“A banker portal? Best of luck, Kate. You’ll deliver that when pigs fly,” he said.

It was 2002, and I had just been named divisional CIO of the investment bank at UBS – my first big job. I had a lot of ideas, no real track record, and a small, courageous team willing to take a bet with me.

Investment bankers had BlackBerrys, market data, PowerPoint, Excel, and close to zero interest in IT telling them there might be a better way to work.

We mapped the banking process end-to-end and found places where technology could remove friction. The idea was a banker portal that would bring the information and tools bankers used every day into one place.

If you’re thinking, “duh, Kate,” please remember it was 2002.

Even back then, technology was not the hard part. The hard part was building belief.

I needed to win over Peter Thomson, a brash Australian senior banker with no interest in corporate theater. Other senior bankers listened politely and found elegant ways to avoid saying no. Peter skipped the elegance.

“When pigs fly,” he said.

On the flight home, I stewed. I was annoyed that he had reduced months of work to a punchline. Then somehow, the irritation got useful.

Peter had not killed the idea. He had clarified the work: prove the value, build belief, and make pigs fly.

Eighteen months later, we launched the portal. It helped bankers work faster and showed a skeptical organization that technology could play a much bigger role in investment banking.

I have carried the lesson ever since: belief fuels transformation.

Strategy matters. Capital matters. Execution matters. But full speed transformation doesn’t happen until people see the future clearly enough to want to build it with you.

That lesson came back hard when I joined Lumen.

The company had been counted out. Revenue was declining. Debt was high. The market saw a mess. I saw fiber, talent, customers, and a company sitting directly in the path of AI.

There was value hiding in plain sight. The question was whether we could help enough people see it before doubt became the default.

We attacked the tangible work first: strategy, culture, capital structure, product complexity, and commercial execution. Hard work, yes. But nameable, measurable work.

The bigger challenge was rebuilding belief with employees, customers, investors, analysts, and the media after years of disappointment had trained people to expect more disappointment.

That got very real in the spring of 2025, when I sat down with Axios journalist Dan Primack in New York.

We had made significant progress transforming our capital structure and had shown why Lumen matters to AI. But the market still had doubts. Fair enough. Doubt comes with the job.

Dan asked about the stock. I said something about keeping a “poker face” through volatility. Dan went straight for the bruise.

“Let me ask you a poker question,” he said, “... the cliché is if you look around the table and you can’t find the sucker, it’s probably you. If Wall Street isn’t buying this transformation … are you the sucker at the table?”

Sucker? Ouch, that one landed.

I would love to tell you I floated out of the room in total executive serenity. I did not. I carried the sting with me. Then I did what every leader must do when skepticism feels personal: I separated the noise from the work.

I started by calling one of my trusted advisors. She helped me put the question back where it belonged. Dan’s challenge, like Peter’s “when pigs fly,” was not a verdict on my leadership. It was a reminder to return to the work: build the evidence, strengthen belief, and make the value too real to ignore.

Lumen has momentum. We are proving it quarter by quarter, customer by customer, product by product.

Our progress is visible now, but the transformation started long before the numbers caught up. It started when a few courageous people believed in our future before it was comfortable. Then they did the work to make that belief reasonable for everyone else.

And I’ll never forget them.

If you are leading change – and in the AI era, I think we all are – expect disbelief. Don’t treat it as a failure. Treat it as data. It tells you where the proof needs to get stronger, where the story needs to get clearer, and where your focus needs to be.

Do the work. Create the proof. Make those pigs fly.