Stop the Fight

So a few months later, when Graves, then a junior marketing manager, noticed that iVillage's ad agency was doing a poor job of promoting the company on the Web, she brought Carpenter a solution: Hire a small agency that was hungry for the company's business. The idea worked. Carpenter later promoted Graves to vice president of online marketing, and a few months ago, Graves was named one of 25 Women to Watch by Advertising Age.

Macdara MacColl, 33, is another success story. Back in 1997, she came to Evans and asked to be promoted to managing director of Parent Soup, one of iVillage's leading destinations. Being a producer at iVillage was, MacColl says, her first "real job." And in her first year, she had gained a reputation as being smart, but an "upstart," someone who could be insensitive and shoot from the hip. "Nancy told me, 'People don't like working with you, and I think that will keep you from succeeding,' " MacColl recalls. "Hearing that was one of the most painful moments of my life."

But Evans helped MacColl, now vice president of member service and marketing, to polish her style. For months, each time the two attended meetings together, Evans took notes on MacColl's behavior. Then she'd do a review: "This is where things went awry; this is the comment that emptied the room."

Carpenter feels good about the culture that's being created at iVillage. She says many young staffers now feel the kind of loyalty to their company that Carpenter felt to her former companies. "Our age is looking better to people," she says. "It's like, 'Hey, they really do have perspective.' People are happy to have adult leadership."

Who's the Boss?

When Tony Fadell reports to work, an alarm goes off. Literally. Near the door to his office, two flashing red lights indicate that the boss has entered the building. The alarm is a hint that business-as-usual is not the business of Philips Mobile Computing Group, a fast- moving subsidiary of the Dutch electronics giant. Chief Technical Officer Fadell is the visionary behind the Velo handheld PC and the Nino palm-sized PC - sleek products designed to compete in one of the hottest arenas of personal computing: personal digital assistants.

What's intriguing about Fadell is not just that he's leading a fast company inside of a slow company. It's that he's leading a company filled with people older than he is - and becoming a better leader in the process. Fadell, 29, is the highest-ranking technical official in a high-profile division of a company with 265,000 employees. He is also the youngest person in the division, aside from a few administrative assistants. It's a tough position to be in.

"The people who work for me don't ask me to go to lunch, because I'm 'management,' " Fadell says. "And the people at my level can't relate to the fact that I'm so young. I guess I scare a lot of people." Well, not everyone. "I've never worked for anyone this young before," says Jim Dumont, 44, manager of product-creation services inside Fadell's group. "And I've never worked for anyone with such energy and enthusiasm. Tony believes we can do anything. There's a bright-eyed wonder about him."

The wonder is that Fadell is at Philips at all. He is a poster child for youthful exuberance and break-the-rules innovation. Ask Fadell where he'd be if he lived in the era before computers, and he responds, "In jail." In high school he was a phone phreaker. By the time he graduated from college, he'd helped start four companies.

At age 22, fresh out of the University of Michigan, Fadell signed on with General Magic. It was, at the time, one of the most glamorous startups in Silicon Valley. Fadell began as a lowly diagnostic software engineer and rose to the exalted position of lead systems architect. He routinely worked 100-hour weeks. "I knew nothing about anything else in the world," he says.

But General Magic's ambitions couldn't rescue its products, which failed miserably. Fadell thought he knew why. So, at age 26, he mapped out a plan for a new generation of handheld devices and brought it to Philips. It took the company 48 hours to sign him on.

It took Fadell less time to wonder about what he'd signed up for. First, he suffered through the company's orientation program - including mandatory drug testing. "It was so oppressive," he recalls. "It was like, 'Hi, welcome to Philips. Here's a shitload of bad video and a lot of paper to fill out.' I'm like, 'Why the hell would I subject myself to this misery?' " Then he arrived at his office. "I was locked up in this little place with fake paneling. It was dark and dank. I thought, 'What am I doing here?' "