A Closer Look:
Laura Hattendorf, MBA 1993
Ashley Boren, MBA 1989
UNEASY LIE THE HEADS that share a crown.
Codirectorships may be known as battlegrounds for different visions or styles of management, but Laura Hattendorf and Ashley Boren have formed a true partnership.
The cooperative model could not be more appropriate to their organization. The San Francisco-based nonprofit Sustainable Conservation brings together business and environmental groups to solve environmental problems. Because all 10 members of the organization have significant private-sector experience, they speak the same language as the companies they work with.
Hattendorf came to the GSB by way of consulting and real estate development. Boren, a pre-GSB veteran of the Nature Conservancy, worked at Smith and Hawken for nearly eight years after earning her MBA.
Hattendorf and Boren usually divide their projects. Hattendorf, for example, has been working on a voluntary effort to reduce high levels of copper in San Francisco Bay and, by extension, in waters nationwide. Brake pads are suspected of giving off copper as they wear down, and this debris is thought to enter the Bay through stormwater runoff. Hattendorf has been working with the brake pad industry and various government and environmental agencies to identify and alleviate the problem. Meanwhile, Boren has traveled south to the strawberry fields around Elkhorn Slough on the coast of central California. There she discovered that farmers who were interested in conservation projects were stymied by an 8- to 10-step permitting process. Working with farmers, environmental groups, and government agencies, Sustainable Conservation was able to reduce the process to a single step.
"Communication is our biggest challenge," says Hattendorf of their work arrangement. "Voicemail and email make job sharing possible." Even so, Hattendorf and Boren, who both are the mothers of preschoolers, find they still need to overlap one or two days a week. What makes the whole complicated arrangement work, they say, is that they share a common commitment, background, and bent toward risk-taking.
—JANET ZICH
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