Take This Job and Love It

By Martha Duffy

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.

But the primary point-of-sale for quality cosmetics like the Estee Lauder line is department stores, and they are in trouble. There are too many of them, and, as a result of the takeover fever of the late '80s, they are overburdened with debts that must be serviced by cutbacks. Since cosmetics and scents are impulse items whose sale depends on pampering the customer, they are vulnerable at understaffed counters.

Then there is the company's own situation. Estee, a superb saleswoman, is far less active now. And as Leonard points out, "Arden, Rubinstein, Revson -- when they passed on, so did their businesses. Others couldn't carry on in the same style." So the image must be altered from the mildly staid, middle- aged profile that the line has.

Burns should be about ideal to lead this tricky transition. There is nothing Old World about her. Her notion of a good time is to go skiing in her native Colorado. Unlike the Lauders, Burns doesn't have any celebrity friends. Although Leonard, a keen businessman, "plays his cards close to his vest, and he has 16 vests under that one," as a friend puts it, she is open and direct -- if very tough indeed. The old line about "what you see is what you get" fits her perfectly. The company is now hierarchical. Says Burns: "My vision does involve a lot of change, but when I get my restructuring done . . ." Odds are there'll be a lot less structure.

It is nearly impossible to find criticism of her. To most colleagues she seems like a relief, a reminder that in the right hands, business life can be simple. No plots, no paranoia, no last-minute surprises. Instead she imparts a sense of discovery to almost everybody she works with, a feeling that anything is possible -- at least for her team. Nowadays she is besieged by crude questions like "What makes you so successful?" Her old Bloomingdale's boss, Lester Gribetz, may have part of the answer: "It's important that she is not a New Yorker, and she doesn't have their brashness, aggression and hostility. She's a frontier girl."

Burns spent a lot of her childhood in Cripple Creek, Colo., the ghost of a gold boomtown. Robin had the run of it. "It was such a great place to live," she says, with a glazy gaze out her Manhattan window. My mother could just pick up the phone and ask the operator where I was." Her father moved out when she was three. She had little contact with him after that. Gribetz might have added her mother Bettina to the reasons for Robin's success. A Southerner by origin, "she is the original steel magnolia," says Burns, who is still very close to her. Bettina can't say enough about her only child. A favorite story involves the girl's refusal to lace up her tennis shoes. When the mother insisted, pointing to the safety factor, the tot removed the shoestrings completely. "She was showing me a better way," sighs Bettina, "and I had to agree." One day in primary school, a report card arrived with a poor grade in deportment. Bettina went to see the teacher. "Well, Robin finishes her work paper first and then helps the slower kids," came the reply. "She has to learn that they must do it on their own." These fond tales reflect Bettina's neat editing eye. Robin's enterprise and her eagerness to share what she knows turn up again and again.

By her high school days, the family had moved to Colorado Springs. There wasn't much money around -- the bungalow Burns lived in would probably fit into her current office -- but you could set a sitcom at Cheyenne Mountain High in the '60s. There were "keggers" (beer parties) and "woodsies" (gatherings in a nearby park) set to Simon & Garfunkel and the Beach Boys. Her old pals remember her as a lively girl, just the kind you'd like to take for a spin in your first fire engine. She did seem to figure things out fast and was aware of a wider world. "She taught me french kissing," says a classmate, Gordon Riegel, "not because she was fast, but because she read about it in some magazine like Vogue and was curious."

To her classmates' astonishment she left the West to go to Syracuse University, although she had never heard of it before a recruiter showed up at Cheyenne Mountain. Just curious, as usual. She did a double major in education and business. Teaching, she decided, was not for her: "The kids were great; the red tape was horrible." But college increasingly became an assignment to complete. The world of part-time jobs was more real than the lecture hall, and inevitably, New York City beckoned.

In 1974 there was pressure to hire women, and blue-chip firms recruited aggressively on campus. "It really turned me off," says Burns, who backs several feminist causes but can compete very nicely on her own. Instead she chose Bloomingdale's state-of-the-art executive-training program and burned up the syllabus. "I worked 10 hours a day, seven days a week," she says, "but it was exhilarating."

Then came window coverings, more fun than a ramble around Cripple Creek. "They wanted to get more aggressively into imports, so here I am, 23 or 24, on an eight-week trip to Europe, India, Japan. I truly thought I'd gone to heaven." Same thing with decorative pillows: "I had a collection of Seurat and Van Gogh made out of needlepoint in India. I merchandized them as art, not pillows -- $500 apiece. They sold out in one day, so I didn't have time to enjoy the fun." And lamps: "You pick up shells, antique tea cans, baskets, boxes, anything. They wire them in the warehouse, and then you say, Now how much do you think we can sell this for?"

Her globe trotting ended and her big-time career began when she was promoted into fragrances. Bloomingdale's vice president Myron Blumenfeld, now retired, was "astonished at the way she could handle people older and more sophisticated than she was. She put issues in front of people and never let the meeting wander."

Robert Taylor, who ran Minnetonka, knew she had what he desperately needed. The Calvin Klein line had no marketing strategy, wretched relations with stores and a disgusted muse, Klein himself. In fact the designer refused to meet Burns for several months, but she went about her job anyway. To her the Obsession launch remains the high point of her professional life. She had, as usual, put together a team that was superenergized and fanatically devoted. Kim Delsing, Burns' successor as Calvin Klein president, says, "It was like the kids running the zoo. Robin had the ability to let her mind go -- What if we did this? What if? What if?"

Going from Klein to Lauder, says industry observer Alan Mottus, "is the difference between turning around a speedboat and turning around a tanker." Carol Phillips, who virtually invented the money machine known as Clinique, notes that "she must deal with the baggage of years of company success and go through the line with a butcher knife, tailoring and trimming."

For this she will need a free hand, but most observers think Leonard Lauder is ready to give it to her. There have been a couple of blowups, caused by the fact that Burns is tougher with stores than he is, but mostly, as an old-timer says, "Leonard gets a ton of vitamins out of having her around."

Where does Burns get her own zip? "She has a crazy appetite for this business," says Phillips. She does. Julia Horowitz, a pal from Syracuse days, remembers a vacation they took a few years ago on Antigua: "Every day at 1 o'clock she would go into town and spend two or three hours on the phone with the office."

Horowitz also knows the quieter side of Burns. "My parents died 10 years ago," she says, "and afterward I really fell apart. Of all my family and friends, she was the one who hung in there." In fact Burns has had a couple of setbacks in life, both impossible to conceal, and handled them with admirable determination and reserve. In high school her face was badly cut in a car crash, and it took several operations to repair the damage. Years later, just before she was to be married to a man well known in the cosmetics business, his company announced that it was suing him for fraud. Says Burns: "I can tell you that these were painful situations. But I am a great believer in self-management, that you must survive and find a way to play the hand you are dealt."

With the switch to Lauder, she will have a more visible profile in the business world and the media. That, according to her feminist friend Gloria Steinem, is ideal. "I think of Robin as the new woman executive -- a lot more individual in dress and behavior, with a sense of humor, a whole person. That's why both men and women love working for her. She makes it fun for the individual."

Frontier girl? New woman? As Burns sees it, a little of both. "Cripple Creek was a free-spirited place to grow up," she says. "Neither my mother nor the community ever revealed any prejudice to me, and I never saw any until I got to Syracuse." So what others may see as new is natural to her. "It's hard to have emotional ties in a new job," she observes. "What I got at Vassar was a bonding to Lauder. You know why? What we all wore there was sweats and T shirts. Everyone. I loved that equality. It's what makes work fun."