Ellen Kullman

Ellen Kullman
Born	Ellen Jamison Kullman 1956-01-22January 22, 1956 (age 70) Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Tufts University (B.S.) Northwestern University (M.B.A.)
Alma mater	Tufts University (BS) Northwestern University (MBA)
Occupation	Business executive, engineer
Years active	1978-present
Employer	General Electric (1978-1988) DuPont (1988-2015) Carbon (2019-present)
Title	Chair and chief executive officer
Term	2009-2015 (DuPont)
Predecessor	Charles Holliday
Successor	Ed Breen
Known for	First female CEO of DuPont Defeating the Trian proxy contest CEO of Carbon
Spouse	Michael Kullman
Children	3

Ellen Jamison Kullman (born January 22, 1956) is an American business executive and engineer who served as chair and chief executive officer of DuPont from 2009 to 2015. She was the first woman to lead the company in its more than 200-year history. Since November 2019 she has been president and chief executive of Carbon, a California-based additive manufacturing company.

Kullman led DuPont through the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, repositioned the company toward agriculture, nutrition and industrial biosciences through the acquisition of Danisco, and separated its performance chemicals business as Chemours. In 2015 she successfully defended the company against a proxy contest brought by Nelson Peltz's Trian Fund Management, one of the largest activist campaigns mounted against an American industrial company. She retired several months later.

Early life and education

Kullman was born on January 22, 1956, in Wilmington, Delaware, the city where DuPont had been headquartered since its founding in 1802. She was the youngest of four children. Her father ran a landscaping business.

She attended Tower Hill School in Wilmington. She then studied at Tufts University, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering in 1978, at a time when women made up a small minority of engineering graduates in the United States.

She subsequently earned a Master of Business Administration from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 1983.

Career

General Electric

Kullman began her career at General Electric, where she worked in the medical systems business. The experience gave her a background in engineering-led product businesses and in the operating disciplines for which GE was known.

DuPont

Kullman joined DuPont in 1988 as a marketing manager. Over the following two decades she held a series of business unit and general management roles across several of the company's segments.

She led DuPont Safety and Protection, the segment that included Kevlar, Nomex and Tyvek, and established DuPont Safety Resources, a consulting business that sold the company's own workplace safety expertise to external clients. This was an early instance of DuPont commercialising internal capability as a service rather than a product.

She was subsequently given responsibility for a group of the company's growth platforms and was appointed president in 2008.

Appointment as chief executive

Kullman became chief executive officer on January 1, 2009, succeeding Charles Holliday, and took the additional role of chair later that year. She was the nineteenth chief executive of DuPont and the first woman to hold the position.

The timing was difficult. She took charge weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, as industrial demand fell sharply worldwide. In her first year she oversaw restructuring that reduced costs substantially and involved several thousand job reductions across the company.

Strategy

Kullman's central strategic objective was to reduce DuPont's exposure to commodity chemicals and increase the share of earnings from science-based businesses with higher margins and more durable growth: agriculture, nutrition, industrial biotechnology and advanced materials.

The largest single step was the acquisition of Danisco, the Danish enzymes and food ingredients company, completed in 2011 for approximately $6.3 billion including assumed debt. The transaction gave DuPont a substantial position in industrial enzymes and specialty food ingredients and formed the basis of its nutrition and biosciences segment.

She also invested heavily in the agricultural business, DuPont Pioneer, which became the company's largest earnings contributor, and in biofuels and bio-based materials research.

The counterpart to this expansion was separation of businesses that no longer fitted. In 2015 DuPont spun off its performance chemicals segment, including its titanium dioxide business, as an independent public company named Chemours. The separation removed a large, cyclical, capital-intensive business from the portfolio. Chemours also assumed environmental liabilities associated with DuPont's historical operations, an allocation that became the subject of extensive later litigation.

The Trian proxy contest

On January 9, 2015, Trian Fund Management, led by Nelson Peltz, launched a proxy contest seeking four of the twelve seats on the DuPont board. Trian argued that DuPont's corporate overhead was excessive, that its acquisitions had not delivered adequate returns, and that the company should be broken into separate businesses.

Kullman led the defence personally, arguing that the company's strategy was already delivering and that a break-up would destroy value by separating businesses that shared research and customer relationships. She engaged directly with large institutional shareholders over several months.

The vote was held at the annual meeting on May 13, 2015. DuPont shareholders rejected all four Trian nominees. Large index funds and other institutional holders concluded that Kullman was already pursuing the shareholder-oriented measures the activists sought, including the Chemours separation and cost reductions. The outcome was widely reported as one of the few clear defeats of a major activist campaign in that period and became the subject of a Harvard Business School case study.

Departure

The victory proved short-lived. DuPont's agricultural business was affected by falling crop prices and a strengthening dollar, and the company reduced its earnings guidance during 2015. On October 5, 2015, DuPont announced that Kullman would retire, effective October 16.

She was succeeded by Ed Breen, initially on an interim basis and subsequently as permanent chief executive. In December 2015, weeks after her departure, DuPont announced a merger with Dow Chemical to form DowDuPont, with a plan to subsequently separate the combined company into three independent businesses. This was substantially the break-up structure Trian had advocated.

Carbon

Kullman joined the board of Carbon, a Redwood City, California company developing digital light synthesis additive manufacturing technology, in 2016. In November 2019 she was appointed president and chief executive officer.

At Carbon she has focused on moving the company from selling printers toward production-scale manufacturing applications, with customers including footwear, dental and medical device businesses.

Board and public roles

Kullman has served on the boards of Goldman Sachs, United Technologies, Amgen and Dell Technologies. She has also served on the board of overseers of Tufts University.

She was a member of the U.S.-India CEO Forum and of the executive committee of the Business Council. She is a co-founder of Paradigm for Parity, a coalition of business leaders formed to address gender imbalance in corporate leadership, and has been named repeatedly to lists of the most powerful women in business.

Business philosophy and management style

Kullman's approach was shaped by her engineering training and by DuPont's research culture. She framed the company's purpose around applying science to defined problems in food, energy and protection, and used that framing to justify both acquisitions and divestitures.

She was known for direct engagement with shareholders, an approach that proved decisive during the Trian contest, where her willingness to meet institutional investors individually was credited with securing their support.

On the question of gender in corporate leadership she was measured in public but active in practice, describing her own path through engineering and operating roles as the conventional route to a chief executive position and arguing that the constraint lay in the pipeline of women entering those roles rather than in the final selection.

Controversies

Chemours liabilities

The 2015 separation of Chemours transferred substantial environmental liabilities, including those relating to perfluorooctanoic acid contamination associated with DuPont's Washington Works plant in West Virginia, to the new company. Chemours later sued DuPont, alleging that it had been undercapitalised relative to the liabilities it was required to assume. The litigation and the underlying contamination have been the subject of extensive coverage and of a subsequent settlement among successor entities. Kullman was chief executive when the separation was structured.

Restructuring and job reductions

The cost reductions undertaken in 2009 and again later in her tenure involved several thousand job losses, and drew criticism in Delaware, where DuPont was the largest private employer and the company's presence was closely tied to the local economy.

Timing of her departure

Her retirement months after winning the proxy contest, followed within weeks by the announcement of a merger and break-up broadly similar to what the activists had proposed, led some commentators to argue that the proxy defence had delayed rather than prevented the outcome. Others noted that the earnings shortfall in 2015 reflected agricultural commodity conditions outside the company's control.

Personal life

Kullman is married to Michael Kullman. The couple have three children, including twins. They have lived in the Wilmington, Delaware area for most of her career.

She has spoken about the practical difficulties of combining a demanding operating career with raising young children, and has cited support at home and deliberate choices about which roles to accept as factors in her progression.

She has been active in Delaware civic organisations and in support of engineering education, particularly programmes aimed at increasing the number of women entering the field.

Legacy

Kullman's tenure at DuPont is assessed largely through two episodes. The Danisco acquisition and the Chemours separation together represented a substantial reshaping of a 200-year-old company toward science-based, higher-margin businesses, and set the direction that the later DowDuPont separation would follow.

The Trian proxy contest is the more studied event. It is one of the clearest cases in which a large industrial company defeated a well-funded activist campaign, and the mechanics of the defence, particularly the direct cultivation of index fund support, have been examined closely in corporate governance research and teaching. That the company subsequently pursued a version of the activists' proposal has made the case a durable subject of debate about the merits of both positions.

As the first woman to lead DuPont, and one of a small number of women to run a major American industrial company, Kullman occupies a documented position in the history of corporate leadership in the United States.

External links

• Profile at Forbes