Duncan's first big break came at Lehman Brothers, the investment-banking firm, where in 1976 she signed on as the executive assistant to then-chairman and CEO Peter G. Peterson, who had been secretary of commerce during the Nixon administration. As Peterson's right arm, no matter what kind of hell broke loose, Duncan was responsible for turning a mosh pit into an oasis of order, and somehow doing it while maintaining an eloquent example in the way she handled things. It suited her down to the ground. To her role she brought concentration and determination. She excelled at sniffing out problems and zapping them into oblivion, something an executive assistant has to do with grotesque frequency.
While at Lehman, Duncan made up her mind to become even more skilled and thus increase her value as an executive assistant. Possessed of an early and total commitment to being prepared and an almost ascetic focus, she hit the books on weekends, taking management and economics classes at NYU and finishing two years of law school on her own time. By then she had already taken and passed the not-for-the-faint-hearted stockbroker's exam. (Good night, nurse!) She never actually traded anything, but she was utterly hooked on the intrinsic value of learning and on the high of achievement. The point of the exercise, as Duncan sees it, was that she "finally understood how business works and how money moves in this country. It was so, so much easier to communicate. I made better decisions." Looking back on it now, she says she thought about finishing law school but decided against it because "it's the practical knowledge that gives you the real strength in business. Books are wonderful," she says, "but I think I made the right choice."
By the time Peterson was closing in on nine years with Lehman, his own entrepreneurial streak was starting to assert itself. In 1985 he let Duncan know that he planned to kick off his own private investment-banking firm, the Blackstone Group, a business that he's chairman of today. Duncan up and flew the corporate coop with him. "I watched Pete begin that company from a yellow pad," she says. "It was a great lesson, that transition from Lehman."
Although Duncan was raised to be polished and polite, there's enough gamble in her that she could feel the stirrings so familiar to anybody who's ever had an entrepreneurial itch: she was in the throes of a new-business idea. "Just moving to a small-company environment made me think about it," Duncan says. "I had to take more control of my own life and my economic well-being. No one was going to do that for me, and I shouldn't expect it. If I stayed with Pete for another two or three years, I'd just be coasting, and there was still more I wanted to do."
She'd already taken her idea for a search firm for a test-drive with a few colleagues whose judgment she trusted (the feeling was mutual), a gilded cluster of movers and shakers that included the chairmen of Goldman Sachs and General Foods; the president of the Economic Club of New York; and the executive assistants to Henry Kissinger, to James E. Burke, Johnson & Johnson's fabled chairman and CEO during the Tylenol crisis, and to literary agent Morton L. Janklow. They all loved it.
But it was Peterson's opinion that mattered most. Over lunch with her boss at the Four Seasons, Duncan floated her plan for a special kind of search practice. "Pete always wrote things down on a napkin," she says, "so now he wrote, 'Find a location, tell me about the cost structure.' And I told him, 'Pete, I've already done that'--because you never want to go to someone like him with any idea unless you go armed. So I knew how many square feet. And the cost. The location. I'd spoken to lawyers about forming a company and I'd spoken to accountants."
"She said she wanted to be an entrepreneur," Peterson recalls, "and I was simply delighted to help her. I thought this market for executive assistants was an interesting niche. So I helped her in two ways: I lent her $30,000 to start, and I introduced her to Russell Reynolds." Yes, $30K, and yes, the Russell Reynolds, who in 1969 founded what grew into a $190-million international executive-search firm of premier rank.
Reynolds, for his part, had built a business powerhouse on his eye for talent, and he was so sure that Duncan was worth betting on that he shrewdly put his money where his confidence was and promptly became the Duncan Group's majority shareholder. Nobody's fool, Reynolds acted to protect his investment by coaching Duncan in what she didn't yet know, such as how a successful search business should be set up. "Russ helped with everything," Duncan says. "Should we buy or lease a copier? What about technology? And stationery? I didn't have a clue!"
Following a model used by Reynolds and most other retained search firms, Duncan now charges clients from 28% to 35% of the new assistant's annual salary, plus expenses. "For nonprofits, I'll drop it to 28%," she says, "and of course, you have to consider fairness if it's repeat business. But I never go below 27%."
For the first few months, Duncan worked out of Peterson's offices in the Seagram Building on Park Avenue. Her first real search assignment--after replacing herself as Peterson's assistant, that is--was, in a word, terrifying. "I had an informal partner then, Janice Brian--she was a friend, a schoolteacher who had great presence, great style, and a strong administrative background," Duncan says. "Together we stepped out to meet our first client. We knew the interview should be about listening, and getting that person to tell us what his problems were and what he needed. Well, we were so into listening that the client was the one who finally had to say, 'Aren't you going to ask for the business?' Janice and I laughed all the way down in the elevator. My back was soaked with perspiration and her hands were shaking, but we got it, the search and the lesson: Never leave until you ask for the business!"
