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SMG's Women's Leadership Forum focuses on money, technology, mentoring

By Hope Green

Vicki Donlan is a strong believer in the power of mentorship. The founder and CEO of the Hingham, Mass.-based monthly newspaper Women's Business, which publishes Boston and New York editions, she often counsels other women starting out.

Candida Brush BU Photo Services

But that doesn't mean she can't be the student sometimes.
"Six years ago an organization I was part of decided to start a mentor program," she recalls. "About 300 people showed up. One person got up and said, 'All the mentors go to the right side of the room and all the mentees go to the left.' Well, what do you think they did? They had no idea which one they were. In business we all have something to learn from each other at the same time."

At SMG's Women's Leadership Forum on Saturday, March 30, where Donlan is among 25 panelists scheduled to speak, women business owners will have abundant opportunities to network and learn from one another.
Panels and workshops will feature successful senior-level women executives and focus on three themes: money, technology, and mentoring.

"If you're going to rise to the executive suite, man or woman, you're going to have to know how to use all of these tools," says SMG Associate Professor Candida Brush, who organized the forum.

The speakers at the first-of-its-kind event at BU represent a range of industries, from large corporations such as Fleet Bank, Genzyme Genetics, and Sun MicroSystems, to small but growing technology startups, consulting firms, and a feature-film production company.

Sponsoring the forum is the Council for Women's Entrepreneurship and Leadership (CWEL), an endeavor that Brush launched and now directs as part of SMG's Entrepreneurial Management Institute.

There will be an international Webcast of the event, and SMG alumni around the world have received e-mail announcements urging them to log on.

"We hope this will be a chance to draw some of our alumni back to the school," Brush says.

She plans to make the forum an annual event. This year's keynote speakers will be Merle Okawara, chairman of JC Foodsnet Co., Ltd., and former president of e-Bay Japan, and Rayona Sharpnack, founder and president of the Institute for Women's Leadership, an international coaching and consulting company.

Okawara, a Hawaiian-born Japanese, got started in business in the 1960s, when she took over her father's frozen-foods company. She was the first person ever to successfully peddle frozen pizza in Japan.

"When I started out as an entrepreneur -- although I was in the manufacturing business -- I always felt the field was tilted against me because I was a woman and a foreigner, and because I didn't have all the connections," she told Japan Inc. magazine in a February 2000 interview.

Sharpnack's institute is a privately held company that provides leadership training seminars, primarily for women. She has been profiled in Fast Company as one of the top leadership coaches of the new millennium.

Sponsors of the event include the Deloitte Foundation, Fidelity Investments, Genzyme Genetics, and Sovereign Bank.

For more information on the forum or to register, visit http://management.bu.edu/research/emi/WLF.

22 March 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations