Mikel Durham ’81
personae
A Delicious Career IT WAS the middle of the night in London, and Mikel Durham ’81, jetlagged from her latest leg of global travel,
Mikel in the test kitchen at CSM Bakery Solutions
was wide awake. Ruminating in her quiet townhouse in Holland Park, she decided—as an organized corporate executive might—to weigh her accomplishments against her goals and figure out what should come next. “I think people see me as a successful business person,” Mikel says, understating a career in which she has turned around several faltering companies. “My story has a lot more to do with the fact that I was at the peak of my career and hit forty and said, ‘You know what? There’s something missing here.’ I realized I was developing only one muscle. I wanted a family and didn’t want to wait for it to happen in a traditional way.” Mikel resigned from her position as president of the global supply chain for Cadbury Schweppes and moved from bustling London to rural Virginia, where her parents could help with the two infants she would adopt: Burkit, now 12, from Kazakhstan, and Arden, now 11, from China. No longer would her career choices reflect only her needs. From then on, she would seek opportunities that satisfied her thirst for challenge and “a fast learning curve,” but that also allowed for precious family time. Over the years, Mikel has developed a reputation as an executive to call when a company needs a shakeup, yet she says she landed in business by chance, when a professor at Smith recommended her to the consulting firm Bain & Company. Bain provided a crash course in business and ultimately paid her tuition at Harvard Business School. Mikel worked in Bain’s London and Australia offices and comanaged the Moscow branch immediately after the Soviet Union collapsed. “Imagine a country the size of Russia bankrupt. Every hairdresser, every restaurant, every
in the world, and there were » “Women buy most of the food so few women leading in the food business.” 12
Groton School Quarterly
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Spring 2016