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THE JOURNAL REPORT: OCTOBER 31, 2005 50 Women to Watch
1. Margaret C. Whitman There's a reason Walt Disney Co. approached Margaret C. Whitman earlier this year when it sought a new leader. The president and chief executive of eBay Inc. has spent seven years building the Web auction company into a world-wide e-commerce marketplace and the gold standard to which other Internet companies are compared. She also has developed a reputation as a skilled business executive who has steered her company through Web site outages and global-acquisition sprees, all while remaining a genuinely nice, down-to-earth person. Her installation as Disney's top executive would have helped stabilize the entertainment and media titan at a time it was besieged with criticism over Chief Executive Michael Eisner's management and its lackluster stock performance. Ms. Whitman withdrew her name from consideration in mid-March for the top job at Disney, clearing the way for then-Disney President Robert Iger to ascend to CEO. But her position at the top of many companies' and recruiters' CEO list underscores her success in leading one of the few Internet companies to thrive during the dot-com bust. Her flirtation with the Magic Kingdom fuels more speculation that the 49-year-old might not be long for the eBay community. Ms. Whitman, who goes by Meg, has tried to dispel that thinking. The Disney job represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that the Princeton economics major and Harvard Business School graduate says she felt compelled to entertain. Plus, she had a personal connection: She spent three years overseeing marketing in Disney's consumer-products unit. While she doesn't believe a chief executive should remain in the post longer than a decade, Ms. Whitman decided she wasn't ready to leave eBay just yet. That's good news for the San Jose, Calif., company, which faces numerous challenges of its own. The company's torrid growth rate has started to slow as its core auction business matures. And competitors such as Web-search company Google Inc. are encroaching on eBay's turf by developing a rival electronic-payment service and possibly a classified-listings product. In August, Yahoo Inc. teamed up with eBay's closely held Chinese rival Alibaba.com3, in part, to test eBay's leadership in the fledgling online auction market in China. EBay is forging ahead to transform itself. Over the past year and a half, the e-commerce company has snapped up international classified-ad listings companies and a rental-property classified-ad Web site. It acquired comparison-shopping Web site Shopping.com4 in August for $634 million, and is investing $100 million in China this year to enhance its position. Ms. Whitman plans to visit China four times this year as eBay continues to develop its products and services there. The company also made its largest-ever acquisition this month, paying $2.5 billion in stock and cash for Skype Technologies SA, which lets users make phone calls over the Internet. The Skype deal alarmed some investors and analysts who questioned the high price and the company's fit with eBay's core auctions business. Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney called the transaction a "major, surprising gamble on eBay's part." Always one to let her actions speak louder than her words, Ms. Whitman shrugged off the skepticism over the Skype deal. "In the end we'll be judged on the results, whether this vision turned out to be the right one," she says. And Ms. Whitman's career path shows she doesn't shy away from change. After working at Procter & Gamble Co. and consultancy Bain & Co., the mother of two boys worked at Stride Rite Corp., Florists Transworld Delivery and Hasbro Inc.'s preschool division. She has always tried hard to balance her work responsibilities and family life. This summer, she and her family spent a two-week vacation camping outdoors in the Grand Canyon. An avid outdoorswoman, Ms. Whitman enjoys fly-fishing, skiing and hiking. She owns a ranch in Colorado and rides horses throughout the year. She also spends time exercising every morning, especially on business trips. --Mylene Mangalindan 2. Brenda Barnes Now that she has climbed to the top post at Sara Lee Corp., Brenda Barnes has an even more difficult task before her: living up to her reputation. Ms. Barnes, 51 years old, became chief executive of the struggling consumer-products maker in February, after years of being seen as a rising star headed for the corner office. She immediately launched an aggressive plan to transform the sprawling Chicago company into a more narrowly focused branded food maker and is shedding businesses that account for 40% of the company's revenue. Whether she succeeds will be particularly important given the high expectations already set for Ms. Barnes. A mother of three, she became a symbol of how women struggle to balance working and raising children when she quit a high-profile job as head of PepsiCo Inc.'s PepsiCola North America unit seven years ago to spend more time with her family. Ms. Barnes's overhaul plan is being closely watched in the food industry, where companies are struggling to find profitable growth after a wave of consolidation several years ago yielded mixed results. She wants to focus on only the company's most promising businesses, including bread, meat, high-end coffee makers and food service in North America, and household products overseas -- a reversal from her predecessor, C. Steven McMillan, who sought growth by keeping the company spread from cheesecake to underwear to shoe polish. Ms. Barnes plans to pull the company out of the apparel business, where it makes the Hanes and Champion brands, and sell some of its slow food lines like traditional coffee, European meats and its directly sold household cosmetics business. She's focused on freshening Sara Lee's executive ranks by hiring former managers of PepsiCo and H.J. Heinz Co. and is moving the company's headquarters out of downtown Chicago to suburban Downers Grove. So far, Wall Street seems skeptical of her plan. Analysts question whether Ms. Barnes has set growth targets that are too high for the streamlined business and whether building stronger brands for items like bread and meat will be enough to command premium prices. Ms. Barnes, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has argued in the past that sharper innovation, backed by more marketing and smarter pricing, will help the company meet its objectives. After a day of pitches to sell analysts on her plan in August, Ms. Barnes concluded by spontaneously grabbing a bottle of Dasani water off the table and arguing that, like water, indistinct foods like lunchmeat and bread can be propelled by powerful brands, too. "While this is a rather large ship to turn, I am confident in our ability," she told the audience. --Janet Adamy 3. Andrea Jung The world's largest direct seller of cosmetics continues its sharp upward pitch under Andrea Jung, chief executive since 1999, and the first woman to lead the 119-year-old concern. Ms. Jung, 47 years old, has steered Avon Products Co. into a radical corporate makeover that has modernized its product line and given its brand a younger, more sophisticated image. In 2004, Avon had annual revenue of $7.7 billion generated through 4.9 million independent saleswomen world-wide. More than 40% of Avon's U.S. customers are under 34 years old. Avon's turnaround has proceeded under the sharp focus of Ms. Jung, considered one of the most powerful women in American business. Executive recruiters mention her on a short list of candidates to turn around bigger companies. But an Avon spokeswoman says Ms. Jung is committed to staying at Avon for the long term. In 1994, the Princeton graduate and former executive vice president of Neiman Marcus joined Avon's marketing team at a time when then-CEO James Preston wanted to start selling Avon in department stores. Ms. Jung asserted that Avon's problem wasn't direct selling, but dowdy products. Under her direction, Avon invested heavily to upgrade its cosmetics' colors, packaging and advertising. Replacing the longtime "Ding Dong, Avon Calling," the new slogan became: "Let's Talk." This year, Avon opened a $100 million state-of-the-art research and development facility. Avon is now the purveyor of fancy skin creams, such as Anew Alternative Intensive Age Treatment, and a kicky, youth brand called Mark, which is being rolled out this year. Avon has also raised its fashion quotient with advertisements featuring celebrities such as Salma Hayek. The Toronto-born daughter of Chinese immigrants, Ms. Jung speaks fluent Mandarin and is a trained pianist. As a twice-divorced mother of two, she is known to be sensitive to balancing family life with a career, and has introduced a culture at Avon that allows parents to take off to attend their children's school activities. Avon has raised more than $400 million in the fight against breast cancer -- a disease that took Ms. Jung's grandmother's life. With a keen appreciation of international cultures, Ms. Jung has aggressively added Russia and China to the roughly 120 countries in which Avon operates. The move into China hasn't been without problems. Avon was forced to operate independent beauty boutiques after regulators banned door-to-door selling there in 1998. But now, in anticipation of direct selling's return, boutique owners have delayed orders. Revenue fell 16% in China in the third quarter. But Ms. Jung regards China as a market in transition and is optimistic it will be a big driver of future sales. In April, Avon became the first company to receive Chinese government approval to test direct selling in Beijing, Tianjin and Guangdong Province. Avon previously revised its 2005 earnings forecast downward, attributing the expected shortfall to "general weakness" across each of its four regions, the impact of Hurricane Katrina and higher fuel costs. --Teri Agins 4. Anne M. Mulcahy Anne M. Mulcahy recently told the Women's Alliance, a group of Xerox Corp.'s women managers, that great business leaders have a "paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. Great leaders are self-effacing." Although Ms. Mulcahy wasn't explicitly alluding to her own experience, she has had more to be humble about this year than in the recent past. After four years piloting a widely admired turnaround of the big printer and copier firm, she was forced to announce that Xerox missed earnings forecasts in the first half of the year. More recently, losses from Hurricane Katrina and a patent suit set the company further back. Its long-awaited revenue upturn has proved elusive. "We were off our revenue targets, off our profit targets, and we missed our earnings estimates for the first time in a long time," she conceded recently. Still, analysts agree that the company has recovered from the near-death experience of 2000 when Xerox faced a massive accounting scandal that led to restatements of some $1.4 billion in earnings and a restructuring that included reducing employment to 55,000 workers from 96,000. At that time, Ms. Mulcahy, a little-known Xerox executive whose most visible role had been head of human resources, was named president and chief operating officer. Debt, which was strangling the company, "is no longer an issue," says Ms. Mulcahy, who was elevated to chief executive in August 2001. The company has cut $10 billion in debt, largely through sales of preferred stock and its Asian operations. Xerox still confronts fundamental business challenges, such as offsetting the decline of traditional copiers. Increased sales of new digital copiers and color printers have helped, but competition is tougher than ever. More corporate customers are buying multifunction devices that print, copy, scan and fax, so Xerox is now facing bigger, richer rivals like Canon Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. as well as scrappy small players like Lexmark International Inc. Ms. Mulcahy, 53 years old, says Xerox has made some fundamental progress in the past year, although it isn't all visible in the earnings statement. In June it completed a two-year new-product cycle in which 95% of its product line was redesigned. After years of decline, Xerox's "post-sale" revenue of inks and toners, the biggest source of profits in the printer industry, finally rose this year as customers made use of the company's new multifunction devices. The key to Ms. Mulcahy's strategy is boosting sales of color printers and copiers because Xerox gets four to five times as much profit when a business prints a page in color as it does from black and white. Meanwhile, Ms. Mulcahy is making sure that Xerox, which promoted her through the ranks, is an exceptionally favorable environment for other women managers. Eight of 32 corporate officers, or 25%, are women, up from 20% when she took over. Below that level, about 30% of its 800 middle managers are women, up slightly from 29%. --William M. Bulkeley 5. Carol Bartz Several years ago, Carol Bartz says, she would wake up in the middle of the night, stunned at how quickly her software company, Autodesk Inc., had slid into relative obscurity during the biggest technology boom in history. During the day, she would "lose it" over news of the latest overhyped dot-com start-up to receive venture financing. Ms. Bartz is sleeping soundly now. Many software companies have slumped since the tech bubble burst in 2000. But Autodesk has soared as the company has gained new customers for its midpriced software for product designers and engineers in manufacturing, entertainment, civil engineering and other industries. That gives the 57-year-old Ms. Bartz, who also is a director of Cisco Systems Inc., BEA Systems Inc. and other companies, a rare perspective on the technology industry's ups and downs. "I like downturns," she says. "People get very anxious, and they have to get more productive." Autodesk offers its software as a way to make production more efficient. Now that Autodesk is on a roll -- its share price has doubled in the past year, giving the company a market value of more than $10 billion -- Ms. Bartz can be candid about past mistakes. In the 1990s, for example, the San Rafael, Calif., company moved too early to make sure its products were ready for the Year 2000 rollover. As the turn of the century approached, information-technology managers preoccupied with making sure their systems wouldn't crash generally left products that were Y2K compliant in place, in many cases skipping an upgrade cycle. Also, to capitalize on the dot-com boom several years ago, Ms. Bartz tried to spin off Autodesk's software for the building industry as a separate company, only to reverse herself and bring it back inside the company. Autodesk's operating profit sank to barely 3% of revenue in the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2003, from 10.4% in fiscal 2002 and 14.7% in fiscal 2001. Ms. Bartz's efforts to customize Autodesk's products for specific industries, such as manufacturing and entertainment, have paid off. AutoCAD, for years the company's only major product, now accounts for less than half of Autodesk's revenue. Two years ago, Autodesk moved to a regular, annual schedule for product upgrades, enabling the company to move most of its customers to subscription-based pricing, which provides for stable, recurring revenue. And even when Autodesk was sagging, Ms. Bartz made a major investment in three-dimensional software, considered the future of the industry. She is also expanding Autodesk's reach beyond designers and engineers, targeting product managers who must track spare parts, component prices and repairs. Autodesk's operating profit margin now consistently exceeds 20%. Ms. Bartz has survived other tough challenges. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992, within days of taking over the top job at Autodesk, then a small provider of drafting tools. One of the industry's longest-serving CEOs, she says she's still not bored. Her definition of a good day is when Autodesk's senior vice presidents leave a meeting muttering, "Why didn't I think of that?" --David Bank 6. Anne Lauvergeon Anne Lauvergeon, chief executive of the French nuclear-engineering company Areva SA, has a ready response for those who question the environmental soundness of nuclear power. Unlike the coal- and gas-fired plants that produce most of the world's electricity, France's highest-profile female executive argues, nuclear reactors don't emit the greenhouse gases that scientists believe are warming the atmosphere and causing sea levels to rise. For now, record oil prices and increasing power failures are leading some countries to give nuclear reactors, and Areva, a second look. Ms. Lauvergeon scored a coup last month when she announced that Areva, the world's largest maker of nuclear reactors and recycler of nuclear waste, was teaming up with Baltimore-based Constellation Energy Group Inc. to form a company that will build and operate nuclear reactors on U.S. soil as soon as Areva obtains a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its new reactor design. Construction also has begun on a $3 billion reactor Finland ordered from an Areva-led consortium -- the first reactor to be built in Western Europe in 13 years. But in a blow to one of Ms. Lauvergeon's biggest ambitions, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin last week shelved plans to partially privatize Areva. Mr. de Villepin cited safety concerns as a prime reason to drop the listing. "In a sector as strategic as supplying fissile materials, enriching and treating nuclear waste, state control must supply the necessary guarantees to citizens and our foreign clients," he said. An initial public offering of Areva shares had been scheduled for this year, after four years of patient planning by Ms. Lauvergeon. But the first hints of trouble came in the spring when the IPO was postponed. Privately, Ms. Lauvergeon's aides say she is extremely disappointed by Mr. de Villepin's decision. Several of Areva's competitors are publicly traded, they point out, and the French state's continued ownership of Areva is likely to hurt its image in the U.S. as Areva tries to implement the Constellation agreement. A graduate of France's prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure and a former aide to the late French President François Mitterrand, Ms. Lauvergeon was appointed to head state-owned nuclear-waste recycler Cogema in 1999. By 2001, she had persuaded the French government to merge Cogema with its state-owned sibling, reactor maker Framatome, to create the world's largest nuclear-energy company. Ever since, she had been on a mission to take Areva public. She hired a former executive from fashion house Hermès to try to gussie up nuclear power's image. And she ran TV ads in France with the slogan: "We've got nothing to hide. Come see." To prove that point, she had cameras installed at a nuclear-waste recycling plant in Normandy, the world's largest repository of radioactive material. The cameras piped live shots of the plant's interior to a Web site for public viewing. --John Carreyrou 7. Ho Ching Ho Ching calls the shots at one of Asia's premier investment companies. She is also married to Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, son of the city-state's founding father, Lee Kuan Yew. But despite being in the spotlight, Ms. Ho works hard to keep a low profile. She doesn't give interviews, and when she does speak at public events, she rarely answers questions. Her reticence, though, seems to stop there. Temasek Holdings Pte. Ltd., Singapore's state-owned investment company, has become one of Asia's most aggressive investors since she became chief executive in 2002. Under the 52-year-old's leadership, the company, which controls most of Singapore's state-owned corporations, has diversified its reach across Asia, particularly in China and India. Her appointment as head of Temasek was questioned in press reports outside Singapore. Temasek Chairman Suppiah Dhanabalan told the Singapore press at the time that Ms. Ho was the best person for the job, and that her family connections were "a hindrance more than anything else." But the subject is still a touchy one in Singapore: Last year, the Economist paid US$237,800 in damages and apologized to Lee Kuan Yew and Lee Hsien Loong in connection with an article published by the magazine that alleged Ms. Ho's appointment was not wholly based on merit. Ms. Ho has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Singapore, and a master's from Stanford. She began her career at Singapore's Ministry of Defense and in 1987 joined Singapore Technologies, a defense contractor owned by Temasek. She rose to CEO and president, and turned the company into a conglomerate with interests in telecommunications, engineering, logistics and aerospace. Ms. Ho, who declined to be interviewed for this article, is described by people who have worked with her as sharp and incisive. Bankers who pitch Temasek investment ideas say they go prepared; Ms. Ho tends to listen quietly to presentations, then relentlessly drill through the numbers afterward. Temasek's holdings penetrate every key segment of Singapore's economy, including telecom, shipping, power, property and health care. On her watch, Temasek also has become one of the most aggressive investors in China and India. In August, it signed a deal to invest US$3.6 billion in the Bank of China. The company's first public financial statement, in November 2004, to pave the way for a debt offering, wasn't exciting: Temasek's investment portfolio stood at S$90 billion (US$53 billion), but the company had managed just a 3% annual return, as measured by market value, over the past decade. To be fair, it was a tough period for Singapore's stock market, hit by the 1997-98 regional economic crisis, then the 2003 outbreak of severe-acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. Still, investors appear to like where Temasek and Ms. Ho are headed. A planned US$1 billion bond offering was recently increased to US$1.75 billion. --Cris Prystay 8. Marjorie Scardino Marjorie Scardino says the most important thing she learned from setting up her own newspaper is that "you can fail miserably and not die." The lawyer and journalist launched Savannah's Georgia Gazette with her husband in 1978. It folded in 1985, having won a Pulitzer Prize but failed financially. Still, the experience was enough to get her appointed head of the North American operations of the Economist magazine, where she oversaw a doubling in U.S. circulation and was propelled into the Economist Group's CEO chair in London in 1992. Pearson PLC owns 50% of the Economist Group, and in 1997 the parent company tapped her to become its CEO. When she took over, the company was a conglomerate of ill-fitting businesses, including a stake in the Lazard investment bank, Madame Tussauds wax museums, Penguin book publishing and the Financial Times newspaper. Mrs. Scardino sold the nonpublishing assets and proceeded to turn Pearson into the world's largest educational publisher through the $4.6 billion acquisition of Simon & Schuster's educational assets in 1998. Two years later, she bought Minnesota-based National Computer Systems, a testing company, for $2.5 billion. As the 58-year-old sees it, testing will be an increasingly integral part of the education business, partly because of the mandatory testing that's a key part of the No Child Left Behind Act in the U.S. Born in Arizona and raised in Texas, Mrs. Scardino has brought a more relaxed, even folksy, atmosphere to a company formerly known as somewhat stodgy. She addresses companywide emails with "Dear Everyone." In 2002, she was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the media, allowing her to use the title "Dame Marjorie." She prefers to continue to be called Mrs. Scardino. Given Pearson's educational focus, some media analysts believe the Financial Times doesn't enhance the company's overall value. It could be sold for a rich sum, analysts argue. In July, Mrs. Scardino said she regretted saying that the FT would be sold "over my dead body," but stuck to her longstanding position that the newspaper and its Web site fit well into Pearson's overall educational mission and provide valuable brand identity. The paper has turned its financial fortunes around after several years of losses, and is expected to break even in 2005. Pearson's far larger education business also is doing well, with sales up 14% in the first half of 2005. The division's performance has helped the company's share price in recent months, a change from the stock's previously lackluster record during Mrs. Scardino's eight-year reign. --Aaron O. Patrick 9. Izumi Kobayashi When Izumi Kobayashi took charge of Merrill Lynch Japan Securities Co. in December 2001, the brokerage firm was in disarray. A ballyhooed attempt to break into Japan's retail stock brokerage business had failed, and Merrill was bleeding cash. That year, the Merrill Lynch & Co. unit had a loss of nearly $550 million. Four years later, Ms. Kobayashi has steered the firm out of its darkest days. By fiscal 2003, Merrill had become the most profitable foreign brokerage firm in Japan, raking in nearly $130 million in profit. For 2004, it announced even better earnings: $172 million. Since becoming both the first woman and the first Japanese to run the Japan unit, Ms. Kobayashi, 46 years old, has demonstrated a willingness to make tough decisions and carry them out quickly. She also has been able to identify areas of growth and build them out to get in front of the competition. Among the tough decisions: Closing most of Merrill's retail offices and slashing staff by almost two-thirds -- an extremely difficult task in Japan. The closures were hard for Merrill, which had made a high-profile investment a few years earlier in Yamaichi Securities, one of Japan's top four brokerage firms before it failed. Ms. Kobayashi also slimmed the equity sales and trading department and the equity-research department, as Japan's stock market began sinking in 2001 to its lowest level since the country's stock and property bubbles collapsed in the early 1990s. Ms. Kobayashi says she used her veteran status to earn the trust of her colleagues. "We told our people that it was not just about cutting for the present, but about strengthening the company for future growth," she says. "Then we had to show them that was the truth." Now, she is overseeing one of the more aggressive expansions among foreign investment banks in Japan. Since the beginning of the year, Merrill's bond team has grown 25% to 65 people, in a bet that debt financing will become more popular with Japanese companies. The company has expanded its mergers-and-acquisitions team by 21% to 103 people. That investment has started to pay off: At the end of this year's first half, Merrill was Japan's third most-active M&A adviser, participating in $49.8 billion in deals, according to Thomson Financial. The turnaround Ms. Kobayashi engineered for Merrill mirrors the U-turn she executed in her own life. After graduating from college, Ms. Kobayashi embarked on a typical Japanese woman's path. She joined a chemical company, making copies and pouring tea for male colleagues. But after four years, she got fed up and joined Merrill. Starting in Merrill's back office in 1985, she worked in the firm's derivatives and operations areas. She rose to become director of operations -- overseeing trade processing, settlement and custody -- in 1998. Two years later, she became chief administrative officer. --Andrew Morse 10. Marion Sandler When Marion Sandler became a chief executive officer in the early 1960s of Golden West Financial Corp., a savings and loan in Oakland, Calif., she was a rarity. Now, there are seven other female CEOs who run Fortune 500 companies, but the 75-year-old Ms. Sandler says she would have hoped for a lot more. "I think the glass ceiling is real," Ms. Sandler says, "and it's going to take a lot of time and effort to penetrate it." Ms. Sandler broke plenty of glass ceilings when she started her career in the 1950s. A native of Biddeford, Maine, she went to work on Wall Street as one of the few female stock-market analysts. Covering the savings-and-loan industry, among other sectors, she recalls once telling her superiors how she wanted to become a partner in their securities firm. "But they would say, 'Well, you're a woman,' " Ms. Sandler remembers. So she found another way to the top: She started her own company with her husband, Herbert, who was a lawyer for several thrifts. Enamored of the savings-and-loan business, they moved to California and founded Golden West in 1963. They agreed to divide the title of CEO -- she says she specialized in her strengths of customer service and retailing, while he focused more on his skills at administration. Together, they built the company into a financial colossus with almost $120 billion in assets. Its principal operating unit is World Savings Bank, which as of Dec. 31, 2004, had 276 branches in 10 states and lending operations in 38 states under the bank's name. Together, the Sandlers hold nearly $2 billion in Golden West stock. Ms. Sandler attributes some of the company's success to her and her husband's understanding of the thrift business from their early association with the industry in the 1950s. "I understood how you made money from them, so [running a thrift] gave me an opportunity to practice what I learned," she says. Besides serving as co-CEO, Ms. Sandler shares the title of chairman with her husband and two other men, James Judd and Russell Kettell. As a long-tenured woman CEO, she gets plenty of accolades for her achievements. She's also a hot draw on the speaking circuit, where she often imparts this advice to female audiences: The way to get ahead in business is to own your own business. "Every time I say that, it brings down the house," Ms. Sandler says. "But I am very serious. You still very much have prejudice against women as heads of corporations. We can rise through the ranks, but getting to the top is very difficult." --Jim Carlton 11. Xie Qihua Ask Xie Qihua about her personal life and you'll get evasive answers. But when the subject turns to her goals as chairwoman of China's largest steel producer, the message is straightforward: make Shanghai Baosteel one of the world's top three producers. Now ranked No. 6 with 20 million tons of annual production capacity, Baosteel is quickly adding capacity. And much of the credit goes to the 62-year-old Ms. Xie, whose steady stewardship of one of the nation's largest business groups has led to the nickname China's Iron Lady. Formed from two factories in 1978, Baosteel has expanded right along with China itself, with 22 wholly owned subsidiaries -- nine of them overseas -- and market capitalization of $5.7 billion. Peter Marcus, managing partner of research firm World Steel Dynamics Inc., says Baosteel succeeds partly because the corporate culture instilled by Ms. Xie breeds good ideas. "Ms. Xie is an administrative power," he says, "and she has happy people working for her." Within China, Baosteel's -- and Ms. Xie's -- footprint extends well beyond its namesake sector. And that gives Ms. Xie a role across a number of important industries, particularly finance. The company owns large stakes in major Chinese banks and has been an innovator in market reforms. For instance, when the Chinese government was looking for a way to boost confidence in a key stock-market reform, it asked a publicly traded division of Baosteel to set an example and streamline its ownership structure. Trained as a civil engineer at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University, the Shanghai-born Ms. Xie spent over a decade during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution working as a technician in a small steel company in the northeastern province of Shaanxi. She has been with Baosteel since it was established in 1978 and has worked her way up the ladder. "I didn't expect to become a leader of a steel company," she said in an interview earlier this year. When China began to trade with the rest of the world, Deng Xiaoping designated Baosteel to lead the charge, using modern technology imported from Japan. Today, Ms. Xie is eager to emphasize that equipment employed by the company, on China's mighty Yangtze River, is increasingly homegrown. But now, the fast expansion of capacity in China's steel industry championed by Ms. Xie threatens to flood the world market with metal. Global steel prices are being tugged lower this year as a result. Ms. Xie's next challenge: move Baosteel further up the quality chain, making more high-grade products. --James T. Areddy 12. Laurence Parisot On July 5, Laurence Parisot was elected president of the Mouvement des Entreprises de France, the country's biggest employers' union, with a promise to make France "love the market economy." It won't be easy. Ms. Parisot, who has been dubbed "the bosses' boss," takes on her new job at a time when France is struggling to determine its future relationship with the world economy. Last spring, voters rejected a draft constitution for the European Union in a referendum largely viewed as a rebuke of the center-right government's free-market agenda. Labor unions staged a big public-sector strike on Oct. 4 to protest government attempts to overhaul France's rigid labor laws and privatize several big state-owned companies. Medef, as the union is known, acts as a counterweight to France's powerful leftist labor unions, constantly pushing the government for further and faster labor reforms. After studying law and political science, Ms. Parisot became director of the Louis Harris polling institute at age 27. At 30, she was named CEO of French polling firm Ifop. She now sits on the boards of tire maker Michelin, amusement-park operator Euro Disney and advertising firm Havas. She also has been running her family's cabinet-door production company, Optimum, since her father's death in 2002. At 46, Ms. Parisot is the youngest-ever Medef president and the first woman to head the organization. She is also one of the first presidents to have a background in small and midsize businesses and the first to work in the service industry -- something observers say could work to her advantage when pushing for liberalization of the labor market. Unlike big-corporation CEOs in France, small-business owners don't have a largely negative image. Though one French newspaper has compared Ms. Parisot to Margaret Thatcher, most see her as a leader who will modernize Medef's message and reopen the communication channels with labor unions shut down by her predecessor, Ernest-Antoine Seillière. Trade-union representatives gave Ms. Parisot positive marks after a first round of meetings in early September, praising her positive and open style. But Ms. Parisot doesn't sugarcoat what she sees as France's big problem: its declining labor competitiveness. When French President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin called on the European Commission to investigate Hewlett-Packard Co. after the U.S. company announced 1,240 layoffs in France, Ms. Parisot went on television to say there was a "line of cause and effect" between France's 35-hour workweek and H-P's decision. In response, several union representatives held a "picnic protest" outside her offices, passing out kebabs to passersby while denouncing the high salaries of French CEOs. --Sarah Nassauer 13. Clara Furse As chief executive officer of London Stock Exchange PLC, Clara Furse heads one of the world's largest, and oldest, stock markets. But the venerable London market also has become a takeover target as moves gather pace for consolidation among stock-exchange operators in Europe and, ultimately, world-wide. That has forced the 47-year-old Canadian native into a yearlong juggling act. Since last December, when a rival made a surprise bid for LSE, Ms. Furse has had to weigh competing offers alongside the wishes of her own shareholders and customers. Yet she also has had to stay focused on the exchange's underlying business, attracting new companies to list on the exchange and improving systems that will lead to long-term growth. So far, Ms. Furse, who became the exchange's first woman CEO in 2001, has managed to do both. Her shareholders, unlike those of rivals, have remained loyal, even as LSE's board twice rejected an offer that was at a big premium to its then share price. Meantime, operations have continued to strengthen. That led Ms. Furse to declare this summer that LSE had reached a turning point for growth, underpinning her belief that it doesn't need to do a deal unless the economics are compelling. Many bankers in London's financial district believe Ms. Furse is biding her time so that LSE can soon become the hunter in acquisitions, rather than the prey, or so that it can eventually merge with the New York Stock Exchange. She receives her highest marks for improvements in the exchange's business through increased listings and its electronic trading systems, initially during one of the worst-ever bear markets for stocks. "She's got the exchange running smoothly and efficiently, they've had revenues growing quite nicely," says Angela Knight, chief executive of the London-based Association of Private Client Investment Managers & Stockbrokers. "Under her, the exchange has operated without the shutdowns or failures that [some competitors] have had in recent years and [has] been able to increase the growth of securities trading." But if Ms. Furse gets high marks for her handling of day-to-day operations, some critics fault her for failing to come up with a long-term strategy that would ensure LSE remains the pre-eminent market in Europe. "The future of the exchange is no clearer now than when she took over," says David Lascelles, co-director of the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation, a think tank in London. Before taking LSE's helm in 2001, Ms. Furse was CEO of Credit Lyonnais Rouse, the derivatives-trading arm of France's Credit Lyonnais SA. She was educated in Colombia, Denmark and England, including the London School of Economics, and speaks five langu ages. She started off in London's financial district as a broker in 1979. In 1983, she joined Phillips & Drew, which was later bought by UBS AG.
Just a few years ago, Susan Arnold was on a tight budget. She filled her gas tank halfway so she could afford shampoo and conditioner. She avoided paid parking garages to save money. She squeezed the tube of her Crest toothpaste to get the very last bit out of the tube. For the highest-ranking woman in Procter & Gamble Co.'s 168-year history, that kind of penny-pinching seems extreme. But Ms. Arnold and her staff were on a self-imposed budget of $60 a week as part of a two-week exercise to get her executive team to think more like the average consumer who buys the products P&G sells, such as Olay face lotions, Secret deodorant and Pantene shampoo. "You can get out of touch, and we wanted to make sure people stayed very close in touch," says Ms. Arnold. That kind of thinking has helped the 51-year-old Pittsburgh native become the first woman vice chairman of P&G, a position she took in July 2004. Ms. Arnold runs P&G's beauty business, which in the past year generated more than $19 billion in sales, roughly a third of P&G's total revenue. That's about the size of Estée Lauder, Avon, Revlon and Alberto-Culver combined. P&G insiders say she is one of a three-person pool of likely successors to the current CEO, A.G. Lafley. Mr. Lafley has made a big push into the beauty business, buying Clairol and Wella. But Ms. Arnold is the executive responsible for making the beauty business a success, a daunting task given that P&G is a relative newcomer to the business and is up against L'Oréal SA, the world's largest beauty company. P&G has struggled to come up with major innovations at Clairol, but Ms. Arnold is steadfast about the company's ability to figure it out. "This is a business we will learn," she says.
P&G's beauty portfolio spans a wide array of products for very different consumers. Ms. Arnold is ultimately responsible for reading their tastes, be they temperamental hair-salon owners who purchase Wella and Clairol colorants, upscale customers of Valentino and Rochas fine fragrances, or buyers of Tampax tampons. Ms. Arnold's new job hasn't changed her direct, casual manner. She has nicknames for the executives who frequently work with her. Gina Drosos, vice president of cosmetics, is "The Big Cheese." Marc Pritchard, president of cosmetics and hair colorants, and Paolo deCesare, president of skin care, deodorants and personal cleansing, are "Marco" and "Polo." "She's fun," says Mr. Pritchard. "That's the main thing--she's fun." She's also quick. "Where most of us would take an hour," Mr. Pritchard says, "she'd get it done in 40 minutes." That's her personality, but it's also part of her effort to maintain a balance between her hectic work life and her life at home with two children, Sarah, 10, and Mark, 13. Ms. Arnold says she never strived for the position she has today. She says she's been lucky enough to work for some of the most talented people at the company. Her first boss when she started as a brand assistant on Dawn dish detergent back in 1980 was Mr. Lafley, who was her brand manager. A few months after she started, he asked her what her long-term goals were with the company. She responded with the default answer: She wanted to be a brand manager. Then she asked Mr. Lafley what he wanted to do. His reply: become CEO. Even now, Ms. Arnold won't say she's interested in the top job. "I've made a career of being focused on doing what I'm doing really well, and I don't have the time or energy to think about what's next," she says. As for her success so far? "I didn't blaze paths at Procter," she says. "I just kind of kept walking forward every day." --Sarah Ellison 2. Zoe Cruz Zoe Cruz, who began the year as one of the most powerful women on Wall Street, gained even more power despite siding with the loser in a bitter civil war at her firm, blue-chip securities giant Morgan Stanley. Ms. Cruz, age 50, was head of the fixed-income division until March 28, when she was elevated to serve as co-president by then-chief executive Philip Purcell just as the battle broke out into the open.
Ms. Cruz's appointment riled several former top executives who had opposed Mr. Purcell but who said they wouldn't return to work for her. Yet from a simple dollars-and-cents perspective, Ms. Cruz had important support from the most profitable parts of the business: bonds, commodities and currencies. Rising fixed-income profits have dominated Wall Street earnings reports ever since the stock-market bubble burst in mid-2000. And Ms. Cruz had led the currencies business, part of the fixed-income division, from 1993 until Mr. Mack named her head of fixed income in 2000 before leaving the firm himself. As head of fixed income, she led the firm's 2002 re-entry into the profitable mortgage-securities business. As interest rates declined during that period, it touched off a massive wave of debt refinancing that helped fixed-income revenue more than double. Mr. Mack has cited those results in calling Ms. Cruz "a proven leader with a track record...of delivering bottom-line results for the firm." As co-president, Ms. Cruz further strengthened her hand at the firm with a decision not to accept a guaranteed pay package at a time when the Morgan Stanley board was handing out generous packages to Messrs. Purcell and Mack as well as her former co-president, Stephen Crawford. Mr. Mack quickly disclaimed his package, but Mr. Crawford resigned after the disclosure that he had accepted a guarantee of $32 million over two years. She also sought to build bridges with the equities division, the home of some of the alumni who had opposed her, by visiting that group's trading floor soon after Mr. Purcell announced he would step down on June 13. People in the division say Ms. Cruz took time to meet with several of the unit's top executives to discuss their business in detail. --Randall Smith 3. Indra
Nooyi After an employee talent show earlier this year, PepsiCo Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Steve Reinemund singled out one of the judges for special recognition: his No. 2, Indra Nooyi. Ms. Nooyi was an ardent defender of the employees' singing and dancing that night amid criticism from some of the other judges. "There is only one PepsiCo Paula Abdul," Mr. Reinemund told a roomful of employees, referring to the upbeat judge on the hit TV show "American Idol."
It was nothing out of the ordinary for Ms. Nooyi, who is known for her razor-sharp wit and singing at work -- she led an all-female rock band in college. However, the 50-year-old president and chief financial officer is also a tough, plain-spoken boss who drives her employees hard. She is fiercely competitive, from racing colleagues home after a business trip to playing hard to win a staff treasure hunt. Her strategic thinking and deal-making skills have been instrumental in remaking the Purchase, N.Y., company over the past decade. She helped spin off Pepsi's restaurant and bottling businesses and worked on the 1998 acquisition of juice maker Tropicana. Then she was lead negotiator on the $13.8 billion acquisition of Quaker Oats Co. in 2001. She was rewarded in May 2001 with a board seat at Pepsi and the additional title of president, putting her in line to succeed Mr. Reinemund someday. The board has made it clear they don't want to lose Ms. Nooyi. This year, she was one of only two Pepsi executives granted multimillion-dollar restricted stock awards that require them to stay until 2009 to cash in. Ms. Nooyi, who was raised in a middle-class family in India, joined Pepsi in 1994 after working as a corporate strategist at Motorola Inc. and Asea Brown Boveri Inc. She remains a director at Motorola. While another major acquisition is always possible, Ms. Nooyi has focused primarily on smaller deals in recent years that fill in geographic holes in Pepsi's fast-growing international drinks and snacks business. She has worked closely with other Pepsi executives on developing new product lines outside its core sodas and chips, such as fruit snacks and dairy drinks, as obesity becomes a bigger consumer issue globally. Ms. Nooyi also serves as an ombudsman for female employees as part of a new senior-management program at Pepsi that assigns executives different employee groups. She helps identify key talent and mentors some female staff members. --Chad Terhune 4. Angela
Ahrendts A great paradox of the fashion industry is that while women are the biggest buyers of clothes, few women run the companies that make them. A prominent exception is Britain's Burberry Group PLC. Angela Ahrendts is set to join the London-based luxury label as an executive director in January. Initially she will work under the current chief executive officer, Rose Marie Bravo, who recently announced she will step down. Ms. Ahrendts will then take over as CEO in July.
Ms. Ahrendts, 45 years old, isn't new to the fashion business. Since childhood, she had wanted to work in fashion. As a girl she collected clothes, and a day after her graduation from Indiana's Ball State University in 1981, she boarded a plane to New York. She spent seven years at apparel giant Liz Claiborne Inc. In her last job there, as executive vice president, she managed 22 women's-wear and menswear brands that account for about 40% of the company's total revenue. During her time at Liz Claiborne, the corporation grew to 41 brands from 10, and sales nearly doubled to $4.6 billion from $2.5 billion. Ms. Ahrendts arrives in London at a time of transition. With its turnaround accomplished, Burberry must keep up the growth momentum of recent years. In the six months ended Sept. 30, sales grew merely 2%, down from a 14% rise a year earlier. And Burberry says it was facing some of the toughest retail conditions in 20 years. The company also faces a big ownership change. British retail and financial-services conglomerate GUS PLC, which owns a 66% stake in Burberry, is planning to split off the Burberry stake in December and allocate the Burberry shares among GUS shareholders in proportion to their holdings. So, where Ms. Bravo had a single majority shareholder to answer to, Ms. Ahrendts will run a fully public company with many shareholders. Ms. Ahrendts will be compensated well for the endeavor. Her pay package at Burberry is worth as much as $27.4 million over three years. The deal includes nearly $8 million in cash and restricted stock not linked to her performance. --Cecilie Rohwedder 5. Laura
Wright Despite a small-town background, Laura Wright, chief financial officer of Southwest Airlines, has always thought big. Off to college after growing up in western Nebraska and east Texas, she decided not to waste any time and earned her bachelor's and master's degrees simultaneously, in a little over four years.
But Ms. Wright jumped on board Southwest as the tiny airline rocketed to the top tier of the industry. Her small-town roots fit right in with Southwest's casual culture, and she quickly broadened her résumé as director of corporate finance in 1990. Ms. Wright assumed the duty of negotiating the purchase of airplanes dumped on the market by other downsizing and bankrupt carriers. Her experience debating arcane business details with government tax auditors had turned her into a painstaking negotiator. Her hard-nosed deal-making contrasts with a mild nature that prompts Southwest's chief executive, Gary Kelly, to describe her as "the sweetest tough lady you will ever meet." Even as she's risen through the executive ranks, Ms. Wright, 45 years old, likes to stay involved at every level of the business. When Southwest was in secret negotiations to buy Morris Air in 1993, she flew to Salt Lake City for a middle-of-the-night, flashlight inspection of its airplane fleet parked on the tarmac. "I'm really not just a paper pusher," Ms. Wright says. "I've always been a roll-up-your-shirt-sleeves type." Ms. Wright succeeded Mr. Kelly as CFO when he moved to the chief executive suite in July 2004. As CFO she's involved in approving capital projects and helping decide what makes sense for the company strategically. She also co-hosts the earnings conference calls with analysts with Mr. Kelly. But she gets the most attention these days for steering the company's lauded fuel-hedging program, which has secured Southwest a supply of cheaper fuel at a time when energy costs are putting a huge strain on the industry. That program could prove crucial to Southwest's future success, giving the carrier the resources to continue growing while other airlines struggle to remain solvent. As energy prices stay high and opportunities for cheaper fuel contracts evaporate, it's becoming more difficult to maintain that edge. "Clearly the decisions are much, much harder today, but they've always been hard," says Ms. Wright. Making tough decisions is a hallmark of leadership, she adds. "You have to be able to make a hard decision, and you can't procrastinate," she says. "Because if you do, that decision will be made for you." --Susan Warren 6. Susan
Desmond-Hellmann Earlier this year, Genentech Inc. got lucky -- really lucky. Over the span of five months, five large-scale clinical trials of its new-style "targeted" drugs each yielded positive results. In quick succession, various Genentech drugs successfully battled lung, breast and pancreatic tumors, helped reverse vision loss in elderly patients with macular degeneration and treated a severe form of arthritis.
"I can't remember a time in my career before where the impact of hard work and the dreams you have when you do drug development" converged so dramatically, says Dr. Desmond-Hellmann, 48. "It's great to see good things happen for patients." The positive results of the trials, of course, come with caveats. None of the cancer drugs actually cure the disease, and when they do extend life, they tend to do so only by a few months. Some of these drugs also work in only a minority of patients; Herceptin, for instance, is effective in just 20% to 30% of breast-cancer patients. Still, the unexpected string of success has boosted Genentech financially. Its stock price almost doubled in the first six months of the year. And sales of some of the tested drugs have started to pick up. Dr. Desmond-Hellmann, a 10-year veteran of Genentech, moved to industry from medical practice after growing frustrated with the limited treatment options available to cancer patients. Over the years, she has been instrumental in pushing the company more deeply into research and development of cancer drugs. The recent clinical successes now bring new challenges for Dr. Desmond-Hellmann. She must oversee the submission of 10 new regulatory filings with the Food and Drug Administration over the next several months. She also must ensure that the company's pipeline of experimental treatments is restocked. "Expectations are high," she says. "Most days, that's thrilling. Some days, it's daunting." Another challenge: keeping up the quality in research as the company grows. Declining research productivity is an acute problem at giant drug companies, one that Genentech hopes to avoid. --David Hamilton 7. Karen
Katen Karen Katen took another step toward the top job at Pfizer Inc. in February with a promotion to vice chairman and new responsibilities for research and manufacturing. The New York drug maker's current chairman and chief executive, Henry McKinnell, isn't scheduled to step aside until early 2008. But the world's largest drug company by sales set its succession plan into motion by elevating Ms. Katen, 56, and two other Pfizer executives to vice-chairman spots early this year.
It's still a three-way race, but the odds already favoring Ms. Katen got even stronger this year. She became president of the newly created human-health group, now the New York-based company's principal operating unit, at the same time she was named vice chairman. In this new role, Ms. Katen added the company's research and development laboratories and factories to her existing sales and marketing responsibilities for Pfizer's prescription-drug business. She takes command of this broad portfolio just as Pfizer has entered a particularly trying period. Safety concerns over Cox-2 painkillers led Pfizer to withdraw Bextra from the market in April and have crimped sales of Celebrex. Patents on some of Pfizer's biggest-selling drugs are starting to expire. The antibiotic Zithromax is expected to begin facing generic competition next month, followed by the antidepressant Zoloft next year. Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration recently denied approval for some drugs, including an osteoporosis treatment, that the company had been counting on to take up some of the slack. New products are in short supply, and savings from the acquisitions of Warner-Lambert Co. and Pharmacia Corp. are waning. So in a bid to cut costs and increase efficiency, Ms. Katen and Mr. Shedlarz are leading a top-to-bottom review of Pfizer's operations to trim $4 billion in annual expenses by 2008. Ms. Katen has also set her sights on restoring the reputation of Pfizer and the rest of the drug sector with the public. "The industry has come clearly to the point that the environment is not favorable to us, if the perception is that we're not there to help patients and their families," she said in an interview this summer. She has pushed initiatives to broaden access to Pfizer medicines with assistance programs for the uninsured and has worked through the drug industry's trade group for broader action on the same issues. "Even people who have good income and access to medicine," she says, "are concerned that there are individuals who do not." --Scott Hensley 8. Sallie
Krawcheck Sallie Krawcheck is usually the only woman at the table when she sits down with her counterparts at other financial-services companies. As Citigroup Inc.'s chief financial officer, Ms. Krawcheck also is now the bank's highest-profile woman, following the recent departure of veteran executive Marjorie Magner, who ran its global consumer business.
"It's been both the longest and shortest year of my life," says Ms. Krawcheck, a 40-year-old native of South Carolina. Indeed, there's been plenty of activity at Citigroup in the past year. In March, the Federal Reserve banned the deal-hungry bank from making major acquisitions after a series of regulatory and ethical missteps. Like other big banks, Citigroup has been hurt by slow revenue growth and a listless stock price. It recently divested its asset-management business in an effort to avoid potential conflicts. In July, Robert Willumstad, chief operating officer, announced he was leaving the firm; Ms. Magner departed a few weeks later. Ms. Krawcheck's job stretches well beyond number-crunching; she also is responsible for the banks' investor relations, mergers and acquisitions, and strategic planning. But it's not all new to her. As chairman and chief executive at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., she was responsible for business development and planning, as well as the firm's research, brokerage and trading operations. A 1987 graduate of the University of North Carolina, Ms. Krawcheck received an M.B.A. from Columbia University. She joined Bernstein in 1994 as an equity analyst after jobs at Salomon Brothers and Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. She moved to Citigroup in 2002. These days, Ms. Krawcheck spends the last day of each quarter bracing for two grueling weeks of financial reviews, preparations for investor presentations, and major strategic decisions. "You lose eight weeks of your life every year to earnings, and at the end of it, you look bad -- all tired and pimply," she says. Still, "the guys shouldn't have all the fun." Ms. Krawcheck prides herself on being frank with investors, whether it's explaining how rising interest rates will affect earnings or how the bank's performance in bond trading fell short. "I don't see my job as chief cheerleader for Citigroup," she says. Later, she adds: "I love Citigroup. I am bullish on Citigroup." --Robin Sidel 9. Ann Moore Ann Moore is the most powerful executive in the magazine business. She runs the largest diversified publisher in America, with 155 titles, including icons like Sports Illustrated, Time, Fortune and People. Since 2002, the 55-year-old chairman and chief executive also has steered Time Inc. through a major industry slump, changed its makeup and moved it into the 21st century.
Eileen Naughton, president of Time magazine, says Ms. Moore has a unique nose for openings in the market and isn't afraid to pursue them. "Ann had more chutzpah than anybody at the table," she says, "because she has lived through business launches and that whole kind of scary roller-coaster ride of committing to a big idea and then seeing it through to execution." Inside the company, staffers call her the "Launch Queen," or simply, "Queen Ann." But her royal status wasn't bequeathed without merit. Richard Parsons, chairman and CEO of parent Time Warner Inc., notes that Ms. Moore "earned her spurs" by working her way up through the ranks, starting as a corporate financial analyst in 1978, moving to senior roles at Money and Sports Illustrated, and eventually running People magazine. Her crowning achievement: the launch of InStyle, a major revenue engine for the company. "I'm pleased with her leadership," says Mr. Parsons. "She has her fingers on the pulse." That can be a challenge in this difficult period in the magazine industry. According to the Publishers Information Bureau, ad revenue through August was down significantly from a year earlier in publications like Fortune, Time and Sports Illustrated. Ms. Moore expects ad growth for all of 2005 to be in the high single digits, down from the 12% compounded average for the past five years. She has tried to tap new growth markets and reorganize to adapt to shifts in ad spending. She expanded Time Inc.'s limited international publishing with the acquisition of Grupo Editorial Expansión, the second-largest publisher in Mexico; and she bought Essence Communications Inc., publisher of Essence, the leading African-American women's title. Ms. Moore wants to keep expanding Time into other categories as well, making magazines that target younger men and women, while also pruning odds and ends that no longer fit. Ultimately, she says, she'll rely on what she does best: "You gotta keep launching." --Joe Hagan 10. Safra
Catz In Oracle Corp.'s crowded stable of presidents, Safra Catz is first among equals. The Redwood City, Calif., software giant has three co-presidents, all with backgrounds in finance and banking rather than engineering or programming. Charles Phillips, a former Morgan Stanley financial analyst, runs sales and marketing. Greg Maffei, once Microsoft Corp.'s chief financial officer, holds the same title at Oracle. Ms. Catz, an investment banker at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette for more than a decade, handles support and services and oversees Oracle's active acquisitions strategy.
In the meantime, "it's her job to do as much of my job as she can so I don't have to do it myself," Mr. Ellison said in a recent meeting with Wall Street Journal reporters and editors. Ms. Catz, 43, first met Mr. Ellison through her work at DLJ, which had done investment banking for Oracle. In 1999, she told Mr. Ellison she was tired of traveling, and he invited her to join Oracle as a senior vice president. She quickly established herself as his gatekeeper and enforcer, dogging other executives to follow through on his orders. She was named co-president early last year. Ms. Catz has survived longer than most No. 2s to Mr. Ellison, who has run the company since he founded it 28 years ago. That's in part because she leaves the spotlight to Mr. Ellison and has no obvious ambitions for the top job, while being tough enough to push back against her mercurial boss. Intensely private, she declines most interview requests. But she gave a hint of her operating style earlier this year, in answer to a question about the dearth of women in technology after an appearance at the Women's High-Tech Coalition, a Silicon Valley group. "You have to be better," she said. "You have got to work harder, work longer, be louder." Ms. Catz took the lead in integrating Oracle's $10.6 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft, after managing the grueling, 18-month takeover battle. Now she's expected to do the same with the company's planned $5.85 billion acquisition of Siebel Systems Inc., though Mr. Phillips handled the merger negotiations. Ms. Catz honed her skills restructuring Oracle itself, forcing the company to end its free-spending ways after the end of the technology boom. Operating profits were 34% of revenue in the fiscal year ended May 31, up from 21% during the boom years. Her services have been well rewarded, with a fiscal 2005 salary and bonus of $5.7 million, more than double her pay of $2.7 million the previous year. --David Bank 11. Linda
Cook More than a year after being named to the inner circle at Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Linda Cook has helped seal a handful of megadeals that the British-Dutch oil giant hopes will catapult it past last year's devastating energy-accounting scandal. In February, Ms. Cook -- who runs Shell's natural-gas and power operations, one of the company's three core businesses -- announced a deal with gas-rich Qatar to invest some $7 billion to drill for natural gas and send it to energy-hungry Europe and the U.S. In the months that followed, Shell moved ahead on a number of other gas projects -- from liquefied natural-gas plants in Nigeria and Australia to big sales agreements for its gas output from a giant plant in Russia.
More than any of its peers, Shell is betting big on natural gas to meet future growth in demand for energy. Gas has long played second fiddle to oil in the world's petroleum industry, partly because it's so difficult to transport to markets. Supercooling the gas into liquid form and then shipping it by tanker has been an option for decades. But until recently, the relatively low price of gas in many markets didn't justify the expense. Shell was the subject of a punishing investigation in 2004 by U.S. and British regulators over the company's overstated energy-reserves tally, a crucial investor metric. Part of the fallout was a major restructuring, completed earlier this year, which elevated Ms. Cook, 47 years old, to Shell's top management. Ms. Cook graduated from the University of Kansas with a petroleum-engineering degree and joined Shell Oil Co. in Houston in 1980. She worked for Shell in Texas and California in a number of technical and managerial roles. In 2000, she was named to lead the gas and power division for the first time around, based in London. While that job included the same operational responsibilities as her current role, she hadn't yet made it to Shell's executive committee, its top decision-making body. In 2003, she moved to Canada, where she served as president and CEO of Shell Canada, one of the country's largest integrated oil companies. Ms. Cook moved her family to The Hague in the Netherlands late last year as part of the restructuring. But she spends a good deal of her time jetting to and from Shell's far-flung operations. Asked by colleagues what keeps her up at night, Ms. Cook says she responds, "My three teenagers, and turbulence." --Chip Cummins 12. Valerie
Hermann When Valerie Hermann became chief executive of the Yves Saint Laurent brand in January, she took over an iconic name in international fashion. But her task -- turning YSL into a profit-making company -- is one of the hardest in the business today. Ms. Hermann's success will depend on whether she's able to balance the creative legacy of the YSL brand, for the past three seasons in the hands of Italian designer Stefano Pilati, with the commercial need to sell clothes and handbags. That means keeping YSL handbags on the arms of A-list celebrities, but also getting more shoppers into the brand's expensive network of boutiques world-wide.
Beyond the fashion world, YSL's turnaround is crucial for French conglomerate PPR Group SA. PPR is betting future earnings on its wholly owned Gucci Group, which includes the Bottega Veneta and Alexander McQueen fashion labels as well as YSL. Ms. Hermann, 42, has experience with suffering brands. Gucci poached the petite, energetic manager from archrival LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA. There, she used to run women's ready-to-wear at the Christian Dior brand, which has experienced a major revamp over the past decade after disappearing from the fashion map for most of the 1980s and 1990s. She was also the business brain behind the John Galliano label, where she helped improve sales of some of the most outlandish creations in the fashion world. Ms. Hermann is highly respected by executives at U.S. department stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue. For her first six months on the job, Ms. Hermann kept a low profile, coming to grips with the business. During the Paris fashion shows earlier this month, however, she made a rare public appearance, hosting a YSL-sponsored art exhibit and gala dinner at the Centre Pompidou. The party, which drew fashion editors, retail executives and a smattering of French celebrities, was a rare occasion for YSL as well. The company hadn't organized such a high-profile event in years. --Alessandra Galloni 13. Yoshie
Motohiro Women are still so rare at the top of major Japanese companies that Nissan Motor Co.'s chief executive, Carlos Ghosn, recently made a commitment to fill 5% of top management posts with women. One example Mr. Ghosn can point to as he promotes this goal is Yoshie Motohiro, Nissan's head of operations in India. She is one of the company's highest-profile female executives and the first woman at Nissan to run an overseas subsidiary.
Nissan has been late to this market, but one of the things Ms. Motohiro will have going for her is that the Indian market is still developing, creating opportunities for newcomers. The Indian market is still small, with this year's sales expected to total 1.1 million vehicles, compared with three million for China. But the 24% increase in car sales in India in 2004 made it the world's fastest-growing market in percentage terms, and Ms. Motohiro expects sales to reach two million by 2010. One of her jobs, she says, is to make sure that India isn't overlooked because of all the interest in China. "Nissan has been allocating a lot to China," Ms. Motohiro says. "I need to appeal to Nissan so that it allocates resources to India. This is challenging." Nissan is widely anticipated to become the next car maker to set up a plant in India, and Ms. Motohiro suggested such a move is a matter of when, not if. "We can't just keep importing cars to India," she says. India poses hurdles to new entrants, including labor strife and a weak infrastructure, but Ms. Motohiro has cut her teeth on tough challenges during her 20 years at Nissan. She has been in charge of marketing and sales for big sections of the Asian region. When heading up the sales team for Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, she was credited for Nissan's achieving the top sales status in Singapore for several years running. She has also headed up the restructuring of Nissan's operations in Brunei, and spearheaded the company's recent foray into Pakistan. Ms. Motohiro is based in Tokyo, and travels to India about once a month for visits that average a little over a week. At some point, she may have to consider a move to India. "The countries I've been involved in until now were considered minor countries," she says. "This is different. I feel a lot of responsibility." --Jathon Sapsford 14. Christine
Poon Christine Poon hasn't wasted any time joining the top-executive ranks at Johnson & Johnson. The health-care products giant named her a vice chairman in January, only five years after she joined the company from Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. With her quick promotion to the uppermost echelon, Ms. Poon, now 53 years old, became the third member of the chairman's office, alongside 34-year company veteran William Weldon, chairman and chief executive, and Robert Darretta, chief financial officer and also a vice chairman, who has been with the company since 1968.
Trained in biology, Ms. Poon turned to business when admission to medical school seemed unlikely. She holds a master's degree in biochemistry from St. Louis University and an M.B.A. from Boston University. Before joining Johnson & Johnson, Ms. Poon was in charge of Bristol-Myers's international business, experience that has served her well in managing Johnson & Johnson's far-flung operations. All told, she says, she has spent almost 80% of her career running businesses outside the U.S. Ms. Poon also has thrived in Johnson & Johnson's decentralized corporate structure by cultivating management talent and common values. With more than 220 operating units around the world, Johnson & Johnson, based in New Brunswick, N.J., has made decentralization its mantra. "The most important thing a leader can do is find good people and match them with what they like to do and what they're good at," she says. In pursuit of that goal, she spends a lot of time in the field. At least once or twice each week she's out of the office visiting one of the units she oversees, such as Ortho-Biotech, Janssen Pharmaceutica and Centocor. This summer she traveled twice to Asia, made a trip to Europe, and headed to the West Coast, where the company's operations have grown in recent years through the acquisition of biotech company Scios and drug-formulation specialist Alza. Ms. Poon embraces her role in a system that encourages autonomy among the people she oversees. In more-centralized companies, she says, people tend to look toward the top for answers. "But you can't run a company of more than 100,000 people," she says, "waiting for the top to tell them what to do." --Scott Hensley 15. Renetta
McCann The advertising industry is littered with creative executives who view their world as a branch of Hollywood. But as audience fragmentation, new technologies and consumers' busy lifestyles all pressure the decades-old advertising model, ad placement is becoming just as important as what the ad says. As a result, Renetta McCann is playing an increasingly important role. Ms. McCann, 48 years old, is the chief executive of Starcom MediaVest, the media-buying behemoth that is owned by advertising company Publicis Groupe SA. The firm negotiates prices for ad placement and figures out which media outlets should get marketers' ad dollars. It currently buys about $18 billion a year in media time for big-spending marketers such as Coca-Cola Co. and Kellogg Co.
With such an outstanding track record, Ms. McCann was promoted earlier this month to the top job at Starcom MediaVest. One of the highest-ranking African-Americans in the ad industry, Ms. McCann was born in Chicago and graduated from Northwestern University. She first joined the agency, which was then part of Leo Burnett, in 1978 as a client-service trainee working on brands such as Keebler and Heinz. She was named a vice president in 1988 and became a media director the following year. She was elected a senior vice president in 1995 and elevated to chief executive of the Americas last year. As the power of television advertising diminishes, Ms. McCann and her team are the executives in charge of redefining advertising. The Starcom MediaVest division charged with buying ad time used to be called the "broadcast investment group"; today it's the "video investment group." Why the change? "We didn't want to limit how we view the market," Ms. McCann says. "We see a world populated by video screens -- not just TV screens, but screens on phones, computers and even screens in elevators and cabs." So where else is Ms. McCann heading in her work? One hint may lie in a book she just finished reading, "Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life," by Steven Johnson. The book is about how the brain works and how consumers process information. Ms. McCann says she is aware of two advertisers who are actively pursuing neuroscience to figure out how they can better connect with consumers. "How advertisers now begin to create messages and what they trigger inside the human [mind] may be what lies ahead," she says. --Suzanne Vranica 16. Anne
Sweeney It's telling that Anne Sweeney enjoys hawking expeditions. Hawks are elegant fighters, and so is she. The 47-year-old executive doesn't wear bravado on her sleeve like many TV moguls. She's soft-spoken, self-effacing -- even nice. Yet Ms. Sweeney has proved she has the talons needed to survive in the television business, spending the past nine years climbing to the top of Walt Disney Co.'s TV empire.
"Desperate Housewives" is a high-profile success, but it's an assignment out of the public eye that makes Ms. Sweeney an executive to watch. She is charged with navigating Disney through the thicket of problems facing its television business. Chief among them: the advance of broadband and wireless technologies, which promise to drastically change how people watch TV -- and how TV companies get paid. The decisions Ms. Sweeney makes in this area will help shape not only Disney's television business, but also the TV industry as a whole. "As our viewers evolve and find new ways to get content, we have to be there," she says. "That means putting aside some very traditional thinking." ABC News Now, launched last winter, gives viewers the ability to access content from ABC News on mobile phones, video-enabled handheld devices and computers. Ms. Sweeney recently brokered a wide-ranging deal with Verizon Communications Inc. that includes delivering content from ABC's stable of soaps on the Internet. Disney Channel, meanwhile, is experimenting with video-on-demand offerings. In a business famous for megalomaniac executives, Ms. Sweeney stands out for a willingness to share the spotlight, says Rich Ross, president of Disney Channel Worldwide. "So many times in Hollywood, the junior executive becomes a ghostwriter," he says. "It doesn't work that way with Anne. She's also a listener, and that's a rare commodity in entertainment." Ms. Sweeney's first taste of the TV business came at age 19, when she was hired as an ABC page. After earning a master's degree in education from Harvard, she joined Nickelodeon in 1981 and spent 12 years at the children's network. In 1993, Rupert Murdoch chose her to launch FX, his first foray into cable. It became one of the largest basic-cable launches in history, in terms of the number of homes initially reached. She took over Disney Channel in 1996. --Brooks Barnes 17. Ann Livermore Hewlett-Packard Co. has a lot riding on Ann Livermore. Ms. Livermore, 47 years old, oversees the business unit that is particularly crucial to H-P, the Palo Alto, Calif., technology behemoth. She is executive vice president in charge of H-P's technology-solutions group, which sells servers, storage devices, software and services. The technology-solutions group is H-P's largest division by revenue, earning nearly $30 billion in sales for the fiscal year ended last Oct. 29. That's about 37% of H-P's annual revenue.
So far, the jury is still out. On the plus side: The server and storage businesses, as well as services, are posting profits. What's more, the software unit's losses have narrowed. But growth has been choppy, and H-P faces fierce competition in these areas with rivals such as International Business Machines Corp. and Dell Inc. Ms. Livermore has moved to strengthen the businesses by introducing a revamped line of storage products and making a number of acquisitions to build up the software line. In August, H-P agreed to buy software company Peregrine Systems Inc. for $425 million. "Our strategy is to enable chief information officers to manage the technology environment in an efficient and cost-effective manner," she has said. Some H-P observers are betting Ms. Livermore will succeed. Born in Greensboro, N.C., she is an H-P veteran who has survived several big shifts at the company, including the 2002 acquisition of Compaq Computer and several chief-executive changes. Indeed, Ms. Livermore, who holds a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.B.A. from Stanford University, has been at H-P since 1982 and has worked in a variety of sales, marketing, and research and development jobs at the Silicon Valley bellwether. Ms. Livermore's name is sometimes mentioned as a possible candidate to take the corner office at other technology companies. It happened last year when the CEO post at software company Computer Associates International Inc. became vacant. Her name came up again this year at H-P when Carly Fiorina was ousted as CEO. Ms. Livermore, who ultimately didn't land the top jobs, has declined to comment on such possible moves. (John Swainson from IBM was eventually tapped to join Computer Associates, while Mark Hurd from NCR Corp. was picked to be H-P's new CEO.) Ms. Livermore recently took a six-week break from work when she had a kidney transplant for an undisclosed ailment. She returned to work in September. "I'm feeling great," she says. "It's good to be back at work." --Pui-Wing Tam 18. Nancy
Peretsman Having grown up the daughter of a therapist, Nancy Peretsman still takes her mother's words to heart: "People don't change unless they're in pain." So with technology and competition squeezing every corner of the cable, Internet, radio and publishing businesses, the 51-year-old managing director at investment bank Allen & Co. sums up the state of her world with customary efficiency: "Big pain. Big change."
"There are other bankers on Wall Street who do big media deals," says William Ford, the president of private-equity firm General Atlantic. But "no one is more plugged in to the strategic dialogues with CEOs of the industry, and that's a big difference." Mr. Ford and Ms. Peretsman helped back the formation of the travel Web site Priceline.com back in the 1990s, and today Mr. Ford calls her "very clairvoyant" for recognizing early on that the Internet could create -- and destroy -- the media order. That was the easy part in establishing Ms. Peretsman's Internet bona fides. The hard part was doggedly sticking to that thesis earlier in this decade, when Internet businesses were staggering toward extinction. Ms. Peretsman and Allen -- with about 50 dealmakers on staff -- began seeding these companies with fresh cash, while holding their hands through the turmoil by brokering outside investments and steering the companies to new strategies. Adelphia's chief executive, William Schleyer, says that Ms. Peretsman learned well from her therapist mother. "Nancy will be sitting in the corner, with her fingers on her chin, and looking at you like you should be on the couch," he says. With just a few insightful words, "she helps you figure something out." Ms. Peretsman's hunches have paid off handsomely over the past year, as Internet properties of every stripe have attracted lavish valuations from huge media conglomerates under pressure to change. Aligning all those moving pieces is what still motivates Ms. Peretsman. "This is the most interesting time in history for me, bar none," she says. And "I get a great pleasure in being right." --Dennis K. Berman 19. Joyce
Chang Even by Wall Street's frenetic standards, Joyce Chang stands out for her hustle and self-demanding work ethic. As head of emerging-markets research, the 40-year-old managing director at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. travels monthly to Asia, Europe and Latin America, to organize meetings of fund managers with heads of state, local economists and business leaders. When not abroad, Ms. Chang is often found on the shuttle to Washington, D.C., joining clients for meetings with the nation's power brokers or World Bank officials.
A 16-year veteran of the industry, Ms. Chang has continued a winning streak that she started with Salomon Brothers and Merrill Lynch & Co. Institutional Investor magazine has named her the No. 1 emerging-markets sovereign-debt strategist for eight straight years. European and Latin American financial publications also have consistently ranked her group at the top. And many of her research analysts have followed her from one firm to the next. What distinguishes her research, many investors say, is Ms. Chang's insistence that political analysis never gets short shrift to economic considerations. In a field traditionally run by men with doctorates in economics, Ms. Chang's approach to emerging markets reflects her own background, which includes a master's in public affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. "The most common error is fixating on one economic indicator or falling in love with a particular country because you analyze it so much," she says. "The numbers can look great, but the predictability of policy may not be assured." Some investors wonder if Ms. Chang's commute between Washington and New York will one day have the nation's capital as its base. According to J.P. Morgan insiders, the Bush administration has offered Ms. Chang a job at the Treasury Department more than once. For now, though, she says she's still excited about working with emerging markets. After the Asian and Russian financial crisis dealt these countries a crippling blow, governments have steadied their economies by reducing debt and building up foreign reserves. The next step of this evolution, she says, is that these countries will increasingly issue debt in their currency, rather than dollars, and that's where her research team is focusing. "At some point," she says of the lure of Washington, "I'll probably be in a more public-policy role. But I love working with emerging markets. That's something, personally and professionally, I'll always want to do." --Craig Karmin 20. Marluce
Dias da Silva Marluce Dias da Silva has made her mark at TV Globo, the largest broadcast network in Latin America, by introducing management methods that have saved the Brazilian company millions of dollars. And it's an efficiency model other family-owned media companies have since emulated. Ms. Dias da Silva, who has worked at Globo for the past 14 years, recently became a strategy adviser to the Marinho family, which owns the privately held network. In this powerful post, she is now even better positioned to guide the network's continued growth.
During her tenure, she treated the network's schedule like a consumer product, launching new shows four times a year, as opposed to one yearly programming change before. Focusing on the bottom line, Ms. Dias da Silva has cut benefits, downsized contracts, and restrained spending at the core creation and production departments. And by investing in new shows, she has boosted advertising revenue. Globo says it couldn't provide specifics on the boost in revenue that could be linked to Ms. Dias da Silva's actions. But these changes have ruffled a few feathers, especially those of Globo's old guard, who complained that personal talent should not be subjected to evaluation methods that only focus on the bottom line. Ms. Dias da Silva declines to comment on her tenure. In the mid-1990s, Ms. Dias da Silva was in charge of the project to build a $125 million Hollywood-style production complex named Projac in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Projac helped Globo to save money by centralizing production that had been scattered throughout several studios across town. Those savings helped Globo a few years later when it was battered by big losses in its cable-TV unit, an advertising slowdown and a currency devaluation. Betania Tanure, a management professor at Fundação Dom Cabral, a Brazilian business school, defines Ms. Dias da Silva's management style as "conceptual and consistent." Ms. Tanure says "she knows how to balance business strategy and people management." Today, Globo is both an artistic and political powerhouse. It produces 2,500 hours of programming per year. Its widely watched newscasts target corrupt politicians and its soap operas mesmerize audiences in 120 countries from Cuba to Turkey and Thailand. In Brazil, the network commands 53% of the audience share and 75% of the television industry's advertising revenue. --Geraldo Samor 21. Tami
Booth Corwin In November 2001, Tami Booth Corwin bought a proposal for a diet book and changed the face of book marketing. Aided by an innovative subscription-driven Web campaign, "The South Beach Diet" now has an estimated 10 million copies in print in the U.S. in hardcover and paperback.
Today, as president and editor in chief of Rodale Books, a unit of closely held media company Rodale Inc., she is leading one of the most striking makeovers in book publishing as she attempts to transform the health and fitness company into a mainstream publishing house. She's already having an impact: One of Rodale's lead fall books, "New Rules" by political commentator Bill Maher, quickly hit the national best-seller lists. "This wouldn't have happened two years ago because Rodale wouldn't have published such a book and Bill Maher would never have dreamt of taking his book there," says New York literary agent Richard Pine. Earlier this month, Rodale published "The Martha Rules," a business handbook written by Martha Stewart. Ms. Corwin says rival publishers don't stay close to their customers -- and are paying the price. By contrast, she has been able to harness extensive personal data collected by Rodale's magazine group. She has emphasized reader surveys, focus groups and communication with readers via the Web. And she sends editors to trade shows so they'll know what's going on in the industries that will eventually drive book ideas. "By staying close," she says, "you can make good decisions when a proposal comes in because your choices are market-driven. Many houses, I think, buy books, edit them, and then hand the manuscript off to the public-relations and marketing folks. What we try to do is envision the marketing from the day we sit with an author or agent and first discuss the concept for the book and what they are trying to accomplish." Unlike many people in book publishing, Ms. Corwin didn't start as an editorial assistant. Instead, she has an outsider approach that has, so far, served her well. After college, Ms. Corwin went to work at a regional business journal in Princeton, N.J. She then joined a publisher of professional books as a marketing associate, working on things like direct mail and advertising to professional groups. Later she moved into editorial. Ms. Corwin joined Rodale in 2000 as executive editor of the women's book group. Within six months, she was named editor in chief of the group. Now she'll have to prove she can continue to expand the business after "South Beach." "The great thing about publishing is that great books come along every year," she says. "The important thing is to be ready for them and hopefully get them. Then you need to be creative." 1. Shari
Redstone Shari Redstone is becoming a media mogul in her own right. Already in line to succeed her father at the helm of media conglomerate Viacom Inc., Ms. Redstone also is building her own mini-empire through National Amusements Inc., the closely held movie-theater company that she runs. She's still going her own way, aiming to revolutionize the moviegoing experience with a chain of theaters called Cinema de Lux, where moviegoers will find everything from wine bars and a piano player to restroom attendants and reserved seating. Some of the theaters have even added live comedians to warm up the crowds before the movies start. Her father has said she may be doing a better job than he did running the chain. "You need to give a compelling reason for people to go to the movies," Ms. Redstone says. "We can't control the movies that come out of Hollywood, [but] we can control the experience people have in the theaters." Ms. Redstone says she also wants to make her theaters a bigger part of the communities they serve. An avid sports fan, she shows Red Sox games at some of National Amusement's Boston theaters. "It's not just putting a Red Sox game on the screen," she says. "It's like a baseball game." The cost to watch a Red Sox game is $7, except when the Yankees are playing, when the price jumps to $10. Ms. Redstone hopes to work with other teams across the country where National Amusements has theaters, to allow games to be shown. While all this may sound a bit gimmicky, Ms. Redstone is trying turn back the clock to the days when going out to the movie theater was a big event. "It's time to re-create the whole idea of a night out," she says. And with the cost of movie tickets constantly on the rise, it can't hurt to try to class up the experience. She is also aware of the gripes coming from many moviegoers about the abundance of commercials popping up on the screen. "My goal is to make sure my pre-show is full of entertainment," she says. "I believe some exhibitors have gone too far in commercializing their screens and their lobbies." Ms. Redstone's push to make going to the movies more than soggy popcorn and sticky floors comes as the exhibitors are finding themselves at odds with some of Hollywood over where the business is headed. Walt Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger made headlines recently suggesting that down the road movies could be released to theaters and on DVD simultaneously. That thought sends chills down Ms. Redstone's spine. "I'm always concerned when people suggest things that will hurt the industry," she says, adding that the moviegoing experience has to be as much a "wow" experience as possible. When Ms. Redstone isn't flying back and forth between suburban Boston (where National Amusements is based) and New York (Viacom's headquarters), she can often be found in Russia, where National has two theaters and is eyeing the casino and cable businesses. Ms. Redstone estimates that she spends 60% of her time focusing on National Amusements. The rest is spent with Viacom, where she is vice chairman. Later this year, Viacom is expected to conclude a split that will create two new companies. CBS Corp. will include the CBS and UPN broadcast outlets, radio giant Infinity Broadcasting and publishing house Simon & Schuster. The new Viacom will consist primarily of the MTV cable group—including MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central—and Paramount Pictures. Ms. Redstone will be on the boards of both companies along with her father. Although some children might get frustrated waiting for their moment in the spotlight, Ms. Redstone is in no rush. "My father is going to do this forever," she says. "I don't think he will ever walk away, nor should he." She may be waiting for a while longer. Her grandfather lived into his 90s, and Mr. Redstone has made no secret that he's in no hurry to give up the top job. He once joked that if he could "figure out a way to control this company from up there or down there, I would." While there is often speculation that she will take a more hands-on role at Viacom and CBS, she plays that down. She says she will work closely with both companies "to make sure we execute our vision," but adds, "My goal is to build National into a diversified media company in its own right. This is something I have to do." --Joe Flint 2. Abigail
P. Johnson Abigail P. Johnson is one of the world's wealthiest women, with an enormous presence in the mutual-fund industry. But questions are growing about whether she remains, as long assumed, the heir apparent to her father, Edward C. Johnson III, the 75-year-old chairman and chief executive officer of Fidelity Investments. Ms. Johnson also has sold some of her Fidelity shares to family trusts recently, giving her father the power to vote those shares. For a decade, Ms. Johnson has been Fidelity's largest shareholder, with 24.5% of its voting stock, more than double her father's 12% holding. The company's latest regulatory filings don't specify her holdings or her father's, but the family stake remains at 49%. (Key employees own the rest.) Analysts value closely held Fidelity, also known as FMR Corp., at more than $50 billion. Fidelity won't discuss its succession plan, except to say one exists. But many company watchers now wonder whether Ms. Johnson remains the presumptive heir. Fidelity's money-management unit "struggled under her leadership," says Christopher Traulsen, a senior analyst at Morningstar Inc., the fund researcher. Fidelity executives say dissatisfaction with Ms. Johnson's performance didn't figure into her transfer, nor did a trading-desk scandal involving gifts that Fidelity employees accepted from brokers who do business with the company. They say she now supervises 10,000 people, five times the number at the money-management unit. A spokeswoman adds that her sales of Fidelity shares were an estate-planning move unrelated to any changes in her status. Through a spokeswoman, Ms. Johnson declined an interview request. In a statement, Ms. Johnson brushed aside questions about succession, saying she remained focused on her new job, which she called "one of the great assignments at Fidelity." "I love my job," she added. Ms. Johnson earned a B.A. in art history from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. She worked briefly for a consulting firm before joining Fidelity full time in 1988. She worked as a research analyst, then became a portfolio manager, overseeing such major funds as Fidelity Dividend Growth, Fidelity OTC Portfolio and Fidelity Trend before climbing the management ranks within the money-management unit. --John Hechinger
Ana Patricia Botín is the heiress to one of Spain's oldest and most influential banking dynasties: her father, Emilio Botín, turned Banco Santander Central Hispano SA into one of the world's top 10 banks over the past two decades. She has spent the past three years kick-starting profits at Banco Español de Credito, or Banesto, a retail bank within her father's empire. The new Santander group bears little relation to the trading house from northern Spain that handled trade with Spain's former colonies in Latin America. Having acquired Abbey National, one of Britain's biggest banks, last year, Santander is now a player in the U.K., as well as in the euro zone and Latin America. Despite its size, the bank is still a family affair. The Botín family owns just over 1% of the shares and votes a little more than 2%, but many family members are on the board, and a Botín has been at the head of Santander since 1909. Ms. Botín's recent success at Banesto is likely to strengthen her position to succeed her father in the top job. She had investment and commercial experience, and her time at Banesto was a way to build credentials in Spanish retail banking that she had been lacking. Ms. Botín cut her teeth with J.P. Morgan in New York for seven years in the 1980s, then returned to Santander to launch investment banking. By the time Santander merged with local rival Central Hispano in 1999, Ms. Botín had expanded her area to include commercial banking across Latin America as well as Santander's global investment-banking business. But Central Hispano executives, worried about a family dynasty, eased Ms. Botín out of the bank as a condition of the merger. In 2002, after her father ousted remaining Central Hispano executives at the bank, Ms. Botín was given the task of turning around the once-struggling retail arm Banesto. She quickly expanded the business with more loans and consumer credit, but also managed to cut bad-loan rates and increase efficiency. Through the first nine months of 2005, Banesto boosted earnings by 16%, further cut its nonperforming-loan rate and improved its capital coverage. --Keith Johnson
What's it like to both break up a business empire and try to expand it at the same time? Just ask Penny Pritzker, one of a trio of family members running the Pritzker empire, which is worth more than $15 billion and includes Hyatt hotels, the Marmon Group industrial conglomerate and other properties. Due to feuding among members of the wider family, the Pritzkers agreed four years ago to split their holdings among 11 cousins by 2011. The agreement generally left the details to the three members active in the core businesses: Thomas, Nicholas and Penny Pritzker. "At some point, groups get too large and people have disparate goals," says Ms. Pritzker of the tensions. She says the family breakup agreement allows "individuals to be able to pursue their individual goals, while at the same time protects the ability to grow." Balancing the two "is the challenge," she says. Early this year, the Pritzkers settled lawsuits by two younger members, Liesel and Matthew, who had claimed they were unfairly left out of the agreement. An important part of Ms. Pritzker's task is revving up TransUnion, which has about $1.2 billion in annual revenue and until recently was awkwardly included as part of Marmon. Ms. Pritzker, who became chairman two years ago, spun off TransUnion in December, recruiting high-profile outsiders to sit on its board. "We're moving from a credit bureau to being a business-information solutions provider," says Ms. Pritzker, adding that TransUnion increasingly is offering analytical tools to help lenders decide to whom they should extend credit. As a 16-year-old, Ms. Pritzker recalls, she chided her famous grandfather, A.N. Pritzker, for teaching accounting to the boys of her generation but not to the girls. "He said, 'I was born in 1896, how am I supposed to know girls want to be active in business?' " Ms. Pritzker recalls. "If you thought about it, it was a perfectly reasonable thing to say." Her grandfather did teach her some basics of credits and debits, she says. After earning law and business degrees at Stanford University, she joined the family business. Wanting to forge her own path, Ms. Pritzker early on had the idea to start Classic Residence by Hyatt, luxury senior-living communities that now house more than 5,500 people in 18 facilities. More recently, she oversaw development of the new 47-story Hyatt Center in Chicago. One of her biggest challenges: balancing work and family life. "Obviously, your first responsibility is to your family and to your children," she says, adding that it takes a lot of "juggling." --Mark Maremont
This time last year, Mexico's richest woman, María Asunción Arambúruzabála, heir to the Corona beer fortune, was relatively unknown north of the border. Lately, U.S. President George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush are among those who have been spending time with her. Ms. Arambúruzabála, known in Mexico as "Mariasun," and Mr. Garza held a Japanese-themed wedding celebration at the exclusive Mexican lakeside resort of Valle de Bravo in April. The event fueled speculation in Texas newspapers about the potential for a cross-border power couple that links her estimated $1.5 billion fortune and his political aspirations. In an email response to questions, Ms. Arambúruzabála said she knows how much Mr. Garza "loves Texas and how strongly he feels about public service. It wouldn't surprise me if someday I am 'living in the great state' campaigning by his side." Ms. Arambúruzabála's grandfather arrived in Mexico penniless during a wave of Spanish immigration at the outset of the 20th century. He founded the brewer Grupo Modelo SA in the wake of the 1910-1917 Mexican revolution, which created opportunity for newcomers by reshuffling the nation's political and business landscape. The brewer, Mexico's largest, prospered during decades of close ties to and protection from the Institutional Revolutionary Party during the remainder of the century. The beer maker has continued to thrive since Mexico embarked on a new era of economic openness and international competition, enshrined in the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. Modelo's Corona brand is the top-selling imported beer in the U.S. When her father died, Ms. Arambúruzabála did an unusual thing for a woman in the male-dominated world of Mexican business. She insisted on occupying the seat her father had held on the Modelo board. She went a step further by taking control of two failing yeast plants -- and turning them around in a year. In 1996, her profile rose as she helped Modelo arrange the sale of a large stake of its shares to Anheuser-Busch Cos. Those negotiations later fell under a shadow of criticism by shareholders who believed that Modelo hadn't wrangled much of a price. Since then, Ms. Arambúruzabála, who owns about a 10% stake in Modelo, has broadened her portfolio to include a major stake in Mexico's largest broadcaster, Grupo Televisa SA. --John Lyons 1. Angela
Merkel If Angela Merkel is confirmed next month as German chancellor, as expected, she will be the first female leader of Germany and one of only a handful of women to lead major Western nations. She will also enter a new phase of struggle in her meteoric career: Her cabinet in this coalition-government-in-the-making promises to be stuffed with rivals from her own conservative camp and from the opposition Social Democrats. Success for Ms. Merkel could even speed up economic changes in other European countries plagued by low growth and high unemployment, such as France, where policy makers have often sought to emulate Germany in a quest to match their bigger neighbor's strength. Ms. Merkel campaigned in the September election to partly deregulate Germany's labor market, making it easier to lay off some workers while weakening unions' power over wages. She also proposed to shift some of the burden of funding Germany's overburdened health-care, pension and unemployment-insurance systems from companies onto consumers and households. Economists say that might help job creation, or at least slow Germany's loss of jobs to Eastern Europe and Asia. But Ms. Merkel's program went too far for most Germans. She failed to win over enough voters to form a center-right government, and now will be forced to govern with her biggest rivals, the center-left Social Democrats. Even politicians in her own camp, where some view her with suspicion, have suggested that she will have less authority than previous chancellors to determine policy. By now, Ms. Merkel should be used to fighting her way through the male-dominated ranks of Germany's political establishment with few trusted allies. "Without large support from a powerful regional organization, she got to the top, and a lot of very influential people lost against her," says Elmar Brok, a Christian Democratic member of the European Parliament who has known Ms. Merkel since 1990, the year she joined Germany's main conservative party. Ms. Merkel, born in 1954, grew up under communism in East Germany and spent a decade working in obscurity as a physicist at the regime's leading science institute. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, she surprised most people who knew her by dropping her science career and entering politics, becoming assistant press secretary to East Germany's first and last democratically elected prime minister in 1990. When Germany reunified later that year, Chancellor Helmut Kohl elevated her to his cabinet as a token eastern German woman, and patronized her as "my girl." Ms. Merkel drew little notice as a cabinet minister in the declining years of the Kohl administration, but she sprang to national prominence in 1999 when she helped to end the career of her former mentor, Mr. Kohl. As the Christian Democrats reeled from a party-funding scandal, Ms. Merkel took the lead in publicly urging conservatives to break with Mr. Kohl and make a fresh start. She quickly rose to become party chairwoman. But the male-dominated cliques that control the party wouldn't accept her as their candidate for chancellor in the 2002 election. Instead they backed Bavarian state premier Edmund Stoiber, who narrowly lost to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Ms. Merkel overcame that setback by building new alliances with a younger generation of Christian Democratic legislators, whose support ensured she would be their candidate for chancellor this year. She also overhauled conservatives' previously cautious economic agenda, injecting some bold market-oriented policies to change the German economy. But Ms. Merkel's often stiff, rational style on the campaign trail and in TV debates came across poorly compared to Mr. Schröder's greater charisma and emotional appeals to defend social solidarity against what Social Democrats termed Ms. Merkel's "cold neoliberalism" -- code in German politics for excessively pro-business policies detrimental to ordinary employees. Ms. Merkel faced down Mr. Schröder over who would be leader of the "grand coalition" government forced upon Germany's two major parties by the inconclusive election result. But a great deal more tenacity will be needed if Ms. Merkel is to shake up the German economy. --Marcus Walker
The most powerful woman in Chinese finance, central banker Wu Xiaoling, has a surprisingly blunt warning for her domestic audience: Prepare for rocky times. For two decades, the 58-year-old deputy governor of the People's Bank of China has been steering the country's financial system toward greater engagement with the rest of the world. Her job is to shake up the status quo and point out where there might be potholes. "Risk is forever with us. Everyone must adapt to it, manage it," she said shortly after China made its most abrupt financial-system move in more than a decade. Ms. Wu saves some of her strongest words for old-guard elements in China's government, some of whom still wield considerable control over monetary-policy decisions at the central bank. She believes they have been slow to allow market forces to replace state planning. "Excessive financial control will hinder economic development and distort the normal functioning of the financial system," she told an audience in February. Ms. Wu has urged women to study finance, invoking Mao Zedong's credo that they "hold up half the sky" and saying: "Men would become more sensible in risk-taking if their wives and daughters possess good command of financial knowledge." Like many of her contemporaries, Ms. Wu was sent to China's countryside during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. When China's government subsequently started developing a market economy, Ms. Wu returned and was accepted into the first class of master's degree students at the new University of the People's Bank of China, graduating in 1984. She initially did research work at the People's Bank in Beijing, then was installed as deputy editor-in-chief of the central bank's daily newspaper, the Financial News. She later headed overall policy research at the central bank. For the central bank, the modern era in monetary policy began on New Year's Day in 1994, when Beijing devalued the yuan by a third against the U.S. dollar as part of a broad restructuring of China's monetary system. Ms. Wu was moved to a newly created agency charged with keeping the currency from falling in value. In her post as deputy director of what is now called the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, she helped write and enforce regulations about how the yuan could be used in international foreign-exchange transactions. Just as Asian economic foundations began to shudder with a wave of currency devaluations, she was elevated to the agency's top spot in 1998. As its first female chief, her work was critical in helping China resist the drag of the Asian financial crisis. She was credited with helping to build confidence in the country's economy and its currency. Ms. Wu left the agency briefly to establish a branch of the central bank in Shanghai, returning when her successor died. As China's No. 2 central banker since 2000, her current position puts Ms. Wu at the right hand of Zhou Xiaochuan, the country's politically up-and-coming central-bank governor. --James T. Areddy
During a drug conspiracy case she once tried as a young assistant U.S. attorney in Baltimore, Linda Chatman Thomsen realized the easel she planned to use during opening and closing arguments was too tall for her 5-foot-2-inch frame. To avoid looking like Lily Tomlin in a sketch from "Saturday Night Live," Ms. Thomsen says she took a stepping stool to the court and proceeded to climb onto it every time she needed to use the easel. Ms. Thomsen, 51 years old, assumed the reins in May, after a series of corporate scandals that rattled investor confidence and pushed the SEC onto the front pages. She has presided over some of the SEC's most high-profile cases, including its investigation of Enron Corp. While the volume of large financial frauds like those at Enron appears to be diminishing, Ms. Thomsen faces a tough task in trying to make sure the SEC stays ahead of problems and remains a deterrent to bad behavior. "What we don't want is a sense of complacency, a sense that we've won," says Ms. Thomsen, who has been with the SEC for 10 years, including as deputy enforcement director. "It's not hard to get people to pay attention to the big problems. It is hard to get people to pay attention to things that are not problems yet." At the same time, she must be careful not to abuse the SEC's increasingly sharp stick and risk losing credibility. Companies have begun pushing back against the SEC's regulatory and enforcement agenda, claiming it's too tough. Ms. Thomsen says she is cognizant of the fine line the SEC must walk. Those who know her say Ms. Thomsen is the right person to strike a proper balance, given her ability to be tough but fair, and sense how far to push. "She has a way, without raising her voice, of saying, 'This is where I am and you may disagree with it and I respect that, but it's not productive for us to spend any more time on this point or on this case,' " says William McLucas, a former director of enforcement and a partner at law firm Wilmer Cutler. Ms. Thomsen is known for wearing a Viking helmet around the office on Halloween, a gift from some staffers. She also has a penchant for sprinkling literary references into her speeches in an attempt to make them more understandable to those outside the securities-law profession. --Deborah Solomon
A few days after Hurricane Katrina hit, investors began betting the Federal Reserve would shift course and not raise rates at its Sept. 20 meeting. Then Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, delivered a speech arguing that there wasn't much the Fed could do to help a local economy, and that inflation risks had "only gotten bigger." On the 19-member Federal Open Market Committee, the central bank's interest-rate-setting panel, Ms. Yellen is known as a dove, meaning she is generally more worried about growth and less worried about inflation than Chairman Alan Greenspan. But her hawkish speech was a clue to market watchers that the Fed would probably raise rates on Sept. 20, which it did. Though on the FOMC for just over a year, Ms. Yellen is one of its most influential members, owing to her career studying macroeconomics at the University of California at Berkeley and her prior stint as a governor from 1994 to 1997. (The FOMC is made up of the seven governors in Washington and 12 reserve bank presidents, only five of whom vote in a given year. Ms. Yellen gets to vote next year.) Mr. Greenspan's dominance has made it hard for other FOMC members to affect the direction of rates. And Ms. Yellen, 59 years old, doesn't come across as a formidable figure: She stands just 5 feet tall, with a soft voice bearing traces of her native Brooklyn. Yet current and former colleagues says she makes her presence felt, through her command of formal economics and the rigor with which she makes her point. "I'd ask her a question, and all of a sudden there would be diagrams written on the tablecloths," says Laurence Meyer, who served as a governor with her in the 1990s and now follows the Fed for Macroeconomic Advisers LLC. In the 1990s, she drew on the latest academic research to help Mr. Greenspan convince skeptical colleagues that worker insecurity was damping wage gains and thus inflation. Ms. Yellen says she decided to pursue economics out of a love of numbers and an interest in the Great Depression. Her grandfather lost his business in the Depression and her parents often worried about unemployment. There were very few women in economics when she pursued her Ph.D. at Yale. But she got plenty of mentoring from the likes of James Tobin and Joseph Stiglitz, both eventual Nobel laureates. (She is married to George Akerlof, who shared the Nobel with Mr. Stiglitz.) Today, she is one of four women on the FOMC. As a Democrat, she was not a candidate to replace Mr. Greenspan when he retires at the end of January. (President Bush recently nominated Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, to succeed Mr. Greenspan.) But should a Democrat win the 2008 election and seek a new Fed chairman, Ms. Yellen would probably be on the short list. --Greg Ip 1. Oprah
Winfrey It has become known as "the Oprah effect." Whenever Oprah Winfrey puts her promotional muscle behind something, impressive things happen. The power of Oprah's Book Club to sell novels has been well documented, but this year the 51-year-old talk-show queen branched out into other areas of influence. She proved herself adept at selling cars: By giving away 276 Pontiac G6 sedans on her show, Ms. Winfrey helped propel annual sales of the model to nearly 100,000 units, making it a runaway bestseller by Pontiac's standards. She also played a key role in turning the dark comedy "Desperate Housewives" on Walt Disney Co.'s ABC into a juggernaut by devoting two full episodes of her own show to the ladies of Wisteria Lane. And Hermès International SA got a glimpse of Ms. Winfrey's clout when she was denied entry to a Hermès boutique as it was closing. The luxury-goods maker suffered such negative publicity -- media reports implied racism was at play -- that the company's CEO finally appeared on her show to apologize. The television impresario also made national news when she devoted two episodes to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Touring a devastated New Orleans, Ms. Winfrey called for a national apology for the inadequate relief effort and vowed, "I'll get the country to pray." Ms. Winfrey has been able to command such attention in the past year because her businesses are thriving. In its 20th year in syndication, "The Oprah Winfrey Show" is notching some of its best ratings ever. About 49 million people a week tune in, a 40% increase from two years ago. A 30-second commercial costs an estimated $81,500, according to TNS Media Intelligence, surpassing what networks charge for some prime-time series. Her publishing business is also white hot. O, the Oprah Magazine, a five-year-old co-venture with Hearst Magazines, reported advertising revenue of $143 million for this year through Aug. 31, a 23% increase over the same period last year. A new offshoot called O at Home is selling so well that Hearst plans to double its frequency to four issues a year. The one dark spot: Oxygen, the women's cable network Ms. Winfrey helped launch in 1999, is still struggling to find an audience. Although the channel notched modest growth in the past year, it still attracts just 216,000 people during prime time, according to Nielsen Media Research, compared with the 1.7 million attracted by rival Lifetime. Ms. Winfrey owns a minority stake in the channel. Her business success largely stems from an unorthodox decision made early in her career. Most TV personalities appear on shows owned by somebody else, but Ms. Winfrey fully owns her program. In 1988, she bought the show from the Chicago affiliate station that developed it, built a complex of studios and formed her own production company, Harpo Inc. Running her own show has allowed her to create a brand free of the pressures of the heavily corporate TV networks and studios. Picking up at a moment's notice and filming her show from New Orleans, for example, probably wouldn't have happened if Ms. Winfrey wasn't the one writing the checks. And while she chats on camera with her share of celebrities -- Tom Cruise made headlines after jumping up and down on her couch in May -- Ms. Winfrey's ownership status allows her to do more serious shows that aren't necessarily ratings gold. In the past year, she has filmed episodes on such subjects as abused women and the Asian tsunami. What's next? Broadway, for starters. For the first time, Ms. Winfrey will test her selling power on the notoriously difficult Great White Way as a producer of the new musical "The Color Purple." Ms. Winfrey knows the material well -- she was nominated for an Oscar for her role in the 1986 film version -- but Broadway will prove a challenge. While fans have been willing to buy a $20 book based on her recommendations, shelling out $100 to see a Broadway musical may be another matter. Also on the horizon is another TV movie. Last year, Ms. Winfrey produced "Their Eyes Were Watching God" for ABC. Starring Halle Berry, the movie scored the biggest audience for any TV movie on any network in five years. This time, according to ABC, Ms. Winfrey is working to bring Toni Morrison's 1998 novel "Paradise" to the small screen. To cheers from publishers, Ms. Winfrey also says she will reopen her book club to contemporary authors. She abandoned the book club in 2002, but restarted it a year later to focus on classic novels such as "The Sound and the Fury." The classics-only club boosted sales, but not to the degree enjoyed by her contemporary picks. In her spare time, Ms. Winfrey will voice the character of a goose in a coming movie adaptation of "Charlotte's Web." --Brooks Barnes 2. Miuccia
Prada In the eyes of the international fashion press, Miuccia Prada is the designer most worth watching on Italian catwalks. The 55-year-old creative mastermind of the Prada label has been setting trends for years, but her influence seems even stronger now that Italy's fashion world is having trouble spawning a new crop of young and talented designers. This spring, Ms. Prada was only one of two Italians -- along with Stefano Pilati of Yves Saint Laurent -- included by Vogue magazine in a group of seven influential fashion designers. Vogue's accolade is a testament to Ms. Prada's steadily growing impact on the fashion world ever since she conceived the brand's plain, black vinyl backpack more than two decades ago. The simple bag, which snubbed the glitz of the 1980s, marked the launch of Prada as a cutting-edge force in fashion. Since then, Ms. Prada's sometimes awkward, often eccentric, and always innovative designs have been adopted by high- and lower-end labels alike. Her eclectic Salvation Army-meets-Milanese bourgeoisie formula also is a hit with consumers, turning the Prada label into one of the most popular designer labels in the world. Many fashion houses like to associate themselves with the art and architecture world, but Ms. Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli -- who runs the fashion conglomerate Prada Group -- have taken their love for contemporary art to new heights. In 1995, they founded the Fondazione Prada, an organization and exhibition space in Milan that promotes the work of international contemporary artists. Ms. Prada, who has a degree in political science from the University of Milan and studied mime theater for several years in the late 1960s, says her love for art and architecture has nothing to do with her work as a fashion designer. Yet the two passions have often intersected. Prada's New York store, which was designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, features a large wooden curve that connects the store's two floors, a huge round elevator and metal cages containing merchandise. Even with the success of the Prada label and its younger sister line, Miu Miu, Ms. Prada and Mr. Bertelli face a big uncertainty about the financial future of their closely held luxury-goods group. The problem is the struggling designer brands Jil Sander and Helmut Lang, which Prada Group bought in the 1990s but has failed to turn around. Prada Group had a loss of €62 million ($75 million) last year on revenue of €1.5 billion. For now, Prada Group is relying on external financing, mainly from a group of Italian banks, to withstand the losses, pay back its big debt and finance growth. Still, many question whether Ms. Prada and Mr. Bertelli will ever revive a much-postponed plan to take their company public, providing Prada with long-term financial support. --Alessandra Galloni 3. Elisabeth
Murdoch Having worked for her father, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, for years before launching her own television-production company in 2000, Elisabeth Murdoch says she has a clear preference. "It's hard to beat being your own boss," she says. Ms. Murdoch's brother, Lachlan, came to the same conclusion this summer when he quit his post at the family business, News Corp., after differences with his father. Now, only one of the adult Murdoch siblings, James, is still at News Corp., running its U.K. satellite-TV affiliate, BSkyB. The Murdoch family owns a 30% voting stake in News Corp. The turmoil at the top raises questions about succession at News Corp., one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. Mr. Murdoch, 74 years old, has declined to comment on succession. Ms. Murdoch, 37, says she doesn't foresee a return to News Corp., but doesn't rule it out. "The family will always be involved from a shareholders' perspective," she says. "But I'm building my own company and loving it and am very happy where I am." Ms. Murdoch began her career working for News Corp.'s Fox TV station group and FX cable channel. In 1994, she and her then-husband purchased two NBC television affiliates in California and turned them around. In 1996, she returned to News Corp. to run the programming division at BSkyB, which is 40%-owned by News Corp. In 2000, she quit to start Shine Ltd. BSkyB backed the new television-production company, purchasing a 5% stake and commissioning a TV series from her. Since then, Shine has scored some hits, such as the supernatural drama "Hex" and the cooking show "Masterchef Goes Large." Ms. Murdoch says the company turned its first profit in 2005, on revenue of about $53 million. In June, Sony Pictures Television International purchased a 15% stake in Shine for about $9 million. Ms. Murdoch says the Sony deal will help Shine distribute its shows internationally. "If you're buying an hour of drama and it has Sony on the packaging," she says, "you're paying five times more than if it had an indie distributor on the packaging." Sony was impressed with Ms. Murdoch after successfully co-producing "Hex" with Shine. "As we started to look at other projects, we realized there was a good fit with the talented team she put together," says Michael Grindon, president of Sony Pictures Television International. "We wanted to invest early when it was still a small and growing company." --Julia Angwin 1. Sylvia
Mathews To those outside the Washington Beltway or Seattle's techno-elite, Sylvia Mathews may be one of the fastest-rising managers you've never heard of. As chief operating officer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ms. Mathews shapes strategy on health and education grants for the $28.8 billion philanthropy launched by the Microsoft founder. Last year, the foundation approved $1.465 billion in grants. "She completely changed the culture" at the foundation, "shifting us all to a more strategic mind-set and helping us focus on saying 'no' to things that were important but not critical," says Gates alumnus Trevor Neilson, who now directs the Global Business Coalition for HIV/AIDS. "Sylvia processes information faster than just about anyone but Bill [Gates] himself," he adds. "And, like Bill, she has an ability to see the big picture emerge while others are still struggling to understand irrelevant details." In the 1990s, Ms. Mathews served President Clinton in key White House and economic posts. "She could have been one of the top 25 women executives in this country making a fortune, but that's not her interest," says West Virginia Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller, for whom she campaigned at age 7. "She's interested in public policy." Born in 1965 in Hinton, W.Va. (pop. 3,433), Ms. Mathews is the granddaughter of Greek immigrants who worked on the railroads in Appalachia. Her family name of Mathews, she says, "was Mantheopolous at Ellis Island." .She graduated cum laude in government from Harvard in 1987, and, like her future boss President Clinton, went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, studying philosophy, politics and economics. Afterward, she worked two years at McKinsey & Co. in New York, learning team building and the consulting firm's analytic slant on problem-solving for clients. After Mr. Clinton was elected in 1992, she joined his economic transition team. From staff director of the National Economic Council at the age of 28, she became chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin at age 31, deputy chief of staff to President Clinton at 32, and deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget at 34. "To be deputy chief of staff to the president is an almost incomprehensibly difficult job," Sen. Rockefeller says. "There's chaos even in the best-organized presidency. From the welter of demands, you find essentials. You have to tell people 'no.' "There's an inner calm which I suspect has a lot of tempered steel in it," he adds. Though her zeal for focus and order chafed a few colleagues, she had a light side, too. At a 1998 female staff soiree with a Spice Girls skit, she was "Money Spice." She wrote a Top Ten list of reasons the White House was a better workplace than OMB, citing her windowless office because "lack of sunlight is good for PMS." Later when she was up for the OMB job, her Top Ten list resurfaced during Senate confirmation hearings. "That told you the level of scrutiny you might face," she says. "It was a joke." Unlike many one-term staffers, Ms. Mathews stayed to the administration's turbulent end in 2000. And unlike others, she avoided tell-all books and TV punditry. In January 2001, the Gates Foundation tapped her as executive vice president, and then chief operating officer. The hardest part of her job, she says, is summoning patience in the face of crises like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria abroad, and the 40% minority dropout rate at home. "The things we work on are burning," she says. "They are on fire every day. You have to be disciplined about making long-term systemic change that will have the most effect for the most people." Between trips to Africa and Asia, she is an avid hiker and biker, recently cycling 96 miles for charity. While Ms. Mathews denies having ambitions beyond her current post, Sen. Rockefeller would like to see her as Governor or Senator Mathews one day. She demurs. Still, mid-career political debuts run in her family. At age 65, her mother became mayor of Hinton. Says Ms. Mathews, "She's now serving her second term." --Marilyn Chase
Kazuyo Katsuma is an inspiration to working mothers in Japan. The telecom analyst at J.P. Morgan Chase in Japan is the founder of a Web site, called Field of Wheat, that has become a rallying spot for Japan's small but growing community of career women with children. On the Web site, Ms. Katsuma recounts her own struggle to advance her career while raising three children and going through a divorce. And that outspokenness has gained her legions of fans among Japanese working mothers, who typically have had few sources of encouragement and support in male-dominated corporate Japan. Ms. Katsuma started the site in 1997. At the time, books and magazines about child-rearing were aimed at stay-at-home mothers, while books about working women talked only about jobs. "We didn't have a place to discuss how to solve our problems," she says. Women "don't have to say, 'I can't do it anymore,'" she adds, "because there are role models on the Web site." Ms. Katsuma's career began while she was still in college, with a part-time job at a Japanese auditing firm. She was the only woman there. She had her first child while still in school. After graduation, she learned English and found work in the Japan operations of several foreign companies, including Citibank and McKinsey & Co. Ms. Katsuma eventually joined J.P. Morgan, where she made a name for herself as one of Japan's top telecom analysts and a frank, cutting commentator. Ms. Katsuma says she tries to focus on highlighting technologies in which Japan leads other nations. Aside from the nonprofit Web site, Ms. Katsuma also writes three blogs and is teaming up with one of Japan's foremost female comic-book artists on a book that offers practical advice to women on how to become financially independent through fulfilling careers. Two of her tips: She tells women to make themselves more valuable with a special degree or skill, and to read, read, read. Ms. Katsuma believes that Japanese women rely too much on television for information, making them less likely to question conventional social mores. She says she is a voracious reader, spending around 150,000 yen ($1,330) monthly on books. In Japan, "women have been expected to be a kind of support role for men," Ms. Katsuma says. "Perhaps I can show them that they can create a new model." --Ginny Parker
Woods 1. Carly
Fiorina For the first time in more than two decades, Carly Fiorina doesn't have a full-time job in corporate America. Earlier this year, Ms. Fiorina, 51 years old, was chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co., a job she landed in 1999 after spending most of her career at AT&T Corp. and the AT&T spinoff Lucent Technologies Inc. She was the first outsider ever to run H-P, the Silicon Valley icon that makes a wide range of tech products from printers to personal computers to servers. While at the Palo Alto, Calif., company, she launched a controversial $19 billion acquisition of Compaq Computer Corp., turned H-P into an $80 billion a year behemoth and became one of the corporate world's highest-profile CEOs, regularly gracing magazine covers as the most powerful woman in business. Ms. Fiorina's exit made front-page news world-wide. "While I regret the board and I have differences about how to execute H-P's strategy, I respect their decision," she said in a statement at the time. When she departed, she garnered a $21 million severance. Since then, she hasn't elaborated much about her exit from H-P. But she hasn't been idle. A few weeks after her departure, Ms. Fiorina surfaced as a possible candidate to replace James Wolfensohn as president of the World Bank. (The position ultimately went to former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz.) Ms. Fiorina has also kept herself busy in other ways. In recent months, she has made speeches at the Detroit Economic Club and elsewhere. She has signed up for the speech circuit with the Washington Speakers Bureau, which is screening potential speaking engagements for her, according to her spokeswoman, Kathy Fitzgerald. Fees for such appearances can reap tens of thousands of dollars each. In early September, Ms. Fiorina joined the board of Revolution Health Group, a closely held health-care company in Washington, D.C. And last week, she joined the board of Cybertrust, an information-security firm in Herndon, Va. Much of Ms. Fiorina's time over the next few months is likely to be taken up with another project: a book. In August, Penguin Group Inc. announced it had won a bidding war for a book that Ms. Fiorina is writing. The volume, due late next year, will include "memoirs of her career with her views on many different issues, including what makes a leader; how women can thrive in business; and how technology will continue to reshape our world," according to a statement from Penguin. The book doesn't have a title yet. The former CEO has given only a few clues as to what she might want to do next. She is well known to have an interest in Republican politics. During her speech to the Detroit Economic Club in May, she told the crowd she is thinking about public service, which could include politics. And in a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School in October, Ms. Fiorina said public service was a "distinct possibility." But for now, Ms. Fiorina is mostly keeping mum about her next move. "She has been approached about numerous opportunities," says Ms. Fitzgerald, her spokeswoman. "But as of now, she is still reflecting on and enjoying life." --Pui-Wing Tam
Myrtle Potter no longer oversees commercial operations at Genentech Inc., but the dramatic shift in her career has scarcely slowed her down at all. Ms. Potter, a 47-year-old veteran of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, stepped down from her Genentech post last August. A former executive at Bristol-Myers Squibb prior to moving to Genentech in 2000, Ms. Potter was one of the highest-ranking African-American women in business, and frequently mentioned as a future chief executive in the drug or biotech industries. Although she remains a consultant for Genentech, an arrangement that prevents her from competing directly against the biotechnology giant, Ms. Potter doesn't lack for other opportunities. She consults for several venture funds that invest in the biotech and drug industries, serves as a board member of Amazon.com Inc. and is considering other board memberships as well. At the same time, Ms. Potter is also helping set up a company that aims to build affordable condominiums and single-family homes for middle-income residents in high-cost areas such as the San Francisco Bay area. "I just couldn't get over the fact that educated people like teachers and nurses and policemen can't find housing in the Bay area," she says. Although still in the early stages, the new venture will eventually comprise a real-estate sales arm, a property-development company and a financing arm designed to cater to middle-income families. Its first two projects are likely to be in San Jose, Calif., although the company is also looking at the possibility of building in parts of Florida as well. "At the end of the day, we'll be putting up a product that really meets a demand, rather than just for the sake of making money," Ms. Potter says. --David Hamilton
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