"My leadership is not really a leadership as such; I feel a little bit as a guardian."

 "I am a very shy and retiring person... I think the big thing that my husband did for me was give me  confidence - why I needed a man for that is really annoying"

Mrs Carvalho-Heineken, controlling shareholder and executive member of the board of directors of Heineken Holding NV, said that she regards herself as a guardian, rather than leader, of Heineken, during her first ever stage interview at the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women International Summit in London.

She said: "My leadership is not really a leadership as such; I feel a little bit as a guardian. I see this as  an asset that I inherited, I don't quite see it as mine. I see it as my responsibility to keep it healthy and keep it growing, and pass it on to the next generation. "I now have five children, so my next responsibility is to hand this on to those who are interested, and qualified, and capable - and I'm in the process of doing that and figuring out how that's going to go. "But me, as a leader, I feel a little bit like a mother hen."

During the conversation on stage with Pattie Sellers, Fortune Most Powerful Women Co-Chair, Carvalho-Heineken spoke about how she encourages a clear demarcation between the ownership and management of the company, advocating an oversight role:

 "As a family, we can do more good for this company from an ownership side, not from a management side. I think we have to know the business and we have to be involved; we have to make decisions on the people who are going to run [the business], and I think that's crucial - people  is all and everything. "And I believe we can do that better from the side lines and we can do that by helping the company to grow a different way, but not sitting in the chairman or the CEO seat."

As an only child, Mrs Carvalho-Heineken inherited the business from her father, and credits her husband with giving her the confidence to assume responsibility:

 "I am a very shy and retiring person. As a child, I was appalling, I wouldn't look up! I think that what my husband did for me was give me confidence - and why I needed a man for that is really annoying! but it did help me." He said: you have a responsibility, you've got to do it, so I got over it basically."

Charlene also acknowledged that despite her reticence to take ownership and make demands, she has had to make some difficult decisions, replacing a previous CEO with Jean François van Boxmeer,  who subsequently tripled the size of the company. She says that a takeover bid by SABMiller was "quite a crucial moment" and although Heineken did not speak about it publicly, Pattie Sellers noted that Charlene did not support the bid. Charlene remarked: "We think that we would have disappeared and lost in quite a short period of time, what makes us special had we done that -yes we could have made a quick buck, but that was not what we were about."

Despite her strong stance, it is not in the current Heineken family's nature to be a controlling voice on the board: "It's very rare that I - maybe two or three times in the last 15 years - that we actually had the power, or wanted the power to say no. We don't do that lightly - we realise that we have 75% outside shareholders. I do feel that I'm not there with my 25% waving a flag and saying that I can do exactly what I want; that's not the way we work."