William Lauder knows the feeling you get when you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle and hunting for one specific piece. You search and search, but you can’t find that little cutout. That is, until someone else peers over your shoulder, plucks it from the scramble, and snaps it into place.
“And you realize you’ve been staring at it all along,” says Lauder, the 65-year-old board chair of Estée Lauder Companies (ELC), who spends time at his home on Palm Beach during the winter. This feeling, he adds, has propelled him throughout his career. “You may be thinking about something, and it’s bubbling in your mind. Then, in conversation with somebody else, they mention something that may be completely tangential to whatever it is that’s occupying your mind, but it sparks a fuse that gives you an idea. I find that very stimulating.”
In his 40 years working for his family’s multinational, multi-brand cosmetics company, Lauder has not only sought the missing puzzle pieces that would expand and strengthen the 80-year-old enterprise, but he has continued his late mother’s work in funding breast cancer research through the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF). Through it all, curiosity has shaped the way he lives, thinks, and leads. He likes to peek behind the curtain to see what’s there, how it’s working, and how he can improve upon it. Yet he has also had to work behind that curtain himself—à la the Wizard of Oz—to make a difference to ELC and its customers.
“I may be the man behind the curtain, but ignore him,” he jokes, paraphrasing a line from the 1939 movie.
Just who is the William Lauder behind the curtain? He is a genuinely inquisitive person, an avid reader of histories and biographies of notable figures like Benjamin Franklin. He travels the world attending conferences and seeking insight from high-profile businessmen like Michael Eisner, the former CEO of The Walt Disney Company. Eisner, he says, spoke to him about how he brought an overarching company culture to the many brands within The Walt Disney Company, which was something Lauder was eager to do—and did—at ELC. He isn’t all business, people say, but conversations with him usually inch toward the topic in some way, shape, or form.
In fairness, Lauder and his brother, Gary, grew up hearing their parents, Evelyn Hausner Lauder and Leonard Lauder, talk business around the dinner table. When your last name is synonymous with cosmetics, your family’s story—and the brand’s story—become your story too. But business aside, his was still a family like any other.
When Lauder shares childhood memories of visiting Palm Beach, you catch idyllic glimpses of a brood just trying to spend time together in the sunshine. He remembers his parents walking him and his brother to Trahan’s Candy Store after their baths so they could pick out a treat before bedtime. He recalls the old Palm Beach Airport, where the baggage claim was outside and passengers had to walk onto the tarmac to board. He thinks about staying with his grandparents at their home on Everglade Avenue, then later South Ocean Boulevard.
“People always ask me what it was like to grow up with Estée Lauder as my grandmother,” says Lauder. “Well, she was my grandmother, just like your grandmother. She worried about whether my brother and I had enough to eat and whether I was wearing a sweater when it was cold. And then there was this whole other side of her. She was this driven entrepreneur and woman who in 1946 was traveling around the country by train selling her products in department stores.”
At first, Lauder wasn’t sure he wanted to work for his grandmother’s business. As a boy, he dreamed of becoming a baseball player or an airplane pilot. But as he grew older, he felt pulled toward ELC. His father encouraged him to try something else first—and to figure out who he was before making such a leap. In his 20s, he participated in Outward Bound, a program that puts young people into challenging but safe situations so they can learn to deal with pressure. Lauder recalls a ropes course where he climbed his way toward the top, only to get stuck.
“I was about 20 meters off the ground and there were two ropes in front of me,” says Lauder, who earned an economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with a concentration in marketing and international business, before working for Treasury Secretary Donald Regan and then Macy’s. “One is high, the other is low, and I’m on this last rope, trying to reach for a rope that’s just beyond my fingertips. The guide told me if you don’t let go of what’s behind you, you’re never going to reach what’s in front of you. So, I let go, and I reached the rope.”
In 1986, at the age of 26, Lauder joined ELC as regional marketing director for Clinique. He challenged the company to let go of old, informal ways of doing things in favor of standardized practices that could propel it forward. Four years later, in 1990, he created and launched Origins Natural Resources, one of the first natural skin care brands on the market. With Origins, Lauder pioneered ELC’s store-within-a-store concept, where a small, branded retail space exists within a larger store. He rose through the ranks at the parent company, acquiring brands such as Jo Malone London, MAC Cosmetics, and La Mer, while establishing and expanding ELC’s digital footprint. Growth became a hallmark of his tenure as CEO.
“One of the things I wanted to do is make people feel like they’re part of a larger organization,” he says. “In other words, they don’t just work for Clinique—they work for Estée Lauder Companies, of which Clinique is a part. And their future may not be with Clinique, but with MAC, or Bobbi Brown, or Aveda.”
But Lauder has also focused on missions that transcend the corporate bottom line. Two years after he began working at ELC, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. His father looked for aggressive and innovative treatments to save her life. He found Dr. Larry Norton, an oncologist at Mount Sinai Hospital who was using intense chemotherapy on small tumors to prevent them from getting out of control. While the medical community first viewed Norton as a renegade, his game-changing work put Mrs. Lauder’s cancer into remission. In gratitude, she co-founded the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF) with Norton in 1993. It has since become the largest private funder of breast cancer research. Lauder now serves as co-chair of BCRF’s board of directors.
“What makes his leadership exceptional is how deeply personal it is,” says Donna McKay, BCRF’s president and CEO. “He wears a pink ribbon on his lapel every day, right next to his heart. It is a quiet but powerful reminder of his mother, of everyone affected by this disease, and of the responsibility he feels to move this mission forward.”
Lauder is also shaping the next generation of business leaders. He is a trustee emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, home to the prestigious Wharton School, where he teaches a popular second-year MBA class called “Decision Making in the Leadership Chair,” bringing in executives to discuss real-world challenges they have faced. He mentors both students and ELC employees who seek his guidance.
In Palm Beach, Lauder says he golfs but is admittedly a “very average player.” Mostly, he relishes time with friends, far from the concrete jungle of New York. These days, he is leaning into curiosity and enjoyment, a luxury made possible, he says, by learning when to release one rope so he can reach the next.
Story Credits:
Production editor: Stephanie Gates
Hair and makeup: Deborah Koepper, Deborah Koepper Beauty, Palm Beach
Facebook Comments