To Create Your Own Destiny: Chalon Keller
If you ask Chalon Keller why she walks fast, she’ll tell you: I don’t have time not to.
What she really means is: I’m on a mission.
The youngest of five children, Chalon grew up in a small town in southern Idaho. She worked hard on the family farm from an early age. Determined to live life her way, she married at sixteen years old while a junior in high school. Married life on minimum wage with limited education and skills was not comfortable. After graduating from high school the next year, she gave birth to her first child and discovered the desperate grind of parenting in poverty. Chalon was determined not to be defeated. She opened a daycare in her home, worked as a cemetery groundskeeper, and sold worms by the pound that she pulled out of the ground to make enough money for the growing family to survive.
Chalon knew education was the key to progress. She obtained grants for college, where she built a network of friends, professors, and mentors who helped open doors to more educational opportunities. “I discovered the more you learn, the less you know. It was extremely motivating,” she says. The hustle that fueled her survival became the pursuit of progress and accomplishment.
From early in the morning to late at night, she ran from job to class, to the next job, to pick up the baby, and back to class. Color-coded visual management cues around the house created efficiency. “I was, by nature, goal-oriented, disciplined, and driven, but it became amplified when life got real. I had to be that way in order to progress,” says Chalon, who received her PhD in Sociology with an emphasis in organizational behavior at USU in 1998, and then became Associate Director of the MBA program in the Huntsman School.
She was tapped for her next mission after military officers attended her presentation on organizational strategies at a Shingo conference. “Preparation meets opportunity. Doors opened,” explains Chalon. General Robert McMahon at Hill Air Force Base hired her to organize the relaunch of the A-10 aircraft, which had been disassembled and stored in a desert facility with no instruction manuals.
A female outsider and newcomer to the male-dominated military leadership scene, Chalon was not warmly welcomed at first. General McMahon communicated to the entire base that she was to have all of the support and tools she needed to be successful. With him figuratively in the trenches beside her, Chalon persevered with her colleagues to achieve results through their combined expertise.
Chalon Keller
“For the first three years, I covered all three shifts. I didn’t take a single day off,” says Chalon. Her high-octane style and near 100% accuracy rates earned her colleagues’ respect. “They needed to see me working as hard as they worked. My work was there to make theirs better.” She spent the next fifteen years with the Department of Defense, refining aircraft production operations and improving quality and delivery. Her final assignment with the Air Force was to overhaul the entire F-16 production line on a tight deadline, with a $6.6 billion budget. “We had to produce a new jet every five days. It was like changing a bike tire while riding the bike.”
In 2018, Chalon accepted a new mission at USU as a Professional Practice Assistant Professor in the Center for Entrepreneurship to help Huntsman students lead lives of meaning and distinction. “The United States Air Force motto is Integrity first, service before self, excellence in all I do. This is what I’ve lived by, and it aligns beautifully with the culture of Huntsman and its strategic pillars,” she says.
“Too often these days, people talk about their rights and what they’re entitled to. I wasn’t entitled to anything. I was raised to know I have talents and skills, and a responsibility to execute them with honor,” says Chalon, who does not tolerate mediocrity from her students. They have to run to keep up in her 15-week entrepreneurship class, where they learn to innovate, solve problems, and create value as they start real companies that are financially viable by the end of the semester.
She is a fierce advocate for her students and their success. As General McMahon did for her, Chalon gets in the trenches with her students. “I’m going to show them what excellence looks like and I’m also going to help them achieve it,” she says. “I’ll literally get dirty with them. I’ll open doors for them, give them resources, come in early, stay late, whatever it takes to help them find their excellence. This is my mission.”