The most important women in German business
Some are managers or entrepreneurs, while others sit on supervisory boards: a magazine has named the 75 most important women in German business. We present just a few of them.
When things get complicated, they perform at the top of their game. Assertive, bright and highly regarded, they are often to be found working in international companies: in cooperation with the Boston Consulting Group, German business news magazine Manager Magazin has compiled a list of the 75 most influential women in the German business world. Featuring 50 women in 2016, the list was extended to 75 in 2017 “because the number of key actors is growing constantly”. Many of the women in leadership positions have an international background: a particularly large proportion of Germany’s top female managers come from the United States, Spain and France. We present just a few of them.
Woman of the year
As Manager Magazin puts it, top manager Melanie Kreis is a first among equals who shines “a little brighter than the others thanks to her successes”. The chief financial officer at Deutsche Post, she is seen as the “woman of the year” in the list of most influential women. In charge of the financial department of the world’s largest logistics company since October 2016, Melanie Kreis is the first woman to hold this position at Deutsche Post, which employs nearly half a million people and achieves sales of 60 billion euros per year. At 45, Melanie Kreis is a physicist, transactions expert and mother of two children.
Managers category
Pragmatic, unpretentious, unflustered: these are the kind of adjectives typically used to characterise Lisa Davis, an American who formerly worked at Texaco and Shell. At Siemens she has taken on what is probably the toughest job of them all: her role is to get the energy division moving again and integrate acquisitions that cost billions.
Supervisory board members category
The great-great-granddaughter of Fritz Henkel, who founded the detergent factory Henkel & Cie in 1876, chairs the multi-billion-euro company’s supervisory board. She is (so far) the only female chair of a supervisory board at a DAX-30 firm, Germany’s 30 largest companies in terms of market capitalisation. An excellent organiser who is passionate about art, Bagel-Trah got together with friends to set up a fund for photographic art. Unusually, it allows anyone to borrow artworks from the collection and hang them on their wall at home until they decide they want to replace them with something different.
Expatriates category
As a young woman, Petra Hesser wanted to work in – and perhaps even run – a department store, but she ended up achieving far more: for five years, she was in charge of IKEA’s German market operations, the Swedish furniture giant’s most important market. Since 2011, Hesser has been a member of the Group’s Executive Management and based in the Netherlands, where she is responsible for human resources.
Entrepreneurs category
Delia Fischer is no ordinary company founder: rather than doing a degree in business studies, she studied fashion journalism. She later worked not at an investment bank, but on the women’s magazine “Elle”. But what Fischer does know is what women want, and that is Westwing. 91 percent of the customers of this home furnishings website are female. Today, more than 26 million members in 14 countries buy home decor and furnishings from Westwing. Its investors are eagerly waiting for the company to go public.
Partners category
After eight years on the board at the advertising agency Jung von Matt, Karen Heumann wanted a change in 2012, so she decided to start her own business. Nowadays, her advertising agency Thjnk works successfully for major clients such as Audi, Bifi and GlaxoSmithKline. Explaining why more women than men are to be found in leadership positions at Thjnk, Heumann says that gender “simply doesn’t factor” when deciding on the right candidate for a job.
Influencers category
Tanja Singer is seen as the new star in the research firmament. The director of the Department of Social Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig is redefining economic theory: rather than being a “homo economicus”, she believes that humans are compassionate, and is exploring how neuropsychological insights into motivation, emotion and social cognition influence economic decision-making models.
Watchlist category
Manager Magazin describes Hildegard Wortmann as “clever, businesslike and well-suited to the executive board”. Wortmann has been working at BMW since 1998, where she coordinates marketing of the Mini and the X and Z series models. An economist with previous professional experience at Unilever and Calvin Klein, Wortmann has been responsible for the BMW brand since June 2016.
