One of the lasting highlights of my full-time career in sales and marketing communications and other areas at the Polynesian Cultural Center in the 1980s  and 1990s was spending hours with members of the First Presidency, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and other leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, being trained, inspired, and sometimes even sharing testimonies. 

 They shared Church and professional counsel: These occasions included special management team meetings during the period when General Authorities actually served on the PCC board, as well as other occasions when our Latter-day Saint leaders came to Laie on behalf of the Laie Hawaii Temple, Brigham Young University–Hawaii, area and stake conferences, and other special events. They often spent hours with us, not only addressing us on Church-related issues, but they also spoke from their former professional perspectives. 

 President Thomas S. Monson, for example, shared stories from his years of managing the Church’s huge printing operations. President Henry B. Eyring spoke to us about his experiences as president of BYU Idaho and prior to that, head of Stanford’s graduate MBA program. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland (then of the Twelve) was equally eloquent speaking about managing BYU, and I remember one meeting when now-president of the Quorum of the Twelve Elder Dieter Uchtdorf, talked tourism with us when he was Lufthansaʻs chief pilot (before being called to the Twelve). 

 Because PCC sales and marketing team members often interfaced with the travel industry and media, I remember another occasion when Elder Lance Wickman of the Seventy (who had previously been an attorney for the Churchʻs law firm, instructed us on legal issues… and these were just some of the many opportunities we had to mingle personally, professionally, and spiritually with these leaders. 

 But my most memorable occasion occurred one beautiful, early Sunday morning in the mid-1980s when then-Elder and now President Dallin H. Oaks invited the PCC management team members and our spouses to a special testimony meeting in the (former) māota (or chiefʻs house) in the Sāmoan village.  

 I couldnʻt help but feel “transported” back in my mind to memories of days I had spent in similar circumstances as a young missionary in Sāmoa about 20 years earlier; and indeed, before Elder Oaks turned the time over to people he called upon in the small congregation, he also shared several stories of how his grandfather, Elder Abinadi Olsen, had served as a young missionary in long-ago Sāmoa for almost four years (starting in 1895) before returning to his wife and their four children he had left in Utah Valley. 

Church leaders have been coming to the Center from its earliest days — sometimes with special messages and instruction, sometimes on vacation with family members, and they have always blessed the lives of our BYUH students and full-time employees from the surrounding communities. In some ways, I think of it as receiving a second MBA, but more spiritual and enriching.