EMMA WALMSLEY, 48
WHEN emma Walmsley was growing up, her family would hold an annual debate as to where they should spend their summer holidays.
Little emma would present her choice, listing the advantages, and pointing out why the other options were rubbish. She always won.
Walmsley’s early aptitude for winning people over through wellresearched analysis has set the tone for much of her soaring career. She is chief executive of Glaxosmithkline, the £80bn pharmaceuticals giant. It is a role which makes her, at just 48, the most powerful businesswoman in britain, if not the world.
Steely, sharp-as-a-tiger’s tooth, with a slightly haughty head girl demeanour, what Walmsley lacks in warmth she more than makes up for in gritty determination.
‘Nice but utterly ruthless,’ is how one ex-colleague described her to me this week, with skin as impenetrable as sheet metal.
Scour YouTube and you’ll find a wonderfully combative performance from her years ago on BBC’s Watchdog, presenter Anne robinson’s customary exocets bouncing off her like ping-pong balls.
As well as being in charge of 100,000 employees worldwide, for which she could earn as much £8.8m this year, Walmsley is also the mother of four children.
HUSBAND David Owen is a former businessman whom she met at a party in her mid-20s. Friends say she spent the morning after their first meeting avoiding his calls, reluctantly relenting to his requests for a date almost through guilt. They married a year later.
Her global jet-setting means squeezing in school plays and parent evenings can be a struggle, but then Walmsley’s own upbringing was somewhat higgledy-piggledy.
born in Cumbria, the eldest of three, her father’s occupation as a naval vice-admiral meant the family was often relocating. In her early life, the Walmsleys moved four times in six years. School was St Swithun’s, a brainy boarding school in Winchester, where teachers remember her as her year’s stand-out pupil. She developed a passion for classics, which she studied at Oxford, but not before taking time out to travel through China.
After graduation, Walmsley landed a marketing job with French cosmetics giant L’Oreal. She performed management roles in London, Paris and New York, before heading back east in 2007 to run the consumer products division in Shanghai. With four young tots now in tow, she made a point of not living in an expat community in order to immerse her family in the Chinese way of life.
She appeared destined for a global role at L’Oreal until 2010, when she met with Glaxo’s then boss Sir Andrew Witty. What she assumed was a networking lunch turned out to be an offer to run the firm’s european business. She was reluctant at first. Her reassuring hubby intervened, however, offering to step back from a business he’d set up in China to allow her to take the job. In a rare moment of public tendresse, she described joining Glaxo as ‘the second best decision I have made – after marrying David’.
Her elevation last year to Witty’s job took many by surprise. The role has traditionally fallen to a pharmaceuticals expert, whereas Walmlsey hails from the consumer side, flogging products such as Horlicks and Aquafresh toothpaste.
ALTHOUGH it was hailed as a glass ceiling-shattering moment for women, questions were raised as to whether she would be able to apply herself to pharma. The City agreed, with shares dipping on the day of her appointment.
but she has answered the sceptics by overhauling her senior management and bringing in big-hitters from pharmaceuticals rivals while boosting research and development spending. This week, in her first set of results since taking over, GSK reported record £30bn sales.
Just like that precocious young tot with her holiday plans, slowly but surely she’s winning the doubters over to her side.