The Times
Harvard Report
Published:Sep 07, 2008
Enthusiasm for a job ensures your company attracts like-minded people who have similar objectives
When my future husband , Roger Brown, and I graduated from the Yale School of Management in 1980, we postponed job offers in management consulting to run emergency programmes in Cambodian refugee camps. The Vietnamese had recently invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, and thousands of refugees fled to the Thai border. I managed a programme for malnourished children, and we saw a lot of very ill babies. Yet, with food and basic medicine, most completely rebounded. Roger and I had always been moved to make a difference, but this experience gave us focus. If you intervene by age five, we realised, you can positively change the whole course of a child’s life. Later, after a few years in management consulting, we went to Africa to become co-country directors in Sudan for Save the Children.
Our humanitarian work engaged us 24/7 — so we gave absolutely no thought to long-term careers. But when we came back to the US in 1986, we had to make some tough decisions. By then, Roger and I had met James Rouse, who co-founded the Rouse Company to turn blighted urban areas into vibrant public spaces. Rouse became our mentor, and one weekend he invited us to his summer cabin on Chesapeake Bay. During one of our wonderful conversations, he said to me: “Linda, your passions don’t have to be extracurricular. They can be central to your life. Unleash them, and you’ll help other people unleash theirs.”
Like most entrepreneurs, I’m loath to follow anyone’s advice, but Rouse’s words immediately clicked. Millions of parents in the US wanted and needed to work, but they had little access to affordable, high-quality child care. It was a national tragedy. We decided to put our passion for giving children the best possible start in life at the forefront of our careers and at the core of a new company.
Don’t get me wrong — building this company was one long, hard slog. We faced a lot of scepticism, including from our financial backers, who had never seen a successful husband-and-wife team before. And when we struggled during our start-up years, some of our initial investors couldn’t understand why we paid higher-than-average salaries, or why we spent precious time founding a non-profit organisatio n to help children of the homeless. But putting our passions first — and backing them up with good financial numbers — gave us a real business advantage.
Through this passion we helped to create an entirely new sector: high-quality, workplace-based child care as a benefit for employees. During our IPO road show in 1997, we talked about the Bright Horizons mission first, before the financials — and witnessed rooms full of tired-looking asset managers, many of them parents of young children, snap right to attention.
Today, Bright Horizons has more than 600 child care and early education centres, and we have made the transition to our second generation of mission-driven senior executives. Our annual leadership conference of more than 1000 managers feels like a cross between a political rally and a tent revival meeting. When you put passion first, you attract the right people, who all naturally head in the same direction. — Linda Mason is chairman and founder of Bright Horizons Family Solutions © (2008) The New York Times
Harvard Report
Published:Sep 07, 2008
Enthusiasm for a job ensures your company attracts like-minded people who have similar objectives
When my future husband , Roger Brown, and I graduated from the Yale School of Management in 1980, we postponed job offers in management consulting to run emergency programmes in Cambodian refugee camps. The Vietnamese had recently invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, and thousands of refugees fled to the Thai border. I managed a programme for malnourished children, and we saw a lot of very ill babies. Yet, with food and basic medicine, most completely rebounded. Roger and I had always been moved to make a difference, but this experience gave us focus. If you intervene by age five, we realised, you can positively change the whole course of a child’s life. Later, after a few years in management consulting, we went to Africa to become co-country directors in Sudan for Save the Children.
Our humanitarian work engaged us 24/7 — so we gave absolutely no thought to long-term careers. But when we came back to the US in 1986, we had to make some tough decisions. By then, Roger and I had met James Rouse, who co-founded the Rouse Company to turn blighted urban areas into vibrant public spaces. Rouse became our mentor, and one weekend he invited us to his summer cabin on Chesapeake Bay. During one of our wonderful conversations, he said to me: “Linda, your passions don’t have to be extracurricular. They can be central to your life. Unleash them, and you’ll help other people unleash theirs.”
Like most entrepreneurs, I’m loath to follow anyone’s advice, but Rouse’s words immediately clicked. Millions of parents in the US wanted and needed to work, but they had little access to affordable, high-quality child care. It was a national tragedy. We decided to put our passion for giving children the best possible start in life at the forefront of our careers and at the core of a new company.
Don’t get me wrong — building this company was one long, hard slog. We faced a lot of scepticism, including from our financial backers, who had never seen a successful husband-and-wife team before. And when we struggled during our start-up years, some of our initial investors couldn’t understand why we paid higher-than-average salaries, or why we spent precious time founding a non-profit organisatio n to help children of the homeless. But putting our passions first — and backing them up with good financial numbers — gave us a real business advantage.
Through this passion we helped to create an entirely new sector: high-quality, workplace-based child care as a benefit for employees. During our IPO road show in 1997, we talked about the Bright Horizons mission first, before the financials — and witnessed rooms full of tired-looking asset managers, many of them parents of young children, snap right to attention.
Today, Bright Horizons has more than 600 child care and early education centres, and we have made the transition to our second generation of mission-driven senior executives. Our annual leadership conference of more than 1000 managers feels like a cross between a political rally and a tent revival meeting. When you put passion first, you attract the right people, who all naturally head in the same direction. — Linda Mason is chairman and founder of Bright Horizons Family Solutions © (2008) The New York Times
