Women on the Move Podcast

Finding success in JPMorgan’s Founders Forward mentoring program

In the very best mentoring partnerships, both mentee and mentor learn and grow from each other—and that’s exactly what happened when Olivia McGuire, a J.P. Morgan portfolio manager, was matched up with Louise Winter, a funeral service founder, through the firm’s Founders Forward mentoring program. Here, Olivia and Louise sit down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss their careers and what they each gained from one another.

Forging a career in finance

Olivia has spent her entire career of twenty-plus years at JPMorgan Chase, starting in the firm’s technology graduate recruitment program after earning her master’s degree. Five years later, she moved to a role in asset management as a portfolio manager. Having applied for a similar role and not been the first choice a few months earlier, she got the call when a new one opened up on the same team. “And I'm still in the same team today working as a money market fund portfolio manager,” she says. She shares that she wasn’t sure she had the requirements for the first job, but she applied anyway since the position description said no experience required. The moral of her story? Take the chance and apply for the roles you want.

Olivia says she’s been excited and motivated by her career—and that she was lucky enough to have strong female role models early on. “But I think that as someone who has a couple of decades in their career, I think it's really important to give back and be a role model to those who come behind,” she explains. “It's trying to combat that imposter syndrome and the perhaps perceived barriers that you've put in front of you from going after what you want. And having someone as a mentor is really important in helping people to achieve the things that they want to do but may be too reluctant or scared to grasp and go after.”

Olivia knew the Founders Forward program would be a good place for her to give back and help other women—and yet she was also intimidated. “I have never run my own business,” she recalls. “What could I possibly tell a very brave and successful entrepreneur who started up their own company? And some of the companies that were described, I thought, wow, that's so impressive. They don't really need me as their mentor. So it took me a little time before I was brave enough to say, I'm going to do this. And I've done it twice now. Louise and I, that was my second pairing.”

Finding purpose in helping families plan funerals

Louise Winter was a 26-year-old creative strategist when her beloved granddad died. She describes his funeral as a “typically British cremation service in a really grim crematorium.” She says she had an epiphany moment of realizing there had to be a better way for people to both grieve and celebrate their loved ones. “I found the thing that I knew I was going to concentrate on for the rest of my life,” she says. She soon founded Poetic Endings, which she describes as a progressive funeral service company.

“I think the main difference between progressive funeral directors and more conventional funeral directors is taking a more emotional approach, not being so closed off and telling people what it is they can have, but asking people what they need, giving them space to explore what might work for them and providing them choices,” she tells Sam. She’s since become a leader in the field of progressive end-of-life care and collaborated with end-of-life doula Anna Lyons on a book, We all know how this ends: Lessons about life and living from working with death and dying, which was published last spring.

Like Olivia, Louise talks about being hesitant to join Founders Forward. She had already gained confidence in another woman’s entrepreneurship program, but knew she wanted to learn more about running her business—especially the finance side. “At first I was really intimidated because I wondered how anyone who works at J.P. Morgan and has a big career in finance, why they would want to hear about me saying how I don’t understand what my accountants are talking about,” she recalls.

Marie Claire Editor in Chief on women, remote work, and a digital first strategy

Taking on the role of editor in chief during the pandemic, Sally Holmes navigated change and growth under extraordinary circumstances. In this episode, she sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about her career, the women who make up Marie Claire’s readership, and the importance of work-life balance.

As the daughter of television journalists, Sally caught the news bug at a young age. While she initially wanted to be a doctor, by the time Sally graduated college, she had decided to follow in her parents' footsteps and pursue a career in journalism. She went on to intern and work at a host of high-profile companies including Scholastic, The Cut, and Elle magazine. Nearly four years ago, she was hired at Marie Claire as digital director, and 18 months ago—just as the pandemic was shutting down offices—she was promoted to Editor in Chief.

Leading during a pandemic

Sally is currently leading Marie Claire through a “digital first” transition—with more focus on the website rather than a monthly print magazine. She says that her ability to transition into her leadership role as Editor in Chief during the pandemic was made possible by the support of her incredible team. “It’s pretty amazing to think about what we've accomplished and what we used to do in the office,” she tells Sam.  “Literally, you know, a paper would arrive on my desk and I would mark it up and write notes on it, and then send it to the next person. And that was all something that we had to pivot and figure out how to do that virtually or digitally.”

Appreciating the support of others is a theme of Sally’s—she discusses role models in her life including her mother, and two of her former bosses. It’s that appreciation of the team aspect of work that leads her to see both positives and negatives in the virtual work model. On the one hand, she says, she’s thrilled to be able to give credit to staff members and empower them to make decisions about their own schedules. But she misses both the creativity and the organic chemistry that happens in the office setting. “It’s not the same as in real life interaction, which I think at the end of the day, unfortunately, is the glue that really holds the team together,” she notes.

Sally and Sam also discuss a recent survey of working women by  Marie Claire and LinkedIn. The survey found that half of women who participated are considering a career change to pursue more money and flexibility. Sally notes that those results highlight that stress or fear of burnout is forefront for many working women right now. And, she believes, there’s inevitably going to be an evolution away from pre-pandemic work attitudes. “I think that our survey was both a way to empower women to say, you're not alone,” she says “You're not the only one who wants flexibility. You're not the only one who thinks I can't go back to the office five days a week, or my priorities have changed or I don't feel safe. And then also to inform workplaces that we do need to rethink what employment looks like, what the state of our offices look like.”

Reaching a diverse readership

Asked about the typical Marie Claire reader, Sally says she is a multi-faceted woman of diverse interests. She defines the Marie Claire reader as a woman of power, purpose, and style. “I always think about basically myself and the 30- or 40-something woman who is either at the top of her game or wants to be at the top of her game,” she says. “She is career oriented, she's passionate. She is also totally multi-faceted. So I think it's totally fine and normal and good to love The Bachelor, but also be highly invested in the abortion bills being passed in Texas.”

Sally believes that one key to meeting those diverse reader needs is to have a diverse staff. “I think it's really important to make sure we have a diverse roster of writers who are able to share different perspectives,” she tells Sam. “Because I look a certain way. My staff looks a certain way. The world looks a certain way. We want to make sure that the stories that are represented really are told through multiple lenses so that we're able to offer different perspectives.”

Retired Command Sergeant Major talks military integration and translating military experience into civilian success

Command Sergeant Major Cynthia Pritchett is a pioneering leader in the U.S. military. In this episode, she sits down with Women on the Move podcast host Sam Saperstein to discuss her time in the military, the impact she made on military education and training, and her firsthand experience of gender integration in the army. She also shares leadership advice and reflects on her involvement with the JPMorgan Chase Military and Veterans Affairs Advisory Council.

Living through gender integration

The daughter of military parents, Cynthia joined the Women’s Army Corps shortly after graduating from high school. She tells Sam that the Women’s Army Corps was a holdover from the World War II era when women were heavily recruited. “We were actually kind of outside the service,” she explains. “So we trained separately. We were mostly in the medical field, the administrative fields, not what women are doing today.”

Norms were beginning to change when Cynthia joined the Women’s Army Corps in 1973, at the tail end of the Vietnam War era. By the mid-1970s, the Women’s Corps was being phased out and women were being integrated into the training and personnel systems of the service branches. It was during this time that male service members began to take their female colleagues more seriously.

“Women in the military didn't want any special treatment, any special advantage,” Cynthia notes. “All they wanted to be was provided the same training so that when they deployed or went into these situations, they were just as prepared as their male counterpart. And I think when we had the segregated training, there was a lot of distrust [where] male counterparts were like, well, I don't know what they're getting over there ’cause I don't see it.”

Transforming education and training

Cynthia has always placed high value on the importance of military training. As an educator, Cynthia was a transformational leader who incorporated critical thinking and analysis into her programs.

She tells Sam that the military has always valued structure,  with a focus on rote knowledge and repetitive training. “When you're under stress and crisis, you want your training to kick in, but as you become more senior in the military, things go from this rote training and reaction to, you have to [have more context],” she says. “And when we're trying to deal with some elders in the village, that's not about training; that's about education and understanding the culture and the environment you're in. So how do you educate leaders to deal in these very complex environments and not just rely on reacting to the situation on the ground?”

Help veterans transition

As an instructor, Cynthia developed partnerships with universities to get military training courses accredited so they can count toward a degree once a service member transitions to civilian life. 

Since retiring from the military in 2021 after more than 36 years of service, Cynthia has served on the boards of a number of different organizations. One of the most rewarding, she says, has been her time as a member on the JPMorgan Chase Military and Veterans Affairs Advisory Council. The Council’s overarching goals are to help veterans and their families succeed. Much of the work draws on her experiences translating military credentials to civilian ones.

“Veterans do have a hard time translating back into civil society and especially into the job market,” she says. “How do you take the skills of an infantryman and translate them into something that corporate America can understand?” She’s passionate about helping veterans with housing challenges, financial literacy, and employment and entrepreneurship goals.

Cynthia explains that one of the biggest challenges has been helping veterans who have transitioned into the workforce navigate the culture differences between the military and corporate America. In the military, she says, service members learn to be part of a team and to talk about their team contributions, but not so much to talk about the individual accomplishments that they might need to highlight in their civilian careers. “It’s the whole package of trying to help veterans understand the corporate world,” she explains. “But also to help the corporate world understand the veterans, that we are not these foreign entities.”

Leadership lessons from the co-CEOs of Chase Consumer & Community Banking

What’s the key to successful leadership in times of fast-paced change? To Jenn Piepszak and Marianne Lake, co-CEOs of Chase Consumer & Community Banking, it includes focusing on the customer and building and maintaining strong company culture. This episode features a segment from the sixth annual Women on the Move Leadership Day, as Jenn and Marianne sit down with host Sam Saperstein to discuss company culture, the pandemic and accelerating the pace of change.

As co-leaders, Marianne and Jenn have split up the umbrella of Consumer & Community Banking: Marianne runs consumer lending and connected commerce, and Jenn heads up banking businesses and wealth management. Jenn tells Sam that their successful partnership is built on a lengthy experience of mutual trust, respect, and friendship. And while they’ve split up the responsibilities, they spend a lot of time collaborating on issues that make all experiences easier for customers.

“Be the CEO of whatever you’re running”

Marianne shares that she looks for a few key traits in managers and leaders, including putting the customer first and communicating clearly with the team every step of the way. She says that being the CEO of whatever you’re working on includes understanding and focusing obsessively on customer needs and putting the customer—internal or external—at the center of all decision-making. “Oftentimes the best way you can obsess about the competition is obsessing about the customer,” she says.

Once a leader has clarified their focus, Marianne says communication is key. “Whatever you have defined as success for your business or endeavor, you need to communicate it clearly, consistently, and often, because people in the team can get behind what they understand,” she tells Sam. 

Finally, she says, a keen attention to the data analytics is necessary: She recommends being disciplined about showing data-driven decisions that people can understand. “Jamie [Dimon, JPMorgan Chase CEO] has said often, and I agree with him,: data analyze, rinse, repeat,” she says. “It takes the emotion out of decisions.”

Building and maintaining culture

Jenn and Marianne discussed one of the largest changes they’ve managed over the past 18 months—the sudden move to remote and then hybrid work. While the firm continues to pilot and test their return to office protocols, Jenn notes that there is a difference between the initial fast-paced move to remote work versus what flexibility will ultimately look like going forward. She highlights that the pandemic had a disproportionate impact on women and that the flexibility coming out of it will likely have a disproportionately positive impact on women as well.

“I think it was extraordinary what we were able to do in a weekend really, turn our entire workforce into a remote workforce,” she says. “I do think that we have proven that you can maintain culture in a remote environment. We have yet to prove that you can build culture in a remote environment. And so I think having an office-based culture is incredibly important to this company for a very, very good reason.”

Jenn and Marianne both agree that while remote work offers valuable flexibility, the in-person experience is critical to establishing team relationships and ultimately building culture and trust. “And I think that is a huge motivating factor for anyone,” Jenn says. “In person, you have that opportunity to build that culture. And yes, you also have that opportunity to take a little bit more time to work through an issue or solve a problem, or run next door to Marianne's office and say, what do you think about this?”

An accelerating pace of change

Marianne wraps up this episode by offering her thoughts on how to meet the challenges of the future. In some ways, she says, the pandemic sped up some changes that were already coming down the pike in terms of digitalization. Successfully meeting and leveraging that accelerating change is the next big challenge for Consumer & Community Banking.

“The competition is everywhere,” she notes. “It’s how every customer experiences every digital ecosystem. It’s how they order a pizza. It's how they order a car. It’s all those things that inform what customers think extraordinary experience looks like. We’re very focused on moving with all due haste, and that’s everything from our technology to how we operate as teams and how we do budgeting and planning, and all those things need to keep pace.”

In particular, Marianne says that they don’t want to be complacent about inclusivity. “We want to be the bank for all Americans,” she says.

Inclusion, exclusion and the power of community from Diversability founder

Tiffany Yu, founder of the social enterprise Diversability, aims rebrand the way we envision disability. Throughout her career, Tiffany has used her platform to advocate for disability inclusion in many settings including the Word Economic Forum and multiple TEDx Talks. Recently, Tiffany was featured as a keynote speaker at the sixth annual Women on the Move Leadership Day. In this episode, she sits down with Sam Saperstein to speak about inclusion, exclusion and the importance of community building.

Tiffany discusses the visible and invisible disabilities that were brought on by a car crash when she was nine years old. Her father died in the traumatic accident and she suffered many injuries, including permanent paralysis in her arm and PTSD. Tiffany refers to the memory of this event as her first “disability origin story,” and noted that for the rest of her childhood and teenage years, she struggled with feeling shame about the accident. “I actually didn't tell anyone about it for 12 years,” she shares, “because not only was it a traumatic car accident that happened, but I lost a parent and in certain Asian cultures, having someone die in your family was seen as ill fate on the entire family.”

She describes her second disability origin story as the time when she began to take pride and ownership of her disability identity. Tiffany reflects on this moment in her life as a 21 year old intern at Goldman Sachs. After a meeting, she recalls her recruiter telling her, “Tiffany, I want you to know that you deserved your place here. You don't need to have a chip on your shoulder.” Tiffany describes that moment as giving her a “permission slip” to view herself based on her potential—as the recruiter did—and not on her disability—as she had done for so long.

Micro inclusions

Tiffany identifies that memory with the recruiter as a micro moment that had an outsized positive impact in her life. Just as we often discuss micro aggressions in society, she believes there are also micro inclusions. “Sometimes that passing conversation, that little micro moment to you can make such a deep impact, such a powerful impact on someone else,” she says.

Another powerful micro inclusion in Tiffany’s life came when she attended the World Economic Forum in Davos. “A large part of the event was these networking dinners,” she recalls. “And as someone who has a paralyzed arm, attending these dinners was probably my biggest fear because at the dinners you've got some fancy meat dish coming out, and in my mind, all I'm thinking about is how am I going to cut this? How am I going to enjoy this meal?”

Tiffany’s fears about how she would handle eating her food made it hard to focus on the dinner conversation. But, she says, she had the luck of being seated next to the rapper will.i.am, who was facilitating the conversation at her table. “He pulls my plate closer to him, continuing to facilitate the conversation, cuts my meat, pushes the playback and Voila—I can now enjoy the chicken dish and participate in the conversation,” she says.

The power of exclusion

While Tiffany believes in the impact of micro inclusions, she also believes in the power of exclusion—both at the micro and macro levels. She describes a personal history with micro exclusions, such as when she had to take a physical fitness class every year of school after her arm was paralyzed. “And for me, exclusion is the reason why I do the work that I do,” she says. “Part of the reason why I created Diversability is I wanted disability to be the reason to belong, not a reason to exclude.”

Part of the power of exclusion is that it keeps the excluded from feeling like a part of a community. Tiffany’s solution to that was to aim to build community through Diversability. She refers to a Japanese proverb that roughly translates to, The nail that sticks out, gets hammered down. Her childhood experience of not wanting to stick out led to her trying to hide her disability. “It's only in recent years, have I realized that I am going to be that nail that sticks out,” she shares. “It’s our duty to be that nail.”

“I’m a nail that sticks out and there are these other nails that are sticking out and I'm literally pulling, maybe that's what my hammer is doing—pulling all of the other nails out because that's who we are,” she adds. “That's how we make this world more colorful.”

Rebecca Minkoff on female entrepreneurship and the importance of taking risks

Taking a risk—whether you end up succeeding or failing—is always the right thing to do, according to Rebecca Minkoff. Rebecca is co-founder and creative director of the global fashion brand Rebecca Minkoff, and co-founder of the Female Founder Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to enabling and empowering female-owned and led companies. In this episode, which draws from the JPMorgan Chase’s sixth annual Women on the Move Leadership Day, she discusses risk-taking, encouraging female entrepreneurship, and her new book, Fearless: The New Rules for Unlocking Creativity, Courage, and Success.

Getting comfortable with discomfort

Rebecca describes risk-taking as a no-loss scenario: Either you succeed and achieve something you didn’t think you could do, or you fail and learn something along the way. “I choose to look at taking risks as always positive,” she says. “I think that sometimes we wait for something to happen to us. And I like to tell women, the cavalry is not coming for us. We have to stick our own necks out to get what we want.”

In her book, Rebecca explains that women need to get comfortable with discomfort. “Because if you look at our history as women, and what we've had to do just to vote, to get a credit card, to sign our own mortgages—people had to stick their neck outs and be placed in uncomfortable scenarios,” she notes. “So we can get comfortable with being uncomfortable.”

Recognizing that the idea of sticking one’s neck out is scary, Rebecca urges women to practice risk-taking in small steps. “If you are like, I don't even know if I can do that, then practice with your friend, with someone who you trust, who you feel safe with,” she says. “Practice asking [your] boss for a raise or, ‘Here's how I'm going to ask to take on a project that no one thought I should take on.’” She likens this kind of practice to working out at the gym: Ultimately, you’ll build the muscle need to take risks in real-life situations.

Encouraging female entrepreneurship

After more than a decade growing her own successful business, Rebecca co-founded the Female Founder Collective in 2018 to support, develop, and elevate the founders of other female owned and led businesses. In just three years, the Collective has grown to a network on 9,000-plus female entrepreneurs and has helped women raise over $15 million in seed funding.

Rebecca says that she and her co-founder were committed to helping women access the resources and referrals needed to make their ventures successful. “Education was the biggest [missing] piece,” she explains. “As working women who've started their companies with a passion, they're not going to go back to Wharton or Harvard and get their master's degree.”

The Collective aims to fill that gap by bringing in experts for weekly or monthly informational programming as well as large networking events. A relationship with Women on the Move includes free one-on-one curated coaching for all Collective members. Rebecca says that that collaboration has been far and away the most requested and most attended of the Collective’s programming.

Looking to the future 

Rebecca says the pandemic has been both a time of great challenge and great growth for her brand, Rebecca Minkoff. When stores shut down in March 2020, they watched 70 percent of their demand evaporate overnight. And yet, she said, it led to their company revamping its product line from more than 300 styles to a fraction of that. “So some of the silver linings from the pandemic is we've gotten more focused,” she notes. As for the future, she says it’s looking bright: They’ve recently launched a luggage line, a second fragrance comes out soon, and a home and lounge line will debut in January.

She’s equally excited for what she sees as the future of solo female entrepreneurship. As the pandemic has led to higher unemployment and a shifting of priorities for women, Rebecca notes the potential for opportunity that this environment has created. “My sincere hope is that they all start businesses and they all join the female founder collective and or take advantage of coaching services [from Women on the Move],” she says. “Because if they can all start businesses, we're just at the beginning of the cycle of solo entrepreneurs.”  

“I think you're going to see a boom of people saying corporate America might not work for me,” she adds. “And so if you can start a business, I think it's a great idea and you're going to need resources and support.”

Closing the Latino wealth gap with youth-focused, digital content

Economic research has shown that among Americans, Latinos spend the most, but save and invest the least as demographic. Beatriz Acevedo has set out to change that. During the pandemic, she co-founded SUMA Wealth with the mission of helping close the Latino wealth gap via youth-focused, pop culture–inspired financial content and fintech tools. In this episode, Beatriz sits down with her friend, Alice Rodriguez, head of community impact at JPMorgan Chase & Co., to discuss the venture, her motivation, and her goals.

Motivation from her border roots

Beatriz describes herself as “a very proud border girl, an immigrant entrepreneur.” Born to parents who lived in San Diego but purposefully moved across the border for their daughter to be born a Mexican citizen, Beatriz describes her father as “the classic Latino man who came from absolutely nothing.” A proponent of hard work and education, he became an attorney and started a philanthropic foundation 30 years ago. “Every cent he made in his career, he put it back into the foundation for educational opportunities for our community,” she notes.

Beatriz shared that her parents’ work and philanthropic focus profoundly shaped her motivations. “I've always felt like I am one of those Latina outliers that was able to have opportunities from a young age,” she tells Alice. “It doesn't mean I didn’t work hard for them, but we know in our community, there are so many deserving Latinos and Latinas that worked so hard and are still not given the opportunities, whether it’s capital, whether it’s boards, whether it’s advancement on a job. So I want to spend as much time as I possibly can every day opening as many doors as I possibly can for my community.”

Ethos of a brand

Alice describes how the demographic discrepancies in the economic impact of the pandemic inspired her to move forward with SUMA Wealth. Alice was an established philanthropist and a leader in digital media and brings a focus on the Latino point of view to multiple mainstream entertainment platforms, but she recognized that Latinos were being hit the hardest by both health and economic measures during the pandemic. “We had the least amount of emergency savings [and] were not equipped for something like this to happen in our families,” she says. Beatriz knew she could help reverse that trend. Despite the fact that her background was in media, entertainment and marketing—not finance—she co-founded SUMA Wealth at the height of the pandemic.

Knowing that younger Latinos are the fastest-growing demographic spurred Beatriz to focus SUMA on them. “These are U.S.-born kids who are English dominant, consume the content in English, but they’re still untrustworthy of certain financial institutions because they just don’t know, they want to learn more, and they want to have that trust,” she explains. “And I thought, now’s a really incredible opportunity to build a brand and a community that really speaks to them in culture, more than in language.”

Beatriz explains that with SUMA, her goal is to empower the Latino community by building trust around tools and services that are already available to them. Adding the in-culture media context ensured its success: In its first ten months, SUMA surpassed all of its growth metrics.

Looking ahead

One key message that Beatriz strives to share with the Latino community is that when it comes to improving your finances or financial literacy, it’s never too early and it’s never too late. “A big goal that we have at SUMA is to really empower our community with so many tools and services that are already available to them, but to have the trust,” she says. “And I think doing it through the youth, through the millennials, through the gen Z's and the families and the communities, is a really smart way to do it because they are the big influencers and an ROI through one of them is never one-to-one, it's always one-to-many. So I think that’s how we need to think about really scaling this information into our community.”

This month SUMA is launching a free financial check-up tool where people can track how they are doing on saving, paying off debt, investing, and other financial indicators. “I would love to see that growth in our community of feeling comfortable, not just being the biggest spenders,” she tells Alice. “I would love to change that data from the biggest spenders to the biggest savers and investors. I would feel incredibly satisfied with that as part of my legacy.”

General Motors head Mary Barra talks leadership and tips for women

Mary Barra is a pioneer in the male-dominated auto industry and one of the world’s most respected and influential CEOs in the world. As Chair and Chief Executive Officer at General Motors, Mary became the first female leader of a “Big Three” automaker in 2014. In this episode, she sits down to discuss leadership with Mary Erdoes, Head of Asset & Wealth Management at J.P. Morgan and share some insightful advice for aspiring leaders.

 

Focus on the job you’re doing

As someone who worked her way up at GM from an hourly job that helped her pay college tuition, Mary offers one piece of career advice to talented and ambitious employees: Focus on doing the job you have well. “Do the job you’re doing today like you’re going to do it for the rest of your life, because that means you’re going to invest in it, you’re going to make it better, and you’re going to drive efficiencies,” she says. “If you’re doing your job today and you’re more focused on your next job, it’s not going to work out well.”

In Mary’s experience, when you’re invested in your job, your leaders notice your commitment, and that’s what leads to new opportunities. For Mary, new opportunities at GM included being named vice president of Global Manufacturing Engineering in 2008, before being tapped a year later to be vice president of Global Human Resources.

Trusting and empowering the most vital resource

One of Mary’s first big moves as head of HR was to abolish the firm’s multi-page dress code and introduce a “dress appropriately” policy. Explaining that her real motivation was to recognize and empower employee’s own instincts. Mary says, “When you think about it, you’re trusting these people to do a great job every day to design a vehicle, or to service a customer,” she notes. “And you can’t trust them to know what they should wear?” 

She recalls one incident where a manager came to her asking her to re-implement the old dress code because his employees were now wearing jeans to work and he didn’t think that was appropriate since they sometimes had to meet with clients. Mary suggested he talk to his team about the issue rather than establishing a mandate. “He called me back two weeks later and he said, it was great. We all decided that we can wear jeans, but we’ll have a pair of khakis or dress pants available. So if there’s that rare time where we have to meet with someone, we will look appropriate for the meeting.”

Recognizing what women bring to the table

Mary also shares tips for aspiring female leaders, drawn from her experiences. First she highlights the importance of women understanding that they bring a lot to the table. “I know we’re all different, but in general, I think we approach things more collaboratively, we recognize people, we include,” she notes. And those traits are invaluable in terms of being able to engage other people and get the best outcomes—especially in cross-functional teams and situations.

Mary also has words of wisdom about the perennial work-life balancing act, stressing that when women take ownership of their own balance and identify what’s most important to them, they have the best results. “Your manager or your leader can’t work life balance for you, because they don’t know what’s important to you,” she says.

Once they’ve identified what’s important to their own work-life balance, she advises women to give themselves permission to state their needs. She recalls a time when she watched the clock keep rolling after a meeting was supposed to end at 5:15 pm. She had to be home to relieve her childcare-giver so they could make it to an evening class. “Finally, I think I let another five minutes go and I just said to my boss, ‘I really need to leave.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, go,’” she recalls. “From that point on, if it was toward that end of the day, he’d be like, ‘Do you need to leave?’ And he didn’t say, ‘You can leave. We’re going to keep going.’ He ended the meeting.” 

Mary says one thing she learned is that most managers will do that—once they understand what you need to be effective at work, they want to make it happen. “No one gets it perfectly,” she says of work-life balance. But the important thing is advocating for yourself at work so you can meet the needs of your family. In the end, Mary wants her family to know she did what was necessary to meet her obligations to them: “I was dedicated and I cared and it was important.” 

Breaking down cryptocurrency with leaders from JPMorgan Chase

Curious about innovative banking technologies such as blockchain, crypto, and liquidity? In this episode of Women on the Move, host Sam Saperstein sits down with two great leaders Christine Moy, who leads J.P. Morgan’s blockchain team, and Lori Schwartz, the bank’s global head of liquidity solutions.

Lori has been in banking her whole career and has become a subject matter expert in liquidity solutions. She describes her current role as a Jack-of-all-trades: using product management to tie together sales, compliance, legal, regulatory, technology, and operations. What she loves most about her work is its relevance,  both to clients—helping them leverage solutions to better manage their business—and to the firm itself—as a deposit generator, liquidity solutions help to “fund the firm.”

Christine has been in banking at J.P. Morgan for nearly two decades. Five years ago, she got to focus on her love for technology and building products when she became the first hire to J.P. Morgan's blockchain and crypto team. While those terms may sound futuristic and complex, throughout the episode, Christine uses practical examples to break them down for listeners and explains the firm’s plans for the future. (Spoiler: It involves outer space!)

De-mystifying “blockchain” and “crypto”

Sam asks Christine to describe blockchain to listeners who might be unfamiliar with the concept, and Christine has a great analogy to help break it down. “I like to have people imagine a shared spreadsheet because the best way to think about blockchain is that it's a ledger that is shared by multiple participants and it's updated in real time,” she notes. She explains that these “shared ledgers” use cryptography and consensus mechanisms to ensure that everyone connected to a ledger is seeing the same view in real time—all while the ledger is tracking the historical progress of its subject.

Christine extends her analogy to explain how cryptocurrencies relate to blockchain. Cryptocurrencies, or crypto assets, are the asset types that you would track on the digital ledger, she says. Christine also describes the critical difference between public blockchains and permission blockchains. Cryptocurrencies usually live on the public blockchain side, she says, and anyone with a computer and an internet connection can have access to cryptocurrencies and crypto assets and public blockchains. “So the easy way to think about it is the Bitcoin blockchain is basically the digital ledger of all the Bitcoin transactions that have happened in the history of the world,” Christine explains. “And so basically what you get from the shared ledger is that you're able to have unique digital assets that have a transaction history.”

Understanding liquidity management

While the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchains may seem removed from the day-to-day focus of a bank, Lori explains how related it really is to her more grounded world of liquidity management. “I think the major connect point between some of the areas that we're exploring and innovating is the keyword or value,” she notes. “And then what we really do every single day to help our clients manage their business. So whether the internet of value or, you know, the value of payments, we're helping companies move money across the globe.”

Lori also shares a practical analogy to help listeners think about liquidity management. “I start thinking about your own personal life,” she says. “You have a bank account, maybe you have one or two, probably have an investment account somewhere, but you have within your own personal life, pretty good understanding of what money is coming in and what money is going to go out.” If you take that simple, personal perspective, she says, and blow it up to global multinationals, financial institutions, and broker dealers, that’s the focus of liquidity management. “It’s managing with the view to understand how much cash you have, where it is, how you get access to it, and to ultimately optimize it,” she says. 

Innovating for the future

Christine describes how her role has recently expanded to include overseeing the Liink network, a  network of cross-border payments and banks connected together with blockchain technology to exchange information. The goal, she says, is to address pain points in the cross border payment space to make payments faster and cheaper and more efficient. The implications for the future, she says, are practically limitless. “Like I have to let you guys know that  J.P. Morgan is actually the first bank in space because we launched a couple satellites in space and we ran an Ethereum blockchain and actually tested tokenized payments to research, maybe an intergalactic coin that we might issue one day,” she shares.

 

JPMorgan Chase’s head of community impact on closing wealth gaps in America

Three weeks away from her retirement, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Alice Rodriguez accepted the opportunity to lead the organization’s new community impact department. In her new role, she is helping manage the firm’s 5 year, $30 billion investment into racial equity. In this episode of the WOTM Podcast, Alice speaks with host Sam Saperstein about some of the early wins that the department has seen, her work as chairwoman for the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and the importance of recognizing Hispanic Heritage Month. Alice also discusses the important role that mentors like her mother have played in her life and how her new role at the firm has allowed her to make a positive impact in her own community and beyond.

Focusing on the wealth divide

The community impact department was created as a part of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s continued effort to reduce wealth gaps and systemic racism in society. As Alice discusses, the median net worth for a white household was $188,000 in 2019, compared to $36,005 and $24,000 for Latino and Black households respectively. Given this alarming discrepancy, Alice discusses the work that her team is driving to bridge these gaps.

Throughout her conversation with Sam, Alice outlines some of her team’s key focuses like home ownership, entrepreneurship and access to credit that will help them to achieve their goal of  increasing opportunities for minorities to build wealth. Key to this initiative is how the bank has aligned and engrained this effort as an integral part of their business strategies in order to ensure sustainability. As Alice states, “The only way to successfully do that is to have the businesses think about (diverse communities) in their strategic work.”

Reaching entrepreneurs

While female minority entrepreneurs are starting businesses at increased rates, Alice notes that many don’t have access to mentors to guide them through essential business practices, from business planning to technical details and challenges. To help with this issue, J.P. Morgan has sponsored a business owners forum in Chicago for Black women, and has helped fund the upcoming Los Angeles Latina Fest in October. Through these events and others, J.P. Morgan is focusing on reaching women of color in an intentional and purposeful way.

from the Chamber

At a moment in history when many Americans are having more conversations about racial equity, Alice mentions that she wants to see Latino communities become a larger part of those discussions. “I've been very vocal as the chairwoman of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce that we're not paying enough attention to this,” she says.

Through her role as a member of the Dallas and U.S. Hispanic Chambers Alice has learned valuable insights about how to meet communities where they are, explaining that trust is a critical component of reaching Hispanic and Latinx communities. “People that come from other Latin American countries, the bank doesn't really have the same reputation that a bank here in the U.S. would have. There's just a lot of horror stories that have happened in their countries, that the bank is actually the last place they're going to come for help on what they need for their business.”

Alice highlights that in order to build trust, the bank can leverage its relationships with organizations in the community, utilize accessible language and be more intentional about recognizing Hispanic culture.

Passing down lessons

During the episode, Alice discusses the pride that she feels in celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, which takes place from September 15 to October 15. “I just know the sacrifices that my mom in particular made for our family,” she says. “There's just so much beauty in the family and culture and the faith and the traditions.”

Alice takes pride in passing down traditions from her mother to her own daughters—everything from making tamales to having a strong work ethic. “One of the most important values that my sister and I always talk about that we got from our mom was we can be scrappy. We do not have to have perfection. You know, we know how to be scrappy. And I think that has served me well over the last 35 years.”