances in life, because of their pathways, have never been able to develop those capabilities. And in fact, have never really known how to, because they didn't have access to good education, they weren't surrounded by people who could give them advice. They didn't really know what the possibilities were.
So what we do is we work with people to sit with them and say, "What are the possibilities for your life? And how do we help you get there?" So one of the most important things we do when somebody comes to us is really do an assessment of what their skills are, what their hopes are, but also what their challenges are. A lot of times, their challenges might be training or skills related, but they also may have challenges with behavioral issues. They may be, many of them don't have housing or have insecure housing. Many of them don't have core financial skills, so they know even how to get through life with a small amount of income.
So if we can work with people to help them stabilize those sort of personal aspects of their life, at the same time that we can provide them with skills that are attractive to employers, we can help them move from a very difficult place to a place where they are flourishing and where they have a fundamentally different future, and a future that allows them to take care of themselves and grow and learn much more.
What we often find is once we've supported somebody and they land that first job and they're successful and they see the people they work with and what the possibilities are, it's not just that their lives have changed to get to that job, it's that the trajectory of their life has changed because many of those people begin investing themselves, learning more, getting better jobs.
And then the other great thing is it's often multi-generational because their kids benefit, or if they don't have kids and they had them later, they benefit. And it really breaks a cycle of poverty and brokenness that's very difficult to break. And that's why we talk about the possibilities and we talk about hope because that's really where we live.
For me personally, I came from what I would call pretty humble background. So I think just in a couple of generations, I've seen what education and opportunity has done for me. But I think on a bigger scale, I've lived in a number of major cities early on, when I was in my 20s, I spent a lot of time in tough neighborhoods in New York working with kids in difficult situations and trying to help them move on. So I feel like I've seen it up front in what's possible.
And then when I worked in the government, I was the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and that is really the federal agency that deals mostly with poverty issues. And seeing intergenerational poverty and seeing people unable to do something about it is a sort of a dispiriting situation, and I believe we can do something about it. And really, Goodwill I think is, well, I know Goodwill is the largest nonprofit that is trying to change the landscape for many of those people, and hundreds of thousands of people find a different opportunity because of us.

Aimee Resnick:
I think that's a really excellent transition because I actually do want to talk to you a little bit more about your experience with housing and urban development. So for context, in 2008, you were nominated by President George W. Bush to serve as the secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. And I'd just like to hear a little bit more about how you started this large career in public service, and then a little bit potentially about how your public sector experiences under George W. Bush have shaped your approach to private sector leadership in your current career.

Steven Preston:
Yeah. So I think one of the important things was I spent almost 25 years in the private sector before I went into the government. So I had been an investment banker, I had been a CFO, I had been a corporate leader. And I say that because many times, young people coming out of college will say, "I want to go into nonprofit, what do I do?" And one of the first things I say to people when they come to me is, "Think about the early part of your career especially as a time where you are learning and growing and developing and getting the skills you need to be effective later in your career." And many kids, many people will go in a nonprofit and have a wonderful career.
But I had 25 years in the private sector to prepare before going into the government and later into nonprofit. And those skills, both as somebody with an MBA and somebody who grew up through the corporate world, have been incredibly valuable for me in my career. So I want to mention that.
So the first thing I did when I went into the government is I ran the Small Business Administration and the Small Business Administration makes loans to people who've lost their homes in a national disaster. And I came in after Katrina and most people hadn't gotten their loans yet. So I applied those skills from the private sector to figure out how to fix the operational and technology and financial issues to accelerate loans to people who needed to rebuild after the disaster.
So toward the end of my tenure at the SBA, the housing and financial crisis was mushrooming. And because of the experiences I had as a banker and a CFO and the experiences I had in working in a federal disaster, the president asked me to go to Housing and Urban Development to work on the housing crisis. I give you the background because that's how I got there. I got there because my experience and my background were sort of uniquely prepared me to be able to do that. I would not be a typical HUD secretary because I didn't have a poverty housing background, but I understood financial markets. I understood operational fixes. I understood national crises and media by that point because you do a lot of... You're on television a lot, you're dealing with Congress. So I was uniquely qualified to do this for that time in history, which was the financial crisis.
So one of the greatest things about serving in these situations was the, and I really do, I think it was incredible blessing to be able to serve in a crisis because when you're in the middle of a crisis, people need leadership, they need people who can pull them together to fix the problems. People want to be part of a team that's doing something great. And if you're successful, a ton of people have seen their lives improved, whether it's an ability to rebuild their home after Katrina, in the financial crisis, whether it's the ability to stay in your home if you're being foreclosed, or we were able to rebuild public housing in New Orleans, and sort of the two came together. The public housing had been destroyed in Katrina. And when I came to HUD, we worked on rebuilding it.
So if you have that opportunity, even though it's extremely stressful to work in a crisis, you also have an opportunity to have a very big impact. And you have an opportunity to have sort of restorative or a kind of healing impact on an organization that's in stress. So it really hits on a number of different levels. It comes with stress, but it also comes with what I would say great blessing and great opportunity, both for the people you're serving with and the people who benefit from this service.
So that was really what that felt like. And then the other part of that is it wasn't just about housing. Some people who know about that era of history will know what the acronym TARP stands for. TARP was a large allocation of capital that the federal government made to support housing and the financial system. That money ended up going into financial institutions to save them. And I was on the board of the TARP with Secretary Paulson and the head of the Fed, Ben Bernanke and two other people, which sort of put me right in the center of seeing what was happening across the financial sector around the world and how we were going to work to save it.
And that was just, it was a remarkable time. I think it was terrifying for many people because we saw what could happen if the world financial system was going to break down. And thankfully, it was averted, although there was just a massive impact from the financial fallout, really from early to mid 2008 going into well into 2009 before things started to recover.

Aimee Resnick:
Absolutely. And that actually brings me to something I'm very curious about, bringing you back to your poli-sci roots. A lot of young people today kind of feel a large sense of distrust in the government, especially on campus at this time, which I've seen some people describe as a new type of political crisis, almost like that you experienced back in the Katrina era. And I'm curious, what steps did you concretely take to rebuild trust, and in particular with the Small Business Administration, because it was somewhat disoriented when you began? And how do you think that can be applied to the current context?

Steven Preston:
Well, so first of all, yeah, trust has been declining in federal government for a long time, and I think we're absolutely at a nadir right now. And for me, it's very distressing to see, because I think there are good reasons for people's concern. But it's also really important for people to believe that if they go into it, they can make a difference.
What I did when I went to the SBA, I found... One of the biggest benefits I had is I'd never been in the government, I didn't really know how it worked. They brought me in because I knew finance and I knew operational change and they wanted things fixed. And I got brought in and sometimes I would say, "How do I do this?" Or, "We want to fix this and this is how we're going to do it." And people would say, "No, you can't because there's a regulation or a law and you got to do it this way." And I'd say, "That can't possibly be true." There's nothing logical about my having to do that to make this decision. But yeah, well, it's a law that's been on the books for a long time.
So one of the benefits I had is I came in and I needed to know how it worked, but I didn't need to be overly shackled in how I did this. So when I first got nominated, so before I even got to Washington, I was in the George Bush administration and a lot of Republicans were kind of briefing me. And the Democrat head on my oversight committee was John Kerry at the time. He had just lost the election for president. And they were the committee that the Senate does the nomination, they were the ones who were going to approve my nomination. And I just said, "Well, nobody... I'm not talking to any Democrats. Why..."
So I called up the people briefing me and I said, "I want to talk to John Kerry's chief of staff." And they're like, "Why?" I said, "Because I'm hearing what you guys are saying, but I don't..." I know I'm a Republican nominee, but I'm not like a super partisan guy and we're all trying to fix this problem. I want to hear what they're saying. And as a business person, the first thing I'm thinking is you hear from all your customers, you hear from all your stakeholders, you want to build the first...
So I talked to her and she was really surprised, and she kind of gave me her thinking on it. Once I got to the administration, I said to my team, "We're all about transparency. I'm going to invite the Democrats to do briefings on how we're doing fixing this problem." And they said, "Well, no, you're going to give them fodder to come against you in the press," and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, "We all want to fix it, right?"
So I started holding briefings at the SBA office on the measures we were taking to fix the problem, the data that we were seeing on how big the problem was, once we started fixing it, the improvements. And I actually became very friendly with the teams on both sides of the aisle. When I got nominated for the HUD job, I needed to get confirmed by the Senate. By that time, the Senate was Democrat and I was a Republican nominee. The two most important reasons I got through that nomination process quickly were John Kerry and Dick Durbin, who was the number two person in the Senate. He was head of my appropriations committee.
And the reason was because we were completely transparent with their teams. We worked with them very closely. We had them over for briefings. And we developed those relationships because they trusted us.
So what I would say is you can be somebody who works both sides of the aisle. And by the way, most of the time, as an agency head, most of the time, you're going to be working on issues that aren't necessarily big political issues. You're serving people, you're trying to improve something. You've got a program that you maybe want to tweak to make it better. And when we go into a situation assuming that people are going to attack us and be against us, sometimes there's a reason for that, right? It is pretty fiery. But I think we have to go into it saying, "Let's win them over." Let's help them understand that we're all trying to get to the same place. We might disagree on the best way to get there. And most of those people just want to do their jobs really well and be part of something good.
So some of my fondest memories were working with people really on both sides of the aisle. And I'm very grateful I had the opportunity to do that. And we probably see less, it felt like it was really kind of fighting all the time back then, but oh my goodness, it's at a whole different level now.
And I also think President Bush was very focused on bipartisanism. He did a lot of work with people on the other side of the aisle. The financial rescue package was very much negotiated with both sides. Believe it or not, back then, he had negotiated an immigration bill that was more heavily supported by Democrats and Republicans. But because of an impending election, a lot of people didn't feel comfortable supporting it because they were concerned about winning re-election. But many of those things were worked on with both sides of the aisle, even though there were plenty of partisan politics at the time as well.

Aimee Resnick:
Really, I like that idea of having optimistic view towards bipartisanship and hopefully seeing that expand into the future in the next decades as a way to build public trust. I absolutely agree, that's critical.
And I think we'll move on to our last question because I recognize we're coming up on our time, but I want to ask you, what do you wish you could tell yourself when you were me, a senior who's interested in public service and policy, who's about to graduate? What do you wish you could say to that 22-year-old version of you?

Steven Preston:
So yeah, it's what I tell people. I've had a chance to talk to students at Northwestern a couple of times, not recently, but I've talked to a couple of classes with Diane Schanzenbach who's on the policy side there. And I've spoken at a couple of other schools. And I tell them, one of the pieces of advice I give is very consistent. You all are really smart. You are getting a great education. You are learning critical thinking skills. But our society is very much about groupthink. And when we see the political divide or the divide on policies, you don't hear a lot of talk about the deep research on one side of the policy or the other. And we see it actually in Congress. I think we've seen fewer deep policy thinkers than we did 10 years ago, or certainly 20 or 30 years ago.
So my encouragement is, even if you have strong views on something, challenge them, look at the data. And in the area that we focus on is a perfect issue. Why do we have intergenerational poverty? What will change it? What really has to happen? And when you think about where that debate lies, it's pretty fiery, and you've got all sorts of people fighting about these issues. But we don't have nearly enough people saying, "Let's look at the data on what really helps somebody." You guys are in Chicago. What really helps somebody who's a little boy or girl who's born in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago or some other tough neighborhood? What are the factors that make it very difficult for them to have the kind of life that most of the people you go to college have?
And what can we change in that person's life? Whether it's the kind of schooling they get, whether it is the kind of family support they have, whether it's the protections we give them. Whether it's when they come out of high school, if they do need a little bit of support to get on the right track, how do we do that? What kind of youth... What truly does it take to help a person flourish in society? Or in our world, somebody who's coming out of prison?
We have all these big narratives. You guys are the ones, because you're super smart, you got a fantastic education, you're taking statistics, like I recommended, you can dig deep. And when you see something where you say, "I need to challenge my thinking. I know I've been telling myself this, but I actually don't see this. Or I think I need to understand it deeper." We need deep policy thinkers.
And the other thing is, if you're going into business, everybody's going to say find the right solution and see the data. But in the policy world, a lot of times that stuff doesn't happen to the degree that it needs to. So use that great education and be rigorous, be tough thinkers, ask tough questions, even if it takes you to a place that maybe doesn't align with what you think is the case today, because that's what's going to help us have a better world.
And you know what? Those are the conversations we need to be having across the table from each other. We can be having rigorous arguments about the right policy decision, but if we're going to do it, let's look at the facts and let's really pressure test those because that's what's going to help us all have a better world.

Aimee Resnick:
Thank you, I really appreciate that idea of having Northwestern graduates go out into the world and just make it a better place. That's very encouraging.

Steven Preston:
Well, I love Northwestern, and I don't live in Chicago anymore, so I'm sad that I can't go to those games and go to the concerts on campus and talk to students as easily as I used to. But I just think it's a terrific place, and thank you for giving me an opportunity to chat with students indirectly.

Aimee Resnick:
Oh, of course. I think with that, I will say thank you to our listeners for listening to this special episode of the Weinberg in the World podcast. We hope you have a good day. And as Steven just mentioned, go Cats.

Steven Preston:
Go Cats. Take care.