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Composing a Career and Life

Linda Mason: May 7, 2009; Running Time: 0:52:06

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Linda Mason was originally going to make a case study of Bright Horizons, her $1.3 billion, early childhood care business, but reconsidered in light of the current economic crisis -- to the benefit of her audience. Instead, she takes up her own story as a recession-era entrepreneur who built several hugely successful, socially oriented ventures, navigating very real pitfalls and challenges along the way. Her “nonlinear path” yielded important life lessons, which she shares in this talk. Some highlights from her story:

Mason took a major detour from a planned career in management consulting when she and Roger Brown, who was to become her husband, left Yale in 1979 with their MBAs to work in Cambodian refugee camps. After a year, they returned to corporate life. But some time later, she and Brown experienced a watershed moment at a New Year’s Eve party, realizing their years of accumulating money and frequent flyer miles left them “depressed.” They determined that night to make a change.

Soon after, Save the Children called, looking for help dealing with the terrible famine sweeping western Sudan. Mason and Brown had 24 hours to make up their minds: There was “no time to make a list of pros and cons. It was a fork in the road, and we knew it was the path we were to take,” says Mason. This experience taught her, “It’s sometimes important to leap before you look.”

Management skills came in handy as the team set up a complex food distribution operation, one that challenged relief organization orthodoxy. This experience, which at the time “seemed crazy and risky,” fueled Mason and Brown’s next move in 1986: addressing the shortage of high quality child care in the U.S. The couple turned their Cambridge home into a start up headquarters, and developed a business plan, which they sold to enthusiastic VCs. But corporations balked at buying in, viewing the fledgling Bright Horizons team as “flaky Peace Corps types.” Mason, reflecting on this period, counsels “do your homework extremely well, then be very, very stubborn.”

As New England sank into a recession, and their idea faced collapse, the duo transformed crisis into opportunity. They summoned all their energy for a final effort, marketing onsite childcare to real estate developers looking to attract businesses. In 1990, four years after starting, Bright Horizons was in the black. The two ran the business for 15 years, when they moved onto other interests. “Discover your passions,” Mason advises, and combine them with your skills “to give your life meaning.”

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

“We kept selling (Bright Horizons) to corporations, who saw us as flaky Peace Corps types. And the early education experts saw us as slick Yale MBAs who didn’t understand early education. We were neither extreme, just two young people with an idea we were really committed to implementing.”

Linda Mason

About the Speaker

Linda Mason

Chairman and Co-Founder, Bright Horizons Family Solutions Chair, Mercy Corps

As Chair of Mercy Corps, Linda Mason deals with the strategy and development of this $300 million international relief and development agency, operating in 37 countries serving 17 million people, with major programs in some of the most difficult environments in the world including Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Somalia, and North Korea.

Previously, Mason spent a large part of her career creating and building Bright Horizons Family Solutions, now a $1.3 billion education company. As the largest world-wide provider of worksite child care and early education, Bright Horizons operates more than 650 high quality child development centers for employers in 40 states and Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Canada. Clients include the US General Services Administration, United Nations, European Commission, Time Warner, Cisco Systems, IBM, Yale University, MIT, Universal Studios, and Paramount Pictures, among others. Bright Horizons also operates eight elementary schools, private and charter. The company employs 19,000 people and serves more than 80,000 families. Bright Horizons was selected by Fortune magazine in January 2009 for the 10th time as one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For in America”.

Mason also co-founded Horizons for Homeless Children, a Boston-based organization that serves the needs of homeless children throughout New England. HHC has trained over 9,500 volunteers to work in 150 playspaces established by HHC in homeless shelters. In addition, HHC operates 3 full-service childcare centers for homeless children, also providing assistance to mothers to reach self-sufficiency.

Linda Mason

Mason's profile

Bright Horizons Executive Team page

About the Host

About the Host

MIT Sloan School of Management

The MIT Sloan School of Management, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the world’s leading business schools — conducting cutting-edge research and providing management education to top students from more than 60 countries. The School is part of MIT’s rich intellectual tradition of education and research.

MIT Sloan began in 1914 as engineering administration curriculum in the MIT Department of Economics and Statistics. The scope and depth of this educational focus have grown steadily in response to advances in the theory and practice of management to today’s broad-based management school.

A program offering a master’s degree in management was established in 1925. The world’s first university-based executive education program — the MIT Sloan Fellows — was created in 1931 under the sponsorship of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., an 1895 MIT graduate who was then chairman of General Motors. A MIT Sloan Foundation grant established the MIT School of Industrial Management in 1952 with a charge of educating the “ideal manager.”