DuPont’s Ellen Kullman on Her Risky Path to the CEO Job

I was in my early forties, running the $2 billion titanium dioxide business and managing about 6,000 employees. It was my dream job, and I was the first woman to lead a business at the vice-president level at DuPont. I was just back from vacation one Monday in late August 1998, when [then-Chief Executive Officer] Chad Holliday called me to his office with an idea about starting a consulting business around the company’s safety practices.

To leave an important position to go to nothing wasn’t something you did at DuPont. This is a company that historically defined importance and power with the size of the organization you led. Being asked to take on a special project was a way to move somebody out, not to develop them. Chad, in his Tennessee drawl, pushed those concerns aside. He made it very clear that it was O.K. to say no. Nobody would have ever known.