“Play golf,” joked Freeborn, stressing that her remark about women learning the sport was meant to be taken seriously.

Drawing from her own experience in market research and willingness to change jobs, Freeborn suggested there are “plenty of opportunities in this dynamic field and if one male-dominated board turns you down, you can certainly look elsewhere.”

Freeborn, who formerly headed a CUSO and headed up the market research function at Kinecta Credit Union before joining Xerox, said she works hard now at “hanging out with fellow CEOs” to watch how they think, make decisions and manage.

She's learned also that a key trait of all CEOs is “self-confidence” and quoting from a self-help management book, CEOs are also “gutsy, a little wild, humorous, a tad theatrical and good storytellers.”

These are all traits she says she now tries to practice at Xerox, a CU, which like others in California and elsewhere, has been in the economic doldrums for months.

“Of major appeal to me when I came on board was the good work that my predecessor had done in the financial performance of this credit union,” she said.

While the CU has a capital ratio of 11.6%, her plans are to improve ROA and to create “a new day” at her CU with an aggressive expansion program. “We're going to rock,” she quipped.

The Xerox board has agreed to focus on business development “like we had never before and the good news now” is that ROA will be positive “before the end of the year,” she forecast.

The third member of the CEO panel at the CUNA conference, Schumacher of Snohomish CU in Washington State, said his years testing other careers including hotel management as well as CU marketing provided the background he needed to take on the CEO job four years ago.

Emphasizing an understanding of finance and accounting, he said, “it's not so important that you do the numbers but that you know them.” And he suggested that as CEO, it is vital to work with a top staffer with a finance background that you can rely on and “whom you trust” to provide both good and bad news.

Like the other panelists, Schumacher agreed that “it's lonely at the top” and that on personnel issues, “you can't be everybody's best friend.”

Responding to an audience question about the difficulty for ex-marketing CEOs to stay clear of the marketing function, Schumacher urged simply, “Just let it go.”

Tierney said she had the same problem. “The minute I picked up one of our marketing brochures, I started to do red penciling”, but now while she still does that practice silently she has let her marketing successors do their job.

Freeborn said she is a firm advocate of an “open door policy,” which means not every staffer can pop into her office whenever they like, but all employees can hear the discussions taking place. In other words, there are no secrets as to how the CU is performing.

Recalling her winning the job at Xerox, she told the CUNA panel audience that after five years as the senior marketer of Kinecta, she applied for the CEO job there and lost.

“Frankly, the biggest strike against me was that I had not been responsible for my own P&L. Things changed when I took the opportunity to run our CUSO,” she recalled.

“And then, a miracle happened. Dave Chatfield, who is a legend in this industry, retired from CCUL and Bill Cheney, the then CEO of Xerox got the CCUL job and a guy who is doing wonderful in that position,” she said.

Based on contacts she made during a CUNA GAC conference, she was asked to submit her name, survived a very rigorous recruitment process, and landed the job in September of 2006.

One other piece of advice she gave to the CUNA group: “be comfortable with imperfect data–you'll never have time to assemble everything you'll need to make a decision about which markets to enter, which projects to support, which vendors to hire, which products and services to offer.”

“We simply don't have the time these days and a failure to decide and act quickly can pre-empt options altogether,” she concluded. –[email protected]