|
Citi's top woman
|
 |
September 1, 1999: 8:48 p.m. ET
Citigroup CFO Heidi Miller is third most powerful woman in U.S. business
|
NEW YORK (CNNfn) - At first glance, Heidi Miller is just an ordinary mom working on a school project with her kids. In reality, Miller is anything but ordinary. This mother happens to be chief financial officer of Citigroup, one of the largest financial corporations in the world.
"I try to understand my business, maybe it's triage," Miller says. "I look for those things that are most important to worry about and I sort of immerse myself in it so I can speak intelligently about it. But I don't worry about the market, I worry about our company."
Since Miller has been CFO, Citigroup (C) earnings have soared. Chairman Sandy Weill says she is key to the company's success.
"In the first quarter of this year we earned more than GE, more than any company in the world. So it is a very big job," Weill says. "It's in a hundred different countries. It's in a lot of different currencies. It is in many different businesses, just about every financial business there is. It is a very big job."
That is why Fortune magazine calls her the third most powerful woman in American business, just behind Oprah Winfrey.
"I don't go around thinking I'm the third most powerful," Miller says. "First of all, if they made the list of the most powerful business people in America, I would not be on the list so it's by virtue of the fact there we're so few women perhaps that I could you know, reside right after Oprah on the list."
But Miller's modesty understates her success. Just a small percentage of women hold similar positions in Fortune 500 companies. Few of them oversee the bottom line for such a large corporation.
Range of responsibilities
Miller has been CFO since 1998, when the company was formed with the merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group. Her responsibilities range from guarding Citigroup's financial stability to deciding whether the company cafeterias should be subsidized.
She commutes to New York from Connecticut every day and spends all of her free time with her husband and two sons. Miller says it's outdated to think a woman can't balance family and career. She's a strong advocate of women's rights.
"I'm passionate about women's issues. I'm passionate about women's rights. Anything that I think takes away from the rights we've worked so hard to achieve collectively gets me a little stressed," she says.
Her politics are simple. If you're not pro-choice, you're not her candidate.
"Because I think it gets to rights of individuals and the ability to make our own choices and not have outsiders decide," Miller says. "I think that raising, having children, raising children is a personal issue. And that society shouldn't judge me or tell me when or how I should do it."
But despite her strong opinions, Miller keeps a low profile. It was only after volunteering with her and her sons that we were able to get a second interview. If there's one thing Heidi Miller doesn't like to do it's talk about herself.
"She will not brag on herself," says husband Brian Miller. "That's true. It's hard to get her to brag. The attention she's gotten, the awards she's received, she uses those as a platform to talk about issues that she thinks are important, not for self-aggrandizement."
When he met his wife, Brian was impressed with the fact she had a Ph.D. in history from Princeton. Miller was among the first women to attend the school. She credits it with giving her confidence.
"I think it taught me how to think. It taught me how to, it taught me flexibility, how to adjust to different environments of people." Miller explains. "It gave me a great deal of confidence. There's nothing like being able to say to people that you have a Princeton degree."
That confidence has served her well. From a job at Chemical Bank 18 years ago, Miller has become one of the top women in finance with a reputation for being disarmingly direct.
An accounting professor once told Miller she would be a failure in the financial world. Miller has had the last laugh.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Citigroup
|
Note: Pages will open in a new browser window
External sites are not endorsed by CNNmoney
|
|
|
|
 |
|
