Women in Business

WOMEN IN BUSINESS 

(By David Evans)

I.  Chapter one: Coco Chanel

‘I entered a world, the world of fashion, where women had little place.’

Hanae Mori

One afternoon in 1961, a young Japanese woman called Hanae Mori arrived at the offices of the great fashion designer Coco Chanel, in Paris. Hanae was nervous. She had always admired the pictures of Chanels clothes that she had seen in fashion magazines at home in Japan. She had also read a lot about Chanel and knew that she was a person with very strong opinions. Now Hanae was going to ask Chanel to design a suit for her. As she sat and waited for her meeting, Hanae watched the women in the office come and go. Some wore stylish Chanel suits; others wore skirts and loose blouses with lots of beautiful jewellery.

‘What kind of clothes will Chanel suggest for me?’ Hanae wondered.

At last, Chanel’s door opened and Hanae went in to meet the great designer. Hanae was surprised when she first saw her. Chanel was much smaller than she had expected. And although she was now an old woman in her seventies, Hanae could easily imagine her as a beautiful young woman many years before.

Chanel looked at Hanae carefully and then said, ‘You have wonderful black hair. We must dress you in orange like the sun.’ Hanae thought for a moment. She didn’t want to be rude to such an important woman, but she didn’t agree with her at all. ‘I’m not sure about that,’ she said. ‘I like quiet colours.’

The two women discussed it for a few minutes and then decided that Chanel would make Hanae a black suit with orange at the edges.

When Hanae left Chanel’s offices, she knew that she had bought a suit that was just right for her character. But she had also got something much more important from her meeting with Chanel. Hanae had realized that she wanted to be a designer like Coco Chanel. Before she met Chanel, she had always thought that designer fashion was a man’s world. Now she knew that if Coco Chanel could succeed, then she could too.

Hanae went back to Tokyo and two years later started her own design company. Within thirty years, it had grown into a five-billion-dollar business.

When Hanae met Coco Chanel in 1961, she already had a lot of experience of the clothes business, although she had never worked in designer fashion before. Her interest in clothes had started when she was a child in a small village in Shimane in the south-west of Japan. Her family was traditional in many ways, but her rich father liked his children to be dressed in the latest European styles. Little Hanae always felt very different from the other village children, who arrived at school in their simple Japanese clothes while she wore an expensive suit from Paris or London.

As she grew up, Hanae often argued with her father about her future. He wanted her to be like him and to become a doctor, but Hanae wanted to study art.

‘Art?’ her father used to say. ‘Art is a wonderful hobby, but it’s not a real subject to study.’

In the end they agreed that Hanae would study literature, and so she left her family and started a course in Japanese literature at university in Tokyo. But before she could finish her studies, the Second World War started. Like many other women students, Hanae had to stop studying and go to work in a factory. Soon she realized that the war was going badly for Japan. Every night she heard the American planes above Tokyo and she listened for the sound of the explosions as the bombs fell on the city around her.

When the war ended in 1946, Japan had a lot of problems. Many of its cities had been destroyed, and millions of its people had been killed. But Hanae wanted to return to normal as quickly as possible. So she went back to university and finished her studies in 1947. At that time there seemed little chance that she would go into business.

The year before, Hanae had fallen in love with a rich young man called Ken Mori, whose family owned a factory that made cloth. They were soon married and it seemed that Hanae would become a housewife. Until the end of the Second World War, Japan had been a very traditional society and a woman was simply expected to be a good wife and a wise mother. At first, Hanae was ready to accept this situation.

‘I had no problem with becoming a housewife,’ she said. But it was soon clear that a life at home, looking after her husband and her family, was not for her. After just a few months, Hanae was bored. She started looking around for something to keep her busy.

In the late 1940s, Japanese society was slowly changing. In 1946, Japanese women had been allowed to vote for the first time and a few women had become politicians in Japan’s parliament. There were still very few Japanese businesswomen, but if women could become politicians, why couldn’t they also become successful in other areas? Hanae decided to try business.

She had always been interested in clothes, she loved art and she was married to a man who owned a cloth factory. So the clothes business was the obvious choice for her. Over the next two years, she learnt about designing clothes, cutting cloth, selling clothes and running a business. By 1951, she felt that she was ready to make and sell her own clothes. She started in a small way, making clothes for a few people, but then she had a piece of luck. An important Japanese film producer saw one of her designs and loved it. He called Hanae.

‘Could you make some clothes for my next film?’ he asked.

Hanae said ‘yes’ without even thinking about it.

Over the next six years, she made clothes for many Japanese films and worked with people like Yasujiro Ozu and Nagisa Oshima. In Japan it was a time when people were building the economy again after the war. They had high hopes for the future, and when they went to the cinema they wanted to see film stars who looked bright, strong and confident. Hanae’s clothes for Japan’s stars caught this mood perfectly. Her experience of working in the film industry was very important for her.

‘My eyes were opened to the world,’ she said. ‘I understood that there were many different types of women. I realized how men looked at women and how they loved them.’

By the time she arrived in Paris for her meeting with Coco Chanel, Hanae already knew a lot about the clothes business and had made a lot of money from it. But her move into designer fashion in the early 1960s was something quite new for her.

When Hanae returned from Paris, she travelled to New York to study European and American design. Then in 1965, she opened a shop in Tokyo to sell her own designer clothes. As Hanae’s business grew over the next few years, she noticed that the fashion industry was changing in important ways. Coco Chanel had always designed clothes specially for each customer; when Hanae Mori bought her suit from Chanel in 1961, she knew that she was buying something that had been made just for her. But the younger designers of the late 1960s were more interested in making clothes that were ready to wear. These could be produced in much larger quantities, which allowed fashion designers to expand their businesses. Now they could have many shops in countries all round the world. As a result, designer fashion became much more international.

Hanae was very comfortable with this change, because from the start of her work in designer fashion, she wanted to make sure that her business was international. She had her first fashion show in New York in 1965, and in the 1970s she started to have regular fashion shows in Paris too. The most important part of Hanae’s business was in Japan, where she had over seventy shops. But she also had three shops in Paris, and customers could buy her clothes in over a hundred places in the US.

She always tried to mix Eastern and Western ideas in her designs. She designed long dresses in a Western style which were covered with Japanese writing. She liked to use cloth which was decorated with Eastern pictures of flowers and birds. She made suits in a European style, but with collars like the ones worn by China’s Mao Zedong. In Japan, rich women loved her ideas and found that they could wear her clothes for all occasions: business, sport and parties. One of Hanae s greatest moments was the design of a wedding dress for Masako Owada when she married Prince Naruhito in 1993. But her clothes were popular not just with Japanese women, but with many rich Europeans and Americans as well, including film stars like Grace Kelly and Sharon Stone and presidents’ wives like Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton.

Just like Coco Chanel, Hanae also understood that success in fashion could lead to success in other industries. Chanel had shown that when people bought a bottle of perfume, they were buying more than a liquid with a nice smell. The success of Chanel No. 5 showed that people wanted perfume with a stylish image; they wanted perfume with a special name in a special bottle and they were happy to pay a lot of extra money for this.

When Hanae Mori produced her own perfume, she knew that customers would connect the stylish image of her clothes with the image of the perfume. She also realized that women, especially women in Japan, would trust her.

‘For the first time it’s a Japanese woman talking to Japanese women,’ she said.

But unlike Coco Chanel, Hanae Mori wanted to do more than just sell designer clothes and perfume. She also saw that she could use her name to sell children’s clothes, as well as books and magazines. In fact, Hanae discovered that her famous name and her skill in business could help her in many different areas. When she visited a famous restaurant in Paris, she liked it so much that she decided to start a similar French restaurant in Tokyo. Of course, it was a big success.

At one time, Hanae’s business made over $5 billion a year, and thousands of people worked for her. But her company was also a family business. Her husband, Ken, was involved in the financial side of her business from the early days and her sons and their wives also held important positions in the company.

Hanae is now over eighty years old and she left business life in 2004, but her ideas are remembered not just by her family and colleagues, but also by other successful Japanese designers like Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto. They learned a lot from her because, with her mix of East and West, Hanae was the first Japanese designer to become an international success. She is also remembered by other Japanese businesswomen. Japan has changed in many ways since Hanae was a bored housewife in the 1940s, but even today there are fewer women in top jobs in Japan than in other big rich countries. Hanae Mori’s life shows younger businesswomen that it is always possible to reach the top.

 

II.  Chapter two: Hanae Mori

 

‘I entered a world, the world of fashion, where women had little place.’

Hanae Mori

One afternoon in 1961, a young Japanese woman called Hanae Mori arrived at the offices of the great fashion designer Coco Chanel, in Paris. Hanae was nervous. She had always admired the pictures of Chanels clothes that she had seen in fashion magazines at home in Japan. She had also read a lot about Chanel and knew that she was a person with very strong opinions. Now Hanae was going to ask Chanel to design a suit for her. As she sat and waited for her meeting, Hanae watched the women in the office come and go. Some wore stylish Chanel suits; others wore skirts and loose blouses with lots of beautiful jewellery.

‘What kind of clothes will Chanel suggest for me?’ Hanae wondered.

At last, Chanel’s door opened and Hanae went in to meet the great designer. Hanae was surprised when she first saw her. Chanel was much smaller than she had expected. And although she was now an old woman in her seventies, Hanae could easily imagine her as a beautiful young woman many years before.

Chanel looked at Hanae carefully and then said, ‘You have wonderful black hair. We must dress you in orange like the sun.’ Hanae thought for a moment. She didn’t want to be rude to such an important woman, but she didn’t agree with her at all. ‘I’m not sure about that,’ she said. ‘I like quiet colours.’

The two women discussed it for a few minutes and then decided that Chanel would make Hanae a black suit with orange at the edges.

When Hanae left Chanel’s offices, she knew that she had bought a suit that was just right for her character. But she had also got something much more important from her meeting with Chanel. Hanae had realized that she wanted to be a designer like Coco Chanel. Before she met Chanel, she had always thought that designer fashion was a man’s world. Now she knew that if Coco Chanel could succeed, then she could too.

Hanae went back to Tokyo and two years later started her own design company. Within thirty years, it had grown into a five-billion-dollar business.

When Hanae met Coco Chanel in 1961, she already had a lot of experience of the clothes business, although she had never worked in designer fashion before. Her interest in clothes had started when she was a child in a small village in Shimane in the south-west of Japan. Her family was traditional in many ways, but her rich father liked his children to be dressed in the latest European styles. Little Hanae always felt very different from the other village children, who arrived at school in their simple Japanese clothes while she wore an expensive suit from Paris or London.

As she grew up, Hanae often argued with her father about her future. He wanted her to be like him and to become a doctor, but Hanae wanted to study art.

‘Art?’ her father used to say. ‘Art is a wonderful hobby, but it’s not a real subject to study.’

In the end they agreed that Hanae would study literature, and so she left her family and started a course in Japanese literature at university in Tokyo. But before she could finish her studies, the Second World War started. Like many other women students, Hanae had to stop studying and go to work in a factory. Soon she realized that the war was going badly for Japan. Every night she heard the American planes above Tokyo and she listened for the sound of the explosions as the bombs fell on the city around her.

When the war ended in 1946, Japan had a lot of problems. Many of its cities had been destroyed, and millions of its people had been killed. But Hanae wanted to return to normal as quickly as possible. So she went back to university and finished her studies in 1947. At that time there seemed little chance that she would go into business.

The year before, Hanae had fallen in love with a rich young man called Ken Mori, whose family owned a factory that made cloth. They were soon married and it seemed that Hanae would become a housewife. Until the end of the Second World War, Japan had been a very traditional society and a woman was simply expected to be a good wife and a wise mother. At first, Hanae was ready to accept this situation.

‘I had no problem with becoming a housewife,’ she said. But it was soon clear that a life at home, looking after her husband and her family, was not for her. After just a few months, Hanae was bored. She started looking around for something to keep her busy.

In the late 1940s, Japanese society was slowly changing. In 1946, Japanese women had been allowed to vote for the first time and a few women had become politicians in Japan’s parliament. There were still very few Japanese businesswomen, but if women could become politicians, why couldn’t they also become successful in other areas? Hanae decided to try business.

She had always been interested in clothes, she loved art and she was married to a man who owned a cloth factory. So the clothes business was the obvious choice for her. Over the next two years, she learnt about designing clothes, cutting cloth, selling clothes and running a business. By 1951, she felt that she was ready to make and sell her own clothes. She started in a small way, making clothes for a few people, but then she had a piece of luck. An important Japanese film producer saw one of her designs and loved it. He called Hanae.

‘Could you make some clothes for my next film?’ he asked.

Hanae said ‘yes’ without even thinking about it.

Over the next six years, she made clothes for many Japanese films and worked with people like Yasujiro Ozu and Nagisa Oshima. In Japan it was a time when people were building the economy again after the war. They had high hopes for the future, and when they went to the cinema they wanted to see film stars who looked bright, strong and confident. Hanae’s clothes for Japan’s stars caught this mood perfectly. Her experience of working in the film industry was very important for her.

‘My eyes were opened to the world,’ she said. ‘I understood that there were many different types of women. I realized how men looked at women and how they loved them.’

By the time she arrived in Paris for her meeting with Coco Chanel, Hanae already knew a lot about the clothes business and had made a lot of money from it. But her move into designer fashion in the early 1960s was something quite new for her.

When Hanae returned from Paris, she travelled to New York to study European and American design. Then in 1965, she opened a shop in Tokyo to sell her own designer clothes. As Hanae’s business grew over the next few years, she noticed that the fashion industry was changing in important ways. Coco Chanel had always designed clothes specially for each customer; when Hanae Mori bought her suit from Chanel in 1961, she knew that she was buying something that had been made just for her. But the younger designers of the late 1960s were more interested in making clothes that were ready to wear. These could be produced in much larger quantities, which allowed fashion designers to expand their businesses. Now they could have many shops in countries all round the world. As a result, designer fashion became much more international.

Hanae was very comfortable with this change, because from the start of her work in designer fashion, she wanted to make sure that her business was international. She had her first fashion show in New York in 1965, and in the 1970s she started to have regular fashion shows in Paris too. The most important part of Hanae’s business was in Japan, where she had over seventy shops. But she also had three shops in Paris, and customers could buy her clothes in over a hundred places in the US.

She always tried to mix Eastern and Western ideas in her designs. She designed long dresses in a Western style which were covered with Japanese writing. She liked to use cloth which was decorated with Eastern pictures of flowers and birds. She made suits in a European style, but with collars like the ones worn by China’s Mao Zedong. In Japan, rich women loved her ideas and found that they could wear her clothes for all occasions: business, sport and parties. One of Hanae s greatest moments was the design of a wedding dress for Masako Owada when she married Prince Naruhito in 1993. But her clothes were popular not just with Japanese women, but with many rich Europeans and Americans as well, including film stars like Grace Kelly and Sharon Stone and presidents’ wives like Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton.

Just like Coco Chanel, Hanae also understood that success in fashion could lead to success in other industries. Chanel had shown that when people bought a bottle of perfume, they were buying more than a liquid with a nice smell. The success of Chanel No. 5 showed that people wanted perfume with a stylish image; they wanted perfume with a special name in a special bottle and they were happy to pay a lot of extra money for this.

When Hanae Mori produced her own perfume, she knew that customers would connect the stylish image of her clothes with the image of the perfume. She also realized that women, especially women in Japan, would trust her.

‘For the first time it’s a Japanese woman talking to Japanese women,’ she said.

But unlike Coco Chanel, Hanae Mori wanted to do more than just sell designer clothes and perfume. She also saw that she could use her name to sell children’s clothes, as well as books and magazines. In fact, Hanae discovered that her famous name and her skill in business could help her in many different areas. When she visited a famous restaurant in Paris, she liked it so much that she decided to start a similar French restaurant in Tokyo. Of course, it was a big success.

At one time, Hanae’s business made over $5 billion a year, and thousands of people worked for her. But her company was also a family business. Her husband, Ken, was involved in the financial side of her business from the early days and her sons and their wives also held important positions in the company.

Hanae is now over eighty years old and she left business life in 2004, but her ideas are remembered not just by her family and colleagues, but also by other successful Japanese designers like Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto. They learned a lot from her because, with her mix of East and West, Hanae was the first Japanese designer to become an international success. She is also remembered by other Japanese businesswomen. Japan has changed in many ways since Hanae was a bored housewife in the 1940s, but even today there are fewer women in top jobs in Japan than in other big rich countries. Hanae Mori’s life shows younger businesswomen that it is always possible to reach the top.

 

III.  Chapter three:  Oprah Winfrey

 

‘I will never, never, as long as I’m black, I will never give up my power to another person.’

Oprah Winfrey

One morning in 1990, seventeen million Americans were, as usual, watching The Oprah Winfrey Show on TV. Oprah was talking to four ordinary people who had all had problems at work. They each told a story of greedy companies, selfish bosses and lazy colleagues, while Oprah asked them questions, smiled and listened carefully. Many of the stories were familiar to the people across the US who were watching Oprah’s show. Oprah’s viewers were mostly ordinary Americans, and many of them had experienced similar problems in their offices, shops and factories. To these people, Oprah was one of them. She had come from a poor family and she had had a tough childhood. She had had to fight for everything in her life. Oprah seemed to be someone who had suffered the same problems as they had and who saw things in the same way.

So everyone was looking forward to some fun when Oprah introduced her next guest. He was a writer on business called Harvey McKay. You could see immediately that McKay would be on the side of the bosses. He would try to explain why they often behaved badly towards ordinary workers. He would try to explain why the bosses earned such a lot of money, while ordinary people earned so little. And then Oprah would have her chance to ask him a few difficult questions. She would tell him how ordinary people felt about big business.

But Harvey McKay surprised everyone. He didn’t just talk and give answers; he started asking Oprah questions about her life.

‘It seems to me,’ he said to her after a few minutes, ‘that you’re a tough but fair boss.’

Oprah looked pleased and called to the people who helped her at the back of the stage, ‘I’m very fair, aren’t I, girls?’

For many of Oprah’s viewers, this was an interesting moment. They had watched her shows every day for many years and they thought they knew most things about her. They had heard about her problems as a child whose parents had separated. They had listened to her tell them about her relationships. They even knew what she ate and that she had often tried to lose weight. But Oprah was also a boss, and that idea was new and interesting to many of them. When they thought about it, it was clear that Oprah was much more than just a friendly woman on a popular talk show.

Oprah didn’t just appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show – she owned The Oprah Winfrey Show. That meant that she earned a lot of money from the advertisements in the breaks in the programme. She also owned the studios where they made her show. It was one of the best TV production centres in the US, and it had cost around $20 million. In fact, her company, Harpo Productions, gave Oprah control over her life and over the lives of many other people. In the entertainment business, Oprah’s love of control was famous; although she was very busy, she signed every cheque for her company, so she always knew exactly how every cent was spent.

It was perhaps strange that Oprah had become so interested in controlling her life; she had started in talk shows because she was so out of control. Her first jobs were as a newsreader for small radio and TV stations in the south of the US in the early 1970s. In those days, it was quite unusual for Americans to see a black woman reading the TV news, and in 1976 she was offered a job with a much bigger TV station in the city of Baltimore. Everyone thought she looked great on TV, but she didn’t have the right character to be a good journalist. She always became too involved in the stories. When stories were sad, she sometimes started to cry. When the stories were happy, she was clearly happy too.

‘This is crazy,’ her bosses said. ‘We have to find this woman another job.’

At the time, the TV station wanted to introduce a morning talk show; this would give the people of Baltimore a chance to appear on TV and discuss their opinions. The show was called People Are Talking. As Oprah clearly understood people so well, perhaps she would be the right person to present this programme. It could be a much better use of her skills than reading the news.

Many TV interviewers prepare questions before an interview and then don’t really listen to the answers of their guests during the show. But Oprah was very different. She was always interested in what people said. She had real conversations with the people that she interviewed. Soon, her bosses in Baltimore realized that Oprah was a star.

Oprah’s show was so successful that, after a few years, TV bosses in other parts of the country started to notice her. In 1983, a big TV station in Chicago asked her to present their morning talk show, A.M. Chicago. They offered her a four-year contract and said that they would pay her $200,000 a year. It was a lot of money, but Oprah was worried about moving to Chicago. She didn’t need to be, because when she arrived there she immediately felt at home.

‘Just walking down the street, I knew I belonged there,’ she said.

The people of Chicago also felt that she belonged to them. Her talk show started in January 1984, and it was an immediate hit. People loved her direct, personal style of interviewing and, within a few months, her programme was the most popular morning show in the city. Her boss at the TV station was very happy. ‘Oprah hit Chicago like a bucket of cold water,’ he said. ‘She just took over the town.’

Oprah was a star in one of the biggest cities in the US, but she now wanted to become a national star. Her opportunity came when she got a call from Steven Spielberg. Spielberg was one of the most important people in the Hollywood film industry; he had made several successful films, including E. T. He now wanted to make a film of a book by the black American writer, Alice Walker, called The Color Purple.

‘Would you like to play a part in the film?’ he asked her.

Oprah couldn’t refuse. The Color Purple was one of her favourite books, and she also knew that a part in a Hollywood film would make her famous around the world. But she was so busy with A.M. Chicago that she had no time to do any other work. Oprah wanted to be in the film so much that she was ready to leave her job with the TV station. But her business manager, Jeffrey Jacobs, had other ideas.

‘We can work this out,’ he told her. ‘The TV station will have to give you a break from the show.’

Oprah’s bosses weren’t very happy about the situation, but they didn’t want to lose her and they could also see that the film could bring a lot of public attention to her show. They agreed to give her a break of several weeks so she could work on The Color Purple.

Oprah was very grateful to the TV station, but the experience also helped her to see that there were a few problems with her present contract. If she really wanted to become a star, she needed more control over her life. But how could she get this?

Jeffrey Jacobs realized that if Oprah wanted to control her life, she first needed to get control of her programme. At that time it was only broadcast in the Chicago area, but he thought that it should be possible to broadcast it right across the country. He knew that when The Color Purple arrived in the cinemas, Oprah was going to become an international star. Lots of people outside Chicago would want to see her show.

Oprah decided to negotiate with the TV station. First, she made them change the name of the programme to The Oprah Winfrey Show. Then she asked for a share of the money from sales of her show to other TV stations. It was a great business decision. When The Color Purple came out, the film was a big success and everybody admired Oprah’s performance. As a result, they all wanted to watch her TV show too. One hundred and thirty eight TV stations across the US bought The Oprah Winfrey Show, and suddenly her earnings jumped from $200,000 a year to $30 million a year!

Oprah’s decision had made her rich, and it had also taught her an important lesson: control was needed for real success. So in 1986 she started her own company, called Harpo Productions. (‘Harpo’ is ‘Oprah’ spelled backwards.) At first, it was just to create publicity for her show and to answer letters from viewers, but Oprah had big plans for her new company. In 1988, she started to negotiate with the bosses of the Chicago TV station again. This time she wanted Harpo Productions to buy The Oprah Winfrey Show from them. The TV station bosses weren’t happy. They knew that Harpo would still allow them to broadcast the show, but the deal meant that they were losing control of their most important programme. As negotiations continued it became clear that, if necessary, Oprah was prepared to walk away from her show and go to work in Hollywood. The TV station bosses realized they had no choice; they had to give Oprah what she wanted.

As she now owned her own show, Oprah needed a place where she could record it. So she bought an old TV and film production centre in west Chicago for $10 million. She then spent another $10 million on new equipment to make sure that Harpo Studios was the best production centre in the city. Oprah could now make her shows at times which suited her and she could also make more money from them. But her studio allowed her to do much more than that. In 1988, Harpo Productions started making other programmes for TV, like The Women Of Brewster Place, and soon other companies were using Harpo Studios to make advertisements, films and TV shows.

In recent years Oprah’s business has continued to expand in many different areas of the entertainment industry. Ordinary people, especially American women, trust her and understand her ideas and beliefs. They see her as an honest person from a tough background who has fought for her success. This means that many people are happy to buy products that carry Oprah’s name. This has given Oprah many great business opportunities. In 1998 she created a company called Oxygen Media, which produces TV programmes for women and children and makes similar material for the Internet. She also has two women’s magazines and her own film company.

Today, Oprah is the most powerful woman in the world’s entertainment industry and also the most highly paid. Over the past few years, business magazines have regularly put her in their lists of top American businesswomen. At the same time, The Oprah Winfrey Show has continued to be as successful as ever – not just in the US, but also in many other countries around the world. Because Oprah is now in control of her life, she has also found time to act in several more Hollywood films. And as her business has grown, Oprah has become richer and richer. In 2004, the year of her fiftieth birthday, she became America’s first black billionaire.

 

IV.  Chapter four: Madonna

 

 

‘Life is short. My idea is that if I want to do something, I do it.’

Madonna

Most pop stars know that they don’t have a job for life. One or two successful records may give them enough money to have a good time for a few months. But the days of fast cars and long hot days by the swimming pool don’t last long. Most have returned to ordinary life by the time they are thirty.

But Madonna isn’t like that. She has been the world’s top female pop star since the middle of the 1980s. During that time she has had many hit records, she has acted in several films, and she has made millions and millions of dollars. She has won prizes for her work, but she has also been strongly criticized by politicians and religious leaders. She has married, separated and married again. She has had children and she has also shocked a lot of people with her wild behaviour.

Some people say that she has been successful for such a long time just because she is a wonderful singer and songwriter, but most agree that it isn’t as simple as that. Madonna has always made sure that she is in control of her life. She has made careful plans and has cleverly used the publicity that surrounds her. She also used her success to build a large international company that made big profits.

But Madonna started right at the bottom. When nineteen-year-old Madonna Ciccone arrived in New York City in 1978, she knew that she wanted to be rich and she knew that she wanted to be a star. But she came from an ordinary family in a town called Pontiac in Michigan, and she had just $35 in her purse. New York is no place for someone with no money, so her first years in the city were very tough. She lived in rooms in some of the worst areas, and she did all kinds of jobs to make money. Sometimes she worked as an artist’s model or a dancer. Sometimes she worked in restaurants and bars. But there were also days when she was so poor that she had to get her food from rubbish bags in the street.

During this difficult time, Madonna never forgot her dream of becoming a star. When she wasn’t earning money, she learnt to sing and play musical instruments. She also taught herself to write music. Soon she was writing and recording her own songs. In 1982, someone at a record company listened to her song ‘Everybody’ and decided to offer her a recording contract. It seemed that her dream had come true.

But Madonna quickly realized that she still had a long way to go. ‘Everybody’ was a dance song and it was popular in the nightclubs of New York, but most people in the US and the rest of the world didn’t notice it. This wasn’t good enough for Madonna. She wanted to find a way of getting everybody to buy ‘Everybody’!

In the days of Elvis Presley, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, the music industry had been mainly about making music and selling records. Pop stars were rarely seen on TV, so most people listened to the radio to hear the latest songs from the pop world. But in the early 1980s, that started to change. In 1981, an American TV company called MTV (Music Television) started to broadcast pop videos to teenagers and young people across the US. Their first song was ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ by the British group The Buggies. It was a perfect way to start, because the song’s words told the story of the future of the industry. Over the next few months, across the US, more and more teenagers switched off their radios and turned on MTV. Soon MTV had spread to a hundred countries around the world. The pop music industry became more international than ever before. Record companies realized that a good song needed a good video to become a hit. Because of this, they started to look for singers with their own style who could perform well on video.

Madonna knew that she could be this kind of star. She didn’t just have great songs and a great voice. She also had her own way of dancing and her own way of dressing. She had had some success in New York, but how could she now become a star on the world stage?

She decided that she needed a manager to help her. Because she was Madonna, an ordinary manager wasn’t good enough; she needed the best manager in the business. At that time, many people thought that the best manager in the pop music industry was Freddy Demann. He had worked with Michael Jackson for several years and had helped him to produce some of the most successful records of all time. Demann understood how to make videos, and he knew how to work with MTV. So Madonna just had to persuade him to work with her. But how?

In Madonna’s position, most young singers sent a manager a letter and a recording of their songs. But Madonna wanted to be different. She found out Freddy Demann’s address, walked straight into his office and performed her songs in front of him. Freddy was rather surprised, but he also liked what he heard and what he saw.

‘She had that special magic that very few stars have,’ he said.

Freddy Demann was the right man for Madonna. Her next song, ‘Holiday’, was also a dance song, but it wasn’t just a hit in New York. It was a hit on MTV; it was a hit across America; it was a hit right around the world. Freddy also found an opportunity for her to act in a Hollywood film. By the end of 1984, she wasn’t just a radio star; she wasn’t just a video star; she was a film star as well!

In the middle years of the 1980s, money and success seemed to be the most important things in the world. The American economy was doing very well and President Ronald Reagan had reduced taxes, so people in business had a lot of money to spend. In New York, young businesswomen wore big diamonds and beautiful dresses from the world’s top designers, and they loved to drive to parties in expensive foreign cars. Intelligent people from outside the business world were often asked, ‘If you’re so clever, why aren’t you rich?’ There was no answer to that.

During those years, Madonna’s face was always in the newspapers, her videos were always on MTV and her songs were everywhere. She had one hit record after another. One of her songs from 1985 seemed to explain the feeling of the time. ‘We are living in a material world,’ she sang. ‘And I am a material girl.’

Madonna had always wanted to be a public figure, but her boyfriend in the middle years of the 1980s had very different ideas. Sean Penn was a film star who had grown up in a famous family and, perhaps because of that, he hated newspaper photographers. This was a problem, because photographers followed Madonna everywhere. At first, Sean tried to push them away. But when they didn’t stay away, he hit them. And when they still didn’t stay away, he tried to frighten them with his guns. When Sean and Madonna got married in 1985, the newspapers sent helicopters so they could photograph the wedding. This was too much for Sean; he left the party and shot at them with his gun from the ground. In the end, Sean’s problems with the newspapers caused too many problems and he was sent to prison. Madonna separated from him after just a few years of marriage.

It was a hard lesson in the problems that come from too much public attention. But Madonna was one of the most famous women in the world and she loved the publicity. So when the drinks company Pepsi-Cola asked her to do an advertising campaign for them, she was happy to help. She negotiated with them for eight months and she was even happier when they agreed to pay her $5 million for a year’s contract.

On 2 March 1989, Madonna’s Pepsi advertisement was broadcast to around 250 million people in forty countries, and it included part of her new song ‘Like a Prayer’. The advertisement was great, but it was never seen again. That was because on 3 March, MTV showed Madonna’s own ‘Like a Prayer’ video. This showed Madonna in all sorts of strange situations inside a church. Religious people around the world were very angry with Madonna.

‘How dare she use our religion like this?’ they asked.

After some time, things got so bad that the Pope said that Madonna would not be welcome to perform in Italy. The people at Pepsi-Cola were very worried about the situation. Would this damage their sales? They didn’t want to wait to find out. They decided not to use Madonna’s advertisement again, although they let her keep their $5 million. But Madonna was the winner in another way as well. After all the talk about ‘Like a Prayer’ in the newspapers and on TV, everybody wanted to buy the record. It soon became a best-seller in thirty countries around the world.

After ‘Like a Prayer’, some people began to see Madonna in a new way. They realized that she wasn’t just an ordinary pop star. She had been at the top of her business for a long time; she was clearly a very tough person. In October 1990, the American business magazine Forbes put Madonna’s picture on its front cover and asked if she was the cleverest businesswoman in the US. It said that she had earned $39 million in the past year. It also said that she was very unusual because she was a star who ran her own business. The next month, Us magazine produced a list of the most powerful people in the entertainment industry. Madonna was at number one, above stars like Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Prince.

In 1992, she proved her skills as a businesswoman when she signed a deal with a value of $60 million with the big entertainment company Time Warner. The deal meant that she was now the boss of her own company, called Maverick. Maverick could produce records, videos, TV programmes and books, and it gave Madonna complete control over her own products.

She used this control to surprise everybody again. Maverick’s first product was not a record or even a video; it was a book of photographs called Sex. The book was unusual in many ways. Its cover was made of metal and it contained a CD of a new Madonna song. It also contained photographs that showed Madonna without her clothes on. In the weeks before Sex arrived in bookshops, journalists around the world wrote about the book. Many people thought she was making a big mistake. But Madonna was completely confident. She decided to print a million copies of the book and to sell it for a very high price – nearly $50.

When the book finally went on sale in October 1992, the big question at every fashionable party was, ‘Have you seen the Madonna Sex book?’ Some people were shocked by Madonna’s photographs, others were angry, but many just went out and bought it. It sold 500,000 copies in its first week!

But Maverick was not just an opportunity for Madonna to produce and sell her own books, records and videos; it also meant that she could work with other young musicians.

‘I want a real record label with real artists,’ she said. ‘I want artists who have a life of their own and who have a point of view.’

Madonna and her team of managers listened to hundreds of recordings from young singers as they tried to find the stars of the future. Everyone in the music industry agrees that this is very hard to do. Sadly, most young musicians fail. But Madonna quickly showed that she could find the right people and, in 1995, Maverick produced a record by the Canadian singer and songwriter, Alanis Morisette. She was a good choice; her record sold over 27 million copies around the world! Maverick also made records for hit films like Austin Powers and The Next Best Thing. In 1999, the company had sales of around $750 million.

Madonna is certainly not everyone’s idea of a typical businessperson; she will always be best known for her songs, her films and her way of life. But as computers, better communications and the Internet change business, ideas and style are becoming much more important than machines and materials. If you want to succeed in the twenty-first century, you need to be able to think of new products and new fashions, and you must also know how to use publicity and how to create the right image. In the factories and offices of the old business world, the bosses were nearly always serious men in dark suits and ties. But in today’s business world, women are proving that they are better managers and that they know more about the lives of ordinary people. In the expensive designer shops of Chanel and Hanae Mori, in the hundreds of Body Shops, and in the studios of Harpo and Madonna, the message is clear: modern women mean business!

 

 

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