Marjorie Scardino

Age: 61

WHAT SHE DOES
Scardino leads Pearson, the U.K.-based media conglomerate.

WHAT SHE’S KNOWN FOR
When Scardino took the helm of Pearson in 1997, the clubby boardrooms of Britain weren’t quite ready to welcome the first woman to head one of the country’s 100 largest publicly-traded firms. The brash American, born in Arizona and raised in Texas, immediately told investors she would double Pearson’s share price within five years. Then she badly missed her target.

She pushed on, and since that rocky time, Scardino has dodged further bullets to become one of the longest-serving C.E.O.’s of a major British company. By all accounts, she remains the same down-to-earth, straight-shooting optimist she was when she first took over. But after having long been considered an outsider in British society, Scardino has become the consummate insider, even being named a Dame Commander of the British Empire by the Queen in 2002, the female equivalent of being knighted.

So what changed? The profits. The past five years have been good, and 2006 was particularly nice for Pearson, which had record profits of $1.18 billion and saw its stock price return to its 1997 high.

Scardino turned things around by streamlining Pearson’s operations. She sold off the company’s stakes in such noncore businesses as the Madame Tussaud wax museums, the investment bank Lazard, and the satellite network BSkyB.

Instead, she invested heavily in education companies. Pearson purchased Simon & Schuster in 1998 for $4.6 billion. Two years later, Pearson acquired National Computer Systems, a Minnesota testing company, for $2.5 billion, which was raised through what was then the largest issue of stock by a U.K. company. Scardino has held on to the Financial Times, Pearson’s best-known asset, asserting that it would be sold only “over my dead body.”

HOW IT ALL BEGAN
Scardino comes by her Texas twang honestly, having grown up in Texarkana, where she rode in rodeos. Her first exposure to the media business came after college, when she took a job for the Associated Press in Charleston, West Virginia. She married her husband, Albert, shortly before earning a law degree from the University of San Francisco in 1975. In 1978, they moved back to his hometown of Savannah, Georgia, where they owned a weekly newspaper. Albert’s crusading editorials won him a Pulitzer in 1984, but the attendant controversies cost the paper advertising and it folded in 1985.

The couple then moved to New York, where Albert worked for the New York Times and Scardino became deputy chief executive of the Economist, of which Pearson owns 50 percent. She more than doubled the magazine’s U.S. circulation and soon moved to London to take the Economist’s top job. There, she impressed Dennis Stevenson, then Pearson’s chairman, who tapped her for the C.E.O. spot.

WHERE SHE’S GOING
With chairman Dennis Stevenson having retired in 2005, some say it is time for Scardino, 60, to follow suit. But she steadfastly defends her record and insists she isn’t going anywhere.—Jeremy Kahn