Aurora press archive - 2003

Real Business

01 February 2003

New Order

ABSTRACT:

Sometimes, truth is just about being open with information. “Women share easily and sometimes give away too much,” says Glenda Stone, winner of the 2002 European Woman of Achievement entrepreneurial award. “Because we (Aurora Gender Capital Management) are a commercial organisation, information is our business. But sometimes I tell my husband about a conversation I’ve had and he says ‘why are you telling them that? Why are you giving all of that away?’ I say, ‘I’m helping them’,’’ she says. “And he just rolls his eyes.”

FULL ARTICLE:

The online resource for the growing business
More intuitive. More open. Better at building relationships. In a career running companies in the UK and US, margaret heffernan has identified eight realities about the female approach to business. Dare you to disagree...

You know that something has changed when James Bond starts working for a woman. M’s cigars are gone and, in their place, Judi Dench – smart, elegant and clearly in charge. And she’s no anomaly. Women are running BBC networks, they’re running Pearson and Random House and Sky; they’re in financial services, recruitment, consulting, retail and wholesale, starting companies, taking over companies and selling companies.

At the same time, business is changing – becoming more diffuse, complex, network-driven. Women’s skills seem to be serving them particularly well. Could that be a coincidence – or something we can all learn from?

One thing women aren’t doing is singing their own praises. I’ve spent months talking to women CEOs and owner-managers about their businesses in the UK and the US. I have found them profoundly hesitant to celebrate or define the special skills and talents that they bring to business. This isn’t just political correctness. They know that difference can be used to justify unfairness – and since women are still underpaid and under-promoted, discrimination remains a real issue. But identifying the value – and values – that are making women so successful could tell us a lot about where we are – and where we’re going.

1. WHOLE LIVES FOR WHOLE PEOPLE
Almost any female business owner you talk to will give several reasons why she started her firm: she had a great product idea or was fed up making money for other people. Statistically, the biggest reason is that she couldn’t stand the culture and environment of the male-dominated firm she worked in any more. But it always goes deeper than that. Caroline Liddon founded Nickers for all those reasons – but also because she wanted to be one person, not two.

“I think that when you get to a certain level, you almost have a dual personality – your corporate self wearing the suit and when you come home, you take the suit off and become the mother, wife, hostess or girlfriend. Those two people are very different and put huge demands on women in particular.” Caroline wants to be one person – doing different things, of course, but as an individual with a consistent style and consistent set of values. She wants, in short, to have a whole life. And she’s risking her own money to get it. She’s not alone; more than one-third of new businesses are being set up by women. In the US, women-owned businesses are the fastest-growing sector of the economy; here in the UK the number of women-owned businesses doubles every decade.

Rachel Elnaugh
Founder, Red Letter Days
Elnaugh has created an industry. Set up in 1989 after quitting Anthur Andersen, Red Letter Days makes dreams come true - whether that’s a trip to space or driving the world’s fastest car.

How do men differ?
Men start with the idea – “how can I make money?” Women start with the customer – “how can I make them happy?”

How do approaches differ?
Sometimes my dog comes to work with me. Male colleagues say it’s unprofessional, but it brings a bit of happiness in the workplace. Anyway, it’s probably the longest-serving employee, too...

Are women more flexible?
The thinking is to be 9am-5pm. But that’s not necessarily the time when people are at their most creative. You can’t just switch on your ideas at 9am. I’m working from home today, for instance. It means I’m not thinking about bottom lines and cash-flow – which are more male things.

What prejudices have you encountered?
I started the firm when I was 24, so being a female and being so young was an issue. Even now people are surprised, especially when I say it’s got a turnover of more than £14m. You can see their jaws drop.

How did you overcome problems?
The trick women have learned is to let men think they’ve won. By doing so, as a woman, you have an advantage.

What do women do better?
The big supermarkets are very sales-driven. It’s all about getting the cheapest best deal for the least money. But quality is very difficult to measure. Debenhams was the first big department store I worked with. What’s interesting is that Belinda Earl runs it – and from the outset, it was all about the customer and quality.

Every woman I talk to – whether they are setting up in business or staying to “slug it out” in traditional corporations – is focused on the same thing: being allowed to be consistently themselves at work and away from work. As one woman put it, “are you the same person at home as you are at work?”

Donna Shirley, who ran NASA’s mission to Mars, gave highly conservative engineers permission to abandon jacket and tie. It had never been done before and it caused a lot of flak. “It was very funny,” she says. “Because if you look at a shuttle launch on NASA television, it’s very dull. They have loads of people who wear ties and have very neat workplaces. Our Pathfinder team was wearing everything under the sun, including shorts with rainbow suspenders; there were food boxes on the counter. We actually got complaints from Johnson Space Center that we were embarrassing NASA because we were so informal.” But NASA hasn’t had a successful Mars mission since she left.

For Gail Rebuck, being herself was about hours. She’d mortgaged her flat to start Century Publishing. After it was bought by Random House, she found herself running a large conglomerate with what she calls a “jacket-on-chair” culture: working or not, it paid just to be seen to be staying late. But she wanted a life, too. So she changed the rules. From now, she said, anyone staying past 6pm is demonstrating that they can’t handle their workload. This was great for women, because it gave them “permission” to go home. And it gave men the freedom to have lives, too.

Determined to have whole lives, women have forced firms to see that flexibility can be a bonus, not a cost. Sainsbury’s knows it helps them keep staff, while recent DTI research has shown that employees would rather have flexible hours than extra cash, a company car or a free gym. For headhunter Zena Everett of Perriam and Everett, recruiting part-time and remote workers is something of a personal crusade; she knows great women are out there who need a different style of working. And, just like Steve Ballmer said in November’s Real Business, she knows it’s the future.

It isn’t some innate superiority that has made women insist on these whole lives. They’ve found it impossible to function otherwise. Historically, their work lives were added on top of their home lives so both had to be accommodated. For men, it was the other way around – work came first; home life got the leftovers.

I once employed a salesman who’d worked for years at Time Warner. Working for me, he said, was the first time he’d ever been able to be honest about his schedule. In the past, when he wanted to do things with his kids, he’d pretend to be at a “client meeting.” Working for a company where he could be a whole person also meant that he didn’t have to lie. Not lying is very good for business.

2. STRAIGHT IS TOUGH
That honesty, about which women are so passionate, assumes many faces and it has never been more important. Dominique Senequier runs AXA Private Equity; she’s a very tough, no-nonsense manager, afraid of no-one and nothing. “You have to be down to earth and you have to be able to say ‘no’,” she says. In her own career, she says, her forthrightness made men uncomfortable; they sometimes found her difficult and impolite. “They were frozen,” she laughs. Her rigour provoked complaints when she wouldn’t sign off on investments that she didn’t believe in. Time has validated the stubbornness that so frustrated her male colleagues. “Truth is a question of survival – it is not a question of politeness.”

Sometimes, truth is just about being open with information. “Women share easily and sometimes give away too much,” says Glenda Stone, winner of the 2002 European Woman of Achievement entrepreneurial award. “Because we (Aurora Gender Capital Management) are a commercial organisation, information is our business. But sometimes I tell my husband about a conversation I’ve had and he says ‘why are you telling them that? Why are you giving all of that away?’ I say, ‘I’m helping them’,’’ she says. “And he just rolls his eyes.”

Rosie Hunter
Founder, Curtains by Rosie Hunter
Rosie Hunter was once a senior manager with Vodafone. She took up a franchised curtain shop in Suffolk and opened another branch in Cambridge. After five years she cut the franchise and re-branded to “Curtains by Rosie Hunter.” Turnover has doubled in the past 12 months.

Women don’t do macho
Honesty is a female trait and women are better at relationships. After all, women have to get on with people in life. They can’t walk in somewhere all macho and expect to be listened to.

Why shout when you can talk?
Good relationships with suppliers are vital and it’s important to be understanding when things go wrong rather than bawl them out. It doesn’t help. It’s the same with staff. Good relationships are the most important part of it. I wouldn’t be here now without having good people working for me. The way to get the best out of people is to understand them and their needs.

The trouble with women
Women sometimes use the fact that they are a woman to their own advantage, but it doesn’t wash. I’ve got kids, I know the demands, but you just deal with it and get on with it. Being a woman, with kids, you know all about time management.

Some people are never happy
One thing I’ve noticed is ageism. I set up the business when I was 27, but even now, eight years later, people comment about how young I am. Particularly men and it’s very patronising. I don’t know what it is about this country. What do they want? For you to be old and grey?

Bully tactics
Men use power in terms of financial clout. Some can be quite intimidating. I simply turn round to them and point out that if they really want the order done for that price in that short period of time, the quality will be lower.


Emma Jones of TechLocate agrees. “When it comes to sharing information, men are more reserved, hoarding information and letting it out only on an ‘as needs’ basis. It just goes against a woman’s natural instinct not to share information.”

“Men like power,” says Dominique Senequier. “And opacity is power. But transparency is essential for delegation, so opacity is the first sign of dysfunction.” Caroline Liddon was sick of such corporate politics when she left to found Nickers; Zena Everett made an open culture a top priority for her business. “I wanted to create an environment where everyone was honest with each other and people felt they had a say.”

Ranjit Bajjon, the only female partner in Begbies Traynor, an independent corporate recovery firm, says men suffer from rampant over-optimism about their businesses. “They seem to have this blind faith that their troubled business will somehow just get better of its own accord. So, they don’t seek advice early enough. When men finally come to me for advice, I often find that their wives have been instrumental in getting them to consult us.”

The trouble with men is...
Debbie Wosskow is co-founder of Mantra PR.
“they often think there is only one right answer”

Merlyn Bignell is founder and MD of women’s design boutique Frockbrokers. “They have yet to develop the facility to do more than one thing at a time. They can come up with big ideas, but need a logical woman around to make them work”


Jacqueline Gold is CEO of Ann Summers.
“they’ve had it too good for too long. women are much better bosses. they don’t have such big egos”

Caraline Brown, CEO, Midnight Communications
“They are work-bitches. Their professional egos are too fragile, and that can lead to business decisions being made for the wrong reasons. It’s hard for men to back down even when they know an alternative option would be better for the business. Women tend to be bitchy on a personal level about other people, but men are bitchy when it comes to power, status and ego”

Sharon Morrison, MD of public relations consultancy Quay West Communications. “good ones are in short supply. we’re always on the look-out for intelligent men who can run meetings with style and efficiency, lead and motivate”

Susan Duffin is managing director of subscription and fulfilment mailing bureau, ESco. “They lack intuition when dealing with staff... especially women. They don’t pick up the signals and can be short on tact”

Gillian Banyard is MD of Newcastle-based mail order clothing business Penny Plain. “they are less flexible and take longer to alter course, when that’s what the business really requires”

3. SURFACE TENSIONS
Another face of women’s honesty is their fearlessness in the face of emotion. In May 1999, at a time when start-ups across the US were holding funding parties and shipping parties and IPO parties, WebCT threw a funeral. After a merger, the company was now the world leader in putting university courses online. But now it had two products, two potential brands. One of them had to go.
“We stood around and had readings, had a eulogy! It was kind of fun,” laughs Carol Vallone, WebCT’s CEO. “And then we put it into a vault. We didn’t cremate it.” What was unusual was Vallone’s insistence on surfacing the emotion inherent in the business decision.

“A death. There’s no question. I joke about it but it was a bereavement. I felt that we had to acknowledge it just like any death. We had a whole team that was working on this product and this was their baby. It was born and they had put their heart and soul into it.” Vallone is no New Age freak. For her, dealing honestly with the emotion in business is part of the job. I’ve seen scores of companies paralysed by men afraid to deal with emotion. I’ve seen CEOs afraid to ask what their boards were really thinking. By contrast, Vallone’s directness is actually less emotional – and a lot more efficient.

4. INTUITION IS KNOWLEDGE
Female skills are gradually acquiring the status and recognition they deserve as business attributes, reckons Glenda Stone. “Things such as female intuition are being taken seriously now,” she says. “I have certainly learned to respect my own intuition. It’s rarely if ever wrong – there is just ‘something’ that tells us.”

“Women are instinctively more intuitive when it comes to communication,” says Caroline Liddon of Nickers. “They just read body language.” That intuition saves time and opportunity. “You can tell when a sale isn’t going to happen,” says Vallone, “even when the salesman’s optimism makes him soldier on.”

Emma Jones eventually sold TechLocate to Tenon. “By that time, it had built value because of female intuition,” she insists. “Our first conference was based on my gut instinct that it would have a huge return. And my female intuition was that: ‘we deal with these people – let’s physically meet them’. I couldn’t prove that it would work, but it added huge value.”

Dr Diana Hodgins MBE
Founder and MD of European Technology for Business (ETB)

Winning the “British Woman in Industry” inventor awards in 2002, Diana’s also a Small Business Ambassador for the DTI. ETB specialises in the design of microsystems.

Women in business: an interesting subject?
I’m in engineering, so I tend to switch off when people start talking about women in business. I’ve heard all the arguments before about multi-tasking. But one thing does strike me: women are much better at networking – and realise its value in business.

Examples please
Our business is niche. We’re small (11 employees). We don’t manufacture. We know that, to be successful, we need other people to work with us. So we build partnerships. I’ve just set up the Network of Excellence in Microsystems. As a result, we’re now perceived as one of the most powerful companies in microsystems. You need people in business - women know that.

Are women more open?
As a business, we err on the side of openness. You have to do this with partnerships. We will tell people anything. This leads to a very flexible, open culture. No-one lies. If someone needs to stay at home to get their washing machine fixed, they don’t need to make up a story. This stops problems being hidden until it’s too late to rectify them.

... And builds trust?
Yes. Many bosses insist on people working specific hours at their desk, because they don’t trust them to do the work elsewhere or at different times. But if employees are given the opportunity to work at home sometimes, they’ll do more work, not less.

5. MANAGEMENT CARE
Research on management has shown women consistently rating more highly than men in peer-performance evaluations of capabilities such as motivating others, fostering communication and producing high-quality work. There is nothing soft about these talents. Once a week, Vallone asks her senior managers how they are feeling on a scale of one to ten. If they are at seven or below, they have to talk about it.

This is not a social conversation: Carol wants to catch issues and manage problems before they damage morale. Maintaining motivation is key to her 300 per cent growth rate.

Women are also more concerned with overall success than personal achievement, says the same research. Focusing on the whole, rather than just her own part, leads to smart decisions. NASA’s Shirley always insisted on not sitting at the head of the meeting table, to ensure input (not just agreement) from everyone. Vallone debates strategy by making senior managers adopt the roles of their colleagues, thus preventing turf battles and empire-building. She thinks she learned some of these management skills from parenting. And evidence is mounting that she’s right. Volvo has found that its male executives return from paternity leave as better managers.

6. WE NEVER CLOSE
“It’s the old adage of peripheral vision – women have 180-degree peripheral vision and men just don’t. Women have developed the ability to see more and do more. It’s why more boys are killed crossing the road than girls. We just have wider peripheral vision.”

Eudie Thompson
Founder, Zynap
On the strength of its software licensing to multinationals, Thompson’s human resources software firm was nominated for New Product of the Year in the Growing Business Awards 2002. Previously, Eudie was responsible for growing Joblink into the Department of Employment’s largest outside contractor.

How do women work differently?
Women just get on and do it. They don’t think it’s special to hold down a job and a home. Women don’t sign their own praises enough for multi-tasking. Women aren’t as pushy for their personal development. It’s not a gender thing, it how women have been brought up.

And how do you work?
I’ve always avoided the “idea” of being a woman and black. But I related better than I normally do at your photo-shoot. Women really do communicate better. When women network, there’s a sharing of information with the knowledge that the other is a multi-tasker. There’s no ego. But when networking with men, there’s always a feeling there’s something in it for them.

How do you motivate?
Women naturally have openness which helps staff understand how the company is doing.

What’s your strength?
Talking about the product is easy for me but I had to learn to talk about myself when raising funds. Walking up to people to develop partnerships and networking is important. We’re a small company but our clients are big. I rely heavily on relationships.

Any communication tips?
I don’t think honesty is genderbased but women do encourage the sharing of information. At meetings, I encourage communication by asking the quiet people what they think and I often find more about what’s going on. I learn from staff.

Caroline Liddon is quoting from Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps, which aims to define the scientific differences between men and women. Women, it says, are great at multi-tasking: at seeing, doing and thinking lots of different things at the same time. Why Men Don’t Listen also cites University of Pennsylvania research showing that, in a resting state, men’s brains stay only 30 per cent active but women’s brains stay 90 per cent active. This, say the authors, confirms that women receive and analyse data constantly. Such multi-directional thinking makes women efficient, creative and immensely sensitive to market shifts.

7. ALL BUSINESS IS RELATIONSHIPS
“Is work becoming more feminised?” asks Glenda Stone. “Yes it is. It isn’t just that work is getting less macho. We are getting smarter about the world because we are doing business with the world. You can’t understand the world if you don’t become like it.” Gail Rebuck calls this “the feminisation of business.” She celebrates its rise along with the demise of “the male paradigm as aggressive and competitive. We need to value the ‘relational power’ that women understand and use so instinctively.” It was just that relational power that Stone built in her prize-winning BusyGirl Network.

“Business is now valuing different experiences and skills more broadly. It is all about making the soft hard, the intangible tangible and making visible (and rewarding) those skills and talents that used to be invisible.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in women’s networking skills. If business is all about relationships, then this key female talent becomes critical to business. Indeed, both the UK and US boast several networking gurus who are paid to teach people (mainly men) how to meet people, work a room and attend a conference.
This isn’t just about swapping business cards. Emma Jones left Arthur Andersen to set up Techlocate. The prime advantage, she felt, was introducing her clients to each other. “I try to connect clients by physically bringing them together. You want to build a relationship – not just a one-hit wonder. Men think about deals; women network to build long-term relationships.”

The strength of networking lies in making links between people and information, seeing connections where others don’t. When, in the US, AOL kept trying to shut down my firm’s software, I found myself fighting for survival against the world’s largest internet company. AOL had 60 full-time lobbyists, infinite resources and the personable, well-known Steve Case. We had nothing. But we won the legislative battle. How? We built a network of companies (some of them our competitors) that had an interest in our winning. As competition grows more complex, linear thinking looks risky.

8. TWO MINDS ARE BETTER THAN ONE
The last business I ran in the US had to close when our investor’s stock plummeted. My terrific salesman, who’d so enjoyed not having to lie, went job-hunting. After several months, I phoned his wife to find out what was taking him so long. “He can’t go back,” she said. “He liked telling the truth and he wants to work for a woman again.” A few months later, he did.

Growing affluence, together with declining deference, promotes the move to what the Work Foundation has called “value matching – where you seek a congruence between your own values and the values of the organisation you are dealing with.” All the female business leaders I’ve met, in the UK and the US, are passionate about that congruence, about building companies that match their values, where they can be themselves, have whole lives, be honest and open and have their innate skills recognised. This doesn’t mean that these women are angels or that they – or their companies – are perfect. But what they are aiming for, and skilled at, is different: being more open, more honest, operating more like webs than pyramids.
That they won’t boast about this in public isn’t just modesty.

It points to one more aspect of these businesses that makes them so exciting. They are highly inclusive. Blazing a trail for themselves, women have opened the door for everyone. The legislation that comes on stream in April gives women greater maternity rights – but it gives men greater flexibility, too. Denied access to men’s clubs for centuries, women are determined to build a new business environment that doesn’t repeat the sins of the past and where whole men and whole women can thrive together.

It may start as ideology but, like all good entrepreneurs, it endures because it’s good business sense. Margaret Heffernan was managing director of IPPA and CEO of Marlin Consulting in the UK. In the US, she was vice-president of acquisitions for Vertigo Development, CEO of InfoMation Software, CEO of ZineZone Publishing and CEO of iCAST Corporation. She now lives and writes in the UK and is starting a new business.

By Margaret Heffernan

www.realbusiness.co.uk

<< Return to press archive