WOMEN of
PROSPERITY WITH SHAN COOPER
Regional c-suite icon lends valuable advice to Coweta’s female leaders By Carla Cook-Smith Photos by Keith Brazie, Pork Pie Pictures
Global business leader Shan Cooper engaged dozens of Coweta’s female business leaders as the keynote speaker at the Newnan-Coweta Chamber’s Business Women’s Alliance Luncheon presented by Progressive Heating, Air, and Plumbing on September 4, 2019. Her address provided insight into her success, empowering the thought-forward audience to be themselves, consider personal value, be expressive but understand the culture of the work environment being careful not to put limitations on themselves, be a good listener, provide solutions to employers, and to be transparent within themselves about non-negotiables. A senior executive since the age of 28, Shan currently serves alongside forty senior executives within the Atlanta metro community comprised of CEOs, university presidents, and civic leaders as the Executive Director for the Atlanta Committee for Progress (ACP). ACP serves as the cabinet for the city’s mayor. Following a storied career, Shan recently retired and initially declined the opportunity with ACP, but soon changed her mind when the mission tugged at her heartstrings. Once she learned that a child born impoverished in Atlanta had only a 4.8% chance of living a life outside of poverty, it didn’t take much to coax her out of retirement. “I could not hear that statistic and not do something to make a difference,” she said. Growing up, Shan was raised to give back to the community. To date, she has served on the board of directors for the Georgia Power Company and Atlanta Capital Bancshares, Inc., the parent company of Atlantic Capital Bank, NA, the Board of Directors for the Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta and the Board of Trustees of both Emory University and the Woodruff Arts Center, the Board for the Technical College System of Georgia and is a member of the Atlanta Rotary Club as well as a life member of the Board of Councilors for the Carter Center. 14
Cooper’s unprecedented career has broken numerous barriers, including that of being the first woman and the first non-engineer to hold the office of vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company. No one expected a woman to be in her role at Lockheed. Cooper earned the job over men who had been building aircraft for thirty years or more. “It wasn’t pretty in the beginning,” Shan shares. “A local newspaper interviewed one of my employees who said I was not qualified for the job. I did not fire the employee,” she said. “He was right. Fall 2019
