10 BIG THINKERS FOR BIG BUSINESS
To the establishment car media, Detroit's fixation with DUB will fade. "If your magazine is strictly tied to this big-wheel fad," says Car and Driver editor Csaba Csere, "it makes your longevity fairly difficult."
Kovacs, though, is gunning to make DUB the next Playboy, a launching pad for a lifestyle. That's why he's now working with companies like Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo. He's teaching corporate America Street Cred 101, telling them it's old school to portray urban culture with ghetto imagery. Preppy is the new urban trend, so Kovacs says the next wicked whip will be the Range Rover Sport. "It's all about aspiration," he says. "Instead of chain-link fences, they need to show the Hamptons." Like Kovacs, the street is heading uptown.
--Keith Naughton
Years before she became Yahoo's chief financial officer, Susan Decker, 42, wrote the book on the company. In 1996, as a media analyst for Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, Decker visited the start-up and wrote a lengthy report that became a case study at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Decker helped take Yahoo public and struck a friendship with its founders. So perhaps it wasn't surprising that when she solicited cofounder Jerry Yang's career counsel in 2000, the conversation "very quickly felt like an interview rather than an exchange," she says.
As Yahoo's new chief numbers cruncher, Decker stepped almost immediately into a hornet's nest. Soon after she joined, Yahoo's revenue plummeted by 40 percent in the dot-com crash. While the rest of Yahoo's top brass left, Decker acted as a steady hand. She pushed to expand Yahoo's advertising base and emphasized transparency with Wall Street. Even in the worst of times, she says, "I never lost faith. We had millions of visitors to the site every month. There were always lots of ways to make this a profitable advertising model."
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