The target customer at J. Jill, the 63-year-old American womenswear brand, is “sophisticated.” Aged 45 and older with $150,000 or more in household income, “she’s well-educated, she’s shopping the social channels, she’s shopping wherever, whenever she wants to,” says CEO Claire Spofford. So when the brand’s product wasn’t up to snuff, the customer noticed. J. Jill was founded in Massachusetts in 1955 and acquired by Talbots in 2006 for $517 million. Since then, the brand known for its easy-to-wear basics and catalog business has been through a steep drop-off in value. bit.ly/4bketyn
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Last year, Thasunda Brown Duckett, President and CEO of TIAA spoke to the graduating class of the MBA program at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She reflected on her speech in a personal Linkedln post, where she shared some of her key reflections. “And what I know today, as a leader, is that I rent my title, but I own my character,” Duckett wrote. “I get introduced as Thasunda Brown Duckett, President and CEO of TIAA. But that title is rented. It describes me, but it doesn’t define me. I earned it, but I don’t own it. To own something feels entirely different. When you own something, it belongs to you. You can claim it and proclaim it. It’s yours,” she added. bit.ly/3Lcsu6J
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CVS Health CEO Karen S. Lynch has been recognized as the highest-ranked female on the #Fortune500 list. At age 12, Lynch lost her mother to suicide; she was raised by her Aunt Millie, who died when Lynch was in her late 20s. As a young adult, Lynch became her aunt’s caretaker. Sitting by Millie’s hospital bed, failing to find the answers she sought about Millie’s breast and lung cancer, and trying to interpret incomprehensible medical bills helped inspire Lynch to enter the health care industry—with the ambitious goal of reforming it. On Feb. 1. 2021, she took over as president and CEO of CVS Health, a chain of more than 9,900 pharmacy locations that was in the midst of a multiyear effort to transform itself from retailer to health care company—a change it says will make care more transparent and accessible to its massive customer base. bit.ly/4cqbvde
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Eugenia Kuyda is the founder and CEO of Replika, an 8-year-old startup that offers an AI companion. Its 2 million users and 500,000 paying subscribers talk to Replika’s chatbot to lift their moods, work through life’s hardest challenges, and stave off loneliness. Replika was used by some as a romantic AI companion; the company spun off that functionality into a separate platform called Blush. Kuyda spends much of her time trying to destigmatize the role of AI in dating. People’s dismissal of these kinds of chatbots is often a “knee-jerk reaction,” she says. Instead of judging people who seek out companionship or, yes, romantic and sexual connection from AI, she says, we should dig deeper. bit.ly/3xKLc22
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