Personality.

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST PAYING JOB?

I was a junior counselor at a performing arts camp. For the privilege of spending an entire summer teaching my hometown's budding Tony and Oscar Award winners to sing, dance and act on the community center stage, I earned a whopping $150.

WHAT'S THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE YOU'VE FACED IN YOUR CAREER?

My biggest challenge was in making the leap from product/brand marketing into public relations. Although a lot of it seems similar on the surface, moving from an environment where you get to control your messages and their placement to one where the influencer community has all the power has been extremely challenging. "Influencing the influencers" is challenging for a marketing know-it-all like I always pictured myself to be. I had to humble myself and rely on my colleagues and employees to help me learn the basic skills for being successful in this unique and strategic marketing discipline.

WHAT GETS UNDER YOUR SKIN PROFESSIONALLY?

Bad PowerPoint! Seriously, though, the deluge of meetings I have to attend every day is astounding. Having a meeting to plan a meeting, then following it up with another meeting to de-brief the meeting and the multiple conference calls and submeetings that ensue as a result of the original meeting can often be eliminated with some strong leadership and solid project management skills. Deb's advice to meeting addicts: 1) have an agenda for every meeting, 2) stick to that agenda, and if you need to deviate, make an agreement with those whom you are meeting with to follow up on tangential items later; 3) assign action items at every meeting, and, finally, 4) hold everyone accountable for doing their own follow-up and communicating with the rest of the team.

WHAT IS YOUR MOST EMBARRASSING PROFESSIONAL MOMENT?

There are so many! It's a toss-up between falling and breaking my foot while diving over my desk to answer what I thought was an important client phone call (it turned out to be my boss!) and sitting on the intercom button on the conference room telephone during a team meeting. The entire Citigate Cunningham Austin office benefited from my 10-minute dissertation on the virtues of red versus yellow peppers in a grilled salmon dish before a colleague from another department rescued me from further humiliation.

WHAT'S THE MOST VALUABLE ADVICE YOU'VE BEEN GIVEN IN YOUR CAREER?

"Fish where the fish are. It almost requires no explanation. To me it means: play to your strengths; first things first; sell what people are buying; be relevant!

WHAT'S THE WORST ADVICE YOU'VE FOLLOWED?

Investing 100 percent of my 401K balance in company stock when I worked for a now almost defunct technology company (Lucent Technologies)...and then leaving it there after I left. Company leadership kept telling us that success was "just around the corner I just heard that last cent of mine hit the bottom of the toilet drain.

IF YOU HAD A 28-HOUR DAY, HOW WOULD YOU SPEND THOSE EXTRA FOUR HOURS?

I would use those extra four hours to spend time with my five-year old daughter, showing her all of the fun things I used to do as a kid: building forts out of refrigerator boxes, exploring the woods for Sasquatch or the Bogeyman, playing outdoor games with other kids like "Spud" and "Kick the Can" and "Capture the Flag," and making up and acting out elaborate fantasies with our Barbie dolls.

IF YOU COULD INVENT SOMETHING TO MAKE YOUR JOB EASIER, WHAT WOULD IT BE?

I would invent a machine that makes instant clones of myself on demand so that I could be in all the places I needed to be all the time. I would use these clones to attend all of those annoying unnecessary meetings that get under my skin (see above).

DIVULGE A DEEP DARK SECRET OF YOURS TO CW READERS.

Confidentially, I'd give my right arm to become TV's next "American Idol."