Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Anne-Mulcahy-The Pioneer In Xerox!

There is nothing business for women in the business world.Unbreakable relation between business and women has been hailed.

Anne M. Mulcahy (born October 21, 1952) is EX chairwoman and chief executive officer of Xerox Corporation. She rose to  CEO of Xerox on August 1, 2001, and chairwoman on January 1, 2002. She has been a member of the boards of directors of Catalyst, Citigroup Inc., Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd. and Target Corporation.

She was named as 'CEO of the Year 2008' by Chief Executive magazine. Then Anne announced her retirement as CEO on 21 May 2009 prior to the company's annual shareholder meeting.]
Mulcahy was born October 21, 1952, in Rockville Centre, New York, USA. In 1974, she received her B.A. in English and Journalism from Marymount College in Tarrytown, N.Y. and a Masters in Business Administration from The Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester.Somehow the path was not very rosy for Anne even.But she was determined to go ahead in the business and wanted to gain name as woman in business.

Career at Xerox

Mulcahy joined Xerox as a field sales representative in 1976 and rose through the ranks. From 1992-1995, Mulcahy was vice president for human resources, responsible for compensation, benefits, human resource strategy, labor relations, management development and employee training. Mulcahy became chief staff officer in 1997 and corporate senior vice president in 1998. Prior to that, she served as vice president and staff officer for Customer Operations, covering South America and Central America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and China.

Though never intent on running Xerox, Anne Mulcahy was selected by the board of directors in 2001. When she became CEO on Aug 1, 2001 the stock price was $8.25, and on Jan 1, 2002 when she became chairwoman the stock was $10.05. On May 21, 2009, the day she announced her retirement as CEO, the stock closed at $6.82. She claims that duty and loyalty from being with the company for so long compelled her to help the company.

Later in her tenure, Anne cut the workforce by 30% and eliminated the desktop portion of Xerox. Visiting offices all over the nation, she attempted to boost morale and help the rest of the organization see how hard she was working, hoping for a mirror effect.

Anne Mulcahy currently serves on four other Board of Directors besides Xerox. She also serves on Catalyst, Citigroup, Fuji Xerox and Target Corp. A letter sent to Citi shareholders on the 26th of March 2009 by American Federation of State County & Municipal Employees requested that shareholders vote against re-electing six of their directors. These where mainly the directors on the Audit & Risk Management Committee. Mulcahy is one of those directors being singled out for termination.
 Magazine Opinion

The Wall Street Journal named Mulcahy one of 50 women to watch in 2005 and Forbes Magazine ranked her at the sixth position among the Most Powerful Women in America in 2005. In 2009, she was ranked 15th. In 2008, she was selected by U.S. News & World Report as one of America's Best Leaders.
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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Indra Nooyi-An Idol For Career Oriented Women!

Pepsi in the Right Direction
Indra has been proved as a perfect deal maker because of two major deals. She is looked upon as a semi God in business world. . She put together the $3.3 billion-dollar-deal for the purchase of the Tropicana orange-juice brand in 1998, and two years later was part of the team that secured Quaker Oats for $14 billion. That became one of the biggest food deals in corporate history, and added a huge range of cereals and snack-food products to the PepsiCo Empire. She also helped in acquiring SoBe for $337 million.
Because of her charismatic deal making talents, Indra got promoted to CFO, this chief financial officer at PepsiCo in February of 2000. This was the time small statured woman of south India named as one of the top ranking corporate of America. After a year she was named as President. She had earned the trust of management tremendously.She has given the world a perfect definition of women and business.
Shouldering the heavy responsibility, Indra worked hard to bring the company back on track of her vision. It was during these days she brought out a dazzling range of snack foods and beverages, from Mountain Dew to Rice-a-Roni, from Captain Crunch cereal to Gatorade-brand sports drinks.
One of Corporate America's Top Visionaries
Nooyi's success in the business world landed her on Time magazine's list of "Contenders" for its Global Business Influentials rankings in 2003. Many watchers predict that she will someday head one of the company's divisions, such as Frito-Lay, or its core brand, PepsiCo Beverages North America. In early 2004, there were mentions in the press that Nooyi, who still wears the occasional sari to work, was being considered for the top job at the Gucci Group, but she denied rumors that she had been talking with the Italian luxury-goods giant.
Nooyi serves on the board of trustees at the Yale Corporation, the governing board of Yale University. She lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, not far from PepsiCo's headquarters across the state line in Purchase, New York. At home, she maintains a puja, or traditional Hindu shrine, and once she flew to Pittsburgh after a tough session with Quaker Oats executives to pray at a shrine there to her family's deity. Her predictions that her American graduate education would hamper her marriage prospects proved untrue, for she married an Indian man, Raj, who works as a management consultant. They have two daughters who are nearly a decade apart in ages, and Nooyi occasionally brings her younger child to work. The former rock guitarist is still known to take the stage at company functions to sing. Her job, however, remains a top priority. She watches championship-game replays of the Chicago Bulls to study teamwork concepts, for example, and admitted to Forbes journalist Melanie Wells that she strategizes 24-7 sometimes. "I wake up in the middle of the night," she told the magazine, "and write different versions of PepsiCo on a sheet of paper."
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Monday, August 9, 2010

Indra Nooyi-An Essence of Beauty And Brain!

Readers,Indra stands apart as a woman in business.There is a small excerpt of business dress.Indra is one of the best women in business.Her simplicity,tactful tackling,and coming out as a successful candidate are guiding tips for the other women in business.
Nooyi quickly settled into her new life, but struggled to make ends meet over the next two years. Though she received financial aid from Yale, she also had to work as an overnight receptionist to make ends meet. "My whole summer job was done in a sari because I had no money to buy clothes," she told Murray. Even when she went for an interview at the prestigious business-consulting firms that hired business-school students, she wore her sari, since she could not afford a business suit. Recalling that the Graduate School of Management required all first-year students to take—and pass—a course in effective communications, she said in the Financial Times interview that what she learned in it "was invaluable for someone who came from a culture where communication wasn't perhaps the most important aspect of business at least in my time."
Pepsi v. Coke
The rivalry between Pepsi, the flagship product of Indra Nooyi's company, and its Atlanta, Georgia-based competitor, Coca-Cola, is one of corporate America's longest-running marketing battles. In the United States alone, the soft-drink industry is a $60 billion one, with the average American consuming a staggering fifty-three gallons of carbonated soft drinks every year.
The battle between Coke and Pepsi dates back almost as long as each company's history. Both emerged as key players in early decades of the twentieth century, when soft drinks first came on the market in the United States. In the 1920s, Coca-Cola began moving aggressively into overseas markets, and even opened bottling plants near to places where U.S. service personnel were stationed during World War II. Pepsi only moved into international territory in the 1950s, but scored a major coup in 1972 when it inked a deal with the Soviet Union. With this deal, Pepsi became the first Western product ever sold to Soviet consumers.
The battle for market share heated up after 1975, when both companies stepped up their already lavishly financed marketing campaigns to win new customers. Pepsi's standard cola products had a slightly sweeter taste, which prompted one of the biggest corporate-strategy blunders in U.S. business history: in 1985, Coca-Cola launched "New Coke," which had a slightly sweeter formulation. Coke consumers were outraged. The old formula was still available under the name "Coca-Cola Classic," but the New Coke idea was quickly shelved. This incident is often studied by business-school curriculums in the United States and elsewhere, along with many other aspects of what is known as "the cola wars."
Coke is the leader in market share for carbonated colas, but soft drinks remain its core business. Pepsi, on the other hand, began acquiring other businesses in 1965 when it bought the Texas-based Frito-Lay company, and has a larger stake in the food industry.
Nooyi did not earn a second M.B.A. from Yale. Instead, her degree was a master of public and private management, which she finished in 1980. After commencement, she went to work at the Boston Consulting Group, a prestigious consulting firm. For the next six years she worked on a variety of international corporate-strategy projects, and went over to Motorola in 1986 as a senior executive. She remained there for four years, leaving in 1990 to join Asea Brown Boveri Inc. as its head of strategy. ABB, as the company was known, was a $6 billion Swiss-Swedish conglomerate that made industrial equipment and constructed power plants around the world.
Nooyi's skill in helping ABB find its direction in North America came to the attention of Jack Welch, the head of General Electric. He offered her a job in 1994, but so did PepsiCo chief executive officer Wayne Calloway. As she told a writer for Business Week, the two men knew one another, but Calloway made an appealing pitch for Nooyi's talent. He told her, she recalled, that "'Welch is the best CEO I know.... But I have a need for someone like you, and I would make PepsiCo a special place for you.'"
Nooyi chose the soft-drink maker, and became its chief strategist. Soon, she was urging PepsiCo to reshape its brand identity and assets, and became influential in a number of important decisions. She was also a lead negotiator on the high-level deals that followed. The company decided to spin off its restaurant division in 1997, for example, which made its KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell holdings into a separate company. She also looked at the successful plan by Pepsi rival Coca-Cola, which had sold of its bottling operations a decade earlier, and had been rewarded with impressive profit margins on its stock performance. Pepsi followed suit, and the 1999 initial public offering of the Pepsi bottling operations was valued at $2.3 billion. The company kept a large share of stock in it, however.
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Monday, August 2, 2010

Indra Nooyi-Cut Out For Business!


Indra K. Nooyi is the president and chief financial officer of PepsiCo. Best known for its Pepsi soft drinks, the international powerhouse that Nooyi oversees is actually one of the world's largest snack-food companies. It makes and sells dozens of other products, including Doritos-brand chips, the Tropicana juice line, and Quaker Oats cereals. Nooyi is one of the top female executives in the United States, and is also believed to be the highest-ranking woman of Indian heritage in corporate America.Indra is the best example of business and women.Because she has been one of the women in business international.


Nooyi was born in Madras, India, in 1955, and was a bit of a rule breaker in her conservative, middle-class world as she grew up. In an era in India where it was considered unseemly for young women to exert themselves, she joined an all-girls' cricket team. She even played guitar in an all-female rock band while studying at Madras Christian College. After earning her undergraduate degree in chemistry, physics, and math, she went on to enroll in the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta. At the time, it was one of just two schools in the country that offered a master's in business administration degree, or M.B.A.Indra has set a trend for Indian women and business.She entered the field as business executive then rose to the CEO'S position.

Nooyi's first job after earning her degree was with Tootal, a British textile company. It had had been founded in Manchester, England, in 1799, but had extensive holdings in India. After that, Nooyi was hired as a brand manager at the Bombay offices of Johnson & Johnson, the personal-care products maker. She was given the Stayfree account, which might have proved a major challenge for even an experienced marketing executive. The line had just been introduced on the market in India, and struggled to create an identity with its target customers. "It was a fascinating experience because you couldn't advertise personal protection in India," she recalled in an interview with the Financial Times 's Sarah Murray.

Nooyi began to feel that perhaps she was underprepared for the business world. Determined to study in the United States, she applied to and was accepted by Yale University's Graduate School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut. Much to her surprise, her parents agreed to let her move to America. The year was 1978. "It was unheard of for a good, conservative, south Indian Brahmin girl to do this," she explained to Murray in the Financial Times. "It would make her an absolutely unmarriageable commodity after that."

"Behind my cool logic lies a very emotional person."I would love to write about this small statured and fiery business woman.Hence I'll continue in the next post.
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