Anthea Disney.

• Author: Alioto, Maryann
• Position: News America Publishing Group's chairman and chief executive officer joins CIT board

CIT Group recruits for its board one of Rupert Murdoch's media magnates for her communications industry savvy.

When CIT Group Inc. began its quest for a new director, President and CEO Albert R. Gamper Jr. hired a search firm to assist him. He was looking for someone who could add business diversity to the board, and he wanted to avoid choosing, as he dismissively puts it, some "old friend," Little did he know that his new board member was going to be someone he might have jostled past in the lobby of an office building they both share.

Anthea Disney, who joined the CIT board in December 1998, presides over a media empire from a fourth-floor office in a midtown Manhattan tower where CIT occupies a 21st-floor office (although its executive offices are in Livingston, N.J.). She is chairman and CEO of News America Publishing Group, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

What precisely attracted Gamper to this media magnate? "We were looking to bring a broader depth to the board," he says. "We wanted someone with management talent who was not a financial-type person."

Disney agrees with Gamper's characterization of her. "They have more financial acumen than I will ever hope to have," she says of the $2 billion in revenues diversified financial services company. CIT offers secured commercial and consumer financing to smaller, middlemarket, and large businesses and to individuals. "I bring to the board the perspective of someone who has spent her life in media and communications. That is an area where CIT can expand and I can help them."

She also says that the reason she accepted the board seat at CIT and not other directorships that have been offered to her was because of Gamper, who has headed CIT for 12 years and had previously been with Manufacturers Hanover Corp. since 1962. "He is a dynamic CEO, and I thought we would work well together," she explains. "I don't want to just sit on a board. I want to be a participant."

This appointment is 52-year-old Disney's first public-company board. She is the only female on the 11-member board, comprised mostly of financiers. "She is an impressive woman," says Gamper, "who succeeded in a very demanding organization."

Disney, who is related to the famous entertainment family by only a very distant relationship, began her career at the age of 22 working for a London tabloid, with hopes of getting a more serious journalism job. She was right. At 24 she moved to the United States and became a foreign...