A Tribute 6A Tribute 6

When disagreements erupt and irritation levels rise during IT strategy meetings at Aon Risk Services, someone tries to break the tension by invoking Wendy Faulkner's favorite observation in such situations: "We're not practicing our team-building skills!"

Faulkner is no longer there to deliver her funny-but-effective mantra to co-workers at the Chicago retail-insurance brokerage. The 47-year-old VP and managing director of IT at Aon Risk Services--one of the thousands lost Sept. 11 just for going to work--was attending a one-day business meeting in New York on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center.

Faulkner had a talent for getting people to work together, and she fostered collaboration with the two other IT executives in her $1.2 billion-a-year Aon Corp. division who also reported to Aon Risk Services CIO Karen Steinberg. "I didn't understand, until Wendy was no longer here, how much was her doing--particularly the teamwork among the three," Steinberg says. Faulkner had been with Aon less than a year, but Steinberg had known her since they worked as programmers at Mutual of New York 30 years ago. Steinberg recruited Faulkner to oversee several critical IT projects because of her unique combination of strong technology and people skills.

Faulkner was born Wendy Morris to Christian missionary parents, and as a child lived in several countries before the family moved to Syracuse, N.Y. At 15, looking for an academic challenge, she signed up for classes at Onondaga Community College. There she met another student, Lynn Faulkner, who would become her husband 10 years later. "She was petite and polite and soft-spoken, and at the same time there was no mistaking an inner strength and power, and a personality that was so forceful," Lynn Faulkner says.

The Faulkners have two daughters, 13 and 19, and Wendy had been commuting from the family's Mason, Ohio, home to her job in Chicago. Her schedule was intense--gone Monday morning until Thursday night--but the family had recently taken a 10-day trip to Chicago in preparation for moving there.

Faulkner helped many outside her work. Every month she sent boxes of donated clothes and toys to impoverished children in developing countries. Her family is carrying on her work, incorporating the Wendy Faulkner Memorial Children's Foundation (http://www.wendyfoundation.org), which accepts donations mainly to fund overseas postage. "Our fondest wish," says Lynn Faulkner, "is the foundation will go on indefinitely."