🔒Role models and entrepreneurs

In this issue, whose cover is devoted to the 2015 Women to Watch, there's a quote that I think says a lot about success in business.

Jean Hoffman, CEO of Putney Inc., was part of the first Women to Watch class, from 2009. (See the profile of the inaugural honorees by Senior Writer Lori Valigra.)

“Consider making your own rules and building the work place you believe in as an entrepreneur rather than thinking about joining a large company,” Hoffman said.

That quote says a lot about this day and age, when we see so many entrepreneurs finding their own ways, their own methods and their own definitions of success.

That theme carries over to this year's Women to Watch honorees. We started Women to Watch in 2009 because we noticed many of our covers featured, um, men.

We had many, many strong nominations this year, and the staff had its own list of people it felt were worthy.

Back to Jean Hoffman's quote. I think this class demonstrates how career paths, and life paths, do not always follow a straight line. Entrepreneurs sometimes have a string of successes and sometimes have a string of failures; either way, they keep inventing and reinventing. With that spirit, they serve as role models for younger employees, both men and women.

The 2015 class shows many of those entrepreneurial traits.

Heather Sanborn, director of business operations at Rising Tide Brewing Co., has a master's degree in education, a law degree and a background as a lawyer. With Gena Canning, a managing partner at the Pine State Trading Co., when her father finally persuaded her to join the family business, he gave her few directions, just the assurance, “you'll figure it out.”

Lois Skillings, director of Mid Coast Health Services, has stayed ahead changes in the industry and is well into carrying out the system's “2020 Vision.” Kristen Miale, director of Good Shepherd Food Bank, worked for a private equity firm, yet seems to have a knack for building a successful food bank. And, yes, a nonprofit food bank can be successful.

We've honored women as successful managers, and this year is no different. Yet the leaders in this year's class of Women to Watch honorees have a good deal of entrepreneur in them as well.

The Wright Brothers (and sister, too)

I have been reading David McCullough's fascinating biography, “The Wright Brothers.”

It turns out the Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville, had a sister Katharine who had a strong role in their lives and their success.

Neither Wilbur nor Orville went to college, but Wilbur had a knack for science and Orville was mechanically inclined. Both had an entrepreneur's stubborn nature — an ability to fail time and again and not be discouraged. Failure was just a starting point for invention, a theme McCullough hammers home in the book.

The brothers had a successful bicycle company in Dayton that helped finance their efforts to build a flying machine. But back to Katharine. While the brothers were taking annual fall treks to Kitty Hawk, N.C., to conduct their flight tests, it was Katharine who stayed behind to work, care for the rest of the family and, on top of all that, make sure the bicycle shop remained profitable.

Katharine Wright, McCullough writes, was an Oberlin College graduate and a Latin teacher at Steele High School, where, “as Orville later noted, she would flunk many of Dayton's future leaders.”