Top Broad
By Hannah Benoit
"Trailblazing alone is not enough.... Leaving a path that others can follow - finding ways to help them eventually go even further than you did... is the ultimate measure of trailblazing." - Janet Hanson, in More Than 85 Broads: Women Making Career Choices, Taking Risks, and Defining Success on Their Own Terms
By most any definition, Janet Tiebout Hanson has been a blazer of trails. As only the second woman professional hired in the fixed-income division of Goldman Sachs, she soared to a vice presidency during a 14-year career at that Wall Street powerhouse. Later, she built from scratch her own $2 billion money management firm, Milestone Capital, the only woman-owned company of its kind. And as a passionate advocate for women in business, she created 85 Broads, which started as a network for current and former Goldman Sachs women and blossomed into a global community of 15,000 professional women and students.
But wait. As Hanson is quick to point out, the bio doesn't begin to tell the whole story. For if Hanson has blazed trails - and scaled heights - she has also taken a few wrong turns, lost her way on a switchback or two, and weathered any number of storms.
"There's nothing in my bio that even remotely suggests any sort of struggle," she says. In fact, Hanson has struggled to reach every milestone. But she's not complaining.
"I want to come back in at least five more lives as me," Hanson told a group of undergraduate women gathered in New York City for an 85 Broads "mini-internship" last summer. "I never want to be anybody else but me. And the reason is that I have had the extraordinary opportunity to meet some of the smartest young women on the planet."
Helping these young women fulfill their potential - in business or on any stage of their choosing - is Hanson's greatest passion. She believes that women, whether neophytes or veterans, have an enormous amount to gain from each other - not by following someone else's road map, but by learning from others' stories and tapping into their expertise.
"You just want to be an example of how really infinite the possibilities are," she says, "and I think that because at the age of 53 I'm still out there creating and innovating and experimenting, that that's really my strongest message. It has nothing to do with the bio.... It has to do with how you create a life that allows you to continue to discover."
Building a global "cyber-clubhouse"
Hanson's own grand experiment is 85 Broads, a family of networks through which she has set out "to prove that women will absolutely help each other."
The idea for the organization started to sprout when Hanson took a few years off from Goldman to be at home with her children, Meredith and Christopher, beginning in 1988. The transition from the trading floor to the sandbox was a rough one. Hanson missed the stimulation of work at the investment bank and especially missed her colleagues. On top of that, she and her husband Jeff were having financial difficulties. Hanson wrestled with depression.
"I just said, 'My life is over.... I've had the most phenomenal career anybody could ever have, and here I am at home with two young children.' In a time before universal e-mail and cell phones, Hanson felt "a total sense of disconnection and isolation."
She went back to Goldman for a while, but in a new position that she found disappointing. In 1993 she left the firm for good to start Milestone Capital with her husband. Together they built it into an asset management company that held its own against the big boys of Wall Street, even though it was located in a suburb and offered flexible hours for parents.
Despite this success, Hanson still longed to find a way to connect with former colleagues at Goldman. She also aspired to help bring newcomers up the learning curve by having former Goldman women share "their stories, their intellect, and their amazing talent."
In 1997, Hanson invited 30 of her former female Goldman colleagues to a dinner unveiling her idea for 85 Broads, which she had playfully named after Goldman's 85 Broad Street address in New York City. But the enterprise didn't really take off until 1999, after a friend suggested that Hanson "dot-com the sucker." 85Broads.com was born, and the technology made all the difference. Now members could stay in touch outside of events, search for people with specific backgrounds or interests, and build their own communities within what Hanson calls their "global cyber-clubhouse."
Membership swelled, and soon the organization expanded to include women in business schools through the Broad2Broad network, and then undergraduates at 60 premier colleges via Broad2Be. Hanson calls these two groups "co-mentoring" initiatives, believing that the mentor relationship is a two-way street - that she has as much to learn from the young "rock stars" of B2Be as they do from her.
Wheaton "Broads2Be"
This fall, Luisa Frontino '05 will help launch a Wheaton chapter of Broad2Be, the fastest-growing segment of 85 Broads. With financial support from Hanson, Frontino undertook an internship last year at a small publishing company in Milan, Italy, and helped start an 85 Broads chapter there. She is now participating in the NBC Page Program in New York and "giving back" through the network. Last August she gave a tour of the NBC studios to the 75 undergraduates, including six Wheaton women, who attended the weeklong Broad2Be Advantage "mini-internship."
Economics major Kellie Chung '09 of Nashua, New Hampshire, said the week of presentations and site visits was the highlight of her summer, during which she learned everything "from how to stand out in an interview to Investment 101, but most importantly, to listen to your intuition about when to work and where, and when to switch to something completely different." Chung says she can"t wait to help get a Broad2Be chapter started at Wheaton.
"This is not a business network," Hanson emphasizes. "We're excited about English majors, philosophy majors, Russian studies majors, govy majors. It doesn't matter what your major is. All that matters is that you have a passion to see other fabulous women succeed."
Hanson is particularly excited that Broad2Be is coming to her alma mater. "That's where I developed all my confidence, and I had exceptional professors. That's where I found this passion for women," she says. Although she was deeply embittered by the 1987 co-ed decision, she had a change of heart when Ben Sarly '00 came to Milestone to interview her for a college publication. The recent graduate impressed her on the spot.
"That was the moment when I said, 'If Wheaton College is admitting somebody as fabulous as this young man, then this is a college that I want to be connected to.'"
Hanson started to get involved with the college again, joining the President's Commission and, in 2005, the Board of Trustees. (Sarly went to work at Goldman for a while, and the two still keep in touch.)
Beyond the old-boys' network
If men have traditionally held an edge in business by virtue of their old-boys' networks, Hanson refuses to see this as a stumbling block. "The power of this network is to declare that edge null and void," she says. "It's to say, ‘You might not recognize when you're at Wheaton College that there are other amazing women with you here and now who you're going to want to leverage five, ten, fifteen, twenty years down the road.... What we're going to do is create a way for you to stay completely connected. You'll never lose these people throughout the course of your career and life.'"
Actually, Hanson has nothing against old-boy networks: she says she's a product of one herself. She grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where her father was a member of the exclusive Saint Andrew's Golf Club. After graduating from Wheaton in 1974, she took a job running the club's pro shop - her notion of heaven. One day a club member named Dan Crowley walked in and said, "Janet, you are way too smart to be doing this. You have a degree in government from Wheaton College. I want you to come and work for me at McGraw-Hill." Crowley was an executive vice-president at the publishing firm.
Hanson balked. She loved being outdoors and working with people. But Crowley was persuasive. "We had that conversation on a Friday," Hanson recalls, "and literally the following Monday, I started working at McGraw-Hill."
As she'd expected, Hanson found the corporate environment stifling, so when Crowley suggested she apply to his alma mater, the Columbia Graduate School of Business, she again resisted, thinking, "There's not a chance that they are going to let me in."
The Columbia admissions officials told her that her board scores were the lowest they'd ever seen, which didn't surprise her. ("I don't possess any quantitative skills that I am aware of," she concedes.) But they said they would admit her if she could ace a couple of graduate courses in calculus and economics. She did, and went on to earn an MBA in finance from Columbia in 1977.
Hanson may have lacked quantitative skills, but she loved sales. Her father had been a salesman for the Campbell Chain Company, and as a teenager Hanson had accompanied him on sales trips to Pennsylvania. "I became his little assistant. I would help him do his invoices and stuff like that."
After Columbia, Hanson tapped another contact, John C. Whitehead, a partner at Goldman Sachs. Hanson had met Whitehead's daughter Anne during a junior year exchange program at Mills College, and had gone sailing in the Caribbean with the Whitehead family. Whitehead was so impressed with the 20-year-old Hanson's ability to discuss bridge and navigating by the stars that he said, "Listen, Janet, if you ever decide to go to business school, come work at Goldman." She replied: "I never will, but thank you."
With her MBA in hand, Hanson decided to check out Whitehead's offer.
"I went to Goldman, and I had a brilliant career there as a salesperson. The only thing is, I sold securities, and my dad sold chain.... It was amazing, and it was all because Dan Crowley said, ‘I see something in you. You have got to realize your potential.'"
Return on a life's investment
Now her life's mission is to help other women realize theirs. In her new book, More Than 85 Broads, Hanson has compiled the candid first-person testimonies of 95 stars of the network - entrepreneurs and stockbrokers, but also mothers, filmmakers, philanthropists, military officers, mountain climbers and others. Like Hanson's own story, which opens the book, their odysseys are rife with both trials and triumphs.
Hanson's publisher, McGraw-Hill, had wanted her to write a "12 Tips to Networking Success" book, but Hanson had other ideas. "It's the women who inspire me," she says. She agreed to forego "any significant fees" in exchange for editorial control. Hanson spent two years on the interviews, working closely with her husband Jeff and her sister, Mary Tiebout.
As she writes in the book, Hanson has also drawn personal strength from the 85 Broads network. In September 2002, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The news came at a low point for her. "Our nanny had literally driven off with her boyfriend, and our business was on the ropes," she recalls. She was walking around in a perpetually bad mood. "Being angry made me feel like I was in control - kind of like a dog barking!"
After the diagnosis, she realized that anger was a luxury she couldn't afford; it might only lessen her chances of survival. "That was the day my anger ended, and when I rechanneled my anger into a fierce desire to survive the mess I'd created."
Via e-mail, Hanson shared her news with the network, and scores of members wrote back to wish her well and share their own stories of surviving cancer. She battled through multiple surgeries, drawing strength from her family and her work.
"I have tried very hard to deal with all of the mental ‘headwinds' that surface," she says. "This is no doubt why I am so passionate about staying focused on the mission of helping women and girls through the 85 Broads network. Every single day I fight to remain positive and optimistic. Having a reason and purpose to continue to go forward really helps."
Janet Hanson is going forward, with as much vitality as ever. As a managing director at Lehman Brothers, she is back on the Street, mentoring women within that company. In addition to serving as a Wheaton trustee, she is on the boards of the Christopher Reeve Foundation, breastcancer.org, and Miles to Go, a foundation she established to support venture philanthropy for women around the world. And she remains active at Milestone Capital, which shares a Greenwich, Conn., address with the 85 Broads "clubhouse."
As her book's subtitle suggests, Hanson believes in women "defining success on their own terms." And what does that mean for her?
"It's getting away from this notion that success is a title," she says. "It's happiness. It's when you say, ‘What's been the return on my living on this planet?' And I would want to say I took every single opportunity to make a difference."
For info about 85 Broads, visit www.85broads.com. To join the Wheaton group, contact Katie Nolan at (203) 983-7520 or knolan@85broads.com.
