What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [29]
Dana grew up in an emotionally rigid home in Orinda, California, the daughter of Dana and William Cook, a housewife who enjoyed flower arranging and a successful San Francisco insurance broker. “Everything in our house was about living the American dream. It looked like Leave It to Beaver on the outside, but it wasn’t fun. My parents believed in achievement, discipline, and narcissism,” Dana said. She worked hard to meet her father’s demanding expectations, got straight A’s in high school, but barely socialized. Two weeks after Dana turned nineteen, during her sophomore year at Scripps College, her ten-year-old brother, Billy, was accidentally shot to death by a friend playing with a shotgun. “It says a lot that our parents didn’t call us to tell us that Billy was killed,” recalled Dana’s older sister, Connie. “A neighbor met us when we came home. And that was the whole flavor of our childhood. We were never really allowed to grieve. And I think Billy’s death went very deep and silent in both of us. Dana learned very young that she was in this life alone and had to make whatever happened her own.”
After her brother’s death, Dana’s parents asked her to leave college and return home. Instead, alarmed by the prospect of losing recently gained freedom, she married Harold T. Couch, the doctoral student she was dating, and left college. Less than a year later, Couch confessed that he was still in love with a former girlfriend. Dana left the marriage, returned to Scripps, and finished her degree in international relations. After graduating, she moved to San Francisco, secured a divorce, and—hoping to eschew typically underpaid women’s careers—found herself working in a succession of short-lived secretarial jobs. She often pretended to take shorthand as she rewrote her bosses’ letters. “I was so frustrated. I didn’t know how to get ahead. There was no opportunity for a woman, which is why I really identify with African women. I just know how frustrated they must be,” Dana said.
Her situation was made worse by the bias she faced as a divorcée in the 1960s. When her first husband asked her to remarry, she agreed. But the second try fared no better than the first. Dana soon met and, after her second divorce, in 1968, married John M. Doyle, an ambitious Harvard MBA. They moved to New York, where she was assigned by her company to work on a project at the New York Stock Exchange that she turned into the opportunity for which she had been waiting. The project, a transformative Wall Street study that led to the end of fixed-rate brokerage commissions, gave Dana cutting-edge tools to become an early investment measurement analyst, an expert on why some money managers succeed better than others.
By 1974, she had moved back to San Francisco, divorced Doyle, and was an analyst for Callan Associates, one of the nation’s biggest institutional investment consulting firms. It didn’t help her income. She earned $15,000 a year, one-sixth of her male counterparts who sold her research. When asked for a chance to do the same, she was told, “You’re a woman. Our clients will not accept that.”
She had had enough of such chauvinistic discrimination. After marrying stockbroker John H. Dakin, she struck out on her own. She founded Dakin Partners in the late 1970s and carved an innovative career as a marketing consultant to institutional investment firms interested in wooing pension funds. Initially, many of the firms feared that in marketing themselves they would lose the veneer of refinement that comforted institutions placing pension funds in their hands. “But Dana was able to convince these people that it was important to market themselves, that the world was changing and they needed to publicize themselves in an authentic way,” said Maureen Oddone, a fellow marketing consultant and friend. Dana’s creative agency pioneered packaging entrepreneurial spin-offs of traditional banks and insurance companies. In a business world dominated by men, she achieved