Profile about the Life and Leadership style of a business leader

Martha Stewart

Submitted to, Prof. Elizabeth Dominic SIM By, Cristee John S1 MBA 2012-2014

Martha Stewart was born on August 3rd 1941. She is an American business magnate, author, magazine publisher, and television personality. As founder of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, she has gained success through a variety of business ventures, that include publishing, broadcasting, merchandising, and electronic commerce. She has written numerous bestselling books and is the publisher of the Martha Stewart Living magazine. Besides all this, her syndicated talk show Martha, is broadcast internationally.

EARLY LIFE
Martha Stewart was born in New Jersey. She is the second of six children born to middleclass Polish Americans. When Stewart was three years old, the family moved to Nutley. When Stewart was ten years old, she worked as the occasional babysitter for the children of Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Gil McDougald, all athletes for New York Yankees. Micky and Merlyn Mantle had four sons, who Stewart watched and organized birthday parties for. She also began modeling. At the age of fifteen, Stewart was featured in a television commercial forUnilever. Stewart's mother taught her how to cook and sew. Later, she learned the processes of canning and preserving when she visited her grandparents' home in Buffalo, New York. Her cooking knowledge and abilities continued to expand as the elderly couple next door, who were retired bakers, taught her how to bake pies and cakes. Her father had a passion for gardening and passed on much of his knowledge and expertise to his daughter. Stewart was also active in many extracurricular activities, such as the school newspaper and the Art Club. During this time, Stewart began a modeling career. She appeared in several television commercials and magazines, including one of Tareyton's famous "Smokers would rather fight than switch!" cigarette advertisements.

Stewart graduated from Nutley High School. Martha Kostyra was a strong academic student, who attended Barnard College on partial scholarship. She originally planned to attend the College with a major in chemistry. She switched to art, European History, and later architectural history. During this time, she met Andrew Stewart, who finished his law degree at Yale Law School. She married him, on July 1, 1961, just after her sophomore year. She then later returned to Barnard a year after their marriage to graduate with a double major in History and Architectural History After she graduated, she continued her successful modeling career and did commercials for Breck, Clairol, Lifebuoy soap, and Tareyton cigarettes. Then in 1965, she quit modeling to take care of her new born daughter, Alexis. CAREER

In 1967 Martha Stewart began a successful second career as a stockbroker. Then when the recession hit Wall Street in 1973, she left the brokerage and moved to Westport, Connecticut, with her family. Once there, Martha and Andrew undertook the restoration of the 1805 farmhouse, which is show in her television programs. She still lives there today. In 1976, Stewart started a catering business. She ran this business out of the basement of her farmhouse. Within ten years, it became a $1 million enterprise. Additionally, she opened a retail store in Westport, where she sold specialty foods and supplies for entertaining. She also began to write articles for The New York Times and was an editor and columnist for the House Beautiful Magazine. In 1982, she published her first book entitled,Entertaining. This book was an instantaneous success, which led her to becoming a one-woman industry. Her career then took off, as she began to produce video tapes, dinner-music CDs, television specials, and dozens of books on hors d'oeuvres, pies, weddings, Christmas, gardening and restoring old houses. She became a regular household name when she started making frequent appearances on the Today show. She even signed an advertising and consulting contract with Kmart for $5 million. For much of the 1980s, she was a contributing editor to Family Circle magazine, before creating her own magazine, Martha Stewart Living. Then in 1993, she started a TV show, resembling her magazine. Her various enterprises have since grown into a conglomerate, Martha Stewart Living, Inc. (MSO).

STRIKING PERSONALITIES
Over the years, Martha Stewart has displayed patience and appropriate humor in the face of criticism and satire. She is a passionate, driven, and resilient business leader, who oversees that Martha Stewart Living, Inc. continues to thrive. She has had more influence on how Americans, eat, entertain, and decorate their homes and gardens than any one person in our history. MOTIVATION As seen with her charismatic leadership, Martha Stewart is motivated by esteem/love (social) needs, focusing on Maslow's theory of the Hierarchy of Needs. Likewise, she motivates her employees and followers through love (social) needs, showing the "motherly" side of her to the public. Another way in which Martha Stewart believes she can motivate employees is by in part using the biological approach to job design.She makes sure that all her companies workspaces are housed in buildings with working windows to allow fresh air can circulate, which she believes is conductive to creativity and productivity.Martha also believes in job rotation to keep employees interested. She referes to this as repotting.

Ms. Stewart is a high need for achievement individual. She leads with a passion and strives for excellence, loves competition, challenging goals, shows persistence in overcoming difficulties. Often leaders with a high need for achievement are persevering and competitive, of which Ms. Stewart's personality encompasses both.Finally, Martha Stewart does have a need for power. She shows this through her desire to influence others, both those in her company, MSLO, and the public that so dearly follows her. Through her experience both personally with her past husband Andy, and her testing trial of her court conviction she has shown perseverence and urges people to have a positive outlook during the bad times and a more critical outlook during the good times. She urges people to make a difference in the world through her success as a businesswomen and through the many lifestyle ideas she gives to the public. She has said repeatedly that she does want to make a difference during her lifetime and there is no question that she has. LEADERSHIP Martha Stewart has many different styles of leadership. At the beginning of her company she would definitely be classified as an autocratic leader. Stewart used strong directive controlling actions to enforce her agenda and relationships and to better achieve her goals for her company. she was authority compliance manager for most of her career. She emphasized efficient production in whatever she was doing, be it cooking gardening or decorating the home. However, during the her whole scandal period her leadership style took a turn to opportunistic "whats in it for me". Stewart was definitely out to maximize her own benefit and lost her way as an effective leader. she lost a great deal of position power after her jail sentence. her authority associated with her company and formal position diminished. Stewart since her trial and sentencing has tried to reclaim her autocratic style of leadership but many are unsure if she will ever truly regain that position. Martha Stewart is not a servant leader. While she doesn't demand that people serve her; Martha will not often go out of her way to serve others.She is not interested in developing her employees, if they do not fit into her organization, "a swift action, fairly carried out is best for all". The only two characteristics of servant leadership that Martha appears to have is her ability to have empathy towards her customers; recogonizing their wants and needs, and her extroidinary ability to conceptualize and have big ideas. .