Business

How Fortune Positions Company’s Most Powerful Women from the COVID Age

The pandemic and its own human and financial toll. The struggle for racial justice. The climate catastrophe .

Nobody wants a reminder of those existential dangers the planet is contending in 2020–we are living them daily. And the effect of these emergencies is anything but short term: They’ll sing our lives within this past decade and beyond.

In other words, 2020 is the year once we said a last goodbye to business as normal.

As we ready our 23rd Most Powerful Women list, it became evident that the strategy we’ve taken on this position for the last 22 years has to change also.

Since its inception in 1998, this record has depended upon four criteria: the size and value of every woman’s company in the worldwide market; both the health and management of their company; the arc of her profession; and its own cultural and social influence. This season we added a fresh dimension:” We wanted to know the way a executive is abandoning her energy. In this period of tragedy and doubt, is she with her influence to form her business and the broader world for the better?

That is the reason you are going to find as our newest No.  1 Accenture CEO Julie Sweet, who’s steering the expert services company –valued at almost $150 billion–since it assists its customers navigate this new world order. Carol Tomé, the former CFO of Home Depot, lands in No.  5, having chosen at the very best project in UPS as the delivery giant is now playing an increasingly crucial function in the coronavirus market. Jane Fraser, the incoming CEO of Citi, has been making her go back to the listing at No.  6. She’s breaking among the strongest glass ceilings by getting the very first female CEO of a leading Wall Street bank.  

To be more clear, company operation still matters just as much as it has. The foreign exchange is a choice example of a market where the disparate effect of the pandemic rallied this year’s record: Even though the CEOs of several fighting retailers dropped off our standing, it raised executives such as Walmart International CEO Judith McKenna (No.  15)–both hailing out of businesses poised to emerge in this time stronger than ever before.

However, in different sectors, the new standards led the scales. 8) along with also Google’s Susan Wojcicki (No.  18), CEO of YouTube, equally fell in their positions. Throughout the lens of the newest metric, their failure to rein in misinformation in their programs overshadows their businesses’ solid financial performance.

We wanted to know the way a executive is abandoning her own power. In this period of tragedy and doubt, is she with her influence to form her business and the broader world for the better?

Besides the 16 public business CEOs on our national record –whose businesses account for over $1 billion in market cap–novices made their debuts in jobs which are critical in the search to construct more environmentally and socially aware businesses. 35), that directs Apple’s sustainability efforts, reports directly to CEO Tim Cook and will be accountable for making sure that the technician juggernaut reaches its objective of getting carbon neutral from 2030. Intel main diversity and inclusion officer Barbara Whye (No.  40)an engineer by training, isn’t just ensuring her firm reflects the real composition of this U.S. workforce but can also be helping to establish metrics and standards throughout the tech market. In Amazon, former GM executive order Alicia Boler Davis (No.  12) gets the gigantic job of maintaining the business’s thousands of warehouse workers secure since they operate on overdrive to fulfill ballooning customer need.

Our listing this season also reflects businesses that haven’t had much of an existence in our ranks before. And in much more terrestrial jobs, Simon & Schuster SVP and writer Dana Canedy (No.  50), the very first Black man to head a significant publishing imprint, will be defined to have an outsize effect on the culture.

We ended up getting 13 novices and a standing of girls that are making an effort to utilize their capacity to make sure their communities and companies emerge from that stressful period better than they were previously. The outcome is a record that’s more diverse, in every meaning of this term, than we have had previously –basically a list that’s more reflective of this moment we are dwelling in.

The 2020 Most Powerful Women list was composed by: Danielle Abril, Kristen Bellstrom, Robert Hackett, Matt Heimer, Emma Hinchliffe, Aric Jenkins, Beth Kowitt, Michal Lev-Ram, Sy Mukherjee, Aaron Pressman, Lucinda Shen, Anne Sraders, Jonathan Vanian, Phil Wahba, along with Jen Wieczner

A variation of the Report appears from the November 2020 dilemma of all Fortune.

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