Alumni Stories: Gaining from Tradeoffs

For Sandy Urie ’85, president and CEO of Cambridge Associates, the key part of a trade-off is not what is given up, but what is gained. When deciding on a post-SOM job, Urie went with Cambridge Associates, a small investment consulting firm located in Boston with about forty employees, over offers from McKinsey and First Boston. “Some classmates thought I was crazy,” she said. “The company was small and had only two offices. But it didn’t feel risky to me. It felt right.”

As Urie told an audience at Yale SOM on December 8, the trade-off in this case wasn’t that she was giving up working for a global, blue-chip company. Instead, she was gaining a chance to start at a dynamic company in her hometown of Boston. With a young daughter and recently divorced, Urie wanted to be close to her family. “I was a single mom,” she said, “and I could be certain that when I was on the road, my daughter would be staying with people who really cared about her. I looked for an organization I thought would enable me to be a good mom. You get only one chance with a child; you get plenty of opportunities with your career.”

Urie spoke as a guest of the Women in Management club. She mixed stories about how she helped Cambridge Associates grow from forty to one thousand employees around the globe with anecdotes about balancing career and family. As she explained, one of the things that attracted her to Cambridge Associates, which advises on investments primarily for foundations and endowments, in the first place was a corporate culture open to employees who needed flexibility. As an example, she explained how after four years at the company, she found that constant travel was taking her away from her daughter far more than was acceptable. She considered finding a different job, but when she brought this concern to her superiors, they asked her what she would need to be happy both at work and home. She restructured her job, going part-time for a while, travelling less, and taking on more of a management role. She was making less money, but found it an easy trade-off. “Never let pay stand in the way of a good job choice,” she said. “You’ll be so much happier.”

Urie took to management. She helped open offices in London and San Francisco, and by the early ’90s became chief operating officer. In 2001, she was named president and CEO of a company that now boasts nine hundred clients in twenty-seven countries, and has expanded upon its historic nonprofit client base to include individuals and governments. The growth of the company has forced her to become a different kind of manager. “When there were forty people in the organization, you knew everybody,” she said. “When there are a thousand people, you can’t know them all. I have to be clear in how I communicate to people. With one thousand “listeners”, people may hear quite different things.”

While the company has grown, Urie said she has worked to keep it the kind of place where a single mother can work without having to sacrifice her family. Urie told the group she sees her role as being a servant leader that she’s doing her job well if she is enabling employees to succeed. At Cambridge Associates, it’s a style of leadership that can be traced back to the vision of the company’s founders, Jim Bailey and Hunter Lewis. Stuck on a train between New York and Boston, Urie once asked the two why Cambridge Associates had always had far more female employees than other investment firms. Bailey, who was earned a JD/MBA at Harvard before starting the company in 1973, told her how the women in his class weren’t getting any offers from Wall Street. “He came to the conclusion that half the talent resides in half the population, but a whole group of prospective employers just couldn’t see it,” she said. “But it wasn’t just that. They figured that if they could make the company work for women, they could make it a better place for everybody.”