Women in Business
November 22, 2006

If you have any doubts that women are well represented in the top echelon of America's biggest companies, check out the November 20th Journal Report for The Wall Street Journal titled "Women to Watch." Among those listed are CEOs for PepsiCo, Kraft Foods, Avon, Archer-Daniels-Midland, Lucent Technologies, eBay, Xerox, Morgan Stanley, Pearson, Chanel, Nielsen Media Research, HSBC Holdings, and VPs of Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Western Union, Hewlett-Packard, Bank of America, General Electric, Rite Aid, Dupont, Unilever, Genentch, Gucci, McDonald's, Wal-Mart, Verizon Communications, Yahoo, Disney, Cadillac, and Leo Burnett.

The article offered some of these women's thoughts for other women just starting out:

* From Carol Bartz (Autodesk): "Nobody is in charge of your career but yourself. You have to stand out and let it be known the kind of job you are doing and what you want to do in the future and manage yourself."

* From Ursula Burns (Xerox): "I walked into Xerox and there were some guys who were doing a lot of different jobs that seemed like good jobs. And I thought, I want to do one of those good jobs. I never got pushed back from the company. But I also got a lot of reinforcement from my upbringing that made me believe it was possible."

* From Frances Aldrich Sevilla-Sacasa (US Trust Co.): "In a very short period of time, the fact that I took a risk and took a smaller job ended up being a much larger opportunity. And that set the stage for what I am doing today. I don't think I would have ever had this opportunity had I not taken that risk."

* From Laura Desmond ( Starcom MediaVest): "I learned that if you are going to inspire people to greatness you have to show them you are one of them and you are willing to get uncomfortable in order to make them comfortable."

* From Andrea Jung (Avon): "I think this is a different world. The cycle times are so much faster. You can't just know how to do growth and you can't just know how to deal with costs. If you're restructuring a business, you have to plan and be able to get out of it quickly and then plan for growth. For me that meant I had to reinvent myself before reinventing the company every year."

posted by M. Masterson @ 1:54 PM,

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