The back, and we would send you information. We will have a panel of 50 minutes. Well try to do 40 minutes of q a, or questions up here, and then followed by a short q a where you guys can ask questions. We are going to be recording this i guess, for cnn and so i guess we can still find out where we can see that on cnn when that will run. We do have a hashtag, wmgbea15 or, of course bea15. And we are thrilled to have our wonderful speakers. Ill start with Bethlam Forsa president of pearson learning services. She was managing director of learning services globally. Before joining pearson, she was executive Vice President of Global Product Development and operations at Houghton Mifflin. Bethlam is an active member in the new york city Startup Community and sits on the board of directors of librafy. We have madeline mcintosh, now president of Penguin Publishing group, Penguin Random house, where she oversees penguins adult publishing businesses in the u. S. Previously, maaed line served as the first president and coo of Penguin Random house u. S. , and prior to the merger of random house. We have lisa sharkey senior Vice President and director of Creative Development at hard per collins. Hard per collins. Harpercollins. She is a twotime emmy winner and former president of al roker entertainment as well as being a senior producer at Good Morning America and inside edition. Thank you all for participating today. I know youre all very busy. Lets get started with some questions about your leadership style. Bethlam could you start us off by talking about how would you describe your leadership style . Thank you lisa, and good morning, everyone. I would describe my leadership style as being very authentic, decisive, passionate about what i do and very much a change agent. Great. And, madeline . Well, i think i should start by saying we were noticing the way we prepared is scrambling things on paper. [laughter] probably over breakfast this morning. But when i was reading the questions aloud in my apartment morning my, one of my 11yearold sons said, oh, mommy, thats ease a city, youre a tyrant easy youre a tyrant. [laughter] thank you. But happily i am, hopefully, the colleagues here who have worked with me would not think that that rings true for me. [laughter] i think my style is, essentially, you know, i grew up as a very shy bookish girl who learned to compensate for the fact that i never really wanted to talk by being a really good listener. So i tend to really use my strength in listening, asking questions. My ideal is if i have really strong people working for me, and what i help do is get decisions made and help them kind of flourish. Great. And, lisa. Well, i would say my management style at home would be part tyrant [laughter] and part completely neurotic mother. But at work i would say that im, my management style would be Something Like a den mother. I consider myself someone whose job it is every day to help bring younger people to the forefront and to help teach them and train them in creativity and in knowing that their ideas are important and that they need to come up with no ones new ones on a regular basis. Great. The descriptions are very different than if we had some men up here. Do you feel you manage differently than men . Bethlam . Absolutely. I think there are inherent differences between men and women, and i think those are going to be absolutely apparent. I, before the Publishing Industry i worked in an industry where it was primarily dominated by men. When i was at accenture, i forgot the percentage very low percentage of women who make it to partnership and, you know this is normal not just for accenture but for other Investment Banking type of jobs, when they start the recruiting process where all of us come out of colleges or Business School and so forth, its about 50 50. And throughout the process you will see some kind of a weeding out if you want to use that word. And i think throughout that process because as i was coming up the ladder, so to speak i worked most of the time for men who were the partners a very small percentage of women were partners. Wiz lucky enough i was lucky enough, i worked also with a woman partner who was phenomenal but our style of management our overall approach on how we deal with clients or otherwise is very different. I think we sometimes tend to think men are much more decisive, and they make the big decision and so forth. Im willing to say like i think ill go head to to head with a man around being very decisive. So i think there are a lot of things that we do that are very different and sometimes i think women, we try to be like men and in my old age ive come to realize i dont have to do that. Im very comfortable with who i am with all my defects, but i think we do manage very differently. Great. Anyone else want to comment on that . Well, i came from a different industry, so i came from news where male bosses when i was coming up in news were known to throw typewriters across the room. It was, you know, and even as a woman growing up in the news business, it was a macho situation. As a mother with Young Children i sneaked down a back stairs so i could leave around 8 00 at night with the hope that maybe i would see one of my children off to bed. I will say that i think men and women are just as capable as being nurturing or too domineering and i dont necessarily see it divided down the lines of sex and more just personality types. I currently work at harpercollins which is my boss, michael morrison, whos a man and brian murray, a man theyre both wonderful leaders that dont throw typewriters or computers across the room. [laughter] and i previously worked for Jane Friedman in Book Publishing who i would say was more demonstrative in the terms of affectionate, you know, more somebody who would hug you when she sees you but still very strong leadership. And i think you can be a bad leader as a man or a woman but i do think women and i would agree with you its especially if youre trying to manage a family and a business you have to learn that juggle and, you know, give a busy person a task, and theyll get it done really quickly, and i tend to think that women can make decisions extremely quickly. Great. Well madeline lets go to the next question. How did you build your leadership skills . How did i build my well, can i just Say Something on last one . Sure. [laughter] i, you know, i feel this ive a been incredibly lucky to work in trade Book Publishing and, you know you come into publishing and, you know from different, clearly different sectors with very different gender balances. I dont think its just random house and penguin which have been the two places ive experienced. I think its generally true within trade Book Publishing that these are you know, majority female companies. And i think the leadership has been also very significantly populated by women. So in a way its hard for me to even think about well, is my style different because im a woman or would it be different if i were a man . And i absolutely have had extraordinary male bosses and terrible male bosses and extraordinary female bosses and terrible female bosses. So for me, i think i have a hard time kind of identifying the gender patterns just because ive had the luxury as probably a lot of people many this room have of working in a very female environment and thats i think, a strength of the industry for women. Great. And then just building your leadership skills. Do you want to building my leadership skills . How have i built my leadership skills. I think there was one particular seminal experience for me which was in my i guess i was in my late 20s and i was given this really big promotion to be the head of, this was doubleday so maybe at that point it was merger with random house, i cant quite remember. I was given this big promotion to be, essentially head of sales for a very large part of our publishing business. And, you know, i was in my late 20s, i had people reporting the to me who had been reporting to me who had been selling books since before i was born. And it was terrifying certainly to me. And my boss who gave me this opportunity, don weisberg, he really believed that i could do it and that or he at least was willing to take a chance. He probably had nobody else in mind now that i think about it. But he gave me a really long rampup to that big moment. Like he told me six months ahead of time, this is something i want to do and well spend this next period of time you shadowing me going into meetings. People arent going to nobodys going to suspect that, you know, you the 20something, whos doing online sales is going to be promoted to this. Itll just give you a really good chance to see whats going on. And still despite all that preparation the big day came and there were a lot of tears. They were not my tears but, again, some of these senior people who were going to have to report to me were like youve got to be kidding me. So i was definitely scared. And the most important piece of advice don gave me, and it has held true for me throughout, is the most important thing that these people are going to need from you is to make decisions. That doesnt mean you make them, you know haphazardly, it doesnt mean you make them when you dont have enough information, but the most important thing you can contribute to them is to whether its to help them make the decision or just to keep things moving forward. And i think that key element of the fact that really adds as a leader thats really what your responsibility is to do. And that ended up becoming something that i really relied on and i think developed as a strength that helped me through my later parts of my career. Great. And, bethlam would you like to comment on how you developed your skills . Yes. I will say through trial and error. I failed, i learned from it. [laughter] there was no perfect formula. So it is through that process in terms of some of madeline, i grew up in accenture, very much a different approach. And, you know people took risk on me, and i learned to take risk on others. But, i mean kind of similar situation as you is i felt like at the beginning i needed to know everything and make sure i cover everything and so forth. But with time im like, its okay, i dont have to know everything. In fact, i dont. I try to learn from others. I try to leverage my strength and use that as a way to make decisions or enable a discussion so that were all in making the decision together. But i really finish it was a trial and error. Very good. Lisa, any comments . I really had to learn to soften my personality. In news i especially producing local news, its really hard core, and youre sort of on the line. And if something goes wrong, you have millions of people that are just looking at a television with nothing on the screen. And so i was a screamer, and i came up with screamers. And over time i realized that that was pretty offensive to people, and i really when i switched into Book Publishing after more than 20 years in another industry, i asked my bosses to, please, connect me with somebody that would teach me the ropes and teach me what Book Publishing was about. And this woman named christine hunt who was amazing, she sat with me once a month, and we discussed the way in which management in Book Publishing works. And its a more genteel industry, and i would say that its, it was really helpful for me. And now as the parent of two college graduates, ive been trying to inform them to teach them to do things not the way i did them. And especially one of my sons whos in real estate development, i said, you know, you really have to learn the manage up as well as manage down or manage across. And that was something that i never realized. I thought that was sucking up. But, actually, its just as important to get to know the people at one two and three levels above you as it is to get to know your peers and that is something, if i had to do it all over again i would have paid much closer attention to. Well, you mentioned sounds like you had a nice mentor when you went into publishing. Madeline or bethlam, would you like to talk about mentors or people influential in your career . I mean, i mentioned don weisberg whos now head of penguin young readers. Its great were now both working at penguin. But he absolutely was, was a seminal figure for me very early on and its absolutely, i mean i think people who know me and don would not necessarily say we have similar styles or personalities or anything like that. Its just that he, for whatever reason saw potential in me and kind of forced me to think bigger about what my future could be in a way that i really dont think i would have taken the leaps that i did if not for him. Yeah. In terms of a mentor, i was lucky enough, as i said, people took a lot of risks on me. And i felt that they were taking a lot of risk. One individual was the president of harcourt, and i was working at accenture. I was a partner at accenture. He recruited me and hired me to be the publisher of the School Acquisition division. Think about how different granted, i had a lot of background in the Publishing Industry and so forth but, still, it is a different approach. My background being in strategy and technology and overall content and transformation of an industry. He basically saw that i could parlay that into joining in a Publishing Organization and being the publisher of the school division. So i took that role. And, you know, it was a huge risk he took. He was a phenomenally, a great mentor, somebody who had a lot of high expectation but gave you complete freedom which helped me to fail but in a much more padded and easier way so that i could succeed and learn from that. And it was, frankly, transformational in terms of what it did for my career and forever will always be thankful for what he did. And as they say the rest is history, but i had that opportunity. Great. Now, we hear a lot about the Glass Ceiling. Lisa, would you like to comment . Did you ever feel like there was a Glass Ceiling in your industry or in your work . I actually never experienced the Glass Ceiling. I felt as though hard work and street smarts and book smarts were going to get whomever was going to get up to the top there and i did not experience that at all. Good. Good to hear. And now what about personal and professional sacrifices that are necessary . Obviously, you all work very hard. I know, i tried to get them on a conference call, it was impossible. [laughter] so shall we start with bethlam . What kind of personal sacrifices might you make to be a president of a giant company . Like these ladies and im sure a number of people in the audience we all make sacrifices regardless of where we are in our career. I think thats the basic. Ill tell you a story. After i started working at after the merger of harcourt and houghton, so i was running basically, the Massive Organization for Houghton Mifflin harcourt, and i was pregnant with my son, and i was just, frankly, terrified to say i just took this new role and to say oh, my god im pregnant. Again, i felt this huge stress that i, it was like something i did. [laughter] wrong [laughter] it was something i did wrong. I was really terrified and i remember for the first three months i was trying my hardest to hide the fact that i was pregnant. I mean, this is, like 2009, people. But i was. And this is the pressure i put on myself, not that anybody else said anything. And i remember i sat down with my boss and i was like, okay, i am pregnant. I can he goes, well, gee i know. You stopped drinking coffee, and youre eating more than everything you eat. [laughter] so im like okay, thank you. But the first thing i said is, like im telling you im going to give birth, and im going to come back right away. I had never given birth, i had no idea what i was committing myself to. But i did do that. I did come back two weeks later. Literally, exactly two weeks later. Probably didnt even know what i was doing at the time but i did feel a commitment that i needed to work and i needed to come back. Nobody else put that pressure on me, but i did. It was a sacrifice that i made for what i felt was the right thing that i must do for my career. Came back two weeks later and, for the record the women here it was a tough delivery i had. And i remember my first meeting was with an author, dr. Bennett as a matter of fact, who was the former secretary of education, our first meeting coming out of that two week if you call it, you know, ma alternative i leave. Maternity leave. I did not see my son because i had a global role. I was traveling all over the world when i had an infant at home. Did not see him. Didnt, you know, all these magic moments, a lot of us as mothers have, did not have those. So sacrifices, absolutely. But it was something that i felt like i needed to do. I think its my personality most likely and how driven can i am that did get me to that. But what i would like to say is while, you know, the entire world tells us we can balance multiple things and so forth,st hard. I its hard. I felt that i was very lucky to have a 5yearold. I was very lucky that i had a very strong support system. And as a result of that, the sacrifice maybe never felt as much as a sacrifice even though they were. But i think that having a very Strong Network of, you know, having a very strong family, my husband and so forth, didnt feel as bad. But it was a sacrifice. Madeline. I would say not so much a sacrifice, but just the, certainly the feeling of juggling which is not in this day and age, i dont think, is a female feeling. I think everybody who works and has children, male or female feels that. And the my, i have twin sons who are now 11, and one of them thinks im a tyrant. [laughter] but when i gave birth and i took a, you know, the full Maternity Leave but at that point my husband was still wor