Woman in business

When you husband says out loud that he is ready to support you as a woman in business...

Throughout last year, Gorda cooperated with INSEAD in what concerns to dating a woman with ambitions. This article shows part of it.

#luckyme
#insead moments
#womaninbusiness

Life changing year

I told you this would be a life changing year, in any sense you can imagine. Indeed, somehow it included a MBA, a new house, a wedding, and... a new job!

Over 30 conversations and interviews later, pretty much with all relevant firms in Portugal, a few mentors, and two headhunters, I came to accept an offer to be part of the Strategic Planning team at José de Mello Saúde (JMS).

Most of the firms I talked to did not have open positions at the moment, some were not the right fit for me, and others took forever to go through my recruitment process. In the last stage of this process, I was between Strategic Planning at JMS, M&A and Business Development at EDP, Business Development for Entertainment at NOS, and M&A at Semapa, in this order. All options were strong in different ways: JMS plays in the sector that is growing the most, EDP is the most solid firm, NOS is certainly more dynamic, and Semapa has cool projects on its mind.

José de Mello Saúde was the first one to make me an offer (and a pretty good one). On top of that, I like the sector and am quite interested in learning about healthcare, eventually to share some knowledge with Gorda (and his family business) in the future. Finally, I like everyone I met in the firm, and I have heard great things about my future boss.

The toughest parts of the entire recruitment thing were i) managing all the processes and relationships well, without closing any door or leaving any bad impression, and ii) quitting from BCG. I talked to Miguel Abecasis (the BCG partner I am closer to) on Monday. He kindly tried to convince me to stay, but was nice enough to understand my position. I then sent a goodbye e-mail to everyone else yesterday, and received lots of love from everyone since then.

New life ahead, y'all... And now it is time to enjoy the bride life.

The official e-mail announcing I'm leaving BCG:

50% down, or is it 90% down?

As you all know, and as all of my INSEAD friends can't help thinking about, our journey together is getting closer and closer to an end. Two weeks of P5 are already down. To me, that means that half of my P5 classes are down as well.

In two weeks, I took two classes summing up to 1.5 credits: Value Creation in Luxury & Fashion, and Your First Hundred Days (YFCD).

Value Creation in Luxury & Fashion aimed at providing us with a better understanding of those two sectors - Luxury and Fashion -, while putting us in contact with one or two relevant players. In fact, this class's big event was an afternoon field trip to the headquarters of Hermès. Our professors gave us one day and a half to prepare, in groups, a presentation on cuteness to be presented to a few managers at Hermès. We had to answer one of three questions:

1. Can one be cute without being girly?
2. Is cute universal?
3. Is cute a product or an experience?

The assignment felt a bit too fluffy and short but, in the end, the field trip was interesting and, somehow, we managed to bring some value to the Hermès leadership team. We got to see two of their  (very manual) production lines, and received a free perfume in the end. Other than that, the course was a bit disappointing in the sense that the topics were a bit vague and I didn't feel I learnt much. On the bright side, it showed me that neither luxury or fashion seem to have the right fit for me. They are mainly intuition driven, are too subjective and too little efficiency driven. Not really my thing... 

YFCD, in turn, was a really cool class. There's not much I can share with the world about it, as all of us had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. If I share too much, future INSEAD classes will not enjoy this course as much as I did. All in all, it is a week-long class in which teams of five manage the first hundred days of a firm after its acquisition. The team of five is composed by a CEO, a CFO, an Operations Manager, a Marketing & Sales Manager and a HR Manager. My team of five was a true bomb - me as the CEO, Zé Viana Baptista as CFO, Tony Feghali as Ops Manager, Helena Mateu as Commercial Manager, and Sid Ram as HR. Hell, we had fun! We had some eventful days as a team, with problems ranging from strikes to accidents in the factory, clients copying our products to suppliers not interested in make business with us anymore, union leaders annoying us to having to manage the relationship with political entities, phone calls in the middle of the night, and more. Our version of YFCD was even more eventful than what it usually is as we had a short version of it (3 days instead of 8), with the INSEAD ball in between. Three of my team members were totally smashed on the last day. We did not win the competition but I would dare to say we had fun and did a reasonably good job.

With this, I finished two classes in two weeks and managed to come home for 10 days, where I have been organising our wedding, recruiting, and enjoying my family and friends.

A different break

After debating whether I should go with my INSEAD friends to Iceland, the UK, Italy, or elsewhere in the world, I ended up deciding to spend the P4-P5 break at home. I had an endless to do list, Gorda and the rest of the family missed me, money is slowly running out our account. It would make no sense to have spent it elsewhere.

So how did I spend my break? Wanna see my (checked) to do list?

• Visited our new house a couple of times to monitor the progress of the construction work and to come up with decor ideas

• Picked the layette (bed sheets, edredon, pillows, and so on) for our new home as Mom's and Dad's wedding present

• Prepared our list of wedding presents, based on what I decided in terms of decoration

• Gathered all the necessary info for our friend and designer Zedi to upload the wedding present list on our website (still in progress)

• Filled in hundreds of envelops with wedding invites and wrote names and addresses of all our guests

• Started handing in a few invitations - all the others will be sent via mail later this week

• Checked kids’ stores to try to come up with an outfit for the two babies getting in the church with me

• Met with a priest to formalise our wedding papers

• Tried the manicure and face cleasing services that I will use on my wedding day

• Add a dancing class with Gorda, Mom and Dad to get ready for the big day

• Met with our wedding planners to decide upon flowers and disposition of tables

• Filled my tax papers

• Helped my bridesmaid and bride Perry in her wedding dress developments

• Attended Perry’s engagement party

• Caught up with some reading

• Had a few more interviews

• Attended quite a few dinner events with my friends

• Briefly showed Lisbon to a few INSEAD friends in town

• Had a family lunch with the Bentos and a family snack with the Amorins to celebrate Mother’s Day

• Babysit for my (dog-)niece Cookie for a day

• AND MORE

It has been an incredibly productive week, but very tiring too. Tonight, I slept 9 hours - something that rarely happens to me. Now it is time to kick two weeks of classes, before another 2.5-week break. I managed to front load most of my classes. It seems that P5 will be kind of a joke.

Will write a post about P4 very, very soon. Keep in touch!

Reflections

I know that this post should be about the incredible weekend I had with Mom, Dad and Gorda in Paris. But it won't be. Sorry Mom, Dad, and Gorda. There's a crucial topic I need to write about before describing the amazing days we spent together.

Work life balance

Or should I even call it:

Women in the workplace?

This may be the hottest topic on my mind at the moment. Not that it is more important than the wedding prep, all that I am learning at INSEAD, or the exploration of recruitment opportunities... But it is certainly a common element of all those.

As Anne Marie Slaughter mentioned in her article "Women can't have it all", this may not be a life-or-dead topic and is not even close to being the most significant issue that women face worldwide. There are single moms out there, as well as moms in very poor families that, rather than thinking about their dream jobs and equal opportunities among genders, need to ensure that their salary (together with their husband's) is enough for their family to survive. Whoever, it is striking how most of the explanations and solutions to this problem don't seem to be entirely true.

In Portugal, more women apply to college, more women graduate from college and, on average, with better grades. Women have theoretically the same opportunities and education than men. So why is Portugal one of the countries yet to have a minimum one woman on every board?

Is it a matter of commitment? Is it the famous Sheryl Sandberg "ambition gap"? I cannot believe I am the only committed ambitious girl in the world. In fact, my experiences both at INSEAD and at BCG have shown me that I am certainly not. Is it the system's fault? School and working schedules are still not aligned, maternity leaves are yet not gender-equal in most countries in the world, face time at the office still matters, and so on. Is it social pressure? Are women just not meant to be as or more successful than men?

Finding the right partner helps. All successful women who are not single claim that they were only able to have a reasonable work-life balance thanks to their husbands. In that sense, I could hardly be luckier. Gorda will have my back at all times and he even says that he won't mind working slightly less hours when we have kids. But is that enough? Will I be ok with leaving part of the childcare to him? Do men have the same instinct as women? Am I replaceable? Better, do I want to be replaceable? No!!! Can both of us contribute and still ensure we reach our goals? Is that possible? Tell me, tell me.

It's frustrating not to have an answer to all this questions, but is reassuring to think like Slaughter: "In sum, having a supportive mate may well be a necessary condition if women are to have it all, but it is not sufficient". At least having the right hubby helps!

This is a crucial/ life-changing year in my life. Somehow, I managed to decide to explore all vectors possible. There's one MBA, a wedding, a new house and eventually an entire career on the table. I just decided I want to run a marathon by the end of 2017 too. Coming soon, there will be promotions and children on the table too. How to deal with all these? And how to succeed?

I will have to smartly decide when it is going to be the right time to get pregnant, bearing in mind that the more I invest on my career now, the quicker I will reach my dream job - but also that the later I have kids, the higher the chances of not having a hard time getting pregnant and/or not having the right physical capabilities to raise my kids. In my opinion, the trick may be having the kids still at a relatively young (not old) age, but adapting your lifestyle and working style accordingly. That may require searching for a job as much predictable as possible, as well as working still quite long hours but organized in different ways (from home, before anyone is already awake or even late in the evening, after putting the kids in bed). Another trick may be putting time horizons in perspective. Maybe I don't need to be a COO in 10 years - doing so in in 15 years or more is quite an achievement too.

This period at INSEAD, I have more than one fluffy classes. One of them - Psychological Issues in Management - has been especially relevant to me. On one hand, it covers all the topics mentioned in this post (that have filled my headspace so heavily in the recent past). On the other hand, our professor is probably the most inspiring one I've had at INSEAD - a successful, determined, good looking female, with amazing communication skills and an impressive touch and feel for anything related to social and psychological topics.

For our last PIM class, we had to write our "10-year profile statement" and share it with a few of our colleagues. Below, you can see a sanitized version of what I wrote:

10 years after graduating from INSEAD, I am leaving in Portugal, with my husband and three kids. I have recently been promoted to COO of a solid Portuguese firm based in Lisbon but with relevant presence worldwide. I work a lot, have quite some responsibility (and the stressful challenges attached to it) but somehow manage to enjoy much more visibility over my life and schedule than I used to when I was a Consultant at BCG.

I now have 10-hour days instead of the previous average of 14-hour ones, and organize them in a different way. I keep doing my early morning workout with my husband. I leave the kids at school and he picks them up in the afternoon. We meet at home around 7 pm, and enjoy a family activity and dinner together, after monitoring the kids’ baths. After the kids are back in bed (early), I work from home for about two more hours. This has been quite a shift from my life 11 years before, only possible due to a good reflective process throughout my MBA.

In fact, at some point, I made the hard decision of leaving BCG and entering the corporate world. I knew it would be reflected in a slower career progression and a significant cut in my paycheck. However, I was urged to ensure a reasonable work-life balance that the consulting world failed at providing me. Such transition into the corporate world resulted in certain challenges, both personal and professional. Personally, I had to delay (by a couple of years) a desired first pregnancy in order to prove myself first in the new job. Professionally, I had to adjust to a slower-paced environment, to a less diverse day-to-day life, and to working with the same team at all times.

Is this too optimistic? Is this totally unreal? Is this selfish? Is this not feminine? Is it something a MBA student feels obliged to write? I will tell you what it is: it's quite aspirational and eventually not feasible. But eventually it may be slightly less aspirational if I adjust the timeframe (15-year profile instead? 20? Even more?) or if the world changes in the meantime.

Being concerned about the success of women in the workplace is a crucial step so that, one day, it becomes a non-topic. Until then, discussion about gender discrimination, inequality, and the necessary changes in regulation, mindset, social norms, quotas, and more, cannot be avoided.

I am sorry if you think that I am egocentric for being concerned about my future professional success and its compatibility with the personal life I dream about. Let me put it in a different way. The opportunities of each generation depend on the behaviors and fights of the earlier generations. As Slaughter pointed out, if more women with the same concerns as mine fight for what they want and raise awareness about this issue, eventually it will be easier for the future women leaders to make it to the top.

Once, in a conference I help organizing for the MBA Portugal Network, Rui Diniz shared with the audience his key to success: managing the professional and personal lives hand-in-hand. Having a stable happy personal life is crucial for anyone to succeed in their professional life. Every relevant professional decision should be discussed as a couple and can only go through if there is personal support to it. Being professionally successful, in turn, helps having a comfortable personal life.

My plan for the future is to always balance my career with my future husband and kids, not forgetting aging parents and social commitments. Easy, uh? Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...!