Tag Archive for: movers and shakers

Mover and Shaker: Molly Tu, Thomson Reuters, Director of Business Planning and Operations

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Molly TuMolly Tu is a strong believer that you can get everything you want, but just not at the same time. For her, workwise, that means understanding that early in your career you might be able to go up like a rocket, but then at certain points you have to be more flexible and adapt your plan, constantly re-evaluating and re-defining what success is for you at any given moment.

Tu started her career working for two large professional firms in China but satisfied her desire to experience the world by coming to the United States to attend business school at Columbia. After graduation, she decided she wanted to turn her career path to the corporate side, and recognizing the potential in the information industry, she started with Thomson Reuters’ rotational program. There she experienced everything from M&A to investor relations to product management, ultimately deciding to join global account management, a division whose goal is to constantly assess how to deliver increased value to Thomson Reuters’ largest customers. There she spearheaded the Geneva Program, for which she received the 2014 Chairman’s Award.

And, less than a year ago, she was named to her current role, where she is tasked with rolling out the Geneva Program companywide.

“I have always viewed my experience here as similar to working in a startup, but still being part of a large company,” Tu says. “It is very satisfying to transform business processes and also help customers at the same time.”

“I have always viewed my experience here as similar to working in a startup, but still being part of a large company,”

Sponsors in the Workplace; Role Models Close to Home

Tu knows that sponsorship is key to corporate success. “As I grew in my career, my mentors and sponsors were the people who directed me to look at new things in different ways, and that vision got me to places I would not have otherwise.”

She’s often asked how to find a sponsor, but her experience is like many — professionals don’t seek out their own sponsor, but rather it happens in a more organic process that usually involves managers with whom you’ve worked or who otherwise are familiar with your work and want to champion the traits you offer that will allow you to succeed in increasingly responsible roles.

“At the end of the day, sponsorship comes from faith in you as a person, and there has to be an accumulation of experience to build that trust.”

In terms of role models, Tu found hers much closer to home — her grandma. Tu has always been inspired by how she puts her heart and soul into work about which she is highly passionate, including risking her life in the founding of new China. When she retired, she raised money on her own to preserve folk music in her area of China.

“Her passion and satisfaction remind me to always focus on what is meaningful,” Tu says, and that includes defining success by pursuing something you love. “Even if your life might appear to be successful in the eyes of those around you, deep in your heart you won’t be satisfied if you’re not doing something you love.”

She notes a famous quote by Confucius that sums up that philosophy. “Choose a job you love, and you won’t have to work a single day in your life.”

Different, Yet the Same

Throughout her working life, Tu has frequently found herself in environments quite different from where she came from, and that has led to many observations about adapting to these differences. But then she finds that she soon spies commonalties amidst the differences and has realized that people are fundamentally very similar.

“Seeing the commonality helps me address challenges with other people,” she says, adding that her work to reshape the company’s business practices would be unimaginable if she wasn’t able to find the similarities in cultures and genders.

Her company has a strong focus on diversity, including many programs for women. One in which she has been active is the Leadership Program for Women (LPW), which is a training program and forum where women across regions, functions and businesses form a community to bring in professional trainers twice a year. “There are unspoken business rules pertaining to women so this group finds professionals who really know the space and can share what’s happening and how we can maximize and leverage our positions.” She also helps plan events as part of Women at TR, which is designed to develop the talents and champion the contributions of female employees, thus promoting women as equal partners in the success, achievement, and profitability of Thomson Reuters.

“There are unspoken business rules pertaining to women so this group finds professionals who really know the space and can share what’s happening and how we can maximize and leverage our positions.”

One example related to the Geneva Project, where women volunteer to apply their specific skills to understand and better position different products for the company’s largest customers.

“Sometimes women tend to get tied up 100 percent with their current task and don’t always look at other opportunities. Being involved in these types of projects allow you to build your network, for example by having the chance to interview sales people and customers, to extract the information we need that will be useful to others.”

Juggling Work and Family

Away from the office, Tu focuses on her 16-month old daughter. She has found that balancing work and family responsibilities has helped her view her career in a more strategic way, knowing that there are times that you won’t be able to focus 100 percent on her career. However, it also drives women to become more effective and prioritize better; in short, to work smarter rather than harder.

“I feel lucky for the advice I’ve gotten, often as part of the women’s groups, on how you have to work with your partner to focus on balance.” As many senior women leaders have told her, they can only do what they do because they have a supportive spouse. She has realized that whether it’s work or family, more gets done when everyone works together.

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Movers & Shakers: Barbara Edwards, Counsel, Shearman & Sterling

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Barbara EdwardsBarbara Edwards has spent nearly the entirety of her career at global law firm Shearman & Sterling, where she is now counsel in the Finance Group, focusing on complex international and U.S. leveraged financings. The story of how she achieved this level of professional success is a remarkable one – from humble beginnings to Wall Street finance lawyer.

Originally from Guyana, Edwards was the first member of her family to emigrate to the U.S. She attended Brooklyn College, and when she started was a bit uncertain of her future plans. But all that changed when she experienced what could only be described as a political re-awakening while protesting the New York city-wide public university tuition hikes and participating in the anti-apartheid college movement. That got her thinking about a career in law and in particular, impact litigation. The rest, as they say, is history.

Except that the road to success was not easy. Prior to college, Edwards worked as a live-in nanny and housekeeper. This experience, she says, often goes uncited when discussing her path to becoming counsel, but the skills she acquired during this time have been incredibly helpful both professionally and personally.

“Working as a live-in reinforced the value of hard work and demanding hours, helping to hone skills of flexibility and adaptability to effectively navigate the needs of different constituencies. I believe these are all skills which underpin my success as a lawyer and in particular my strong client management skills,” Edwards said.

Giving & Receiving

Throughout her career at Shearman & Sterling, Edwards has been a mentor to a multitude of associates, a role which she considers very important. She takes pride and pleasure in helping others learn, grow, and progress in their careers. Many of these mentoring relationships have been informal and her biggest challenge, she says, has been ensuring that she’s striking the right balance of being professional mentor and coach, “therapist” and friend to her mentees.

“Investing in people makes my work so vibrant, but I have to be intentional in how I approach it. It’s important to make sure the help you provide is translating to both professional and personal growth,” she said. While Edwards doesn’t seek out recognition for the support she provides to colleagues and especially younger lawyers, she likes to tell the story about the time when a group of women she worked with, all from diverse backgrounds and religions, entered her office around Christmas to thank her for her time, guidance and the significant impact that she had on their work experience, giving her a gift card to designer shoe store Manolo Blahnik. It is a memory that will always resonate with her.

“I love shoes, but it wasn’t just about the shoes,” Edwards recalled. “It was a profound moment for me because I felt that my efforts had really made a meaningful difference to these women. There’s no replacing that feeling.”

Edwards has also given back on the pro bono side, working with women – often minority women – on initiatives related to economic empowerment. Most notably, she represented the women founders of Harlem Lanes, the first bowling alley in Harlem in 30 years and the only one in the country to be built and owned by Black women. The project was one of the William J. Clinton Foundation Urban Initiatives and the former president attended the ribbon-cutting.

Shearman & Sterling’s global platform and pro bono strength intersect nicely with Edwards’ passion for traveling the world. She spent two years in the firm’s Singapore and Hong Kong offices, working across Asia, as well as a secondment with one of the firm’s clients in Germany. Edwards is also one of the few counsel and partners at Shearman & Sterling who has participated in the firm’s work for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), a partnership that the firm has had for over 14 years. She traveled to Arusha, Tanzania for a one-month externship at the ICTR. It was an experience she says was life-changing.

“The ICTR work is not abstract. It has real, tangible outcomes and I’m proud to have been a part of it and to have made a useful contribution.”

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Mover and Shaker Stephanie Curulewski: Partnership and Trading Manager, BP

 

People around a laptop“Most people are good people, and they’re trying to do the right thing. If you assume that everyone has a good reason for what they’re doing, you can make progress by coming at issues from the positive side,” says Stephanie Curulewski.

That philosophy has anchored her career and helped her ascend the ladder, even as she created a part-time position that has given her the best of both worlds.

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Mover and Shaker: Swatee Singh, Vice President, American Express Technology

women salesAs a student in electronic engineering with a focus in technology, Swatee Singh’s graduate work involved working on clinical trials for an imaging device to detect breast cancer. While that may seem far removed from her current work at American Express, it actually epitomizes the defining characteristic of her varied career.

“Whether you are working in retail, finance or the power industry, there is a focus on predictive analytics at every level. Over the course of my career, I have gone past my initial hesitation about feeling comfortable in a new industry to realizing I can diversify and bring value to any industry through my experience with analytics.”

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Mover & Shaker: Silvia Lucena Gosalvez, M&A Director, PwC Spain

 

woman sitting at deskSilvia Lucena Gosalvez has spent her entire career on the M&A team for PwC Spain, having joined 15 years ago after a short stint at a family business while finishing her tax advisement master’s degree. And for her that has been a perfect fit.

“Being on the M&A team has given me the opportunity to work on complex international projects, exploring the full continuum of deals — from restructuring to execution to post-deal integration.”

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Movers and Shakers: Justine Chen, Senior Manager, SunGard Consulting Services

Welcome to The Glass Hammer’s “Women in Tech” month! We will be celebrating successful women in technology all month long!

Justine Chen, senior manager at SunGard Consulting Services is deeply committed to getting more women interested in technology careers. Through her current role, Chen participates in a lot of community outreach and as a result, she took a particular interest in the organization, Girl Develop It, which offers courses for women who want to learn technical skills.

“I made a connection at GDI who introduced me to the film, Girl Rising, a documentary about the education of girls in several developing countries,” explained Chen, who organized screenings of the film at many SunGard offices in honor of International Women’s Day.

“This collaboration has been so rewarding and it is an empowering feeling to be involved with spreading a positive message about technology to young women and girls across the globe,” Chen said.

Career Path

Chen grew up in Taiwan and moved to Canada after high school. She explained that in Taiwan the education system requires students entering senior high school to declare an area of study. Chen had always been drawn to logic and problem solving, so naturally these interests pointed her in the direction of engineering. “This was the first step toward my career in technology,” said Chen, who continued to study engineering when she was at university in Canada.

After graduating from college, Chen accepted a position at a traditional engineering consulting firm working on a system that would commission commuter ferries in Washington. While Chen enjoyed this experience, she sought a role that would give her the opportunity to interact more with the public as opposed to focusing so much on back end developing.

“This put me at a crossroads early on in my career where I had to decide to pursue opportunities on the East coast or stay on the West coast. Ultimately, I was drawn to the East coast and started working as a java developer for a search company right as the internet was becoming extremely popular,” Chen explained.

As a result of the increasing popularity of the web, companies were looking to design more interactive and dynamic websites. Chen, who found herself in the right place at the right time, was asked if she wanted to learn the programming languages that were emerging at the time. “I entered that field and I have been working on web technologies ever since,” Chen noted.

According to Chen, the changes within the web technologies field that have taken place over the last few years have created such a dynamic environment offering opportunities for people from all walks of life. In the past, she explained, web technologies primarily attracted computer science majors. Now, more and more people entering the field are self-taught programmers and developers who are bringing an entirely different skill set to the table.

Selected as SunGard’s rising star for the Women’s Bond Club in2013, Chen continues to make significant contributions in her current role as a senior manager at SunGard Consulting Services. “In addition to my daily responsibilities, I am working on a new business solution through SunGard Consulting Services solution proposal competition held each year that encourages us to think outside the box,” said Chen.

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Movers and Shakers: Adda Birnir, Founder and CEO, Skillcrush

Women SpeakingAdda Birnir is the founder and CEO of Skillcrush, an online technical skills platform designed specifically for women. According to Birnir, her career path has been unconventional, but as she looks back at all of her experiences she is certain that each role she had in the past served as a building block and learning opportunity to help her create the company of her dreams.

Navigating a Career in Technology
When Adda Birnir first had the idea for Skillcrush, she identified a hole in the marketplace and created a platform to fill the gap in an area she felt very strongly about: inspiring women to discover technical skills by developing an accessible online resource.

Before this, Birnir was working as a technical producer at MTV while running her own web development and design consulting business. “This was a great business, but I found that I wasn’t professionally fulfilled by the client work I was doing. Instead, I was craving a more hands-on experience where I could take a project through the entire life-cycle,” she explained.

Birnir graduated from college and moved to New York in order to pursue a career as a professional photographer. “I quickly learned that the reality of the profession was nothing like I had imagined,” explained Birnir, who shortly thereafter found a job working for an online publishing company. “I was lucky because my position straddled editorial and production, which gave me the opportunity to gain exposure to the technical side of the process of creating and delivering online magazines,” she said.

Here, Birnir realized that she not only had genuine interest in technology but also a natural talent that began to emerge as she spent a lot of time working closely with the web developers. “This was my first real introduction to the world of technology,” said Birnir, who started to take on small coding projects in addition to her regular tasks.

According to Birnir, sponsorship has played a critical role in her career development in technology. “I have been fortunate to have several people in the workplace take me under their wing and guide me as I developed my skills,” she noted. This is why, Birnir added, she has made mentorship such a key component of her company, Skillcrush.

“There are a lot of excellent resources out there for anyone who is interested in learning about programming and web development,” Birnir said, “but it can be confusing to navigate. This is where it is important to have someone who can interject and give you guidance along the way.”

She continued, “Through Skillcrush, we recognized a great opportunity to serve women in the technical space and offer something different than any other technical skills platform that was available at the time.”

Growing Pains: The Ups and Downs of Startups
When Birnir was initially developing Skillcrush, she decided to take a “test and learn” approach to her business. This, she explained, meant treating the company like a science experiment by creating a series of hypotheses and testing them one at a time, beginning with the riskiest.

“The riskiest part of this business model was not creating an online technical skills platform,” Birnir explained, “It was building this type of business that would attract women.”

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Movers and Shakers: Esther Yang, Vice President and Senior Trader-Derivatives at Voya Investment Management, formerly ING U.S. Investment Management

 

diverse women in the boardroomIn a recent round-table of derivative portfolio managers of the largest insurance companies, Esther Yang found herself being the only female among this male dominated profession. How did she get to where she is now?

Esther Yang did not have a conventional route to success in financial services. In fact, she didn’t begin college or her career with intentions of entering the field at all. However, Yang used her instincts and willingness to try new things to guide her into the position she currently holds.

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Movers and Shakers – Peg DiOrio, Vice President and Quantitative Analyst for the Portfolio Engineering Group at Voya Investment Management, formerly ING U.S. Investment Management

people at workWhen Voya’s Peg DiOrio describes the keys to her success overseeing quant for an entire group of investment managers, she uses a sailing analogy. “When you are part of a sailing crew, you have a job and you rely on others to do theirs. To be successful in business, you have to both respect and rely on your colleagues.”

Career Beginnings
Peg DiOrio taught high school math when she graduated college. As the newest teacher in school, she was assigned to some of the most challenging students. “One of my first classes was filled with high school seniors who were taking ninth grade math for the third and fourth time. They weren’t the most enthusiastic students, but it allowed me to try a lot of different ways to reach them. It taught me the importance of understanding my audience.”

In order to advance in the teaching profession, Peg had to get a masters degree. She enrolled in a then-new joint program between New York University’s Stern School of Business and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. DiOrio recalls, “Courant had long relied on training Department of Defense types in its masters programs.” When that source began to dry up, Courant looked for new opportunities for mathematical sciences and found it in the finance world. “I think the program is now called financial engineering,” DiOrio commented, but back then financial quant work was just getting recognized as a discipline.

There wasn’t a huge amount of academic work devoted to the finance and mathematics at the time, so she and her cohorts studied mathematical models from a range of other disciplines – physical sciences, social sciences, etc. “We studied models that described fish populations, neural networks and flu outbreaks.” She believes that applying math to a range of situations has been really useful in creating financial models that work in the real world.

“Finance is Just Math”
Peg’s study group at Courant included a student who was working at Sanford C. Bernstein. Her cohort’s commitment to developing models that accurately described the real world and his willingness to push for the best possible solution were inspiring. One day he told her, “You are smart. You should come work at Bernstein.”

Peg was intrigued, but a bit concerned that she lacked an understanding of finance. Her studies were in pure math and applied math. To that point her cohort said, “Finance is just math. You’ll figure it out.”

Learning Finance through Experience and Collaboration
Peg was assigned to work with a group of financial advisors who managed money for Bernstein’s high net worth clients. Part of her role was to run statistical reports for clients. “Some of our clients were unusual trusts – such as nuclear decommissioning trusts. It was a challenge because the goal was to have enough money to decommission the plant but not extra because additional funds would have to be returned to utility customers. It was also interesting because it was a time when decommissioning trusts were finally allowed to be invested in stocks. “We spent a lot of time looking at the right level of volatility.”

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Movers and Shakers: Suzanne McAndrew, Vice President of Talent Management, American Express

women sales“By not telling your story, you might run the risk of creating barriers for yourself at work,” said Suzanne McAndrew, vice president of Talent Management at American Express.

“That being said, you need to find the right outlets to tell your story and feel comfortable that it will then become part of what you are known for at the same time–and this can be challenging,” she continued.

Currently, McAndrew works to identify high potential talent within American Express and facilitates pathways to their success. For LGBT professionals, she advocates bringing their whole self to work, but also encourages them to define a personal brand that extends beyond their sexual orientation. “Regardless of whether you are gay or straight, you still possess skills, knowledge, and talents that make you a leader who is worthy of attention,” she explained.

Career Story
As McAndrew looks back at her career, she can separate her professional journey into three different chapters that blend the areas of service, communications and change management and talent. She started her career in retail, working in HR for Saks Fifth Avenue where she really had the opportunity to develop depth and breadth of knowledge in the area.

“I was fortunate to have a sponsor who brought me to New York to lead the corporate communications group before becoming the HR Director for Saks Off Fifth, the outlet store division of the company,” said McAndrew, who led the initiative of opening new outlet stores all over the country during her time in this role.

Before moving on to what McAndrew considers the second chapter of her career, she continued to develop her communications experience at Macy’s where she was charged with building a strong corporate communications group in addition to bolstering the company’s internal programming for employees.

Continuing to focus on communications, McAndrew took her career in a different direction when she accepted a consulting role at Towers Perrin, which later became Towers Watson. “I started as a communications consultant, but my role evolved over time to include work in the talent space and thought leadership,” she said. It was here that her relationship with American Express began as she spent eight years providing communications consulting services for the company.

“An opportunity opened up in the talent management group at American Express which involved executive talent planning, development, and assessment for the top 1,500 employees at the firm. And this is the third and current chapter in my career story,” McAndrew explained.

She is spending a lot of time right now thinking about the employee of the future and what that profile looks like. “What does the next generation of leaders look like? What motivates and drives them? How do we build a diverse talent pipeline and build inclusion into our everyday? These are ongoing questions that we have to consider while managing our current talent pool and bringing on new talent as well,” said McAndrew.

“I take a lot of pride in developing people and helping them discover and reach their full potential,” she continued. “It is rewarding to see others grow and succeed.”

Advice for Achieving Professional Fulfillment
According to McAndrew, her personal definition of success centered around the notion of finding her purpose, although this is not something she figured out until later in her career. “I wish I had been more in tune to the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ aspects of my professional development,” McAndrew noted. “I learned that having a purposeful career did not necessarily mean finding the quickest path to the top, but rather being clear on what I am aiming to achieve overall for myself, my family and the company I work for.”

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