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When Sandra Lawrence was about 13, her grandmother, Lillian, sat her down and told her she would become a great woman.
"It scared the living daylights out of me," Lawrence said. "I was scared because if my grandmother said that was the case, then that was going to be the case."
Expectations of Lawrence always have been high, and she has met them all so far.
Lawrence, along with her two younger sisters, finished high school by 16. She has degrees from Vassar College, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has counted architecture, real estate development, investment banking, a stint as a corporate executive and entrepreneur among her professional pursuits.
Currently, she is president and CEO of Olathe's 1-year-old Global Packaging Solutions Inc. But business success, which she has had in abundance, isn't all that motivates Lawrence. That isn't what would have made her grandmother proud. For Lawrence, being a success in life means striving to be a better person, leaving a legacy and leaving her community a little better than she found it.
Lillian's words that fateful fall day put a fright into the impressionable young Lawrence, but nothing much has scared her since.
She majored in psychology at Vassar but fell in love with architecture along the way. So she got a master's degree in architecture from MIT before brief stints in architecture and construction management. But Lawrence loved the business side of building she loved getting all the players in a project to work together. What she wanted to do was join a large commercial real estate development firm.
So Lawrence made a list of all the big Boston real estate development firms. She called the firms' managers and asked what they look for in new employees.
They said they wanted someone from a Top 10 business school, so Lawrence got an MBA from Harvard and then went to work as an...