Career and Life
Marcia Kadanoff
After thirty-five years, it seems timely to reflect on what Stanford Business School meant to me.
it is said that the GSB prepares you not for the job you get right out of business school but for the job you will have ten years out. I found that to be the case. The job I had after business school at the Clorox Company proved to be a disastrous fit for me; I jived neither with the products nor with the people there. It did give me a solid foundation in consumer-packaged goods marketing. Many people refer to a stint at a CPG firm as a second MBA. With this in hand, I was able to move on to Apple Computer, which I loved. From this experience, I developed a philosophy that odd-numbered jobs should be “good for you,” and even-numbered jobs should be fun, a philosophy that I put into action for the next thirty years.
The position where I had the most fun was co-founder and general manager of a pioneering direct and interactive agency based in San Francisco. Our client ledger included Cisco, Levi Strauss, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Wells Fargo, as well as some startups like General Magic. Clients came to us for a branded approach to direct marketing, and in fact our mission statement was to become “the Chiat Day of direct marketing.” (How very Apple!).
Over seven years, my partner and I built the agency to $20M in revenue and 100 people. I once closed an $8M deal on the back of a napkin. And then we ran into a hiccup. Business dissolution is not something that we learned at Stanford Business School, but it is a lot like a divorce. Ours was, in a word: ugly.
Looking back at that, which happened in 1997, from the perspective of 2020, I can understand how trivial it is compared with a pandemic that, as I write this, has taken over 120,000 lives, and put forty million people out of work. Still at the time, it was life-defining for me.
Today, I live with my husband, fellow classmate, and love of my life Rich Mironov in Portland, Oregon; we’ve been married for thirty-three years. We just moved here after more than thirty-five years in the San Francisco Bay area. We came to Portland to slow down (a bit), free up money to travel (well, that’s not happening in the middle of a pandemic), and to experience new adventures.
Rich and I collect modern art and photography, are avid theater fans, and have joined our classmates on trips to Greece (2018) and Colombia (2020). We have a daughter Sasha (age twenty-nine) who lives in New York, and works in global marketing for Pfizer, while getting her MBA/ MPH at Cornell’s Roosevelt Island campus. Sasha is gracious about having been replaced only a little by Celeste, our West Highland white terrier.
I am (semi) retired and work with community-based organizations that build economic opportunity as well as with arts organizations, especially photography and theater. For six years I served on the board of directors of SF Camerawork, the oldest nonprofit gallery in San Francisco, which kickstarted the careers of Robert Mapplethorpe and Chris McCaw, among others. I am active in the women’s movement, having served on the board of About Face, an organization that arms thirteen to eighteen-year-old girls with the tools they need to fight back against a culture that diminishes and disempowers them. I co-wrote the book Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities.