2 Pre-Work through the Early Days at Chase

I grew up in Athens, Ohio. It was small-town America in many ways, way back then.  Athens is also a college town – home of Ohio University or OU, the first university in the Northwest Territory – even though it is nestled in the hills of the Appalachian mountains.

Other than the university, the biggest employer in the area was the Southern Ohio Coal Company. I went to elementary, middle, and high school in Athens in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. I was what we called affectionately (at least to us!) a “townie”. You can see a snapshot of life in Athens in those days, from this Facebook post:

I come from a family of educators – both of my parents have doctorate degrees, and both taught at multiple universities. For me, going to college after high school was a must and something I looked forward to. I had already started taking some college classes at OU during high school summers, and also in my senior year of high school. I chose the University of Wisconsin as the college to go to after high school – partly because I was familiar with the school (it was actually the place where my parents met each other: mom was starting her undergraduate and dad was getting his PhD. He got his degree and she quit school – temporarily – to start a family).

College Days – Part 1 – The Wisconsin Union

At the University of Wisconsin – Madison, they have a multi-building concept of a student union (one of the first ones in the country, and part of the original eight schools which formed the Association of College Unions around 1914, now known as the ACUI). As a kid, we had been back to Madison a couple of times on family trips, and I liked the campus, too. Especially their Memorial Union, which is right on Lake Mendota:

 

Plus it was really far away – away from home, my townie friends, etc. It was that live in a dorm life, coming home only on breaks, Big 10 university campus life. In the fall of 1983, I dove right into all of that. Well, maybe not academically, but certainly socially. Wednesdays were two-for-one beers and free tacos at one bar, Thursdays were $5 large pizzas, delivered! The list goes on and on. My sophomore year I applied for a job – and got it – at the Wisconsin Union Directorate, which was the student events programming group that worked in the student Unions. I was the Union South Social Director in the 1984-85 school year. Nothing to do with disasters, but I believe the blood collection center at Union South (which was under my domain and management responsibility) was affiliated with the Red Cross.  It was, however, a great opportunity to learn about volunteers and community support. And we had paid staff program directors who helped mentor us all (thanks, BD and of course TC!).  And while I could not sustain my academic progress at UW-Madison (translated: I could not keep up the grades in computer science – the math was too hard for me – read more in Chapter 2) and I left after two years there; I am still a lifetime Union member and supporter. The Wisconsin Union Directorate is a great place for college students at Wisconsin to gain leadership experience – and with a strong sense of community service, as well.

I started studying Computer Science, having worked on big and small computers in high school. This was 1983, when this field of study was still fairly new, and still very mainframe computer based. Personal Computers were not part of the college curriculum yet. It was also very math oriented. All of the Computer Science professors at Wisconsin were mathematics PhD’s – and candidly calculus was not my thing. I still do not understand trigonometry even to this day.

I also believe many of the course requirements for the major were designed to weed out students. Their computer science major was a “hot” one – and there were seniors and juniors trying to get into freshman and sophomore classes (registration was in order of seniority), so it was looking like this was going to be a five-year undergraduate degree instead of four because of the inability to take the required classes ina four-year window. Almost all of my classes were very hard, and I probably was not as focused on schoolwork as I should have been. Computer Science was a very solitary and lonely field of study.

I really did try to have fun in the process, but as in high school, I needed a team for support and structure. In my sophomore year I became a director at the Wisconsin Union, which was a student group that helped create social programs at the university. I learned a lot about working with people there – much more than I did in the classrooms (see the box above). With my G.P.A. hovering around a 2.5 I really could not justify the cost of this education to my parents (and the student loans I was started to accrue were getting quite large) in order to stay in Madison. So, I transferred back to OU, back to my hometown of Athens.

That transfer (somewhat a meant I could live at home, since my dad was teaching there. All I had to do was pay a small fee of about $150 each quarter (as compared to the $8,000 a year it was costing me and my family at Wisconsin). I switched majors to the College of Business (their math requirement was non-trigonometry calculus – I got a ‘B’ in that class, I think). Many of my classes at Wisconsin transferred over and with the few courses I took during high school, I was able to finish up in about three and a half years instead of four. I graduated with high honors, earning a B.B.A. majoring in Computer Systems in Business (what is now commonly called Management Information Systems – or MIS).

In that last year and a half of college I also had some additional leadership fun along the way. OU has a past history as a heavy “party school” (Wisconsin is really much more of a party school, too – at a much higher, almost professional level). As noted above, people would come from all over for Halloween and take over the main downtown areas’ streets. I think at one point Playboy magazine named it one of the top party schools. Not the best reputation to aspire to, academically.

I volunteered to be a student member of the University Judiciaries Hearing Board. That is the group (one administrator, one faculty member and one student) that adjudicates students who violate the university’s code of conduct. For me, it was a chance to make university life a little better, by getting rid of some bad apples, so to speak. And to be the voice for those who maybe can’t get justice through the courts. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a lawyer (and I also wanted to be a firefighter – more on that goal, later). Judiciaries was serious business, but a chance to understand a bit more about the role each of us play in education for both ourselves and others. Some of the students who came before the board did not realize their actions could have both legal and academic consequences at the same time. Later in life, the skills I gained from these hearings would help me with both human resources work and leadership in member organizations.

Each year back then, the university also hosted a one-day outdoor music festival called “SpringFest” which was student-led and fundraised independent of university funding. I volunteered for a leadership position with the group and became their director of security in 1986. Another chance for people leadership. There was fundraising, finance, communications, marketing, human resources, event management – and lots of fun along the way. One of my classmates even made a documentary that is still on YouTube about our team – it is at https://youtu.be/jOMsg8gOokQ

Around that same time in 1986, I was selected to be a part of a new group at the College of Business – the Corporate Leaders Fellowship program. The College had convinced a number of alumni to take on interns from the program, including an alumna who was a senior vice president at the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City (NYC). I competed for and won that internship and started there that summer. I was there in NYC for the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, and actually did some real work during my internship (many other interns spent their summers making copies or getting vice-presidents their daily coffee).  That senior vice president continued to take on interns from OU for many years after that – she was effectively competing with one of her bosses – he was from the University of Notre Dame and doing the same type of recruiting from there. Chase liked my work and made me a job offer once I graduated. I started working there the following year in 1987 as a computer programmer in the management accounting group of the Corporate Controllers division.

After about four years of programming work, I was promoted to managing the development of the systems I used to code, and training others on how to use them. Personal computers were advancing quite quickly – and becoming commonplace in the business world. I was pretty good at making them work for what the department needed and kept advancing up the corporate ladder. My last title there was Vice President. It’s funny with ‘title inflation’ now – lots of people are Vice Presidents at big banks. Back then, there were less than 1,000 of us across the entire company.

The early nineties were very exciting in the financial industry – part of my work included international travel to train our overseas divisions in Great Britain, Asia and Brazil. My team put together a monthly newsletter which I edited and wrote most of the articles. We had more than 500 subscribers, and stuffed each copy in an inter-office envelope. This was all paper-based then, e-mail was still in its infancy! Between the training and writing, I was feeling a bit like the corporate version of my parents. I got married in 1995 and bought a townhouse on Staten Island. There was consistent and forward momentum for me career-wise.

Then in 1996, Chase merged with Chemical Bank. Two adverse impacts happened right away – half the combined bank branches closed (in those days, every other corner in Manhattan had either a Chemical or Chase bank on it – some had both), and the two back-offices were consolidated. That senior vice president, JW, who had been mentoring my career all these years, was being pushed out. She found a short-lived spot in the Private Banking division, which services the wealthiest of the bank’s individual clients – her own personal mentor leader went there to lead that division. Our MIS team was broken up and I floundered for a year  under Chemical’s leaders – who had no interest in what we did at Chase before the merger – then I jumped over to Private Banking, as well. This time without being part of a team as I had been before, and I basically bounced around from project to project – representing the Private Banking clients on national projects like the World MasterCard, the Euro conversion and Y2K. One of the aspects of being in MIS is that you are a middleman – usually between the folks who program and build computer systems, and those who need them for their jobs and work. One of the challenges is that if there is no one looking out for you or mentoring you; once all the pieces fall in place and the systems are working the way the end-users want them, you can become irrelevant. Coincidently that happened to me when the Y2K project work ended in 2000, and JPMorgan bought Chase that same year.

Lessons Learned (in Emergency Management, without knowing it)

• Certainly that middleman role started to become a pattern for me. I now think that is a good spot for Emergency Manager leaders, overall.
• Significant events (new product offering, global currency conversion, change in millenium) generated quite a bit of ‘what if’ contingency planning efforts. Those are now described as consequence management, a significant part of overall Emergency Management which blends/mixes with organizational continuity of operations/government.
• I learned I could only go so far in my career without mentors and leadership above me who had my professional career track in mind.

I considered myself lucky that I could keep working at the new JPMorgan Chase in Private Banking, as they tried to organize the two companies together. In many ways, there was a clash of corporate cultures back then (and in my opinion, this still exists today). I really did not have a backup career plan. Big mistake. I was put on a sales team whose clients were affluent lawyers and law firms in NYC. A tough spot for someone like me, without a sales background (or loan officer training). I did some community volunteer work, including being on a board for a homeless charity. My sales team at work was really in name only, very competitive even within the group of four bankers. JP Morgan was pushing for everyone to become licensed to sell securities (and to promote products to our wealthy clients and prospects that were investments, and not bank products) so we all were trained and passed the FINRA Series 7^[1] and 63^[2] exams. My business card changed once again – I was now a Registered Representative as well as a Vice President – Banker.

Then September 11, 2001 came.