Voice of Experience: Minal Patel, Managing Director, Managed Services Business Development, SunGard

Mina Patel 2Minal Patel, a Managing Director at SunGard, started her career in banking at Barclays Bank in the UK over twenty five years ago. At Barclays, she had the opportunity to participate in an accelerated training program that rapidly moved her through various areas of retail and wholesale banking. Although she had the chance to experience different aspects of the industry, Patel ultimately decided to explore career options outside of banking.

“I joined a technology startup that was looking for business expertise to build a treasury management system. I was able to apply my business background, which in turn exposed me to IT operations and the entire software development lifecycle,” said Patel.

She continued, “This experience led me to another tech startup focused on derivatives trading and risk management. I switched gears to focus on the sales and account management side of the business. We were a new operation in Europe, with a very small team, so I was involved in everything from pre-sales support, getting in front of prospects, contract review and working with customers. After a couple of years I decided to transfer to the New York operation to focus on that market. All of this was great experience for building my career.”

When the second startup was acquired by SunGard in 1998, Patel stayed on board and has been with SunGard ever since. She attributes her longevity at SunGard to the fact that she has been able to adapt and take on different roles within the company. “It has been exciting to have the opportunity to do a number of different things while remaining at the same company,” noted Patel.

Her Work at SunGard

During her tenure at SunGard, Patel’s responsibilities have spanned from running a global client and professional services team (around a set of trading and risk solutions) to taking on a horizontal role focusing on expanding SunGard’s global development and delivery capabilities.

Over the last 2 years, her role has been focused on further developing the managed services business within SunGard Financial Systems. Patel partners with each of the Financial Systems business groups to shape business and operational plans that will advance their managed services agenda – and grow the company’s overall managed services portfolio. “Figuring out the best ways that we can evolve as a company alongside the industry – and our clients – is one of the most exciting things about my job,” said Patel.

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Finding Balance between Work and Family – How to Avoid Missing Out

wroklifebalancescale.JPGBy Kelly Tanner

The long-standing struggle to find balance between work and family has left many women wishing for an easier path.

When asked about their primary reasons for leaving jobs in Corporate America, women state concern that they are missing out on quality moments and milestones with their children. This absence is made more poignant when they feel that their job is not meaningful or has stalled. A recent study by Elle Magazine and the Center for American Progress revealed that both men (46%) and women (51%) think that family is the main reason why there aren’t more women business leaders. A lack of mentors and contemporaries within an organization can contribute to this dissatisfaction and create a sense of isolation, though in truth this predicament is quite common.

Stella Compiseno, who after 12 years in institutional equity sales and trading, left to start a lifestyle blog, said that her initial impulse to leave was a desire to balance work and family.

“The tipping point came [when] I had a two-year-old son and was pregnant with my daughter. I was spread too thin across all areas of my life. I was also preparing for a four-month departure from day-to-day client contact, which can be a tough setback,” Compiseno said. “Personally, I was missing out on my son’s milestones due to the demands of my job. Between early morning commutes and meetings, and late night client engagements, I felt my personal priorities were slipping away.”

Compesino’s employer attempted to provide benefits to support work-life balance, providing a generous maternity leave policy and a job sharing program. What looks good on paper within an organization often doesn’t really work as designed in real life, as Compesino found out.

“Likewise, job sharing is equally challenging for me and the company. Large institutional clients appreciate consistency and relationships are crucial to building the business. If you’re not around a few days a week, you miss out,” Compesino said.

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Movers and Shakers: Mary Ruane, Senior Manager, Assurance, PwC Ireland

Women workingOne of the most important lessons that Mary Ruane, Senior Manager of Assurance at PwC Ireland, has learned throughout her career is that if you do not take the initiative and express your interest in new opportunities, they might pass you by. “If you want to try something new or different, just speak up,” advised Ruane. She continued, “There are endless opportunities and you will find that taking initiative and displaying an eagerness to learn can go a long way.”

With this attitude, Ruane has been able to enjoy a variety of different roles and experiences at PwC, where she is currently responsible for establishing and building strong relationships with clients, internally and externally. “It is an interesting time in asset management right now, partnering with our Clients who have weathered the storm of the credit crisis and are now dealing with the wave of regulation that followed,” said Ruane.

Career Path at PwC

Ruane graduated from Dublin City University in 2001 with a degree in Accounting and Finance. Shortly after, she joined PwC and planned to complete her auditing qualifications while working full-time. “I joined Assurance and was assigned to the asset management department, which was more by accident than design at the time. However, I quickly recognized that asset management was a growth industry that held a lot of different opportunities and that a chartered accounting qualification would provide a great basis for any professional career in Ireland or internationally” she recalled.

Ruane had a lot on her plate as she was learning the asset management industry, assisting clients with their audits, and studying for her professional qualifications exams, but after she passed her exams Ruane expressed her interest in supporting the development of young PwC professionals facing the journey she had just completed. . “Every year, we receive training on both technical skills and soft skills, and when the opportunity to get involved in the learning and education department presented itself, I took advantage of it,” said Ruane.

She trained and worked as a tutor in the learning and education department for about two months where her role involved teaching the intensive training course to new associates. Ruane enjoyed training so much that she continued to teach courses for the next four years. “At one point, I had trained the same group of people for three years in a row at different career levels, which was an extremely rewarding thing to do,” Ruane noted.

As a result of her commitment to training and on the job coaching, Ruane recently received a coaching award to recognize her developmental impact. “I benefitted greatly from coaching, and it is something that I have always believed strongly in from my first day at PwC,” she noted.

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How Executive Search Firms Exclude Women

Businesswoman Standing Out From the Crowd - IsolatedBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

A new study of executive search firms delves into the way common headhunting practices can keep women out of top jobs by perpetuating the status quo. According to the researchers, when women are included on candidate slates, they’re commonly considered risky choices, regardless of their qualifications for the job, simply because they may not fit the stereotypical notion of a leader at the firm in question.

Women candidates face questions about loyalty, stability, and competence in ways that men simply don’t. And men are often considered the “default” candidate type, with women representing a “different” choice. Even when search consultants do try to include more women on long and short lists, clients will change their search criteria over time, the end result of which is weeding out women from the candidate slate.

The research zeros in on organizational factors that keep male dominated teams male dominated, and it shows just how difficult it is to change these patterns.

“Our study thus highlights the power of established practices in sustaining inclusion and exclusion in top management,” write the authors.

Because the executive search field is built on notions of exclusivity and fit, the researchers argue, it naturally upholds the stereotypes that keep women out of the corner office.

Stereotypes and Fit
The study, “And then there are none: on the exclusion of women in processes of executive search,” appeared in Gender in Management: An International Journal last year. It was written by a team of European researchers: Janne Tienari, School of Business, Aalto University, Finland; Susan Merila¨inen, University of Lapland, Finland; Charlotte Holgersson, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden; and Regine Bendl, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria.

The team based their studies on interviews with headhunters at executive search firms in Finland, Sweden, and Austria, with the goal of comparing search practices in the more gender-diverse and egalitarian Finland and Sweden with the more patriarchal and hierarchical Austria.

What they found was that while Finnish and Swedish teams were more open to including women on candidate slates than those in Austria, in the end, the result was the same. Few women would make it to top positions. Gender was an explicit factor up for discussion during the Austrian search practice; that is, a headhunter could ask a client point blank if they wanted a women candidate, and the client could say no.

In Sweden and Finland, the discussion around gender was more nuanced. For example, an executive search team will ask a client how they feel about having women candidates on the list, and common response will be that the gender of the candidate doesn’t matter.

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Be Yourself at Work: An International Women’s Day Event, Hosted by Capco

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iStock_000017306404XSmallJarod Cerf

Featuring a panel of senior partners, top clients, and thought leaders, Capco’s 2014 International Women’s Day Event, “What Would You Tell Your Younger Self?”, provided the 63 attendees with an opportunity to speak frankly about their career aspirations and hear from the panelists, first-hand, about how to create opportunities and reach for the top. As founder and CEO of Prosek Partners, Jen Prosek, stated, in quoting author Jim Collins: “we all have the same amount of and return on luck.”

Prosek, who at twenty-four and lacking the credentials she sought, joined a local financial communications firm in Greenwich, CT, noted how her circumstances at the time conflicted with her desire to run an internationally-acknowledged firm: “We were going to be in New York, London, Hong Kong, Singapore. And we were going to work for the biggest companies.”

Regarding her first few years at the consultancy, Prosek remarked: “It still wasn’t the job I wanted. And I made a promise to myself, that if every year I could make it closer to what I wanted, I would make it work.” Currently, Prosek serves as the chief executive and managing partner of the company, which was named Corporate Agency of the Year by the Holmes Report in 2013.
“The people who are entrepreneurial,” she advised, “know how to recognize good luck. […] They also know how to turn the unfortunate moments around.”

Make the Most of Every Opportunity
For author Shari Harley, whose business management consultancy, Candid Culture, trains employees to be more up front about their needs and concerns, the opportunity to move her career forward stemmed from an unlikely moment.

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When It Comes to Innovating in Tech, Age is Nothing But a Number

Woman with tablet computerBy Hadley Catalano

Unencumbered by regulations and potential failure, 35 and under innovators, powered by the unlimited potential of technology, are greatly appealing, prompting investors to jump on the branding bandwagon – but they are not the only show in town. According to Women in Tech Network founder Marina Lee, we are fixated on younger entrepreneurs “because of Silicon Valley successes” and the publicity Millennials receive for their innovations. “With that said, the stats support that there are more mature/experienced entrepreneurs creating successful businesses under the radar,” Lee said.

Successful innovators – and the irrelevance of youth as a factor in entrepreneurialism ¬ – for the high technology and information technology communities has been well documented by Vivek Wadhwa and the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) in the MIT Technology Review. The message is clear: there is no age limit on innovation. The SSRN research team found the average and median age of the founders of successful U.S. technology businesses (with real revenues) is 39, with twice as many founders over 50 than under 25 years old.

“The age of 39 is interesting because it is an age where entrepreneurs are raising families, meaning that they are vetting and building companies that are less risky than their younger counterparts,” Lee said.

Additionally, according to a Kauffman Foundation report by Dane Stangler, successful entrepreneurs, with a “peak age” of 35 to 45, typically come from previous jobs in big companies or from institutions or universities. This observation “runs against the prevailing stereotype that entrepreneurs are, or should be, recent college grads or college dropouts, (but) helps explain the age distribution of entrepreneurs,” Stangler reported.

What Does This Mean For Women?
It can be marginalized road for middle age entrepreneurial women in technology, according to Flavia Sparacino, CEO of Sensing Places, but women are present and their stories need to be told.

“Women are innovating all across the spectrum of new technology companies, as founders, CEOs, heads of marketing, programmers, and as UX designers,” said the entrepreneur, who received her Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.

“Together and in large numbers, as a community, we can start changing perceptions. Not only can women design and build innovative technology products and lead great teams. The cultural shift we’re aiming for is that women are also actually ‘entitled’ to do so,” said Sparacino.

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The Case for Women Intrapreneurs

iStock_000019152998XSmallBy Robin Madell

While we read plenty about women leaving corporate jobs for entrepreneurial ventures, much less discussed is the option of female intrapreneurship. Being an intrapreneur simply means acting like an entrepreneur in terms of risk-taking and innovation while working within a large corporation.

The potential pros of entrepreneurship are often touted and well-known: the opportunity to be your own boss, to work more flexibly on your own schedule, and to have the chance to do meaningful work of your own choosing. A 2013 report by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) found that where personal satisfaction is concerned, those who start their own businesses rank the highest in the world in happiness scores. The report also stated that female entrepreneurs rated themselves even higher in their sense of well-being than male entrepreneurs.

While these stats are compelling, a 2012 report by GEM noted that the relatively small number of women launching new businesses worldwide—and fewer still who are running mature businesses—suggests a conundrum. This may stem from the fact that female entrepreneurs are less likely to receive funding to grow their businesses, which is a problem in itself. But what it also means is that women more often than not are failing to wield powerful resources and reach larger audiences at the entrepreneurial level.

As any basic business textbook confirms, the pros of larger companies generally include financial, labor, and audience advantages over smaller companies, whose main benefits are being nimble and reactive. When women leave the corporate arena, they aren’t just leaving behind their jobs; they are abandoning ample resources that could be used to enact change on the largest level. They just need to know how to access these resources.

Enter intrapreneurs. Unlike with entrepreneurship, intrapreneurs have a built-in corporate support system to help them reach their goals, if they know how to use it. Three companies that have strong intrapreneurial cultures are Google, LinkedIn, and Dreamworks. While intrapreneurship has traditionally been the purview of a limited number of people within a company, the trend is growing to extend this domain throughout entire organizations. Google and other tech companies, for example, have used “20 Percent Time” to give employees an allocated percentage of hours in their daily work schedule to tinker and innovate. This has led to some incredible discoveries, like Gmail and Google Earth, which affect hundreds of millions of users.

Here are some ideas on how to become an intrapreneur no matter which company you work for:

• Look for problems to solve. Whether it’s a process that’s broken or you envision a way to build a better mousetrap, keep your finger on the pulse of the marketplace and your customers. Use your unique role as an industry insider to recognize new trends coming down the pike, and grab opportunities early to think outside the usual boundaries.

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Women in Tech: Leaders of Tomorrow | Whitepaper

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It seems like today women are better positioned than ever before to rise to leadership roles in technology. Not only do companies have many kinds of support structures in place, such as women’s networks and leadership development courses, but there is an increasing number of women at the top who can serve as role models or inspiration. Externally, groups like the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, Girls Who Code, and other organizations aim to support women in the industry and increase the percentage of women entering the tech space as well.

Nevertheless, women are still a distinct minority in the technology workforce – and an even smaller proportion of corporate leadership. In the 1980s, women represented a peak of between 35 and 40 percent of the computing and information technology (IT) workforce in the U.S. By 2011, that percentage dropped to about 25 percent, according to NCWIT. This coincided with a decrease in the percentage of women majoring in computer science degrees in college.

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Voice of Experience: Mary Beth Bosco, Partner, Patton Boggs LLP

stephanie_martin-222x300To Mary Beth Bosco, her former career as a graphic designer and her current as Partner at Patton Boggs LLP aren’t as diametrically opposed as some would assume.

“I was working in New York designing book covers, where you’re given limited space to get your message across. It’s the same thing when writing a brief or giving an oral argument,” Bosco said.

After growing tired of the “starving artist route”, Bosco went to law school and clerked at a D.C. law firm where her focus was government contracts, an experience she cites as invaluable.

“So much of law school is theoretical and for me, it was important to learn by doing,” the partner said.

As partner at Patton Boggs, where Bosco has been since 1985, she counsels new and experienced government contractors on matters involving contract compliance and opportunities in the federal marketplace, drawing on more than 25 years of experience with both regulatory and litigation matters.

“The federal government buys everything from paperclips to battleships, which keeps my work very interesting because you’re always learning about a new industry,” Bosco laughed. “I love solving problems as they come up. It’s not my job to say, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ It’s my job to say, ‘This is how you can do it.’”

Diversity Leader

Bosco was the first female member of her firm’s Executive Committee, as well as the firm’s first Chief Diversity Partner. As the Chief Diversity Partner, Bosco is committed to starting over from scratch if that is what it takes to move the firm’s diversity goals forward. The partner is interested in driving diversity at the firm in real, tangible ways. This, she says, requires new innovations; something she’s calling “Diversity 2.0.”

“We want to recruit the best talent and if that requires pulling everything apart and starting over, that’s what we’ll do,” Bosco said.

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Australia is Pushing for ‘Waves of Change’ for Women in Senior Roles

Feminine Business 2By Nicole V. Rohr

In November 2013, the Business Council of Australia (BCA) published the report Increasing the Number of Women in Senior Executive Positions: Improving Recruitment, Selection and Retention Practices, based on its July 2013 launch of the Action Plan for Enduring Prosperity. The report highlighted ambitious efforts to increase women in senior roles in BCA organizations from 46 percent to 50 percent by 2023.

As part of the proposed plan, the BCA published a letter to members, a checklist to help companies increase the number of women on senior executive boards, and a report to act as a support tool for companies as they review and change recruitment and promotion standards in alignment with the BCA plan. These documents include categories like “The role of the CEO,” which detailed the expectations of leadership in order to encourage gender diversity. According to the report, the role of the CEO is inclusive of including “the achievement of gender diversity within an inclusive culture as a significant strategic objective of the organization”, as well as overseeing the development and implementation of the strategy to achieve it.

It is also recommended that leaders “sponsor talented women into senior roles and participate in a socialization program with identified internal and external female talent [and] ensure and model the company’s approach to flexible working arrangements in ways that do not prevent progression of women within the business.”

The BCA report also outlines “waves of change” that can lead to improved business performance. “Given that talent is randomly distributed across both genders, there is a high probability that at least half of a talented workforce will be women, so to take 90 percent of company leadership from just 50 percent of the talent poll – the males – simply does not make sense,” the report noted.

Is the US Ready for a Similar Plan?
Could something like the BCA’s plan work in the United States, making senior roles more accessible to women, leaving CEOs more enlightened, and increasing performance? Jane Ott, President of North South Capital LLC, said that in order for aggressive action to be taken, citizens have to believe that the targeted group is in need of the assistance, and that that change in attitude has not yet happened in the United States.

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