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When Ngaire E. Cuneo made the top tier of Working Woman magazine's 20th Annual Salary Survey, she hardly paused to consider the honor. As executive vice president of corporate development for Conseco, she has plenty to think about as she focuses her attention on wisely investing capital for the Carmel life insurance company.

Still, it made an impression on the rest of us: After all, Cuneo brings home an annual bonus at the board of director's discretion that, in the past, has amounted to a cool 1 percent of Conseco's pre-tax income. Coupled with her $250,000 annual salary, that amounted to a $6.51 million paycheck in 1997, enough to land her fourth in the country on that coveted highest-paid women executives roster last January. "It was embarrassing at first," says Cuneo. "But once you get over the initial shock of having your salary announced in national magazines and newspapers, you realize it carries a huge responsibility."

That achievement puts her on equal footing with (and sometimes above) such women as Jill Barad, chairman and chief executive officer of Mattel; international designer Donna Karan; makeup queen Estee Lauder; and Christie Hefner, who runs Playboy Enterprises. In fact, Cuneo never has dropped lower than the sixth spot since she appeared on the list in 1995.

Her achievement appears even more outstanding because women still make up only 2.5 percent of top earners in this country, says Bernadette Grey, editor-in-chief of Working Woman. Furthermore, the magazine's survey last year indicates that women still lag behind men in salaries in the fields of accounting, financial services and science.

Cuneo translates her success into an obligation, in part, to help other women learn her life lessons — preferably without taking the same lumps.

Swim Practice

Cuneo's corporate birth actually began at age 2, when her Australian parents literally threw her in a swimming pool before she was completely adept at walking on land. Little Ngaire (rhymes with starry), the second child contending with three brothers, accepted the challenge. "The men in our family were competitive swimmers, and I didn't want to be left out," she says. By age 7, she had donned her miniature Speedo to perform the backstroke in the 400- and 800-meter relays for private clubs, school and athletic associations and anywhere she could get pool time. Eventually, her swimming talent bought her a ticket to such exotic locations as Canada and Japan for team competitions. The young tomboy participated in other sports as well, but she claims she wasn't good at them.

The lessons she learned in chlorinated water, however, kept her afloat in every aspect of her life for the next four decades:

1. Always play your own position. "No matter what you think is your skill base, you don't jump over and play somebody else's spot," says Cuneo.

2. It's up to you to set goals against your personal best — then do it. "Sometimes, you're only trying to achieve a tenth of a second, but it's important," she says.

3. Accept that you must learn to pack a suitcase, navigate a new place with a group of peers and take orders from somebody besides your parents. "That's an incredible experience for global business today," she adds.

4. The coach is the coach — and she always calls the shots, even if you don't agree with or like it.

5. You must compete throughout the day as hard and as powerfully as you can, then turn around and cheerfully eat pizza with these same competitors that night.

Cuneo describes her talents as not the best in the world, but certainly at the top of the pack. "You learn the same lessons on a team sport, whether you're the ace player everyone cheers or the kid passing out the oranges," she says.

She stayed in competition until age 13, when societal mores of the day deemed swimming too strenuous for young ladies. "When you came into maturity, it was considered inappropriate to be swimming in a pool," she recalls. By the time she enrolled at the College of New Rochelle in New York, however, the petite blonde had found another — albeit still not widely accepted — love: numbers. She left that town with an economics degree under her belt, a non-traditional honor for women in 1972. Although quotas would get her foot in the door, a woman often found herself eliminated from promotion possibilities because of preconceived notions that women wouldn't go out of town for three days to work on an audit. Popular thinking also held that women wouldn't move for a position. "No woman's job could possibly be as important as her spouse's," says Cuneo.

Despite the barriers, she stuck her head in the water and kicked off. "When I look back now, I think, ‘Whoo!' ," she says. "But at the time, I was so into getting my piece done right and getting it on the table, I wasn't aware of how few females were doing that work." Her first desk job involved handling operational audits for the New York City branch of the federal General Accounting Office, and she immediately began throwing her hat in the ring for those elusive traveling assignments. Employees who wanted to move up and make top pay had to make themselves available for every assignment to be considered for that next seat, she recalls.

Six months after she walked in GAO's door, she hit her own personal wall. A supervisor told her he would not work with her because she was a woman who would just marry and leave in six months. Cuneo today counts herself lucky she heard that degrading speech so early in her career. "It's harder if you've glided along and then are smacked suddenly with this," she says. "And today it's more difficult for women because people can't be as direct about their feelings in the workplace. At least this man told me straight out he wouldn't bother — I didn't waste time and energy guessing."

Whatever the setback, Cuneo's advice and approach remain the same: Take the hit, bounce back to do the best job you can and keep your personal goals before you. "If you let it roll off your back, return to your position and play, you can turn people around," she says. By the time Cuneo moved on to the next assignment in six months, the male supervisor became one of her strongest supporters. Still, she never volunteered to work on his projects again.

Meanwhile, she landed those coveted travel assignments too well; three days after returning from her honeymoon with Rich Cuneo, she left town for six weeks. Government employee policy at that time flew her home only every third weekend. Despite the hardship, the newlyweds remained confident in the durability of their relationship. "We're part of a team," she says. "When you concentrate on your role, the team as a whole becomes stronger."

Corporate Ladders

Cuneo spent 11 years with the GAO, earning an MBA from Iona (N.Y.) College in 1978 and attending the Executive Development Program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1982. She also gave birth to three children in those years: Lauren, now 18; Matthew, 16; and Michael, 14. With each baby, her government position afforded her up to six months away from the worksite. It's a luxury she'd like to see women take, even if they lose some income.

Among her prestigious assignments, Cuneo also participated in the Presidential Executive Exchange Program during Ronald Reagan's first term, working for one year with senior executives at Xerox Corp. in designing a total quality control process for the company's business units. That experience convinced her to leave GAO. "The first thing I realized about the private sector was that the pay was better, and that's a driving force for me," she says. "Plus, it was wonderful to see the accountability, how you were driven to performance." Such a philosophy fit her competitive nature perfectly.

However, to further hone her acceptance to this private world, she first served three years as the deputy director general of the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York City, where her responsibilities included planning and directing all audits of the MTA's operations. In 1986, she moved to a managing director position in corporate finance at GE Capital Corp. in Stanford, Conn., where her primary role was to evaluate new business opportunities, with a special focus on the insurance industry. Within two years, she was named a corporate officer, one of a few women to achieve that honor.

Those boardrooms became the perfect stage to hone her negotiating skills. She quickly turned her status as the lone woman at the negotiating table into a positive. "When you stand out, people remember what you say, even if it's only ‘What did you say?'," says Cuneo. Coupled with her intuition to allow everyone in the room to speak their piece and her knack for herding the crowd in one direction, this made Cuneo's presence an asset.

It certainly saved the day when the president of a large grocery store chain asked to order a pizza at 9:45 a.m., only 15 minutes into a session. Cuneo ordered the snack without blinking. She discovered after they sealed the deal that this man used oddball requests as a weapon to shake the other side. He didn't bargain on Cuneo remembering swim lesson No. 5: "Negotiating is a blast because the decisions are being made right there," she says. "Often you don't see how your decisions work out for years. But I walk out of a negotiating room feeling great or lousy!"

One such fortuitous time came when Cuneo met with Stephen Hilbert, chairman of the board, and president and chief executive officer of Conseco, in 1988 when his company and GE Capital partnered to provide debt and equity financing to allow him to buy a competitor. "What struck me instantly was her uncanny ability to understand every aspect of the business issues, to get everything GE Capital needed, and to do it in a such a disarming manner that you felt she'd just done you the greatest favor on the face of the Earth," says Hilbert. He decided on the spot that if his company ever grew large enough, he wanted this top business executive on his team. Hilbert began that two-year pursuit in 1990.

Cuneo performs at Conseco essentially the same function she did at GE Capital: poring over numbers, assessing companies in which to invest Conseco profits and investigating as many as 60 investment possibilities in various industries each year. Among her more visible investments: $20 million in magician David Copperfield's Magic Underground restaurant in Times Square; and the July 1998 purchase of the General Motors Building in New York in an $800 million transaction that involved a joint venture with Donald Trump. "She is the epitome of positive mental attitude," says Hilbert. "I've seen her in some very tough situations, dealing with the other side on different business issues, and yet she keeps that same incredible smile and bounce in her step and voice. But she never compromises or forgets what the end result must be."

However, such opportunity meant trading the East Coast lifestyle for Carmel, dragging three sports-active teens along for the ride. Husband Rich, then tax director for Philip Morris Inc. and now a self-employed financial planner, commuted from the Midwest to his job in Manhattan. Cuneo says despite the jolt to the family, she wouldn't trade the experience. "Moving is terrific for kids," she says. "Because you're not in any specific pattern or tradition, you make more of an effort to fit in."

Even a trip to The Children's Museum opened her eyes. For starters, she couldn't believe parking was available on the premises. A comparable experience in New York involves a train ride and subway tokens, or else a 90-minute ride, leaving the car 5 miles away in a "safer" neighborhood and hailing a cab, says Cuneo. She confesses she muttered about passing every good street-parking opportunity during the Indianapolis trek out of habit. Again, those swim lessons proved handy. "Competing around the world teaches you not to worry and to go have fun," she says. "Somehow you will find the grocery store that stocks the kids' favorite jelly. And if you don't, you'll still find a jelly that works just as well."

From her investment vantage point, Cuneo was instrumental in forming Conseco Private Capital Group, an acquisition partnership formed in January 1994 with $624 million of equity commitments from 35 limited partners, including Citibank, the California Public Employee Retirement System and the State of Michigan pension fund. The new division meant returning to the Big Apple 18 months after she decided to become a Hoosier. Today, she serves as president of Conseco Private Capital Group there.

She travels either to Indiana or elsewhere across the country at least once a week, so she stands ready at any moment to board a plane. Much of this jetting concerns Conseco business, but she also travels to attend meetings of various boards. She currently serves as a director on Conseco Inc. (the holding company) and several of the insurance firm's subsidiaries boards, not to mention Duke Realty Investments' board in town, as well as private companies such as Late Night Magic (David Copperfield's venture) throughout the United States. "At least in our house, everyone can dress themselves now," she says of juggling family and her hectic schedule.

Personally Speaking

Of course, at one time she had three youngsters under 5 years old to balance with this demanding career — and motherhood, she admits, was the heat that forged her metal into a superior performance player. She arranged for a live-in nanny to help her cope, but she insists the answer doesn't have to be expensive. She encourages friends and co-workers to hire high school students to help out with child care in the evenings, or to buddy up with one another to pick up at day care.

"If you're expected to be at your job from 8 to 5, you can't have daycare relationships that end 10 minutes after the work hour," she says. "You're always on edge then." Furthermore, women need that 15 minutes when they come in the door to transform back into Mom, which is where young sitters take their turn at bat while dinner cooks. "Do whatever you can to save yourself from going nuts," she advises. "Women give other people room to breathe, yet we always think twice before we give ourselves permission to relax and flex our self-confidence." In the Cuneo household, that boils down to the oft-quoted "don't sweat the small stuff" philosophy. For instance, despite snide comments from outsiders, she and Rich celebrated the children's birthdays on the weekend before the actual event when they were small so she could be home for the celebration.

Similarly, she bluntly told Working Woman in 1997 that her best advice to colleagues is: "Get a life. You will be a much more interesting person to your co-workers and your clients. You can never do everything you want to do, but if you haven't cut out a space for yourself you become disgruntled. And sooner or later, that enters into your work performance." Cuneo describes her outsides interests as binges: Currently she's on a workout kick with a personal trainer's guidance — another rebellion against the forbidden sports list of her teen years. In the past, she's taken up photography, racquetball, tennis and paddle ball. Reading — anything from Tom Clancy novels to Tom Sawyer-style classics — never loses its appeal for her.

Her children heed these lessons, wrapping themselves in sports as she did in her youth. Lauren, now a freshman at Duke University, plays tennis; Matthew goes for football, basketball and golf; and Michael plays soccer, runs marathons and golfs. Those pesky rules of the universe, such as the one that dictates 24 hours in a day, prevent Cuneo from attending all their competitions. "This isn't just a working woman's problem, but one that any mom who has more than one child faces," she says. "Every mom in the world — and father, too — wishes they had more time for children's events. But you do what's feasible and move on." She's also learned that if you really want to make the event special, invite someone else, such as a close family friend or favorite uncle to go in your place: It guarantees the event will go down in the youth's memory scrapbook.

Cuneo carries her own swimming trophies from move to move where she easily can find them. Her office, however, is littered with what she considers her business trophies: plaques preserving national press announcements on major deals she created. They remind her daily of her commitment to bring about the day when women make the country's top pay lists period, no gender distinctions noted. Yet she admits that entrepreneurship appears to be the next logical step for someone in her position. She looks forward to the possibilities with her characteristic unsinkable optimism. "Why not? Everybody at some point in their life ought to jump off and give it a whirl," she says. "Setting goals is how you know if you're happy."

SIDEBAR: A Career Map

Entrepreneurship might provide the answer to many women seeking to balance career and family in the '90s, but it's not the only answer. Ngaire Cuneo maintains that plenty of opportunities remain in the corporate world; in fact, with women now gaining 25 to 30 years of executive experience under their belts, she sees the next pioneering wave set to crash over the Fortune 500 boards of directors. That opportunity remains especially open to those with a road map:

Get Ready

The first step is to keep an open mind. Opportunities pop up everywhere, so make sure you can jump on them at all times. "You don't have to be obnoxious, but you can let people know you are interested in moving ahead and taking more responsibility," says Cuneo. "You have to do this for yourself: Others won't take that step for you."

Beware, however, of falling into the common trap of planning growth by locking yourself into a calendar. "Life doesn't run on a Monday-to-Friday scenario," she says. "We all know that in our personal lives, using a calendar as a guide doesn't necessarily get us where we want. Why would it be different in business?"

Get Set

To get ahead, Cuneo says, you must know people besides your colleagues. Keep in touch with school chums, club mates and PTA parents. The more you know about how others think — particularly as you climb higher in an organization — the easier it is to make sound decisions.

Next, make sure you have enough help to perform the family/career juggling act. It's virtually impossible to underestimate this figure, she says. Cuneo's rule of thumb: If you work five days a week, make sure you have six days of help.

Of course, she acknowledges, by the time you pay for all your child-care needs, the paycheck doesn't stretch very far. "I see many women drop out of the workforce when they do that mathematical formula," she says. "And when you add in the other expenses that accompany a two-person working family, you look at the balance and are ready to cry at the amount of seemingly worthless effort."

That's the moment when Cuneo advises women to think outside the box. "If you keep at it, that balance is the one that changes. You'll build a track record, and more of the bottom dollars will come your way." Besides, the work gradually becomes less physical as the children mature.

Go!

When you reach a pinnacle, celebrate by taking time for yourself. Relaxation time gives you the mental toughness to hang in there longer, feel better about yourself and perform better. "No matter what period of your life or career, things will change," she says. "Sometimes that stinks, but the sooner you catch on to that, the easier it is on you mentally."

Finally, Cuneo sees one common trait successful business people share: They reach out and try to bring along the best talent they can. When it's your turn to call the shots, welcome new talent to make the team stronger. "Maybe that person is better than you are, but you still feel great when you're holding that team championship trophy," she says.