About Susan
Author | Speaker | ConsultantAuthor, speaker and consultant, Susan Gates has a wealth of experience in public sector budgets and policy, financial services, housing and academia. She is available to work together to solve complex policy problems — or speak to your group on topics ranging from the housing crisis to business ethics, and from matters of faith to the public square.
Career highlights:
- Author, “Days of Slaughter: Inside the Fall of Freddie Mac and Why It Could Happen Again,” (Johns Hopkins University Press, March 2017)
- 19 years at Freddie Mac, including four as VP Public Policy
- Five years Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget
- PhD in Public Policy; affiliations with Georgetown University and Virginia Tech
- Advanced Management Program, Wharton Business School
- Adjunct professor in business and public management
- Small business owner, Wharton Policy Group, and Vintage Picnic
Independent Certified Coach, teacher and speaker with The John Maxwell Team
Susan has deep roots in the Chesapeake bay region. Born and raised in Delaware, with family ties to Maryland’s eastern shore, and living on the Virginia side of the Potomac, she draws inspiration from the Chesapeake’s beauty, tranquility and ecology.
Bricolage
An old friend from my finance days — who went on to become an Anglican priest — once called me a bricoleur after French social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.
Unsure if this was a compliment (or not), I had to look up the word.
Scrappy artisan. Cultural handyman. One who “shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life.”
That is hard to fit on a business card.
The term “jack of all trades (and master of none)” used to rankle me when my father said it. But now I embrace it. After decades in government, finance, academia and now a small business owner, I’ve done a renaissance tour of the major sectors. You learn a thing or two doing that!
- Stints as a civil servant at the Office and Management and Budget taught me how much good government can do, as well as how messy and expensive it is to do it.
- 19 years at Freddie Mac taught me a lot about US housing policy, moral hazard, organizational politics…and real politics. And that scandals and disasters actually do happen.
- Six years as a small business owner has been a rollercoaster of joy and heartbreak. I’ve learned a lot about the promise and limitations of business in revivifying small town America.
Drawing on these varied experiences, I strive to speak freshly into hard conversations about the place of faith in the public square and marketplace. Hints of the transcendent seep into everything I write: from scholarly books and articles to blogs and poetry. That’s how I bricolage. I try to shape something beautiful and useful for understanding.