Improvise
by Margaret Heffernan

You can't plan -- so you'd better improvise
When I’d finally got through on the phone, much to my amazement, June Coldren was laughing. "Oh my god, it’s ridiculous. It’s been insanity. We evacuated New Orleans and moved west to Lafayette. They’be basically evacuated everyone from Galveston right along the coast to Louisiana. Then all my staff who were evacuated here left to help evacuate their families. I’m ready to move to Canada!”

June’s family and her companies, Cenergy Corp. and Cenergy Logistics, had been based in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29, 2005. Everyone had to scatter, to friends, to family. But when it was all over, June had two companies to run, companies that catered to the oil and gas companies in the Gulf of Mexico, themselves in turmoil. Yet three weeks after the storm had hit, the website proudly announced that Cenergy was up and running. June was very far from daunted.

"I love just winging it. That’s just how I am. The logistics group – some of them live in Lafayette so they came here and set up. So then we all got in touch and realized Lafayette was the best place to be. We identified an office, set up, signed a lease and moved in. Everyone who could get there did. The hard thing was to find places to live. There were no hotel rooms, no houses to rent. One of the guys I work with had an extra house so I felt like a queen because I had a house to live in! But a lot of people didn’t luck out like that. You have to keep going.”

Not every business gets hit by a hurricane. But every business suffers shocks and setbacks – and successes – it had in no way foreseen. You can plan, do your research, and plan again. But the one thing you have to be is resilient.

June has what so many female entrepreneurs have: phenomenal powers of improvisation. What makes women so good at this is that they have, as psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen wrote, "no expectation of lawfulness.”1 Women do not approach business expecting it to obey rules. We don’t think of business as a machine which, if we could just understand the physics well enough, we could control. So many descriptions of business and management carry this assumption: that if you could just study companies deeply enough, crunch the numbers long enough, you can glean the scientific laws of business that govern business behavior. But business isn’t a science; you can’t design or conduct replicable experiments. No two companies are the same, no two days are the same. The variables are infinite. And so starting from the premise that there are rules is doomed to frustration.

Where women start – with no expection of lawfulness – turns out to be a lot more realistic. That doesn’t mean we don’t believe in plans or decisions; we make plans and decisions all the time and we’re good at it. But we aren’t paralyzed when events render those plans and decisions meaningless.

"I just tried to sit back and think about how to start again. I made the big decision (that I probably should have made without the hurricane) which was to move most of my corporate presence in Houston. So I did that and kept travelling and kept doing business as usual because sales had to keep ramping up and we had to appear seamless.”

Every business person confronts catastrophes of one kind of another – lack of funding, product faults, market resistance, hiring delays. It’s part of being an entrepreneur that, rather than agonizing about what went wrong, or seeking scapegoats, all energies are devoted to moving forward. What matters most in a crisis is not what has happened – but how well, and how fast, you are able to respond to it.

This isn’t something that’s taught at business schools. Asked where they hone these skills, many women cite their families. As a mother, you never know quite what your children will turn out to need, or want, be great at or stumble over. One day they may obsess over Lego – and change their minds just after you’ve bought the huge Christmas set. One month they’ll eat nothing but tuna fish and a month later your cupboard will be full of untouched cans. Every mother quickly learns that there is no point protesting; you have to adapt.

In a business world where the rate of change only accelerates, being good at change is a fantastic advantage; it’s one reason why women-owned businesses are proving so very successful. Of course, that doesn’t mean improvising is easy. But it sure can be stimulating.

"Did I get tired?” June Coldren laughed at my question. "Yes, I got tired. It was so hard getting to sleep because my mind was just racing all the time.”

1 The Essential Difference by Simon Baron-Cohen, Allen Lane, 2003.

© Margaret Heffernan

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