OUR STORY

ABC to CEO was created after I retired from a successful career in a Fortune 500 Company. I reported to the Chairman and CEO and was part of the C-Suite of Executives. During the last ten years of my career I had global responsibilities that ranged from Human Resources to Information Services to Supply Chain Management; from global security to flight services to facilities management. My responsibilities were carried out with the efforts of several hundred employees who were on my teams and we implemented our goals with annual budgets in excess of several hundred million dollars. I was always a high-achiever and it was a wonderful career. But, as I reflected on it, I realized that as much as I accomplished, I felt I didn’t do all that I maybe could have done. Specifically, at age 60 I regretted never considered guiding my career in a manner necessary for what it takes to be considered for that top job, the CEO.

I grew up like many other successful people, with little money, blue-collar parents who were kind and loving but themselves having been limited to an eighth grade education, a rural community with great work ethics but few mentors and certainly not a CEO of a major company, a public high school without a gymnasium and before the birth of Title IX with sports available only for the boys. I wanted to be accepted to a 2-year nursing school program, so I was driven to studying to be a top student and obtaining a high score on the ACT test. However, one night in the spring of my senior year of high school, friends of my parents suggested that with my good grades, maybe my parents should think about sending me to a four year college. I was so thrilled to even contemplate a four year school, that I decided on the one that was closest to my family’s home as it was the only one I “knew” and I would still be able to see my boyfriend. Out of my high school class of 89 graduates, less than ten of us continued on to a four year college. I decided to double major in psychology and human services, as those seemed like interesting fields of study. I married before I finished college. To save money, I finished college in three years while working part time. After college, I was fortunate to be hired by a large company into their “personnel” department. A co-worker suggested I needed to consider getting an MBA to “catch-up” with others who had business degrees. Since I was lacking in all required business classes, I went to night school for six years to complete it. I continued to get promoted within the re-named human resource department and felt proud of my accomplishments. Little did I realize that I was missing an entire world of other experiences. I never knew the importance of getting operating experience, sales and marketing experience, or having roles with P&L responsibilities. And being married to someone with their own career, considering a request for a relocation to expand my horizons did not seem like a possibility.

As I look back on it now, I know that I was very fortunate in many ways and I am grateful for the challenges and accomplishments that were part of my career. I don’t know if I had what it takes to be a CEO even if I had had it on my radar screen. But assuming I had the right “DNA”, the mistakes I made early in my life compounded with mistakes I made in my early career limited me in my options. By the time I was 40, I had made so many wrong turns, I could never have found the road to becoming a CEO.

The goal of ABC to CEO is to provide every girl with the knowledge that I and many women didn’t have available to us. For women who did accomplish this goal, much can be learned as they did it despite many obstacles....our hats go off to them for finding their way through the difficult maze. Our objective is not to encourage girls to make becoming a CEO their goal; it is only to provide knowledge of it as a career option and perhaps provide some guidance down the path so it will not be quite as difficult as those who found their way down the CEO path by instincts with little direction. As a matter of fact, many CEOs might say that they would not wish their role on anyone as it is a life-style commitment requiring great personal sacrifices. We can speculate on why less than 10% of all Fortune 500 CEOs are women. However, the bottom line is that with the right career path and awareness of “dead-end” career moves and decisions, more women can set the stage for being qualified to assume the role of a CEO. Or maybe our materials will cause them to create a company of their own in order to become “the” leader. In the end, we are not about changing what girls want to be, rather, we want to increase the choices of what they can become.