Donna Johnston-Blair

M.B.A (University of Toronto) May 1976 Chartered Accountant (Canada) 12/10/81 C.P.A. 5/84 (certified in Colorado, Texas and California) Continuing Education Courses in Accounting and Taxation: 40 hours/year

Growing up in Canada, Donna Johnston-Blair studied math and computer science as an undergrad at the University of Toronto before switching to French and eventually returning to earn an MBA. In between, she spent a year “goofing around,” she says, working as a tour guide of CN Tower, then the tallest building in Toronto.

In a way, she is an accountant by accident: she wasn’t sold on a specific career path, but one of her favorite business school classes was accounting. She decided to go for a CPA. In her MBA program, she was one of only a handful of women, and after graduating, she witnessed firsthand the difficulties of being a woman in the workplace. Some of her firm’s clients wouldn’t allow women on their job and she had few fellow female accountants. She says that she likes to bring these “war stories” to the classroom to motivate her students.

“Don’t be a defeatist. Problem solve,” she advises students when they get in a rut. When she has to deconstruct an esoteric tax concept or power through a dry accounting lesson, Johnston-Blair relies on a good sense of humor, analogies, and getting her students involved.

Johnston-Blair, who also works for a venture capitalist firm in Palo Alto, California, doesn’t see herself as above her students and likes to tells them: “It’s okay to make mistakes. I do sometimes, too. Yell at me when that happens … [because] in the real world, that’s going to happen.” — R.D.