Thasunda Brown Duckett is a force. She was a star at JPMorganChase before taking the CEO job at TIAA five years ago, overseeing more than $1.6 trillion in assets. Today, she is one of only three Black women running a Fortune 500 company, and one of only five Black women ever to have done so.
She credits a good portion of her success to her dad, Otis Brown. He grew up under segregation. He never went to college. He drove trucks, scanned boxes. And yet he told his clearly talented daughter to reach for the moon, because even if she missed, she’d “land among the stars.”
It was good advice.
The Lesson That Lit the Fuse
Thasunda Brown Duckett recalls her childhood with her parents, Otis and Rosie Brown, in Texas as being long on love, but short on money.
“My dad would sign us up for karate lessons, and I never got past white belt, yellow stripe,” Duckett recalls, “because the money wasn’t there.”
Sometimes the lights worked, sometimes they were cut off. Sometimes there was food in the refrigerator, other times there was not. “But somehow, some way, my parents always fed us,” Duckett said.
A defining moment came when Duckett, in college, happened to look at her father’s financial statements. After three decades of work, Otis Brown had never contributed a single dollar to his 401(k).
“Maybe the beautiful benefit flyer didn’t make it to the guy that scanned the boxes and drove the trucks, or maybe the way in which it was presented, he didn’t think it was for him,” Duckett said. But as soon as she explained it to her dad, he found a way to start maxing out his contributions.
Coming Into The Corporate World
As a young girl, Duckett’s family thought she might become a lawyer since she excelled at debating with her brothers. However, it was a program for college students called Inroads that introduced her to the corporate world. The recruiter from Fannie Mae was impressed by Duckett, but had already identified an applicant for their internship. So the woman convinced her bosses to create a second position. “I don’t know what I said. I don’t know what I did, but Fannie Mae added me as the second intern.
Duckett credits her ascent to a deep awareness of what she calls her “ownable assets,” like her intelligence and tenacity. It’s a smart approach that avoids a mistake many leaders make by identifying too closely with their job. Duckett’s philosophy is that you “rent your title, you own your character.”
“Especially as you move up in leadership, you don’t know when you will get tapped on the shoulder. But what you do know is that does not define you,” Duckett says. “And I can give you back the business card, but I’ll be taking with me my intellectual curiosity, my character, my grit, all those things.”
Climbing The Ladder
Thasunda Brown Duckett moved from Fannie Mae to JPMorgan Chase, rising steadily until she became CEO of Chase Consumer Banking. In 2021, she made the leap to TIAA, joining in the middle of COVID and learning a century-old company one Zoom call at a time.
During her rise, Duckett acknowledges there were hardly any leaders who looked like her, but she still found mentorship and support.
“Some of the people that advocated or people that gave me great advice… were men,” Duckett recalls. “But I also understand the importance of representation. And I think the why is that I understand that we are still in pursuit of meritocracy… which means we open up the aperture of what could be possible for talent. Women, people with differences, minorities. “
She adds, “You’ll still see men, you’ll see lots of them there. There are so many dope ones. I just want to make sure you see me too.”
Building Her Personal Portfolio
Another pillar of support is her husband Richard Duckett, a former Marine and engineer. He became a stay-at-home father to their three kids, a decision she emphasizes they made together. But it hasn’t always been easy.
Earlier in her career, after feeling the stress of working late and missing too much of her young children’s routines, she decided to change her perspective. She believes work-life balance is a lie. Instead, she now views her life as a portfolio,
“Tell yourself the truth. There’s no such thing as 110%, it’s a hundred,” Ducketts says. From there, she strategized what percentage her kids, her work, and the things she wanted and needed in her life would get.
She added, “It gives you language to understand what being over-allocated means. Because if I know my kids only get X percent and someone’s asking me to do one more thing in a different category, that means I’m taken away from this allocation, and that’s no longer in balance for me. So I live my life like a diversified portfolio because over time, you’ll outperform this thing called life.”
Why She Shares It All
Thasunda Brown Duckett’s Instagram account might offer a fuller picture of her life than what other CEOs choose to share. And that’s intentional.
She posts about TIAA and its mission to continue “this drumbeat about the importance of a secure retirement.”
Also on her Instagram feed: posts about her children, including her daughter Madison’s triumph as an All-American Fencer at Harvard, her son Myles and his pursuit of excellence in basketball, and her youngest daughter Mackenzie’s latest adventure.
Duckett shares anniversary wishes to her husband and full-bodied declarations of her faith. Not only that, but her fashion choices are also on full display – full of vibrant colors, designer clothes, and a healthy love of great shoes and accessories.
“I want more than 11% of women running companies,” Duckett says, “And I don’t want it to be because we opted out, because we thought we had to give up something that we really wanted because we couldn’t see that we could be hyphenated in a lot of different other ways … And I hope I’m inspiring people in a real way.”
The point: she wants women, and especially Black women, to see that a CEO can also be many things. That includes being a mother, a wife, and a woman of faith. And that sometimes, it takes a village to make it all happen.
She wants them to see it, so they can be it.
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