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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&T 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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