The room had done what rooms do best: it had told the truth without saying a word. It was 2003, a retirement party for one of Michelle Ferguson's male colleagues, and Ferguson looked around. There were three women besides the guest's wife and the wait staff. People of color were similarly scarce. For an executive trained to read numbers, the arithmetic was unmissable. The tally was small; the conclusion was enormous.
By then, Ferguson had spent years inside corporate America, most of them in finance and operations. She knew how organizations described themselves in reports and values statements. She also knew that a room is an audit with hors d'oeuvres. Its guest list shows who has accumulated authority, who has been invited into the network and who remains outside the door.
Ferguson decided she and the company had work to do. Out of that evening came McGraw Hill's first women's initiative, later known as WINS. At its launch, four breakout sessions were assigned. Ferguson says she drew the short straw and got mentoring, a subject she then associated mainly with a program for high-school students. Six months later, her group launched 50 mentoring partnerships. What began as an assignment became the durable theme of her professional life.
A career chosen by elimination, then enlarged by people
There is a pleasing lack of destiny in Ferguson's account of choosing accounting. She began college as a chemistry major. It was, she has said, brutal. At the time, accountants and engineers seemed to be the graduates getting jobs, and she concluded that accounting was the discipline for which she was less ill-suited. Ambition often receives a stately biography after the fact. Ferguson's version keeps the awkward furniture in the room.
She attended the University of Notre Dame early in its coeducational era, when men outnumbered women by roughly three or four to one. At home, she was the oldest of seven children, with five brothers immediately after her in the family order. Male-heavy environments felt ordinary. At Columbia Business School, she recalls about 12 women in a class of 72. The imbalance was familiar enough to become scenery until that retirement party made it visible again.
Her professional training began in audit at Peat Marwick Mitchell, the firm that became KPMG. Roles at Abrams and Maxwell Communications followed, then a long run at McGraw Hill and S&P Global. Her portfolio grew far beyond the conventional borders of accounting: financial analysis, international operations, shared services, real estate, workplace strategy and large-scale transformation. Finance, in her view, became a foundation for understanding almost any part of a business.
The work might have turned her into a connoisseur of systems. Instead, it clarified her appetite for teams. Ferguson has said she would never be a solo entrepreneur because she loves working with people and developing them. The sentence reveals her preferred unit of accomplishment. A project may arrive under budget, a technology may go live, a service may cross a border. She wants to know who learned, who grew and who can lead next.
“I would never be a solo-preneur because I just love working with teams, being with people, and developing people.”Michelle Ferguson
The six-month deadline and the human balance sheet
One transformation condensed her philosophy. Ferguson led a fast outsourcing of finance, accounting and human resources. The request for proposals went out on December 23. The new arrangement went live July 1. Roughly 400 people at different levels were caught in the change, with some positions set to disappear. There was little time, a great deal of uncertainty and every temptation to reduce the exercise to milestones.
Ferguson did more coaching and job-search support during that project than she had before. On a narrow spreadsheet, investing in people who would soon leave could look inefficient. On a human balance sheet, abandonment was a liability. Her rule was bracingly direct: people deserve the truth, and they deserve to hear it from their own boss.
Candor, in this account, is neither theatrical bluntness nor a management slogan. It is delivery. The person responsible stays in the room long enough to explain what is happening, listen to the consequences and help with the next move. Ferguson had spent a career implementing systems. Here was another system, invisible but consequential, made of trust.
The mentor should leave different, too
The original mentoring cohort focused mainly on women as mentees. It soon included men, a deliberate choice for a program trying to make the company more inclusive. The structure also allowed participants to identify their own aims, from work-life questions to specialized business knowledge, and matched them with people equipped to help. The point was purposeful development rather than ceremonial coffee.
Ferguson is suspicious of the miniature-self model, in which senior people gravitate toward protégés who resemble them. Similarity can be useful when lived experience is central to the question. It can also reproduce the same narrow rooms. A person teaching negotiation, financial fluency or organizational navigation need not share every demographic trait with the learner. Difference, handled with care, gives both people a larger map.
Her most mischievous idea is that mentors should be selfish. She means they should bring learning goals of their own. Ferguson says she has gained at least as much from mentees as they have from her. Reverse mentoring, cross-generational perspective and exposure to unfamiliar experiences give the senior participant something more valuable than the glow of being helpful. They provide an education.
“I learned from at least as much from my mentees as they do for me.”Michelle Ferguson
That reciprocity eventually became a book. A friend at Chief was writing one and suggested Ferguson should do the same. Ferguson had long repeated the reassuring line that everyone has a book in them, while never producing hers. The nudge worked. In 2022, New Degree Press published Women Mentoring Women: Strategies and Stories to Lift As We Rise. She learned more about mentoring, learned how to write a book and discovered, with some amusement, that grammar had changed since grammar school.
A network becomes real on the second Tuesday
Ferguson joined Chief in New York as a founding member in 2019. The title sounds ceremonial; her contribution was practical. Within the community, she became a leader of a group for senior women navigating their next professional chapter. She welcomed members, organized discussions, found speakers and kept the cadence alive. When the pandemic ended in-person meetings, she moved the weekly group to Zoom and carried on.
This is the unglamorous heart of community building: someone sends the invitation, makes the introduction and returns the following week. Members described her as a connector, motivator and strategist. The three roles belong together. Connection without motion produces a full address book. Motivation without strategy produces a lively hour. Ferguson's gift has been turning both into a next action.
In 2026, Chief named her to its Member Advisory Council. The council is designed as a bridge between members and leadership, bringing member experience into programming, engagement and community decisions. Its members commit to a two-year term. For Ferguson, the assignment feels less like a fresh direction than the latest version of familiar work: observe the room, invite honest accounts of what is happening inside it, and build a better passage between people and power.
The useful question after “What?”
Ferguson's career began with practical incentives. Jobs were available. College debt had to be paid. Money mattered. Purpose appeared later, through the parts of work that returned energy rather than merely consuming it. She found it in teams, development, candid conversations and the moment when a capable person could see a route forward.
Her advice is to ask why. Why this work? Why this morning? The question has little patience for decorative mission statements. Ferguson puts it plainly: if you do not know why you get up in the morning, getting through everything else becomes hard.
There is an accountant's discipline in that thought. Purpose must reconcile with the days. It must survive deadlines, reorganizations, remote meetings and the occasional short straw. Two decades after Ferguson counted the women at a retirement party, her work continues to measure leadership by who gains access, who hears the truth and who is prepared to hold the door next. The room is still an audit. Now, more people know how to read it.