NEWS
Tales of a ‘Cereal’ Mover
Given her globe-trotting track record, Albuquerque, New Mexico, may not seem a likely spot for Eileen Andersen ’97EvMBA, but Andersen believes the General Mills cereal plant located there is exactly where she needs to be right now.
“It may be the most important job in my career,” says Andersen, the financial operations manager for the plant. “It deals with the heart of how the business is run—profit, productivity, how you compete, and supply chain. It’s something of a badge of honor and it’s a fun job.”
Before landing in New Mexico, Andersen held several international positions at General Mills, including a job in Corporate Reporting. There, she handled the financial matters related to Cereal Partners Worldwide, a joint venture with Nestlé to produce and market cereal outside the United States, and Snack Ventures Europe, a joint venture with PepsiCo, to produce and market snacks in Europe. Andersen’s dream job is to be a country manager in Europe.
Andersen, who grew up in Kinnelon, New Jersey, caught the travel bug early. She spent a month in Germany as a teenager, and it changed her life. “I realized then that I wanted to do something international,” Andersen explains.
As an undergraduate, Andersen majored in German and spent several months in Austria where she met her future husband, David Andersen. When David moved to Atlanta to pursue his PhD, Andersen followed, worked for The Coca-Cola Company and enrolled in Goizueta’s Evening MBA Program. “Goizueta gave me a solid, broad business background,” notes Andersen. “I was going international and it was important for me to broaden my horizons.”
After graduating, Andersen joined the MBA Enterprise Corps (Goizueta is one of approximately fifty leading business schools in the United States that participates in the program). Similar to the Peace Corps, the MBA Enterprise Corps assigns MBAs to companies or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in emerging markets. She worked for an NGO in the Ukraine. Andersen stays connected with Goizueta as a resource for students who express an interest in the Corps.
Andersen calls her career path “unconventional” and considers General Mills’ ability to accept her “meandering” path as part of its diversity. “I’m not a one-size-fits-all kind of person,” Andersen adds.
Neither is her husband, who quit his job to stay home with the couple’s two children, Rose, who is three years old, and Bridget, who’ll turn one this winter. “Internationally, the only way to make it work is to have that home stability. It’s a critical part of the equation,” says the 37-year-old Andersen.
Before having Bridget, the couple traveled to more than thirty countries (even little Rose’s world-traveling track record stands at eight countries). These days, Rose’s interests—and therefore those of her parents—are more pedestrian. “We go to the zoo a lot,” says Andersen. “Rose is a zoo-aholic.”