<Begin Segment 23>

AI: And so then what caused you, you know, you had, you were really dissatisfied. But what caused you then to take your, your next step? Was there a defining point, or...?

PJ: Well, I had no idea what I wanted to do, and I was still under this whole thing of my father, and what I had promised my father and that I couldn't possibly go and give up business, because what else would I do? And so it was just a very logical -- I had two options: one was to stay as an associate in investment banking, which they sometimes would make an offer to stay on as an associate, and then you would still have to go back to business school at some point, but it was considered a big... and the other was to go to business school. It never occurred to me that I had other options besides those. [Laughs] And so I applied to business school and I, and I went, just really because I didn't know what else to do, and I knew I didn't want to do investment banking, but I thought... you know, I like the idea of business. I mean, I like management, I like the concepts of management and I love think-, like strategic thinking, and I love to kind of envision -- even then, I loved to envision sort of new projects, and figure out how you would get those done. And there was a portion of that in the business world that I really liked, and really that was all I knew. I didn't know any other worlds, either.

And so I went off to business school, and then while I was at business school, I met this woman named Mary Houghton, who was the, one of the founders of the South ShoreBank in the south side of Chicago that was doing economic revitalization of the south end. And she, she became kind of a mentor to me. She said... because I said to her -- I took this class on economic development, and I thought, "Well, maybe this is a way to use my business skills for something that I believe in more." And she said, "Yeah, economic development is a great way to do that, and it's business, but you're applying it to something that matters kind of on the societal level." And so with her encouragement -- she introduced me to the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, because they were doing this very interesting reverse technology transfer, and it was the Good Faith Fund that Hilary Rodham Clinton was actually involved with in Arkansas. But ShoreBank was kind of heading up that project, and so she had, Mary and been to Bangladesh and she had met Muhammad Yunus and Muhammad had come here and gone to Arkansas. And so I heard about Microcredit back in the mid-80s, and was fascinated by the whole idea. I mean, just thought it was very, very cool.

And so that summer I applied to go, I basically found an internship in Thailand, and all my friends thought I was crazy, 'cause they were all going into investment banking and management consulting jobs where again, they were earning huge amounts of money, and I was gonna to go to Thailand and I was thrilled that basically my expenses were being paid, but I, I wasn't gonna get a salary or anything, and I was gonna be counting chickens along the borders of Laos and Cambodia -- [laughs] -- trying to figure out how rural economies would work. So that's what I did. I went to Thailand and I worked along the borders of Laos and Cambodia, and it was kind of my first introduction to doing international, quote "international development work."

And then came back from that very invigorated, but also saw a lot of things that aren't so great about the non-profit sector, but also still had, now had not just my college loans, but my graduate school kind of commitments that I needed to pay off. And so decided that when I graduated, I would try to find a job working for the side of business that had a heart. [Laughs] And... literally. And so I found this company that manufactured heart equipment, and Seattle had just been voted the number one city in the country to live in, and Physio was one of the top-ranked hundred best companies to work for in the country, Physio-Control, sold heart equipment. And so I decided to go work for Physio. And that program involved -- it was called a management development program, where you had to rotate through the different parts of the organization. So you had to spend some time in sales, and then some time in marketing, and some time in production, operations, that kind of thing. And then you would eventually be ready for kind of senior management of the company. And so you had to do this sales stint, and my sales stint in Cincinnati, Ohio. And that was quite something.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.