We've Got It
The Inevitable Rise of the British entrepreneuse
by Margaret Heffernan

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

What women aren't doing is singing their own praises. I've spent months talking to them about their businesses in the US and the UK and 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.

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. their home lives so they both had to be accommodated. For men, it was the other way around - work came first and home life got the left overs. The legislation that comes onstream in April gives women greater maternity rights - but it gives men greater flexibility too. Blazing this trail for themselves, women have opened it to everyone. I once employed a salesman who'd worked for years at TimeWarner. 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.

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.'" In her own career, she says, her forthrightness made men uncomfortable; they sometimes found her difficult and impolite. "They were frozen!" she laughs but makes it clear that 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, who won the 2002 European Women of the Year entrepreneurial award. "Because we (Aurora Gender Capital Management) are a commercial organization, 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? And I say, 'I'm helping them,'' she laughs, "and he just rolls his eyes!" But Glenda's openness is typical -- and it is in marked contrast to the power play that comes from hoarding. Emma Jones, of TechLocate, agrees, "When it comes 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 Liddell was sick of such corporate politics when she left to found Nickers and 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."

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 America were holding funding parties and shipping parties and IPO parties, WebCT threw a funeral. After a merger, Carol Vallone was the world leader in putting university courses on line. But now she 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. "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 and I felt that we had to acknowledge it just like any death. We had a whole team that was working for this product and this was their baby. It was born and they had put their heart and soul into it -- and how are you sensitive to that? So we had a memorial service."

Vallone is no New Age rhetorician. For her, dealing honestly with the emotion in business is part of the job. I've seen scores of companies paralyzed by men afraid to deal with emotion and 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.

Intuition is Knowledge

Glenda Stone sees female skills generally as gradually acquiring the status and recognition they deserve as business attributes. " Things like female intuition are being taken seriously now. I have certainly learned to respect my own intuition. My intuition is rarely if ever wrong -- there is just 'something' that tell us." Caroline Liddell agrees, " Women are instinctively more intuitive when it comes to communication; they just read body language." And that intuition saves time and opportunity. "You can tell when a sale isn't going to happen" says Carol Vallone, "even when the salesman's optimism makes him soldier on. You can tell and there's just less opportunity cost to moving on." Emma Jones eventually sold TechLocate to Tenon. "By the time that TechLocate was sold, it had built value because female intuition. Our first conference was based on my gut instinct that it would have a huge return. My female intuition: "We deal with these people - let's physically meet them." I couldn't prove that it would work but it added huge value."

Management Care

Research on management has shown women consistently rating higher 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 at all. Once a week, Carol 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% growth rate.

The same research gave women high marks for being more concerned with overall success than personal achievement. Focusing on the whole, rather than her own part, gets smart decisions. Donna Shirley always insisted on not sitting at the head of the 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 their male executives return from paternity leave as better managers.

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."

Caroline Liddell is citing Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps which aims to define the scientific differences between men and women. Commanding serious attention from financial editors to business owners, its accuracy may be less important than that it appears to explain what we all feel to be true: that women 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, at a resting state, men's brains stay only 30% active but women's brains stay 90% active The authors interpret this as confirming that women receive and analyze data constantly. This multi-directional thinking his makes women efficient, creative and immensely sensitive to market shifts and it informs the companies that businesses of tomorrow will have to compete with.

All business is relationships

"Is work becoming more feminized?" Glenda Stone asks. "Yes it is. It isn't just that work is getting less macho. We are just 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 the world." All of this adds up to what Gail Rebuck calls "the feminization of business" and 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 more broadly valuing different experiences and skills. It is all about making the soft hard, the intangible tangible, making visible and rewarding those skills and talents which used to be invisible.".

Nowhere is this more apparent than in women's networking skills. If business is all about relationships, then a key female talent is not just a social grace but a critical business asset -- so much so that now both the US and UK boast several networking gurus who are paid to teach mainly men how to meet people, work a room, attend a conference. Relational power isn't just about swapping business cards. Emma Jones left Arthur Andersen to set up Techlocate whose prime advantage, she felt, was introducing their 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." Networking's real strength lies in making links between people and information, seeing connections where others don't. When, in the United States, AOL kept trying to shut down my company'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) who had an interest in our winning. As competition grows increasingly complex, linear thinking looks risky.

Two minds are better than one

The last business I ran in the States 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 organization you are dealing with." All the female business leaders I've met, in the US and the UK, are passionate about that congruence, building companies which match their values, where they can be themselves, have whole lives, be honest and open and have their innate skills recognized. 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: more open, more honest, 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. 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.

This column was originally published in Real Business magazine.

© Margaret Heffernan

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