Lady Business: Fentanyl, Cat Person, Under Armour, and the risks of replacing a startup founder
A CEO profile looks at the vagaries of working for the guy you're supposedly replacing.
Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 150th (!) issue, published October 22, 2023.
Calculated Risks
It’s been a minute! The past couple of months were filled with travel and joyous family events–congratulations to my brother and my new sister-in-law!–and a lot of chasing stories. Only some of that work has yielded published results so far, and some of what I spent my time on might never turn into a full story–but it doesn’t feel wasted. Just simmering in the background of what else I’ve been working on.
Such as this profile of Stephanie Linnartz, the former Marriott No. 2 turned new Under Armour CEO. I’m really happy with the writing in this one–it’s a CEO profile, of course, and the business story of the faded sportswear brand she’s trying to turn around, but I think a livelier read than either of those two descriptions imply:
Imagine that you grow up, literally, in the hotel industry. Your parents run an iconic pub and boutique hotel in Washington, D.C., where you spend your teenage summers cleaning rooms and working the checkout desk. After college, you intern at Hilton, go to business school, and then join the finance department of Marriott International, the largest hotel company in the world.
Over the next 25 years, you rise through the ranks to become one of Marriott’s most senior executives, and its highest-ranking woman, telling Fortune in 2015 that “anyone can make it to the top here if you work really hard.” And by 2021, when you’re named one of two executives sharing the duties of acting CEO and likely in line to become the next chief executive, it seems like your lifelong devotion to this industry is about to pay off.
And then you don’t get the job. What do you do next?
For Stephanie Linnartz—the former president of Marriott, and now the CEO of struggling sportswear company Under Armour—the answer was: Find one of the biggest turnaround jobs out there, and get back to work.
“Why things happen, we don’t ever know for sure,” she tells me during an interview at the new corner office that she’s still settling into, overlooking Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. “But life’s all about timing—and I always had this idea that the rewards of taking risks are, the great majority of the time, worth it.”
It’s also about the classic post-startup problem, going back to my Inc. days, of replacing a founder who’s still very much in control of the company–not always to the company’s (or the new leader’s) benefit. In Under Armour’s case, that’s executive chairman Kevin Plank, who still controls the majority of voting shares … and who continues to be a strong presence at his company, not always helpfully.
As I wrote this story, I was also thinking about a lot of other recent news events, and some of the universal things that many CEOs, and especially women, have to deal with to get ahead:
Everyone has a boss to keep happy—even ridiculously well-compensated CEOs—and the vagaries of working for the guy you’re supposedly replacing aren’t always gendered. But it’s striking how many ambitious women, still, have to take such risks in order to get a shot at the top spot in corporate America, where women account for barely 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs. The career choices made by [former Walgreens CEO Roz] Brewer, [current Twitter CEO Linda] Yaccarino, and potentially Linnartz also raise questions about how much executives still have to navigate the “glass cliff,” the data-backed phenomenon in which women have to accept riskier opportunities in order to advance.
So is this the tightrope Linnartz is walking at Under Armour? Probably—but “I don’t focus on that,” Linnartz says. “I believe in taking calculated risks. I don’t believe in being reckless.”
Read the full profile here.
Lady Bits
–”AB InBev’s seemingly innocuous Bud Light marketing ploy ended up breaking the unspoken first commandment of corporate gospel in this awkward, politically divided era: Thou shalt embrace social and environmental causes—especially if doing so helps sell more stuff—but that embrace shalt absolutely not cost the company money.” Also for Fortune’s October issue, I wrote about the Bud Light boycott, the right-wing trolling of corporate America, and the all-too-frequent emptiness of “corporate values” and stakeholder capitalism.
–Politics and fentanyl and menopause, oh my! Last week at Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women Summit, I really enjoyed interviewing several senior leaders from business and government, including Land O’Lakes CEO Beth Ford, Athletic Greens President Kat Cole, and DEA Administrator Anne Milgram.
–As I told Milgram at the start of our fireside chat, I can find it difficult to wrap my head around the overwhelming tragedies of the fentanyl crisis, which is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year–and she was terrific at putting it into (devastating) lay person’s terms. (Also, if you watch the 18 minutes of heavy discussion of opioids and drug addiction, we did have some fun talking about her work on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.)
–I saw two very stereotypically Lady Business movies recently, and I admit I had the opposite reaction from many professional film reviewers to both Cat Person and Fair Play. Cat Person did lose me in the last half hour, when it veers past its original text into extreme violence, but it otherwise did an excellent job of fleshing out the characters and making me actually enjoy watching a famously uncomfortable story. Whereas Fair Play had some interesting scenes and ideas, but desperately needed its characters to have personalities beyond “They Do Finance and Drink” and “Sexism Happens.” Maybe that was deliberate, to have the leads be archetypes representing The Message rather than individual characters? But it made it really hard to care at all about their ambitions, their toxic relationship, or what ultimately happened to them.
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