Voice of Experience: Marianne Brown, CEO of Omgeo LLC

by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

A true pull-yourself-up-by-your bootstraps success story, Marianne Brown, CEO of Omgeo LLC, spoke with The Glass Hammer about her unusual path to the top and why she’s succeeding there.

A self-professed academic overachiever in high school, Ms. Brown described her university experience simply: “fun won out”. Since she was, in her own words, “debt adverse” and paying her own tuition, she left school temporarily to get a job and earn some money. That job with ADP Brokerage Services, initially as a clerk/secretary, was the beginning of her illustrious career in trade management services.

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Adventures in Trading

Contributed by Suzanne Bodlovic (Chicago)

I am deep in the woods, up high on a mountain. It is the dead of night. With a map, compass and a backpack full of gear, I am with my teammates and we are looking for our next checkpoint. We are lost and have been racing for the last 15 hours. We are still nowhere near the finish line. Tired, hungry and cold, with blisters on my feet, I am ready to quit. I tell myself to dig deep and find the inner strength to push through. Focus on good thoughts and ignore the negative – just make it to the finish line.

I am back at work on the trading floor, making markets for my own trading account in a pit full of sweaty men who are out for blood. The tension in the air is thick. I am mentally drained and my position is going against me. Even though people surround me, I am alone, and must rely on my mental strength to get me through the day.

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Movers and Shakers in Energy

It’s the first bud of the spring that gets noticed. It pokes its head out of the dirt, and blooms regardless of whether others around it are doing the same thing. This is true of women at the top of corporations as well. Often, they’re the only women at the table, and even as their numbers increase, they do so slowly, causing us to take notice of big appointments when they occur.

This week, Lynn Laverty Elsenhans was elected Chief Executive Officer and President of Sunoco Inc. Ms. Elsenhans is Sunoco’s first female CEO and President, following her tenure at Royal Dutch Shell, and replaces John Drosdick upon his retirement in August. Ms. Elsenhans holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from Rice University, and an MBA from Harvard. Ms. Elsenhans will receive an initial salary of $1.24 million and a onetime grant of restricted share units equal in value to $5 million, the company said. According to the Wall Street Journal, this appointment increases the number of women at the head of Fortune 500 companies to 13.

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The Executive’s Guide to Throwing the Perfect Dinner Party

by Jacqueline Church

You run a department, head a practice, handle the crankiest clients and supervise staff. But throw a dinner party? Who has the time? Where to start? If hosting a dinner party has never been your strong suit, and you don’t want to go the “hired help” route, fear not: you already have all the skills you need by virtue of your success at work. Here then, the simple rules of successful hosting:
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Stay at Home Husband? One Lawyer’s Story

Ilise*, a female attorney at a big New York law firm, is the envy of most of her female peers, at least those with children. Unlike most of the other lawyers at her firm, who have to juggle unpredictable hours with inflexible and costly childcare arrangements, Ilise has a built in child care system that doesn’t make her feel as though her two daughters, ages 18 months and 4 years, are being deprived of quality parental time. After Ilise came back to work from her second maternity leave, her husband, a writer, decided to stay home with the girls.

Ilise’s situation is unique, but hardly unusual among professional woman these days. In fact, stay at home husbands have been a hot topic in the blogosphere.

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100 Women in Hedge Funds Honors Sonia Gardner of Avenue Capital Group

by Margarita Shelley-Smith

While numerous publications and analysts address the question of women’s inability to successfully manage high risk investments and understand the nuances of portfolio management, Sonia Gardner is a clear example to the contrary.

On June 5th, 2008, 100 Women in Hedge Funds named Sonia Gardner of Avenue Capital Group as a recipient of this year’s Leadership Award. This award recognizes individuals whose professional dedication, innovation, passion and ethics set a standard of excellence for the industry. “We are so pleased to be honoring Sonia Gardner, whose combined achievements as a founder, partner and leader of a pioneering, pre-eminent alternative asset management firm are unique,” said the board director, Mimi Drake.
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These Times They Are a Changin’

Recently, as I sat in my Chicago apartment listening to my iPod, Bob Dylan’s famous verses prompted me to consider the changing times for women in business. I started to think of the significant advances that have been made over the past 20 years, resulting in the ever-increasing pool of talented female professionals. I believe these advances are due to in no small part to the increasing availability of resources for women in business, including the growing number of organizations dedicated to helping female professionals succeed.

One such organization, Chicago Financial Women (CFW), was established to support Midwest women in the fields of finance and financial services through professional development, education, and networking. Originally a chapter of the Financial Women’s Association headquartered in New York, Chicago Financial Women became an independent organization about three years ago. I sat down with Deborah Canale, the president of the organization, to discuss the activities of the group, as well as the current state of women in finance in Chicago.
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Ms. Fix-it: Barbara Desoer

By: Pamela Weinsaft

Just as military promotions are offered as a reward for dangerous missions, the key to success in the corporate world may lie in the willingness to take on the challenge of turning around struggling companies or divisions of companies. When women succeed in meeting these challenges, they blaze a trail, advance to senior ranks, and may even shatter that fabled glass ceiling.

Barbara Desoer, bumped from her position of 47 on the Forbes 50 Most Powerful Women in Business in 2006 has been catapulted back into the spotlight this week with her promotion to the rank of President of the new Bank of America mortgage, home equity, and insurance services business. The Wall Street Journal reports that with the acquisition of Countrywide on July 1, 2008, Bank of America became the largest mortgage originator and servicer in the U.S. Ms. Desoer has been given the challenge of pulling Bank of America’s new problem child—Countrywide Mortgage—back into the family fold.
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Movers and Shakers: Maria McLaughlin, Marketing Director at Appro

By: Bailey McCann

Recently, Glass Hammer spoke with Maria McLaughlin, the Director of Marketing for Appro International, a technology firm in Milpitas, California. Appro specializes in high performance computing for the oil and gas and financial services industries; government labs, energy and defense departments; electronic design automation; digital content creation; education and manufacturing sectors.

According to the company website, Maria McLaughlin joined Appro in 2002 and has responsibility for all Appro’s marketing, which includes branding, market analysis, perception improvement, marketing communications, and demand creation. She is also responsible for coordinating the product-definition and Go-to-Market Plan activities across Appro. Prior to her role at Appro, Ms. McLaughlin worked at Hewlett-Packard and 3M Corporation.

Ms. McLaughlin is the only woman on the 8-member executive team. When she started at Appro, there was no marketing department, a deficiency that relegated the company to serving a niche market. But before she could help take the company’s message to a larger consumer base, she had to prove her own value, as well as the value of marketing, to the company. During our interview, she offered insights on how she successfully created a now-thriving department and overcame any negative preconceptions of a woman in technology marketing.

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35 Women Under 35: Lisa Ditlefsen, Head of Search at Base One

By: Elizabeth Harrin

The same week that Lisa Ditlefsen turned 30, she collected her prize at the BlackBerry Women & Technology Awards for the best use of technology by a woman under 30. She received the award for the work she has done creating an SEO (search engine optimization) department at Base One. Not bad for someone who three years ago admitted she knew nothing about online marketing.

Lisa came to London from Norway in 1999 on a gap year and fell into B2B marketing more or less by chance, after a stint working on a travel magazine. After a break to have her daughter, she returned to Base One and was offered the chance to do something the company had never done before – search engine marketing.
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