Voice of Experience: Carla Brooks, Managing Director at Commerce Street Capital

By Elizabeth Harrin (London)Carla Brooks

“I come from a family of bankers so it must be somewhat ingrained,” says Carla Brooks, managing director at Commerce Street Capital. But it’s more than just growing up with the knowledge a career in finance meant. Brooks excelled in math during her school years and took this interest and skill with her to further education. “My college undergraduate thesis was titled ‘Bank Holding Companies: Their Growth and Future,’” she says. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Brooks has ended up in such a senior role in fund management.

“I joined the team at Dallas-based Commerce Street Capital LLC and its predecessor firm in 2002,” Brooks explains. Since then, she has put her three decades of experience analyzing financial institutions to good use. Having built a successful career in bank regulation and oversight, Brooks was in a unique position to help create private equity funds to invest in banks at Commerce Street Capital. “Private equity’s involvement with banks is relatively a young concept,” she adds.

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Voice of Experience: Margaret Enloe, Principal and Associate General Counsel, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City) Margaret Enloe - PricewaterhouseCoopers

Life lessons that come from one’s parents are not uncommon. But when your parent is the founder of an NGO—specifically, UN We Believe (which ultimately became the Business Council for the UN)—such lessons are as likely to come from a speech as from casual dinner conversation.

And it was a speech by her father that taught Margaret Enloe one of her most treasured life lessons: If it is meant to be, it is up to me.

Ms. Enloe, Associate General Counsel in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Office of the General Counsel explained, “You can hope or expect others to act, but it’s almost never a given. If you really want something to happen, it’s up to you. You have to be proactive. And, it’s not about complaining, or worrying or blaming someone else when things aren’t going right. It is much more ‘let’s try to figure this out and where do I start.’”

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Voice of Experience: Melinda Schramm, founder of the National Introducing Brokers Association (NIBA) and owner of MHS Capital Resource

By Jessica Titlebaum (Chicago)Schramm

Melinda Schramm is the founder of the National Introducing Brokers Association (NIBA), the writer of the industry’s only guide for Introducing Brokers (currently circulated by the CME Group) and the owner of MHS Capital Resource, an NFA registrant. A lawyer by training, Schramm decided to go into finance after being physically threatened on her prior job. Knowing she needed a change, she answered an ad in the Chicago Tribune and went to work in a newly created compliance department at Green & Collins (known today as the Rosenthal Collins Group).

Now, more than 30 years later, “Melinda is considered a matriarch to the leaders in the financial arena of Introducing Brokers,” said Karen Bertoli, Director of Communications Strategy at Zen-Fire and an affiliate member of the National Introducing Brokers Association (NIBA).  “I have been lucky enough to enjoy her leadership through NIBA and her friendship outside the office.”

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Let’s Bury Short-Termism to Avoid Another Crisis

Contributed by Bill George, professor of management practice at Harvard Business SchooliStock_000005516576XSmall

The Aspen Institute recently made the following announcement:

“Twenty-eight leaders representing business, investment, government, academia, and labor joined the Aspen Institute Business & Society Program’s Corporate Values Strategy Group (CVSG) to endorse a bold call to end the focus on value-destroying short-termism in our financial markets and create public policies that reward long-term value creation for investors and the public good.”

I am one of those twenty-eight leaders, and am proud to join the likes of Warren Buffett, Louis Gerstner, Barbara Hackman Franklin, and Richard Trumka as a signatory to the statement, “Overcoming Short-termism: A Call for a More Responsible Approach to Investment and Business Management.”

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Voice of Experience: Beth Skillern, President and General Counsel, Bullivant Houser Bailey

By Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)Skillern[1]

From a very young age, Beth Skillern, Bullivant Houser Bailey‘s firm president and general counsel, was determined to grow up to be the kind of woman that found her own way and supported herself, an unusual aspiration for a young girl coming of age in the 50s and 60s. But her father, who she cites as her main source of inspiration, raised her to make the most of her talents. “My father really valued education because he didn’t have the opportunity to go to college,” Skillern said. “His work ethic was incredibly strong and he inspired me to become who and what I am today.”

Skillern spent a majority of her adult life as a junior high history and English teacher before deciding to return to graduate school. “When I was in college in the 1960s, many women didn’t go to law school,” Skillern said. “I’d always been fascinated by lawyers [though] so I decided to [go to law school and] begin my second career. I was up for the intellectual challenge it posed.”

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Voice of Experience: Mareile Cusack, General Counsel, Ariel Investments

By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)Cusack_Mareile_H_9975

“Change awakens the stranger in you. When you are faced with a different situation, that’s when you find your strength and are able to grow and become a better person,” said Mareile Cusack, General Counsel at Chicago investment firm, Ariel Investments.

That’s the voice of experience talking. Cusack was born in Haiti. At the age of two, she and her family fled to Guinea when her father, a government official, was exiled. They remained in northwest Africa until a nationalist movement forced all foreigners out five years later. “It was an unusual time. It wasn’t yet violent but foreigners were being looked upon with suspicion. I do remember, though, that the father of someone I knew suddenly disappeared because he was thought to be a spy. It was that kind environment, so my parents decided it was time to get out.” The family moved to France, where Cusack lived until she came to the United States to attend boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts at the age of 16.

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Voice of Experience: Cynthia Steer, Chief Research Strategist and the Head of Beta Research Group, Rogerscasey

By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)steer_cynthia_2006_3

A former competitive figure skater, swimmer, and track and field star, Cynthia Steer knows about self-discipline and drive. She relies on those traits daily as the Chief Research Strategist and the head of Beta Research Group at global investment solutions firm Rogerscasey.

“I was an athlete at a time when women were not normally athletes,” she explained. She forced the integration of her high school track team and held her own as the only girl on the team.
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Voice of Experience: Monica Mandelli, Managing Director, Investment Management Division, Goldman Sachs

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Monica MandelliOn a faded and tattered piece of paper taped to a wall in Monica Mandelli’s Manhattan office is the motto by which she lives: “La vittoria non e’ mai definitiva e la sconfitta non e’ mai fatale: quello che conta e’ il coraggio,” which roughly translates into “Victory is never forever and defeat is never fatal: all that matters is courage.”

That piece of paper (and its message) has traveled with Mandelli from London to Harvard and from a small cubicle to the large office she now inhabits as a managing director at Goldman Sachs. Said Mandelli, “It encourages me to not become complacent when I win and never to give up when I’m struggling. It reminds me to wake up every day and fight. I’m very confident and relentless and it sums me up quite well.”

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Voice of Experience: Cynthia Meyn, SVP and Senior Operations Manager,PIMCO

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by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

Cynthia Meyn, the Senior Operations Manager at PIMCO’s New York Office, spent her childhood on the move, living in three states and a European country, all before the tender age of twelve. And while some might have viewed this as a negative experience, Meyn actually sees it as one that had a wholly positive impact on her. “I think it helped me be at ease meeting new people,” she explained, “and helped me be comfortable trying new things,” a skill which has allowed her to fearlessly take on new challenges in her life and career.

When it came time for college, Meyn moved again, this time from Ohio back to Massachusetts to study math, computer science and philosophy at Smith College. While her senior level research fieldwork was in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, she decided not to pursue it as a career once she realized that artificial intelligence “was just too academic.” Instead, she chose to pursue finance and business, an area she became interested in via a sophomore year internship with Smith College’s Summer Women in Business Mini MBA program, an executive education seminar for women. Meyn said, “My role was to set up, monitor, and staff the computer center. I also got to take the classes with the executive women because I had to help them do the LOTUS spreadsheets. That summer was formative because I met executive women from places like General Motors and AT&T, and they encouraged me to pursue a career in business. They also told me about some internship and training programs that I would be able to get into if I tried. So, because of them, I sought out an internship at Morgan Stanley.”

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35 Under 35: Alexandra Basirov, Head of Sovereigns, Supranationals, and Agencies for Debt Capital Markets, BNP Paribas

By Elizabeth Harrin (London)AlexandraBasirov[1]

“One of the first pieces of advice I was given was never tell your age to anyone as they could perceive you differently,” says Alexandra Basirov, Head of Sovereigns, Supranationals and Agencies for Debt Capital Markets at BNP Paribas. I won’t tell you her age, but suffice to say that Alexandra has leapt up through the hierarchies of banking to her position before most women have managed to make much of a mark on the corporate world.

“Economics had always fascinated me from a very young age,” she explains. “I had the first opportunity to study it at A-level while being educated in England after moving from Australia. I went on to study at the London School of Economics.” During the holidays, she sought out internships, and it became clear that a career in the banking industry was what she wanted to do. “There was something about the working environment coupled with being able to follow markets and applying my studies that excited me,” she says.

Basirov continues: “I have always been a firm believer that you have to love what you do to succeed. Like any job, and in particular on the trading floor, work can get very stressful. Banking is an industry that requires you to give it all, and unless you are devoted and have a passion for what you do, it’s unlikely you will last for the duration or climb the ladder.”

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