Reviews for Women on Top

The Globe and Mail

Copyright 2007 The Globe and Mail, a division of CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc.
All Rights Reserved
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
April 25, 2007 Wednesday

HEADLINE: The feminine (entrepreneurial) mystique
BYLINE: HARVEY SCHACHTER, harvey@harveyschachter.com
SECTION: REPORT ON BUSINESS: GLOBE CAREERS; IDEAS: MANAGING BOOKS; Pg. C3
Women on Top
By Margaret Heffernan
Viking, 274 pages, $32.50

The number of businesses started by women keeps surging, with profits for them growing faster than all companies, Margaret Heffernan states. Indeed, in the United States, women's companies are creating jobs at twice the rate of all firms and are now responsible for more payroll than all the Fortune 500 behemoths combined.

Ms. Heffernan, who has been the chief executive officer of five different businesses in the U.S. and Britain, set out to talk to some of these successful female entrepreneurs and, although they were a diverse lot, came away with some important lessons.

The first is what motivates female entrepreneurs: These women "were driven to look for a place where they could prove themselves on their terms. There is some evidence that women are willing to take bigger risks with their careers than men. This is not because they are stupid; it is because they are desperate. So often they can see no other way to find work, and a way of working, that suits them."

The businesses they build, therefore, are different from those that men create, notably for the attention they pay to others and the way they lead by orchestration rather than direction. That made Ms. Heffernan uncomfortable. "When I describe these women as nurturing, it makes me flinch. I did not grow up in an environment in which my female qualities were regarded as anything other than an obstacle in business. I spent a good deal of my career trying to ignore them. So it is a shock to see them as an asset, but it is a very important lesson for the business world as a whole. It is critical for both men and women to appreciate just how relevant, effective, and successful women's ways of working are, so that everyone will gain confidence in us just the way we are," she writes in Women on Top.

She also feels it's important for established, traditional corporations to recognize the achievements of these female entrepreneurs, and understand the talent they are losing. What is it about most corporate cultures that makes them intolerable to precisely the kind of entrepreneurial imagination and drive needed for success? In particular, since these women generally have found a balance between family and work - and have encouraged their staff to do the same - she feels their success should shatter forever the ossified belief that you can't have a family and be fully committed to a professional career.

The hundreds of entrepreneurs she studied include some reasonably well know figures, such as clothing designer Eileen Fisher, Oxygen Media founder Geraldine Laybourne, and Doris Christopher, founder of kitchen utensils seller The Pampered Chef. There are also many unheralded but astonishing success stories, such as Carol Latham, who, newly divorced and broke, built a tech business by hiring her inner-city neighbours, many of whom didn't speak English, and giving them the schooling and training that allowed the business to take off.

The book is built around themes that serve as lessons. It begins with the value of values: Ms. Heffernan found that when a woman talks about her company, she is more likely to talk about its philosophy - about the purpose underlying the business. That draws others to her. But, also, in a business world characterized by chaos and change, values provide continuity.

The cornerstone of their people management is a belief in fairness, the opportunity to achieve, and a sense of community. At a time when some major companies are looking to cut back on benefits, women's businesses have been loath to follow their example. "In fact, you are more likely to be offered a choice of insurers and pension plans if you work for a woman. What this says about the company is that it is serious when it talks about valuing people," Ms. Heffernan says.

Most of the women lead by orchestration, putting people in the right place and intervening only when necessary. Lauri Union, who revived her family's steel manufacturer, Union Corrugating Co., oversees nine plants with the headquarters attached to one of them in North Carolina - but she isn't located at that headquarters or any of the plants, living in Boston. "The fact that I was not there made the management team stronger because they weren't dependent on me. The company's growth was not held back by the limits of what I could do," she says.

That's a provocative notion - not being held back by the leader's limits - and this engaging book is filled with similarly thoughtful fodder for entrepreneurs and managers. Beyond that, of course, it will be inspirational for female entrepreneurs, as they hear the stories of women who have triumphed in business while not changing who they are.

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Bloomberg News

Do Female Tigers Have the Muscle to Shake Up Business Culture?
By Joan Oleck

March 7 (Bloomberg) -- Carol Vallone killed her own creation. The CEO of Universal Learning Technologies called a halt to the software her company had designed for putting university course material on line when she realized that her competitor, WebCT, had a product that already boasted the momentum and customer base hers lacked. So Vallone initiated a risky merger with WebCT.

In "Women on Top: How Women Entrepreneurs Are Changing the Rules of Business Success," Margaret Heffernan shows how Vallone -- woman that she was -- confronted the intense emotions that surround an M&A deal.

"It was a bereavement, and I felt that we had to acknowledge it just as in any death,'' Vallone told Heffernan. "So we had a memorial service. We literally stood around and had readings about the product, remembered it, had a eulogy!''

She went further. To ward off the usual M&A turf war, she sent technical teams back and forth between WebCT's offices in Vancouver and her own company's base in Boston. She installed Canadian flags in the Boston reception area and videoconferencing equipment to give face time between the two staffs real meaning.

Vallone made the merger a success, writes Heffernan (herself a former CEO of iCAST, Zinezone and other businesses and the author of "The Naked Truth: A Working Woman's Manifesto on Business and What Really Matters''), by facing rather than running away from the "maelstrom'' of M&A anxieties.

Female Norm

With privately held businesses owned by women growing at three times the rate of all such American firms over the past decade, Heffernan thinks it's time to toss out those old-school male qualities of aggression, single-mindedness and hard-edged analysis.

The "new norm" welcomes such female qualities as a feel for the zeitgeist (as society's primary consumers, women are more likely to capture the spirit of the moment); improvisation; and adherence (not just lip service) to values. Wal-Mart may call people its most precious asset while it implements health insurance cuts, but the women Heffernan met stuck to their values through good times and bad.

In this engaging celebration of female business owners, Heffernan offers chapters on 10 "female" qualities and interviews 27 businesswomen about how they put them into practice. Eileen Fisher, the designer, demonstrated her zeitgeist sensitivity by recognizing that women want more comfortable work clothes that transition to evening wear.

Unorthodox Forecast

Doris Christopher, of the kitchen-utensil maker the Pampered Chef, exemplifies improvisation. When she was starting out, her company's 400 percent growth rate was unmanageable -- and inventory was insufficient. So she took the unorthodox route of informing her sales consultants that she was putting the brakes on further recruiting: She presented a business plan that forecast a freeze -- not something most male entrepreneurs would even consider doing.

Mona Eliassen, CEO of Eliassen Group, software consultants, recognizes what Heffernan calls the "power of people" and understands that morale matters. (In fact, analyses of publicly traded companies suggest a 20 percent earnings premium for high morale.) Despite economic downturns and unavoidable layoffs, Eliassen has refused to cut the massages, fresh fruit, dry- cleaning pickups and other perks that define her company culture.

All This, All That

Heffernan sees a "good cultural fit" between the business cultures these women have built and society's expectation that women will be more caring, communicative and encouraging than men. But readers may wish she had interviewed these impressive CEOs and left it at that. Instead she promotes stereotypes -- all women are this, all men are that. C'mon: Surely there are a few good guys out there.

Still, she's on to something when she describes "the dominant cliche in the business world: the start-up run by emotionally stilted, 20-something boys who eat pizza, work through the night and change the world.'' What makes this cartoon picture of Bill Gates and Sergey Brin ring true is the unfunny fact behind it: Less than 9 percent of venture capital funding goes to women's businesses.

It's about time for some of those VC guys to get in touch with their feminine side.

"Women on Top" is published by Viking (274 pages, $25.95).

(Joan Oleck is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer on this story: Joan Oleck in New York at joanvalo@aol.com

Last Updated: March 7, 2007 00:24 EST

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Business Voice

Contradictions about the role of women in business remain but in the US female-run companies are doing better than ever.
Women on Top: How Women Entrepreneurs Are Changing the Rules of Business Success By Margaret Heffernan, Viking, $25.95

Reading Women on Top feels like attending a kaleidoscopic, high-energy drinks party, packed to the gunnels with brave, buzzy, imaginative businesswomen. I left energised – and convinced... [view PDF]

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Publishers Weekly

Women-run companies are more likely to stay in business than the average U.S. firm, to grow at three times the average rate, create jobs at twice the average rate and produce profits faster, according to former CEO and BBC producer Heffernan. To find out how and why, she interviewed hundreds of women business owners. Although the way her results confirmed stereotypes about gender differences made her queasy, it turned out that women business owners typically possess the characteristics experts think are needed in 21st-century businesses: combining "discipline, focus, detachment, and systematic thinking with playfulness, empathy, and design." She found that many women started their own businesses after working for corporations that didn't respect or listen to them. In charge of their own companies, their abilities to assert their values, nurture their employees and customers, "orchestrate" rather than "command and control," emphasize collaboration rather than competition, stay open to change, ask for help, learn from mistakes and make time for family became a formula for success. Heffernan's tone matches the frenetic pace and idealistic underpinnings of her interviewees' packed lives. (Jan. 22)

Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
All rights reserved

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Library Journal

A woman who has been the CEO of six companies, Heffernan is an unusual breed, but here she argues that she's not that unusual. Women represent the fastest-growing segment of the entrepreneurial population, starting and growing businesses of all kinds. As Heffernan gives facts and figures (e.g., more women attend college now than men) along with plenty of success stories, this book is as much a preview of the future of business as it is a pep talk for women. Most books on business entrepreneurship can be divided into two types: those directed toward anyone wanting to start a business (e.g., Wes Moss's Starting from Scratch or Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start, a kind of handbook on bringing new ideas to life) and those that focus on women. In this context, Heffernan's is a solid work that adds another dimension to the business library. Most of what it presents we already know: women shop more often and are in tune with trends; they have fresh ideas, communicate more, and are willing to take more risks. But the book also argues compellingly that many women are driven to become entrepreneurs because those in power in corporate America-that is, men-shut them out. Consequently, this book could work in women's studies collections as well as business collections.

~ Stephen E. Turner, Turner & Assocs., San Francisco

Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.