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AGENDA
THE CORNER OFFICE
Text by Dana White Photo by Chris Ware
GLASS ACTION
As CEO of Schott North America, Linda Mayer brings a refreshing transparency to the Elmsford-based American division of tLhe German glass conglomerate.
Linda Mayer loves factories. She loves the hard hats and steel- toed boots, the sound and fury of American industry. After earning her MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1980, she passed up a career in finance for manufacturing. “I didn’t like the idea of making money on money, where money was the prize,” she explains. “I’m a builder, a creative person. I like the tangible product. I like seeing people involved in making things. I emotionally connect with it.”
That connection was forged at Kohler Co., the $4.7 billion Wisconsin-based company renowned for its high-end plumbing fixtures. It was her first job out of Wharton. Not long after arriv- ing there, Mayer toured the cast-iron foundry where Kohler makes its sinks and tubs. It changed her life. “It was elemental—these big furnaces, that big fire. I thought it was awesome.” She wanted a job on the shop floor but ultimately went into marketing “because that was the heartbeat of the company in terms of making decisions on strategy and business.”
Over the course of her career, Mayer has taken her connection for building and marketing stuff to John Deere’s Homelite division (chain- saws, weed whackers, leaf blowers); Moen Incorporated (faucets); Rexnord Corporation (transmission components for heavy machin- ery); and Terex Corporation (lift systems for construction vehicles). A mother of three daughters, she has hopscotched around the country along the way—Charlotte, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Seattle—and now finds herself in, of all places, Elmsford. This is where Schott AG, a German manufacturer of high-tech glass components and specialty materials, with revenues of nearly $4 billion annually, has its North American headquarters, in the Taxter Corporate Park off Route 119.
Schott AG is a 125-year-old company that employs more than 17,000 people in 42 countries. Its various business units supply highly specialized components to the household appliances, optics, archi- tecture, automotive, and pharmaceutical industries, among others. Mayer has been president and CEO of Schott North America since April 2011. The first woman to hold the job, she oversees 2,800 people and 13 factories in the US, Canada, and Mexico, as well as the shared services for these facilities (HR, IT, R&D, and so on).
Mayer readily admits she didn’t know much about the glass industry before coming here, and there is far more to know than one might think. Schott’s glass products have as much in common with your average windowpane as a SpaceX rocket has with a paper airplane. A sampling of the American-made products is showcased in the lobby. There are fiber-optic components for night-vision goggles and small LED lighting strips for retail display cases; a pint-sized ver- sion of its Ceran cooktop; and complex glass-to-metal seals that help keep nuclear plants and submarines from springing leaks. There are syringes and vials and bulbs. In the display of architectural products, there are squares of brightly colored glass for walls and a piece of ribbed glass for shower doors. There’s also a piece of thick, opales- cent glass that offers the diffuse and shadowless light of a cloudy day. It is particularly suited for ceilings.
Mayer does know a thing or two about glass ceilings, including the metaphorical kind. She has bumped up against that invisible bar- rier to advancement: “It’s real, and it’s hard. It hurts.” But she holds no grudges. She knows the best glass cutter is a multi-tool composed of work ethic, professionalism, empathy, and authenticity.
This last attribute is a major strength, says Mike Mrotek, who worked with Mayer at Rexnord and Terex. “I’ve worked with senior- level women in the industrial space, and they try to fit in, try to be one of the good ol’ boys, and it typically doesn’t work. But Linda was never like that. She never compromised her values or her belief sys- tem; she is who she is. She lets her capabilities and accomplishments speak for themselves.” ➔
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