UNLEASHING FEMININE POTENTIAL AND EMBRACING DIVERSITY

It’s been a week of two halves.

 

The first about “not getting it” – me, my e-mails as Orange, my provider, collapsed; Orange – not getting the restrained fury their laconic call centre is creating.

 

The second about being cheered up by a presentation from Kirstin Furber HR Director of BBC Worldwide on the power of women. On the basis of what she said the future will be better (and better looking than the past.)

 

USA data shows women have recently built twice as many companies as men;
whilst they find it much harder to get funded than men, that doesn’t stop them succeeding.

They succeed because:

 

1. Their motivations are huge…”I wanted to do something for me…but I realised it was also for the people who worked for me – which was better.”
2. They want to create a good, sustainable business not just get rich.
3. They tend to be kinder than men, looking to create a business that outlasts them.
4. Their sense of the zeitgeist is profound noticing gaps in markets
5. They are good at “pattern recognition”- a key barometer of success in business
6. When a female CEO is interviewed she’ll tend to have her top team there with her, in support and answering their special interest questions. (Male CEO’s tend to be seen alone – as the leader.) Women see themselves as conductors of an orchestra – they don’t make the noise.
7. Women in general want their company to be smarter than they are.
8. Women tend to be more right brain users but they really work at and try being good at left brain too – their male counterparts tend not to work much at their right brain.
9. Women have an “irrational love” of their customers whom they regard as part of their family.
10. Men are measurement obsessed and love doing plans and revising them interminably. Women are looser about possible outcomes saying: “No one expects things to turn out quite the way we predicted.”

 

The future’s bright if our managements and leaders – female and male - follow the “ten commandments” above but the future certainly isn’t Orange unless they start to have a more irrational love of their customers than they showed this week.

WOMEN ON MY MIND

Women….can’t stop thinking about them…and that might not be so bad a thing nor even so unusual one but the thoughts about women fizzed dramatically into life for me three or four times during the week.

In reverse order – I met a 24 year old manager of a design group in London doing terrific work and feeling her way into the job with appealing modesty. She will be amazing in two years and is merely very impressive now.

Then, lunch with two women of power and a vast sense of curiosity and the endless desire to ask “why?” and to mean it. So you have to stay on your mettle because you are being asked to give their questions your genuinely best shot not because you’re joined in a male debating combat where he who blinks first loses.

And finally, a conference at Mercers in Tower Place. 100 very powerful women and about 8 not so powerful men. I was impressed by the observations of Margaret Hefferman (author of “The Naked Truth” and “Women on Top”) who’d researched successful female entrepreneurs in the States. And their success, she said,  was owing to a series of factors:-

1. The motivation amongst these women was huge – far greater than their male equivalents – and they mainly wanted to create great companies that lasted not just create great wealth.
2. Their sense of zeitgeist was profound…they noticed “gaps in markets…noticed…yes, that’s what women do, they notice things.
3. They had an irrational love of their customers whom they really seemed to regard as being part of the family.
4. They surrounded themselves with advisors and smart, interesting people who kept them alive, alert and on track.
5. They had plans and to a person said wryly “but no-one really expects things to turn out that way”.

There was more but that will do for now….great stuff.

This is not about glass ceilings or feminism or Girl-Power…it’s about balance. About all this female right brain power battling with all that male left brain power.

As someone said to me during my troubled week….”how about finding a way of using the whole human brain for once?”

THEY ARE SAYING THIS WAS A MALE RECESSION

Perhaps to be a little cynical that is why it is over almost before it has started.

All the signs are that green is the colour and surge is going to replace shoots.

If you believe what you read.

The story about male recession was in the Times a week or so ago and was about a McKinsey study revealing an emergence of an alarming gender imbalance in the city. Women are departing in their droves through voluntary redundancy, resignation or whatever. The emigration supposedly brought about by a high level of disapproval and anger at male excess and sheer bad behaviour.

One woman said “they were foul enough in the good times but now they are repellent”.

The women are off to set up their own businesses – what price the first all female bank? – now that would be a winner. And behind they leave chaos. Because without some kind of gender balance this is going to be a very unstable and erratically managed place.

If this was a male recession this loss of women terrifies me. It would terrify Tom Peters even more. It was Tom who said in Re-Imagine!

“Women make most of the buying and investment decisions. Women are better investors than men.”

He added “women roar”.

I think that’s what they’ve just done.