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October 14, 2025

Janet Foutty: How the Former Deloitte Consulting CEO Honed Her Focus on Women’s Health 

As a world-renowned business expert and best-selling author, Janet developed the why, what, and how, for her next chapter through the Leadership and Society Initiative (LSI) fellowship.


For over three decades at Deloitte, Janet Foutty led numerous practices through change and growth, including technology and government, ultimately serving as CEO of Deloitte Consulting and Deloitte US Board Chair, respectively. She shared her leadership insights in a variety of top-tier business publications and co-wrote the book Arrive and Thrive, 7 Impactful Practices for Women Navigating Leadership.

But when it came time to navigate her own next chapter beyond those roles, she realized that finding focus would take what she calls “directed work.”

From Deloitte Leadership to Defining a Purpose-Driven Next Chapter

Not that she wasn’t quite busy and engaged. In addition to writing and speaking about women in leadership, purpose-driven leadership, advocacy for DEI, and technology innovation, she’d been advising multiple venture-backed companies, serving on non-profit and for-profit boards, and working on public policy. But she wanted to be as strategic and intentional at this stage as she’d been throughout her career. 

“When I finished my job at Deloitte, I did not have a plan for what was going to come next, but I knew that I intended to be professionally productive,” Janet says. “I hadn’t thought about my roles or looking for a job in well over 30 years. So I didn’t know how to talk or even think about what I wanted to do next.” Without a fully articulated plan, the opportunities that came her way organically were very similar to what she’d done in the past. “I intend to be really productive for the next set of decades but if I do the same thing all over again, will I be in any different place in four or five years than I am today?”

One thing was certain, retirement was not in Janet’s DNA. Her mother, the globally recognized artist Dominiue Nash, still works in her studio five to six days a week, thriving in her mid-80s. Her late father, a physician and researcher at the National Institute of Health, was also very productive scientifically through the end of his life. “So I had these role models and this conviction in my head: you don’t retire.” Janet says. “You might shift what you do, but you keep going.” 

Building a Framework for Meaningful Impact

In the LSI fellowship, she recognized an ideal opportunity for more fully developing her next chapter in community with other leaders at a great university. 

“I went in, I think as many people do, not quite knowing what to expect,” she says. “As someone who’d run a bunch of different businesses, I was pretty good at the beginner’s mindset. But taking this time and space to be in the classroom with a lot of reading, dialogue, and full-on exploring was very different. Amazing, but very different. The LSI puts a sound structure around doing the work of understanding yourself, the world, and solutions.” 

For Janet, the LSI fellowship offered not only this necessary structure, but inspiring professors and course content combined with an invaluable community of fellow leaders motivated to adapt their skills—and learn new ones—to benefit society. 

“The classroom experience was incredible,” she says. “But the community of my peers who come from really diverse backgrounds—we had two architects, three lawyers, a rabbi, six business people, an air force fighter pilot, and beyond—was truly extraordinary.” She notes that some of her Fellows were as deeply engaged in other work as she was during the 9-month program, each carving out time to focus on the invaluable curriculum and community that the fellowship offered. 

Her own experience as a Fellow gave shape to both her thought and action. In the language of her final presentation of the fellowship, she was able to define a “Why, What, How, and Where” for her second chapter.  

Janet found her ‘why’ in the classicists—Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius—through the teachings of LSI faculty members such as David Wray and Howard C. Nusbaum. Among the words she found most inspiring were from Confucius, “Find work that aligns with virtue and surround yourself with people who inspire you” and Aristotle’s wisdom that “a fulfilling life requires purpose and effort, but also balance.” 

A New Chapter Centered on Women’s Health and Equity

She knew that her own balancing act would involve three main areas of concern and endeavor —technology for good, women’s leadership, and the health of women. 

“If I didn’t keep my technology capability and credibility high, it’d be hard to be effective at anything else,” she notes, citing the continual, exponential development of new technology and its increasing centrality in business and society writ large. And women’s leadership would always be important to her. But, even at the outset of the program, she suspected that women’s health would be the dominant axis of her attention. 

The program gave me a really good framework for how to think about women’s health. “Some of my healthcare-related class work helped me learn parts of the market I didn’t know and offered me the tools and experiences for how to actually have impact in the place where I was choosing to spend my time,” she says. 

Her consulting and public policy work had already given her a solid understanding of how corporations and governments can impact social change. But during the Fellowship, she was able to address a series of questions about the roles that not-for-profit philanthropy, venture capital, and private equity have to play in pursuing the greater good.

For Janet, ‘greater’ was the operative word. “I’m still spending some time in women’s leadership, which is a place I thought about being my primary axis. But I decided that I wanted to have a broader impact,” She explains. “I knew I wanted to focus on equity in some form; that’s been fundamental to how I led in the corporate world and was personally important to me. Having more women lead in government and  business is a very good thing for us all collectively. But if you’re already in a top 10 business school in this country, if you’re working on getting into an executive role or into a boardroom, you already have tremendous privilege. I really wanted to work on something that was going to be much more relevant to a broader set of women.” 

She found the data on women’s health staggering. “Women already live longer than men, but the issue is that women live, on average, 12 more years than men in poor health. It’s crazy. And this is not at the end of their lives, it’s in the middle of their lives,” she stresses. “This is setting aside issues around pregnancy. When you see how underfunded research is, how underfunded companies are, how the differentiation and reimbursements for men and women…this was my ‘ah ha’ moment. I’d spent some time in young women’s breast and ovarian health and early prevention and detection but I had no idea of the scope of the delta. I had experienced it, but I never was able to put a name to it.” 

Janet is now working to improve women’s health through board service, advisory and consulting roles, and venture capital, among other things, as she continues to have, in her words, “more oars in the water” including work with her cohort of LSI Fellows. 

Beyond what she recognizes will be lifelong friendships, she values the program’s ability to “know more about yourself, humanity, and the world, which makes you a better human and maybe better at doing what you’re going to do next.” 

The University of Chicago Leadership and Society Initiative

The University of Chicago Leadership and Society Initiative (LSI) supports accomplished leaders in successfully transitioning from their longstanding careers toward purposeful next chapters. LSI Fellows immerse themselves in UChicago’s unparalleled environment of big ideas and multigenerational dialogue, gaining frameworks for learning from their past and planning for their futures. 

Contact us to learn more about LSI.

This piece was developed in partnership with ROAR Forward. Learn more about ROAR Forward here.

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Fellow StoriesPlanning Your Next Chapter

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