Park City Cookie Magnate Puts Her Family First

Published January 18, 1990. First in a two-part series.

What is the most important thing in life to a woman in her early 30s who last year, together with her husband, sold more than $100 million worth of cookies? Ask Debbi Fields. She notes:

“When I look ahead now, into the future, I realize that the most important thing to me is to do my best as a wife and mother. That’s not what I’ve done; that’s what I am and always will be. Those are the jobs I take seriously every day; that’s where my love is needed; that’s where it’s offered. Love isn’t just inside your head, it has to be practiced, shown, given. I seem to have it to give, so I give it.”

At first it may seem too good to be true. In the hectic business world of computers, competition, calculators, and customers, it would appear too idealistic that the young CEO of Mrs. Fields Cookies with more than 500 stores, now international, could have her husband and children as her first priority in life. As I read her book “One Smart Cookie” (with Alan First, Simon and Schuster, 1987), the thought kept recurring to me: Is she genuine? Is she for real?

After a recent interview with Debbi Fields, I came to a definite conclusion: She is.

Debbi Fields does not really “fit” as a chief executive officer of a multimillion-dollar company. A recent survey by Korn-Ferry International Recruiting Firm in New York of more than 2,000 CEOs in the United States found that most of them were urban males in their middle 50s, Protestant, married with a stay-at-home wife, with an average of three children. Of the relatively few women in upper-management positions, more than half were single (divorced, widowed or never married). Few of the women had more than two children.

Debbi is a young Catholic wife in her early 30s who, along with her husband, runs a multimillion-dollar cookie company with 5,000 employees. And she publicly states that her husband and children are her first priorities in life.

The first question I asked Debbi was: How does she do it all? How does she manage work, marriage, motherhood, and her recent rise in the celebrity scene? She said for her it centers on four focal areas: (1) Priorities or determining what matters most; (2) Balance in trying to do a few things reasonably well; (3) Backups at both home and business when the demands on one require a modification in the other; and (4) Research in obtaining quality information on which important decisions in both business and family can be made.

Debbi noted that under proprieties family must come first. “Family is wealth,” she said quoting her father Edward “Bud” Siuyer, now deceased, who, along with her mother, Mary, reared Debbi and her four sisters as a close-knit family in Oakland, California during the late ‘50s. And she notes, “We all shared one bathroom.” Debbi recalled her father’s philosophy: “If you have family, if you have friends, you have wealth.”

(Next week’s column will continue this interview with Debbi Fields.)