As Fidelity Investments’ newly named CEO, Abby Johnson is one of the most powerful women in finance. She’s also one of a growing number of daughters who are proving to be as adept at running businesses as their powerful fathers. Caroline Ghosn, the CEO and co-founder of Levo League, is the daughter of Nissan/Renault chief Carlos Ghosn. In the political realm, there’s Lauren Bush, the CEO of FEED Projects, and Chelsea Clinton, who’s now helping to run her parents’ foundation. Producer Megan Ellison, whose Annapurna Pictures backed projects like American Hustle and Zero Dark Thirty, is the daughter of Oracle’s Larry Ellison. The third-generation CEO of the Cisneros Group media and real estate conglomerate is not the eldest son of Gustavo Cisneros, but his youngest daughter.
Some women have famously defied the odds to run their fathers’ companies, from Playboy Enterprises’ Christie Hefner to Carlson Companies’ Marilyn Carlson Nelson. What’s unusual now is the number of daughters on the rise. About 69 percent of business owners no longer see first-born sons as natural contenders for the top job, according to a global study released this month by Pitcher Partners and Swinburne University. As men get more involved in raising children, and more comfortable with seeing women in leadership roles, they naturally exert more influence on their daughters’ career choices.
In Abby Johnson’s case, the road to the job long occupied by her father Ned has been a long one. Since joining Fidelity as a research analyst in 1988, she has worked in every major unit, steadily adding more responsibilities as she rose to president. Even so, it was never a given that she’d step into the CEO spot, as her 82-year-old father didn’t formally identify a successor. Had her name not been Johnson, it seems clear that her track record and breadth of knowledge about the firm would have made her the leading candidate in any case.
For other women, the ascent to CEO has proven to be more swift. Adriana Cisneros took over Cisneros Group a year ago at the age of 33. She’d worked about eight years in the media and real estate conglomerate founded in Venezuela by her grandfather, and also went through a special leadership program at Harvard to help prepare her for the top job. When asked in 2011 why he’d identified Adriana over her two older siblings, Gustavo Cisneros said she was the most suited to the job. His son Guillermo manages the family’s finances while his other daughter Carolina is raising five children. Adriana, he said, had been interested in the business since she was a teen. “She’s a leader,” he said. “I knew that early on.”
