Mrs. Big's Big Deals

In Warsaw she is known as Mrs. Big. It's a reference not only to Barbara Lundberg's physical stature (5 ft. 10 in.) and no-nonsense New England manner but also to an audacious operating style that has in the past 10 years made her one of Warsaw's most influential executives. As CEO of Elektrim S.A., one of Poland's biggest and oldest communist-era companies, Lundberg, 47, admits that she attracts attention. "I think people find it amusing that a woman is president," she says. In her case they also find it daunting. Late last year the conglomerate was on the verge of insolvency; today, after Lundberg's aggressive restructuring (and a last-minute investment by the French conglomerate Vivendi), cash-flow problems are history and investor confidence is back: the stock price is up 100% since the beginning of the year. Now the former Wall Street banker wants to make Elektrim Poland's foremost producer of interactive Internet content by year's end. "She's ambitious and aggressive, and that's what you have to be to succeed in this country," says outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Poland Daniel Fried.

Lundberg was brought in as Elektrim CEO in February 1999 by institutional investors who had grown impatient with the previous management. The company had grown too quickly in the 1990s, says Lundberg, with interests in everything from chicken farms to electronic-cable manufacturing. Then reports leaked that the management had granted an option to an outside company for a 5% stake in Elektrim's most valuable asset, the wireless firm Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa, or PTC. Major Western shareholders swooped in. Lundberg sold off interests in nearly 80 companies, slashing staff levels from 30,000 to 15,000 by last December. They will be down to 7,000 by the end of 2000.

The former venture capitalist then refocused the company on telecommunications with acquisitions worth more than $1 billion. Today Elektrim boasts more than 2.5 million subscribers through its voice, video, mobile and fixed-line telephone networks. Early last year Elektrim clashed with the German giant Deutsche Telekom over a controlling interest in wireless company PTC. Lundberg has apparently prevailed, but a lawsuit launched by Deutsche Telekom in Polish courts blocked further investments and forced her to take out a loan that increased PTC's debt load 55%. It took a last-minute $1.2 billion sale to Vivendi of a 49% share in a subsidiary that controls PTC to stave off disaster. "It wasn't an experience that I would like to go through again," she recalls. Even so, Lundberg is embarking on a new growth phase, investing $200 million over the next two years in Internet companies.

Lundberg is a rarity: an American in Poland with no Polish roots. A graduate of Wharton and a native of Lexington, Mass., she moved to the country in 1991, not for any sentimental reasons but to become the local head of the Polish-American Enterprise Fund, a U.S. government-backed effort to spawn new businesses in the post-communist nation. "I didn't necessarily make a decision to leave the U.S.," she says, but "I felt that the potential was here [in Poland]." "She's very post-1989," says Ambassador Fried. "There's no sentiment or ethnic ties. She's business."