Carol Fulp, a senior executive at John Hancock Financial Services, recalls one of the first times she shared a company car with Wayne Budd, John Hancock’s general counsel at the time. She filed into the backseat, figuring Budd would follow. But instead Budd, a down-to-earth son of a policeman from Western Massachusetts, took the passenger seat and struck up a conversation with the man behind the wheel. “It was more important for [Budd] to connect with the driver than focus on his own world,” says Fulp. “The driver was his world, too.”
Budd, 69, knows what it’s like to straddle different worlds. After graduating from Wayne State University Law School in 1967, he moved to Boston, where he found a cold reception from prospective employers. “There wasn’t an array of options,” he says. “Large firms weren’t tugging at me.”
