The Women of Berkshire Hathaway by Karen Linder

Author:Karen Linder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Moving Up the Food Chain

Marla’s next employer was Kraft Foods, where she began in 1989. She advanced through increasingly responsible positions during her 14-year tenure. She had nine different job titles during that time, which kept her hopping back and forth, moving her office between the Kraft headquarters in Northfield, Illinois, and the Glenview, Illinois, office, a distance of less than three miles. (Berkshire Hathaway is Kraft’s largest shareholder.)

Her first position was as senior financial analyst (Glenview). In this position, her responsibilities included overseeing the reporting and analysis of financial costs versus budget, comparing expense performance, and preparing budgets. She provided financial information to senior managers, impacting their decision making and project prioritization. In 1989, General Foods and Kraft merged to become “Kraft General Foods.” During the 1990s the company expanded to Europe and Scandinavia through acquisition of other companies and now markets its brands in more than 170 countries.

The current CEO of Kraft, Irene Rosenfeld, was president of Kraft Foods, North America, while Marla was there. Forbes magazine has named Rosenfeld one of the world’s “100 Most Powerful Women” and ranks her as second on its 50 Most Powerful Women in Business list.

Gottschalk started studying for her MBA in 1991 while still a full-time employee at Kraft. That year, she was named director of Financial and Business Analysis, and worked at the headquarters in Northfield. She graduated from J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, with a master of management degree in 1993.

For a year, from 1993 to 1994, Gottschalk was controller, sales (Glenview). Then in 1995, she became vice president of Finance for Sales and Customer Service (Northfield). In this position, she helped integrate four separate sales organizations necessitated by the General Foods–Kraft merger.

In 1996, she was named vice president of Strategy, Finance, and Systems, Kraft North American Foodservice (Glenview), and in 1997 she became vice president for Financial Planning and Analysis for Kraft Foods, North America (Northfield).

She decided to leave the realm of finance and took a job in marketing in 1999 when she was named vice president for Marketing and Strategy for the Kraft Cheese division (Glenview).

Of this transition to new ground, Gottschalk says, “Kraft wants you to be well-rounded. Even in finance, they expected we would be full business partners, making more input in decisions than just carrying the numbers. That’s why I wanted marketing and strategy experience. When I talked to Bob Eckert, then Kraft’s CEO of North America (now CEO of Mattel), he supported me. I moved over to the cheese division, Kraft’s largest.”6

From 2000 to 2002, Gottschalk was executive vice president and general manager of Post Cereals, the third largest cereal company in the United States behind Kellogg’s and General Mills. In this position, her responsibilities included brand marketing, trade marketing, marketing research, finance, consumer promotion, and human resources. She also shared responsibility for five manufacturing plants and a research development facility.

Gottschalk was named senior vice president of Financial Planning and Investor Relations of Kraft Foods in February 2002.

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