Company Description: Cardinal Health, Inc. is a Fortune 60 healthcare services company with revenues of $38 billion and 45,000 employees internationally.
Education: B.A., cum laude, Harvard University
J.D., Yale Law School
Department Size: 36
Immediate Prior Position: Vice President and General Counsel, Information Dimensions, Inc.
1. How would you describe your management style?
My approach is primarily collaborative with an emphasis on helping my lawyers get to the right place. I emphasize working with them, not just placing authority over them. In fact, I prefer to use persuasion rather than authority.
2. How does community participation help your career?
Community participation gives you an opportunity to develop leadership skills and to show that you have the confidence to lead and motivate. By working with charities and serving on boards, you understand how they work. Since leadership is articulating why we should move in a certain way, you learn how to persuade people. Then you can transfer those skills to the corporation.
And of course it’s gratifying to make a contribution to the community. We are all better off to be well-rounded; we should not focus our lives exclusively on our jobs.
3. Please describe a defining moment pivotal to your success.
I had three defining moments. The first was deciding to become a lawyer, despite the fact that no family member or friend had been one. I was breaking new ground. I was involved in speech and debate in high school because I enjoyed persuading and arguing a point. But my interest was in trial law because the attorneys I saw on television were trial lawyers. I didn’t even know what corporate law entailed.
The second moment came during my first summer after law school. I interned for a firm in Los Angeles, and was exposed to transactional law for the first time. That shifted my focus away from trial law. I enjoyed the negotiations and the give-and-take process.
Becoming an in-house attorney was the third moment. I had received grounding in the fundamentals of law through my work with a firm. But I loved being in-house and serving one corporation, one client.
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From the December 2001 issue of Diversity & The Bar®