The MBAs On Fortune’s Most Powerful Women List

24. Mary Erdoes

CEO

JP Morgan Asset Management

Harvard MBA, 1993

“My father was an investment banker, and I think my interest in finance started before my cognitive skills were well formed — maybe even in the womb!” Erdoes once told Harvard’s Alumni magazine.

Callahan earned her Bachelors degree at Georgetown University, majoring in Mathematics, she was the only female to complete a Math major at that university at the time. When she went to Harvard in 1991, she left two years later with an MBA but also the man she would marry–fellow Harvard MBA student Philip Erdoes.

She started her career with Stein Roe & Farnham, and credited her maternal grandmother Izzy as instrumental for helping her get that job during college. She described her job there as a “glorified mailroom job”. She then moved on to Bankers Trust, where she worked in corporate finance, merchant banking, and high-yield debt underwriting. Before joining J.P. Morgan, she was employed at Meredith, Martin & Kaye, a fixed-income specialty advisory firm, where she was responsible for credit research, trading, and individual portfolio management. In 1996, she joined J.P. Morgan Asset Management as head of fixed income for high-net-worth individuals, foundations and endowments.

In March 2005, she was appointed CEO of J.P. Morgan Private Bank. She assumed her current post, which effectively puts her in charge of more than $1.9 trillion in assets, in September 2009.

28. Susan Wojcicki

Senior Vice President, Advertising

Google

UCLA Anderson School MBA, 1998

Having an MBA can certainly help one’s career, but sometimes luck can play a bigger role. Just ask Susan Wojcicki. After earning her MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School in 1998, Wojcicki bought 232 Santa Margarita Ave. in Menlo Park, California, for about $600,000. At the time, she worked for Intel as a junior staffer in marketing. To help pay the mortgage, she rented the garage to two Stanford students for $1,700 a month. The renters: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who incubated Google in her garage.

The rental deal also helped her land a key early job at Google less than a year after purchasing the home. Employee No. 18 at Google, she also introduced a future husband to Wojcicki’s younger sister Anne, who married Brin on an island in the Bahamas.

Among other things, she’s credited with refining the original Google logo designed by Brin and the overall spare look of the Google home page. She came up with the first of Google’s “doodles,” the remaking of the logo for holidays and other special events. And, most importantly, she came up with AdSense in 2003, the idea that brings in multiple millions of revenue to Google each year.

It was an extension of a program Google had successfully launched in 2002 called AdWords which offered advertisers sponsored search ads, those little text ads that appear near search results. Wojcicki’s suggestion was to offer these same ads all over the Web, on blogs and websites. Needless to say, it was a big hit.

30. Gail Boudreaux

President, UnitedHealthcare & EVP, UnitedHealth Group

UnitedHealth Group

Columbia MBA, 1989

31. Gina Drosos

Group President, Global Female Beauty

P&G

Wharton MBA, 1987

35. Lynn Elsenhans

Chairman & CEO

Sunoco

Harvard MBA, 1980

39. Bridget Van Kralinger

General Manager of IBM North America

IBM

University of South Africa MBA

41. Phebe Novakovic

Executive Vice President, Marine Systems

General Dynamics

Wharton MBA

42. Ilene Gordon

Chairman, CEO & President

Corn Products

MIT Sloan MBA

47. Deanna Mulligan

CEO & President

Guardian

Stanford MBA

49. Beth Mooney

CEO

Key Corp.

Southern Methodist University Cox School MBA, 1983

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