In this 2019 keynote, Shelley Rood delivers an inspirational address to a gathering of women in business, weaving together historical narrative, personal metaphor, and practical leadership advice. She begins by honoring the legacy of suffragist Lucy Burns, recounting Burns’s militant activism, imprisonment, and hunger strike that helped secure the 19th Amendment. Rood then references the unfinished battle over the Equal Rights Amendment, noting its continued legal limbo. Using the image of a torch passed from generation to generation, she challenges the audience to identify their own “torch”—their personal mission, passion, and purpose in business—and to consider how they will carry, nurture, and eventually hand it off. Rood emphasizes that leadership is not confined to the podium; it thrives in everyday interactions, servant‑leadership, and authentic connections. She engages the crowd with a series of role‑identification prompts (veterans, first responders, CEOs, managers, etc.), underscores the importance of community, and introduces a framework of “old, new, borrowed, blue” to inspire creative problem‑solving. The speech culminates with a call to action: to recognize one’s torch, align with allies who can help bear it, and invest in initiatives that better the world. She also acknowledges her business partner, Steve Hernandez, as a fellow torch‑bearer.
Chapters
I'd like to introduce Shelley Brew. The year is 2019. As American women, we have the right to own a business. As American women, we have the right to own property. You can open a line of credit in your own name. And we have the right to vote. Now, these votes are gifts. They are gifts that have been handed down to us by those who have come before with their lifeblood, with their business, with how they moved forward and how they sought to better the world. There's a young lady named Lucy, Lucy Burns. She spent her life's work making sure that you someday may be able to vote for who represented you. Lucy's path was not easy. She marched on the White House front. She was arrested, she was thrown in jail, she was horribly beaten. And in protest for the way that she was treated, she went on hunger strike in jail, because what can you do? What action can you take when you're at that point? Well, the guards didn't like it very much, and everybody was worried she was gonna die, so it took 5 guards to hold her down and shove a feeding tube up her nose. Because of Lucy's actions, a special session of Congress was called, and President Wilson helped make sure that our voice was heard. And in 1920, history was made, ladies, and we got the vote. Raise your hand if you voted this year. Yeah! Some of you didn't, but you just didn't want to be left out, 'cause you feel bad now. 3 years after that, we had the vote, but we didn't necessarily have guaranteed rights to all the other rights in the Constitution. And something was submitted called the Equal Rights Amendment. Now, I'm not here to play parts. I'm just introducing an option. The ERA was put up and was not passed. The statute of limitations has fallen. Did you know that it's still— here we are 93 years later, and it still has not been put up or passed. Passed. Now, depending on the lawyer you talk to, some lawyers will tell you that we don't need to have it passed because our rights as females are already included in the original Constitution. If you talk to another lawyer, then they will tell you that no, that's not exactly true, and we should push to have that passed. I'm not here to sway you one way or another. My point in bringing this up today is to show you that every action that you take in your business leads to a point. It builds something. Excellence is the culmination of all the tiny successes that you have ever had, and someday when you don't even realize it, you've achieved something great. Around this room, It is my honor to walk amongst you today. Do you know who you're sitting next to? Seriously. If you knew the stories of the women at these tables, if you knew their hearts, if you knew their minds, if you knew what made them tick, you would be dying to come back. Year after year, you would be dying to get that lunch with them, to sit down and have coffee, to make that connection and make that phone call. Why? Because this isn't business. What is business? Business is your occupation. Business is what you do on a daily basis to put food in your mouth and bread on your table. That's, that's business. That's the definition of business. And how you work that business step after step, day after day, is eventually going to lead to something. Lucy, not even 100 years ago, that was Lucy's fight. 3, maybe 4 generations have passed. That's not that much. And as you work in your businesses, those little tiny steps, guess what? Another generation is gonna come along. Generations are about every 25 years. So the first wave of generation comes along, and you have the opportunity to invest and help them to see what you see. And then the second or third generation is going to come along, and guess what? You're done. You're out. Your time is over. If you even made it that far. 'Cause sometimes you don't get to go that far. It's not up to you. It's the daily actions that drive us to connect with each other to achieve something great. Now, I met Miss Lucy for the first time in the Henry Ford Museum. I wish I had known her as a lady. They have an incredible women's suffrage display. And if you are lacking inspiration or motivation, or you wake up and you hate going to work and you can't stand to take a shower, and it is everything that you can do to not hit snooze one more time, you need to take yourself down there and go look at that display. Lucy carried a torch with her. When I went down there and saw and read her story, she is no longer with us. And do you know the shame of it? The shame of it is that as Lucy got older, she gave up her fight. And that's not even fair to say because she fought her fight. She fought her fight. And then she passed the torch. She became so frustrated and disgruntled with so many women who did not take action, who were so happy and comfortable living their lives with their husbands' names on everything. And it just ate at her soul, and she passed the torch. Now I'm asking you today, as you move forward through the day's events, to consider what is your torch? What are you carrying? I picked up Lucy's torch. She doesn't know it. She may never know it. But I know it. And I recognize her life's work, and I am thankful for what she did. The thing about a torch is that you can't hold it forever. It's yours, or maybe, maybe it was passed down to you, but you have it. You have this incredible thing and you're going to move through day to day to day to day. And someday that torch is going to fall. And the question is, what is the torch and who is going to pick it up? Is it going to continue to lay there? Each one of us has a different torch. We have different passions. We have different desires. We have different business models. We have different missions. If you don't know your mission, and if you are not in tune with your torch, you are not doing the women in this room any favors. The thing about a torch is that it cannot be carried alone. Because you can go fast alone, but you can go far together. So when you find that torch, you have to own it. You have to fight your fight. You have to run your race. And then you have to make preparations for who you're gonna pass it to. And you might trip along that race. You might fall, you might stumble. Which is why you need to align yourself with people, with people who will pick up that torch for you, maybe hand it back to you, maybe carry it themselves. When we think about women in business— business, that's how we say it in my house— business so serious. We're talking about our lives. Today, as you move through the events, we have two incredible panels ready for you, and I'm going to help guide you through these panels. But it's not about who's up here. It's about you. So let's take a minute just to recognize who is in the room. I'm going to ask some very special people to stand, and I'm going to raise myself because I'm teeny tiny. So I need all of my members of the military and my veterans to stand, please. Stay standing. We're going to stay, stay up. We're going to add to this our public servants. I need my first responders, my police officers, and my firefighters. And we are gonna add to that. I need anyone who has ever served in an office. If you are serving a public office or ever have been in your past, we're gonna add to that. Now we're gonna add our C-suites. We're gonna add our CEOs. If you are a CEO, CFO, CTO, CO, whatever, if you've got chief in your name, yes, get on your feet. We're gonna add to that. Where's my department heads? That's a fancy title. Where's my managers? Anybody in here managing people? That's like wrangling cats. That's one of the hardest things to do. All right, where's that title manager? Anybody got that title? I'm just a lowly manager. One or two. All right. Where's my leaders? I better see every person in this room on their feet. So the question is not who's leading us. The question is how do we lead? And sometimes we lead by sitting. Actually, I would argue that the majority of leadership is done sitting down. It's not done on a stage. The majority of leadership is the personal one-on-one conversations with a good friend. The majority of leadership is the genuineness that you bring to the table, the authenticity of who you're talking to and how you're talking to them. Leadership is not done on a podium with a microphone. Leadership is done in a handshake. And a heart-to-heart communication. So today, as you move forward, I encourage you to open your hearts, open your minds, and sit down. It's a really hard thing for somebody to tell someone like me to sit down. So I know some of you are inside going, "Ugh, don't tell me to sit down." But sometimes you have to. The best things in life can come from sitting down, observing, Watching, listening to yourself, asking yourself, what do I need to work on so that I can improve those around me potentially so that I can further our mission? How can I put others over myself? Servant leadership is what we're here for today. Keep your brains alert and you're going to look for— I love tradition because traditions are ridiculous. Ready? So when a bride goes down the aisle, she's supposed to have something old, something, something, and something. And there's one more. Does anybody know it? And a sixpence in your shoe. Yeah. So today, as you're listening to everything, for you inside, you need to be mindful of something old, It's old advice. You've heard it before. You should probably listen to it again. Listen for something new. Oh, well, that's an interesting take on that. I've never heard somebody say that that way before. Listen for something borrowed. Now, in the original Old English poem, what they did was they actually— the bride would borrow a woman's underwear who already had children because it would confuse the evil eye to thinking that, you know, her fertility was protected. So when we take our first 10-minute break, we're all going to move to the bathroom and the ladies that have children are going to exchange— no. So weird. Let's take that in a different direction. Something borrowed. You've got a problem at work. And like you just can't figure it out, I want you to borrow the advice from somebody else. Just humble yourself. Just say, hey, this is what I'm going through. Can you, what would you do? Old, new, borrowed, blue. Something sad. You guys, you are gonna have some unbelievably powerful women sit in these chairs in just a few minutes here. You cannot imagine what they have been through in their lives. It's such an honor to hear their stories. They might move you to tears. I don't cry. So like, you know, they might, I don't know. Well, it's like a challenge to see if they can get me there, but open your hearts and be in tune with what makes you sad. That's not a fault. That's an opportunity for you to connect in some way with another human being. And the 6 pence, I'm accepting donations for new tactical pants. And I also want you to keep an eye out today and keep an ear out for an opportunity for you to further the mission of your money, to invest it in a way that will not change the world, because we don't do that. What do we do? We better the world. I'm Shelley Rood. I'm going to bring up one of my dear business partners. His name is Steve Hernandez. Remember how I talked about that torch and people who help you carry the torch? Steve Hernandez is helping to carry my torch.
