By Casey Kaplan · Photography: Andrea Ceraso
I visited with Suzy at her spectacular Honey Hollow estate in Pound Ridge on a brisk winter morning, and we sat for a cup of coffee, with the sun shining brightly through an extensive wall of windows. When I arrived at about 10 a.m., Suzy had just returned from a long walk around the trails on the property with her three dogs, Sir, Audrie, and Pierre…and had already that morning conducted a staff meeting, and recorded a new episode of her podcast Becoming You With Suzy Welch.
Suzy is a multi-hyphenate who traverses the worlds of academia, business, and media. She’s on the faculty of the NYU Stern School of Business, teaching two immensely popular classes, Management with Purpose and Becoming You: Crafting the Authentic Life You Want and Need, and serving as the Director of the NYU | Stern Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing. She’s an active media presence and serves as a frequent contributor on The Today Show. She’s an op-ed writer for the Wall Street Journal, and has an Instagram following of 140,000. She’s topped the New York Times and Wall Street Journal Best-Seller lists three times, and has just released Becoming You, published by HarperBusiness.
Suzy is also, notably, the widow of Jack Welch - the legendary CEO of General Electric and icon of American business. Their lives before he died in 2020 were well chronicled, as the couple built companies together, appeared as co-hosts of the CNBC show It’s Everybody’s Business, and often appeared at charity events in New York and Palm Beach. Jack was also an active partner in raising Suzy’s four children, and the family traveled the world together and summered at their home in Nantucket.
“I’m so in the moment when I’m here,” Suzy beamed as we sat down to chat on an impossibly plush sofa. About acquiring the Honey Hollow estate, that’s complete with magnificent landscaped grounds, a pond with an island, and miles of adjacent walking trails, Suzy explains, “Jack died in March 2020, just before the pandemic. Afterward, I headed upstate to Rhinebeck with my four kids and their spouses. In 2021, as I started to step back into my life, I moved back to the City to work again, and wanted to find a weekend place that was closer to Manhattan and that fulfilled that love of nature and spending time outdoors, but was also convenient and spacious for my family and friends to visit and spend time. I fell in love with this place. It wasn’t very hard.” After buying the house, Suzy converted one bay of the garage into a pottery studio, where she and her children often spend Saturday afternoons. “My family is filled with artists and my canvas is my home. I hope to get my hands into the clay with my grandchildren, Lirael and Taran, as soon as they’re old enough,” Suzy smiled. “They’re only two and two months old now, but they are the light of my life.”
Suzy is high energy and fast-paced, her conversation peppered with jokes and asides, and there’s rarely a lull. But she’s also immediately warm and authentic. Throughout the morning, two members of her team kept popping in and out to let her know about performance metrics, calls, and scheduling changes, or to check with her on an urgent decision…but Suzy still managed to make us feel that we had her complete attention and focus.
As we began to set up lighting in the eclectically decorated living room, Suzy caught me looking inquisitively at a portrait and explained, “I collect portraits of women from all different eras and cultures. I don’t really care about the provenance… I’m mostly interested in the story behind them…and I especially like it if they have their dog! This particular painting is of a female merchant from the Netherlands in the 1800s. …What’s funny, at least to me, is that if you look across the room, I also acquired the matching portrait of her husband from the same commission…but you’ll notice that the painting of the husband is quite a bit smaller…and size would typically signify importance. So my theory is that she was perhaps more successful or came from a more successful family.” She paused as if to consider the mystery of the painting, and then added, “In the end, it’s just a matter of whether the painting touches me in some way. I want everything in my house to have emotional content that evokes a memory or makes me happy or thoughtful for some reason. Mementos from travels, and lots of art. Jack and I made it a point to visit local artists and artisans everywhere we went.”
Suzy’s home was decorated by Elizabeth Lawrence, the decorating partner of Bunny Williams.
Suzy was born in Portland, Oregon, but lived in various parts of the country growing up. “My father was an architect from the Bronx and my mother was an artist from a Sicilian family that had settled in Rochester, New York. Education was definitely valued, but our family was more likely to talk about a new album by Bob Dylan or a fun day fishing than getting into any particular college,” Suzy says. “By the time I was 14, it became clear that I needed more of a challenge than my public school could provide, and a teacher suggested that I might be better off at a rigorous boarding school… With four kids, it definitely wasn’t easy for my parents financially, but they worked hard to make it happen, and sent me to Exeter with their love and high hopes. It changed the course of my life.”
Suzy went on to attend Harvard, where she majored in Fine Arts, and spent much of her free time at the daily newspaper, The Crimson. “As someone who studies and teaches career development, I am certainly amused by the irony of how little thought I’d given to my own career starting out,” Suzy mused. “Intrigued by a pair of recruiters who came to campus my senior year, I took a job as a crime reporter at The Miami Herald. I started off covering crime in 1981 in the middle of two sets of riots and the Mariel boatlift. It was a fantastic place to be a young journalist, and I learned a lot. But a terrible boss, and missing home, brought me back up North a few years later, when I landed at the Associated Press as a Business Reporter. …The only thing was,” Suzy laughs, “I didn’t know anything about business!”
Though I’d found journalism to be profoundly interesting, I felt like I found my true calling in business…
“I did what I think everyone should do when you want to really learn about something… I went back to school,” Suzy relays of her decision to apply to Harvard Business School. “Though I’d found journalism to be profoundly interesting, I felt like I found my true calling in business… I really loved it, but believe me I worked twice as hard as everyone else. I sat in the front row, stayed up late doing all the homework, and I didn’t go to any parties. I had loans to pay, and a car that was falling apart at the seams, and, honestly, I spent a lot of business school completely stressed out. It was not pretty.” Suzy landed an internship at Bain & Co., and then discovered that the firm would be willing to cover the entirety of her education costs if she graduated at the top of her class as a Baker Scholar. That was all she needed to hear. “Good Lord, that put me over the top,” she recalls with a laugh. She did indeed graduate #1 in her class, earning the high honor of Baker Scholar, and joined Bain, where she stayed for seven years, mainly working with industrial clients in the Midwest.
“I loved my years at Bain and really enjoyed consulting, but the constant travel required, with four young children at home, was a difficult combination. In 1995, I was offered to join the Harvard Business Review, and felt that it was the perfect opportunity to combine my love for business with my passion for writing,” Suzy shares. She would go on to become the Editor of the Harvard Business Review, one of the most prestigious publications in business. “My job was writing and editing articles on strategy, operations, organizational behavior, leadership, crisis management, and change. It made me more able to think about business conceptually…and in many ways prepared me for my current career,” Suzy recounts. Suzy later attended the University of Bristol in England to obtain her PhD in Management, with a thesis that explored the connection between values, identity, and professional choices.
After marrying Jack in 2001, Suzy transitioned into a career as a public intellectual, and spent much of her two decades of married life writing books, giving speeches, and advising companies. Suzy worked as a columnist for O: The Oprah Magazine, wrote a best-selling book titled 10-10-10, and began hosting two shows on CNBC.com called Get to Work with Suzy Welch and Suzy Welch: Fix my Life.
“In the midst of it all, in 2019, my son, Marcus, and Jack’s grandson, Joe - who are buddies - launched a music streaming service for college musicians, called Quadio. The company’s success was quick and dramatic, and Jack urged that I become Chairman. Suddenly I was running a 55-person start-up - where I was about 40 years older and 100% less cool than everyone else,” Suzy recalls. “I’d always been fascinated by entrepreneurial ventures, and I loved working with Joe and Marcus and the rest of the team, and I learned more in those three years about business than probably the previous three decades. Jack’s health was failing, but he loved watching me get my bearings as a tech executive, and got so much joy out of the family partnership. He cheered us on - wanting to hear about every detail. We had a wild run – and then the pandemic hit. Ultimately,” Suzy says, “the company had to downsize, and we sold it in 2023… In the end we didn’t make a penny, but I don’t regret a minute of the Quadio experience.”
With the pending sale of Quadio, Suzy turned her focus to the creation of a self-discovery and career planning class that would help young people have lives of more intention and career paths with more fulfillment. “It’s an idea that had long been bubbling, and the methodology is adjacent to the career advice I’d been studying and publishing for years,” Suzy says. “I proposed it to the Dean at NYU Stern, who agreed to try it as an experiment. To my delight, the class was extremely well received, and I was asked to join the faculty and take on a full teaching load the following semester.”
At this point in life, I feel like I’ve finally found my purpose as a teacher.
Suzy Welch
“I get so much gratification from being in the classroom with young people filled with hope and vision - and not without concerns and challenges. My course helps to answer the question: What should I do with my life? The methodology centers around finding what I call your ‘Area of Transcendence’, which is another way of saying ‘purpose’. And the premise of the course is that it lies at the intersection of your values, aptitudes, and economically viable interests. For most people that makes sense intuitively, but not everyone necessarily has the language to talk about their values or identify what theirs are, and the same is true about aptitudes, and to a lesser extent, interests. These are important pieces of data, and often they are buried and need to be excavated, so to speak.” To that end, Suzy’s class, called Becoming You, is filled with exercises, activities, and assessment tools. Suzy also teaches Becoming You as an open-enrollment class on NYU’s campus a few times a year.
Some students who take Becoming You end up using the process to tweak their career paths, but for others, reinvention is the outcome. Suzy recalls a student who took her class sure that he would end up in banking. Before enrolling at Stern as an MBA, he had already spent five years in finance in London. But the class revealed to him that his top value was ‘Beholderism’, a desire to live a life filled with beauty and aesthetic harmony, and that further, he actually held the value of ‘Affluence’ or ‘Wealth Accumulation’ as a very low priority. Further, after testing, the student rediscovered his very strong aptitudes for spatial visualization. Ultimately, the six-week course allowed the student to admit and embrace his deeply held – and long suppressed – dream of becoming a fashion designer. On the last day of Becoming You, students present the 40-year narrative of their life going forward, and the student joyfully announced that he intended to leave banking and devote his career to “making the clothing that makes women impossible not to look at”. The class was stunned…and then cheered him on. “Obviously, the Becoming You process does not always have these kinds of big turn-arounds,” Suzy says, “but it almost always helps people come into a fuller understanding of themselves and refine or define their hopes for their future.”
“I’d love you to come to my next workshop,” Suzy invited, before we finished our photography and our coffee…
I arrived on the first day of the three-day program to find a packed room of over 60 people, buzzing with excitement. The group was wide-ranging in age and backgrounds, with the bulge of people looking like they were in their 30s and 40s… although I met folks from 18 to 70. Many had found out about Suzy on social media - and taken three days off of work, and traveled to New York, to take the course. One person came from Madagascar just to participate, and two sisters had traveled from South Africa.
Suzy - or should I say Professor Welch - was a complete dynamo, lecturing non-stop for three 8-hour days, and always clearly passionate about the material and the impact. Day one was focused on a ‘values excavation’, going over the results of tests we’d taken in preparation of the workshop, and answering on-the-spot questions like ‘What would make you cry from regret at your 85th birthday?’, and ‘What do you want people to say about you when you’re not in the room?’. Day two explored cognitive and emotional aptitudes to better understand what makes you - and those around you - tick. And we took a deep dive into the results of the aptitude tests we’d taken in advance of the workshop. Day Three started with an overview of the fastest-growing industries at the moment, and then an exercise outlining the myriad of industries that are less-travelled or that many of us overlook.
People were clearly impacted by being there. A couple from Utah who were looking for guidance planning their retirement discovered that neither wanted to spend their remaining years working in the construction industry and told me they were now determined to change careers. One young woman’s presentation had the entire class sobbing, as she talked about her dream of building a biotech company producing a device to help women, based on her own struggles with Endometriosis. Another man outlined his new intended career path through the technology industry - not a change of industry, but a course correction from operations to development. The experience was enlightening, and often rather emotional. Everyone seemed deeply satisfied that they’d found what they came for.
At a party to close out the intensive workshop, I noticed that Suzy asked each person who hadn’t chosen to present about their findings and feelings about how they felt about the course… and seemed to genuinely care about how they were impacted. I know that she’s kept-up with most of the people in the class, and maintains a relationship with many of her former students.
For me, the workshop was a valuable confirmation that I’m right where I need to be, doing something that brings me joy and fulfills my values. I gained some valuable insights into better understanding others who think differently than I do. …And, although I’d left my coffee at Honey Hollow quite impressed with Suzy, I left the workshop quite amazed by Professor Welch and her ability to captivate and motivate so many people.
Remarkably… while she’s teaching three courses this semester, running six workshop intensives, putting out a weekly podcast, continuing to appear as a special correspondent on the Today Show, and maintaining a strong social media presence, Suzy nevertheless finds time every weekend to return to Pound Ridge.
In fact, she says she couldn’t do it any other way. “The beauty and peacefulness of this place is what grounds and resets me every week,” she says. “I’m so lucky I found it.”
As featured in the May/June 2025 issue of Bedford & New Canaan Magazine