In Depth

Bob Littlejohn: It's a Small World After All

Bob Littlejohn heads up Avon's worldwide effort to keep the business up and running and the employees safe.

By Simone Kaplan

January 09, 2003 — CSO — Bob Littlejohn is in the middle of a day that most people would consider tumultuous. Hair-raising, even. First, there's that evacuation drill he's planning for the New York City headquarters of his company, Avon Products. He's taking rapid-fire calls from Guatemala, Brazil and the Philippines, just a few of the 140 countries in which Avon operates. He worries about them all. And he's headed to Greece tonight to handle a situation in person. For Littlejohn, this is just business as usual.

He fine-tunes the details of the evacuation drill as the phone rings. It's Avon's El Salvador office. Littlejohn's security director there is worried because the U.S. Embassy, which is next door to Avon's regional facility, just received a bomb threat and is in the process of a lock down. Littlejohn's immediate concern is with the more than 200 Avon employees working near the embassy. When he realizes the bomb threat is specific and credible, he calmly orders the employees to evacuate until the situation is resolved.

As vice president of global security for Avon, Littlejohn conducts nearly half of his professional life from his New York office and the other half traveling around the globe. He has security directors in every major region of the world who report to him on a daily basis. International employees use a 24-hour hotline for emergencies. "The phone rings from 9 p.m. to midnight with calls from Asia. Then Europe starts calling around 6 a.m.," Littlejohn says. "Most of the callers are just looking for advice, but sometimes I'll need to get on a plane." He's concerned that a lot of U.S. companies look at security from only a national rather than international standpoint. "Security is an integral piece of the business processit doesn't function alone," he insists. "Companies must look at security as a whole; you can't divide national and international entities."

This is Bob Littlejohn. Championing a multinational effort to keep Avon employees safe while exuding a confidence and a calm that's based in the knowledge that he's planned for just about every contingency possible. For him, that is the essence of leadership. And Bob Littlejohn is all about leadership.

M any consider littlejohn to be a leader in the security worldas seasoned a security pro as you can find. A former vice president of investigations and consulting at security services giant Pinkerton Service, he's a retired Army colonel from West Point who became a cop with the NYPD. During his 21 years with the force, he held executive positions in narcotics and intelligence and headed the operations division. In the early '80s, Littlejohn was appointed director of the New York City mayor's emergency management office. He developed a disaster-mitigation program for the city in the event of terrorist attacks or a chemical leak, not knowing how relevant his actions would be some day. He served on the board of the American Society for Industrial Security and is currently chairman of the Overseas Advisory Council, a body overseen by the Department of State that fosters the sharing of security information between the public and private sectors.

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