Leading A Mining Giant

Tom Albanese is the chief executive officer and board member of Rio Tinto one of the largest mining firms in the world. Albanese was born in New Jersey on September 9, 1957.  He equipped himself well academically for the job earning a bachelor’s degree in mineral economics from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Later Albanese got a master’s degree in mining engineering from the same university.

As it often happens the path to the top is not programmed. Early on Albanese did not imagine himself heading Rio because he worked for another company called Nerco.  In 1993, Nerco was acquired by Rio and Albanese was on his way to getting the top job.

He held various management positions and was appointed chief executive of the Industrial Minerals group in 2000. Albanese was then named chief executive of the Copper group and head of Exploration in 2004. 

Outside of Rio he has been a director of Ivanhoe Mines Limited from 2006 to 2007, director of Palabora Mining Company from 2004 to 2006. On the academe Albanese since 2009 has been member of board of visitors, Duke University, Fuqua School of Business.

The company that Albanese heads has a unique structure. There is Rio Tinto plc, a London listed public company based in the U.K. and Rio Tinto Limited, which trades on the Australian Stock Exchange and has headquarters in Melbourne. These two companies are called the Rio Tinto Group, joined in a dual listed companies (DLC) structure as a single economic entity. Rio has five principal product groups – Aluminum, Copper, Diamonds & Minerals, Energy and Iron Ore; with two support groups: Technology and Exploration.

Due to its size a whole country’s economic situation can have a huge impact on the company.  Take for example the case of China. Rio and Albanese watch closely the economic growth of this country as it has a significant impact on its bottom line. Last year with the cut in the forecast for Chinese growth Rio had to also cut its on sales and profitability forecast.  Albanese had to also make the tough calls to cut costs including jobs.  He also refused to receive a bonus when the company did not do well.

Davide Grasso: Developing of Innovative Nike Campaigns Such as “Write the Future”

With more than two decades of corporate leadership experience, Davide Grasso works from Nike, Inc.’s Portland, Oregon, headquarters as Vice President Global Brand Marketing. He has engaged with the footwear and apparel firm in a number of key marketing capacities, and has guided the firm’s style and branding direction for more than a decade.

Prior to taking his current position in 2010, Mr. Grasso served as the company’s Vice President of Global Football Marketing and spearheaded development of the innovative, “Write the Future” marketing campaign. Nearly three minutes in length, the film captures the kinetic energy of professional soccer and features the achievements and failures of stars such as Wayne Rooney, Cristiano Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Fabio Cannavaro, Thiago Silva, and Landon Donovan. It also shows the real time effect that these exploits have on fans around the world. In addition to top-flight soccer stars, the extended commercial featured cameos by NBA legend Kobe Bryant, tennis great Roger Federer, and Homer Simpson. In its debut week, the film set a record for the highest number of viral video advertisement views ever, and it ultimately earned the Cannes Grand Prix award.

Earning his Bachelor’s degree in Business & Economics at the University of Turin, Davide Grasso began his career as Account Executive with the consumer goods investment enterprise Armando Testa, SpA, He subsequently received his MBA from Bocconi University in Milan and joined Nike Europe as Product Line Manager. As Director of Marketing with Nike Italy for three years, Mr. Grasso achieved business growth of 200 percent and led the brand’s emergence as a national market leader. In particular, Nike’s footwear market share in Italy doubled from 18 percent to 36 percent. Davide Grasso has since fulfilled diverse corporate roles with Nike, including Apparel Marketing Director Europe, and Asia Pacific Region Vice President of Brand & Category Management.

Big Litter Sister

Maggie Wilderotter is the younger sister of Denise Morrison who is the CEO of Campbell Soup. She may be the little sister of Denise but she is a big little sister; she herself is a CEO. Maggie is the CEO of Stamford, Connecticut-based Frontier Communications Corporation. She came in as President and CEO in 2004 when the company was still known as Citizens Communications. In 2006 Maggie became the Chairman and CEO.

The company was renamed Frontier Communications in 2008. Maggie navigated the company as it grew to become the largest communications provider concentrating on rural America.  She has made it a priority to hire military veterans and reservists. The company has more than 15,200 employees who are all based in America serving customers in 27 states.

Before heading Frontier, Maggie worked at Microsoft as Senior Vice President of Business Strategy from 2002 to 2004 and was tasked with developing the company’s global business strategy.  Prior to that Maggie was the CEO of Wink Communications, an interactive television company. Microsoft invested in this company in 1998 and it was then bought by Liberty Media in 2002.

Born Mary Agnes Sullivan, she came from a family comprising 4 sisters who were taught the value of education and hard work by their parents. She earned her B.A in economics and business administration from Holy Cross College in Massachusetts and married her childhood sweetheart, Jay Wilderotter. Then her journey began that would lead her to head a company of her own.

Turning Around ING

Financial giant ING was in trouble in 2008 with a fourth quarter loss of €3.3 billion. Just how bad was it? It had to draw £22bn of government money to stay alive.  It already had in place a plan to enter Japan which had to be shelved. ING was also going to lay off 7,000 workers.

It was under these conditions that Jan Hommen became the CEO of one of the largest banking and insurance group in the world, ING.  Given the fact that he had only been with the company for around 4 years some were a bit skeptical with his appointment. It didn’t help that prior to joining ING he didn’t actually work at another financial institution but with companies in the heavy industry and electronics. He had previously been working with Alcoa and then at Philips Electronics.

He took on the job through and he acted quickly. There were three main tasks that had to be done as he later stated: correct and strengthen the financials, reduce the number of business interests and reinforce franchises in the company’s core markets.  Moving decisively, he acted to have the group exit from 10 of the 45 countries it operated in. The goal was to become a bank focused on Europe once again while keeping some smaller operations in strategically global locations.

The results of the changes led to a net loss of only €712 million for the first three months of 2009 as compared to a loss of €3.7 billion in the same quarter of 2008.  The banking division also recorded a profit of €132 million as compared to a €1.84 billion loss in the same quarter of 2008.

Other changes included the restructuring of the management team of the insurance division and partial sale of some assets.  All in all Hommen’s reforms have helped ING get back on its feet. There are fewer doubters now that he has shown result. Hommen became chairman of the Supervisory Board on January 2008.  His current positions are CEO, chairman Executive Board ING Group, Management Board Banking, and Management Board Insurance.

When the going got tough for ING they were fortunate to have leader who acted quickly and decisively.

A Trillion Dollar Responsibility

Heading a multimillion dollar business is already a lot of responsibility so you can imagine what kind of responsibility (and pressure) is involved in handling over a billion dollars worth of assets.  There are very few people in the world doing that and one of the few is Kathleen Murphy. She is the president of Fidelity Personal Investing.  This enterprise offers retail brokerage, managed accounts, annuities, mutual funds as well as other financial products and services to individual investors that number in the millions.

Aside from this Kathleen is also responsible for the annuities and life insurance business of Fidelity. This includes workplace savings business for tax exempt organizations, the entire advertising and brand programs of Fidelity as well as online strategies of Fidelity via Fidelity.com.

Among Kathleen’s outsized achievements was increasing last year’s customer account from 12.7 million in 2010 to 13.5 million in 2011. Under her watch assets under management increased to $1.1 trillion.

Before joining Fidelity Kathleen was the CEO of ING U.S. Wealth Management.  Kathleen who is a 25 year industry veteran began her career at Aetna where she stayed for 15 years.  She has always been an achiever.  In 1984, Kathleen graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. degree in economics and political science from Fairfield University. She finished her juris doctorate from the University of Connecticut in 1987 with highest honors. 

A Huge Role

Banks nowadays have many capabilities. It can make international transactions and billions of profits are made all done electronically. Many people still associate banks with the brick and mortar branches that they’ve had for ages.  In fact many people will associate the strength of the bank with the number of bank branches they see.  Branch banking may be the old way of doing banking but it is still a big chunk of the business and will continue to do so.
 
Any person who is in charge of handling the branches of a huge bank belongs to the elite crops of managers. This person is literally in charge of the face of the bank. The branches are the front liners of the bank. For banking giant Wells Fargo, it has Carrie L. Tolstedt heading its Community Banking division.  She is thus responsible for retail, small business and business banking.

On its own the division she heads would be a huge company. It serves 22 million retail banking households with its more than 104,000 employees. It also caters to 2.5 million small business and business banking households. This unit has more than 6,200 retail banking stores and more than 12,000 ATM in 39 states and the District of Columbia to serve its customers.

Carrie can be considered a bank insider. She started her career in 1986 joining Norwest Bank in Nebraska.  Carrie joined another company FirstMerit Corporation then opted to rejoin Norwest.  Norwest merged with Wells Fargo in 1998. The merger did not slow down Carrie’s rise in the new organization; she eventually became the Central California regional president of Wells Fargo in 2001. From there it has been steady rise to positions of more responsibilities.

Her ascent at Wells Fargo has not gone unnoticed. In 2010 U.S. Banker magazine listed her as among the “25 Most Powerful Women in Banking”, and she held the number one spot. Carrie earned her B.S. degree in Business Administration at the University of Nebraska and finished the Pacific Coast Banking School at University of Washington.

The REIT Master

The real estate industry was severely affected during the 2008 financial crisis. Many companies no longer had access to credit and witnessed their own demise.  Ventas though was another story. The company’s chairman and CEO Debra Cafaro deftly guided the company through the crisis. Ventas has come out even stronger.

Ventas is a publicly traded seniors housing and health care real estate trust (REIT). It had been on an acquisition binge prior to mid-2007. Cafaro saw that there was trouble in the horizon and asked her senior managers to become defensive in nature. This totally shocked them as the only thing they knew was to grow, grow, and grow.

While her company’s stock price was high, Cafaro wisely raised equity and refinanced debt. When the financial crisis hit the company had a solid balance sheet and strong cash position.  Despite the crises and low stock prices she was also able to raise several hundred million dollars in equity and debt during the first half of 2009. This was outstanding considering the fact that there were companies who had little or no access to capital.

The following months saw Ventas lead the REIT sector as the market began to recover.  Ventas which is an S&P 500 company is now one of the leading seniors housing and healthcare REIT in the U.S. It has a well diversified portfolio of over 1,400 seniors housing and healthcare properties in 46 states, the District of Columbia and two Canadian provinces.

As to its financial performance, from 2001-2011 its compound annual total shareholder return of 23.4% greatly outpaced both the healthcare REIT and the overall REIT indexes. Much of the credit goes to Cafaro with her mastery of the real estate and REIT markets.