Nine Tips for Maximum Potential, From the Women of Smith

Retired KPMG partner Terry Iannaconi, MBA ’78, did not start her career looking for a fight. As a college graduate in 1965 with a bachelor’s degree in accounting, she just wanted a job.

Her grades earned her an interview with one of the big accounting firms at the time, but the hiring managers made a false assumption when they screened her résumé.

“When they saw my name, they thought I was a man,” Iannaconi says. “They thought it was a great joke when they saw me.”

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was new, but the interviewers dismissed Iannaconi as a woman and dared her to sue. Instead, she left and found a job with a rival firm.

“We were singled out for attention because we were women,” she says. “It was a horrible issue at the time.”

Women have made strides since 1965, but challenges remain. Fewer than 5 percent of Fortune 1,000 companies have women CEOs, and gaps persist in corporate pay, business school enrollment and other measures.

Nine women of Smith, from senior leaders to recent graduates, address these issues below and share tips to unleash the maximum potential of an inclusive economy.

1. CHOOSE YOUR BATTLES

Iannaconi’s career advanced until her first pregnancy, when she no longer could hide the expected childbirth from her employer. “It was a scary thing,” she says.

Like the hiring managers before, her boss made another false assumption. “I presume you will be leaving the firm,” he told her.

Iannaconi refused to resign, so the company set a date for her termination. This time she decided to fight back. She contacted a civil rights office and told her employer to expect litigation.

The threat worked, and Iannaconi managed to keep her job.

“Sometimes a person must confront conflict head on,” she says. Other times, a consistent record of results can speak loudly.

Prior to joining KPMG in 1995, Iannaconi worked as an SEC regulator for 19 years. At home she raised three children and now has four grandchildren. She made time for summer vacations, youth swim practices, Girl Scouts and other family activities.

When Iannaconi picks her battles, she comes prepared. Since her retirement in May 2014, she has volunteered at a poverty law center while finishing a Georgetown law degree.

She will be almost 73 when she graduates in 2016, but she has no plans to slow down. “I have been given a lot of gifts in life,” she says. “I am happy to give back.”

2. THINK GLOBALLY

Chinese expatriate Stella Liu, MS ’13, had the full support of her parents when she arrived in the United States to study business at the Smith School.

“My parents seldom hinder my decisions,” she says. “There was no one standing in my way.”

That is not always the case in Asian cultures, where obligations to the family, community and country can take priority over individual preferences. “Some kids have their future planned or guided by their parents,” says Liu, a financial analyst at JP Morgan Chase in New York.

Gender often factors into these family conversations. Although women typically work outside the home in China, the country’s one-child policy puts pressure on couples to get married and have a baby quickly.

“It is up to us to take care of our parents,” Liu says. “There is no one else.”

When discussing gender in the workplace, she says people need to keep a global perspective. In some countries women cannot even drive cars or walk in public without male escorts. In other countries women have greater opportunities, and discrimination is subtle when it exists.

“It is important to keep an open mind to changes and differences,” Liu says.

3. GO ALL IN

At work Donna Blackman, EMBA ’10, manages a team of 60 finance professionals. At home she manages two children.

Navigating the dual roles requires skill, but Blackman does not claim to have a secret recipe for work-life balance. “You cannot have it all,” she says. “Not all the time.”

She felt her limitations during her Executive MBA program at Smith, when she added the third role of business student to the mix. Feelings of “mother guilt” crept to the surface as Blackman spread herself thin, but she persevered.

“I decided that if I was sacrificing this time away from my family, I needed to give it all that I have,” she says. “Every reading assignment, I read it. I read it all. Every homework assignment, I did it.”

Part of her motivation was to set an example for her children. “It was good for me to show my children that, when you have a goal, you should move forward and achieve it,” says Blackman, who has served as senior vice president of finance and controller at BET Networks since 2013.

4. HAVE A COFFEE

Brenda Freeman, MBA ’92, arrived at Pepsi as a young professional with marriage and children still in her future. Like many businesswomen, she wondered how these personal decisions would affect her career.

One woman who seemed to have the answers was Pepsi’s chief operating officer, a mother of three. “How did she do it?” Freeman asked herself.

The question was not something she could discuss openly in a corporate setting, where talk of family planning can raise suspicions about long-term commitment to the firm.

Instead, Freeman arranged for a private conversation. “I remember being brave enough to have coffee with her, and I asked her that question,” says Freeman, who now works as chief of television marketing at DreamWorks Animation.

The chat touched on many topics, from work-life balance to career achievement in a male-dominated world.

Now that Freeman has emerged as an entertainment industry executive with her own family commitments, women sometimes come to her with their hushed questions.

She met with about 200 female business students on April 24, 2014, at Women Leading Women, an annual event organized by the Smith School. Like the private coffee early in her career, the comfortable setting allowed Freeman to talk openly with her audience.

“I remember sitting in the chair of a student when I was younger, and I certainly asked lots of questions and was interested in the stories of women who were a few steps ahead of me,” Freeman says. “As women, we tend to bond in a certain way when we have intimate discussions.”

5. FIND YOUR PATH

A business mentor would have been helpful for Cara Weikel, MBA ’12, during her undergraduate studies.

“My skills and my interests were well-aligned with business,” she says. “I just had no idea. Business just was not on the radar because I had no role models at all in business.”

Instead, she gravitated toward something familiar, working for three years as a middle school chemistry teacher before realizing she might have an aptitude for consulting.

“When I finished my undergraduate degree, I did not even know what business consulting was,” says Weikel, who leveraged her MBA into a senior consulting position at First Annapolis Consulting in Maryland.

Having the right conversations with the right role models can activate someone’s mind to new career possibilities, but such guides do not always to appear. Weikel eventually reached out to a career counselor, who provided tests, tools and other resources to help her find a new path.

“While I did not have traditional role models, I certainly did not go it alone,” she says.

6. BUILD WORK-LIFE HARMONY

Sherika Shaw Ekpo, MBA ’09, made her time at Smith count.

She was the first in her class to secure an internship offer and the first to secure a job offer, and she did this while working 20 hours a week on campus. She also brought together students from the full-time, part-time and executive programs as president of the Smith Association of Women MBAs.

Despite the accomplishments, Ekpo says her most important work happened at home, where she managed a household as a single mother.

“Being there for your family is very important,” says Ekpo, a manager at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who is married now and celebrating the recent arrival of her second child. “Balancing school and home was difficult at times, but this was my top priority during my time at Smith.”

Although work and family commitments sometimes collide, Ekpo does not view life in separate compartments.

“I see it as less of a balancing act and more of an integration,” she says. “No matter what obstacles you have, you can overcome them. And you can do that while managing multiple roles.”

7. INVOLVE EVERYONE

Switching careers requires careful planning. The challenges multiply when a person tries to jump from the nonprofit sector to business. Becky Eisen, MBA ’12, faced both scenarios when she came to Smith.

Before enrolling in the full-time program, she worked as poverty campaign coordinator at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. Today she is an associate product manager at McCormick & Company, a manufacturer of spices, herbs and flavorings in Hunt Valley, Md.

To help pull off the two-year transformation, Eisen built an expansive support network. “Many people helped me along the way,” she says. “I tried to open as many doors as possible.”

She says the corporate world needs a similar type of coalition to bring gender issues into the open. “Some of these questions are still hush-hush,” she says.

Although events such as the MBA Women International Conference and Career Fair have value, Eisen says men also need to join the conversation.

“You need everybody in the organization, regardless of gender, to address the barriers to women,” she says. “You cannot do that if only the women are talking about it.”

8. MAKE A BUSINESS CASE

Hewlett-Packard had made strides in diversity when Carly Fiorina, MBA ’80, arrived as CEO in 1999. With her recruitment, the Silicon Valley giant also had the first woman leader of a Fortune 20 company.

“We did everything right,” Fiorina says. “Except when we looked at our senior management ranks, they were not diverse at all.”

Fiorina’s response was a new hiring policy that shook up conventional thinking about what an ideal candidate looks like. For every opening above a certain level, supervisors had to consider at least one qualified woman and one qualified racial or ethnic minority.

Supervisors who came up empty were told to go back and try again. Often their searches led to candidates with nontraditional backgrounds from unfamiliar sources.

“You have to change the process to get different results,” Fiorina says. “People have to be willing to take a risk on someone they do not know, and someone who is different.”

The new promotion policy paid off at HP. By the time Fiorina left the company in 2005, half of her direct reports were women.

While many people champion workplace diversity as a matter of social justice, Fiorina also views the issue as a matter of good business.

“It is the smart thing to do,” she says. “There is a direct correlation between innovation, risk taking and diversity. When teams are confronted with somebody who is different — or with new ideas — it causes them to think differently. That is where innovation comes from.”

She says companies that only look at safe, traditional résumés misunderstand the real risk.

“Human potential is the only limitless resource we have,” she says. “If we do not fully tap human potential, then we do not solve our problems. And women are the most underutilized resource in the world.”

9. SHIFT THE CONVERSATION

Fulbright Scholar Stephanie Graf ’14 never saw herself as a barrier breaker when she came to the Smith School as an undergraduate student with a double major in finance and marketing.

“Gender never entered my mind,” she says. “All opportunities were equal.”

While Graf understands the importance of talking about diversity, she sees a potential downside when conversations dwell too much on old narratives.

“Maybe some women today already are tearing down barriers without even knowing it,” she says. “You do not want to introduce the idea of a barrier to someone who already is on a trajectory to overcome it.”

Real progress has been made in recent decades, and Graf says society needs to shift its conversations about gender.

“We need to establish a new norm,” she says. “In 10 years, instead of talking about the struggles women face to break down barriers, we should focus the conversation on the results, the impact and the accomplishments of women.”

Related story: Smith Builds Momentum on Women’s Issues

Women at Smith