For Suzy Welch, success skills are gender-neutral

(pat greenhouse/globe staff)

Suzy Welch, 48, and her husband, former General Electric chief executive Jack Welch, 72, will give the keynote address at the Massachusetts Conference for Women on Tuesday. A former editor of Harvard Business Review and a Harvard Business School graduate, Suzy Welch has worked as a management consultant and a reporter. She now writes a syndicated BusinessWeek column with her husband called "The Welch Way." She recently spoke with Globe reporter Sacha Pfeiffer.

Q: Do you think women need different skills or tactics than men to succeed in business?

A: No, I don't. Certain characteristics make you successful as a leader, and they're gender-neutral. Leaders have to inspire people; they have to get into their skin and make them understand the importance of the work. They have to have a keen sense of marketplace dynamics and what's coming around corners, and I don't think that's any different for women. Some women bring special qualities to the job because they've got certain skills we sometimes ascribe to women, like soft skills. But, God, I've known a lot of great men leaders who've got those soft skills and certain women leaders who don't have them at all. I would say there's probably more of a difference between young leaders and old leaders than there is between men and women leaders.

Q: Do women face any different business challenges than men?

A: They do. If you're a single woman at age 40, you have similar challenges as a single man at age 40. There are Neanderthal companies where there's a bias against women, but most companies now in the global marketplace really just care about winning. You have to put your best players on the field, and if that person is a woman then in most enlightened companies she's played. But there is this biology issue. I have four children of my own, so I'm not speaking from anything but experience. When you are working and have a second, huge, important job of raising your children, you face different challenges because you have to make different choices about where your priorities are going to be and where you're going to spend your time. And it can be extremely difficult and very, very challenging if you're a woman who wants to do it all at the same time.

Q: Your resume is prestigious, but many people know you mainly as Jack Welch's wife, and for the affair that led to that marriage; he was married, you were divorced. The two of you have talked openly about your relationship, but is it frustrating to field questions about your personal life?

A: It doesn't really happen any more. It's been six years and when you have a couple that's married and working together, and especially when one of the partners is Jack, it just comes with the territory. Usually people are wonderful. Ninety-nine percent of the time people say things like, "I love your love story" and "I think you've got a beautiful marriage," so most people are pretty done with that, done with the curiosity about it. We are what we are.

Q: Some of your critics say you got ahead by marrying rich. Do you worry that's a message some people infer from your life?

A: I was very well-to-do before I met Jack, and I actually have not heard that. Nobody ever says that to your face, I'll tell you that. I guess you could say that about any woman who marries a man who's famous and well-to-do. Obviously it was a love story. It remains a big love story. Here comes the love of my life now. Hi, sweetheart. [Jack Welch walks in]. People talk, you get over it, you just don't care. And if people are saying that, man, they need to get a life. And I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Q: You'll be a keynote speaker at a women's leadership conference, but would many people know you if you weren't Mrs. Jack Welch?

A: No, of course not. I had a great job and I had a wonderful career and I certainly wasn't looking to advance myself professionally by getting fired [from Harvard Business Review after her affair with Welch became public]. It's not a career move you'd suggest to a person, so there's something really funny about people saying I did it for my career. But it worked out great.

Q: Do you miss Harvard Business Review?

A: No. My God, no. No. I mean, look at my life. I have the happiest life of any person who ever lived. I have a wonderful column in BusinessWeek, it's a great platform, we get hundreds of e-mails a week, I work for Oprah [writing a monthly column for O magazine], I give speeches, I do work with Boston Health Care for the Homeless, I've got my fabulous children. No, I don't miss HBR. I had a great run there. I don't mean to in any way criticize it. I learned a lot. I had a great team. I think it's a wonderful publication. But life goes on.

Q: After graduating from Harvard College, you wrote for the Miami Herald and the Associated Press. Why did you leave newspapers?

A: I love writing and i loved journalism a lot, but I had a growing uh-oh feeling in my stomach about the invasion of privacy issues that go along with journalism, so that was creeping up. Then, when I was at the AP, I had seminal moment when Christa McAuliffe cq very, very sadly died in the space shuttle explosion and I was assigned to sit on her parents' front lawn until they came home. And I had a moment where I had to stop and say, 'Can I keep doing this?' I just had too many queasy moments. Very serendipitously and fortunately, around that time I was asked to do business reporting for the AP -- not because I had any business ability, but because there was a hole and I was an available body. So I started covering business and I really loved it and really found it interesting. I didn't know anything about it and I was intrigued. It was the 80s and business was becoming front-page news and I wanted to know more. So I applied to business school and I was unbelievably lucky to get in, and I went. It all came together at the same time. My original plan was to go business school and become a business reporter, but then I got very lucky to be hired by Bain & Co. and I just loved it.

Q: You wrote a novel more than a decade ago, about a female reporter in Miami. Are you working on another one?

A: I had my fill of writing fiction and I realized it's not for me and let it go. You try a lot different things as a writer. I'm not a fiction writer. I'm a journalist. I'm a non-fiction writer. Fiction's too lonely for me. It's not a great fit.

Q: Is "The Welch Way," the BusinessWeek syndicated column you write with your husband, ghost-written?

A: Are you kidding? But I'm a professional writer. That's all I do. It's my job. Why would we have a ghost writer? It's really my priority in life, after my children, of course. No, no, I write that column. Jack doesn't write. He thinks, and thank God for that. It's a fabulous process that works really well. It's exactly how we wrote Winning [their best-selling business management book]. We choose which topic we think would be the best management lesson, and then we choose a question or two and I interview Jack about what he thinks. I play the role of conceptual editor, and we go back and forth and debate. We have a great conversation, and it can happen over breakfast, over dinner, walking to the bus stop to get Eve [her youngest child], at Stella [a South End restaurant] having a bowl of pasta -- it happens anywhere we are. Then I write a first draft and Jack edits it. He says, 'Yeah, this is right, but you missed this point,' or I'll say to him, 'I'm not sure this is the right.' Then I go back and write another draft and, depending how thorny or complicated the topic is, that process can go on ten times or can go on two times.

Q: What is your primary professional focus now?

A: The column. When you have a weekly column, that tends to take over your professional focus.

Q: Would you talk about how you balanced raising kids with working?

A: Having children is challenging for anybody whether or not you're working in a workplace. There are simple logistical challenges. How do you get to all the things you feel you should be going to as a mom and also meet your commitments at work? As your children get older, these problems, thank God, fade away somewhat. But there were many days when I needed to be several places exactly at the same time, and the more children you have the more complicated that can become. There were days where I had a kid who was in a wrestling match at the same time that an important meeting was happening. So there's this simple, constant juggling of meeting other people's needs and constantly trying to predict the future about whose needs should be met. You have to make choices about how you're going to allocate your time and your emotions. There is no solution or trick. There is only muddling. You muddle through it. You ask for help. I ask my kids for a lot of help. I got help from my mom and my sisters. I got help from my coworkers and my team. You make mistakes and you correct them and you learn and you're right some percentage of the time. On a good day, you're right 50 percent of the time. On a bad day, you're not right at all. I've had my moments of feeling like it was too much and then other times when you say, 'I can do this.' Then, bit by bit, your kids get older. With my kids, I was always very clear in saying: I'm going to work, I'm a working mother, I have to work for many different reasons, I have to work because it makes me the person I want to be. So for my kids there was never any bargaining about whether or not I worked. That can really complicate it for a working mom where she engages in a debate with her kids about how much she's going to work and whether she works, and I didn't go there with my kids. There are so many ways to do it right. I do not have the patent on it, I'll tell you that. I did it the only way I could and I was driven a lot by instinct and a lot by love -- and you love your kids fiercely. You become a wildly efficient person.