Voice of Experience: Alison Sanger, Chief Operating Officer, Ironwood Capital Management

alison_sanger1by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

The last nine months have been the toughest of Alison Sanger’s career. As COO of Ironwood Capital Management, she has worked incredibly hard to help the firm navigate the choppy waters of the financial crisis. But Sanger had an additional challenge as she had her third child right in the middle of the chaos. “It was a kind of a crazy intersection of all things. I’m a ‘put one foot in front of the other’ kind of girl, so I think that, right now, I’m most proud of having survived and come out the other side.”

Sanger hails from a small town in Michigan, and majored in accounting at Miami University (Ohio). But when she first entered university, accounting seemed the least likely path she would take. “I tested out of all the English classes but into remedial math going into college. So how does someone like that end up in accounting? I’m really competitive and considered it a challenge. So I got to work and took a lot of math classes. And, as I took the classes, I realized I was good at them and enjoyed them. That, combined with the idea that I would be employable in a very slow job market, is what got me into accounting.”

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Voice of Experience: Marlys Appleton, Vice President and Chair of Sustainability Steering Committee, AIG Investments

smile_bangs_5617_cropped1by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

Marlys Appleton, chair of AIG Investments’ Sustainability Steering Committee, is a champion for and architect of the integration of sustainability into the investment process. But it is a role no one – not even she – could have foreseen when she began her career more than 20 years ago.

Upon completing a fellowship and an MS from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Appleton started her multi-disciplinary career as a financial analyst at Morgan Stanley. But she switched paths and companies a few years later when she heard the siren call of sales. “It looked as if people were having more fun and making more money [on the sales track].” When Appleton reached out to management to try to make the switch, she was told that, while adding her to the sales force would likely upgrade the skill level of the force, the head of the sales desk only hired his ski buddies. It was an important lesson for Appleton, who then realized that not all promotions are based on one’s abilities; some are based purely on who you are.

She then joined Bank of America as an institutional fixed income sales person, ultimately becoming the top producing salesperson on the East Coast in the bond trading operation for the bank. She attributes that success to her thoroughness and her ability to build trusting relationships with clients. “I’m an information hound,” says Appleton, “I want to know and understand everything myself before presenting it to clients. I think that what made me the most comfortable was what made the clients most comfortable with me. I was successful because, over time, the foreign and domestic banks and domestic money managers I had as clients learned that I wouldn’t lead them down the wrong path and they could trust me to deliver for them.”

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Voice of Experience: Ann Margaret Pointer, Partner, Fisher & Phillips LLP

ann_margaret_pointer1When Ann Margaret Pointer was in grade school, a woman became a Justice of the Supreme Court for the State of North Carolina, and that had a profound impact on Pointer’s life. ”My parents knew and respected [Justice Susie Sharp] and pointed out her accomplishments to me,” explained Pointer, who is a partner at Fisher & Phillips LLP. “That, together with my parents’ attitudes, helped me know I could do anything I wanted to do if I had the gifts to put hard work to use.” And, as it turned out for the young woman who loved to debate, what she wanted to do was to become a lawyer.

Pointer, who has been practicing labor and employment law for 30 years, was guided to the specific area of practice while at the University of Virginia School of Law. “I said I wanted to do litigation in Atlanta, and a law school professor told me to try to get a job with I. Walter Fisher, who he said was the best management labor lawyer in the country.” She did indeed get that job and has been with the firm ever since.

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Voice of Experience: Carolyn N. Dolan, Founding Principal, Samson Capital Advisors

cnd1by Elizabeth Harrin (London)

“I wish I could say that I woke up one morning and decided to leave my social work profession to work in the investment management business,” says Carolyn N. Dolan, founding principal at New York-based Samson Capital Advisors.  “But, in reality, the change was gradual and the piece that did not fit into my background and my academic strengths was the social work experience.”

Carolyn graduated from college in 1968 with a political science major and a math minor.  She says that women then only had a handful options – teacher, administrative assistant, Peace Corps volunteer, airline stewardess, to name a few.  “In my search for employment, I took a civil service test and wound up working for the State of New Jersey as a caseworker watching over the lives of children under the age of 18.”

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Voice of Experience: Jeannie Diefenderfer, Senior Vice President-Global Engineering and Planning, Verizon

j_-diefenderfer1By Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

Verizon’s Jeannie Diefenderfer, Senior Vice President-Global Engineering and Planning for wireline business, has only been in her current role for eight months, but she already has a strong opinion concerning her favorite—and least favorite—aspects of her job. “The best part of my job thus far is accomplishing seemingly impossible and tough challenges through a group of people across organizations,” said the mother of two. “My least favorite is going to meetings with no real objectives or deliverables.” Being productive is a major concern for the Tufts University graduate, as she’s come a long way both in the world and professionally.

Diefenderfer is originally from Seoul, South Korea. At thirteen, she immigrated to the U.S. with her father and siblings, with no idea of what the future, let alone her career, would hold. “I don’t ever recall actually thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up,” Diefenderfer said. “I had to learn a whole new language and culture as a teenager, so I think I was mostly focused on mastering the language and excelling in school, despite my obvious language barriers.”

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Voices of Experience: Ann Oka, Senior Vice President, Supply Management, Sodexo Inc.

head_shot-ann_oka3001by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)  

Shortly after graduating from high school, Ann Oka stuffed her clothes in some garbage bags, packed her record albums in a box and loaded up her $200 Vega for a three-week road trip across country with a high school friend.  Destination: sunny California, where she had lived before her parents had moved her to the East Coast.  The plan was to work for a year, establish residency, and start down the path to becoming a doctor.   

 

Oka, now the senior vice president of supply management at Sodexo Inc., explained, “I’ve always been stubborn, so while my parents were perfectly willing to pay for my college education, in my mind it was something I was going to do on my own.” Read more

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Voice of Experience: Pam Flaherty, President, Citi Foundation

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by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

 

At the age of 21, Pam Flaherty, President of Citi Foundation, was well on her way to achieving her childhood dream of becoming an ambassador. While waiting to get called up into a Foreign Service Officer class, she was accepted into the M.A. program in International Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. It was there that she learned more about the realities of life in the Foreign Service and decided, for a variety of reasons, that “it was not the way [she] wanted to go.”

 

Fluent in Arabic and French and still enamored with all things international, she obtained a position as an assistant to a very senior international monetary advisor at Citi in New York. She explained, “Citi [was a good fit because it] is a global company and was very receptive to people with odd kinds of backgrounds.  I started out by doing economic research, which I knew a fair amount about [because economics was a heavy part of the requirements at John Hopkins].  But, from the moment I got here, I realized I was more intrigued by the business environment and solving business problems than by the research I was doing.”

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Voice of Experience: Janice Chaffin, President of the Consumer Business Unit, Symantec

janice_chaffin1By Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles) 

Janice Chaffin, Consumer Business Unit President at security giant Symantec, knows a little something about hard work.  She got her first job at the very young age of fourteen, working her way up over time from cleaning person to receptionist in a doctor’s office.

Once in college at the University of California, San Diego, Chaffin took any job that came her way, including dishwashing, bookkeeping, acting as a Spanish-speaking tour guide at Disney World, and working as a medical school admissions office staffer, just to name a few. “Whatever I wound up becoming, I always knew I would work hard to achieve what I wanted, no matter what,” Chaffin said.

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Voice of Experience: Lynne Doughtie, National Managing Partner for Advisory Services, KPMG

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Lynne DoughtieLynne Doughtie, KPMG’s National Managing Partner for Advisory Services, had one goal when she entered the firm upon graduating with an accounting degree from Virginia Tech: she wanted to be an audit partner serving banking clients out of KPMG’s Richmond office.  But, ten years out, due to a major consolidation effort going on within the banking industry, that goal was becoming more elusive each day.  “That was a really difficult time for me because, within a two-year time period, one after the other, my banking clients were disappearing.  So by the time I was ready to get promoted to partner, I had no clients. That was a huge crossroads for me.” 

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VOE: Kit Chaskin, Partner and Firm-wide Chair of the Women’s Initiative Network of Reed Smith

The Glass Hammer Managing Editor Pamela Weinsaft recently spoke with attorney Kit Chaskin about Chaskin’s path from acting to the legal profession, her thoughts on tackling barriers to the advancement for women in law, and the importance of having a long-term vision for one’s career.

chaskin2cc_3001“I’m a third generation lawyer.  My grandfather hung out a shingle in 1929 and built a small firm in Cleveland, Ohio, which my father joined when he graduated from law school.  We always joked that we used the Socratic Method at our dinner table.  Being a lawyer was very much a part of the fabric of our lives,” said Kit Chaskin, a partner in the Insurance Recovery Group at international law firm Reed Smith and the director of the Women’s Initiative of Reed Smith.

Despite the virtual apprenticeship at an early age, she first pursued a career as an actress.  When she was ready to settle down and find a more financially rewarding career, the law was an obvious choice.  But she knew from day one that she wanted to have a life outside of law. “The fact that I had been out on a totally different career path put some perspective on law school.  I was more of a go-getter because it was such a privilege to be in law school and I appreciated the opportunity.  On the other hand, I had a life and I was already married.  I knew I was not going to put my life on hold until I made partner, which was the prevailing strategy for most of the women I went to law school with.   Read more

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