The competition is tough, but the Red Team has the edge in both cunning and sheer gall. It kidnaps a member of the Orange Team and delivers her, bound and gagged, aboard a clanging fire truck to the opposition. What a bold move! What a great promo! The playing fields of Lauder University have not witnessed its like.
The Reds' triumph will gain them major points for strategy as well as showmanship. For their sunny blond captive is Robin Burns, 37, president and CEO of the Estee Lauder USA cosmetics company and -- at an estimated salary of $1.5 million a year -- probably the nation's highest-paid woman executive.
In truth the Reds are strictly a pickup team, and Ole L.U. is a seasonal setup on the Vassar College campus in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. The idea is to give selected employees a week-long immersion in exercise, self-improvement, competition techniques and the Lauder corporate outlook.
It's like Burns ("I have a very, very hands-on approach") to go through the whole drill -- the 5:45 a.m. hikes, the Win/Win negotiating workshop, the Take This Job and Love It seminar. She could write the book on most of it. She does not need a dawn trek to command explosive animal energy all day. Her touch at negotiating is magic -- people can't seem to tell whether they have come out of a deal with gold or dross, but whatever it is, they're happy. In her professional career Burns has held three positions and adored each one. Add the dozen-odd part-time jobs that she worked at from age 13 on to put herself through school -- she loved them all.
She sprinted up the business ladder at Bloomingdale's to a vice president's rung and did it in the '70s, when Bloomie's was the hottest and most innovative department store in the U.S. In 1982 she took over the moribund Calvin Klein fragrance business. While the public may not know who Robin Burns is, it has certainly heard of Obsession and Eternity, the two perfumes she launched with consummate marketing strategy and blatantly sexy ad campaigns.
Last year Minnetonka, the parent company of Calvin Klein cosmetics, was sold, and Burns found herself more responsive to Leonard Lauder's five-year professional courtship to join the family-owned, $2 billion-a-year business. The wooing had been fun on an international scale -- the occasional lunch in the Bois de Boulogne, the duets of shop talk, the tycoon's equivalent of ardor ("I am a patient man"). But this woman knew what she wanted: "I am not interested in profit improvement, acquisitions or expansion. A place looking for that won't benefit from what I bring. I am a risk taker, and it's a luxury not to have shareholders and Wall Street pressure."
! Taking over at Lauder in 1990 is a challenge. The 44-year-old company is the biggest American cosmetics maker. Its roots are in the Hungarian recipes for face creams that the legendary Estee, now in her 80s, brewed up. Her son Leonard, 57, turned these potions into a huge international business, which includes perfumes, as well as divisions like Clinique and Aramis. He is president of the parent company and the one to whom Burns reports.