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MOST POWERFUL WOMEN IN BUSINESS
Patient but Not Passive
A new kind of leader emerged in our annual ranking of powerful businesswomen. She is strong and resolute, but not in a hurry. 
Patricia Sellers
Mon Oct 15 00:00:00 EDT 2001
For some 30 years--ever since women started jockeying for power in the  workplace--patience has gotten a bad rap. After all, the virtue fairly  reeks of a Victorian mission to corset women into the role of submissive  wife and mother. So women have shunned it. Instead they have felt the  need to make bold pronouncements and rush to action. That was never  truer than during the season of dot-com mania, when every CEO professed  to be leading a revolution. And any leader who failed to act quickly was  supposed to get trampled by the capitalist vanguard.  
Now, in these new, more tempered times, patience may be about to reap  its reward. In FORTUNE's annual survey of the 50 Most Powerful Women in  Business, we see the emergence of women who came to power slowly. We're  not talking about women who had the patience to suffer indignities or  who sat passively in an out-of-the-way corner. Rather, they stayed with  a company, steadily building influence there, and rose to power through  determination and insider knowledge, not promises and self-promotion.  These qualities, of course, serve men as well as women. Jim Collins,  author of Good to Great, argues that the most successful corporate  turnarounds were led by such colorless men as Darwin Smith at  Kimberly-Clark and William Allen at Boeing. Through a combination of  deep knowledge of the corporation, personal humility, and will, they  created enduring greatness. It's too early to say whether Anne Mulcahy,  No. 6 on our list, can pull off such a feat. But she fits the profile.  An unpretentious workhorse who never aimed to be CEO, she felt  ambivalent accepting the title at troubled Xerox in July. "I'm not as  famous as Carly--and I want to keep it that way," says Mulcahy, 48. 
The famous Carly--Hewlett-Packard Chairman and CEO Carleton Fiorina--is  still No. 1 on our list, as she has been every year since we began  publishing the The Power 50 in 1998. She still heads the biggest company  ($48.8 billion in revenues last year) run by a woman. And she is still  as audacious and impatient as ever. Wall Street practically heckled her  latest move--a bold bet to buy competitor Compaq--but Fiorina, 47,  remains defiant. In difficult times "people who drive change are the  subject of great scrutiny," she says. As a woman--and a daring,  outspoken one at that--her actions are scrutinized more closely than the  most driven of men. Says Fiorina: "I've had a lot of male CEOs say to  me, 'Thank God they don't rank us.' "  
PepsiCo President and CFO Indra Nooyi (No. 10) understands the urge to  take bold action, but she also knows the necessity of holding back.  "There is no question that women who reach the top have to perform at a  higher level--which is why women tend to push themselves harder than  men," says Nooyi, 46. "But we have to have the right people around who  can say to us, 'You're draining the organization. You're pushing too  hard.' " Particularly now, as the U.S. prepares for an uncertain kind of  war and enters what could be a sustained economic downturn, power seems  to call for pragmatic and careful leadership. 
This year's Power 50 is full of such steady leaders. Mulcahy, Nooyi, and  the other corporate women who are new to the top ten this year--Mirant's  Marce Fuller (No. 5), Pfizer's Karen Katen (No. 7), Chevron's Pat Woertz  (No. 8), and Kraft's Betsy Holden (No. 9)--are all low-profile  loyalists. The combined tenure at their current companies: 118 years.  The six years Andrea Jung (No. 4) spent as head of marketing at Avon  gave her the knowledge to revive the troubled company faster than anyone  expected when she became CEO two years ago (see It Took a Lady to Save Avon ).  
As always, the list is a snapshot of power at a moment in time. Last  year, power resided in the technology and Internet sectors, but that  influence was fleeting. Gone from the list this year: "Hurricane Debby"  Hopkins, who pushed her agenda too ambitiously at Lucent and lost her  CFO job in May; Ellen Hancock, who failed at the startup Exodus; and  Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker, who influenced so many to buy into the  Internet fizz. But one Web warrior looks better than ever: eBay's Meg  Whitman, No. 2 on our list. Whitman, who at times took heat for not  managing aggressively enough, has never overpromised investors; instead  she has diligently delivered above-target profits every single  quarter.
While the economy and its points of power change, the definition we use  to evaluate power remains the same. We consider the size and importance  of a woman's business in the global economy, her clout inside her  company, and the arc of her career--where she has been and where she is  likely to go. When appropriate, we also weigh the woman's influence on  mass culture and society. That factor lifts Oprah Winfrey to No. 3 on  this year's list. She owns a product, The Oprah Winfrey Show, that  generates more than $300 million in annual revenues and reaches 26  million viewers in the U.S. each week--plus millions more in 106  international markets. Her show, and now her magazine, O, The Oprah  Magazine (whose subject is personal empowerment), have immense influence  on the popular culture--from what books people read to what kind of  lives they lead.  
The shifts on our list this year are dramatic, with 14 newcomers and  three returnees from previous years. But one trend is especially  intriguing: Women are taking on bigger businesses than ever. A few years  ago responsibility for a $3 billion business almost automatically earned  a woman a spot on this list. No more. (Unless she wields media power  like Martha Stewart, No. 13.) This year's FORTUNE 50 includes several  women who lead businesses with annual revenues of $20 billion or more.  That's a first. The ranking has become so competitive, in fact, that  some women moved down even though their power increased. Example: Shelly  Lazarus. She heads a healthy business, ad giant Ogilvy & Mather (where,  by the way, she has worked for 30 years), whose revenues grew 20% last  year. Plus, she added a prestigious board seat--General Electric--to her  resume. But in order to make room for newcomers, Lazarus slides to No.  11, from No. 7 last year. 
One newcomer is Southwest Airlines President Colleen Barrett (No. 20).  Loyalty and self-knowledge took Barrett to corporate heights she never  imagined while growing up in tiny Bellows Falls, Vt.  Barrett couldn't  afford to go to a four-year college and had no specific ambition beyond  believing she "would be the best legal secretary in the world," she  says. Barrett started as Herb Kelleher's secretary in 1967, a decade  before he quit a Texas law practice to launch Southwest Airlines. She  made an indelible mark as the startup grew to be America's  top-performing airline. In her job as executive vice president of  customers, she helped create Southwest's famously collegial culture and  provided essential structure and discipline to Kelleher's grand vision.  "I've never wanted the CEO job," says Barrett. "I don't think I have the  talents for it. I'm a great No. 2 person." Now 57, Barrett is exactly  where she wants to be.  
Loyalty does not mean kowtowing. The women on our list push their  companies to change and grow, and they take personal risks. "Women have  to take a lot of risks because there is no natural career progression,"  says Mirant CEO Marce Fuller. She should know. Fuller was getting great  marks running international project development for Mirant's former  parent, Southern, in 1994, when her boss asked her to take charge of the  company's tiny North American power plant operations. After looking  closely at the business, she told her boss she didn't want the job  unless she could do something altogether new--build a high-tech  risk-management and marketing organization to complement the expansion  of power plants in the U.S. "I told him, 'If you don't have this piece,  you don't have a game plan,' " she says. It wasn't an easy sell. Only 35  at the time, Fuller lobbied Southern's board for approval. Once she got  it, she built a 600-person energy trading and marketing unit that is  expected to generate $25 billion in revenues this year. Southern, a  regulated utility, spun off Mirant last spring. So now Fuller is her own  boss--and, with Mirant sure to be among America's largest companies this  year, a FORTUNE 500 CEO. 
One of the few. The grim news is that there are only six women CEOs of  FORTUNE 500 companies, including Fuller. And there are fewer women in  the pipeline than anyone would have thought 30 years ago. "When I was  21, I was expecting that by this point we'd be in the fifty-fifty  range," says Betsy Bernard (No. 23), CEO of AT?Consumer. The reality,  though disappointing, has motivated Bernard to become "a catalyst,  making sure that other women get opportunities." Bernard, 46, and other  women emerging now are not based on the old model--the shark-like Linda  Wachner, whose company, Warnaco, crashed into bankruptcy this year. Or  the flamboyant Jill Barad, who was booted from Mattel last year. Says  PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi: "PepsiCo, which used to be known for hiring  'Pepsi pretty'--blond, blue-eyed males--has made an Indian woman its  president. That says a lot about the future of women." Let's hope Nooyi  is right. Meantime, if you don't see a new Wonder Woman in corporate  America, it doesn't mean she doesn't exist. She might be quietly and  diligently doing her job. 
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