Betsy Ziegler

Long before she was CEO of 1871, Betsy Ziegler grew up in Milwaukee. She was the oldest of three, an athlete, and a “good, not great” student. She was also a bit of a tomboy and “a Daddy’s girl;” he was a great father, she says, and their connection was close. But as Betsy was about to begin her senior year in high school, the business her father had started failed. The family pulled up roots and moved to Ohio to start over. They had been in Cincinnati for less than a year when Betsy’s father learned he had lung cancer. He was diagnosed in March; by mid-July he was dead. Betsy had graduated from high school just a couple weeks earlier.

When he died, he took Betsy’s childhood with him. Overnight, her picture of life changed. She went from being a teenage girl dreaming about college to feeling responsible for her whole family’s future. College? Who has time for college?

“I don’t come across as super-driven and I’m not really competitive with other people,” she says. “But from an internal perspective, I am really driven. And I think a lot of that started when my dad died. I’ve had this feeling for the last 35 years that I’m responsible for the health and safety of my family.”

Betsy’s mother, however, was having none of it. “I didn’t ask you to play these roles,” she said and pushed Betsy firmly out the door. The Ohio State University was just 100 miles down the road, in Columbus. They offered Betsy a full scholarship if she enrolled, and she accepted.

At Ohio State, “I found my people,” says Betsy, and she flourished. “I don’t think you’ll find a bigger Buckeyes fan than me,” she admits. She’d loved an economics class in high school; economics became her major in college. Economics gives one a way to put structure around the world, she says; having a way to explain the world felt grounding.

After graduating from Ohio State, Betsy went to work at GE Capital as a Management Development Program Associate. GE recognized her talent and made her an Operations Team Leader. She wanted more; in 1998, Betsy graduated from Harvard with an MBA. In her study group at Harvard, she was the lone woman among six male partners. “They’re my brothers; I love them,” says Betsy. But when she took the job offer to join global consulting firm McKinsey & Co., “they voted me most likely to leave my job in six months. They thought I’d hate it.”

McKinsey is known for its high intensity, high-performance culture. And Betsy didn’t come across as that kind of intense. “I never spoke, ever,” she admits. “It got to the point where my manager had a large sticky on his notebook with my name on it. And every time I spoke, he made a hash mark. Which didn’t make me want to speak more. It made me want to speak less.”

Her first engagement for McKinsey put her in a series of aluminum can factories around the country. Her job was to roll out a new program designed by another team. “I was literally by myself,” says Betsy. “My manager refused to come visit me because the quality of the restaurants in the towns where I was working was, like, fast-food level. I was brand-new and I knew nothing.”

She had to rally her intention. “I had to keep telling myself that I wasn’t a hiring mistake, that McKinsey believed I had something important to offer,” she says. And in the end, that assignment went well, “but I knew I knew nothing. And the next assignment was a disaster. I was getting yelled at all the time.” She stuck it out. She grew as a consultant. There were still really bad days; “I got fired once by a client,” she admits. “I think what I learned, though, was that people remember how you respond to the mistake more than they remember the mistake. That was a major lesson for me.”

Grit worked, and so did striving. Betsy proved her study group wrong and stayed at McKinsey for 13 years, making partner. But after a while, something felt off. She was up for the next level of promotion at McKinsey. Yet when she looked at the people who should have been her role models, she didn’t want to be like them. She realized all she talked about was the Ohio State Buckeyes, how the life insurance industry had lost half its value, and call centers — “a topic I happened to be expert in,” says Betsy. “I felt like I was living in this tiny box.”

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 came as a blessing. Client work slowed dramatically. Betsy had time on her hands for the first stretch in years to just think. She asked herself what she was spending time on and if she really cared about any of those things. One day she made a list of the 40 things she wanted to do by the time she was 40. It only took 20 minutes, but “that list changed the arc of the rest of my life forever.”

Some of the items on her list were light-hearted: See Michael Jackson in concert. Meet Bette Midler. But another item was deciding if she wanted to have child while not being married. She also opted to leave McKinsey. She set her sights on moving into higher education.

Which was great — “except no one in higher education wanted me,” she says. Waiting for a friend to meet her for lunch, she picked up the paper and saw an article on “10 people in Chicago to watch in 2011.” One of the people profiled was Sally Blount, Northwestern University’s new dean at the Kellogg School of Management and the only woman leading one of the top U.S. business schools. (Click here to also see our profile of Sally Blount.)

“I got out my Blackberry and sent her a cold-call email, saying ‘I’m leaving McKinsey and thinking about higher ed. Would you spend 30 minutes with me?’” Betsy remembers. “And we had lunch.”

Sally Blount wanted Betsy on her team and offered her a job. But so, suddenly, did Groupon. Some sleepless nights followed. One of those sleepless nights, Betsy got out of bed and picked up a big sheet of paper and some colored markers. Which job to take? And what about that baby?

She drew a picture of her future life that night, which she keeps framed and hanging on her wall. It has a dog and a baby and the Ohio Buckeyes in it, plus a few other things. There was nothing in the picture about power or money or travel or stress. Betsy had her answer.

The next day, she walked into Sally Blount’s office. “She was so nervous. She kept feeding me M&Ms,” remembers Betsy. They worked out a deal: Betsy would work for Groupon for six weeks to help them find their person. (It ended up being another former McKinsey consultant.) And then Betsy would join Sally’s team as Chief Innovation Officer, Associate Dean for Degree Programs, and Dean of Students at Kellogg — the highest-ranking non-faculty leader at Northwestern.

And the baby came along, too. Charlie was born when Betsy was almost 42. Today, she describes herself as a “proud boy mom.” “He is so different from me,” she laughs. “I’m a sports person and he couldn’t care less about sports. In fact, when the football game is on and the Buckeyes are playing, he scampers away. He doesn’t want to be anywhere around me.”

One of the things Betsy relishes about being CEO of 1871 is “getting to spend each day with people who believe any problem can be solved.” She also serves on several non-profit boards, including the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, where she is helping support programs that get young girls interested in technology and STEM fields.

“The thing is, you can plan to live an intentional life,” says Betsy. “That was something my mother really taught me: Have a point of view. Make a choice. If it’s not working, make a different choice. It’s what I preach to my team constantly because I have all these young people working for me. And women are so much harder on themselves than men are. But I want them to get that you always have agency and your life story is a summary of the choices you make.”

Although Betsy does have limits. Once years ago, Betsy and her brother and her son Charlie were vacationing together. Betsy’s brother was living with Betsy at the time, and Charlie was three years old. As Betsy’s brother and Charlie played in the pool, Charlie turned to his mother and said, “Mommy, I am the boss and so is Uncle Pete because we are the boys.”

“And I looked at both of them,” she laughs. “I said to my brother, ‘Excuse me, but I’m funding your life right now’ and I said to Charlie, ‘Get this straight: You are not the boss. I am Mom. I AM the boss.’”