Big shot of the week
ANNE STEVENS, 69 CHIEF EXECUTIVE, GKN
ASK most executives whether they hope to take charge of their company one day and they squirm like a cell of panicked eels.
They um and ah and obfuscate, before mumbling some garbled management speak about being happy getting on with the job they’ve got.
Anne Stevens is no such pussyfoot. She has wanted to be a chief executive her entire working career and has never made any bones about it.
At 69, she finally got her chance last month after being appointed boss of GKN, the British engineer which helps build F35 fighters and Apache helicopters. If it’s a challenge she was after, then it’s a challenge she has certainly now got.
Barely weeks in the job, and GKN is in the midst of the most bitter takeover battle since Kraft’s acquisition of Cadbury back in 2010, following an unwanted and openly hostile £7bn bid from private equitystyle asset strippers Melrose.
For Stevens, the stakes could not be a higher. Should Melrose succeed, it’s not only her job at risk, but many of her 58,000 employees around the world.
OFStevens’s pluck there can be no doubt. Tall, straight-talking with a shock of platinum hair, she enjoys a glass of wine, likes to race cars at break-neck speeds and is smitten with her terrifying-looking Dobermanns.
Before joining the board of GKN four years ago, she was number three at Ford, making her the most powerful woman in America’s burly, male-dominated automotive industry. A woman boss at Yankee Doodle Ford! That must have had the rednecks choking on their gumbo.
So how has this tomboyish grandmother-of-four ended up in charge of one of Britain’s proudest engineering firms, whose origins can be traced back to the industrial revolution? Buckle up, as engineers say, it’s really quite a story.
Born in Pennsylvania to a Catholic family, young Stevens was never a girls’ girl. Her mother was incapacitated with Motor Neurone Disease, meaning Anne spent her formative years going to baseball games with her father and hanging out in the pit lane at the local stock car races.
She was known as ‘The Brain’ at school, where she enjoyed dissecting frogs and competing with the local boys. ‘Anne Louise, go play with the girls!’ the nuns would yell in unison.
She won a nursing scholarship, but the first time she slipped on her uniform and began taking orders from doctors, she knew it wasn’t for her. She quit the next day.
By 20, she had married Bill, now a retired auto-parts supplier, and became a mother to two children. She could have ended up a stay-athome mum, had she not found herself leafing through Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique.
Inspired by this female- call-toarms, she and Bill sold their house and went back to University, splitting parenting duties and saving cash where they could, so they could become engineers. After being inundated with offers upon graduation, Anne took a job at oil giant Exxon where she spent ten years as a chemical engineer.
A dedicated animal lover, the environmental damage caused by the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 prompted yet another career change. She wanted to be a leader of industry so enrolled in a business course at New York University. It led to a marketing position at Ford and five years later she became the firm’s first female plant manager, taking over the Enfield site in the UK.
Further responsibility for operations in Canada, Mexico and South America followed, leading to her to be Ford’s first female executive vice president in 2005. The top job always looked set to elude her and by 2009, when the global downturn hit, she departed to take non-executive roles with Lockheed Martin and Anglo American.
She’s more mumsyish than the battle-axe appearance might suggest. ‘Push, push, hug,’ is how she describes her management style, perhaps appropriately for someone who has somehow successfully raised a close-knit family as well as enjoying a hugely successful professional career.
Reassuringly, Stevens claims to have never failed in any job she has done. In seeing off Melrose’s challenge to GKN, failure simply isn’t an option.