No More Superheroes
It's not easy—especially in today’s business environment. But she leads by example. In the process, she’s helping to create alternative pathways to power for tomorrow’s corporate leaders.
Recently, an old college friend of Lynn Utter called her
Superwoman. At first, it made the Coors Brewing Co.
executive wince.
That’s not quite the image she hopes to project. Though a doer and a straight shooter from the time she was knee-high to a grasshopper in a Nebraska cornfield, Utter, BBA ’84, doesn’t think women should have to be superheroes to strike a work-life balance.
But as chair of the McCombs School of Business Advisory Council, a founder and chair of the Longhorn Women Leaders and a board member for numerous community organizations in her adopted hometown of Golden, Colo., Utter has all the trappings of, well, a Superwoman. This 43-year-old dynamic woman is not only smart and professionally successful, she is also the mother of two children and happily married to her husband, Ward, a Harvard MBA who has opted to be the stay-at-home parent these days.
While her husband runs the household during the day, Utter acts as chief strategy officer for Coors, a major player in one of the most rugged (read: male-dominated) industries in corporate America. She is essentially “chief of staff,” reporting to the company’s CEO on everything from distribution to long-term planning strategies.
While Utter seems to have it all and be doing it all, her biggest source of professional pride is what she hasn’t done. Lynn Utter hasn’t followed the traditional path to power. She hasn’t hit the dreaded “glass ceiling.” And she hasn’t sacrificed her family or personal life as she’s ascended the corporate rungs.
It’s all about choices, she claims
Early Successes
As an undergraduate at The University of Texas at Austin, Utter (née Fox) was one of just 22 students chosen for the Business Honors Program. By graduation, she’d been selected as the university’s Outstanding Female Student as well as its Outstanding Business Student.
“You might say it hasn’t always been the easiest thing for me to relax!” says Utter. “Working hard is just part of my DNA. I was brought up in a middle-class family in Midwestern America—in Omaha, Nebraska—where hard work was highly valued.” Her father was an accountant for an oil and gas firm, and both her parents came from farming families. “In my family, you didn’t sleep late on Saturday,” she explains. “It just wasn’t what you did.”
After completing her MBA at Stanford in 1986, she was recruited by Rich Fairbanks and Strategic Planning Associates. Utter describes Fairbanks—who is now CEO at Capital One— as an early role model who helped her establish family as a priority.
In her four years at SPA in Washington, D.C., she strode easily from associate to senior associate to manager of human resources. In 1991, Frito-Lay hired her as group manager of sales planning in Dallas, but by the following year, she’d been promoted to director of service and distribution and relocated to Denver. By the time she left Frito-Lay for Coors in 1996, Utter had become vice president of sales operations for the Texas-based company. Now, 10 years into the brewing business, Lynn has risen from vice president of logistics to CSO.
As one might expect, her meteoric trajectory in the corporate big leagues hasn’t been all smooth sailing. Personally and professionally, Utter has faced critical junctures; those crossroads forced her to formulate her own ideas about the “work-life balance” well before it became a buzz phrase.
Considering that only 15 percent of Fortune 500 officers and directors are women, she feels a responsibility to share her story about her rapid rise in the corporate world and express a handful of core ideas that she believes warrant further exploration: making choices to achieve work-life balance, mentorship, changing the corporate structure and bending gender norms.
The Road Less Taken
Over the past two decades, Utter has faced more than her fair share of choices. Like other successful women, she has had to deal with major conundrums—usually involving whether to accept a big promotion or a relocation—that might put her family’s happiness at risk.
Child care was a big dilemma she and her husband faced four years ago after their last nanny left for college. “I married a Harvard MBA. When we got married, we both had this vision for our careers and they were pretty standard—what you’d expect of business people. But as we’ve gone down this path, we’ve both had to make decisions,” she said. “We’d had a couple of nannies, and when our last nanny quit my husband said, ‘You know what—I don’t want to get another nanny.’”
Ward made the decision to leave his job and stay home with their children, Ellie, age 8, and Andrew, age 10. “That took a lot of courage,” Utter says. “So, the questions we have to ask are how does society value my time and how does society value his time?” Society doesn’t typically accept the “absent” or “workaholic” mother, Utter points out, though it often expects this of an ambitious father.
That’s not quite the image she hopes to project. Though a doer and a straight shooter from the time she was knee-high to a grasshopper in a Nebraska cornfield, Utter, BBA ’84, doesn’t think women should have to be superheroes to strike a work-life balance.
But as chair of the McCombs School of Business Advisory Council, a founder and chair of the Longhorn Women Leaders and a board member for numerous community organizations in her adopted hometown of Golden, Colo., Utter has all the trappings of, well, a Superwoman. This 43-year-old dynamic woman is not only smart and professionally successful, she is also the mother of two children and happily married to her husband, Ward, a Harvard MBA who has opted to be the stay-at-home parent these days.
While her husband runs the household during the day, Utter acts as chief strategy officer for Coors, a major player in one of the most rugged (read: male-dominated) industries in corporate America. She is essentially “chief of staff,” reporting to the company’s CEO on everything from distribution to long-term planning strategies.
While Utter seems to have it all and be doing it all, her biggest source of professional pride is what she hasn’t done. Lynn Utter hasn’t followed the traditional path to power. She hasn’t hit the dreaded “glass ceiling.” And she hasn’t sacrificed her family or personal life as she’s ascended the corporate rungs.
It’s all about choices, she claims
Early Successes
As an undergraduate at The University of Texas at Austin, Utter (née Fox) was one of just 22 students chosen for the Business Honors Program. By graduation, she’d been selected as the university’s Outstanding Female Student as well as its Outstanding Business Student.
“You might say it hasn’t always been the easiest thing for me to relax!” says Utter. “Working hard is just part of my DNA. I was brought up in a middle-class family in Midwestern America—in Omaha, Nebraska—where hard work was highly valued.” Her father was an accountant for an oil and gas firm, and both her parents came from farming families. “In my family, you didn’t sleep late on Saturday,” she explains. “It just wasn’t what you did.”
After completing her MBA at Stanford in 1986, she was recruited by Rich Fairbanks and Strategic Planning Associates. Utter describes Fairbanks—who is now CEO at Capital One— as an early role model who helped her establish family as a priority.
In her four years at SPA in Washington, D.C., she strode easily from associate to senior associate to manager of human resources. In 1991, Frito-Lay hired her as group manager of sales planning in Dallas, but by the following year, she’d been promoted to director of service and distribution and relocated to Denver. By the time she left Frito-Lay for Coors in 1996, Utter had become vice president of sales operations for the Texas-based company. Now, 10 years into the brewing business, Lynn has risen from vice president of logistics to CSO.
As one might expect, her meteoric trajectory in the corporate big leagues hasn’t been all smooth sailing. Personally and professionally, Utter has faced critical junctures; those crossroads forced her to formulate her own ideas about the “work-life balance” well before it became a buzz phrase.
Considering that only 15 percent of Fortune 500 officers and directors are women, she feels a responsibility to share her story about her rapid rise in the corporate world and express a handful of core ideas that she believes warrant further exploration: making choices to achieve work-life balance, mentorship, changing the corporate structure and bending gender norms.
The Road Less Taken
Over the past two decades, Utter has faced more than her fair share of choices. Like other successful women, she has had to deal with major conundrums—usually involving whether to accept a big promotion or a relocation—that might put her family’s happiness at risk.
Child care was a big dilemma she and her husband faced four years ago after their last nanny left for college. “I married a Harvard MBA. When we got married, we both had this vision for our careers and they were pretty standard—what you’d expect of business people. But as we’ve gone down this path, we’ve both had to make decisions,” she said. “We’d had a couple of nannies, and when our last nanny quit my husband said, ‘You know what—I don’t want to get another nanny.’”
Ward made the decision to leave his job and stay home with their children, Ellie, age 8, and Andrew, age 10. “That took a lot of courage,” Utter says. “So, the questions we have to ask are how does society value my time and how does society value his time?” Society doesn’t typically accept the “absent” or “workaholic” mother, Utter points out, though it often expects this of an ambitious father.
