SUZANNE LUNDAY: Hi. My name’s Suzanne Lunday. I’m a senior strategy analyst in our Corporate Strategy department. Corporate strategy tries to answer some of the larger strategic questions facing the business. So it could be around new market entry. It could be around new products and services or looking at different corporate initiatives that we should potentially engage in.
A typical day, I usually get here around 8:15 and then leave usually around 5:30. Usually, I’d say, about half the day is in meetings. So I try to carve out the beginning part of my day just for pure reflection, desk time, trying to actually “”get,”” quote-unquote, “”the work done””– so, making a lot of either writing white papers or putting together presentations or actually running analysis for the work that we’re doing. And then we’ll spend a lot of time either running meetings with the various stakeholders on a working team project or having one-on-one conversations with either people that I’m informally managing throughout the project or maybe informally coaching, as well, in the department.
We are interfacing with tons of people across the business, so our Corporate Financial Services group is a huge partner. Really, any group could be a huge partner, in any project. So I could list pretty much every business and shared service group in Vanguard, and there’s a good chance that we’ll be interfacing with them, at some point, on one of our projects.
And then, I would say, there’s a lot of time spent together, as a team, actually getting to a whiteboard and trying to sketch out the problem that we’re trying to solve and kind of breaking it down into its component parts to think about what are really the key strategic questions that we are facing, as a business, and how can we answer those questions effectively.