Category Archives: Women in Business

Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

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LEAN IN

A CLOSER LOOK AT A CONTROVERSIAL MUST-READ

In her controversial best-seller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Facebook Chief Operations Officer Sheryl Sandberg suggests that many women react to the substantial challenges they face on their career paths by choosing to be self-limiting. When faced with pivotal turning points that could affect their ability to achieve the highest levels of leadership, a large percentage of women step back rather than take Sandberg’s suggestion to lean in.

Sandberg’s decision to focus on women’s internal struggles has drawn criticism that she does little to offer solutions for the institutional problems that present the most apparent barriers to the goal of creating more female leaders. A closer look at Lean In reveals that Sandberg is fully aware of the barriers women continue to face on the path to power. She simply prefers to attack them by helping women achieve leadership positions. This would enable women to have a more substantial stake in the decision-making processes that shape (and will ultimately smash) the current obstructions.

The Personal and the Professional

The self-help process provided by Lean In is contained in a series of chapters that interweave advice for a better career with relevant research and personal anecdotes from the author. Sandberg’s stories are likely the material that is doing the most to fuel the book’s fire as a topic of conversation.

Some tales, such as the story about Sandberg asking a private equity fund’s senior partner for directions to the women’s restroom, combine a pinch of humor with a strong dose of reality about the state of gender equality in the 21st century. Other incidents, such as Sandberg’s discovery that her daughter had lice while the pair were guests on the private plane owned by eBay, unintentionally provide more talking points about the growing concern over economic inequality in the United States.

Solid Advice for Everyone

Despite the protests, many of the core messages in Lean In have genuine merit for workers of both genders. She recommends that people have a short-term plan for career and personal advancement (Sandberg prefers an 18-month plan). She also addresses the importance of stretching one’s abilities by taking assignments that, while not directly labeled as a promotion, offer better opportunities to expand one’s skills.

Sandberg also deftly provides guidance from expert sources. One of the book’s best takeaways for readers is the advice Sandberg received from current Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. While Sandberg debated the merits of working for the nascent tech giant, Schmidt pointedly told her that the only deciding factor for choosing where to work is whether or not the company would rapidly expand. “When companies grow quickly,” Sandberg writes, “there are more things to do than there are people to do them.” Schmidt summarized the philosophy by saying, “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.”

The problem, in Sandberg’s opinion, is that too many women either choose to get off the rocket just as its countdown nears launch or, worse yet, never get on at all. She spends a good portion of the book attempting to resolve the tug-of-war between career and family that she feels stops many future female leaders in their tracks. While her opinions in this area are left for readers to debate, there is enough good content in Lean In to make it a worthwhile read for men and women alike.

How the Gilt Groupe Got Its Shine

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BY INVITATION ONLY

There is an old maxim that friends should not do business together since it invariably ruins the friendship. The Information Age has disproven this notion as best friends and college roommates have launched enterprises that eventually become billion-dollar companies (Microsoft and Google are two notorious examples). Perhaps one of the most engaging stories of friendship turned into entrepreneurial success is told in By Invitation Only by Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson. The relationship between Harvard Business School graduates Maybank and Wilson is so tight that the pair is known as A&A. However, By Invitation Only is more than a story of friendship, it is a story of how two smart young women leveraged their experience, intelligence, contacts, complementary personalities, careers, skills, and a passion for fashion into an innovative online enterprise called Gilt Groupe.

The Core Idea

The Gilt Groupe — co-founded by Maybank, Wilson, engineers Mike Bryzek and Phong Nguyen, and chairman and veteran online entrepreneur Kevin Ryan — is based on the idea of the “sample sale,” in which a very select group of customers is invited to buy (during a very small window of time) luxury brands at discount prices. “To savvy, fashion-conscious New Yorkers, a Louis Vuitton or Hermès sample sale was a drop-everything-and-run proposition,” the authors write. “Once there, you basked not only in the bargains, but in being part of (and often trampled by) an elite, stylish, in-the-know crowd.”

Gilt essentially brought sample sales to the Internet. The idea began with Ryan, whose French wife discovered a French “luxury private sale” Web site. Through a recruiter, Ryan was put in contact with Wilson, who had followed Harvard Business School with stints at Louis Vuitton and Bulgari. Uneasy with the idea of an Internet business, Wilson suggested her best friend Maybank instead.

Maybank joined Ryan but eventually realized that Gilt needed a high fashion insider with the right contacts and personality to lure the right high-end brands to the site — a job description perfect for her best friend, Wilson.

How to Network and Other Lessons

By Invitation Only describes the successful entrepreneurial journey of Gilt, revealing to readers the exhilaration and terror that launching, growing and managing a start-up inevitably brings. More than just telling a story, however, Maybank and Wilson want to help readers succeed in the way that they have succeeded, and therefore offer specific advice, often in the form of boxed checklists, on moving from an idea to a profitable enterprise. Extensive networking, for example, was a key factor in the successful launch of the site. In a chapter entitled “Networking to a Launch,” the authors offer a checklist that explains the rules for growing and maintaining your network. Another chapter describes how the co-founders laid the foundation for their viral business model. This chapter includes a checklist that enables readers, through a series of questions, to evaluate whether their business has the potential to be viral.

At the heart of the book, however, is the continuing friendship and collaboration (in that order) of Maybank and Wilson. The ultra-organized and cautious Wilson and the spontaneous, risk-taking Maybank complement each other perfectly. In an era in which company founders can end up on opposite sides of a courtroom, the story of the partnership described in By Invitation Only should be a primer for any friends considering going into business together.

What Business Book May Become Political Ammo?

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As we’ve mentioned many times before in this blog, this is not a place for political discussion. However, political stories occasionally cross the border into the domain of business books. That’s our territory! Last night, with so many primaries taking place across the United States, one story in particular sparked my interest.

Carly Fiorina won the Republican nomination for one of California’s U.S. Senate seats. Fiorina will square off with three-term incumbent Barbara Boxer in November. As the respective political camps begin digging the trenches and stocking up on rhetorical ammunition, one wonders how Fiorina will fare when the subjects of leadership and economics are broached during debate. Fiorina’s supporters will obviously point to her success rising through the corporate ranks. Her detractors will likely focus on what happened after she reached the pinnacle of that success.

It’s a subject with which our subscribers are familiar. A few months ago, Soundview summarized Derailed: Five Lessons Learned from Catastrophic Failures of Leadership by Tim Irwin, Ph.D. Fiorina’s failed tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard is one of the examples Irwin uses to demonstrate poor leadership. In the summary, Irwin writes, “On Fiorina’s downfall, it is perhaps simplest to conclude that what led to her derailment were the shortcomings she saw abundantly in others but did not acknowledge in herself.”

While Boxer’s campaign could quote from Derailed, doing so would corrupt the intentions of the book’s author. One of Irwin’s primary purposes in writing the book was to use well-publicized downfalls to help executive’s recognize their own vulnerabilities. When Irwin appeared on Soundview’s Author Insight Series (a FREE MP3 podcast available exclusively for subscribers), he said, “What I tried to do was tell readers that, look, these are great individuals, highly competent, strategic, tough-minded and so on, but they made some really fundamental errors. Interestingly enough, these are also the character issues that can derail us.”

The fact that Fiorina overcame her lackluster dismissal from Hewlett-Packard and is now poised to make history supports Irwin’s thinking that character limitations aren’t permanent.

Visit us at Summary.com to learn more about this excellent summary and see our latest summary releases.

Linking on the Links

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According to Nancy Berkley, president of Berkley Golf consulting, women golfers make up 23 percent of the total adult golfers in the U.S. Golf is also considered a past time that is excellent to partake with business partners, clients and peers because of the networking potential it provides (Trust me, it is not as easy to network while playing basketball or hockey.). However, it seems that businesswomen who golf are at a disadvantage when compared to their male counterparts—they have hit what researchers from the University of Mexico are calling a “grass ceiling.”

 

The study, titled “The Impact of Gender-Differentiated Golf Course Structure on Women’s Networking Abilities,” was presented at the annual Academy of Management meeting in August 2008 and found that “the greater the distance between tee boxes [for men and women], the fewer women there will be in management and marketing in that geographic locale and the less money those women will make.”

 

The researchers—Michelle M. Arthur, Robert Del Campo and Harry J. Van Buren III— gathered tee distance data from 455 golf courses across all 50 states, with each golf course being linked to a specific census locale. On average, women’s tee boxes are approximately 50 yards closer to the hole than men’s tee boxes.

 

So what does this all mean?

 

The researchers feel that there are two reasons for the correlation of golf tee distance to women’s career success. I’ll start with the second reason: According to the researchers, “If on average the women’s tees are far away from the men’s tees, this may portray a negative belief about the golfing abilities of women—and perhaps by extension negative beliefs about other abilities. Significant differences in the placements between men and women may reinforce biases against women, not just on physical terms, but also intellectual terms.”

 

Now, to me that sounds like a bit of a stretch, but their first reason for the correlation is stronger by far.  If the tees are farther apart, it is more likely that men will take one golf cart and ride together to their tee box, while the women in the group will ride together to their tee box, closer to the green. Thus, the women miss out on the networking possibilities that usually take place “during the idle time in the cart and waiting at the starting tee boxes to tee off.”

 

I find this fascinating, and not completely far-fetched. What do you think?