Page 11 - How We Lead Matters

early days of the family business. Family vacations were rare and if they ate
out, dessert was forbidden—better to put the money back into the company.
And as time went on, another point of view her father shared very publicly
was his severe disappointment that he didn’t have a son to whom he could
entrust the business.
In the meantime, Marilyn raised her family, accepted community lead-
ership roles and, when encouraged by outsiders, pondered a move into poli-
tics. It wasn’t easy to win her father’s approval, but after working in several
positions within the family business, eventually he had to acknowledge she
was the right leader at the right time.
To say that as an incoming CEO she inherited a booming success is to
misunderstand just how significant her own contribution has been in the
decade since. Harvard professor Bill George, a long-time friend of Marilyn’s
and the former CEO and Chair of Medtronic, has written: “When she took
over Carlson . . . Marilyn inherited a demoralized organization suffering from
decades of top-down rule. She immediately set about changing things,
expressing empathy for her employees and compassion for her customers.
The result: a remarkable turnaround with record levels of growth and new
heights in employee and customer satisfaction.”
Under her leadership, Carlson has turned into a global powerhouse.
From a system-wide revenue base of $22 billion when she took over, it
enjoyed revenues in 2007 of nearly $40 billion. Moreover, Marilyn made
good on her promise to transform the corporate culture. Women now com-
pose nearly 40 percent of executives.
Along the way, Marilyn has herself become a global powerhouse. A
national selection committee organized by the Center for Public Leadership
at Harvard’s Kennedy School—a committee that I co-chaired with Warren
Bennis—in 2006 voted to name her one of “America’s Best Leaders” in a
U.S. News & World Report survey. Forbes named her one of the “World’s
Most Powerful Women.” President Bill Clinton appointed her as a leader at
a White House Conference on Tourism, and after her highly successful
efforts to revive the international tourism industry in the wake of
September 11th, President Bush asked her to chair the National Women’s
Business Council. She has been a star at the World Economic Forum in

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