Tell Flavia D’Alo she can’t do something and she won’t set out to prove you wrong – but she’ll probably be doing it anyway.
Spanning a Who’s Who of influential companies, her career was not the result of the expected comfortable, upper middle class upbringing, connections, or Ivy League education.
Flavia’s parents moved from South America in the 60s, part of a big migration to the gold-paved streets of the US. What they didn’t realise, she says, was that the paving wasn’t gold at all, it was blood and sweat, a lot of hard work.
Having a father who looked a lot like Barak Obama and a blonde mother, she says, had its challenges.
“Segregation was alive and well when I was a kid. I just didn’t fit into the community, because I don’t look like a woman of colour, but I don’t look entirely white either.”
And the pressure was on.
“You don’t fail just yourself. You fail your community, so you embarrass your family, your community, your entire race, So we had an expression, the South American F is when you got an A-.”
Her father passed away at 42, when she was 8. Her mother married a Japanese man and they moved from a really poor part of Central LA to a very nice location in Orange County.
While at university she met her future husband – Italian but raised in Australia – and they later moved to Melbourne.
A less-than conventional upbringing could not have led to anything but an unconventional career. It began in law enforcement.
It was 1982, and there were two women in the police academy.
"We were never allowed to go on a beat, because if we had gotten hurt, the press would have been horrible. So I worked ladies jail, and the morgue with the coroner, which I loved, it was really interesting work. But I really thought, this is not what I got into this for. I was going to save the world, I was young.
“So my love of people and my interest in people and what I do for a living, is borne out of my absolute love of anthropology. I’m in love with the human genome, I’m not a psychologist and I’m not a sociologist.
So she turned her sights to retail.
She got a job as the secretary of a woman called Joan Miller the corporate office of Bullocks Department Store, which become Macys. “At my first performance review she said ‘You’re the most brilliant person I’ve ever worked with but you’re a brat, you need to pull your head in’. She was brilliant.
“I think every day of my working life, something that Joan taught me has been pulled through."
Flavia learned about the basics of HR and people engagement and process and P&Ls and balance sheets at a place with 13 floors of retail therapy. They hired 1500 additional staff at Christmas time alone, and on any given day would get 60-70 sick calls
"I learned about productivity, I learned about everything. It was great, retail was wonderful.”
But once again a new challenge beckoned. Tech.
“We were moving into the 90s, Windows was becoming prevalent and I’ve always been a nerd. I’m a dyed in the wool nerd, serious.
"I lovingly referred to myself as the outsourced executive. So I would go into organisations for 3-4 years and I would transform them.
"I’ve worked for brands like Hitachi, Johnson & Johnson, Guidant. I worked for Yellow Pages, huge iconic brands.”
And she’s worked with some iconic people.
“Before I returned to Deloitte I worked at BHP Billiton, and I had the pleasure of working under and for Marius Kloppers. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Marius was a loving, warm, caring individual. I’m not going to say that because it’s not true. But he was brilliant, off-the-scale brilliant.”
We present women as being the ideal when we see Housewives of Melbourne, The Kardashians, the Giuliana and Bill shows. Reality TV paints women in this image of an enormous amount of plastic surgery, and appearance. That’s what we feed young women.
“I also think we say in order to get into technology you have to be a mathematician and that’s not actually true. It was at one time, for sure, but it doesn’t preclude you. We tend to talk in STEM, which I think is not beneficial, because you don’t have to do well at science engineering or mathematics to do well at tech.
“So I think we’re getting better, I don’t think we’re there yet. I don’t think women think I can’t, but I don’t think that’s attractive to me. I think that technology will change faster than other industries.
Despite this, she thinks it’s a good time for women – in the developed world.
“It is ours for the taking. We have to focus. We can’t focus on what we’re dissatisfied with. We need to just work for it, stop asking. Don’t set up clubs for women, let’s just be together. Absolutely it’s the time for women. Nobody in this firm would ever, ever, ever stop me from doing anything because I was a girl.
"We just need to ask. I’m excited about what young women are accomplishing. And I think that’s wonderful and I think we can celebrate that. Elsewhere, we have a long way to go.
She says organisations need to promote women, not because they’re women, but because they’re good.
“They can look at my stilettos through the glass ceiling, I’m quite confident in the fact my gender means nothing to me.
“So how do we not promote envy? Stop making my gender an issue or a topic, please don’t do that, it’s offensive. I’ve worked in mining, retail, medical, tech, they don’t get more male dominated than that.
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