Voice of Experience: Jan Floyd-Douglass

JAFD_March_2009[1]By Elizabeth Harrin (London)

“I’ve always been a cold contactor,” says Jan Floyd-Douglass, when I ask her how she landed her top city jobs at Zurich and Barclays. “I find it’s much better to circumnavigate all the job ads.”

Jan started out with two job offers on the table: Lloyds and Citicorp and back in the ’70s took the lower paid role because Citi created “a hum” inside of her. It turned out to be a good choice. Over her fourteen years with Citi, she had seven different roles, ultimately ending up as Resident Vice President for mortgage sales.

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Voice of Experience: Stephanie Hauge, President, Financial Women’s Association

hauge_stephanie72_06[1]by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

“Gender diversification represents a range of approaches to risk analysis and problem solving. All of that is part of the equation of getting better decisions made in a company; it isn’t just to dress up the boardroom or the C-suite with females. If there had been different perspectives and different experiences among the leadership and decision-makers [of the companies that were at the center of the financial meltdown], I believe it could have had a very different outcome.” said Stephanie Hauge, president of the Financial Women’s Association.

Hauge started her own financial career at a pharma company in New Jersey. Working as a marketing customer service representative while attending night school at Seton Hall—first for her B.A. in Accounting and then her M.B.A. in Finance—she saw firsthand the importance of gender diversity and the challenges women face in the workplace.

“I was one of just a few women in the accounting department. A senior accountant at the time, I ended up filling in for my boss when he was not doing his job. When he was eventually let go, there was a lot of external and internal support for me to be moved up into his position. But, [some months later when I still hadn’t been promoted and/or gotten a pay raise], I went to the head of the department to ask why, since I was already doing the job. The department head actually said to me, ‘If I promote you into this position, then all those guys I play golf with will work for a woman and I can’t do that to them.’ Although after some further conversation, I was officially appointed into the position, that incident made me question whether or not I would want to continue there, but it also was a seminal moment in terms of my focus on helping other women. ”

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Voice of Experience: Sabrina Callin, Managing Director, PIMCO

By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

“I think I ordered my first application to Harvard and Stanford’s Business Schools when I was roughly 10 years old,” said Sabrina Callin, a PIMCO managing director based in the firm’s Newport Beach headquarters. “My parents were both educators, and instilled a strong work ethic and belief in me that I could do anything I wanted to do. As a result, I was motivated from a young age by the ability to have an influence and make things happen.”

During her undergrad years at Texas Christian University—a school founded by her father’s ancestors back in the 1800s—Callin decided to pursue a career in finance, graduating with degrees in accounting, finance and economics. A focus on finance, she felt, would provide her with the opportunity to be in a “very dynamic and intrinsically interesting profession,” and could provide an opportunity gain unique insight and expertise that “is very broadly relevant, and well beyond the day-to-day workings of a given job.” In the period between her undergraduate and graduate programs, rather than heading to Wall Street as she’d originally planned, she earned her CPA. “I believed experience as a practicing CPA would provide me with an important knowledge base that would be beneficial for my longer-term career path.”

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Voice of Experience: Joanne Kinsella, Managing Director, ITRS America

Joanne_Kinsella_168_resized[1]by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

When asked how she ended up in the financial technology industry, Jo Kinsella, managing director of ITRS America quickly answers: “Pure unadulterated chance.”

Indeed, her career path has wound through industries and countries, starting with French proficiency upon graduation from university from Leeds, England. And although she was able to write a thesis in the language, Kinsella did not want to be a translator. Without much office experience, she went to work as an office temp for Carlton Television but was soon promoted to full-time events manager, organizing and running corporate events, hospitality, and public relations for the shows they did around England.

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Voice of Experience: Ann Ziegler, Chief Financial Officer of CDW

Ann_Ziegler[1]By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

Audacious proclamations are the hallmark of the many of the successful among us. “You’ve got to raise your hand,” says CDW’s Ann Ziegler, the corporation’s CFO.

No surprise, then, that Ziegler, who is an attorney—not a CPA or Finance MBA—told her boss at Sara Lee— “I want to be the corporate CFO”—and has come to realize that goal.

Ziegler was drawn to the law early, mostly because of strong influence of an older cousin who was an accomplished lawyer. Once she was knee-deep in her legal studies, she realized that, above all else, she was called by corporate law, even though it wasn’t what most of her classmates were doing. “At that time I was in law school, litigation was the sexy part. But I never wanted to be a litigator. I enjoyed corporate law and other similar courses.”

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Voice of Experience: Lucy Reed, Global Co-Head of International Arbitration Group, Freshfields

By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)Reed_Lucy[1]

“It is not the amount of money that affects how hard I work. I worked as hard when I was a GS-7 law clerk as I do now as a highly paid law firm partner. The most important thing for me is that I have a varied practice and a varied career. I’m always looking for new challenges, which is why I like international arbitration— each case involves a different sector, different expert, different issues,” said Lucy Reed, the global co-head of the International Arbitration Group at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP.

Reed started her career clerking for a federal trial judge in D.C. who had a number of international cases, including a 9-month criminal trial of the first defendants accused of the assassination of former Ambassador Orlando Letelier ordered by Augusto Pinochet. She then went into a D.C. law firm that had arbitration cases before the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal set up in The Hague after the Iranian Revolution. Read more

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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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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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