BY EDDY GOLDBERG
MOMS IN THE C-SUITE
BALANCING ACT
Barbara Moran-Goodrich on raising a special needs child
E
arly in her career, Barbara MoranGoodrich, CEO of the Moran Family of Brands, was fired from her job
as controller at Moran Industries—by her
own father, who had founded the company.
He believed his intentions were good. His
timing was not.
“I wish you would have let me know
before I bought a house and had a baby,”
she told him. Yes, those were different
times, and she knows that in his mind he
meant well, but still…
“A lot of people will say, ‘Okay, that’s
unacceptable.’ And it is unacceptable in
the workplace. But in the 1980s, that was
not unheard of. Many women had to make
career choices between families or their
career. And many times it derailed their
career, or they would make decisions to
push having a family back, just to be able
to continue forward in their career.”
And while some things change, some
don’t. “My father, when I bring it up to
him today, still feels he was doing the right
thing in wanting me to be at home with
my daughter. And I can understand from
his perspective. But that wasn’t fitting into
what I wanted in life.”
After being fired, Moran-Goodrich
stayed home for three or four months with
her daughter, busying herself with arts and
crafts projects and a garden. “Then I started
a career working in the government for
a time. My father was furious because he
thought he was doing me a favor by firing
me, and I was thinking, ‘Seriously, I have
to pay my bills.’”
She landed a job working as a legislative aide to Jane Barnes, a state representative in Illinois and a pioneering woman
in Chicago-area politics who spent 18
years in the Illinois House until her retirement in 1993.
“Jane helped me to understand the
good old boy network, the glass ceiling. I
learned it was all about respect and followthrough. She showed me that no matter
what the barriers, there is a way around
them,” says Moran-Goodrich. Those include hard work and continually educat Franchiseupdate I S S U E I , 2015
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