Marsha Petrie Sue is an author, public speaker, and motivational coach from Scottsdale, Arizona, United States. She has produced over 27 titles of CDs, DVDs, and books including Toxic People: Decontaminate Difficult People at Work Without Using Weapons or Work and The Reactor Factor: How to Deal With Difficult Situations at Work Without Going Nuclear. Her best selling books have been translated into Russian, Romanian, Czech, French and Portuguese. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Newsweek On-Line, Business Journal, The Boston Globe, Women's Media, AllBusiness.com, Cosmopolitan, and more. One of her first books, The CEO of YOU: Leading Yourself to Success was named the Arizona Book Publishers Association Non-Fiction Best Book of the Year.
Biography
Sue was born in 1946 in Long Beach, California, near her parents' home in Palos Verdes. Her father, Marshall, was an accountant in San Pedro and her mother, Dorothy, was a real estate broker. She was active in theater in high school, and graduated from Cal State University at Long Beach in 1968 with a Home EconomicsBachelor of Arts degree. After realizing being a schoolteacher was not the career of her dreams, she was hired into gourmet food and candy sales as the first woman salesperson for a Los Angeles company. She was then hired away by GTE Directories and sold the Yellow Pages. Within nine months of being hired, she was promoted to a management position. She was one of the first women to serve on the board of the National Yellow Pages Service Association. In 1986 she was hired away by another Yellow Pages company. She retired from the industry in 1992. In 1985 she received her Masters of Business Administration from the University of Phoenix, magna cum laude. In 1992 she met and married Al Sue and started her own company, Communicating Results, Inc. as a professional speaker and author. She is also an accomplished outdoors woman in many of the outdoor sports, with her favorites being fishing and sporting clays. Sue and her husband are involved in many conservation projects in Arizona, including Arizona Antelope Foundation and the Arizona Elk Foundation, promoting the migration and growth of the herds as well as protecting the land that the animals inhabit. She is the Chairman of the Women's Outdoor Media Association, Executive Committee of the Women's Leadership Forum and a member of the Outdoor Writers Association. Along with Ruth Covey, Sue founded Women's Safety & Leadership Training.
Sue's books have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Newsweek On-Line, Phoenix Business Journal, Boston Globe, Women's Media Center, AllBusiness.com, Cosmopolitan, The Detroit News'', and more.
Copyright Infringement
In 2010, communication expert Lillian Glass won a jury verdict for copyright infringement against Marsha Petrie Sue for having published in 2007 a book entitled Toxic People. Glass had written a book by that same title in 1995, and the 2007 book contained word-for-word copying of Glass's work. The incident has generated controversy around Sue's membership in the National Speakers Association.
