Typically, says the 57-year-old, "CFOs get in trouble if they get creative. Finance and writing have a lot in common; both have their own language and both require you to string words and numbers together to produce a complete story or picture." When they are combined — Joyce wove his knowledge of fraud-recognition software into the plot of Last Effects, for example — it generates "a bit of authenticity and color," he says.
Having a passion to write doesn't guarantee success, however. After facing multiple rejections, Joyce quickly realized how "very difficult [it is] to get into publishing houses and booksellers if you haven't been published before," and opted to launch his own publishing company, Centennial Books. "It's become quite an expensive hobby," he says. And while his first book has sold only 200 copies, Joyce is hopeful that the second one, Father Land, will do better.
"Our motto at Centennial Books is, 'Publishing fact and fiction for fun and profit,'" he says. The profit part may not have been realized yet, but for Joyce, it's much more satisfying than writing a 10-K. — L.D.
Save the Environment
Joy Covey looks back at her time as CFO of Amazon.com as "180
percent intensity on one narrow slice of life." When she left in 2000, at age
37, she says, "it was time to think about the rest."
Not "rest" as in taking it easy, of course. Living in Utah with her family, Covey has since focused much of her energy on environmental issues and maintaining open spaces in the West. "It's the area I feel the most urgency about," she says. "The Bush Administration's assault on the environment has been very energizing."
Her response has been to start the Beagle Foundation with her anesthesiologist husband, and to serve on several boards, including the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Santa Fe Institute, which is devoted to the study of problems that transcend traditional fields of study.
Covey launched the foundation in 2000 with a broad mandate that included making environmental grants. She and her husband sharpened their skills by attending Philanthropy Workshop West, a crash course in maximizing effective giving.
The foundation, funded largely with appreciated Amazon stock, is named for the ship Charles Darwin took to the Galapagos Islands. (It was in planning the first trip there with her husband that Covey came up with the idea for Beagle Foundation — naming it after herself was just not her style.) Today, their foundation "is not huge," she says, describing their endowment for it as "seven figures, although we're planning to turn it into eight at some point."
One project of which she is particularly proud is the Beagle/ Harvard Law School Fellowship, which sends recent graduates to the NRDC for two years of training in nonprofit environmental law. Another program funded by Beagle Foundation's $1 million gift to Harvard Business School was directed to the Harvard University Center for the Environment. (Covey holds both law and business degrees from Harvard.)
While her passion for the environment was less a factor in her decision to leave Amazon than were "the fertility tables," Covey doesn't rule out at least a part-time return to the workforce, perhaps when her young son starts school. It may not end up being a CFO role, she says, but finance "is so much a part of my vocabulary that it's hard to identify anything that I now do differently." — Roy Harris
Mix It Up
The simple life is not in Thomas J. Meredith's
nature. If he were "etymologically based," the 56-
year-old former Dell Computer CFO laughs, "I
would be a compound complex sentence."
On the one hand, there's his private-equity investing. Meredith's last brief job before leaving Dell, running Dell Ventures, taught him "how hot — and then how not — the IPO market would be for technology companies." While there, he teamed with former Dell treasurer Alex C. Smith to create an investment advisory firm, Meritage Capital, that specializes in multimanager hedge funds. Meritage now has about $350 million in assets under management.
Then there is his family charity, MFI Foundation — whose mantra is "inspiring, investing, and involving" — making a difference in the world with the personal wealth that he considers largely a product of luck. "I was fortunate early on to be involved with technology companies that got to be big," says Meredith, who was treasurer of Sun Microsystems before joining Dell. MFI Foundation takes the notion of a family foundation literally: Meredith and his wife, Lynn, run it, and all four of their children participate. "It's been really fun to watch them invest," says Meredith, recalling with special fondness his then-9-year-old daughter's effort to organize a benefit screening of the first Harry Potter movie to aid the families of those killed in the September 11 attacks.
Mixed in are myriad causes to which Meredith lends his finance connections and his sense for a reasonable ROI. For example, he is on the board of One Laptop Per Child, which is developing a $100 laptop for distribution to millions of impoverished children. And while simplicity may not be the end result of all his endeavors, he hopes they add up to "significance." — R.H.
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