Q: Given how frequently you travel internationally, does the threat of terrorist attacks on airplanes make you nervous?
A: I don’t know that I’m nervous. The reality is that flying is very safe. In some ways you feel safer after an incident. (The management team) always goes on separate planes.
Q: How do you balance travel with your family life?
A: I’m married with four boys. My husband stays home, which is a great advantage. It’s not always been easy. I’ve been working in very demanding jobs for most of my career. After I had kids, I felt like I got more sleep on planes.
You try to be there and be involved. It’s the relationship between the boys that’s the hard part to build. It takes a parent to work on that when you have four children. It’s easy to keep kids happy in separate activities.
Q: Do you travel for fun?
A: Some. We have big families so a lot of our travel is with them. I grew up in Idaho, and we have a ranch there. We’ve gone to Hawaii and London. We’re going to go to Costa Rica.
Q: How does an anthropology major and former museum curator wind up as CFO of a global distribution company?
A: I was always interested in business. I was very interested in the way people interact with each other, and I was thinking about the interaction of people with their companies.
I spent four years at the Museum of International Folk Art in New Mexico as curator of Spanish Colonial art. The interaction of people with each other was fascinating to me.
Introducing one thing into a culture can change the hierarchy and how people interact. Small things you do can influence the overall organization.
Q: Tell me about your involvement in the Center for Work-Life Policy.
A: It’s a task force that’s both private companies and public policy people. I was one of the founders. The idea was to bring together a group of people to think about how we do work and how to include the entire workforce.
We have 33 companies on the task force, and the point is to share best practices to make it so we can accommodate different parts of people’s lives.
We’re re-engineering extreme jobs. They’ve become even more extreme because it’s global. So, we’re looking at ways to restructure jobs so they’re not so extreme.
I had never been a big proponent of women’s issues and minority issues. I worked in investment banking and in cultures that weren’t women friendly.
From the time I had my first child at Goldman Sachs, I had an arrangement where I could work at home one day a week. I didn’t tell other people about it because I felt if people knew, it would diminish my effectiveness.
Q: What’s the most challenging aspect of your work?
A: The global nature of the business. We’re a company that has a lot of assets but not a lot of people. Of roughly 1,000 people, 500 are in the U.S., 250 are in Europe and 250 are in Asia. The hardest thing is to make sure we’re all connected.
Edited for space and clarity from an interview by staff writer Margaret Jackson.
