Marjorie Scardino

‎thumb|Marjorie Scardino in 2011 Dame Marjorie Scardino (née Morris; born 25 January 1947) is an American-born British business executive. She is the former CEO of Pearson PLC. Scardino became a trustee of Oxfam during her tenure at Pearson. Quotes Dame Marjorie Scardino encourages girls at Eltham Hill Technology College to explore different careers ‎Dame Marjorie Scardino urges Eltham Hill Technology College students to try out various career paths Try to work on something that has a purpose. ‎*It may be something in which you’re going to influence 50 people, or two people, or a million people, but try to do something bigger than yourself. We tried, we failed, but we learnt an incredibly important lesson If you fail, you don’t die. Once you realise that, everything is possible. Marjorie Scardino: the quiet-spoken American who climbed to Pearson’s highest position ‎ After 16 years leading Pearson, Dame Marjorie Scardino shares why she’s stepping down I knew very little about public companies at that point. I had analysts in on the first day and I could feel them thinking, 'Who is this person?' and I started wondering, 'Who is this person? I don't even use that word because, first of all, that's what old people do. That's what you do after dinner. I just felt like it was time. Time for me, time for the company. You know how the world's changed over the last 16 years, and we've got a lot of amazing opportunities but they require very long-term choices and long-term plans Although we won a Pulitzer Prize, we sold the paper to someone else for a dollar and then they broke it up and threw it away. The experience taught her a valuable lesson. I learnt then that you can fail and you don't die. over my dead body. Pearson will still behave as it has in the past, which is to review all the time what the best assets are. It will be careful in deciding how to handle it. It will not be religious about it. Don’t cry for me Dame Marjorie ‎No need for tears, Dame Marjorie said When I left Cambridge for what was then the top name in mergers and acquisitions in the City. I'd never heard of the glass ceiling, still less the concrete one. I'd studied what I wanted (philosophy and history) while ensuring I did the maths for arts students course. The pre fast track entrance week at a big American corporation and a research job in the House of ­Commons. I talked my way into a transfer on good expat terms to New York. There, shackled to a spreadsheet at midnight before an early morning flight to somewhere like Oklahoma. It dawned on me that being on call for difficult corporate finance clients day and night was family unfriendly. Nobody used that word, and I did not then have children but I had noticed there was only one female director in the entire department. I took a pay cut and went into newspapers. Much depends on what you call a top job. Someone like Chrissie Rucker of The White Company, who creates a successful chain of shops, doesn't have the power to shape law that a senior judge has but she may create jobs for hundreds and significant wealth, as we report on the opposite page. Conversation with Pearson Plc leaders — CEO Marjorie Scardino and CFO Robin Freestone ‎Discussion with Pearson Plc’s CEO Marjorie Scardino and CFO Robin Freestone Well I think there are three dynamics that have really been at work at Pearson's this year and a few years before this that have changed our fortunes. The ubiquity of digital across Pearson, not only in how we make things, but how we sell them and how we deliver them to our customers. Another is the business mix. We are just far more focused on businesses that have a lot to do with each other, and that are consistent. We are a large education business and the FT and Penguin certainly play into that very nicely. Emerging markets, our exposure to emerging markets, emerging markets are now about 10% of all of Pearson's revenue and growing at more than 20% a year. Those are markets where we have not only great demographic characteristics but we can use our scale. We can take things that we've made in one country and move them to another country. All three of those pieces together have given us fundamentally different financial characteristics External links ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Category:1947 births Category:Living people ‎Category:Entrepreneurs Category:Chief executive officers ‎Category:Businesswomen from the United States ‎Category:British women chief executives ‎Category:British chief executives ‎Category:British women chief executives ‎Category:British women chief executives  Category:People from Arizona