Meghan Hickey
Business Editor
businesseditor@glimpsesofguam.com
A whole-hearted congratulations from the team at Guam Business Magazine and Glimpses Publications to Mary Grace D. Jacot, president and CEO of SET Pacific Inc., on her nomination and award of the 2018 First Hawaiian Bank and Guam Business Magazine Businesswoman of the Year title. One comment that Jacot made at the beginning of the nomination process stood out to me as something that I think many women feel upon nomination, but that she was given wise advice on. She said, “When [the committee] called me and asked me to accept the nomination, it was tough. I don’t need to make it known to the public that I’m successful — I do it for myself. I don’t feel that I need to prove [my success] to anybody.” However, she said that it was something that her husband mentioned to her that made her think hard about accepting the nomination. “My husband had mentioned to me that this is a time to showcase SET,” she said. “The buildup is coming up, and this is the right time to run for the Businesswoman of the Year.”
Reading through the nominee profiles this year, you will find six other women who probably also don’t feel the need to prove their success to anyone — and maybe that is what makes them so successful in what they do. But each of these women at some point realized that they were at a tipping point in their careers — either for themselves or for their business — that they had a choice to either take hold of an opportunity that could make them great or continue on the comfortable path that they were on.
Not only does this tipping point phenomena occur in most individuals’ careers, but it often happens to groups of people, societies, economies — you name it. Take a look through the stories in this issue, and you’ll see that Guam as a whole may be at a tipping point — from leadership turnover and government funding decisions to changing business laws and evolving education and training practices, the island and the region is on the very edge of moving from the comfortable path that has been status quo to a cliff of change that may be just what our businesses and economies need to see a new level of success. As proven, fighting it only catches us in a merry-go-round of legislative meetings and business discussions with no end in sight.
Just as Jacot needed only to acknowledge that the time was right for her company for her to take a leap of faith to move forward, our government and businesses need to acknowledge the tipping point at which we stand. Now is the time to push the boundaries for a new level of success to be realized.
