Joyce Williams

Abstract

Joyce is the youngest woman in this book. An attractive blond, married to a successful real estate developer, and living with their two beautiful young children in her dream home, she would appear to be the epitome of the country-club wife. Joyce is anything but. She was born to be an entrepreneur, but she decided to start out in the corporate world to gain some practical experience. Once there, she was caught up in the high of her own rapid success. In only eleven years she achieved more than many people do in a full career—but she still had a dream, and a grievance. Her dream was to be self-employed; her grievance was the environment that operates in corporations, particularly how challenging it is to find work-life balance. She took action on both her dream and her grievance, growing two successful businesses and coauthoring a book on work-life balance. Along the way, she experienced a rapidly growing high-tech company, a highly structured Fortune 50 monolith, and a regulated industry struggling to learn the competitive model. Beginning her career at 22 in 1987 and exiting her last corporate job in 1998 at only 33, her story is almost too much to believe, and these are just the highlights:

I originally wanted to go to school for landscape architecture but my parents talked me out of it, saying, “You’ll never work!” They have that depression-era mentality.