Taking Vassar’s Values up the Ladder
Their answers may surprise you, not least because they bear little resemblance to what you might find in the curriculum at a typical MBA program. Instead, their reflections have more to do with the so-called “soft skills” they learned at Vassar—staying curious and open, writing well, thinking clearly and deeply, and doing work that feels satisfying in a personal way.
That may not sound like a formula for corporate success, but there are nearly 500 Vassar alums who hold a CEO title or its rough equivalent. As the alums we interviewed make clear: There is something in the Vassar ethos that can stick with you all the way to the top of the ladder.
Mark Breitbard ’90
President and CEO, Global GAP Brand
fter a career marked by a proven ability to drive transformation and innovation, Mark Breitbard now leads one of the world’s most iconic apparel brands. Over his more than 25 years of retail leadership experience, he has served in numerous product, creative, and management roles at major global brands. He has held leadership positions across Gap North America and was instrumental in its resurgence. As CEO and President of Banana Republic, he stabilized the business and launched new models, including a rental subscription service, Style Passport, and a partnership with thredUP, the world’s largest fashion resale platform. Since taking the helm at Global Gap Brand in 2020, he has helped to turn the brand around by instituting new positioning and a new operating model. Previously, Breitbard had served in leadership roles at Old Navy, Levi Strauss & Co., and Abercrombie & Fitch.
After graduating from Vassar with a degree in English, he earned an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
Like many people, my path was windy. And my becoming a CEO had more to do with my interest in fashion than in wanting to conquer the business world. During my first job working for a beverage company in London, I realized that I had more interest in what people were wearing than what they were drinking. And so, after I went to business school, I applied to several apparel companies and landed a job at the GAP. That was in 1997, and I felt as if I was in exactly the right place, which, for me, means I’m doing something I’m super interested in that I also happen to have an aptitude for. That’s what makes it fun. I ended up leaving the GAP and coming back, then leaving and coming back again. I kept coming back because there was something about the values of the brand that appealed to me. Most important, I’ve always felt that I could bring myself to work there—not just a little piece of myself, but who I really am. I want everyone I work with to feel as if they can do that, too.
We are deeply committed to inclusivity. We also have customers, offices, distribution centers, and stores not just all over the country, but all over the world. That means we are always trying to find common ground. Recently, we had a company forum where we brought in a Democrat and a Republican who work together in Washington, DC, to come talk to us about how they deal with their differences. What was interesting is how much they agreed on, despite their political viewpoints. It helps to have a guiding mission—which has always been to bridge gaps to create a better world.
Your vintage question is good. Thrifting is definitely a trend we are tapping into. Besides doing a vintage collaboration with Sean Wotherspoon, who sources GAP items for us from the ’90s, we now have literal vintage GAP in some stores. That’s one piece of the equation. The other piece is how we work and what we do in the communities we are in. We are using more sustainable fabrics, fibers, and ways of working. It’s equally important to engage with the people in our supply chain. One way we do that is through our P.A.C.E. and RISE programs. P.A.C.E., which stands for Personal Advancement and Career Enhancement, offers women who work in our supply chain practical educational skills; we’ve since expanded that with RISE, which stands for Reimagining Industry to Support Equality, a program where we offer life skills to adolescent girls. Between the two, our focus is on empowering girls and women. Since 2007, when we started P.A.C.E., we’ve trained millions of our women partners around the world.
I’ve always been attracted to the creative world, but I also have a business side. It’s a right brain, left brain thing. I think the liberal arts education you get at Vassar sets you up for that—for being able to apply creativity to business. At work, I love that I go from a meeting on budgets and numbers and forecasts to one where I’m looking at prints and color palettes.
My Vassar professors also made a big difference in my life, whether it was Ann Imbrie in the English Department, or the year I spent with Don Foster studying Shakespeare, or Eamon Grennan, who was my advisor for my thesis on James Joyce’s Ulysses. They were more than professors to me—there was a real depth to those relationships. That’s because the faculty created an environment where you could have open, back-and-forth conversations. I’ve carried that into my leadership style. I want to be able to speak from the heart and create space for other people to do that, too—so we can all have creative, courageous conversations.
ANNE GREEN ’93
CEO, G&S Integrated Marketing Communications Group
s a business leader and communicator, Anne Green is known for her curiosity, empathy, and a drive to make strategic connections for clients, as well as her ability to cultivate a vibrant and growth-oriented culture for employees at G&S. In addition, Green is an accomplished and prolific media trainer and coach to those who wish to sharpen their presentation skills.
Green’s work as CEO and a partner at G&S is informed by 30 years of experience in integrated marketing communications. In this role, she is responsible for ensuring excellence across all areas of the agency, which offers services and counsel to clients in sectors as diverse as healthcare, professional services, financial services, technology, and home and building.
Green was previously President and CEO of CooperKatz & Company, Inc., an award-winning agency she helped to build for more than two decades before it was acquired by G&S in 2018. She began her career with the global communications company Burson-Marsteller.
After graduating with a degree in English from Vassar, she went on to earn an MA in American literature from New York University. She serves on Vassar’s Board of Trustees.
In my teens and in college, I always thought I’d be a literature professor. I was an English major at Vassar with correlates in women’s studies and vocal performance. At the same time, I knew I didn’t want to go straight from undergrad to get my master’s degree and PhD. I wanted to work, and the summer after my sophomore year, I was privileged to be able to take on an internship at a former nonprofit called the Center for Communications. The next summer, I applied for—and got—one of ten spots for a competitive internship in the New York City office of [the integrated public relations firm] Burson-Marsteller, this time for a nice stipend. I’d never really heard much about the marketing and communications field. Vassar prepared me for it without my knowing it, by helping my writing, my public speaking, and teaching me how to absorb information quickly and think on my feet.
After I graduated, I did end up going to get my master’s and PhD and even passed my orals and wrote one chapter of my dissertation. But I also kept freelancing in the communications field. At the time, there was growing pressure in academic hiring—basically, the message we were getting from professors is that it would be very hard for those of us in humanities disciplines to secure a tenure-track job in academia. But more than that, I was discovering that leading client services in integrated marketing communications really fed me—if you’re intellectually curious, it’s a fascinating field that combines multiple disciplines (marketing, public relations, paid media, digital) and covers so many subjects.
I was around for one of the first seismic shifts in communications, which was the ability to instantly write to the web via early blogging platforms like TypePad; the revolution of the general-purpose Internet; and of course, the two-way communication of social media.
AI is another, even bigger seismic shift. It’s going to change the way we work and the tools we use. There is amazing potential here for so many aspects of my field. Yet it can also make it more difficult to recognize misinformation, when something that is shared is inaccurate, and disinformation, when someone actively spreads lies for a purpose that suits them. The best way to guard against either of these is education, awareness, and active self-engagement. We all need to be aware of what we are reading and ask ourselves some pointed questions, including: What is the source of this? What is its purpose? Does it seem AI generated or fraudulent? Is it trying to make me feel a heightened emotion like anger? Those are some of the big tells. But it can be easy, even for professionals, to get pulled into a fiery comments thread by foreign actors or bots using AI at scale. Unfortunately, it’s in the interest of many people in the world to have us all at each other’s throats. I say to my team and my clients that we all have to resist this and be smarter.
There’s one story I always tell because it’s part of my organizational leadership today—and part of understanding what it means to guide a community of people in a pluralistic and now quite polarized society. My freshman year, in 1989, I took Women’s Studies 101. Our readings included Bell Hooks and Audre Lorde, who were among the voices critiquing second-wave feminism through the lens of race. That was the first time I realized that a social justice movement could replicate oppression. It was my first deep learning on the need to hold space for multiple truths at one time. I still draw on those lessons I learned at Vassar every day of my life, especially when I’m trying to expand representation in my industry.
KEVIN SARA ’82
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Nur Energie Ltd
Partner, RIVE Private Investment
Partner, RIVE Private Investment
evin Sara’s comprehensive coursework in science and technology at Vassar and his close connection to nature on campus helped propel the entrepreneur onto his current career path: investing in “cleaner” energy. Sara is responding to Europe’s move away from fossil fuels and its quest to lower carbon emissions by creating alternatives to fossil-fuel-burning power plants. His background in investment banking guides him as he leads the renewable energy company that structures and finances solar power plants, primarily in Southern Europe and North Africa. In his work at RIVE, he applies the same knowledge and skill set to invest in a wider variety of energy transition assets, including EV-charging networks and grid-scale battery storage systems.
At Vassar, Sara majored in physics and minored in Science, Technology, and Society. Then the German-born New Yorker, who grew up in Belgium, earned his MBA from École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris. He worked for a decade in international finance, covering the technology, media, and telecommunications industry. After that, Sara became an angel investor in renewable energy and clean-tech companies before founding Nur Energie.
In Tunisia, Nur Energie’s affiliate TuNur is developing solar and renewable hydrogen projects for the domestic and export markets, which includes developing submarine export cables to transfer renewable energy between Tunisia and Italy, and Tunisia and Malta.
I became a CEO because I decided to be an entrepreneur and start a company, and the founder usually ends up being CEO. I began my career on Wall Street—I was in investment banking at Salomon Brothers—then transitioned to more of an investing role at Nomura, the Japanese bank. Eventually, I thought, maybe I could apply these skills to something more socially interesting and beneficial. Right before I started Nur, I was in the fund management business where I was funding startups and early-stage companies. I thought, “I think I could do that myself.” I was concerned about the environment and felt we needed to transfer to technologies that were more respectful of nature and the environment. It seemed to be the most hands-on way to make a contribution. So, I founded a company in a sector I was familiar with, where I had a lot of contacts and relationships.
The most challenging thing is setup—finding investors, finding employees, and getting the whole thing going. At Nur Energie, we’re very focused on things that make sense from a scientific point of view and projects that make economic sense. We contribute to some scientific research projects, as well. We’re not just chasing money.
The most important thing is to understand that every little bit counts. So, it’s just a question of personal dedication to small things, and all the small things add up. For instance, companies can have policies and programs that facilitate commuting in alternate ways, like by bicycle. Working as a partner at RIVE, I find that incentivizing the companies themselves to be more sustainable is absolutely critical. We won’t invest in companies that don’t have sustainable strategies, very specific internal goals on sustainability, and a system in place for monitoring and reporting.
The academic program permitted an intellectual development that enabled me to understand a very complex and changing field. I was really able to understand a lot of the issues about new and changing technologies and how they work. Because of the presence of nature on campus, especially the absolutely spectacular trees and the greens and the beautiful nature around it—the rose garden, the lake, and the farm—I never lost touch with nature. In fact, I probably got closer to nature during my four years at Vassar. That reinforced my love of and my respect toward nature, which influenced my career. Later, when I saw what we were doing to nature, that it was getting worse and worse, it caused a shift in my career. I wanted to see what I could do professionally to maybe mitigate some of the damage.
Tanay Tatum-Edwards ’12
CEO, FreeCap Financial, Inc.
rowing up in rural Florida, Tanay Tatum-Edwards watched too many smart friends and family members go to prison instead of college—including her younger brother. At Vassar, she sought out classes that helped her make sense of why so many people in her community ended up incarcerated. Courses with Professor of Sociology and now Dean of the College Carlos Alamo-Pastrana and the late Professor Larry Mamiya—who ran the Vassar Green Haven Prison Program—opened her eyes to the systemic forces driving imprisonment, including corporations that profit from the exploitation of prisoners and their families.
After learning about impact investing at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, she decided to put her knowledge to work by founding a company that allows investors to make justice-informed investment decisions, particularly those that do not support the prison-industrial complex. FreeCap Financial has given asset managers and shareholders the data they need to understand how the largest U.S. companies manage the reputational and financial risk of using prison labor in their supply chain. Her index also shows how corporations handle second-chance hiring for the formerly incarcerated.
I wasn’t chasing the CEO title, but I was actively pursuing opportunities to be an entrepreneur. I saw a gap in my industry and realized I had the expertise and energy to help fill it, so I became a CEO when I started solving that problem. In graduate school, I worked for a financial education startup in Nairobi called Arifu, and at that moment, I knew I loved building, inventing, and business development. I actively pursued jobs at startups after graduate school. I landed at an asset management firm, and while there, I helped create a new marketing function at the company, so even in my first corporate job, I was still pursuing my entrepreneurial interest.
In the U.S. there are some 2.2 million people incarcerated—that’s over 20 percent of the global incarcerated population, and Black and brown communities, immigrants, and people who suffer from mental illness are disproportionately impacted.
A lot of companies have an incentive to lobby for harsh policies. There are businesses that source prison labor to make products at a cheaper rate. Some make money off of interactions between family members—the businesses that own the messaging apps and telephone and video conferencing technology. There are a lot of exclusive relationships, and people in prison and their families just have to pay whatever the price is. Email is something most of us take for granted. But when you’re emailing someone who’s incarcerated, you pay per message, you pay per photo you’ve uploaded and attached. It’s a pay-to-play system.
There’s been a lot of movement to try to ban these types of practices, especially since one of the most important things you can do to make sure someone doesn’t go back to prison is to make sure they have close family ties while they’re there. But the pricing model makes it very difficult to do that. For the companies that profit from these practices, a reduction in people going to prison is a risk to their business model.
Our work is about changing incentives so it’s not profitable to make money off prisons. Investors who want better policies around prisons can use our benchmarking to advocate for change at the corporations where they’re shareholders. Asset managers use our data when designing [financial] products. Wealth managers consult it as they advise clients. It helps them decide which companies to invest in and divest from.
But we’re trying to go a bit further than what the private prison divestment movement has done so far. Our work is also about making sure [formerly incarcerated] people have jobs and they’re connected to resources that will make it so they don’t go back to prison—fair-chance hiring.
This is a difficult question to answer in light of the election and having to balance my personal politics with how to keep my business operating so that we can survive through uncertainty. I always make sure I’m listening to my employees and clients around these issues so that they are supported no matter what’s happening politically. Our team is led by folks with a range of racial, gender, age, and ethnic identities, and I work to create a space where people can bring their whole selves to the office and reflect those unique perspectives in their work.
Vassar played a massive role in my success. I first learned about the prison industrial complex while taking classes with Professors Carlos Alamo-Pastrana and Larry Mamiya at Vassar. They gave me the language to understand how capitalism impacts social issues and made it possible to see a link from an industry like asset management to the social issues we all care about. Fundraising for the development office as a student was the first time I learned that I’m good at business development. As a student co-chair for Vassar’s Sesquicentennial committee, I worked closely with John Mihaly and got to see the ins and outs of how the College brought in capital to make our experience as students possible. I loved it! My liberal arts education makes me a more effective leader, innovator, and CEO. My first full-time research analyst hire for our company is a Vassar grad (Erika Folgar ’22) who started interning with me during her junior year of college and made herself indispensable.
STEPHEN FARBER ’84
CEO & CO-FOUNDER, HEALTHIVE, PBC
tephen Farber is a “reformed” investment banker who is passionate about addressing the care management of older adults—particularly those who are underserved.
He is now focused on helping patients/consumers, their families, and their formal and informal care teams navigate the processes involved in health care more effectively. HEALTHHIVE addresses critical enterprise needs driven by regulatory mandates, shifts in payment models, and gaps in care management outside of the institution across our siloed healthcare and social care systems.
Farber has an MBA in finance from NYU Stern School of Business and a JD in corporate law from Emory University School of Law.
One plan I had was to go to a liberal arts college—I wanted to get broad exposure to things because I knew that I was going to be focused on the business world later. I also knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, though I didn’t know how I’d get there. I just felt that the building blocks I would absorb through a liberal arts education would help me no matter what I ended up doing. After college, I went to law school and became a mergers and acquisitions lawyer. Then, I went to business school and went into investment banking.
I loved what I did but it kept me away from my family. When my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I decided to take some time off so I could be involved in her caregiving. Even though our family had knowledge and resources—we have five doctors in the family—caring for her and getting her what she needed was a difficult process. After she died, I reassessed what I was doing and got into the health-tech field. I started to work on tackling the problem of care coordination and management to support older adults, their loved ones, and their caregivers. And that’s how HealthHive came into existence.
It’s a high-risk challenge because it’s a complex problem, but it’s also the most rewarding thing I have done. How, within a broken health system, can we help address a problem so many of us encounter? How is it that we waste $93 billion a year during a person’s last twelve months of life on treatments that they don’t want, or because their doctors don’t have a broader view of their care?
With HealthHive, we’re thinking about every person along the continuum—in terms of what they need now and what they’ll need in the future—and not just doctors but a person’s entire support network. We all need better ways of getting information and getting on the same page when someone we love is sick.
What’s satisfying is that a few years ago, I’d go into meetings to talk about my idea for HealthHive, and I’d hear, “That’s impossible.” Today, when I go into meetings, I rarely hear it’s impossible but rather just that it’s really hard. And when I’m lucky, they ask what they can do to help.