Avon’s New Boss: Sherilyn S. McCoy

Avon has had some strings of bad luck lately. After having a great run for a good number of years the company has experienced declining sales.  It also faces embarrassing charges of bribery allegations in China and perhaps other parts of the world.  Another company has also been trying to buy it.
Sheri McCoy has been appointed as Avon’s CEO and will definitely have a lot of things to work on. She isn’t exactly a greenhorn. Sheri was a vice chairman at Johnson & Johnson.

Johnson & Johnson is a $65 billion a year healthcare company while Avon is an $11 billion dollar a year beauty company. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind about Sheri’s ability to run this size of a company.  While at Johnson & Johnson she handled a business unit which was into beauty products. 

Sheri also knows how to work under tremendous pressure managing to turnaround the pharmaceutical business of Johnson & Johnson.  She has also done acquisition of an enterprise that would later help improve the company’s bottom line.

Despite her experience including having a master’s degree in chemical engineering from Princeton and an MBA from Rutgers, some are concerned that she has not handled a company with a direct sales force like Avon.  There are 6.4 million of them worldwide.  Others point out though that Johnson & Johnson also has a sales force but knocks on doctor’s doors and not house-to-house.  Some view this concern as overblown.

This executive who is known to be caring yet can be tough does have one advantage; she is a woman and in this business where women are the main customer it just may spell the difference.

You Don’t Have To Be

There are many stories of entrepreneurs raking in millions or billions for their inventions, products or services that they brought to the market.  There are some who are worth billions and have made significant marks in their field without necessarily being the inventor or founder of a company. They were simply good at managing the company.

Take the case of Eric Schmidt. At the onset he didn’t have anything to do with Google.  He was brought in to bring some sort of stability and management skill to a company that was basically being run by two geniuses who were good but needed some help by a more business seasoned professional.

Before joining Google in 2001 as CEO, Schmidt already had outstanding credentials.  His academic background reveals his technological grounding with an electrical engineering degree from Princeton as well as a Ph.D. in computer science from Berkeley.  Career wise he was Sun Microsystems, Inc.’s chief technology officer and later on Novell’s chairman and CEO.

In a decade, what was once a start-up company became a behemoth under Schmidt’s stewardship.  This shows his above average managerial skills as well as his understanding of the technology involved.  Google has grown so large that it now gets entangled in anti-trust investigations.

He relinquished his CEO position in 2011 and remains as Google’s Executive Chairman. With an estimated net worth of $6.2 billion as of  2011, Schmidt is a very rich man and holds influential positions in other organizations.

This shows that you may not have started it all but you can make huge and lasting contributions as a great executive.