Stop the Fight

In short, iVillage is an organization run by fortysomethings, where twentysomethings do most of the work. That generational fault line has been a source of innovation - and frustration. Problems began to surface about a year after the company took shape, when Carpenter and Evans made a decision to reposition iVillage. They'd started out as a company devoted to creating online communities where people could discuss "life issues" such as parenting, work, and careers. But the closer they watched the Web, the less they liked their business. Content-based chat sites weren't taking off. Meanwhile, 85% of iVillage users were women - a surprise, and a major market opportunity.

So the company's online business transitioned away from its original model to become iVillage: The Women's Network. The strategic retooling was popular with both investors and users - page views increased from 9 million in June 1996 to 41 million a year later. But the shift unleashed resentment and confusion among more than a few staff members. "Some people had a messianic zeal about the old direction," Carpenter says. One young executive took to criticizing the founders - and their move to reposition iVillage - to job candidates he was interviewing.

There were other problems. "A few young mavericks were running amok," Carpenter says candidly. "They weren't good at working with other people. They didn't understand our business model. They were making dumb deals with content partners."

So Carpenter and Evans used that strategic inflection point as an opportunity to redesign the organization. They nudged out about 10 of their high-level staffers - all in their 20s and 30s - and replaced them with "gray hairs" - seasoned professionals who were more in sync with the founders' values. "We hired the same number of grownups as the twentysomethings who we lost," Carpenter says. "They brought discipline and perspective to the process."

Carpenter and Evans also reinvented their relationship with the young people who remained, offering their most promising staffers a new deal: Show us some staying power, and we'll show you how to become real businesspeople. "We'd had mentors who'd raked us over the coals," Carpenter says. "And we'd stayed around long enough to see the consequences of our decisions. If all you do is move around, all you do is make mistakes."

Thus began an intense but informal program that Carpenter calls "radical mentoring." It was, for her, an exercise in back-to-the-future management. She graduated from Stanford University in 1975, spent seven years as an Outward Bound instructor, and went to the Harvard Business School. Then she joined American Express as a "wild child," unschooled in the corporate environment.

Her boss at American Express made sure that Carpenter learned what she needed to know - whether or not she wanted to learn it. When she hired a vendor without consulting colleagues, she infuriated several people. "My boss dragged me into a room and said, 'Don't ever do that again.' I just didn't get corporate politics."

Next, Carpenter's boss gave her a plum assignment, which she bungled - presenting a deeply flawed financial analysis to a group of senior executives. So her boss made her deliver the presentation again, until she got it right: "I had to know this stuff to get to the next level. He kicked my butt and saved me from myself."

It was, says Carpenter, a case study in radical mentoring: "If you are a great radical mentor, people will never forget what you did for them." The job of a radical mentor is to "move people along faster than they want to go. But accelerated growth hurts."

Radical mentoring at iVillage is both more demanding and less structured than traditional mentoring programs. Every few months, Carpenter and Evans choose a different rising star to coach. There are lunches, private meetings, occasional late-night phone calls. More important, they give the staffer feedback - direct, sustained, brutally honest: "People don't grow if you're soft with them."

Indeed, Carpenter likes to compare herself and Evans to drill sergeants who are running a boot camp for young leaders. Their focus is on the big questions: How do you separate personal complaints from company matters? How do you choose among prospective business partners? "We do not coddle our staff," Carpenter says. "We feed them cod-liver oil. In return, we promise that they'll become ass-kicking senior managers."

Take Hillary Graves. One of iVillage's rising stars, Graves, 28, rushed into Carpenter's office 18 months ago to complain that a consultant was excluding her from meetings. Carpenter's advice: Get over it. Focus on your deliverables, and you'll be rewarded. "I was trying to get her to discard the 'what about me' issues, which are what you tend to focus on when you're young," Carpenter says. "Complaining doesn't get you anywhere. Coming up with solutions to problems moves you up the food chain."