He left for a jog in their city of Pune, India, as he had so many times before. But this time, he didn’t come back.
The memory is clear and painful in Sheila Hooda’s mind. She was about ten years old the day her father collapsed and died of a heart attack at age forty-two.
Losing him sent a shockwave through Hooda’s family and drove her to take a on a new role: that of role model, motivator, and co-caretaker of three younger siblings.
“To make anything of yourself, you have to be driven,” she says now.
Hooda pushed herself as hard as she pushed her two brothers and one sister, getting herself into good schools and attaining success, then encouraging her siblings to do the same.
She has taken a similar approach in her adult life, ambitiously climbing the corporate ladder and then, when she neared the top, turning her focus outward to people who needed her—all while working eighty-hour weeks and spending time with her husband and twin nine-year-old girls in Westchester County, New York.
“Initially the full focus in life is to make something of yourself,” Hooda says. “But once you touch forty you begin to say, ‘I think I’ve reached and achieved something in my life. What can I do to give back?’”
After graduating from the Indian Institute of Management–Ahmedabad, Hooda completed her degree at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in 1988. Her career then took her from McKinsey to Bankers Trust to American Express Bank to Credit Suisse. In November 2006, Hooda was named global head of strategy and development focusing on mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures and growth strategies at the $410 billion financial services group TIAA-CREF.
Now she’s focusing on lifting up the people around her, by improving children’s access to education and women’s access to business funding.
Hooda works with Pratham, a non-governmental organization that provides educational opportunities to children in poor urban and rural parts of India. The group’s “Read India” Initiative, she says, is expected to help sixty million children become literate by 2009. She also serves on the board of Prerana, a non-governmental organization in India that offers funding to bright students who are at risk of dropping out of school.
