LINDA O'BRYON, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT ANCHOR: They are two different women. They lead two different companies. They have one goal, to make a difference. And they're both women who win. Good evening everyone. I'm Linda O'Bryon. The markets are closed for the holiday, so join us for our Labor Day special, "Women Who Win." We're going to explore leadership, specifically women and leadership. We'll sit down with Marilyn Carlson Nelson, chairman of Carlson Companies, an international travel and business services provider. We'll talk with Anne Mulcahy, the chief executive officer of Xerox (XRX), the document solutions and services firm. And we'll ask two experts how women in corporate America are faring overall. We begin in America's heartland, Minneapolis, Minnesota, home to Carlson Companies and a chairman who believes in doing things on the right note. This is how Carlson Companies greets employees each morning, the first sign this is not an ordinary firm doing business an ordinary way.

MARILYN CARLSON NELSON, CHAIRMAN & CEO, CARLSON COMPANIES: Our objective is to be a great place for great people to do great work.

O'BRYON: Carlson provides business services and solutions and owns some of the world's best known brands. If you've eaten at a TGI Friday's, stayed at a Radisson or a Regent Hotel or cruised on a Radisson Seven Seas ship, you've seen those brands in action.

NELSON: A brand is a promise. People need consistency in a brand. I think that a brand needs to have integrity.

O'BRYON: And Marilyn Carlson Nelson values integrity. She's a 62-year-old grandmother running a $10 billion company with 72,000 employees in more than 140 countries. Despite its size and scope, Nelson sees Carlson Companies as an extended family and that's the key to her leadership.

NELSON: Respecting every stakeholder, whether it's our employee partners, our customers, the owners, which in my case happen to be in some pieces of the business family, but in some, with our franchises, we deal with maybe 2,000 owners around the world. Why would I differentiate in the way I interact with these people? I wouldn't. This is family.

O'BRYON: But as Nelson knows and reminded her board recently, being a family-run business doesn't insulate the company from the pressures of the business world.

NELSON: The softness in the economy, the fact that we have retail businesses and a whole consumer confidence issue is impacting us.

O'BRYON: In fact Carlson recently cut 360 jobs, less than 1 percent of the workforce. But in deciding to make those cuts, Nelson didn't face the same leadership pressures as the chairman of a publicly traded company.

NELSON: We really can't control the economy and to the extent that we can flex our workforce, we have to do it. On the other hand, because we're a private company, we will not ever cut to the bone. We don't have to hold our stock up because it's currency that we're going to use to make acquisitions.

O'BRYON: Given that sense of family that your company has thrived on for many years, how do you go about downsizing?

NELSON: Linda, I think that any, any thoughtful executive has a hard time ever having to downsize. I spent my whole career trying to create a momentum but provided job security and career opportunities.

O'BRYON: Carlson Companies began life in 1938 as the Gold Bond Stamp Company, founded by Nelson's father, Curtis Carlson, on a $55 loan. He was her first mentor.

NELSON: Every night he would come home and pose questions and case studies when we were growing up. And my mom and my sister weren't very interested, but I just loved it and I thrived on discussing these things with him and he would always make a big deal if I made the right decision in these case studies. So I had my own little kind of MBA course before I even went off the college.

O'BRYON: Her professional career started at a brokerage firm in 1961 with an unusual job requirement.

NELSON: When I applied to PaineWebber, they said that they really didn't hire women for anything except as secretaries because they didn't want to put a lot of money into training. There were no women investment bankers or registered representatives at the time. And I wanted to be a research analyst. So I finally convinced them that I wasn't going to start my family right away and that I could be an analyst. We had a very hot market actually in the region at that time. So I became an analyst but with the agreement that all of my research would be signed MC Nelson because they claimed that no one would buy stock on the recommendation of a woman.

O'BRYON: When her father recruited her to join Carlson, he was in his 70s and his thinking about a woman's role in business was rooted in another time.

NELSON: At that point he had accepted the fact that he liked to see him play a bigger and bigger role, at the same time that he hadn't reconciled this thing about my being a woman. So he was, he was as hard as anybody on me.

O'BRYON: When her father retired, she took the reins, then took to the skies. To celebrate becoming chairman, Nelson flew with the Thunderbirds. It was an experience that turned her world upside down, quite literally.

NELSON: I like to try to work with the people around me to create the world as we'd like it to be. I think it was Ghandi who said be the future you'd like, be the change you'd like to see in the world.

O'BRYON: Working with Nelson every day is her son Curtis, who runs Carlson's consumer group. But his leadership style is not quite the same.

CURTIS NELSON, COO, CARLSON CONSUMER GROUP: Everybody has their own style and our style is different in some ways. She is extremely participatory, likes to make sure to gather everyone's thoughts on certain topics and on decisions and it is an effective way of getting big buy in, but sometimes it takes a little bit longer. I tend to try to get buy in, but keep the process moving along a little bit more quickly sometimes.

O'BRYON: But still, he and his mother share the same family centeredness that's a hallmark of the firm.

CURTIS NELSON: This company is a family company and it will always be a family company and we do operate a little bit differently. We really consider people that work here part of our extended family.

NELSON: This the day that we did the groundbreaking and all the families brought their kids.

O'BRYON: To help employees take care of those kids, Nelson opened an on campus day care center. For her, this center is a labor of love.

NELSON: I remember when my first grandson was born and he had a new crib and all the things grandma's have and I went to take him out of the bed and the sun was coming in behind him so he looked really like an angel and I took him out of the bed and suddenly I just had this extraordinary insight that I just had a rush of love and I kept thinking, if I love you that much, I've got to love that child that's not being taken out of a crib lovingly today. Because somewhere on a street corner or a playground, those who are angry and left out are going to have their lives meet yours little one. And it's up to me to love you enough to love them so that that future can be a safer, better, happier place for both.

O'BRYON: The last company on that alphabetical list is the latest one to promote a woman to the chief executive officer's post. Anne Mulcahy took the job at Xerox in August after 25 years with the firm. As Suzanne Pratt reports, Mulcahy's leadership is facing some big challenges.

SUZANNE PRATT, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: It's been a long and hellish time for Xerox's Anne Mulcahy. In the last 15 months, she's been all consumed, trying to heal a company in chaos, a company struggling to survive. Her efforts have not gone unrewarded. Mulcahy was promoted to CEO after only a little more than a year as president and after spending virtually her entire career at the document company. Well, why do you think you got the top job here at Xerox?

ANNE MULCAHY, CEO, XEROX: Because I earned it.

PRATT: Mulcahy's appointment also earned her a spot on the short but illustrious list of female CEOs at "Fortune" 500 companies. She is number five.

MULCAHY: I'm certainly glad I was five and not one. I think it's been great to watch other women take over the helm at other companies and I've been really pleased to see that. I think it will be particularly rewarding when we don't have to count, number five and counting. So that would be a victory in itself.

PRATT: And even bigger victory for Mulcahy would be getting Xerox back in shape, not an easy task when you consider what the company has gone through. When Anne Mulcahy was suddenly promoted to president a little more than a year ago, things at Xerox were pretty bad. CEO Rick Thoman had just been fired. Customers and employees were equally disgruntled, but it would soon get much worse. By October of 2000, the company was facing a severe liquidity crisis. The SEC was investigating accounting irregularities and Xerox had just reported its first quarterly loss in 16 years.

MULCAHY: It was an incredibly intense period of time. It was Xerox 24 hours a day, seven days a week and certainly we had an idea of the challenges that we were facing but day by day, they seemed to be getting worse instead of better and certainly a convergence of circumstances that we affectionately refer to as the perfect storm.

PRATT: Former CEO Paul Allaire came out of retirement to weather that perfect storm and even though Mulcahy and Allaire had been partners in Xerox' restructuring, as leaders, they may be best described as opposites.

PAUL ALLAIRE, CHAIRMAN, XEROX: She's got a lot more charisma. People want or are more naturally, people can read her much better than they could read me. I tended to keep things a little bit closer to myself and share only when I wanted to share. With Anne, you know where she's coming from and how she feels and how she thinks. She makes it very clear.

PRATT: What is your leadership style, if you had to define it?

MULCAHY: Well, it's me. It's pretty natural. I have to say. For most people who know me, it doesn't change from occasion to occasion. I'm very direct. I speak my mind. I really develop very close working relationships with the team, but I think I probably would sum it up in terms of what you see is what you get.

PRATT: So far, Xerox employees seem to like what they're getting from Mulcahy. At her first town meeting with employees as CEO, she does something she says is critical to repairing Xerox, communicate. And that means lots of talking.

MULCAHY: I'm going to do it a little differently this time. I'm even afraid to repeat the question. The motto is, every boat floats on its own. We will not be subsidizing any business to another business.

PRATT: Mulcahy's direct, no nonsense leadership style is at first intimidating but it is her warm and friendly manner that ultimately wins over colleagues. Consultant and Xerox advisor David Nadler says people who work with Mulcahy are rarely disappointed.

DAVID NADLER, CHAIRMAN, MERCER DELTA: Anne is also a, has very strong personal leadership skills. People like to follow her. People like to work for her. If you talk to anyone who's worked for Anne, it's one of their best experiences. She's tough minded. She's very honest, but she's also seen as fair. And that's a great combination.

PRATT: Many on Wall Street seem equally taken with her.

JACK KELLY, SR., ANALYST, GOLDMAN SACHS: She has been viewed positively by the investment community. She had done a terrific job, a series of jobs actually leading up that to her current post, so I think people had a good feeling for her moving into the slot.

PRATT: Mulcahy's career path to the top job has been somewhat round about. She began 25 years ago in sales and has held positions in human resources, marketing and the small office business. Her eclectic resume made her promotion an easy choice for the Xerox board and its Chairman Allaire.

ALLAIRE: I think she's grown tremendously over the last number of years and she knows Xerox extraordinarily well. She's very bright. She has a good strategic perspective. She's very tough minded and has proven that she can implement as well as design strategic direction and she just has superb people skills.

PRATT: For all her accomplishments, Mulcahy is not cavalier about how tough it still is for women to break through barriers in corporate America. Two years ago, when Carly Fiorino was appointed CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HWP) Mulcahy wrote a newspaper essay about the glass ceiling. Today she feels it's still pretty thick.

MULCAHY: I think there's a lot of challenges out there and it's not broken and it's one of the areas of responsibility I feel as a woman leader, that you have to stay focused and be a spokesperson and make sure that you really take on that role of being a role model to other women.

PRATT: As for Mulcahy's own role models, they can just as easily be men.

MULCAHY: I've looked certainly to my experience at Xerox for lots of role models. Paul Allaire has been not just a role model, but a great coach and mentor over the years in terms of certainly leading Xerox for the decade of the '90s. I've worked with people that I have great admiration and respect for and have learned from lots of different leaders throughout Xerox and other companies.

PRATT: Do you think that the standards are higher for you because you're a woman?

MULCAHY: It's hard to say. I haven't ever focused on adapting myself to a higher step of standards. I've tried to stay very much in a results-oriented kind of approach so that there's less opportunity for those kinds of qualitative perceptions. But Xerox has been very focused as well on environment and diversity and it's been a great place to work with regard to quite frankly a level playing field.

PRATT: Somewhat tougher for Mulcahy is achieving that ever illusive balance between work and family, something she says has gotten tougher as her responsibilities at Xerox have grown.

MULCAHY: Up to 15 months ago, I was doing a pretty good job I thought, but certainly the last year plus has created a little bit of havoc in my life. I've always been very focused on balance. I'm married with two children and they're certainly the priority in my life and I've been fortunate that we've really worked together as a family and they're very supportive of what I do.

PRATT: Have you ever thought of leaving Xerox?

MULCAHY: I certainly had those thoughts along the way. I'm grateful I didn't yield to them, because this is such a great opportunity. But I think, I don't know too many people who haven't questioned that and I think particularly if you've got all of those responsibilities of family and spouse and job, there are points in time where you wonder whether it's all worth it.

PRATT: But you'd say it's worth it.

MULCAHY: It's worth it.

O'BRYON: Let's talk with two experts who have been involved in women's leadership issues for years. Our guest in New York is Sheila Wellington, president of Catalyst, the nation's leading nonprofit organization working with business to advance women. And in our Miami studios is Lois Levy, president of Lois Levy Enterprises, an executive development consulting firm. Welcome both of you to "NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT." First off, we have seen the stories of these two incredible women and their achievements, but Sheila, Catalyst studies suggest and as we've seen, Anne Mulcahy agrees, there is still very much a glass ceiling in terms of women reaching the top ranks of corporate America. Just how thick is that glass?

SHEILA WELLINGTON, PRESIDENT, CATALYST: The glass is pretty thick. There have been some cracks in the pane. There are five women CEOs, as Anne said, of the "Fortune" 500. That's a sturdy 1 percent. On the other hand, 20 years ago there were none. Last year there were two. Progress has been made, but it's painfully slow from a very low base.

O'BRYON: If you could give one or two reasons, what are they for the barriers.

WELLINGTON: Well, in Catalyst's vast survey research, what women tell us is that there are myths and stereotypes about women that still persist and they also say that women just aren't in those informal networks where they get information.

O'BRYON: Let's talk for a moment about our two case studies and how their management styles differ. Lois, what is your reading of the differences between Marilyn Carlson Nelson and Anne Mulcahy and their management styles?

LOIS LEVY, PRESIDENT, LOIS LEVY ENTERPRISES: I think the big difference is that if you listen to Marilyn, Marilyn starts talking about people immediately. She is really people centered and she's using people as the way to get to profit. The better our people are, the more talented our people are. This is the way we're going to do business and this is the way we want to operate. Anne is talking about her own capabilities as a leader. I don't hear her talking about the people within Xerox as the way that she's going to get to where she wants to go.

O'BRYON: Interesting. Sheila, what are your observations?

WELLINGTON: Seems to me that they're really in many ways quite similar. They're both warm. They're both comfortable in their skins. They both do talk about what it's like to be a woman, but their organizations are vastly different and each one of those women it seems to me is perfectly matched for her organization. One is a family-owned private business. The other one's a vast public business. Anne Mulcahy gets rated every single day when the stock market closes. That's very different from someone whose family actually owns the company.

O'BRYON: All right, so what can women in middle management or those who want to reach senior management, learn from these two women? Lois.

LEVY: I think it isn't so much women. I think it's about leadership in this country in general and the things that I would tell people to do is, you have to value people as the intelligent human beings that they are. You need to really expect everything from them and put it in writing so they know. You want to create time lines and milestones so that the whole company knows where it is and where it's going. You want to stay out of the way. I think one of the big problems we have today is talent doesn't get a chance to do what it needs to do. Help when people need help, instruct to correct and then applaud every time it's right.

O'BRYON: All right, are these concepts things that can work in both types of organizations that we've seen, the publicly traded company and the private company?

LEVY: I think that they can and I also think that Sheila's point was very well taken. I think in the private companies, there is a lot of room for behavior that would be viewed more skeptically in the public companies. But leadership is leadership. And good management is good manag