Women to Watch (A Special Report); The 50 Women to Watch
“My favorite feedback came from a boss who once said to me, ‘You’re so good, I didn’t realize you were a woman.’ “
IT’S BEEN a busy year for [Anne Sweeney], president of Walt Disney Co.’s Disney-ABC Television Group. Last fall, she shook up the TV business with the decision to sell episodes of TV shows on Apple’s iTunes store. Later, she led the field by streaming shows on ABC’s Web site. And in recent weeks, new seasons of hits like “Grey’s Anatomy” and newcomers including “Ugly Betty” have powered the once-troubled network to the top of the ratings.
Ms. Sweeney, 49, says she has focused on “creating an environment that’s all about risk-taking where mistakes are valued and criticism is constructive.” She says her goals remain creating programming “that people are dying to see”; aggressively exploiting new technologies and platforms; expanding internationally; and building franchises that touch all parts of Disney, like the Disney Channel’s “High School Musical.”
2. Indra Nooyi
President and Chief Executive
PEPSICO
IN HER FIRST public appearance as PepsiCo Inc.’s new chief executive last month, Indra Nooyi wasted little time taking the vision that won her the post and spinning it into the future. “I don’t see any need presently to change a strategy that is working,” she said at the start of a daylong meeting in New York with industry analysts.
Ms. Nooyi, after all, was a key force behind the strategy that has transformed the company over the past decade into a convenience-food powerhouse, from a company that had been known for lackluster financial results as it struggled to compete with Coca-Cola Co.
Ms. Nooyi helped spin off PepsiCo’s restaurant and bottling businesses and engineer the 1998 acquisition of juice maker Tropicana. That deal accelerated PepsiCo’s expansion into healthier drinks and snacks, a segment she identified as a source of future growth shortly after arriving at the company in 1994. She also was the lead negotiator on a $13.8 billion acquisition of Quaker Oats Co. in 2001.
Her skills as a strategist are a big reason why PepsiCo’s board awarded Ms. Nooyi, 51 years old, the post of CEO even though she has never held a position at the company overseeing operations, normally a prerequisite for the top job.
As chief executive, Ms. Nooyi is expected to continue PepsiCo’s push to expand its foothold in international markets, long dominated on the beverage side by Coca-Cola. The company also plans to spend some $500 million a year on small acquisitions that help fill in market gaps.
– Betsy McKay
3. Irene Rosenfeld
Chief Executive
KRAFT FOODS
PROBABLY NO OTHER chief executive has more impact on the stomachs of millions of Americans than Irene Rosenfeld. That’s because she heads the nation’s largest food company, Kraft Foods Inc., maker of Oscar Mayer meats, Chips Ahoy! cookies and that staple of kids’ diets everywhere, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.
But Kraft has been squeezed lately, pressed on one side by competition from cheaper private labels and on the other by a lack of innovative ideas for new products.
So Ms. Rosenfeld, 53, who joined the company as CEO in June, has wasted little time in trying to turn things around. In September she announced a new executive team, and last month, in her first full conference call with analysts, she identified underperforming product lines. Chief among them were Kraft’s ready-to-drink beverages, such as Fruit20, its pourable salad dressings and its heavily promoted personal coffee maker, Tassimo. She did not disclose plans for those brands.
A big question mark involves Kraft’s corporate parent, Altria Group Inc. Altria owns about 88% of Kraft’s stock. But last month, Altria’s board said it intends to finalize at a regularly scheduled meeting on Jan. 31 its plans for the distribution of all Kraft shares the company owns to Altria shareholders. Such a spinoff would free up Ms. Rosenfeld to take Kraft in the direction she sees fit.
Ms. Rosenfeld, who holds a Ph.D. in business administration, is a big believer in direct, clear communication.
“My favorite feedback came from a boss who once said to me, ‘You’re so good, I didn’t realize you were a woman.’ “
– Joseph T. Hallinan
4. Patricia A. Woertz
President and Chief Executive
ARCHER-DANIELS-MIDLAND
WHETHER THE U.S. can break its addiction to foreign oil anytime soon depends in large measure on Patricia A. Woertz.
Ms. Woertz, a former Chevron Corp. executive, started in May at Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., the largest U.S. producer of corn-derived ethanol fuel. The new CEO has pledged to make the grain processor the “global leader in bioenergy.”
Already in control of 20% of U.S. ethanol production, ADM plans to build two giant plants in the Midwest that would increase its annual capacity by nearly half, to 1.6 billion gallons by 2008. ADM also is building plants that turn soybeans and canola into biodiesel. And it’s interested in using Brazilian sugar and Indonesian palm oil to make fuel.
Ms. Woertz, 53 years old, is walking a tightrope, though. While she wants ADM to capitalize on forecasts that demand for ethanol could easily double, it is a very volatile business. The rapid expansion of the ethanol industry and falling petroleum prices in recent months punctured the record-high ethanol prices of the summer, and with it, cooled interest in the highflying stock.
At the same time, Ms. Woertz risks alienating the food-company executives who buy their ingredients from ADM. They worry that the diversion of crops for making fuel will create shortages and greatly increase their costs.
But Ms. Woertz is optimistic that demands for both can be satisfied profitably by ADM. “I believe it is an ‘and’ world,” she says.
– Scott Kilman
5. Andrea Jung
Chairman and Chief Executive
AVON PRODUCTS
THE NEXT YEAR is likely to be a make-or-break one for Andrea Jung, the chairman and CEO of Avon Products Inc.
Nearly through the first year of a massive multiyear plan to revamp the world’s largest direct seller, Ms. Jung must continue to keep investors and some five million sales representatives around the globe confident in her leadership.
Though Avon’s earnings are down more than 50% so far this year, there are signs that Ms. Jung’s ambitious turnaround plan is gaining ground. Steps to re-energize U.S. sales representatives are taking hold. Sales in foreign markets — from China to Latin America to Turkey — are proving strong. And Wall Street is getting increasingly bullish.
For years, Ms. Jung, a graduate of Princeton University, has landed on the short list of candidates to lead bigger companies. But the 48- year-old Ms. Jung, Avon’s CEO since 1999, has maintained that she is committed to seeing Avon through its turnaround.
Already famed for bringing innovation and style to Avon’s products, packaging and image, Ms. Jung continues to charge forward with more ways to keep the company a nimble competitor against beauty-industry titans Procter & Gamble Co. and L’Oreal SA.
– Ellen Byron
6. Neelie Kroes
EU Antitrust Commissioner
EUROPEAN UNION COMMISSION
HER YEARS of service on Dutch corporate boards nearly toppled Neelie Kroes’s appointment as the European Union’s top antitrust cop in 2004. But by playing hardball with Microsoft Corp., the 65-year-old former Dutch transportation minister has dispelled concerns she’d be too cozy with big business.
Taking over a long-running case against Microsoft, Ms. Kroes at first tried to negotiate a solution with Chief Executive Steve Ballmer. But she was also determined to uphold a 2004 EU ruling that found Microsoft had illegally used its Windows operating system to muscle aside software competitors.
When Microsoft failed to comply to her satisfaction with an order to produce a kind of how-to manual for rival companies trying to make software work with Windows, Ms. Kroes fined the company 280.5 million euros ($359 million) in July. “I don’t buy Microsoft’s line that they didn’t know what was being asked of them,” she said then.
The result: Microsoft has produced a new format for its programming manual that even the U.S. Department of Justice has adopted in enforcing its 2002 antitrust settlement with the company. And in response to Ms. Kroes’s warnings, Microsoft last month announced it had altered its next generation of Windows, named Vista, to address antitrust concerns raised by competitors in the Internet-search and computer-security fields.
Known in the Netherlands as “Nickel Neelie,” in part for her tough negotiating skills, Ms. Kroes worked in her father’s transportation business in bustling Rotterdam, launched her political career in 1969 on the Rotterdam city council, and later served in the Dutch Parliament. She is a past president of Nyenrode University, a Dutch business school.
Ms. Kroes and her staff are also trying to scale back government subsidies to European businesses and break down barriers to a single European market in financial services and energy.
“It’s an uphill battle,” she says of trying to persuade EU nations to stop blocking mergers in important industries.
– Mary Jacoby
7. Patricia Russo
Chairman and Chief Executive
LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES
AFTER THE TECH crash, Patricia Russo brought Lucent Technologies Inc. back from the brink by shrinking the company to half its former size. Then, when growth proved elusive in the crowded field of telecom equipment, she completed a merger agreement with Alcatel SA of France- a deal that had foundered years before.
Ms. Russo is poised to lead the Paris-based combined company, although Lucent is the smaller partner and she speaks little French. With the companies expecting to close the merger on Nov. 30, she is preparing for such challenges as shaving $1.8 billion in annual costs by cutting overlapping product lines and eliminating 9,000 jobs from the combined work force of 88,000.
The 54-year-old Ms. Russo is no stranger to adversity-or to corporate change. After eight years in sales and marketing at International Business Machines Corp., she joined AT&T Corp. in 1981, where she turned around a unit that was losing $500 million a year selling internal phone systems to corporations. She went to Lucent after it split off from AT&T in 1996, then left in August 2000 just before its accounting and sales problems became public. She next became president and chief operating officer of Eastman Kodak Co., then in the throes of transition from film to digital photography. And finally, after less than a year at Kodak, she was offered the chance to return to Lucent and turn it around as its new chief executive.
Now Ms. Russo knows much of Wall Street expects her to lead Alcatel Lucent only long enough to see through the cuts. But she insists she will call the shots at the new company. “These kinds of things always have significant challenges,” Ms. Russo said in an interview after the deal was announced. “I’m not naive about that.”
– Sara Silver
8. Clara Furse
Chief Executive
LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE
It wasn’t a simple marriage, however. In the wake of the deal, the combined company actually lost market share. But analysts say Lenovo appears to have reached a turning point, recently posting above- average revenue and unit-sales gains.
Ms. Ma is expected to remain a major force at Lenovo as the company plans for listing on the New York Stock Exchange in a few years.
As CFO, Ms. Ma is credited with setting up a system of revenue collecting and monitoring that has allowed Lenovo to sell its goods effectively across China — no small achievement in a market where even big brands tend to be regional rather than national.
Ms. Ma, 53, graduated with an arts degree from Beijing’s Capital Normal University. She later studied at King’s College of the University of London. She went on to work at the government-run Chinese Academy of Sciences. She also worked as a translator for VIPs such as then Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping.
During one of her translation jobs, she met Lenovo co-founder Liu Chuanzhi. Ms. Ma says she was so impressed by his vision that she later applied for a job at the company. She started off as an office assistant.
– Mei Fong
20. Mary Schapiro
Chairman and Chief Executive
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SECURITIES DEALERS
SHE MADE her career as a tough cop on Wall Street. But in September, Mary Schapiro took over as chairman and chief executive of the National Association of Securities Dealers, just as the enforcement winds were changing.
After years of pressure for heftier fines, investor disputes in arbitration at the NASD have been declining, along with Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement actions. Defendants are winning some securities cases. Companies concerned about the tough rules implemented in recent years are starting to bypass U.S. markets.
The new post, and climate, give Ms. Schapiro a chance to make critical investor-protection decisions 10 years after she arrived at the industry-funded regulator of brokers and exchanges. Among her priorities: handling surveillance more efficiently and using technology to identify areas where investors may be at most risk of getting harmed.
“The pace of new regulation is ebbing,” says Ms. Schapiro, who is 51 years old. The Washington-based NASD is looking over past rules to make sure they’re working, and in September clarified that penalties should take into account a firm’s size. The NASD, which sets and enforces rules for 5,200 brokerage firms, also has been discussing a merger of some brokerage-firm regulatory operations with the New York Stock Exchange.
In coming years, Ms. Schapiro plans to use NASD’s $600 million annual budget in large part to protect and educate the growing number of retirees investing. NASD is also focusing on investment-like insurance products, low-priced “penny” stocks and energy scams.
A former Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman and SEC commissioner, Ms. Schapiro says she decided to get into regulation as a law student when she saw silver prices surging amid alleged manipulation.
In her first few months in her new job, to increase transparency, Ms. Schapiro has given more than half a dozen speeches. “I kind of overdid it,” she says.
– Aaron Lucchetti
21. Silvia Lagnado
Vice President for Savory, Chilled And Frozen Foods
UNILEVER
CONSUMER-GOODS giant Unilever is hoping Silvia Lagnado, the woman behind Dove’s successful Real Beauty ad campaign, can work the same magic on its troubled food business.
With 2005 sales of 2.3 billion euros ($2.9 billion), Dove — which has grown from a simple bar soap into everything from firming lotions to facial cleansing wipes — is the model of what Chief Executive Patrick Cescau would like to see elsewhere at Unilever.
When Ms. Lagnado, 43 years old, took over as global brand director for Dove in 2001, she found that local Unilever country managers were taking the brand in different directions, with no fewer than 77 different projects world-wide. So she took a page from rival Procter & Gamble Co. and formed a seven-person board that slashed the projects to just a handful of the strongest ideas that could work across whole regions. She soon extended Dove into shampoos, lotions and tanning creams. She then created a single advertising theme that would speak to women around the world. The result: The Real Beauty ad series that shows women of different backgrounds proudly flaunting their beauty flaws — be it gray hair, flabby thighs or unsightly scars.
Now, Ms. Lagnado is heading up a large part of Unilever’s food business, including billion-dollar brands such as Knorr soup and Bertolli tomato sauces and pasta. The move is part of Mr. Cescau’s shake-up of Unilever’s top ranks. Over the past year, he has replaced scores of executives and created a group of four vice presidents — Ms. Lagnado among them — who have more power over global innovations and ad campaigns.
Ms. Lagnado has her work cut out for her. Since Unilever acquired Bestfoods in 2000, the company has struggled to make its food business grow. Under pressure to prove his new strategy will work, Mr. Cescau is counting on Ms. Lagnado to start closing the gap with faster- growing rivals like Nestle and Groupe Danone.
– Deborah Ball
22. Deb Henretta
President, ASEAN, Australasia and India Markets
PROCTER & GAMBLE
AS THE FIRST woman and mother to lead Procter & Gamble Co.’s baby- care operation, Deb Henretta transformed the then-sleepy Pampers business. She turned it into a powerful lifestyle brand and made it P&G’s most successful line, with annual sales reaching $7 billion.
In September of last year, she took on an even bigger challenge — overseeing the company’s crucial Southeast Asia, Australia and India markets, which represent the largest block of consumers in the world. P&G’s current CEO, A.G. Lafley, also held senior posts in Asia, leading some to believe 45-year-old Ms. Henretta has the potential to take the reins of the consumer-products giant one day.
Ms. Henretta will face intense scrutiny as she tries to maintain P&G’s fast growth rate in the region while integrating the company’s $57 billion acquisition of Gillette. She must also push a big company objective: catering to lower-income consumers, particularly in India and Indonesia.
A summa cum laude graduate of St. Bonaventure University, Ms. Henretta has been with P&G for 21 years. She also sits on the board of Sprint.
Ms. Henretta joins a handful of other rising female stars at P&G, including vice chairman Susan Arnold, the most senior woman at the company and leader of the beauty business, its primary strategic focus. Melanie Healey, who last year became the first woman to lead P&G’s feminine-care division, drew notice after leading a dramatic turnaround of that business in North America over the past three years.
– Ellen Byron
23. Ellen Kullman
Executive Vice President
DUPONT
LAST SUMMER, when Ellen Kullman was elevated to the helm of the two most important divisions to DuPont Co.’s bottom line, some analysts put her on the short list of possible in-house successors to company Chairman and CEO Charles O. Holliday Jr.
Ms. Kullman, 50 years old, already headed the Wilmington, Del., company’s safety and protection division; with the promotion, Mr. Holliday added DuPont’s coatings and color technologies division to her portfolio. Together, the two divisions accounted for 63% of DuPont’s pretax operating income for the third quarter of 2006.
Mr. Holliday, 58 years old, hasn’t announced any plans to step down. But Ms. Kullman’s elevation comes amid an enormous transformation at DuPont, which Mr. Holliday is attempting to steer toward more reliance on biologically produced and fewer oil-based products. Ms. Kullman says her approach has been to stay focused on DuPont’s markets, “bringing more functionality to the product, and marrying it up with our science.”
The chemical industry as a whole has been under pressure in recent years as its feedstock costs rise, but customers resist product price increases. And analysts expect Ms. Kullman’s safety and protection division to be key to DuPont’s profits into the next decade.
– Steve LeVine
24. Debra L. Lee
Chairman and Chief Executive
BLACK ENTERTAINMENT TELEVISION
THE NATION’S capital wasn’t wired for cable television when Debra L. Lee joined Washington-based Black Entertainment Television as its general counsel in 1986, and few people living in the city had ever heard of the network. But Ms. Lee had been impressed by the network’s charismatic founder, Robert Johnson, and leapt at the chance to work in the media field.
She quickly established herself as one of the company’s key executives and played a central role in its initial public offering in 1991. “As general counsel,” she says, “I was able to cross departmental lines, and I saw a lot of the deals.”
A graduate of Harvard University, Ms. Lee was promoted to chief operating officer in 1995. She was named CEO last year, but didn’t take full control until Mr. Johnson retired this year.
In its early days, BET reached about 10 million subscribers, and its programming was focused on music videos and talk shows. Today, the network, which sees its target audience as 18- to 34-year-olds, is increasingly producing its own shows.
Viacom Inc. acquired the network in 2001. So far, though, it has resisted the temptation to fold BET — which now has about 83 million subscribers — into MTV Networks. The 52-year-old Ms. Lee says it’s important that BET remain apart from Viacom’s other operations in order to retain its “unique voice.” Her vision for BET is to build its presence both internationally and on other platforms, including the Internet and mobile phones.
– Matthew Karnitschnig
25. Mary Sammons
Chief Executive
RITE AID
The people familiar with the matter describe Ms. Decker’s comments as a milestone in her role at the company, whose shares are down about 30% for the year amid slowing growth in some online ad sales and a delay in rolling out a new system for Internet advertisers. While the longtime financial analyst and Warren Buffett fan has always gone beyond the traditional finance functions of a CFO, her responsibilities for operations have expanded significantly in the past year. Her role in crafting strategy and rallying Yahoo staff has, at the least, become more visible. Through a spokeswoman, Ms. Decker declined to comment.
Ms. Decker led Yahoo’s talks with eBay Inc., in which Yahoo beat out Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. for a pact to serve ads on eBay’s auction site and marketplace in the U.S. this year. As part of a reorganization announced in September, she oversees a new unit that includes classifieds, dating, jobs, real estate, travel, autos, shopping and auctions. People inside and outside the company speculate that Ms. Decker, who joined Yahoo in 2000 and was named to Intel Corp.’s board last week, is being groomed as a potential successor to CEO Terry Semel upon his eventual retirement.
– Kevin J. Delaney
48. Anne Sweeney
President
DISNEY-ABC TELEVISION GROUP
IT’S BEEN a busy year for Anne Sweeney, president of Walt Disney Co.’s Disney-ABC Television Group. Last fall, she shook up the TV business with the decision to sell episodes of TV shows on Apple’s iTunes store. Later, she led the field by streaming shows on ABC’s Web site. And in recent weeks, new seasons of hits like “Grey’s Anatomy” and newcomers including “Ugly Betty” have powered the once-troubled network to the top of the ratings.
A onetime ABC page, Ms. Sweeney was elevated just over two years ago to the role of co-chairman of Disney’s TV business, including oversight of ABC, the Disney Channel and the Touchstone TV studio. The television group is Disney’s biggest division, with almost $15 billion of revenue in fiscal 2006.
Ms. Sweeney, 49, says she has focused on “creating an environment that’s all about risk-taking where mistakes are valued and criticism is constructive.” She says her goals remain creating programming “that people are dying to see”; aggressively exploiting new technologies and platforms; expanding internationally; and building franchises that touch all parts of Disney, like the Disney Channel’s “High School Musical.”
– Merissa Marr
49. Liz Vanzura
Global Marketing Director
CADILLAC
IT DIDN’T TAKE long for Liz Vanzura to shake things up at Cadillac. Shortly after arriving as global marketing director of the General Motors Corp. division in January, she saw flaws in the approach of Cadillac’s longtime ad agency, the Leo Burnett unit of Publicis Groupe SA.
Her solution: give Cadillac’s account to Boston-based Modernista, which had created ads for GM’s Hummer brand. The 42-year-old Ms. Vanzura had been the head of Hummer’s advertising for five years before joining Cadillac. The result is a new Cadillac campaign that aims to move the brand beyond its bling image with the theme, “Life. Liberty. And the Pursuit.”
Her decision to switch agencies came as a surprise to many in the industry, but to those who have followed Ms. Vanzura’s career, it was a typical move. At Hummer, she made the behemoth SUV a vehicle that women could love and made the H3 model a hit with an ad depicting a monster falling in love with the smallest Hummer. And at Volkswagen in the 1990s, she launched the new Beetle with memorable ads featuring indie rock that brought a new generation of youths to the brand.
Her biggest challenge, she says, is to keep her team focused on the long-term vision while balancing that with the need to hit short-term sales and profit objectives. An example of that challenge: For the first 10 months of this year, Cadillac sales were down 5.4% from the same period last year, according to Autodata Corp.
– Gina Chon
50. Michelle Kristula-Green
President
LEO BURNETT ASIA-PACIFIC
SHE’S ALREADY the most powerful woman in Asian advertising. Now, as Madison Avenue looks to the East for growth, the question is whether Michelle Kristula-Green’s savvy at working across cultures can help her build client relationships with Asian companies poised to become global brands.
Ms. Kristula-Green was born in the U.S. but has lived two-thirds of her life abroad. She first proved herself in the old-boys club of Japan’s huge ad industry, second only to the U.S. industry in revenue, where she was one of few women — and fewer foreigners — allowed in the clubhouse. As president of Beacon Communications, a joint venture between Japan’s behemoth agency Dentsu Inc. and Leo Burnett, Ms. Kristula-Green built the agency into one of the very few successful foreign ad firms in Japan.
“The industry in Japan is built on very tight relationships. It is a tremendous challenge . . . for a Western company to be able to develop relationships with Japanese companies. It is about taking an incredibly long-term view,” she says. On her watch, Beacon created a quirky campaign for Japanese consumer-loan firm Aiful Corp. that featured a Chihuahua and sparked a pet craze in Japan.
When Burnett, a Publicis Groupe unit, promoted Ms. Kristula-Green to run the agency across all of Asia-Pacific in 2004, she took on even bigger challenges: China and India. In both, she expanded the business by over 15% in 2005, and nurtured local clients such as Air Deccan, a low-cost Indian airline, and Chinese shoe brand Li Ning, which recently hired Shaquille O’Neal as a spokesman.
She speaks both Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, the latter learned in college at the University of Chicago. Her father, who was a Foreign Service officer, told her Chinese was the language of the future, she says. Ms. Kristula-Green sharpened those skills as a tour guide in China in 1979, where she took some of the first foreign tour groups into certain Chinese cities. That experience, she says, has given her a perspective on what’s going on in China today.
“Everyone was in blue or green Mao suits and riding bicycles,” she says. “I could never have imagined how China would change in 25 years. That is the reason I have always been energized by Asia.”
That force of change is also her biggest challenge. “Everything is changing so quickly,” she says. “Just when you think everything is going OK, you have to jump ahead.”
– Geoffrey A. Fowler
Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Nov 20, 2006. pg. R.3
