8. Harvard Business Review

Sample Page: Harvard Business Review: Will She Fit In?

Will She Fit In?

And then, well, he just lunged at me."
"He did what?" Nancy asked incredulously.
"He lunged at me," Susan replied. "One minute we're sitting on the couch in his hotel room, rehearsing his board presentation, and the next minute he lurches toward me, knocking me over. I just couldn't believe it."
"Wow." There was silence on the phone line.
"Yeah, wow," Susan repeated. "Now what do I do?"
Susan Carter was a partner at the Crowne Group, a strategy consulting firm based in New York. Her good friend Nancy Richfield was an investment banker. In the 12 years since they had graduated from business school, the two women had kept in touch, often seeking advice and support from each other at difficult moments in their careers. Susan and Nancy were among a handful of women who had "joined the club"-attaining the rank of partner at elite, privately held firms in which 95 percent of the partners still were men. Crowne's New York office had the kind of partner mix typical of most consulting and investment-banking firms: there were 98 partners in all, 4 of them women.
Promotion to partner four years earlier was a goal Susan had worked hard to achieve. And her successes on the Pellmore account had given her a lot of visibility in the firm. In particular, her work with Brian Hanson, a group senior vice president at Pellmore Industries, was responsible for the dramatic turnaround of a troubled business. The turnaround had made Brian look like a hero, and he was so pleased that he had begun to champion Crown to other executives at Pellmore. Almost overnight, Pellmore became Crowne's largest and most profitable client. Billings mushroomed to $28 million-more than 20 percent of the New York office's revenue. And Crowne's senior partners were hoping to expand the Pellmore budget even further during the annual account review the following month.
Susan could feel the tension in the back of her neck.
"So then what happened, after he lunged at you?" Nancy asked.
"I pushed him aside, jumped up off the couch, and said, 'This is not a good idea,'" Susan replied. "And-can you believe this?-I'm the one who picked up the slides, which by now were scattered all over the floor. Then I just got the hell out of there. I still can't believe Brian Hanson would pull a stunt like this. I've worked so hard. How am I going to get past this with him? Talk about the things they never teach you in business school!"

Harvard Business Review: Will She Fit In?

In this section:

2. Hoover's Handbooks
3. Standard & Poor's
4. Robert Morris Associates' Annual Statement Studies
5. FASB Accounting Standards
6. The Wall Street Journal
7. Occupational Outlook Handbook
8. Harvard Business Review
9. Who's Who in America
10. MIT's Technology Review
11. Small Business Sourcebook
12. Peterson's Guide to Four-Year Colleges
13. American Heritage
14. The Worldly Philosophers

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