When Ilene Gordon, president and CEO of Ingredion, announced she was stepping down last week, she was the second female CEO to make the same announcement in as many months.

In August, Irene Rosenfeld, CEO of Mondelēz International, said she'll be retiring in November. Last June, Fortune counted 21 female CEO st Fortune 500 companies in 2016.

A more recent demographic study of global chief executives, Route to the Top 2017, finds the typical CEO to be largely male. Women have made little progress toward the top job since the inception of this research in 2011.

“In my business school class there were 20 women,” recalled Ilene Gordon, MIT Sloan alumna, SM ’76. “Today approximately 30 percent of the students in the top graduate business schools are women.

During her first year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Gordon considered math education as a career. While working on her bachelor’s degree in mathematics, she took a summer job as a teaching assistant at a private school. Gordon remembers having a wonderful experience teaching students how to use the computer in a productive way. But the six-week assignment also brought the rookie teacher an unforeseen challenge.

“My reaction was if this is the ultimate, and I am looking for even bigger challenges, then I think I’ll apply to business school,” she said.

Gordon says she felt ahead of her time―partly because in the 1970's the mathematics field didn’t offer the range of careers for women they do now. She notes that opportunities were opening up in engineering, but most women that had been a math major seemed to end up going either into computer science, the actuarial field or a bank. She, however, spotted an opportunity for a female mathematician in business and management and courageously helped blaze the trail.

“I think I would’ve ended up in a field that used my problem solving and analytical skills. So I’m excited I chose the field of business which has so many opportunities for people with strong analytical and problem-solving skills,” she said.

After B-school, she joined a Boston consulting firm founded by a man who’d earned an undergraduate degree in engineering before attending Harvard Business School.

“I was interested in problem-solving,” she said. “And they were looking for people to join the European office so I volunteered to go to London. It was my first international (those days it was international, not global) experience and I was exposed to international businesses.”

Gordon also met her future husband in her new employer’s Boston headquarters.

“We were going to stay in London but the company decided to open a Chicago office, another opportunity that came early.”

Gordon says that maybe the challenge of opening up an office wasn’t in the original plan but she’s always been willing to be flexible. She also said choosing to go into consulting and getting international experience was one of the most critical decisions in the first 14 years of her career. Another important event she says was joining a corporation.

But Gordon always wanted more than to ‘be a good cog in the corporate wheel.’

“I had two different positions and was given the opportunity to be a line manager,” she said. “I had a mentor who was willing to put me in charge of running a business. I was 32 years old and running my first P&L.”

Gordon says although she embraced learning about strategy―how to build companies, market share, and competitive advantage―and was good at it, what she learned in her profit and loss job was that setting strategy, while challenging, is really the easy part.

“Implementing strategy is more challenging because it requires leading and motivating people to do things they didn’t think they could do,” Gordon says.

“You must have a strategic plan to start with, but taking it to implementation―hiring the best people, executing against that plan, and being relentless with goals and measurements―that I think, really separate successful people from those that are less successful.”

Since she joined Ingredion in 2009 as chairman, president, and CEO, she has grown the market, increasing sales to $6.5 billion. Gordon told Forbes’s Jenna Goudreau that she was able to come into a legacy business, make major changes, and take it in a new direction because she likes challenges and surrounds herself with people who feel the same way. She famously updated and implemented a strategy that hadn’t been refreshed in years, and managed the largest acquisition in the company’s history. She then boldly changed the company’s name from Corn Products International to Ingredion Incorporated and showed the strength of character to bring people together, get everyone excited, and reorganize the company.

In December 2013, Gordon told Women of Color magazine “I’ve been with the company for 4 ½ years and we have more than doubled our value creation for shareholders. Now we’re $6 ½ billion in sales. We laid out our plan and have a strong balance sheet; great people and a leadership position in the ingredient solutions market,” adding, “As an ingredient company, there’s no reason why we can’t continue to grow and create even more value for our customers, employees and our shareholders. It’s not about what you’ve done in the past but about the value you’re going to create in the future.”

Previously, as president and CEO of Alcan Packaging, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto Group, Gordon led the $6.5 billion global packaging business. Prior, she was a senior vice president of Alcan, Inc., and president of Alcan Packaging’s $1.4 billion food packaging Americas unit. Before Alcan acquired Pechiney in 2003, Gordon was Pechiney’s senior vice president and president of plastic packaging, where she was responsible for a business with locations in the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Gordon was the first female officer at Tenneco Inc. and spent 17 years in executive roles at the Packaging Corporation of America, a division of Tenneco. She was vice president and general manager of the company’s folding carton business, vice president of operations at the Tenneco corporate level, VP, total quality management, which included continuous improvement, vice president and general manager of corrugated and specialty packaging; and vice president of strategy.

“It’s all about accountability,” Gordon surmises. “I tell our people here that we lay out a strategic plan; update it every year and then have an operating plan.”

The keys to success she says are laying out metrics.

“We call them key performance indicators (KPIs) where people commit to action plans they will implement during the year and measure the progress of those action plans. We measure effectiveness about accountability. It’s doing what you said you were going to do. So we have a plan, layout targets and measurements and then measure every quarter how we’re doing against those targets. At year-end, we evaluate: ‘did we achieve what we said we’re going to achieve?’ and then lay out a new set of targets. Sometimes it’s strategy or laying out the next stage of the implementation plan.”

Gordon says Ingredion spends a lot of time developing people internally as well as recruiting talent.

“Part of our company culture is exciting and developing employees. So when we recruit people we tell them that we’re going to have a development plan to help get you to your objectives. This might mean getting someone international assignments, a short rotation, or operating experience where they get a chance to run a business as opposed to just analyze numbers in the office. We tell people that we’re going to mentor them, and we do.”

Gordon says that contrary to current trends she plays an active role in interviewing.

“I interview a lot of people you wouldn’t normally think; people two or three layers down. I say to them we’re going to treat you like I was treated. We’ve put people in assignments bigger than they are― assignments that people are going to grow into. People have come back and said ‘I really loved when I heard that you were going to challenge me and put me in a job that I may not be quite ready for, but you were confident that you’ll give me the opportunity faster than I would get at another company.’

“ It’s important that we do that for new hires and people we’re managing internally,” she says.

Ingredion looks for people with analytical backgrounds. Because no matter what field you’re in whether it is human resources, manufacturing, management or engineering, you need to have skills to analyze the facts and information to make recommendations, she said.

“I look for people that have an analytical view on the world. I also look for people who are curious, in other words, people who have a lot of questions. I call it 'peeling the onion' so that when they are in a job they don’t just take the information as given. They dig deeper and ask another question; they’re inquisitive but collaborative because this isn’t about someone being the smartest person in the room but working as part of a team instead of being the individual problem solver. Analytic, curious and collaborative are the three things that we look for in our people.”

When Gordon isn’t working, she likes to relax in nice weather, run on the beach in Aruba, or play a little golf with her husband and son. The couple has two adult children. Gordon also likes to watch movies. Her sister is an independent filmmaker. One of her favorite films she says is “Gladiator” which she admits to having watched multiple times.

“It shows strong leaders, strong women, and values,” she says. “This is a movie that depicts all the themes I experience in daily life. It’s all about having a strategy and leaders who are collaborative. The ones who’re collaborative are the winners.”

Gordon is equally drawn to bestsellers. She even admits to reading Sheryl Sandberg’s bestseller, Lean In.

“Not so much for me,” she explains. “I’m the lean-in pioneer, but it’s important to know what the people who work for me are reading and what the next generation is thinking about.”

To the next generation of leaders she advises “It’s important to be part of a team and add value. Look at every experience. Be willing to take a risk. That might be international assignments, working on the floor of a factory. People get mentored in many ways, by those more experienced than you and those that are your peers.”