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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: The 50 Women to Watch: More than a year after being named to the inner circle at Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Linda Cook has helped seal a handful of megadeals that the British-Dutch oil giant hopes will catapult it past last year's devastating energy-accounting scandal.": Posted Tuesday 1 November 2005

Scroll down to see a list of the 50 women to watch in these categories:
October 31, 2005

Running the Show | In Line to Lead | The Inheritors | The Policy Makers | The Owners | The Advocates | On the Sidelines

Running The Show
NAME POSITION ACHIEVEMENT
1. Margaret C. Whitman President and Chief Executive, eBay Built the Web auction company into a world-wide e-commerce marketplace
2. Brenda Barnes Chairman and Chief Executive, Sara Lee Instituted an overhaul plan at the struggling consumer-products maker
3. Andrea Jung Chief Executive, Avon Products Modernized the product line and gave the brand a younger, more sophisticated image
4. Anne M. Mulcahy Chairman and Chief Executive, Xerox Helped the company recover from near-death experience of a massive accounting scandal
5. Carol Bartz Chief Executive, Autodesk Has helped the company soar since the tech bubble burst in 2000
6. Anne Lauvergeon Chief Executive, Areva Teamed up with Baltimore-based Constellation Energy Group to build and operate nuclear reactors in the U.S.
7. Ho Ching Chief Executive, Temasek Holdings Turned Temasek into one of Asia's most aggressive since 2002
8. Marjorie Scardino Chief Executive, Pearson Turned Pearson into the world's largest educational publisher
9. Izumi Kobayashi President, Merrill Lynch Japan Securities In 2003, turned Merrill into the most profitable foreign brokerage firm in Japan
10. Marion Sandler Co-Chief Executive, Golden West Financial In the 1950s, was one of the few female stock-market analysts on Wall Street
11. Xie Qihua Chairwoman, Shanghai Baosteel Chairwoman of China's largest steel producer
12. Laurence Parisot President, Medef President of France's biggest employers' union
13. Clara Furse Chief Executive, London Stock Exchange Heads one of the world's largest, and oldest, stock markets
In Line to Lead
NAME POSITION ACHIEVEMENT
1. Susan Arnold Vice Chairman, Procter & Gamble Became the first woman vice chairman of P&G
2. Zoe Cruz Acting President, Morgan Stanley As head of fixed income, she led the firm's 2002 re-entry into the profitable mortgage-securities business.
3. Indra Nooyi President and Chief Financial Officer, PepsiCo Helped spin off Pepsi's restaurant and bottling businesses and worked on the 1998 acquisition of juice maker Tropicana.
4. Angela Ahrendts Chief Executive-designate, Burberry Group Will join the London-based luxury label as an executive director in January
5. Laura Wright Chief Financial Officer, Southwest Airlines Steered the company's lauded fuel-hedging program
6. Susan Desmond-Hellmann Chief of Product Development, Genentech Will oversee the submission of 10 new regulatory filings with the Food and Drug Administration over the next several months
7. Karen Katen Vice Chairman, Pfizer Simultaneously named president of the newly created human-health group, and vice chairman.
8. Sallie Krawcheck Chief Financial Officer, Citigroup Responsible for the banks' investor relations, mergers and acquisitions, and strategic planning
9. Ann Moore Chairman and Chief Executive, Time Inc. The most powerful executive in the magazine business
10. Safra Catz Co-President, Oracle Took the lead in integrating Oracle's $10.6 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft
11. Linda Cook Executive Director, Gas & Power, Royal Dutch Shell Has helped seal a handful of megadeals
12. Valerie Hermann Chief Executive, Yves Saint Laurent Run women's ready-to-wear at the Christian Dior brand, and was the business brain behind the John Galliano label
13. Yoshie Motohiro Managing Director, Nissan Motor India First woman at Nissan to run an overseas subsidiary
14. Christine Poon Vice Chairman, Johnson & Johnson Has managed the drug and biotechnology operations that are the company's largest source of sales and profits.
15. Renetta McCann Chief Executive, Starcom MediaVest Group Landed General Motors's $3.2 billion media-buying account
16. Anne Sweeney President, Disney-ABC Television Group Responsible for ABC, the Touchstone TV studio, Disney Channel, Toon Disney, SoapNet and ABCF amily, among other units
17. Ann Livermore Executive Vice President, Hewlett-Packard Executive vice president in charge of H-P's technology-solutions group, the largest division by revenue
18. Nancy Peretsman Managing Director, Allen & Co. Helped guide the $17.5 billion sale of Adelphia Communications Corp. to Time Warner Corp. and Comcast Corp.
19. Joyce Chang Managing Director, J.P. Morgan Chase Responsible for guiding investor strategy in three of the hottest areas in financial markets
20. Marluce Dias da Silva Adviser, TV Globo Introduced management methods that have saved the Brazilian company millions of dollars
21. Tami Booth Corwin President, Rodale Books Leads one of the most striking makeovers in book publishing
The Inheritors
NAME POSITION ACHIEVEMENT
1. Shari Redstone President, National Amusements Building her own mini-empire through National Amusements Inc., the closely held movie-theater company that she runs
2. Abigail P. Johnson President, Fidelity Employer Services Retains an enormous presence in the industry that oversees America's retirement money
3. Ana Patricia Botín Chairwoman, Banco Español de Credito Has strengthened her position to succeed her father as the head of Banco Santander Central Hispano, one of the world's top 10 banks
4. Penny Pritzker Chairman, TransUnion Oversees the nonhotel side of the real-estate holdings and is chairman of Pritzker-owned TransUnion LLC, a big consumer-credit information firm
5. María Asunción Arambúruzabála de Garza Vice Chairwoman, Grupo Modelo Mexico's richest woman and heir to the Corona beer fortune
The Policy Makers
NAME POSITION ACHIEVEMENT
1. Angela Merkel German Chancellor-designate Is expected to be confirmed next month as the first female leader of Germany
2. Wu Xiaoling Deputy Governor, People's Bank of China The most powerful woman in Chinese finance
3. Linda Chatman Thomsen Director of Enforcement, Securities and Exchange Commission Presided over some of the SEC's most high-profile cases, including its investigation of Enron
4. Janet Yellen President, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Though on the FOMC for just over a year, Ms. Yellen is one of its most influential members
The Owners
NAME POSITION ACHIEVEMENT
1. Oprah Winfrey Harpo Inc. Called "the Oprah effect," whenever Oprah Winfrey puts her promotional muscle behind something, impressive things happen
2. Miuccia Prada Prada Group The designer most worth watching on Italian catwalks
3. Elisabeth Murdoch Shine Launched her own television-production company in 2000
The Advocates
NAME POSITION ACHIEVEMENT
1. Sylvia Mathews Chief Operating Officer, Gates Foundation Last year, the foundation approved $1.465 billion in grants
2. Kazuyo Katsuma Telecom analyst, J.P. Morgan Chase-Japan Has gained legions of fans among Japanese working mothers
On the Sidelines
1. Carly Fiorina Former CEO at Hewlett-Packard Is well known to have an interest in Republican politics
2. Myrtle Potter Former commercial operations president at Genentech. Consults for several venture funds that invest in the biotech and drug industries and serves as a board member of Amazon.com
 

 

THE JOURNAL REPORT: WOMEN TO WATCH
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Report Rundown
• Special Report Main Page
• The 50 Women to Watch 2005
• Running the Show
• In Line to Lead
• The Inheritors
• The Policy Makers
• The Owners
• The Advocates
• On the Sidelines
• Ten Managers to Watch in Europe
• Ten Executives to Watch in Asia
• Editor's Note
 
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In Line to Lead
October 31, 2005; Page R6

11. Linda Cook
Executive Director, Gas and Power, Royal Dutch Shell

More than a year after being named to the inner circle at Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Linda Cook has helped seal a handful of megadeals that the British-Dutch oil giant hopes will catapult it past last year's devastating energy-accounting scandal.

In February, Ms. Cook -- who runs Shell's natural-gas and power operations, one of the company's three core businesses -- announced a deal with gas-rich Qatar to invest some $7 billion to drill for natural gas and send it to energy-hungry Europe and the U.S. In the months that followed, Shell moved ahead on a number of other gas projects -- from liquefied natural-gas plants in Nigeria and Australia to big sales agreements for its gas output from a giant plant in Russia.

[cook]

While gas and power projects currently make up just a slice of Shell's earnings -- which are running at stratospheric levels because of high oil prices and refining margins -- Ms. Cook's unit accounts for a giant chunk of new business that Shell expects will bear fruit in years to come. Shell is the world's third-largest publicly traded oil company by market capitalization, behind Exxon Mobil Corp. and BP PLC.

More than any of its peers, Shell is betting big on natural gas to meet future growth in demand for energy. Gas has long played second fiddle to oil in the world's petroleum industry, partly because it's so difficult to transport to markets. Supercooling the gas into liquid form and then shipping it by tanker has been an option for decades. But until recently, the relatively low price of gas in many markets didn't justify the expense.

Shell was the subject of a punishing investigation in 2004 by U.S. and British regulators over the company's overstated energy-reserves tally, a crucial investor metric. Part of the fallout was a major restructuring, completed earlier this year, which elevated Ms. Cook, 47 years old, to Shell's top management.

Ms. Cook graduated from the University of Kansas with a petroleum-engineering degree and joined Shell Oil Co. in Houston in 1980. She worked for Shell in Texas and California in a number of technical and managerial roles.

In 2000, she was named to lead the gas and power division for the first time around, based in London. While that job included the same operational responsibilities as her current role, she hadn't yet made it to Shell's executive committee, its top decision-making body. In 2003, she moved to Canada, where she served as president and CEO of Shell Canada, one of the country's largest integrated oil companies.

Ms. Cook moved her family to The Hague in the Netherlands late last year as part of the restructuring. But she spends a good deal of her time jetting to and from Shell's far-flung operations.

Asked by colleagues what keeps her up at night, Ms. Cook says she responds, "My three teenagers, and turbulence."

--Chip Cummins

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