Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The PUMP Act goes into effect, Vodafone gets a new CEO, and Mary Dillon is the rare woman to run two Fortune 500 companies. Have a meaningful Monday.
– Double duty. Last September, Mary Dillon became the CEO of Foot Locker, the struggling shoe retailer. In taking the job, Dillon achieved a milestone of sorts: The former Ulta Beauty CEO became the third woman ever to run two Fortune 500 companies.
Dillon, who led beauty retailer Ulta for eight years before stepping down in 2021, follows in the footsteps of Patricia Poppe, who served as CEO of CMS Energy and PG&E, and Meg Whitman, who led Hewlett Packard and eBay.
In a business world in which women currently run just 10% of Fortune 500 companies—and that 10% represents an all-time high—joining that club twice is a notable achievement.
My colleague Phil Wahba dives into Dillon’s career transition in a new story for Fortune. Instead of spending her post-Ulta life serving on boards or playing pickleball—her new passion, Phil reports—she chose to take on a second retail turnaround challenge. “I didn’t realize how much I would miss having one big thing to focus on and how much I would miss leading a retail company,” Dillon told him.
Mary Dillon, CEO of Foot Locker, photographed at its State Street location in Chicago.Akilah Townsend for Fortune Before she became one of the retail industry’s most successful CEOs at Ulta, Dillon made a name for herself as a marketing exec at PepsiCo and McDonald’s.
Her two CEO jobs have some parallels. At Ulta, she tripled the company’s revenue to $8.6 billion and revamped the retailer’s flailing e-commerce presence. At Foot Locker, she’s now presented with similar challenges, from improving the e-commerce experience to building a stronger loyalty program; the business is around the same size with a greater international presence. Dillon says that sneakers and beauty are both “growth categor[ies].”
As for her own career trajectory, Dillon had a simple realization that helped her decide to accept a second CEO job. “I realized how much I miss running a company, and don’t laugh when I say this, but I’m not getting any younger,” she says. “So I thought, ‘If I want to take another run at a company, now’s the time to do it.'”
Read Phil’s full interview with Dillon here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
The Broadsheet is Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Kinsey Crowley. Subscribe here.
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