New Female CEO at Swiss Post: Susanne Ruoff to take over

In the past years, a significant move has been made towards having more women in management and on executive boards. Female CEOs or company presidents, however, are still a very rare exception. One of the few examples is the current president of SEB Group (Sweden), Annika Falkengren; she has been in this position since 2005. Others have moved out recently, like Areva’s CEO Anne Lauvergeon, who held the position from 2001 till 2011, Marianne Nivert, former CEO of Telia, and Clara Furse who was the CEO of London Stock Exchange from 2001 till 2009.
The most recent appointment of a female CEO has now been announced in Switzerland. The Board of Directors of Swiss Post has appointed Mrs. Susanne Ruoff as new CEO of the Bern-based logistics corporation. The company has more than 45,000 employees (FTEs), 7.3% of whom work abroad. Swiss Post has just reported a new record profit of CHF 910 M, combined with high levels of employee engagement, customer satisfaction and reduced impact on climate and environment.
The new CEO, Susanne Ruoff is said to be the first ever women heading a blue chip Swiss corporation. The 53-year-old economist will replace Jürg Bucher as of 1 September 2012. With Susanne Ruoff a manager owning extensive leadership experience in large international corporations will assume the management of Swiss Post. The 53-year-old economist has been working in her current function as Country Manager and CEO of BT Switzerland Ltd. since 1 April 2009. At BT (British Telecom), she has been focusing on expanding the key account business and on the acquisition of new clients. Before she joined BT (British Telecom), Susanne Ruoff had been active in various functions at IBM Switzerland in the areas of marketing, sales and services. As head of the business domain public administrations, she has developed close relationships with the Swiss Confederation and the Federal Authorities. At the end of the twenty years she had worked for IBM Switzerland she had been a member of the Executive Management and responsible for Global Technology Services. IBM Switzerland is one of the few major companies lead by women.
Susanne Ruoff has a diploma in economy and an Executive Master of Business Administration (MBA) in Telecommunications from Fribourg University. She has graduated from INSEAD (France) with a Client Executive degree and at the University of St. Gallen attended courses of further education on “Corporate Governance” in Executive Boards. She is already being discussed as an important role-model for Switzerland, a country that has had positive experiences with different kinds of diversities, but relatively slow in developing gender diversity. However, the country has had three women in the three highest positions of government and State for more than a year now. A fact, that has been surprisingly little advertised nor leveraged.

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