It's Good To Be the Boss

Female chief executives are taking charge at a slew of corporate giants. Call it the year of the Most Powerful Woman CEO.

By Patricia Sellers

October 30, 2006

While White, vice chairman and head of Pepsi's international business, was the onetime favorite of then-CEO Reinemund, Nooyi convinced the directors that PepsiCo needed a transformational leader. "We have to keep reinventing ourselves," she likes to say. A lifelong vegetarian, she is sure to accelerate Pepsi's expansion in nutritional foods and beverages around the globe. "I grew up in an emerging market, and I cannot forget that," Nooyi said two years ago. "I have a basic belief that positive nutrition is important in developing markets."

A transformational leader at Kraft

At Kraft, the $34 billion marketer of Oreos and Maxwell House coffee, Irene Rosenfeld also aims to be a transformational leader. But she had to leave the company and prove herself elsewhere to earn the CEO title. Rosenfeld, 53, had a superb 22-year record at the world's second-largest food company, rising from associate market research manager to president of the North American business. "She's a no-nonsense problem-solver with an almost laserlike focus on improving a business," says Bob Eckert, a former Kraft chief who is now CEO of Mattel. In 2003, as Kraft's growth slowed and Rosenfeld disagreed with the direction of new top management, she decided to leave. Advisors scratched their heads. "Why get off the treadmill? You have all this talent," Heidrick's renowned recruiter, Gerry Roche, told her. But Rosenfeld knew what she was doing. She took a year off, turned down several CEO opportunities, and heeded the advice of her onetime boss, Jim Kilts, who ran Kraft before he headed Nabisco and Gillette: "I told Irene, 'Always go with a super company. Don't get caught up in the title.' " She ultimately joined PepsiCo to run Frito-Lay, its most profitable division.

Her successful stint at the $10 billion snack unit (Frito-Lay's profits rose solidly despite higher costs for potatoes, corn, and energy) convinced Kraft's board that she is the kind of CEO it needs. In July the board ousted Roger Deromedi, a stringent cost cutter and top-down decision-maker. Louis Camilleri, Kraft's chairman (and CEO of Altria, which owns 88% of Kraft), called Rosenfeld in. She claims she's a better leader today, having worked at Pepsi: "I learned the value of a relentless focus on growth," she says. Three months into her job as CEO, Rosenfeld is trying to view Kraft the way an outsider would. After visiting 22 Kraft plants and facilities around the world, she announced a sweeping reorganization to hand more power to the company's line operators.

An outsider reaches the top at ADM

Woertz, meanwhile, is viewing ADM as an outsider—because she is one. "I'm outside the company, outside the industry, outside the family, outside the gender expectations," notes the oil industry's former top female executive. An accountant by training, Woertz, 53, had spent 29 years at Gulf Oil and its acquirer, Chevron, changing jobs every three years or so. Undaunted by male competition (a 15-handicap, she plays golf from the men's tees), she climbed to EVP at Chevron, in charge of refining, trading, and marketing—plus 20,000 employees in 180 countries.

Despite all that power, she had, in her view, reached a plateau. After four years in the position, she was looking at another four or so to get a shot at succeeding Chevron CEO David O'Reilly. "I didn't want to do the same job for that long," she says.

Leaving Chevron in February, "all I knew is, I didn't want to sit in a rocking chair," Woertz recalls. On a Sunday morning, she got a call from ace CEO recruiter Tom Neff of Spencer Stuart. "You should look at this," Neff said, explaining that ADM was searching for a new chief. John Strackhouse, a friend in the Philadelphia office of recruiter Heidrick & Struggles, gave her background on ADM's directors and sample interview questions—so she could screen the ADM folks as seriously as they were screening her. "John told me, 'Think of your first interview with the board as the beginning of a long-term relationship,' " Woertz says.

In April she beat four rival candidates, all men, for the CEO job at ADM. She hit the ground running—with a few bumps. Early in the morning on her first day at ADM headquarters in Decatur, Ill., Woertz got off the elevator and found herself trapped on a tiny landing with three locked doors and an elevator that wouldn't reopen. She rapped on the doors and called out until finally someone heard her. Which goes to show, the ride is never easy, even when you think you've reached the top.

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