A former CEO of Celebrity Cruises. A champion for women. Now Lisa Lutoff-Perlo can add author to her list of accomplishments. Two months before her planned departure from the cruise industry, the outgoing vice chair of external affairs for Royal Caribbean Group spoke with cruise editor Andrea Zelinski about her new book, "Making Waves: A Woman's Rise to the Top Using Smarts, Heart, and Courage" (Matt Holt Books, 2024).
Lisa Lutoff-Perlo
Q: You dedicated this book to your nieces. Who else is it for?
A: Somebody asked me once, what's the thing that you appreciate most about being a CEO? My answer was making a difference. This book is just another way I hope I make a difference; that all the lessons I learned along my way, I hope one or many of them will help other people as they're navigating their own journeys. Men, women, young, old; career, personal life.
Q: What was the process of writing your life lessons like?
A: My agent had sent it to a few publishers before Covid. She came back to me and said, "Lisa, we're having a hard time with publishers. They don't get the cruise industry. They don't know it. They're not sure that enough people would care about it and buy the book about a woman in the industry. Maybe we need to write a few pages, educating publishers on the cruise industry and how meaningful it is, how many kazillion dollars it contributes to the economy and how complex it is." I'm like, oh my God! I shook my head; what am I going to do now? And then Covid hit and the industry shut down, so I didn't have to worry about it.
I say in Chapter 1, every day I look for the silver lining in the Covid-19 cloud. Well, a silver lining in the Covid-19 cloud is that by the time we came out of Covid, everybody knew about cruising, and my agent said, "All right, you're back. The industry is back. Unfortunately, the industry got a ton of negative press, but just like they say, no PR is bad PR. I think everybody knows about the cruise industry. Let's get this book back into proposal stage."
Q: What did you learn about yourself in putting this book together?
A: I really was able to accomplish so much over a long period of time, with the help of so many amazing people. What I've learned at the end of it was, wow, I had an amazing career, and in an industry and in a company that was just extraordinary. The end of Chapter 10, Full Steam Ahead, is when I made the decision that it was time to move on and step away and call it a great career. What I learned as I was writing that was, you've left an amazing legacy. You've had a great career. You're done. It's a mic drop moment. You can leave feeling really, really good about everything.
Q: What's next for you?
A: I'll be retiring from the company at the end of April. It doesn't mean I'm retiring, though. I'm really into this next chapter of my life. It was time to go embark on a new adventure, whatever that meant.
Q: What will you do in this next chapter?
A: I'll be able to announce that in early May. I've been looking at some different and fun things that I've never done before that will keep me busy and challenged and having a little fun. I might be retiring from the company, but I'm not 100% ready to retire yet.
Q: Will you still be involved in cruise?
A: No. Thirty-nine years, I'm done in cruise. I really can't be involved in cruise anyway for another couple of years [due to the terms of her retirement]. By then I'll be in a rocking chair or something.