Please clean your plate dear, the Lord above can see ya. Don’t you know people are starving in Korea.
Making a Difference: Part Deux
Posted by: Jane Jelenko | Posted in: Being creative, Living Intentionally, Social/political Activism, Jane's MusingsMonday, April 28, 2008
What’s it all about, Alfie?
Leaving a Legacy
This is the second blog of a two-part series on the topic of choosing to change lanes to become more engaged in social issues. Since publishing Changing Lanes, Susan and I have come across several remarkable change artists who have deepened our understanding of effective social entrepreneurship. I wrote about one of them, Robin Smalley, in my April 7 blog. Robin is the Executive Director of mothers2mothers, an amazing organization which is making real progress in Africa on the prevention of transmission of the AIDS virus from mother to child.
Connie Duckworth, founder of ARZU, is the inspiration for this second piece. I was privileged to meet each of them through completely separate circumstances, but learned that they are 
each 2008 recipients of the Skoll Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship. I’m so proud of both Robin and Connie and hope this recognition and grant helps them advance their respective causes.
As we face the second half of life, our internal clock starts ticking louder and louder. Time is short and its passage seems to be speeding up on a daily basis. The profound question that ticking sound poses is “what legacy will you leave behind?” It’s human nature to want your life to amount to something. The process of changing lanes gives you the opportunity to chart a course of meaning and lasting impact.
Everyone can choose her own realm for making a difference in the world. The goal can be tightly focused on a single human being and can be no broader than one’s neighborhood. Or it can encompass all of humanity and the entire globe. The scope doesn’t matter. What matters is the knowledge that you made the most of your time and left something of value behind.
Connie Duckworth is blessed with the satisfaction that comes from creating not just one but two legacies of which anyone would be proud. Her career provided the platform for her first contribution. Her retirement provided the opportunity for a second shot at making a difference. For many baby boomers, that’s what it’s all about. 
Connie is an improvisational artist. She approaches her life something like a jazz musician or a beat poet. Plans are made only to be upended when the universe offers up an opportunity that is better aligned with who she is at that moment in time. That’s not to say that she isn’t a serious person—as demonstrated by her commitment to her education and career performance. It means that throughout her life, she stayed tuned into her evolving sense of herself and what she could be doing in the world.
Connie didn’t plan her career, which is one of the many things I felt we had in common when she shared her story with me. She calls herself “opportunistic.” As a kid, she had thought she would become a lawyer, but she was put off that idea by the experience “watching sausage being made” in Austin, working for the Texas legislature. Though she had majored in liberal arts, she applied to Wharton Business School at the last moment. Forever grateful that they accepted her, Connie describes her Wharton MBA as the first “inflection point” in her life’s journey as it opened up to her a wide range of opportunities in the exciting but unfamiliar business world.
She worked as a financial analyst at ARCO on the oil company side, loving the incredibly smart and talented people but disliking the work enough to consider changing lanes to go medical school instead. But the company rotated her into the Treasury department which put her in contact with the Wall Street firms, and Goldman Sachs recruited her to join their vaunted Bond department. This was the second inflection point Connie points to as taking her into a new direction.
Connie knew she had found her niche and for the next 20 years, she blew past all the barriers women had faced in investment banking and like industries. She became a partner after nine years, although there had been only one other woman made partner in the 120 history of the firm. And from the distant outpost of Los Angeles, no less. What’s more, she became pregnant that year, causing her supporters to warn her “don’t screw it up.”
This part of Connie’s story really resonated with me. I too was the first woman partner in my division of my firm, having had my son the year before which caused most of my colleagues to assume I would quit. I too felt the hopes of the women riding on my success and the pressure not to mess up. Like a turtle, I just stuck my head out and moved forward. But Connie, God bless her, took it one step further. “Perpetually pregnant,” she was nevertheless transferred to Chicago to run the Bond department. While conducting a performance review, her water broke. She couldn’t resist returning to her desk to complete the discussion, enjoying the consternation it created for her male colleagues in the room.
Alongside her day job, Connie took on the assignment to run the firm’s committee to promote workplace diversity and inclusion. When Bob Rubin (who later became Secretary of the Treasury) asks—you answer the call. She is very proud of the family friendly programs she instituted—like flex-time and job-sharing, but her main contribution went well beyond these tactical issues. She succeeded in persuading her colleagues to develop the women’s careers in the same way they did the men’s; that is, by giving them access to decision makers and assignments that would enhance their opportunities for advancement.
The legacy Connie left behind is a source of pride to her to this day. Goldman’s generous four month maternity leave policy is so institutionalized that female professionals talk about their pregnancies openly and without concern for negatively impacting their career progression.
Connie had one more assignment in her, this time to run another department in New York. But she didn’t want to move the kids, so she commuted from Chicago for over three years. At the 20 year 
mark, having lived through the trauma of 9/11, Connie retired and eagerly embraced the process of changing lanes.She co-authored a how-to book on starting a new business and chaired the Committee of 200, a premier women’s business group. One of its members submitted Connie’s name for the State Department’s U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council, knowing of her interest in women’s rights and the plight of women under the Taliban regime. The mission of the council is “to promote private/public partnerships between U.S. and Afghan institutions and mobilize private resources to ensure Afghan women gain the skills and education deprived them under the Taliban.” This initiative would also help to ensure that Afghan women had a seat at the table in the reconstruction of their country.
Connie met with people from all strata of Afghan society from President Karzai to women and children living in villages in the most squalid circumstances. As the business representative on the council, Connie studied ways to create sustainable income for the women and concluded that she could help them sell the rugs they weave into the world market. After 30 years of war, there were no roads, no power grid, no commercial shipping, no rule of law and no financial system. Bad enough, but on top of all these hardships, was the challenge of improving the status of housebound women living under ancient tribal customs and Sharia law.
Determined to work with the issues at the grass roots level, Connie incorporated ARZU, which means hope in one of Afghanistan’s local languages. It is a non-profit organization which provides women with economic empowerment by giving them jobs today and investing in the future by educating their children and providing health care.
As their marketing material states so well: “an ARZU rug is an investment in hope.”
Despite the fact that Connie had no experience in running a non-profit, nor in international development, she just dove in and learned by doing. She leads a staff of fifteen in Afghanistan and another seven in the U.S. and she hopes to get to a self-sustaining cash-flow positive position by the end of this year. She certainly has my vote for a Turtle Award.
How was she able to build this legacy despite her lack of experience in the field? First she recognized that the mission was about the development of human capital and capacity building. The program is about the Afghan women and not about us. Like Robin Smalley’s program in Africa, ARZU is a grass-roots organization that focuses on being culturally respectful. Nothing is done without gaining the permission of the village elders to enroll the families in the program. They pay higher than market wage to overcome the entrenched social norms and persuade the patriarchs to accept women gaining status for generating income and children being educated for a more productive future.
Another key element of the program is wielding the economic power to take control of the supply chain and displace the middlemen who were sapping almost all the profits from the business of exporting rugs. The women weavers now keep more of the money and reinvest it in their communities.
Connie sees the need for others like herself who have management skills from the private sector to engage in international development work along side the public sector and NGOs. She has demonstrated what progress can be made when such skills and energy are brought to the table.
The key take-away from both stories in this series is that progress can best be made by working at the grass roots level with a strong commitment to respecting the local culture. If you are inspired to change lanes to follow in Robin’s or Connie’s paths, be mindful of this critical point of view that they share. It’s what has allowed them to succeed in applying their American managerial know-how to what appeared to be intractable problems in distant parts of the world.
They are leaving behind a legacy of hope and sustainable progress.
What will your legacy be?
