HRLR311 Michigan State Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership Article Discussion This is the case for my course. Please strictly follow the rubric??. Briefly

HRLR311 Michigan State Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership Article Discussion This is the case for my course. Please strictly follow the rubric??. Briefly, reading the HBS reading and answering the questions in case study assignment. It is limited to two single-spaced pages. Please use bullet points in each answers. The questions mention “Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership” and “women rising”. I already post these two PDF. 1
HRLR 311
Applied Organizational Leadership
Case Study Assignment 2
1. Both the “Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership” and the “Women Rising” articles
noted that resistance to women’s leadership or the double bind can be a barrier to women
in leadership roles. How did Maggie Wilderotter overcome this barrier? Use examples
from the case to support your answer.
2. Both the “Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership” and the “Women Rising” articles
noted that building social capital, networks, and sponsors can be a barrier to women in
leadership roles. How did Maggie Wilderotter overcome this barrier. Use examples
from the case to support your answer.
3. The “Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership” article noted that the demands of family
life can be a barrier to women in leadership roles. How did Maggie Wilderotter
overcome this barrier. Use examples from the case to support your answer.
For the exclusive use of A. chen, 2019.
9-417-091
JUNE 30, 2017
BORIS GROYSBERG
SARAH L. ABBOTT
ROBIN ABRAHAMS
Maggie Wilderotter: The Evolution of an Executive
Serving on boards is about learning, because you get to live real-life case studies that can happen to you,
right? It gives you the opportunity to watch how other CEOs handle things, how choices are made, how strategy
is created for companies, how to govern better the company you run. I’m chairman of my board, too, so I learn a
lot in other boardrooms that I can bring back to my board. But I also think it keeps you broad. It keeps you from
being myopic about your industry and about your business.
— Maggie Wilderotter
Maggie Wilderotter first joined a board of directors at age 28; over the span of her executive career,
she served on the boards of more than 30 public and private companies. She and those who worked
with her agreed that the knowledge, perspective, and relationships she gained was a prime source of
her in-house value as a leader. (Exhibit 1 lists Wilderotter’s directorships; Exhibit 2 lists leading U.S.
female board directors; and Exhibit 3 explains the purpose of boards.)
In the new millennium’s second decade, women were still underrepresented on U.S. boards.
According to a 2016 report from Catalyst, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, women held
only 19.9% of board seats at S&P 500 companies. (Meanwhile women represented 4.6% of CEOs, 9.5%
of top earners, and 25.1% of executive/senior-level officials and managers).1 In 2015, the majority—
73.1%—of new directorships at S&P 500 companies went to men.2 Globally, women’s representation
on boards ranged from 40.5% in Norway to 0.1% in Saudi Arabia.3
Typically Wilderotter was the first woman on any board she joined—but she made it a point not to
be the only woman by the time she left.4 “I’ve always had the philosophy that, no matter what board I
join, when I leave that board I’m leaving it with more women on it than when I joined,” she explained.
“I would get myself on the nominating committee to make sure that I could have a say in who we were
considering for board service. I think it’s important for women who are on boards today to pull other
women onto those boards as well.” Eventually Wilderotter began helping women join boards she
herself was not a member of: “I probably placed 20 to 30 women on boards a year, because I get a lot
of calls as the CEO of a Fortune 500. A lot of people will seek me out—and I’m full up, so I always
provide them with names of other women in order to help move other women forward onto boards.”5
Professor Boris Groysberg and Research Associates Sarah L. Abbott and Robin Abrahams prepared the original version of this case “Maggie
Wilderotter: The Evolution of an Executive” HBS No. 417-047, which is being replaced by this version prepared by the same authors. It was
reviewed and approved before publication by a company designate. Funding for the development of this case was provided by Harvard Business
School and not by the company. HBS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements,
sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management.
Copyright © 2017 President and Fellows of Harvard College. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, call 1-800-545-7685,
write Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA 02163, or go to www.hbsp.harvard.edu. This publication may not be digitized, photocopied,
or otherwise reproduced, posted, or transmitted, without the permission of Harvard Business School.
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417-091
Maggie Wilderotter: The Evolution of an Executive
Wilderotter had a long and varied career in telecommunications and technology, culminating in
10½ years as CEO of the telecommunications provider Frontier Communications, whose operational
and managerial culture she transformed and whose size she doubled via acquisitions. Wilderotter’s
achievements were particularly notable in light of the extreme underrepresentation of women in the
C-suite and at the board level in the male-dominated telecommunications industry, and the fact that
she lacked both a background in engineering and an MBA. How had she accomplished it all? “Maggie
is what I call a low-flash kind of person. She’s not one that projects herself out into the public eye,”
observed Craig Mundie, Wilderotter’s former boss at Microsoft. “She gets stuff done and has influence
because of her ability to relate to people, to build trust with people, both with external relationships
and with her employees, and to be focused on execution every day.”
Growing Up Sullivan
Maggie Wilderotter grew up in Neptune, New Jersey, a middle-class town on the New Jersey shore,
as the second-oldest of four girls. Her father, Dennis Sullivan, was an executive with AT&T; her mother,
Connie Sullivan, was a part-time but highly productive realtor, a member of the Million Dollar Club.
Like Wilderotter, her three sisters all had successful business careers. The oldest, Denise Morrison, was
CEO of Campbell Soup; Andrea Doelling and Colleen Bastkowski reached the vice-presidential ranks
at AT&T and Expedia respectively. Denise and Maggie, just 13 months apart in age, shared a bedroom,
clothes, and confidences. “She was my best friend as well as my sister,” Maggie said in a 2011 joint
interview; Denise’s responded: “We challenged each other.” The two sisters once collaborated on a
“business plan” to win their parents’ permission to pierce their ears.6
The Sullivans’ family life was “high-achieving,” Morrison recalled:
It was cooperative and it was competitive—cooperative in that we were a family team,
competitive in that there were high standards. My father used to say to us, ‘I see the world
someday opening up for women, and I want you to be prepared for it.’ He treated our childhood
as our training program. He would say, ‘Kids today have too much time, too much money, and
no responsibility. I want you to have no time, no money, and a lot of responsibility.’
The girls were expected to maintain high grades, read widely, minimize television, and pursue
independent projects and extracurricular activities. Morrison described how family “job jars” worked:
Job jars were an inventive idea that my father had to distribute the family chores. On
Sunday we would gather around the job jars and he would say, ‘The family is a team, and
every person in the family needs to carry their weight on the team. Everybody is a
contributor to the team, and so these chores are an important part of running the family
as a team.’ We would pull our chores out of the job jar, and if we didn’t want to do that
particular chore, we could negotiate with each other—so those were ‘negotiation skills.’
But the chores had to be done by the end of the week, which was ‘goal achievement.’ Once
they were accomplished, we would earn an allowance, which was ‘pay-for-performance.’
He would talk to us about these things, and so we learned a lot of business skills in that
one little example.
Dennis Sullivan also involved his children in his business life. Morrison described how he “used
our kitchen table as a focus group”:
A lot of times, when you talk to children, you talk to them or at them. He really made
sure that he talked with us and got our input. For example, when he was vice president of
marketing for AT&T and in charge of new-product development, I can remember him
2
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Maggie Wilderotter: The Evolution of an Executive
417-091
bringing new products home to our table and discussing them. I remember the example
of the Trimline phone, which had push buttons in the handle instead of a rotary dial in
the base. We gave him our input: ‘Well, maybe the phone should have colors to match the
bedrooms.’ He listened to us, and so we really felt that he was developing our marketing
skills. Maybe that even inspired Maggie to go into the telecommunications business. She
was exposed at a very young age, as was I, to a lot of different new products that were
coming down the pike in telecommunications.
”It was not my plan for [the girls] to become executives,” Dennis Sullivan said. “It was my plan for
them to actuate their potential.”7 Still, the business world was what he knew, and thus what he
introduced his daughters to: “I tried to inculcate them with what the business world is like—how
products get launched, customers sampled—and about all the interesting people I met, and how they
could be part of that,” he continued. ”I’d ask them what their goals were, and when they told me I’d add
a few more to their list.”8 Success was important, but failure wasn’t stigmatized, Wilderotter recalled: “In
our household, failure was just do it, try it, fix it, do it again. And it was a learning experience. It wasn’t
something that you were afraid of; it was just something that was just part of life.”9
And learning was only part of the picture. “My father always talked to us about the importance of
community service. It might have been his Jesuit education, but success was not only about academic
achievement; giving back to the community was also important,” Morrison said. When Maggie and
Denise became interested in comedian Jerry Lewis’s annual telethon to raise funds for muscular
dystrophy, they decided to hold their own fundraisers for the cause. “We engaged our friends, assigned
them specific tasks, put signs all over the neighborhood, and established booths and games that could
be played with pennies to collect for muscular dystrophy,” Morrison recalled. “And we would run
these enormous carnivals. I remember contributing a $25 check. That’s a lot of pennies when you’re a
kid.” At the time Denise was nine and Maggie was eight. ”We discovered we liked handling money
and liked being in charge,” Wilderotter said..10 In ninth grade, Maggie invited then-President Nixon to
a benefit she had organized for Vietnam veterans. When the White House telephoned her at school to
convey the president’s regrets that he could not attend, Maggie replied, “Isn’t he at least going to pay
for the dinner tickets I sent?”11 A donation arrived the following week. Maggie’s sales skills bloomed
early: “I was the number-one salesperson at our Catholic school for all of the cookie drives, the candy
drives, and the Christmas-card drives.”
Her networking and teambuilding skills were also apparent early, and adults began to take notice:
“I remember, for example, the school we were going to was building a new junior high school, and
[Maggie] was picked to rally the students around adapting to that new school and creating a
community,” Morrison recalled.
The Early Years: Building Skills
Maggie Sullivan attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. The same
weekend as her graduation, with a degree in economics, she married her junior-high sweetheart, U.S.
Air Force Academy graduate Jay Wilderotter. Jay’s first assignment took the couple to Phoenix, where
Maggie found a job as secretary to a bank’s vice-president of human resources. Her boss, the highestranking woman at the bank, recognized her potential and soon began to mentor Wilderotter and offer
her development opportunities. But after six months the Wilderotters were transferred to California,
where Maggie took a second banking job as an account supervisor. Following yet another transfer, she
answered a newspaper ad for a job at a company called CableData, and entered what she called “the
fledgling new industry” of cable television “before software and services were cool.”
3
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417-091
Maggie Wilderotter: The Evolution of an Executive
CableData’s founder, Bob Mathews, had made an effort to build a culture where women could
thrive. As the Wall Street Journal later recounted, he “went out of his way to advance and retain women,
offering Friday night baby-sitting services, free dry cleaning and other perks.”12 At CableData, where
she spent 12 years, Wilderotter built her skill set via aggressive job rotation:
I had the opportunity in that 12-year window to have 11 different jobs, including
running the regional operations for the company. That gave me the opportunity to really
have a foundation for running a business: gaining profit-and-loss experience, hiring
people, building relationships with customers, delivering on service commitments, and
delivering on the bottom line and the top line. That was a terrific experience for me.
Wilderotter credited Mathews with building her confidence as well as her skills: “He got me out of
my comfort zone. Whenever I got comfortable with something, Bob Mathews would say, ‘Hey, Maggie,
I want you to go do this. ’” The challenges always escalated, Wilderotter recalled:
I was running the accounting department, and I decided I wanted to run marketing,
and we didn’t have a marketing department at the company. I worked on Bob for about
six months, and finally he said, ‘Go hire your replacement, and you can start a marketing
department.’ And I did, and about three or four days before I was going to start this new
job, he called me in his office and said, ‘I have some good news and some bad news.’ And
I said, ‘Okay, what’s the bad news?’ He said, ‘You’re not going to do a marketing
department.’ I said, ‘Well, what’s the good news?’ And he said, ‘I’ve decided to open
regional operations, and I’m going to put five regions around the country, and I want you
to run them, and hire people, and put data centers out there, and get close to the customers
and put the teams in place.’ And I looked at him—I was in my twenties, like 29 years old—
and said, ‘Bob, I don’t know anything about regional operations,’ and he said, ‘You didn’t
know anything about marketing either.’
In 1991 Wilderotter moved to McCaw Cellular Communications as president of the company’s
western region. When AT&T acquired McCaw three years later, she was promoted to executive vice
president of national operations for AT&T wireless services, and eventually to CEO of AT&T’s
Aviation communications division. Though she had what she later called “a great learning experience
working under the umbrella of the number-one brand in the United States,” in 1996 Wilderotter took
the step of becoming a full CEO at Wink Communications, a startup software company whose new
technology enabled cable and satellite subscribers to interact with television programs and ads.
Wilderotter described the decision as a milestone in her career: “I left corporate America, and I went
to run a startup. I raised over $100 million in private funding. I had no CFO, no banks, just strategic
partners. I built the company. I took it public and then eventually sold the company to Liberty Media
in 2002. Wink was my first opportunity to be the CEO of a public company.”
But moving from a corporate giant to leading a startup was daunting: “No one knew who Wink
was. I came from an AT&T business card to a card where people wouldn’t even return your phone
calls,” Wilderotter recalled. The experience forced her to rely on her own judgment and to develop
even more resilience and risk tolerance: “Things happen slower in cable than you expect,” she
explained. “The wherewithal to hang in there and put the right win-win partnerships in place, or cut
through and get attention among operators, investors, and shareholders, required a major pull inside
of me that, frankly, I didn’t know I had.”13
The complexity of bringing interactive television to fruition made for some “really dark days.”
Hundreds of mutually mistrustful entities had to be coordinated to make the new service work:
interactive television required cable and satellite operators, television networks, software companies,
4
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Maggie Wilderotter: The Evolution of an Executive
417-091
electronics companies, and advertisers to work together. “None of them get along very well,”
Wilderotter observed. “But to launch end-to-end systems, you need them all to be on board.”14
Competition over territory in the dynamic new market was fierce; Wink suffered a critical loss when
two customers defected to Microsoft’s WebTV service on the same day, forcing Wilderotter to delay a
planned initial public offering and revert to private fundraising.
Wilderotter, who had “always looked at failure as an opportunity to learn, and an opportunity to
self-assess what I could do differently and how to make sure I don’t wind up in that situation again,”
concluded that she needed a new strategy to deal with Microsoft. “I knew if I didn’t create a
relationship with Microsoft that was different than a competitive one, they could kill the company.
And I had to figure out how to dust myself off and move the company in a different direction to make
that happen.” Ultimately, Microsoft invested $30 million in Wink for a 10% ownership share and a
cooperative marketing-and-development agreement.15 When Wink went public in 1999, Microsoft’s
share was valued at $107 million.16
Sam Zell, an investor in Wink, recalled his impression of Wilderotter during the Wink years:
What I saw initially was somebody who was very smart and very competent but,
frankly, less worldly than I would have expected based on what I had seen; I also saw that
cup fill up very rapidly. She is a tremendous sponge, and I just watched her absorb
everything around her. I would say that her sophistication in the beginning was nothing
compared to what it was at the end.
Wilderotter’s style as CEO was communicative and highly visible. Interviewed for an article on
executives’ stress-busting tips, she said:
I know that it’s time to recharge my batteries whenever I look at my schedule and see
that every single minute of the day is booked. . . . That’s precisely when I tell my assistant,
‘I need a half-hour to go on a lion hunt.’ When I go on a lion hunt, I’m totally off the grid.
That means that my assistant holds all of my calls and rejiggers my schedule, canceling
anything that isn’t a priority.
And then I begin my hunt: I prowl through the office, aski…
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