Family Values

The Professional is Personal

Jessica DeGroot and Jeffrey Lutzner first met at a friend's house party on 22nd Street in Philadelphia. She was 26, and she was working for a child-care resource-and-referral service. He had just quit Temple University's medical school. On the dance floor, he joked about the tiny purse that she was carrying, but he admired her good looks and her dry sense of humor. She was impressed when he made a three-course meal without a cookbook on their second date. "I thought, Hmmm, that's pretty interesting." She smiles now at the thought.

To understand DeGroot's agenda for the ThirdPath Institute, look first to her own marriage. For sure, it's not the standard arrangement: Over the course of 10 years, she and Lutzner, both 39, have designed and built a union that appears to be shared equally -- explicitly and self-consciously so. The marriage inspires DeGroot's work, and her work feeds the marriage. Together, they are her life's work.

Some women imagine their weddings, dreaming as kids of the dress that they'll wear and the music that they'll dance to. DeGroot spent years imagining her marriage. As an undergraduate at Hampshire College in the early 1980s, she wrote a senior thesis that was rooted in interviews with working women about the tension between their jobs and their families. She knew that she wanted to work and that she wanted to achieve at work. She also knew that she wanted to be an active parent. And she knew that she wanted a spouse who would regard her as an equal partner.

After the birth of her daughter Jocelyn in 1990, DeGroot entered the MBA program at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School to study organizational change and workforce diversity. This was actually an advanced degree in marriage. "She was totally atypical at Wharton," recalls Stewart Friedman, 48, one of DeGroot's professors and mentors there. "For me, she was a breath of something really different." DeGroot understood that the emerging noise around work and life in corporations was about more than just employee attraction and retention. For her, it was about redefining gender roles, about demarginalizing family, and about changing the workings of the workplace.

Lutzner had also thought about his marital future. His vision wasn't as highly evolved as DeGroot's -- he was a guy, after all. But one of the reasons that he had left medical school was the prospect of life without a life. He knew too many doctors who seemed miserable. "I knew that I wanted to be involved with my family," he says. "I didn't want to be invisible" the way his entrepreneur father had been. "I didn't have a road map for this, but I knew that I wanted to try to figure it out."

So they did, devising a strategy that revolved around their shared vision and then amending the process through continuous trial and error. Their basic framework: Both were free to pursue meaningful, paid work, but not work that became controlling. They would be content, in fact, with making less money than they could -- and with a lifestyle that reflected that choice. They would divide parenting and housework duties equally. They would acknowledge, too, that everything changes all the time. Kids grow up, career opportunities arise, and stuff happens. So over time, the strategy would have to change too.

Sounds easy, but it wasn't. Even now, this marriage is a highly choreographed dance, with each week requiring careful planning and explicit scheduling. "We've had huge fights along the way," DeGroot admits. They've visited a family therapist. "But we're fine-tuning something that we already fundamentally agreed on."

Today, DeGroot and Lutzner both work out of their three-story Victorian home in Philadelphia. DeGroot is developing ThirdPath, and Lutzner is running a growing door- and window-manufacturing business. They take turns getting Julian, 4, and Jocelyn, 9, ready for school in the morning, and they alternate shifts looking after the kids in the afternoon. On any given weekday, one of them will work from 8 AM to 5:30 PM, and the other will work for about five hours. Most nights, both of them return to their offices from 9 PM to 11 PM, after the kids have gone to bed.

Lutzner uses the evening hours to email suppliers in the Far East and his manufacturing managers in Guatemala or to phone customers on the West Coast. He has figured out whom he can talk to on his cell-phone while he's walking the dog or while the dishwasher is running. But more important, he has figured out what tasks can be put off. He realizes that deadlines are often self-imposed. "I've gotten better at putting things off until later," he says. "I ask myself, is it more important to do chores and spend time with the kids, or to get work done? Well, a lot of the time, work can wait."

Sure, there are drawbacks to the arrangement. But their careers are growing, and they live well enough. They know their kids intimately. They've learned that they are good parents in different ways. Lutzner is better at playing with the kids, DeGroot is better at listening without lecturing. Because they spend so much time with Jocelyn and Julian during the week, they don't feel guilty about going out on their own nearly every Friday.

It is a marriage that tests norms and pushes the envelope. It is the product of imagination and of endless experimentation. But it doesn't have to be unique. "Friends tell me that I'm lucky because I have a business that allows me to do this," Lutzner says. "Well, am I really just lucky? Or am I smart enough to recognize that this is how business can be done?"