'The Best Way to Keep the Devil at the Door Is to Be Rich.'

Helena Luczywo and Wanda Rapaczynski, 54 and 52
Gazeta Wyborcza, Agora SA
Warsaw, Poland

How do you take a group of committed political activists who don't have a shred of interest or experience in building a business and create a thriving for-profit enterprise -- without losing the values that brought everyone together in the first place? That was the high-stakes challenge that faced Helena Luczywo, a onetime Polish dissident turned multimedia mogul, when, in 1989, Poland became a free country and began its transition to a market economy. Luczywo, now 54, has spent the past 11 years responding to that challenge -- and building one of the most successful companies in post-communist Europe.

Until 1989, Luczywo had spent more than a decade dodging government authorities and avoiding arrest while she edited Poland's most important underground newspaper. But when the communist government agreed to hold elections and to allow the opposition to have its own newspaper, Luczywo suddenly found herself running Gazeta Wyborcza (Election Gazette), the first legal, independent newspaper in the former Soviet bloc. She immediately faced a whole new set of struggles -- from how to define the paper's editorial mission in a free society to how to drum up money to pay for much-needed new printing presses. Her goal: to turn a beleaguered opposition newspaper into a European media giant, making it a forum for objective news and democratic ideals. But how?

Cut to Wanda Rapaczynski, Luczywo's childhood pal. Rapaczynski had emigrated to the United States in 1968, earning a master's degree in management at Yale and then becoming a top executive at Citibank in New York. The two women had seen each other only twice in nearly 22 years, when, in January 1990, Rapaczynski came to Warsaw on a business trip and looked up her old friend. After only a few minutes together, Rapaczynski, now 52, volunteered to help with the paper. "I felt that I owed a debt," she says. "These people were here during martial law and communist rule. I wasn't."

For nearly two years, Rapaczynski worked as a pro bono consultant from New York, spending her vacations at the paper and dispensing advice by phone until the pressure of working two jobs finally got to her. In 1992, she quit her Citibank job, moved to Warsaw, and joined the paper full time. Together, Luczywo and Rapaczynski have spun the small underground newspaper into a Polish media giant, Agora SA, making it one of post-communist Europe's most remarkable success stories. Rapaczynski is president and CEO of Agora's management board. Luczywo, who has never cared much for titles, calls herself simply a "member of the management board," but she functions as the editorial director.

Agora, a publicly traded company with a market value of more than $1 billion, has holdings in newspaper, radio, and cable television. And it's rapidly expanding onto the Internet. Agora's flagship property, Gazeta Wyborcza , is by far Poland's most popular and most profitable paper, with ad sales of $123 million in 1999 and an average daily circulation of 560,000. While the company's 5-year-old radio division is small by comparison, it has grown quickly, with 13 local radio stations, one national radio station, and advertising revenues of $7 million in 1999, up from $2.7 million in 1998.

Agora's track record is so firmly established that when the company went public last year on the London and Warsaw Stock Exchanges, the IPO was oversubscribed by a factor of 10 -- causing one American advertising executive based in Warsaw to quip, "It's Poland's Dell, the stock everyone wants to buy and get rich from."

Many people have. More than half of Agora's 3,000 employees are sitting on a pile of cash, thanks to a generous stock plan created by Luczywo, Rapaczynski, and Agora's third management-board member, Piotr Niemczycki, 41, head of the company's printing operations. Prior to the IPO, more than 1,500 staffers were given the right to buy shares of stock (based on their years of service) for one zloty each (about 24 cents). Last July, Agora sold 2.2 million shares to institutional investors at 104 zlotys per share, representing a huge windfall for the company's employees. The average Gazeta Wyborcza reporter earns $13,000 a year, but more than a few staffers are now millionaires.

No other company in post-communist Poland is believed to have shared so much stock with so many employees. But the company is sharing the wealth with the rest of Poland too. When Luczwyo, Niemczycki, and Rapaczynski restructured Agora in preparation for its IPO, they set up a charitable trust, holding 7.5% of the issued shares. When the trust matures, the company is obligated to distribute the proceeds -- now valued at about $150 million -- to charities in Poland. "This isn't just a business for us," says Rapaczynski. "Part of being a free media, untainted by political interests, is being willing to play a role in the country's democracy. And part of that belief is being committed to broad ownership of this company and giving back to our country."