Women of the Roundtable:
A Quest for Sustaining Vermont's Vitality

by Lynn Monty

Their leader is not a king, and their mission certainly isn't a search for the Holy Grail. But this Roundtable's quest is definitively a rescue mission.

"The Vermont Business Roundtable is a unique business organization. Our mission is to elevate the standard of living for all Vermonters, not just benefit the members themselves," says VBRT President Lisa Ventriss.

VBRT is an independent non-profit and non-partisan organization comprised of 120 CEOs from around Vermont celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Its focus is broader than a traditional trade association, utilizing research analysis and member recommendations to encourage public debate on a range of current policy issues, including education, economic health, environmental quality, health care, and technology.

VBRT is one of approximately 25 Roundtables nationwide that have formed over the last quarter century, each operating as an independent, autonomous organization. Ventriss describes their role as creating a voice from the business community that addresses long-range issues; VBRT looks specifically at policy challenges 10 to 15 years on the horizon.

"Vermont is not anti-business," Ventriss says. "This state is struggling with inherently true constraints. We are as about as far from transportation networks and energy supplies as you can get. Some companies need access to these to be successful and it's easier for these companies to choose other states to operate from."

"It is too bad that Vermont is perceived as anti-business. I wouldn't call it anti-business, Vermont is just not pro-business," offers fellow VBRT board member Carolyn Edwards, president and CEO of Competitive Computing in Colchester. Today, even small companies in Vermont face global competition. Consequently, we must continually re-assess business strategies and make the necessary investments to maintain competitiveness. I would like to see Vermont policy makers make those same investments to maintain Vermont's competitiveness as a place to do business."

Despite these limitations, Ventriss notes that technology-based companies, higher education, health care and small entrepreneurial companies are having great success in Vermont.

Daria Mason, president and CEO of the Central Vermont Medical Center, joined VBRT as the organization sought to expand their representation of health care. She now serves on VBRT's health care industry task force.

"We serve as a think tank on policy and production," Mason says. "The business community takes on a large portion of health care costs and this task force provides an opportunity to discuss with other business leaders some approaches to the current problems."

One of the most successful programs put into place during Ventriss' five years as VBRT president was the Peer to Peer Collaborators program, which brought in business leaders from around the nation to advise struggling Vermont business owners who were struggling.

"For example, a CEO might have started a business from the ground up 10 years ago, but is holding it together on a shoestring operation with systems in place, unable to keep up with growth and sales volume," Ventriss explains. "These business leaders assess the situation and suggest avenues to take. As a result, new technologies are often implemented and manuals put in place."

VBRT developed the program specifically to address a lack of technical assistance from the state, Ventriss says. They housed the program on-site for two years before passing operation on to the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, which was created by the Vermont Legislature to identify and fund solutions to economic, social, and environmental issues.

The most recent Roundtable venture is a new report on the lack of skilled workers shortage in Vermont. "Having the Courage to Change: Avoiding the Coming Workforce Crisis," as the report is titled, offers solutions for surviving in a competitive global economy, including funding social programs and generating educated citizens through an effective, adaptable education system.

VBRT's research demonstrated a pattern between the lack of school readiness, an increasing percentage of students deciding before ninth grade not to pursue higher education, and a fragmented post-secondary workforce education and training system in Vermont. "All of these are catalysts for a failing economy," Ventriss says.

Noting that 70 percent of Vermont's workforce has children under the age of six, the report offers a broad range of recommendations for creating an education delivery system capable of preparing children for success and making Vermont more competitive in the national marketplace.

The Joust Between Trade and Hearth

These women of the Roundtable all face the challenge of balancing work and family throughout their careers. "The issue for women often tends to be, 'How can I be an effective leader while being a nurturing parent?'" Ventriss says. "I have three boys, two in college and one in the third grade. Being accessible to my members means being on the road all of the time and that's tough."

Ventriss acknowledges that it isn't always easy to compartmentalize work and home, but adds, "It is impossible to serve two masters equally. My advice is to define priorities."

Mason gives similar advice - "Know yourself, be yourself and don't let others define you, understand your priorities, keep a sense of humor and know that achievement and success are a team sport," - adding that she's certainly on the right team. "What keeps me going are the people I work with," she says. "We have a tremendous team who takes pride in their work and who put their heart and soul into this mission-driven organization. It buoys me up and inspires me. We are always changing and finding new ways to be creative."

VBRT member Ellen Mercer Fallon, a partner at Langrock, Sperry &Wool, LLP, has been balancing work and family during her legal career over the past 30 years. "I have a spouse and one child," she says. "When I first began working, only women had this balancing issue. Now many of my male colleagues struggle with the same issue."

Fallon says she began her career at a time where there were very few women practicing law. "There were no women trial judges in Vermont when I began. No women on the Vermont Supreme Court or on the U.S. Supreme Court," she says. "I had no women lawyer mentors in my firm at all. There were few senior women in the profession at the time."

"I think some - but not all - of the women who chose to go into law and medicine 30 years ago had an interest both in the profession and in being a trailblazer," she adds.

Now there is a dramatic change for women entering the profession, with a substantial number of women trial judges, and lawyers, and with women on both the Vermont and U.S. Supreme Courts, she says. Women today have mentors at all levels.

As Fallon also notes, the prevailing view used to be that having a family was incompatible with being truly serious about a legal job. "This is no longer the case," she says. "In 1984, when I had my child, I only took three months' leave and as a partner I could have taken as much time as I needed. But I felt great pressure to get back to full time quickly." Now the expectation that people, men and women, will take some additional time is mainstream. This has made a huge difference for in integrating women into the workforce, she says.

While the glass and marble ceilings may still be present in some organizations, Edwards believes we are close to the tipping point because the value in a diverse work force is being understood. "It makes good business sense to have a diverse team. Women are not at a real disadvantage anymore," she says.

"Today we are still seeing, on a macro level, that women earn less than men," Ventriss observes. "Of course there are other issues as well, including women in the work force continuing to shoulder the bulk of the responsibilities within their households. As a result many companies have implemented family friendly practices. Workplaces are trying hard to ease tensions between work and family."

Families and business both take more time than you have, Edwards admits. "I make trade-offs every day. In today's world balancing work and family is not necessarily just an issue for women. I find men are just as engaged in their families as women are. We all struggle with it. When we get hung up on men vs. women in the workplace it slows progress."

Mason agrees, saying "The greatest misconception of not only women in the work place, but of men, too, is that we're all the same. Women are not all the same. Men are not all the same. We are all individuals with different strengths and abilities.

"When you're an exec, you're an exec," Mason continued. "Regardless of gender you worry about the same things - quality outcomes, satisfaction, financial sustainability, attracting the best and brightest, meeting the needs of the community and meeting expectations. None of these things are gender based."

Although VBRT members are predominantly men, Edwards and Fallon see it as an organization of business leaders with no bias around gender. According to Fallon, "Integration of women into the membership is a reflection of women's integration into their respective business and professional worlds."

Lynn Monty, of the St. Michaels College Journalism program, lives in Hinesburg.

Owning Her Own Time:
Former VBRT President Maxine Brandenburg

by Cindy Ellen Hill

While Vermont was being buried in three feet of snow, former Vermont Business Roundtable (VBRT) President and Chief Executive Officer Maxine Brandenburg spoke by phone from her winter home in mild, merely overcast Scottsdale, Arizona. Brandenburg's jet-setting business career took her around the nation, traveling in power circles where few women had access in generations past. Now, she possesses the one most precious commodity that most of us can only dream of: her time.

"My husband Richard and I both retired from our full-time work in 2002 because we wanted to own our own time," she says, with travel itineraries now devoted to grandchildren instead of rushing to make the next meeting. But retirement has hardly been a passive endeavor for this high-achieving businesswoman.

Brandenburg is engaged in nonprofit and community activities, both in Vermont and Arizona. She serves on the Dean's Investment Board at Arizona State University's College of Public Programs, and as co-chair of the Child Care Fund of Vermont.

Education and childcare are two strong interests of Brandenburg's, which shaped the project of her professional career of which she is most proud, VBRT's "Born to Read." This hands-on project was the Roundtable's contribution to the Bicentennial Project of Vermont. "For every child born in Vermont in the year 2000, the parent would receive a set of materials and books and information about reading at an early age. We worked with pediatricians, so when parents took babies to well-baby visits they got a package with five or six books. We also produced a videotape which showed parents how to use books with babies to cultivate language and communication. This was a key addition, because some of the parents are not readers themselves so they wouldn't read about reading," Brandenburg explains. "It was a tremendous success. It had an impact on every child born in the state, and that impacts everyone else. It shows that the business community is willing to invest in the long term," she added.

Retirement has also freed Brandenburg to take more public political stances. "The Vermont Business Roundtable is a nonpartisan group," she explains, "so you have to keep your head down," describing herself as an independent then, a liberal now - concerned with health care and education. "Now I have an opportunity to be more involved." Already she has her eye on the upcoming presidential elections: "I'm interested in how the primary will go. The war is extraordinarily distressing to me. We want to find a way to get some leadership to extricate us from this terrible situation we are in. The election in 2006 was encouraging, but it won't be easy."

"Having worked all my life, so many people said to me, 'how are you going to retire?' But it was not difficult at all. There [comes] a time to stop and focus on the things you really want to do. I have a real sense of satisfaction for the things I did," she says, but adds that now, if someone asks her to participate in something political, she can say yes.

And there's time to read, too, which Brandenburg relishes. "One of the nice things about retirement is you can read [what] you want to read, not just what you have to read," she says. Her book choices are hardly the brain-candy bodice-rippers that might come to mind as recreation: she has just finished Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Shadow of the Wind, a surreal novel about books and censorship. She's moved on to another work of fiction, Half a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ("about a young African woman, amazing, based in Nigeria, recounting the evolution of a family coming through the civil war, establishing independence"); and a non-fiction history, Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin ("It's about the Civil War; it's interesting to me, in the context of the current war, how Lincoln brings all these diverse opponents together to solve this national crisis").

When not reading, Brandenburg is likely to be found swimming or on her exercise bike, of which she declares herself "a pretty religious user." She continues to travel, only now with family rather than business associates. "We went to Ireland this summer and took our eldest grandson who is 13. It was a great trip and a great age for our grandson to be traveling, and we had a wonderful time. We went to Alaska last year with the whole family. We are a congenial group."

Raising Strong Women

Family has been an integral part of Brandenburg's life, with all the inherent challenges of balancing children and careers. Her two girls grew up in Buffalo, New York, where Brandenburg worked as the first executive director of an arts and education nonprofit. During this time she was awarded the Outstanding Woman of Western New York Award, just one of many honors she has accumulated through the years. "I spent a bit of time in the arts management cultural area, and that's still an area that I have a great interest in," Brandenburg reflects.

The two-career household was unusual in that time and place. "I met my husband in high school - we've known each other for an eternity. We both went off to college, married young, went on to graduate school." She describes the challenges for a professional couple with children. "We'd both be taking an early flight to New York City for the day, and the babysitter would get sick," she says. "You'd [both] be standing in the hallway by the front door at six in the morning having to decide who doesn't go to New York City for their meeting that day. Daycare was nonexistent; there were some preschool things, but no institutions."

"In the 1960s when my girls were born and I was working, it was a rare thing for a suburban mother to be going off to work. But both my girls say it made them strong women," Brandenburg says. Both girls attended Dartmouth College; the eldest is a physician in Colorado, and the younger daughter is now a neuroscientist at UVM.

Women in Vermont Business

The VBRT formed in 1987. At the time, Richard had just recently come to UVM to be Dean of the School of Business. Brandenburg herself was still in Colorado where the family had moved from Buffalo, working as head of the Colorado Alliance of Business, an organization dealing with labor and workforce issues. "I came to Vermont several times, but it's a tiny market to find a comparable position," she recalls. So she commuted between Denver and Burlington for about a year. Then, when some Vermont business people with whom she had networked were forming the state's Business Roundtable, they hired Brandenburg as its first president.

"I found out after the fact that they had had a lot of applicants, not that many of them women. And here I was an outsider, too, not from Vermont," she says. But her credentials were perfect: she'd started organizations like this before, had done policy work, and was willing to learn the subject and learn Vermont. Brandenburg recalls a board that at the time was "extremely knowledgeable, a great set of mentors. I don't think the 'woman thing' entered into it." The organization's original membership included very few women only because Vermont had few women CEOs at the time; those that were here tended to be family-owned businesses.

"Over the time I was there, women came into major roles in so many of the big institutions--heads of banks, the head of Verizon, a woman came in to run General Dynamics. The change was that, instead of women starting businesses, they came in to be head of various other business corporations."

Brandenburg points out that the Roundtable has never had a woman head of the board. "But the President is the person, on the day-to-day basis, running the organization. They've had an interesting list of presidents," she continues. "In its early years there were two former governors, CEOs of very big companies; in the last few years, people from smaller businesses."

"Women sometimes have a different style of management and that can bring a balance," muses Brandenburg. "An organization is more vibrant and effective with diversity."

Education, Early and Often

Brandenburg believes that the challenges for the Vermont business environment have not changed too much since her earliest involvement with the Roundtable. Chief among them is still education. "Education continues to be one of the key underliers of any successful society - not just business; I like to talk about the society as a whole. For a successful state and a successful nation, we need thoughtful, informed citizens. That starts with early education. It's an essential component of building an education system."

Despite Vermont students' pattern of high scores on national testing, the VBRT has advocated sweeping changes in the state's school systems. "We looked at the school districts: we have sixty, in a tiny state, which has never been efficient if your goal was efficiency," Brandenburg observes. "Cost-wise there has been this amazing Vermont concern with local control, and somehow having these sixty regional school districts made people feel like there was local control. But if you look at our costs and delivery systems and the turnover for superintendents, and for citizen participation, I don't think it makes sense. I don't have a solution - but historically, as we have looked at this, I've advocated some kind of consolidation," Brandenburg says. "National studies have rated us at the very top in education. We're expensive, but that's a rural factor as well as an organizational factor. Our student results do show we've done well, but that doesn't mean we can't do better."

"The Dr. Dynasaur program started in 1998, [ensuring] universal health care for children in Vermont - so we have very healthy children. That is an asset. I don't have any empirical evidence on this--it would be interesting to study--but I think that has a lot to do with how well our children do in school," Brandenburg suggests. "We have a strong ethic in Vermont for a social safety net. Some people get upset about it, but one of the rewards is that we don't have some of the social problems. It doesn't mean we don't have poor people, or people with needs, but for children, Vermont has done a good job."

I Can Do This

The Vermont business environment has done well by women, too, Brandenburg believes. "Probably in Vermont women have as many opportunities as anywhere else. In some respects in the business community, [Vermont] women have fared well. We have had a lot of very successful women, women in high office; we've had a woman governor; most of our state administrations have included a fair number of women; and we have a woman Speaker of the House.

"There are a lot of women in Vermont who should be motivated and encouraged, and not think about it as 'I'm a woman' but rather as 'I can do this.' You don't have to justify yourself as a woman as you did 20 years ago."

Cindy Ellen Hill is the author of Creative Lawyering: A Handbook for Practice in the Twenty First Century (Xlibris.com/creativelawyering).