TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/080690/0806520.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.6 KB | 253 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 70

Take This Job and Love It


An inspired leader and a tough negotiator, ROBIN BURNS may be
that elusive figure, the new woman executive

By MARTHA DUFFY


    The competition is tough, but the Red Team has the edge in
both cunning and sheer gall. It kidnaps a member of the Orange
Team and delivers her, bound and gagged, aboard a clanging fire
truck to the opposition. What a bold move! What a great promo!
The playing fields of Lauder University have not witnessed its
like.

    The Reds' triumph will gain them major points for strategy
as well as showmanship. For their sunny blond captive is Robin
Burns, 37, president and CEO of the Estee Lauder USA cosmetics
company and -- at an estimated salary of $1.5 million a year
-- probably the nation's highest-paid woman executive.

    In truth the Reds are strictly a pickup team, and Ole L.U.
is a seasonal setup on the Vassar College campus in
Poughkeepsie, N.Y. The idea is to give selected employees a
week-long immersion in exercise, self-improvement, competition
techniques and the Lauder corporate outlook.

    It's like Burns ("I have a very, very hands-on approach")
to go through the whole drill -- the 5:45 a.m. hikes, the
Win/Win negotiating workshop, the Take This Job and Love It
seminar. She could write the book on most of it. She does not
need a dawn trek to command explosive animal energy all day.
Her touch at negotiating is magic -- people can't seem to tell
whether they have come out of a deal with gold or dross, but
whatever it is, they're happy. In her professional career Burns
has held three positions and adored each one. Add the
dozen-odd part-time jobs that she worked at from age 13 on to
put herself through school -- she loved them all.

    She sprinted up the business ladder at Bloomingdale's to a
vice president's rung and did it in the '70s, when Bloomie's
was the hottest and most innovative department store in the
U.S. In 1982 she took over the moribund Calvin Klein fragrance
business. While the public may not know who Robin Burns is, it
has certainly heard of Obsession and Eternity, the two perfumes
she launched with consummate marketing strategy and blatantly
sexy ad campaigns.

    Last year Minnetonka, the parent company of Calvin Klein
cosmetics, was sold, and Burns found herself more responsive
to Leonard Lauder's five-year professional courtship to join
the family-owned, $2 billion-a-year business. The wooing had
been fun on an international scale -- the occasional lunch in
the Bois de Boulogne, the duets of shop talk, the tycoon's
equivalent of ardor ("I am a patient man"). But this woman knew
what she wanted: "I am not interested in profit improvement,
acquisitions or expansion. A place looking for that won't
benefit from what I bring. I am a risk taker, and it's a luxury
not to have shareholders and Wall Street pressure."

    Taking over at Lauder in 1990 is a challenge. The
44-year-old company is the biggest American cosmetics maker.
Its roots are in the Hungarian recipes for face creams that the
legendary Estee, now in her 80s, brewed up. Her son Leonard,
57, turned these potions into a huge international business,
which includes perfumes, as well as divisions like Clinique and
Aramis. He is president of the parent company and the one to
whom Burns reports.

    But the primary point-of-sale for quality cosmetics like the
Estee Lauder line is department stores, and they are in
trouble. There are too many of them, and, as a result of the
takeover fever of the late '80s, they are overburdened with
debts that must be serviced by cutbacks. Since cosmetics and
scents are impulse items whose sale depends on pampering the
customer, they are vulnerable at understaffed counters.

    Then there is the company's own situation. Estee, a superb
saleswoman, is far less active now. And as Leonard points out,
"Arden, Rubinstein, Revson -- when they passed on, so did their
businesses. Others couldn't carry on in the same style." So the
image must be altered from the mildly staid, middle-aged
profile that the line has.

    Burns should be about ideal to lead this tricky transition.
There is nothing Old World about her. Her notion of a good time
is to go skiing in her native Colorado. Unlike the Lauders,
Burns doesn't have any celebrity friends. Although Leonard, a
keen businessman, "plays his cards close to his vest, and he
has 16 vests under that one," as a friend puts it, she is open
and direct -- if very tough indeed. The old line about "what
you see is what you get" fits her perfectly. The company is now
hierarchical. Says Burns: "My vision does involve a lot of
change, but when I get my restructuring done . . ." Odds are
there'll be a lot less structure.

    It is nearly impossible to find criticism of her. To most
colleagues she seems like a relief, a reminder that in the
right hands, business life can be simple. No plots, no
paranoia, no last-minute surprises. Instead she imparts a sense
of discovery to almost everybody she works with, a feeling that
anything is possible -- at least for her team. Nowadays she is
besieged by crude questions like "What makes you so
successful?" Her old Bloomingdale's boss, Lester Gribetz, may
have part of the answer: "It's important that she is not a New
Yorker, and she doesn't have their brashness, aggression and
hostility. She's a frontier girl."

    Burns spent a lot of her childhood in Cripple Creek, Colo.,
the ghost of a gold boomtown. Robin had the run of it. "It was
such a great place to live," she says, with a glazy gaze out
her Manhattan window. My mother could just pick up the phone
and ask the operator where I was." Her father moved out when
she was three. She had little contact with him after that.
Gribetz might have added her mother Bettina to the reasons for
Robin's success. A Southerner by origin, "she is the original
steel magnolia," says Burns, who is still very close to her.
Bettina can't say enough about her only child. A favorite story
involves the girl's refusal to lace up her tennis shoes. When
the mother insisted, pointing to the safety factor, the tot
removed the shoestrings completely. "She was showing me a
better way," sighs Bettina, "and I had to agree." One day in
primary school, a report card arrived with a poor grade in
deportment. Bettina went to see the teacher. "Well, Robin
finishes her work paper first and then helps the slower kids,"
came the reply. "She has to learn that they must do it on their
own." These fond tales reflect Bettina's neat editing eye.
Robin's enterprise and her eagerness to share what she knows
turn up again and again.

    By her high school days, the family had moved to Colorado
Springs. There wasn't much money around -- the bungalow Burns
lived in would probably fit into her current office -- but you
could set a sitcom at Cheyenne Mountain High in the '60s. There
were "keggers" (beer parties) and "woodsies" (gatherings in a
nearby park) set to Simon & Garfunkel and the Beach Boys. Her
old pals remember her as a lively girl, just the kind you'd
like to take for a spin in your first fire engine. She did seem
to figure things out fast and was aware of a wider world. "She
taught me french kissing," says a classmate, Gordon Riegel,
"not because she was fast, but because she read about it in
some magazine like Vogue and was curious."

    To her classmates' astonishment she left the West to go to
Syracuse University, although she had never heard of it before
a recruiter showed up at Cheyenne Mountain. Just curious, as
usual. She did a double major in education and business.
Teaching, she decided, was not for her: "The kids were great;
the red tape was horrible." But college increasingly became an
assignment to complete. The world of part-time jobs was more
real than the lecture hall, and inevitably, New York City
beckoned.

    In 1974 there was pressure to hire women, and blue-chip
firms recruited aggressively on campus. "It really turned me
off," says Burns, who backs several feminist causes but can
compete very nicely on her own. Instead she chose
Bloomingdale's state-of-the-art executive-training program and
burned up the syllabus. "I worked 10 hours a day, seven days
a week," she says, "but it was exhilarating."

    Then came window coverings, more fun than a ramble around
Cripple Creek. "They wanted to get more aggressively into
imports, so here I am, 23 or 24, on an eight-week trip to
Europe, India, Japan. I truly thought I'd gone to heaven." Same
thing with decorative pillows: "I had a collection of Seurat
and Van Gogh made out of needlepoint in India. I merchandized
them as art, not pillows -- $500 apiece. They sold out in one
day, so I didn't have time to enjoy the fun." And lamps: "You
pick up shells, antique tea cans, baskets, boxes, anything.
They wire them in the warehouse, and then you say, Now how much
do you think we can sell this for?"

    Her globe trotting ended and her big-time career began when
she was promoted into fragrances. Bloomingdale's vice president
Myron Blumenfeld, now retired, was "astonished at the way she
could handle people older and more sophisticated than she was.
She put issues in front of people and never let the meeting
wander."

    Robert Taylor, who ran Minnetonka, knew she had what he
desperately needed. The Calvin Klein line had no marketing
strategy, wretched relations with stores and a disgusted muse,
Klein himself. In fact the designer refused to meet Burns for
several months, but she went about her job anyway. To her the
Obsession launch remains the high point of her professional
life. She had, as usual, put together a team that was
superenergized and fanatically devoted. Kim Delsing, Burns'
successor as Calvin Klein president, says, "It was like the
kids running the zoo. Robin had the ability to let her mind go
-- What if we did this? What if? What if?"

    Going from Klein to Lauder, says industry observer Alan
Mottus, "is the difference between turning around a speedboat
and turning around a tanker." Carol Phillips, who virtually
invented the money machine known as Clinique, notes that "she
must deal with the baggage of years of company success and go
through the line with a butcher knife, tailoring and trimming."

    For this she will need a free hand, but most observers think
Leonard Lauder is ready to give it to her. There have been a
couple of blowups, caused by the fact that Burns is tougher
with stores than he is, but mostly, as an old-timer says,
"Leonard gets a ton of vitamins out of having her around."

    Where does Burns get her own zip? "She has a crazy appetite
for this business," says Phillips. She does. Julia Horowitz,
a pal from Syracuse days, remembers a vacation they took a few
years ago on Antigua: "Every day at 1 o'clock she would go into
town and spend two or three hours on the phone with the
office."

    Horowitz also knows the quieter side of Burns. "My parents
died 10 years ago," she says, "and afterward I really fell
apart. Of all my family and friends, she was the one who hung
in there." In fact Burns has had a couple of setbacks in life,
both impossible to conceal, and handled them with admirable
determination and reserve. In high school her face was badly
cut in a car crash, and it took several operations to repair
the damage. Years later, just before she was to be married to
a man well known in the cosmetics business, his company
announced that it was suing him for fraud. Says Burns: "I can
tell you that these were painful situations. But I am a great
believer in self-management, that you must survive and find
a way to play the hand you are dealt."

    With the switch to Lauder, she will have a more visible
profile in the business world and the media. That, according
to her feminist friend Gloria Steinem, is ideal. "I think of
Robin as the new woman executive -- a lot more individual in
dress and behavior, with a sense of humor, a whole person.
That's why both men and women love working for her. She makes
it fun for the individual."

    Frontier girl? New woman? As Burns sees it, a little of
both. "Cripple Creek was a free-spirited place to grow up," she
says. "Neither my mother nor the community ever revealed any
prejudice to me, and I never saw any until I got to Syracuse."
So what others may see as new is natural to her. "It's hard to
have emotional ties in a new job," she observes. "What I got
at Vassar was a bonding to Lauder. You know why? What we all
wore there was sweats and T-shirts. Everyone. I loved that
equality. It's what makes work fun."