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When my
future husband, Roger Brown, and I graduated from the
Yale School of Management in 1980, we postponed job
offers in management consulting to run emergency
programs in Cambodian refugee camps. The Vietnamese had
recently invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge,
and thousands of refugees fled to the Thai border. I
managed a program for malnourished children, and we saw
a lot of very ill babies. Yet, with food and basic
medicine, most completely rebounded. Roger and I had
always been moved to make a difference, but this
experience gave us focus. If you intervene by age five,
we realized, you can positively change the whole course
of a child’s life. Later, after a few years in
management consulting, we went to Africa to become
co-country directors in Sudan for Save the Children.
Our
humanitarian work engaged us 24/7, and our only
connection to the outside world was the occasional
telex—so we gave absolutely no thought to long-term
careers. But when we came back to the United States in
1986, we had to make some tough decisions. By then,
Roger and I had met James Rouse, who co-founded the
Rouse Company to turn blighted urban areas into vibrant
public spaces. Jim became our mentor, and one weekend he
invited us to his summer cabin on Chesapeake Bay. During
one of our wonderful conversations, he said to me,
“Linda, your passions don’t have to be extracurricular.
They can be central to your life. Unleash them, and
you’ll help other people unleash theirs.”
Like
most entrepreneurs, I’m loath to follow anyone’s advice,
but Jim’s words immediately clicked. Millions of parents
in the United States wanted and needed to work, but they
had little access to affordable, high-quality child
care. It was a national tragedy. We decided to put our
passion for giving children the best possible start in
life at the forefront of our careers—and at the core of
a new company.
Don’t
get me wrong—building this company was one long, hard
slog. We faced a lot of skepticism, including from our
financial backers, who had never seen a successful
husband-and-wife team before. And when we struggled
during our start-up years, some of our initial investors
couldn’t understand why we paid higher-than-average
salaries or why we spent precious time founding a sister
nonprofit organization to help children of the homeless.
But putting our passions first—and backing them up with
good financial numbers—gave us a real business
advantage. Through this passion we helped create an
entirely new sector: high-quality, workplace-based child
care as a benefit for employees. During our IPO road
show in 1997, we talked about the Bright Horizons
mission first, before the financials—and witnessed rooms
full of tired-looking asset managers, many of them
parents of young children, snap right to attention.
Today
Bright Horizons has more than 600 child care and early
education centers, and we have transitioned to our
second generation of mission-driven senior executives.
Our annual leadership conference of over 1,000 managers
feels like a cross between a political rally and a tent
revival meeting. When you put passion first, you attract
the right people, who all naturally head in the same
direction. |
