Content area
Full Text
NEW YORK ECONOMY IS EMERGING, driven by technological change, global pressures and transformations in many traditional industries. Fittingly, a new generation of leadership is also developing in New York in response to these changes: younger, hipper and more diverse.
The rising young executives, chronicled over the following pages in Crain's annual list of 40 executives under 40, reflect our evolving economy and the city itself. Some, like Josh Grotstein at Prodigy, come from new businesses like new media and telecommunications. Others, like Chris Latimer of Da Streetz which helps companies reach an urban audience, are finding new ways of doing business.
But this group also represents traditional New York businesses whose fundamentals are shifting, like Warren Spector, whose rise at Bear Stearns has paralleled the growth of complex financial instruments like derivatives.
Some, like Andrea Jung at Avon, are energizing the city's biggest companies with new ideas, projects and intensity.
Others are bolstering the city's small business community with their successful new companies.
Many have been born and bred in the city and educated in its schools, like Neil D. Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium. Or they have been drawn here from around the world, like Yawar Shah of Chemical Bank, lured by the energy and challenge of succeeding in New York.
Madonna Badger, 30 President Badgerway Advertising
THERE WERE EARLY SIGNS OF MADONNA Badger's strong will. Take the time she stood outside her third-grade classroom, refusing to enter until her teacher referred to her by her full name.
"She always insisted on calling me 'Donna,'" recalls Ms. Badger, a native of Lexington, Ky., whose flawless diction comes from years of drama school. "It really annoyed me. And I'm a real stickler about that kind of thing."
With firm resolve she taught that schoolmarm a lesson And today, her daring still turns heads. After only a three-year stint at CRK, designer Calvin Klein's in-house ad agency, she set out on her own in 1994.
Badgerway Advertising, her agency, is responsible for stopping traffic with a number of sultry ads. These include spots for Calvin Klein underwear, featuring a crotch-grabbing Marky Mark, and for Hot Sox hosiery, capturing leggy models seductively adjusting their stockings.
Ms. Badger says that as a woman, she brings a "certain...