Cathy E. Minehan, MBA: Why It Pays to Be Bold

Q: My guest on today’s podcast is Cathy Minehan. Cathy joined the Federal Reserve Bank in New York after college in 1968. During her career she has achieved many firsts. She worked her way up the ranks, eventually moving to the Boston Bank to become Chief Operating Officer and First Vice President, then CEO and President. She was the first woman to become the first VP of any reserve bank, the first woman to become President of Boston Bank, and only the second female President in the whole Fed system. She held that role for 13 years until her retirement in 2007. Today, Cathy is the Chair of Mass General’s Board of Trustees, as well as a board member for a number of notable organizations, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and local NPR affiliate, WGBH. As the Chair of the Board of Trustees, she helps guide the strategic planning and financial management of the hospital. Cathy’s passion for healthcare also shows through in her philanthropic support of the Heart Center and the Women’s Heart Health Program here at Mass General. So welcome, Cathy.

A: Thank you.

Q: So you’ve had a long successful career and I know that you have written on the topic of doing what you love. So, I’m wondering if you can talk about kind of how you fell in love with finance and how you found that field.

A: I feel very strongly that given all of the adjustments one has to make in one’s life and the near absence of work/life balance most of the time that if you don’t do what you love you’ve made life a lot harder for yourself. How did I fall in love with, well not so much finance but central banking, the Federal Reserve System? It wasn’t that it was intrinsically exciting to me.

I remember learning about the Federal Reserve, taking economics classes in college. I distinctly remember lying up on the deck of my dorm, those were the days when lying out in the sun was considered healthy, I remember lying out in the sun and reading in the economics textbook about how the Federal Reserve system created money and thinking to myself, “That’s a lot of BS.”

Because I know what creates money. I had been working since I was 14, doing jobs after school during the summer, working at a drugstore, in a bank, you name it. When I actually ended up getting a job in the Federal Reserve, in 1968 campuses were in upheaval and so forth and even going to interview for jobs took a little ingenuity at times.

And there were financial institutions there who were interviewing, and for some reason or another I had the presence of mind to ask them about management training programs. To an institution they said to me, “Yes we have a management training program, but women are not allowed.” The next interview I had with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York who came up to Rochester to interview, and asked about computer programming jobs, because I had learned how to program a computer, the 1401. Someone had to program it and I had learned how to do that. So they invited me down to New York to interview, take a test.

I passed their test. And then I asked them did they have a management training program and did they allow women. And they said well, they did have a management training program. They had never had a woman, but they had been thinking about it. So, they sent me around for a round of interviews and they ended up offering me a job. 20-some odd years later when I moved from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston someone was reading from my personnel file, and there was in big capital letters from somebody I interviewed with then, nice comments about the interview, but then in big capital letters “This could be trouble.”

Q: About you?

A: Yeah. The first stop on the management training program was bank examiners, and while they hadn’t had any women management trainees, they had never had any women bank examiners and they had never had any women travel with the bank examiners, which is what bank examiners do.

So, that was a very interesting learning experience, but I didn’t fall in love with the Federal Reserve until I got to the Accounting Department. Now, all of you are going to go, “Accounting? Are you kidding?”

But really the Fed is the center of all money movements that settle the markets in the United States and worldwide on a daily basis, and all of that information goes through the Accounting Department.

So, I got to understand that the Fed was at the heart of the financial system and it was just such a fascinating place to be throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s and early ‘90s. There were financial crises, either operational, debt from Third World countries, crises in Latin America and South America, different kinds of ways in which the government came up with things to meet those crises, like Brady bonds.

Just so many different aspects, and I was right there in the middle of things. And I used to say I couldn’t hold a job, because they kept moving me every couple of years, so I went from bank examining to bank applications to public information to accounting, then to IT and then payment systems broadly speaking. So I got an enormous background.

By the time I left the Fed of New York, there wasn’t anywhere except economic research in the bank that I hadn’t been in. And I was in love with the place. I got to really understand what it is about. So, deriving a lesson from that is yeah, you need to do what you love, but sometimes that is not going to be the thing you think you love when you’re in college or even your first two years of working.

You really have to step back and say, “What is it I like or don’t about what I’m doing, because I’m going to be putting in a lot of hours and I’m going to be doing a lot of things that are difficult to do in the process of moving forward in any position.” And if you don’t love it you know, life is too short, you should find something you do love.

Q: What advice would you give to a young person who is trying to figure out how to do that and how to find it?

A: Well, I’ve come to believe that values are very important and that if the organization you’re working with has a set of values that are close to yours and if it’s doing something, and this may be selling peanut butter, you know, but if it’s something that you feel they do well, the people in the company are people that you can respect and who respect you, selling peanut butter is an honorable profession.

My daughter for a long time was the Global Product Development Officer for Ore Ida french fries and tater tots. Man we ate a lot of tater tots, I can tell you. My daughter has a recipe for tater tots for every, any meal of the day and some snacks. You’d call her up and talk to her about what she was doing and maybe 10 minutes later you get a word in edgewise, because she was all, is always so excited about what she does.

And I think that’s how it has to be, because if you don’t approach work in a way that gives you pleasure, and whatever that work is, if the values are close to your own values and if you think you’re respected that’s what you should look for.

Q: You had all of these different roles within the Fed. How did you know when it was time to look for the next one? I think sometimes people struggle. You know, you’re in a role and your job is good and you like it well enough. How do you figure out when it’s time to look for the next one?

A: When you get bored. The reason I moved from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston was that I had been in almost every position I had the qualifications to be in at the Fed of New York, they had promoted a fellow who is head of their legal area to be the Chief Operating Officer. And he and I were colleagues and friends and all, but I knew that the chances for that job coming open, were not great. And it was like, “Okay, what do I next here?” And I was used to, as I said, every two years, every two and a half years moving either to another level in the current area I was in or to another area, and so I was getting a little bored. And so I called up the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston who was a friend, and asked him about his Chief Operating Officer, it’s called the First Vice President, who I knew was retiring.

And I said, “You know, do you ever think about interviewing me?” And he said, “Oh it never occurred to me.” In those days you didn’t pick a First Vice President from another Reserve Bank, let alone a woman First Vice President. He said, “Well, why not?” So, he and I had a couple of meals together and I interviewed with all of his directors, and then they offered me the job.

So, it was I started on April Fool’s Day of 1991. So, there is a couple of different lessons there, I think. First of all, you need to realize when you’re getting bored, because boredom is not good in a job. You usually don’t end up doing your best work when you’re bored. And secondly, nobody is going to advocate better for you than you.

You’ve got to look around. You’ve got to be realistic. But hopefully over your career you’ve made friends with the people that you’ve worked with, you’ve earned their respect, and you can turn to them and either ask them for advice or in this case pose a question that ultimately they answer in the affirmative.

Q: I noticed something that just jumped out at me. You said in the beginning of your career you asked to join these programs that no woman had ever been a part of and later you called up and asked, “Hey, what about me?” So what gave you the confidence to do that?

A: Well, what’s the alternative? You going to wait for somebody else to advocate for you? I think you have to have that confidence. What can they do but say no? It’s not going to hurt you.

Q: That’s true. I think we often get in our own way and we’re scared to be told no.

A: Yeah, I guess people say that and I don’t, I understand it at one level, but at another level you have to have enough confidence of your own abilities and enough confidence in yourself. If somebody says no, if they laugh at you, you know, nothing ventured, nothing gained. You learned things from negative encounters as well as positive encounters. I’ve had negative encounters in my time, believe me, and you always take something, you learn something, and you do it better the next time.

Q: Absolutely. I think that is important to remember. I used to be a teacher and I would tell my students that sometimes you try something and you don’t like it and that is, I think, almost more valuable than finding something that you like sometimes.

A: No failure is highly underrated. It’s really a good thing to fail sometimes.

Q: Yeah. I’m curious though, are there some failures that you’ve have encountered that you think back on that have been a meaningful part or propelled you in a certain way?

A: Yeah, I can think of one failure and it’s kind of dramatic. 9/11, I was President of the Boston Fed, my husband worked at Goldman Sachs in New York City, the Senior Partner there, and I was on the phone with Goldman Sachs people, not having anything to do with the Fed, it was a personal financial thing, just about this time that the first airplane slammed into the first World Trade Tower. And the woman at the other end of the line said, “Oh my goodness, a plane flew into the World Trade Center.” I said, “Oh my gosh.” I said, “Can you transfer me to Jerry’s office?” So, she transferred me and I asked his secretary, “Okay, where is Jerry? Let me talk to him.” And she said, “He is over at the World Trade Center. He had a speech to give there this morning. He left a while ago to walk over.”

So, along about then we were starting to hear about the second plane. As it turns out, he was standing in the doorway of the first World Trade Center and he saw the plane fly into the tower. He backed away to the Brooks Brothers that was there which ultimately became a morgue and watched the second one.

And it took him then another, just to navigate the crowds, 45, 50 minutes to get back to Goldman Sachs. And I was, had two things going on at the same time. One was trying to find him and the other one was the realization that the primary money market centers and a lot of the necessary infrastructure to settle markets or even to trade had been seriously impacted by the collapse of the two towers.

I mean obviously all of us were just in shock and mourning at the loss of the people and all of that, but we had to, we were really focused, myself, people around the country, on keeping the money markets moving so that the financial infrastructure, bad enough the damage and the loss of life, but we needed the financial infrastructure to stay and support the economy.

They finally found Jerry. Well, he checked into his office and they said, “Your wife is crazy.” And I had been calling the New York Fed and they said, “Don’t bother us. We have lots of other things to do. We can’t look for him.” But then we started meeting very, the officers at the Boston Fed, along with officers around the country started meeting on conference calls to figure out how to, as I said, keep the financial structure going.

None of that sounds like failure. The failure is this: While every other tall building in Boston let its people go almost immediately, particularly after the second airplane struck and the realization hit that the planes had come out of Boston, people were terrified, and they just felt, “Well they made a wrong turn. They were really aimed for us, right?” So, almost every tall building let all their people go, and the Fed has a lot of tenants and the tenants were let go.

It didn’t even occur to me until 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon that I should have let everybody in the tower go. We were so focused on doing the job that we forgot that what comes first is the people, the people that work for you, and their health and their safety and their welfare. And it was a tough lesson to learn and it took a long time to scramble back from it. But I have said this to a number of different people that I’ve spoken to that that learning process was so important. Gaining people’s trust again was a six month event of almost constant communication and discussion of what we would do differently and how we really did care about them or I really did care about them. So it was a really trying time, but it was a good learning time for me.

Q: How did you change then after that as a leader of the organization?

A: A lot more frequent communication and a lot more getting around. Not long after that, maybe a year or so after that we were doing a new strategic plan, and sometimes you think when you write the strategic plan down your job is done. Six months later it still wasn’t done. I mean we had meetings at every different level all through the organization and I wouldn’t have done it that way had it not been for what I learned in the 9/11 situation.

Q: So, as you were coming back from that and communicating did you admit the failure, the lesson to your employees? Is that something you talked about with them?

A: Sure. Sure I did. I apologized. Yeah. I apologized to some of my officers as well, yeah.<

Q: And what was that like?

A: What is apology ever like? You try to go hat in hand and learn from people, what people are saying to you. It was a good learning experience, that’s all, the best I can say about it.

Q: The other thing that stuck out to me in that story was talking about balancing in such a huge dire sense your professional responsibilities and your personal worries and responsibilities.

A: Yeah.

Q: How did that look or how did it feel for you throughout your career?

A: Well, the first thing about it is there is no such thing as work/life balance. There just isn’t. It’s a crazy term. I always think of it as you think about yourself at home, you think about it with your family, you think about yourself at work, you think about things you need to do for yourself personally, you think about things in the community, and at no point in time are all of those evenly balanced.

Lots of times you’re skinnying down on the community and building up on the exercise or skinnying down on the exercise and building up on the time with family or whatever. And sometimes there are real challenges at work, at home that draw all your time and attention. But I think it’s important when you’re in any one of those four zones to be there.

And the important thing is wherever you are, however you spend your time do your best possible job at whatever it is. Knock the socks off of exercise so when you go to work you feel relaxed and comfortable. Take care of your kids as much as you possibly can. Be comfortable with what they’re doing and then go to work.

I mean it, everything takes a lot of balancing, but part of that is what makes life fun and interesting, and sometimes when things are going really badly in one or another of those areas, it’s nice to have another area to go into and focus on for a while.

Q: So you have a little bit of escape from “This is stressing me out.”

A: Yeah, my kids, when they got to be teenagers would look at me and go, “Mom, go to work.”

Q: So they knew Mom will be more sane if she gets a little--

A: If she just leaves, yeah. And maybe we’ll be more sane too. Another element too in the things we have been talking about is developing a group of friends who are at your level, and that is one of the hard things about a woman coming up the ranks, or at least it used to be, because there are not a lot of women who were facing the same kinds of challenges and who understood what was going on with you.

When I moved here from New York one of the best things that Dick Siren, the former President before me of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, one of the greatest things he did for me was to introduce me to a couple of women he knew who were part of something called the Mass Women’s Forum.

And these were professors and doctors and CEOs and general counsels around town. It was wonderful to go out to dinner with them, because they would understand the pressures, they had, many of them had children and families and all the issues, but they knew how hard it was to be in a decision-making position, in a high level position, and balance all the other stuff.

And that kind of takes me to how I moved from First Vice President to President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Dick Siren, went to become the Chairman of the American Stock Exchange and by law the First Vice President, the Chief Operating Officer is the Interim President of the Reserve Bank until a new one is selected.

And a few of these women, they kept calling me and they said, “Oh of course you’re going to put your hat in the ring for President. Of course you’re going to do that.” It was not a job that I had ever thought about. And I have this memory, I don’t think it really happened this way, but I have this memory of a few of these women kind of locking me in a little room and yelling at me until I agreed to apply for the job. And I did apply for the job, and I was very fortunate to get it, because it was the singularly best experience I could have ever imagined.

Q: I love this idea of having a community of women around you who it sounds like were on the one hand a community of support, but also those people who held you accountable.

A: Right, exactly. Yeah, how many of them were not going to speak to me ever, ever again unless I put my hat in the ring, yeah.

Q: Yeah, and I think at least for me as a younger woman sometimes it’s hard to see your potential in yourself, so to have other people around you who reflect that back to you is really valuable.

A: And also they said the same thing to me, and I ultimately said it to myself too, “What are they going to say except no? Somebody else will get the job.” So, yeah, in the end I realized I had nothing to lose.

Trying for it would be a new experience. And it was interesting because I really wondered, all the brilliant economic minds in Boston, all the Nobel Prize winners and whatnot, and I really wondered if they, me not being even a PhD economist, let alone a Nobel Prize winner, how they would receive me. To a person they were welcoming, they were supportive, they were helpful, they would call me with ideas, they would ask me to come over to conferences or to little get togethers they were running. I would have them over to dinner at the Fed.

I cannot tell you how surprised I was until I reflected on the fact that for them feeling as though they could help me make better reasoned decisions, I could never thank them enough for their support and their help. It was really a surprise. And they wanted to do it because they wanted the right policy for the United States.

Q: I don’t lead the Federal Reserve Bank and I don’t have a board behind me, but I am a person who needs those trusted advisors who can share perspective, so I’m curious, Cathy, what advice would you give to a younger person who is trying to find those touchstones and those people that they can rely on?

A: Well, a lot of people talk about how you manage people who work for you, and a lot of people talk about how you manage people you work for, so manage up, manage down. I think the most important thing is managing your peers and using your peers as a set of if not mentors then at least reliable sources of information and support.

And in order to use your peers that way, you have to be able to be counted on by them as well. So it’s got to be a two-way street. And there are going to be times when that two-way street seems like you’re giving 70% and they’re only giving 30. That is sort of the nature of any partnership from time to time. If they’re going to be successful both people have to respect the effort the other side is making. When you work to really engage your peers, engage them in a way that makes them respect you, not just as a person but as a professional and as good at what you do, then you’re automatically creating a group of people who you can rely on for support, at least--

I think you can promoted one level up from where you are by managing up only, but you’re not going to go anywhere unless you have a firm base of support from the peers in your organization if you’re thought to be one of the best of whatever level.

Are those really mentors? I think if you’re really a person who is really contributing in the organization, mentoring will come automatically from people that you work for or with, because they will want you to be the best you can be, they will want you to do the jobs that you want to do, and they’ll be helpful.

Sponsors is another thing and that is usually somebody who is going to recommend you for the next position, who is going to say, put in a word, and maybe that person isn’t necessarily your mentor or someone you are thought to be close to.

Q: Another thing I know that you have done some writing on in this topic and the idea of replacing yourself, and as you move up through the ranks someone has to come behind you. How do you think about that?

A: Well, I think that is one of your most important jobs at any level of management. You should always be grooming people who can either replace you or who are great candidates for promotion elsewhere. That is the only way that you get the best out of the people that work with you, because they know you’re on their side, they know to take seriously what you’re telling them to do or how you’re telling them to do it.

So it’s kind of something that I think comes naturally with management that if you’re not thinking about the organization and how the organization grows and is ever more successful with or without you then you’re not doing your job.

Q: So I want to transition from talking about your career at the Federal Bank and as a person in that world, to the latter part of your career where you have shifted your focus to being--

A: A board member.

Q: A board member and a guide almost of.

Q: I think a lot of people, we know that organizations have a Board of Trustees and you hear that all the time, but I think a lot of people maybe don’t know what that actually means in a day to day sense. What is the role of a board within an organization?

A: The role of a Board of Directors is incredibly focused on how the organization is governed, is it looking at risks in appropriate ways, is it managing its accounting, is it financially stable, is it telling the truth to investors, is it compensating its senior officers well, is it treating its employees well, is it maximizing returns to shareholders.

In a way being on a Board of Trustees in a not for profit is very similar. I mean you’re not worried about necessarily the stockholders of the company, for sure, because there aren’t any, but you are worried about the impact that the organization makes in the area to which it’s devoted. In the case of Mass General we have the four missions. We’re really focused on the highest quality clinical care, on educating the best and the brightest of the leaders in medicine to come, on cutting edge research and we’re really focused on taking care of the communities in which we live.

So, as a Board of Trustees we really want to ensure that those four missions are being followed, and we want to particularly be sure that the organization is financially stable and delivers a high quality product.

So that sort of role of governance, going beyond management and looking at the bigger issues, the bigger trends, the bigger missions, the bigger goals, that’s how I see being on either a Board of Trustees or a Board of Directors.

Q: Cathy, you serve, I know, on a whole slew of different boards and different kinds of organizations. Do you approach a hospital differently than you would approach another kind of business, whether it’s for profit or not for profit?

A: Not really. I mean you want to be sure that the organization A has a set of missions and B has those missions drive what it’s doing each and every day, year, week, year, is financially stable, is delivering a high quality product.

I have been Chair of the hospital board for 10 years and it’s only recently that I’ve really begun to think that maybe I understand it a little bit. So, I have to say that the complexity of an academic medical center is truly daunting and it takes a long time to understand the culture that goes into creating the excellence in clinical work, in research, in education, in serving the communities.

So, I’d have to say from my perspective the academic medical center is right up there on complexity with the largest organization I’ve ever been on the board of, but aside from how long it takes you to kind of understand those different layers, the real effort you bring, the things you care about, the kinds of things you think the board should be involved in and so forth isn’t that different.

So, the core reality, I think, for a board member is what are the basics, is this organization set up so that it survives for the long run.

Q: Yeah, and I think we’re in this age where the idea of corporate social responsibility is becoming more of the ethos of just because you are a for profit company doesn’t mean you should forget about all these other things. And I think feeding back in--

A: Well, it’s important to people who eat peanut butter, or in my daughter’s case tater tots. And it’s a great business and it keeps a lot of potato farmers in clothes and whatnot.

Q: Another thing I’m wondering, Cathy, if a young person comes to you and says, “I want to be a board member” how do you do that?

A:There’s no easy answer to that question, A lot of people tell you that nonprofit board work doesn’t translate into for profit board work, but I don’t agree with that. The first board membership I was ever asked to be on after I left the Fed was directly the result of having been on United Way here in Boston and working on some things with some other leaders around Boston.

And they ultimately, one of them ultimately asked me, “Well, would you be interested in this board when you leave?” So, I think if you get involved in things around town bigger than the organization and you, first of all it’s fun, second of all you could meet your own mission in doing it, but third of all you meet a lot of other people, and those people can be good sources of information.

Getting to know the people in town, working in organizations in town, letting, getting people to know you as a, as a good thinker and a good worker.

Q: Yeah. So kind of put good out into the world.<

A: Yeah.

Q: Awesome. So the last thing I wanted to ask you about is in addition to being the chair of the board for Mass General you have also played a really important philanthropic role and been involved with the Heart Center and I know in particular the Women’s Heart Health Program. How did that happen and is there a particular reason it was heart health?

A: Well, the Women’s Heart Health program came out of a tragedy in our family where a very healthy woman age 60 who you may think of as old but I think of as very young went home from her job in New York, she worked for one of the big law firms, feeling sick to her stomach one night and was dead the next day. And it might have been what I now know is sudden coronary artery dissection or it might have been just a heart attack, the symptoms of which women experience differently than men.

So, after she died my husband and I and his daughters wanted to do something to learn more about how women experience heart difficulties and support research and clinical care in that area. So that’s how we formed the Corrigan Women’s Heart Health Program. It’s named for my husband’s two daughters, Elizabeth and Karen. And it was their mother who died.

We just celebrated our 10th anniversary, and it’s just amazing what they have been doing. The same women, Melissa Wood and Nandita Scott, Claudia Chae, plus several others are still involved.

At our 10th anniversary celebration there was an 11 month old baby who wouldn’t have been there, her mother had severe heart problems, without the work that the Women’s Heart Health Program, without discoveries they made and care that they gave her and so forth the baby would not have been born. So, it’s very satisfying to see how concrete their contributions have been. And so from that kind of led to a bigger commitment to the overall Heart Center.

And they are very committed to bringing women along. Cardiac surgery, cardiology, tough areas for women, but we’re making some inroads.

Q: Alright, well thank you so much, Cathy. Before I let you go. I have my final five that I ask everyone. What is the best advice you have ever gotten?

A: Think before you talk. I don’t always follow it, but…

Q: This podcast is called Charged. What does that word mean to you?

A: Excited, on point, just really into something.

Q: How do you recharge?

A: Good question. Not always easy to do. I like kind of dead time on the weekends, it’s hard to have dead time anymore, but it’s good to go someplace where the environment is very calming. We have a house in the South Shore, a little place called Padanaram. It’s pretty low key there, which is good.

Q: Yeah, unplug.

A: Yeah.

Q: Great. When and where are you happiest?<

A: I’m happiest with-- Well, my daughter and I went hiking the Amalfi Coast last summer, and I have to confess that was, I was pretty happy with that. That was fun. I like being active. I like being near my children and my, now my grandchildren. I write up a little set of goals and the one goal that doesn’t change from year to year is spend more time with children and grandchildren.

Q: That’s a good goal. And what rituals help you have a successful day?

A: I do a little set of floor exercises in the morning or I go, well we call it running, but it’s really walking with a woman that I went to college with, walk my dogs, get them fed. I like to get up early in the morning and I like to do those things so that I feel as though I’ve taken care of myself and the dogs and gotten ready for the day.

I love--this is the antithesis of this though--I love sitting in bed with a cup of coffee and reading the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which takes me a couple of hours and therefore I have no time for my morning ritual. So, it’s always, it’s a balancing act, right?

Q: Different days.

A: Yeah.

Q: And I have one follow up question. What kind of dogs?

A: Oh, King Charles Cavaliers.

Q: Very nice. Alright, well that concludes our time, Cathy. It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you and thank you for taking the time.

A: Thank you. This was fun.