Rhode Island’s new Governor Helena Foulkes spent 25 years at CVS and lost her first election—she says failure and bad bosses made her a better leader
Source: Fortune ·
Helena Foulkes spent decades in corporate before making a run for governor: ‘You can go for something and it doesn't work, and yet other gifts come’
From the source
Amidst the wave of democratic victories in Tuesday’s 2026 midterm elections, Rhode Island voters elected Helena Foulkes, a former Fortune 500 executive, as their next governor. Foulkes spent 25 years at CVS, eventually rising to president of its pharmacy division, before leaving to become CEO of Hudson’s Bay Company, the now-defunct Canadian department-store operator. She was also repeatedly named one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women, reaching No. 12 on the list in both 2015 and 2016. While becoming governor marks her first elected office, Foulkes’s career has been defined by ambitious pivots, taking chances, and learning to see failure as something other than a dead end. “You can go for something and it doesn’t work, and yet other gifts come,” she said on a Harvard Business School podcast in 2024. “I’ve had a lot of those experiences in my life, in my career. I think it’s redefining what failure looks like and asking yourself, not only what could go wrong, but what could go right?”…
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- Symbols referenced: CVS.