Women on the Move Podcast

Head of AI research sees a collaborative future

A world-renowned expert in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), Dr. Manuela Veloso was a professor in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University and she took a leave of absence three years ago to be head of artificial intelligence research at JPMorgan Chase. In this role, she has applied AI to problems in economics, data management, and gender equity. She sits down with WOTM’s Sam Saperstein to talk about her journey, what she loves about her job, and the future of AI and robotics.

Working as a team

Manuela Veloso earned her Master of Science in electrical engineering in Lisbon, Portugal, before coming to the United States in 1984 to begin work on a PhD. She made the switch to computer science after she came to see how computers can solve problems for people, a purpose that still resonates for her today. She became interested in robotics because while computers and AI could create plans, it took robots to execute them. She tells Sam that she never had interest in science fiction or robots before that. “I began addressing the robotics only because of my interest in seeing these plans that we’d created theoretically eventually, through a generation of actions, being executed,” she says.

In 1996, Manuela cofounded a robotics soccer competition known as RoboCup, bringing together people’s love of games, and soccer in particular, as a way of promoting robotics and AI research. The RoboCup is still held every year and has advanced from the days of single robots on wheels acting independently to today, where humanoid robots work as a team.

A collaborative future

Manuela sees a future in which humans and intelligence systems are inseparable. She relates this vision to a breakthrough she had at Carnegie Mellon about ten years ago when she was developing robots that would not be able to solve certain novel problems. “These robots would move down these corridors and then they would face a closed door, or they would have to press an elevator button or someone talked with them and they didn't understand what people were saying.” The robots would never be autonomous if they kept being stymied by these problems. “And then one day I decided that we wouldn't be able to solve this problem with more arms for the robots or better language technology. There will always be these limitations, intrinsic limitations in the robots.” 

Her solution was “cohort robots,” or robots that work together with humans to solve problems. Manuela explains: “Basically if there was an obstacle in front of them, they would say, please, can you help me please? Excuse me, get out of my way, open the door, press the elevator button. They became autonomous, but asking for help.” She calls it “symbiotic autonomy.” She also calls it “the secret of the future.”

“One day I believe that we will be always asking for assistance from AI,” she says. Because of the huge amount of data we’ve accumulated and continue to accumulate, the scale of our problems—whether it’s at work, getting advice from a financial advisory, or just sorting the photos on our iPhones—is only getting bigger. Manuela says that humans who leverage AI to make decisions will be more trustworthy.

Advice and Legacy

Manuela hopes her legacy will be the simple notion that “problems can be solved.” But not even AI can solve them easily or right away. We have to put in the work, but we can celebrate progress. “And this is true for women in the job,” she adds. “This is the advice I always give: Break the difficult problems into pieces. Try to reward yourself, be happy when little pieces are accomplished. It's perfectly fine that the big piece is not there yet.” Take satisfaction in the steps along the way.

 

Three Babes Bakeshop owner on pandemic lessons and the importance of community

Lenore Estrada co-founded Three Babes Bakeshop just in time to have business upended by the pandemic. But rather than shrink from the challenge, she went on to co-found the SF New Deal, a community support and food relief organization dedicated to helping other small businesses—and individuals in need of food—make it through the pandemic. Here she sits down with WOTM host Sam Saperstein to discuss how she created her business, what she’s learned, and what she thinks about the future.

Launching a start-up

By her early 20s, Lenore had experienced a lifetime of challenges—including growing up around poverty, the sudden death of her college boyfriend, and cancer diagnoses for both her and her mom. Something told her it was time to take stock of her life, starting with her career. She made a list of the day-to-day job experiences she actually liked. Her list included talking to people, and community work. “So then I made a list of jobs where I could use these skills every day, and one of them was entrepreneurship,” she tells Sam. “So I decided to start a business.”

First up was determining the where and the what. She landed on northern California for the where—to be closer to mom. For the “what” she picked baking. She had a lifelong friend who already worked in the food industry, and she realized a bakery business had a low “barrier to entry,” which suited her since she had little money to invest. She and two friends launched a Kickstarter campaign, and soon raised $10k. Three Babes Bakeshop was born.

“When I started my company, I really was coming from a kind of a place of no other options,” she recalls. “And I started it, and immediately the feeling was so different [from] working for someone else.” She was hooked on the entrepreneurial life, but faced many curveballs from the beginning. After an early focus on fruit pies, she and her partner realized the product was too seasonal to offer the stability they needed to grow the business. They soon found that stability in contracts to provide a variety of baked goods to corporate offices. 

Start-up ups and downs

Selling baked goods for corporations offered Three Babes the stability to plan in advance and invest in the future. But less than a year later, Three Babes Bakeshop faced a big challenge: The pandemic crashed into their space like a natural disaster. In early 2020, Lenore was warily watching news of the coronavirus. But it was Pi Day (March 14^th) that really drove home the impending catastrophe. Clients weren’t ordering their usual large Pi Day orders. “That sort of told me that people were feeling uncertain,” she tells Sam. It wasn’t long before Three Babes scaled down to nearly no business.

Helping the community

It was still the very early days of the pandemic shutdown when an old friend called Lenore and said he was concerned and upset about what was happening to small businesses in San Francisco. “And he offered to donate a million dollars if I was willing to sort of be the leader and form a non-profit to get that money out to the community,” she tells Sam. “So we started this organization and basically we started just buying meals from small restaurants and delivering them to hungry people.”

That’s how SF New Deal was born in March of 2020. Before long, they were helping small businesses band together to apply for federal grants. Businesses were getting the revenue they needed, and food insecure individuals were getting tastier and fresher food than they would get at a food pantry.

Today, Lenore is still the executive director of SF New Deal and running Three Babes. As far as what else the future might hold for her, she tells Sam that she’s always wanted to run for office.

Driven by the mission of placing more women on executive boards

Diversifying a board of directors is easier said than done, but Rebecca Thornton, head of Director Advisory Services at JPMorgan Chase & Co., has some great advice about creating a well-rounded board. She sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss how her team identifies diverse board candidates—and her advice for women aspiring to sever on a board.

The art and science of matching candidates to board positions

Rebecca describes how JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Director Advisory Services was formed in 2016 by Jamie Dimon. It was a time when senior bankers at the firm were increasingly being contacted as sources for board searches. “And Jamie knew who he knew and the banker down the hall knew who she knew, but there was no real central clearing house for all the great talent our bankers knew to be board interested,” she explains. “And on the other side, we had clients coming to us saying, We need an audit chair. Do you know anybody with emerging markets experience? It'd be great if they were also diverse.”

Rebecca’s team now acts as that central clearinghouse with a mission of creating a more robust list of candidates. They now have a network of 4,000 people, and about 60 percent of their “actively looking network” are women or other underrepresented individuals.

Creating the list is when art and science meet, according to Rebecca. “The science is where they match the criteria,” she says. “So you're looking for a qualified financial expert who can step into an audit chair role who has emerging markets experience [and the client would love it] if they've also had operations experience out of a consumer-facing business, and this has to be a female or underrepresented person.” Rebecca’s team goes through their network and identifies people who meet the science. “The art is where the special sauce is because you have to make sure that beyond the paper that the person is going to fit,” she describes. “And that's where you really do need to understand a little bit of the culture of the organization.”

Advice for aspiring board members

Rebecca acknowledges that there’s a catch-22 for people seeking their first board positions: boards want individuals with board experience, so how do you get the experience? Her advice: be really good at what you do, and make sure that people are aware of your skills. With about 70 percent of board vacancies filled through relationships, Rebecca maintains that building your brand and networking are key to getting your name out there as a potential board candidate. As a resource for aspiring board members, she recommends checking out the local chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD).

And while she believes that the time is right for women taking more and more prominent roles on boards—most firms are fully on board with wanting to recruit women and other diverse members—there are still practical roadblocks to achieving full parity. One of them is the simple fact that board vacancies can be infrequent. She says that age remains the predominant reason for board turnover, and members typically serve until 72 or 75 years of age. “I just think there are some practical reasons why it continues to sort of lag or take time or plateau, but the good news is that I don't think there’ll ever be a board search done again where there’s an entire slate of white men,” she adds.

Rebecca and Sam also discuss the topic of quotas on boards. And while Rebecca says that in general she doesn't like quotas for quota’s sake, she  does feel like we’re in a place where the talent and depth is there, and quotas can help move institutions toward parity. “And if a company's doing it to satisfy a quota, I have a lot of confidence in my sisters that they show up, they do their work, and they’re going to have impact,” she emphasizes. “So if that voice convinces everybody else in the room that, Hey, this wasn’t so bad, she was actually pretty great. Then they get a second voice and a third voice and a fourth voice and parity at some point down the road . . . you have to start somewhere.”

Fast Forward founder talks thinking big and achieving dreams

Like many talented and ambitious professionals Lisa McCarthy once believed that professional success required personal sacrifice. But when she found herself at a career crossroads in her mid-40s, she took a leap of faith and left the corporate world to start a business aimed at proving that old assumption wrong. Today, she’s the CEO and co-founder of Fast Forward, a training and coaching company whose mission is to help organizations create a culture where professional and personal success go hand in hand.

In this episode, Lisa sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein—who has been through Fast Forward coaching herself—todiscuss her company’s approach to helping individuals think big, focus on what matters, and achieve success in their whole lives.

Dreaming big

Lisa and her co-founder, Wendy Leshgold,started brainstorming about the company when they were in their 30s and shared the epiphany that it is possible to have both professional success and personal fulfillment.But it wasn’t until nine years ago, when she was in her mid-40s and encountered an unexpected twist in her successful career as a sales executive, that Lisa made her dream a reality.

“When we launched the company, I literally moved from a corporate setting with a big team and a lot of infrastructure,” she recalls to Sam. “And all of a sudden I was in my home office on video with Wendy on the west coast. And so I knew that I was choosing to be uncomfortable, but similar to what we do in the program, we created a bold vision: At the time we went two years out and we really imagined What would extraordinary success look like for our company? What are we known for? What type of leaders are we working with? What impact are we having on their culture, on their talent, on their business?”

Lisa shares that the biggest critical success factor in starting Fast Forward was putting that bold vision down on paper. Sam wholeheartedly agrees, as she recounts her own experience as a Fast Forward participant through a JPMorgan Chase program. “It really did change my life and my career,” Sam says. “I wrote this vision down and I shared it with my Fast Forward buddy, who was a senior executive here at JPMorgan Chase. And when she heard it, she said to me, you know what, there’s a job that’s going to be created to run our new Women on the Move group, and it might be something of interest to you. I was amazed that I’d written something down, I shared it with someone else, and lo and behold, she had another idea for me, and look at what’s happened. Four years later, I’m in this job which is really a dream come true.”

Plan the work and work the plan

Lisa explains that Fast Forward is based on a simple, science-backed framework aimed at helping people identify and achieve their goals. Their clients are organizations that recognize the commercial benefit to having employees thrive in all areas of their lives, but the program participants are the ones who do the work of visioning and achieving. “We talk about getting clear on how you personally would define success and fulfillment because it’s different for all people. What is truly important to you?”

Fast Forward participants are matched with coaches who help them stay track and develop actionable steps to achieve your goals. “Then you’re chunking it out into bite size things that move it from daunting to doable and getting somebody else’s input, because sometimes you don’t know how to do it,” she explains. “And your buddy or a colleague may see a lot. So the first step is declaring a bold vision and sharing it. And then we plan the work and work the plan.”

Scaling up

In response to a request from JPMorgan Chase, Fast Forward has intensely scaled up their programs. As Sam explained, leadership wanted the Fast Forward program to reach employees broadly across the company, to move it from serving 30 to 40 people at a time in a room to reaching thousands of employees. Fast Forward met the challenge by developing more digital assets and using online meet rooms. “The punchline is 6,000 people have gone through this program entirely during COVID, which is really remarkable,” Lisa shares.

Pre-COVID, 80 percent of Fast Forward’s trainings were in person. Rather than letting the pandemic impact the company, Lisa and Wendy re-envisioned what success could look like for the company. Today they offer organizations virtual options and online resources for individuals who aren’t part of a formal Fast Forward program. Anyone can download the bold vision exercise and two samples to help them get started at FastForwardGroup.net.

Trinny London CEO helps women find and flaunt their unique beauty

 

Trinny Woodall wants all women to experience the joy of showing your best self. As CEO and founder of global beauty brand Trinny London, Woodall creates makeup personally tailored to women’s unique skin, hair, and eyes. “I love that feeling somebody gets when I make them feel better, it’s just such a secret sauce, such a magical thing to be able to do,” she says.

 

In this episode of Women on the Move, host Sam Saperstein sits down with Trinny to discuss her passions, her path to success, and lessons she’s learned along the way as a renowned makeover expert, best-selling author, mother, and TV personality. Listen in as they discuss Trinny London’s unique approach to personalization and its mission to give customers the confidence to be their best.

 

A passion for the power of makeup

Trinny started her career in finance, before getting her break as a fashion columnist for the Daily Telegraph in the 1980s. She and her columnist partner soon enjoyed success as fashion makeover experts. From there, she tells Sam, the transition to the makeup industry was a natural step for her. “I think that founders come either from a passion of understanding a hole in the market or that coupled with what they really would want for themselves,” she says. For her, it was both: Her years working with fashion had taught her how much women value the concept of an individually tailored makeover, and her personal experience with makeup gave her a passion for it.

Growing up with acne, she explains, made her fall in love with what she calls the power of makeup at a young age. At 15, she recalls, her godmother took her to a makeup counter in New York City. “And going into an American beauty counter at that stage when England was so boring and behind . . . there was that feeling of, I can be transformed by this,” she recalls. “For me, it's like, how can I be the best me, but still be me? And that was always what I felt as a woman. I didn't want to become somebody else. I wanted to just be able to look in the mirror and feel happy with what I saw.”

It was the idea to personalize makeup that helped her stand out in the market. She says that once she had identified the need, she wanted to invent trends, not follow them. “And so I thought, okay, don't put red on every single person, because this woman has brown skin, a blonde hair, a greener eye,” she explains. “This woman has a peaches and cream skin and a blue eye and a brown hair. So why would you do the same thing? And I just thought back in my head, I’d love it. And that was that beginning of all, match-to-me technology.”

She began making the formulations in her bathroom and sending them off to the lab. Early clients would come to her bathroom, and she would track their products on a large physical chart on the wall. From that early data, she developed an algorithm and “things evolved from there.” Today, clients log onto the Trinny London website, put in their skin profile, and get customized examples and suggestions of what to pick.

 

Lessons learned

Trinny says she was confident early on that personalized makeup would work. “I knew from the 5,000 women I've made over in that 10 years, I knew there was a need,” she says. “I knew women would love it.” Developing Trinny London into what it is today, however, was facilitated by the help and advice of others. One mentor “was fantastic,” she recalled. “She said, you need suppliers. You need somebody who can help you manufacture what you're making in your bathroom. So, she put me in touch with people. I developed relationships.”

 

She credits much of Trinny London’s success to her staff and her hiring philosophies. “At Trinny London, we look for raw talent,” she explains. “I literally glide over somebody's university degree. When I look at the CV, I glide over nearly everything. I just want to kind of understand What's their passion? What's their motivation? What motivation have they inherited from their family life?”

Workplace inclusion for individuals with disabilities: insights from an MS patient and a leading neurologist

Multiple sclerosis is a focus of interest for many medical researchers, and a critical issue for women as more are impacted than men. As a disease that also affects working-aged women more than retirement-aged, it’s also the focus of many workplace diversity and inclusion experts. In this episode of Women on the Move, host Sam Saperstein sits down with a noted neurologist, physician, and MS specialist, as well as a diversity and inclusion leader at JPMorgan Chase who was diagnosed with MS nearly a decade ago.

Dr. Jai Perumal is the attending Neurologist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medicine, where she specializes in MS and other neuroinflammatory diseases. And Sheree Carara is Vice President and Product Manager for Digital Channels at JPMorgan Chase—where, as an employee with MS, she’s also become a leader in the inclusion arena. In this conversation you’ll hear their insights on MS as well as learn about their efforts to increase awareness of and treatment for all disabilities.

MS and the workplace

Sheree was diagnosed with MS in July 2013, and at the time she took the diagnosis as a death sentence for her career ambitions. As an autoimmune disease that can disrupt the functioning of the optic nerve or spinal cord, MS can cause symptoms ranging from vision problems, to numbness, balance issue, or cognition problems.

Not all MS patients experience all or even any of those symptoms, but they often share one common thread: emotional distress and fear after diagnosis. Sheree recalls that she immediately assumed she could never succeed in corporate America. “I realized that I couldn’t do what I used to do,” she tells Sam and Jai. “I didn’t think there was any other option. I saw myself in a wheelchair. That’s what I thought.” 

Instead, Sheree flourished at JPMorgan Chase—due to both her own tenacity and the support of colleagues. In fact, CAREERS and the disABLED magazine recently celebrated her as an employee of the year for her efforts on behalf of people with disabilities in the workplace. She says the JPMorgan’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion offers great resources, including videos illustrating how to tell your manager about a disability as well as how managers can supportively respond to hearing the news. She says the more tools and information that is available, the better. “I now have a different ability,” she says. “It’s not the same abilities as before, but I can say I need help. It’s okay. I just need support and help.”

Treatment and the future

With many MS patients being diagnosed in their twenties, Jai says that one of her motivations for getting involved with MS research and treatment was the opportunity to develop long-term relationships with patients. “You start seeing patients in their twenties and they grow with you,” she says. “You see patients over time and you become friends.”

Jai describes the care she takes when a patient is newly diagnosed, and how the first visit can be overwhelming. “Because you’re talking about the disease,” she notes. “We have to talk about the next step too, which is treatment. The most important thing is understanding what it is committing to treatment. We have so many treatments now. So a patient diagnosed now can expect to have a treatment that controls their disease very well.”

In terms of workplace policies around inclusion, Jai offers straightforward advice to employers: don’t try to fit all people with disabilities into one mold. For instance, with MS, some patients have visible disabilities, and it can be easy for employers to make accommodations. But others have invisible disabilities such as fatigue or cognition issues. When employers and colleagues both recognize and communicate about these invisible disabilities, accommodations can go much smoother. Because, she notes, “sometimes you just need to make some adjustments and patients can continue their jobs.”

Jai offers one other piece of advice for individuals with unexplained symptoms: Don’t ignore those symptoms, seek answers by visiting a doctor. And look for a good fit with a medical provider. She notes that many patients find a good fit with the first provider they see. “But if they don’t resonate with you, if you don’t have a connection [seek another opinion] because this is a long-term relationship, you need to be perfectly in sync with your provider.”

Leveraging the power of women—and the millennial VC who is investing in them

Co-founder and managing partner of the first female-led millennial venture capital firm, SoGal Ventures, Elizabeth Galbut sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss how she's going beyond investing in women to creating a global ecosystem of both women and men who are investing in women.

The Accidental Venture Capitalist

As the only child of two doctors, Elizabeth “grew up in the healthcare system.” “And very early on, I was seeing that there were a lot of problems in healthcare from a business perspective, as well as, how do you improve patient care for all of us in the U.S.?”

Initially, Elizabeth’s goal was to enter the healthcare industry to solve some of these broad issues. In the end, she says, she’s doing something very similar as a venture capitalist, by investing directly into innovative companies that are currently changing the landscape of healthcare. “So I call myself a bit of an accidental venture capitalist,” she tells Sam. “It definitely wasn't what I went into graduate school thinking I was going to do, but looking back, it really makes sense.”

During graduate school at Johns Hopkins she recognized the need for venture capitalists to invest in healthcare ideas. At Hopkins, she saw so many entrepreneurs with amazing backgrounds who weren't able to find capital to finance their businesses. “I thought,there's really this arbitrage investment opportunity of backing these founders.”

Through early, small investments she learned the value of even very small investments in talented people with great ideas. “It's not always about the dollar amount, but it's really about being that supporter and,helping somebody understand that what you're doing is actually valuable and you should keep going.”

Building an ecosystem

Elizabeth was just 23 when she and her 25-year-old partner decided to launch a venture capital firm. Going to career fairs and conferences as an MBA student had opened her eyes to the gender issues in the VC field. “Sometimes the men venture capitalists would say we don't hire women,” she recalls. Rather than join a male-dominated firm she and her partner founded SoGal, with an investment focus on exceptional, diverse founding teams that have plans for global expansion focused on tackling major consumer or healthcare problems in the U.S. and Asia.

Elizabeth and her partner identified early on that they were interested in supporting not just women entrepreneurs, but also other women investors. She describes those efforts as creating an ecosystem for investors, empowering founders and investors, and creating a support system and community. “There are trillions of dollars to be unlocked by empowering women. So of course I want to empower women from a social perspective, but it's also a deep business opportunity that we should all be paying attention to.”

Mother-daughter tech pioneers empowering and investing in women of color

Gayle Jennings-O'Byrne learned about the power of sisterhood and of women in technology from her mother, Thelma Bataille, who was a tech trailblazer in the 1960s and 70s. After a career at JP Morgan Chase leading philanthropy, Gayle went on to found the WOCstar Fund, a venture capital firm that invests in women of color (“WOC”) and diverse inclusive teams in the tech sector. In this episode, Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein sits down with both mother and daughter to discuss their pioneering contributions in nurturing and mentoring the next generation of entrepreneurs.

The can-do mindset

Seeing her mother succeed in computer programming and impact the nation was inspiring, “but the biggest thing that she did was she just believed in you,” Gayle recalls. Gayle’s biggest advise to other entrepreneurs is to “believe in yourself, believe you can do it. Because if you believe in yourself, you have a radius about you. That is a magnet, it will attract others.”

Gayle received her M.B.A. from the University of Michigan and spent 20 years in corporate America. “I had this amazing, great experience of seeing the capital markets from corporate finance and investment banking,” she tells Sam. “And then I also saw how capital was being deployed in a philanthropic impact investing way. And yet I realized we were still missing a huge segment of the population women and in particular women of color.” She went on to found her first firm, focused on investing in startups led by Black and Latinx women. In 2018, she founded WOCstar.

Builder capitalists

Gayle describes herself and her partners as “builder capitalists” versus venture capitalists. The builder capitalist is also focused on returns and on the most efficient and productive deployment and usage of capital. “But the difference is that we want to be there to help those founders build to success,” she says. “It's not enough for us if we're simply investing in them and hoping that they're going to be that unicorn.” This idea encompasses her belief that the way women succeed is by building together.

Part of Gayle’s investing thesis is customer engagement to validate customer product fit.  Companies must have a  product in the marketplace, ensuring there is an active and open dialogue with customers Pushing for progress

Reflecting on their careers and similar barriers faced despite being different generations, Thelma is disheartened but not ready to concede. Gayle says that’s why she’s continued to devote her energies to building women’s inner confidence and empowering them. She says that women, and particularly women of color, are very diverse and inclusive in how they build teams and how they collaborate. “So if you get a woman of color involved, she’s going to bring the rest of the village.” Thinking about the WOCstars they invest in and advise, both mother-daughter believe change and progress is on the horizon.

How Melissa Bradley is creating $100 billion in new wealth for the New Majority by 2030

Helping women and People of Color achieve their entrepreneurial goals has been Melissa Bradley’s driving force throughout her career. Along the way she founded 1863 Ventures, a nonprofit that helps underserved entrepreneurs move from high potential to high growth, and she co-founded a separate platform that provides support for small- to medium-sized businesses. On this episode, she sits down with Women on the Move’s Sam Saperstein to discuss these two ventures, the lessons she's learned, and her progress towards creating $100 billion in new wealth for the new majority by 2030.

Empowering women, black and brown entrepreneurs

Melissa first realized that entrepreneurship was a pathway to financial success when she was bartending as a student at Georgetown University. When she returned to Georgetown as a professor, a student project to organize an entrepreneurial summit in Anacostia quickly grew, eventually becoming 1863 Ventures. The organization is dedicated to accelerating black and brown entrepreneurs from high potential to high growth, through rigorous leadership training and strategic market access. A key differentiator is their focus on ongoing operations for established companies, rather than startups. Their methodology was proven out by the high survival rate of their companies during the pandemic.

Following the success of 1863 Ventures, Melissa co-founded Ureeka in 2018. Ureeka offers “always-on coaching” to minority entrepreneurs, with 24-7 access to peers and colleagues via an app or website. “We essentially partner with accelerators and incubators all over the country and now corporations and others who want to help women and entrepreneurs of color and provide a scalable platform,” Melissa tells Sam.

1863 was Ureeka’s first customer. After businesses “graduate” from 1863, they receive ongoing support through Ureeka. At Ureeka, Melissa and her team  “made a commitment that every conversation, we would solve a single problem,” rather than offering theoretical advice

Qualities of a successful entrepreneur

The environment for entrepreneurs has changed in just the past decade. Ten years ago, Melissa notes, there was a stigma attached to entrepreneurship—that people starting businesses were either crazy or had graduated from Harvard. Today, “there's diversity in who shows up,” she says. “I think people are much more open to asking for help because they don't worry that people are going to make fun of them.”

In addition to the three most common mistakes entrepreneurs make, Melissa shares the three key qualities entrepreneurs must have to be successful. The first is blind optimism, “if you believe and see it for yourself, then go for it.”  The second is a dose of tenacity and resilience, she says, noting that many people are going to tell you no along the way.  The third quality is self-awareness and the ability to recognize “when you're not the right person to do certain things” and then move on to the next big problem that needs solving.

Anne-Marie Slaughter talks Care Feminism and Portfolio Careers

Anne-Marie Slaughter talks Care Feminism and Portfolio Careers

 

Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” published in the Atlantic Magazine in 2012, ignited a national conversation about women and the workplace. The former director of planning at the U.S. State Department and current CEO of New America sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss why this article continues to resonate with women, her career, and a new type of feminism.

 

 

The article heard around the world

Anne-Marie had just left her glass ceiling–busting job in Clinton’s State Department when she wrote her Atlantic Magazine article. She recalls how the article “catapulted me into this different world, this domestic world, mostly talking about gender equality.” It was her time at the State Department, she says, that prompted the realization that “having it all” wasn’t the solution or the end game. As she wrote in the article, “I finally allowed myself to accept what was really most important to me. And that decision led to a reassessment of the feminist narrative that I grew up with and have always championed.”

 

“Real equality doesn't mean remaking myself as a man,” Anne-Marie tells Sam. “It means having the same opportunities that men have had, but also being able to be who I am.” She says that while working in D.C. during the week and commuting home to her family with two teenage sons on the weekend, she realized that while she took pride in her work, she didn’t want to look back later and feel she missed out on critical time with her family. Recognizing how hard it was to make space in her life for both her career and her family prompted her to re-think the ideas of feminism she had grown up with. Now that she was a leader in the system, her next goal was to “reshape the system to adapt to me, not to shape myself to the system.”

 

Care feminism

Anne-Marie tells Sam that her ideas of feminism evolved over her time as a professional leader and family caretaker. “When I wrote my Atlantic article, I was focused on the ways in which workplaces and norms needed to adapt, to allow women to have the same careers as men,” she says. “So I was solidly a career feminist and just saying, it's just much harder than I recognized, and I've been wrong not to see it from the perspective of women.” 

 

She soon began focusing on what she calls deeper forces of care and career. “And I'd concluded that you couldn't value men's traditional work and expect women to do it without equally valuing women's traditional work and expecting men to do it—just mathematically, it won't work,” she says.

 

Care feminism is infused into New America, particularly in the organization’s initiative, Better Life Lab. The Lab, sponsored in part by JP Morgan Chase, focuses on original research and reporting aimed at reimagining work, gender equity, and work-family justice for families of all types.

 

Portfolio careers

The lifelong arc of women’s—and men’s—careers is another piece of the work-life balance that Anne-Marie is reimagining. “I think about this increasingly in terms of what I call a portfolio career, that most of us need a job, and we do other things on top of it, but there's a kind of central job,” she tells Sam. Throughout people’s careers, she says, there may be times when they want or need to step back or slow down—but that doesn’t mean they have to take a break from their career. Anne-Marie believes rather than balancing everything at once, “it’s really possible to think about all the different things you want to do and construct a portfolio of activity that is your life.”