On a credit application, a person is expected to know what she does. Doctor. Architect. Underwriter. Jahn Marie Surette has occasionally written “professional manager,” a phrase so bloodless it sounds as if it arrived wearing a gray lanyard. Her preferred metaphor is a unicorn. Not the venture-capital kind, breathing valuation figures, but the rarer executive who can enter an unfamiliar room, work out what matters and assemble the people who can fix it.
The distinction is central to Surette's career. She is not selling omniscience. Her argument is more disciplined: difficult organizations need specialists, and they also need someone able to connect the specialists, translate across their languages and recognize which method belongs to which problem. In a business culture fond of declaring a new universal doctrine every quarter, there is something bracing about a leader who says, in effect, it depends.
Surette has earned the right to say it. Her working life has run through customer service, call centers, program management, insurance operations, procurement, real estate, automation, corporate transformation and expert networks. She started at Cigna in the early 1990s and advanced from supervisor to project and operations leadership, eventually becoming a vice president. The sequence matters. It began near the machinery of service, where policies meet ringing telephones and an elegant plan receives its first review from reality.
The ladder bends sideways
Corporate biographies tend to iron a career flat. The dates march, the titles swell, and every move appears inevitable. Surette's path is more interesting because it accumulated different kinds of responsibility. At Travelers, beginning in 2008, she led Select Accounts service operations and then moved into global sourcing. At The Hartford, where she spent the better part of the next decade, her responsibilities ranged across consumer operations and enterprise procurement. She built transformation capabilities around LEAN, Six Sigma and automation. She also learned the large, unglamorous disciplines that keep companies standing.
Then came another change of instrument. In 2019, she joined Third Bridge, the private-equity-backed research company, to lead its Connections business and expand its research capabilities. Her public biography from that period credits her with leading global teams of more than 4,000 across both business-to-business and direct-to-consumer models. Scale of that kind makes slogans expensive. A weak operating idea does not remain a weak idea; it becomes thousands of confused mornings.
The expanding remit
The temptation is to read those shifts as restlessness. Surette reads them as training. She has said that she was encouraged to move vertically and horizontally, gathering enough range to solve complex problems rather than repeating the same solution with increasing confidence. A specialist's depth can explain a system. A general manager's breadth can reveal where two perfectly rational systems are colliding.
“I don't just have one playbook.”Jahn Marie Surette, on general management
The useful unicorn
In 2021, after leaving Third Bridge, Surette published an essay called “The Unicorn You Didn't Know You Needed.” The title is puckish; the argument is sober. Companies prize technical pedigrees, she wrote, but technical excellence does not abolish the need for general oversight. An orchestra full of virtuosos still requires someone to mind tempo, balance and the inconvenient fact that everyone is playing the same composition.
Her general manager is not a heroic fixer who parachutes into meetings with a proprietary framework. It is a leader who is comfortable without being the cleverest specialist in the room, hires people who know more and chooses among methods according to the moment. Surette's compact line - “I don't just have one playbook” - contains both confidence and restraint. She has playbooks. She also knows none deserves permanent sovereignty.
That philosophy now has a company around it. JM Surette Advisors, founded in 2021, works with executives and growing organizations on long-range strategy, market plans, mergers and acquisitions, executive coaching, employee engagement and leadership transitions. The service list pairs lofty nouns with practical ones. Strategy sits beside key performance indicators. Leadership sits beside onboarding. Vision gets a roadmap and a calendar.
Starting the firm also changed the direction of the questions. Inside a large company, an executive inherits history, systems and a defined field of authority. An independent adviser is invited into several histories at once, usually at the point where the old answer has stopped working. The breadth that once complicated a credit-application box becomes useful inventory. Surette can recognize the procurement problem hiding in a growth plan, the people problem disguised as a process problem, or the onboarding problem waiting to become a strategy problem. The value is not clairvoyance. It is pattern recognition with the manners to check the pattern against the facts.
Four playbooks, chosen by the problem
The pairing is revealing. Plenty of advisers can describe the destination. Fewer remain for the luggage. Surette's language returns to sustainable growth, near-term goals and a pragmatic route forward. It is the voice of someone who has watched grand strategy arrive in operations as a queue of small decisions, each capable of spoiling the plan.
Her own description of the work includes encouraging, informing and intellectually challenging the people around her to think bigger. The last word is capitalized on her firm's site, a small typographic flourish with a serious condition attached: bigger still has to work. Growth must survive contact with staffing, systems, customers and time. Ambition is welcome at the table, but it does not get to skip the spreadsheet.
People before diagrams
There is another constant beneath the changes of function. Surette puts “building leadership and developing people” at the core of general management. At Third Bridge, she noted that women made up 40 percent of the executive team and that women led both major businesses. The next task, she said then, was to keep cultivating female leaders through employee groups and regional forums. Representation, in this view, is not a photograph taken after the appointments. It is an operating practice that produces the next set of appointments.
Her board work extends that instinct beyond the corporate perimeter. She has been associated with Forge City Works for more than a decade, including service as board chair and adviser. She also sits on The Hangout Spot's advisory board, serves as a director of Project 8p Foundation and is listed as an adviser to IronStreet Advisors. Chief, the network for senior women leaders, counts her as a founding member. The connective tissue keeps reappearing: leaders, organizations and the communities that have to live with their decisions.
Even Surette's extracurricular résumé has an operational cast. She gardens and hikes. She has completed an Ironman and numerous full and half marathons. These are hobbies with feedback loops. A garden objects to wishful scheduling; a marathon is unimpressed by a charismatic first mile. Both reward preparation, pacing and the willingness to revise a plan without abandoning the finish.
Breadth is not a refusal to choose. It is a choice to work where specialties meet.The operating idea behind Surette's career
The conductor does not steal the violin
The case for the general manager can sound unfashionable because it lacks the clean silhouette of expertise. Specialists can name their field in a word. General managers often reach for sentences. Yet modern companies are not short of seams: technology and customer service, strategy and execution, acquisition and integration, growth and culture. A seam is where two competencies touch and where each can fail while insisting it performed correctly.
Surette's career has been a long apprenticeship in those seams. Call centers taught her what customers do with corporate promises. Sourcing taught her that strategy comes with contracts. Transformation taught her that efficiency without adoption is a handsome folder. Global leadership taught her that a playbook written for one place may become comedy in another. Board work taught her to consider the institution beyond the quarter.
This does not make breadth morally superior to depth, and Surette does not present it that way. Her essay concludes that specialists and general managers need one another. The useful generalist is not a tourist collecting functions for a résumé. She becomes fluent enough to ask better questions, humble enough to summon expertise and accountable enough to make the final call.
That may explain why “professional manager” feels too small. It describes employment but misses the craft. Surette's craft is synthesis: seeing the future, drawing a practicable route and helping people move along it together. The unicorn image is livelier, though perhaps a touch unfair to horses. Her work is less magical than it is accumulated - three decades of learning how one part of an enterprise changes the weather in another.
The world has plenty of leaders carrying one excellent hammer. Surette brings a toolbox, a route map and, one suspects, sensible shoes.