Book Review Archive

10 January 2010: "Women at the Top"

12 December 2009: "Keep Your Cool If You Lose Your Job"

22 April 2009: "A Woman's Place is in the Boardroom"

12 April 2009: "Why Women Should Rule The World"

6 December 2008: "You're Wearing That?"

11 November 2008: "How She Does It"

22 July 2008: "Women Leading"

20 May 2008: "Connecting Leadership and Learning with Humour"

12 April 2008: "Happier"

10 January 2008: "What Happy Women Know"

5 October 2007: "Learned Optimism"

22 August 2007: "Girls Just Want To Have Fund$"

26 March 2007: "Reinventing your Life by Jeffrey E. Young and Janet S. Klosko"

Women at the Top

by Frances Denz (A handbook for aspiring women directors)

A Book Review by Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

24 November 2009

Recently at Professionelle, we advertised our last public networking event for the year. Our chosen topic for discussion was “Women at the Top – the business case” and this title prompted Frances Denz to get in touch to let us know she had written a book with exactly that title and which she thought could be of interest to us and our members. She was right!

It is worth noting that this “handbook for aspiring women directors” is written by a woman who has triumphed over adversity to become a director duly accredited by the Institute of Directors (IoD) and now engaged on a number of Boards, one of them overseeing almost $1bn in investment assets. Though Frances does not dwell on her struggles, she developed cancer as a young woman, a condition she then battled for almost 30 years. As she wryly puts it in the foreword,

I have not had the standard orthodox work history.

Nevertheless, she has successfully made the transition from her first governance role on a regional Dog Club Committee to ones of commercial influence and for which she is paid!

Reviewers

When I first picked up this slim grey volume, the thing that struck me most was the profile of its reviewers. Dame Jenny Shipley, no less, warmly endorsed it as:

a gutsy, pertinent and timely book… Frances lays down the challenge for those who appoint directors and those who would wish to be directors.

Adrienne von Tunzelmann, who I had the pleasure to meet at a Professionelle workshop, and who has an extensive public sector background with deep experience in governance and policy review, said of the book,

Frances Denz’s account of her real-life experience and her acutely accurate – and often rueful - observations will resonate with many women. The book is… an excellent factual ‘how to’ guide to seizing opportunity and avoiding pitfalls.

Format

Frances has written her handbook in 28 short chapters on topics ranging from ‘The Difference between Management and Governance’ through ‘Components for Success’ to ‘What Boards and Trusts are Looking For’. Most of these chapters contain a sidebar showcasing Frances’ relevant experience or else have her stories woven into the advice. In the section on ‘Getting Paid’, for example, she provides sobering numbers on the level of pay relative to the work and risk, and describes the amount she is paid and reimbursed for her two most significant Boards.

Frances’ Path

At Professionelle, we are working to demystify the paths to the board room. I was therefore interested to pick through this book to identify Frances’ own route to “the top”. It is a pattern of moving from smaller to larger, from clubs to companies:

Otago German Shepherd Dog Committee
NZ Kennel Club Obedience Committee (elected)
Member, Labour Women’s Council
Founding Chair for Women’s Loan Fund
Chair of Richmond Fellowship, Wellington branch (elected). Richmond is an NGO active in community mental health and support services
Director on a small trust Board working in the disability field
ACT party Board (elected) – and, yes, Frances’ political allegiances do seem to have swung from one side of the spectrum to the other!
Director of Tauranga Energy Consumer Trust (elected)
Director of a Council-owned company that administers 5 swimming complexes
President of her local Grey Power Association (elected).

Throughout this journey, Frances has continued to learn skills. Early on, a series of short stints on committees gave her exposure to a wide range of issues and of operating styles (good and bad!). Rocketing up the Kennel Club’s hierarchy in record time – my favourite story – in order to change an obedience rule showed her the value of goal-directed action. The political party experience taught her valuable lessons about handling meetings. More recently she has taken formal courses through the IoD and last year became one of only 43 women with provisional accreditation from the Institute.

Straight Up

I do like writers who are not afraid to march through the minefield of gender politics, wearing their best non-PC boots! Strong points of view are not only entertaining to read, they also make me confront my own prejudices and beliefs. Frances does not flinch from talking about:

Queen Bees
The Old Boys network
What it means for women that men are the ones who have written the boardroom rules
How to frame stories and examples in language male directors can relate to
The stereotyping she still experiences from female staff members of organisations of which she is a director (regardless of whether she dresses in a power suit or not!)

My One Gripe

I am a pedant in matters of grammar, spelling and punctuation – frustratingly, Frances’ copy editor was not. By the last page, I was more than ready to shoot this person. You have been warned!

New Ideas

Editing aside, I certainly came away with new ideas and perspectives including Frances’ take on networking (one of our favourite topics!). Do your many and wide contacts help you find Directorships, or does your high calibre network and what it can bring to an organisation add to your allure as a potential Director?

Whether you know a lot about governance already or are embarking on your journey, there is likely to be something in this handbook for you. This is because of the way Frances mixes her hard-won experience and advice into a comprehensive coverage of the issues surrounding a path to the Boardroom. At 73 pages, it will be both a quick and an enlightening read.

Women at the Top was published by Stellaris Publishing in 2009.

www.stellaris.co.nz

ISBN 978-0-473-14796-9

"How to Keep Your Cool if You Lose Your Job" by Kathryn Jackson

A Book Review by Jacquie Sherborne, a Human Resource professional based in Hamilton.

25 October 2009

How to keep your cool if you lose your job is a low-key, easy to read and practical resource for those finding themselves facing redundancy or in similar circumstances. It is a book you can dip into based upon your needs or interests; it describes itself as a 'workbook for those surviving redundancy' and contains practical tools, templates and thought-provoking questions to set you on the path to finding a suitable and enjoyable role.

It is New Zealand-centric, which is particularly valuable; all resources and websites are current and it reflects the realities and opportunities of the New Zealand labour market and workforce.

The author – Kathryn Jackson – has an empathetic style and extensive experience in assisting those looking for work or looking to make a career change. However, Kathryn keeps you moving proactively through a structured but flexible process and won’t have you sitting on the couch bemoaning your situation!

The snippets from other people Kathryn has worked with or come across are useful and provide extra credibility and interest throughout the book. One of these contributors is none other than Galia, who reflects on her own experience of redundancy and what helped her most through that challenging period. Kathryn has worked successfully with a wide range of people of all ages, career stages and professions and has helped them move along with purpose and new tools and information.

I would recommend this book to most people facing redundancy, those returning to the workforce after a career break or people seeking their first role after completing education and training. I think it would be particularly useful if combined with some online resources or coaching from a professional or skilled friend if possible. Additional customised support will pick up on your particular opportunities and provide you with real-time feedback. The book provides some excellent insights, templates, links and questions and enables readers to work at their own pace and whenever suits them in a cost-effective and confidential way.

The very best of luck to anyone facing redundancy. You may find it a challenging and worrying time, however this handy guide and wise counsel and assistance from a good friend or coach will have you on track quickly and very painlessly!

Comments and Recommendations

If you’ve read this book, what were your thoughts? Do you have recommendations for other books that you can pass on? Please let us know.

A Woman’s Place is in the Boardroom by Peninah Thomson and Jacey Graham with Tom Lloyd

A Book Review by Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

12 April 2009

This 2005 book was recommended to us by Philippa Reed, Chief Executive of the EEO Trust. It’s about how and why there are so few women in Boardrooms and senior teams in the big companies and what can be done about it. In the process, it also sets out the business case for why Board Chairs, CEOs and their shareholders should care – a topic close to Professionelle’s heart, as many of you will know!

The authors use international research on women’s progress to outline the opportunity. They then colour it in vibrantly with interviews with FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 Chairmen and CEOs, senior women and Board Directors, and headhunters.

The book makes a great read both for more senior women who aspire to Board positions, and also to younger women, helping them confront “issues and barriers of which they as yet have no inkling.” For me, it was affirming to find a book full of the issues we talk and write about at Professionelle.

Highly Recommended

There are three good reasons to read this book:

The interviewees, speaking anonymously, tell it like it is, in PC-free terms. The Boys Club, the Queen Bee syndrome, they’re all here.
It lists specific pipeline-priming actions that women and employers can take
The cartoons are excellent!

Demand Side

So what do the “Kings” – the highly influential males in the largest firms - say about the dearth of women in the boardroom? Several themes came out of these interviews:

The imbalance is a supply problem, the Kings believe. They do want women on their boards but they say they can’t find them.
Some want women on their boards because they believe women bring different and valuable qualities like lateral thinking and listening skills.
The gender imbalance on boards is less surprising, they say, in industries that are heavily male-dominated. Thus 14% of consumer and retail board directorships are held by women, but only 3% of industrials’.
Women’s careers are slowed (but not derailed) by babies and by typically lower mobility. This affects women’s progress in multinationals who expect offshore experience in their top executives and Board candidates.

Headhunters are often gatekeepers for Board appointments and their section provides new perspectives on the demand side. The headhunters deny only looking for Anglo-Saxon male candidates who have run large businesses. As proof they point to the ‘third sector’ boards (NFPs, charities etc) that are professionalising in the UK, and are becoming a hiring pool they will consider. Academia is another such new pool. Nevertheless, the continuing emphasis on candidates who have had bottom line experience comes through strongly in both the headhunters’ remarks, and those of the women directors who were interviewed.

The boards of major companies also are changing and this affects the demand side, according to the headhunters. For example, as boards shrink, the demand for board appointees from functional backgrounds like HR and marketing, which are populated with women, has reduced. On the other hand, appointments in the UK are increasingly handled through Nominating Committees rather than only the CEO, and this means “there’s less recruitment going on ‘in own image’”.

The headhunter section also contains a challenging but refreshingly un-PC list of Do’s and Don’ts for aspiring women directors. A selection of three is in the sidebar below.

Headhunters’ Dos and Don’ts

Find a senior male mentor – you need male input because your interviewers will usually be men. Be candid about your communication style but be very careful about how you talk about your family and hobbies. It is OK for a man to talk about shooting and golf and putting the children to bed – that’s not seen in the same way. It is more difficult for a woman to talk about herself without triggering prejudices about emotional capacity, time, and the ability to juggle domestic commitments.

A lot of women suffer from the interloper syndrome and it comes across. Sometimes they’re a little bit too jokey, some witter on too much…Be confident and succinct. Don’t be afraid to “sell” yourself by …talking about the value you will bring. One of the challenges for women is to be seen by (usually male) interviewers as approachable, competent and professional.

Be well groomed from top to toe. Your appearance should be appropriate and professional; not too severe, that’s a common mistake, but well-tailored

Supply Side

What do the women in the “marzipan” layer – that’s the one just below the board – say about the very slow progress of women through the boardroom door? In short, they weren’t surprised. When asked what they thought the contributing factors were, they pointed less to the need for flexibility and childcare and more to cultural issues and women’s own shortcomings.

One very interesting concept mentioned at this point comes from GE Capital’s women’s network. They call it the PIE, based on P = Performance, I = Image and E = Exposure. Together these are the ingredients for what the GE network claims creates favourable promotion decisions. The best mix, they believe, is:

10% Performance (because everyone performs)
30% Image (ie being known to be capable)
60% Exposure (ie simply being known)

Women are not good at the E. We tend to undersell ourselves. We’re not that confident. And we sometimes develop coping strategies early in our career for being a woman in a man’s world that can backfire on us as we get more senior.

The confidence and self-promotion issues were recurrent themes throughout the book. “It’s a combination of some men not letting women in and women discounting themselves. Men do things that are high profile, rather than things that need doing. Women pick up so many low-level tasks they don’t have time for higher level tasks.”

So What Works?

The book makes recommendations for priming the pipeline and many of them will be familiar to readers at Professionelle. The list below contains practical steps that either the organisation or women themselves can undertake to increase women at the top:

Measure it! Numbers give shape and focus, though as Unilever’s Global Diversity Director says, “The numbers get it started but don’t get it going.”
Top support - finding the right sponsor for the gender diversity campaign. Note: it isn’t necessarily the most senior female, especially if she’s loathe to admit to any gender barriers on her path to the top!
Executive coaching - this is for the most senior levels that warrant the investment. Self deprecation and an apparent lack of self esteem are issues the book describes as commonly tackled by senior women in these sessions.
Mentoring programmes and role models – a cross company mentoring programme is proving successful, perhaps reflecting the fact that the differences in the area near the Board are less between companies than the differences between different levels in the same firm.
Career development programmes – increasing women’s confidence to step up to stretch assignments through interventions like group discussions about career planning, self confidence and male-female communication styles.
Childcare and flexible working – good provisions in this area are table stakes for attracting highly talented female staff these days
Women’s networks – a way for women to create connections to offset their lack of interest in “political” activities and receive personal and professional development. Also a way for them to contribute to the firm’s marketing insights (eg Ford and aspects of car design).

One other critical intervention is to change the culture. The authors are talking here about:

a barrier that consists of assumptions and habits embedded so deeply in cultures and business processes that they are below the threshold of conscious awareness.

A telling story in the book is of the manager group brought together to discuss diversity. They were split into gender groups and asked to describe “what it’s like being a man (or woman – as appropriate) in the company today.” The women were soon scribbling away, the men were perplexed.

The question made no sense to them because, like fish in water, they were so in tune with their environment they struggled to gain any external perspective on it.

Women’s experiences, of course, are typically the opposite. At this point the book provides a rather painful list of micro-inequities - the little unfair actions that, singly, are not worth making a fuss about, but that add up to a frustrating and alienating environment for ambitious women. Simply being able to put a name to such discourtesies, however, helps women (and men) express and address them. So does recruiting sympathetic male allies.

The journey to a changed culture is long, of course, and the book only skims the process. This may explain the authors’ latest book…

Stop Press

In 2008, the authors published a follow up book, entitled A Woman’s Place is in the Boardroom: The Roadmap. The new book is described as a practical guide for how to apply the theories put forward in the first book. Certainly the 2005 book did not have room to investigate the prescriptive recommendations in depth, especially in the area of long term cultural change. I haven’t read this later book but it seems a logical progression of the ideas.

Comments and Recommendations

If you have read either of these books, please let us know what you thought.

This book was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2005 and is available at Amazon

"You're Wearing That?" by Deborah Tannen

(Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation)

A Book Review by Helen Mackay.

Helen Mackay is the General Counsel at New Zealand Oil & Gas, and also the immediate past president of CLANZ, the Corporate Lawyers Association of NZ. She is mum to two young boys and her third child is due any day.

I was so moved by “You’re Wearing That?” I suggested to Galia that it was worthy of a review for Professionelle members. Galia not only agreed, she persuasively convinced me to provide this review!

Insights at a Book Club

It started at a recent book club meeting, when the discussion among the seven or eight women present turned to our mothers and the complex relationships many of us have as daughters. If your book club is like mine, the conversations are extremely wide ranging with the book of the month only being one possible topic we might cover in an evening! An American friend mentioned this book as one that provided a very real insight into what really goes on between mothers and daughters.

The book's author, Deborah Tannen, is a Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University in the US so it has the rigour of academic analysis but also explores very real interactions. The book provides a compelling focus on what Tannen describes as the most fraught and passionate connection of women's lives: the mother-daughter relationship.

I found so many issues and ideas in this book resonated with me and I would often excitedly read them out to my husband only to get a quizzical look and the reaction "Well, of course, I could have told you that!" Perhaps we don’t see what is right in front of our eyes. For me, this book has provided some crucial illumination.

Conversations with our Mothers

“You’re Wearing That?” contains fascinating analyses of different conversation chains where seemingly insignificant remarks have such power to spark intense reactions based on a lifetime of conditioning and in-built response. I was intrigued to read that many of the familiar conversations I have with my mother are not unique but are played out across phone lines around the world.

I am not the only woman whose mother, upon being told her daughter was speaking at a conference or meeting, would ask, "What are you wearing?" This has always irritated me as I would have thought the more appropriate questions were "what topic are you speaking on?" or even "How do you feel about speaking - are you well prepared"? But as Tannen explains, many of us work in professional areas that our mothers are not familiar with, so the topic we are speaking on may not resonate with them. In asking what clothes we intend to wear, our mothers are not trivialising our achievements. Instead. they are trying to establish a point of connection with us and to show they care by ensuring we look our best.

Undercurrents

Another topic examined is that of message and metamessage. The metamessage is the underlying meaning behind words.

A common complaint is that daughters wish their mothers would just come out and speak plainly to express their needs and wants. Tannen shows that in today's Western society we value people who express themselves directly but she also explores the idea that indirectness and silent communication are much valued attributes in many cultural systems and have their own merits. While we might wish our mothers could be more upfront, she counsels patience and making efforts to understand the true meaning behind the spoken words whose good intentions can often be poorly expressed.

Much of this book is common sense. Nevertheless, I have found it has given me insight into not only what might lie behind my mother's thoughts and words, but also into my own reactions and trigger points. The result has been what I hope is a better attempt by me to react not only to my mother's words but to try and understand what she really means to say!

It’s All Your Fault

A common thread in all relationships is our willingness to see another person as being at fault and our own behaviour as faultless. Tannen describes this in the context of mothers and daughters as each person wanting to be seen for who she really is, but tending to see the other as falling short of who she should be.

The frequency and amount of conversation between mothers and daughters is one of the many reasons given why misunderstandings occur. It is apparently very common for many women to speak to their mothers several times a week for several hours in total, as I do with mine, but interestingly mothers and sons and fathers and daughters usually speak far less frequently.

A powerful message from this book that I have discussed and agreed with many women friends since reading it is that we often treat our mothers in a worse manner than we would ever dream of treating anyone else! Tannen's view is that from a young age, we are aware our mother's love is unconditional and therefore able to be taken very much taken for granted. This realisation alone has made me try to be more mindful during my conversations with my mother.

Criticism and Complaints

The parallels of control and criticism are also explored with many women reporting their mothers always criticise them and mothers complaining they have to walk on eggshells with their daughters. One of the memorable insights of the book for me is that when we ask our mother for advice we are really asking for her approval: subconsciously, we value our mother's approval very highly.

It also seems that many mothers, when asked for advice, believe it is their duty to provide correction as they did when we were children and they are disappointed when we reject their input. It makes sense, then, that many of the women interviewed in the book who report having close relationships with their daughters realise what those daughters truly seek and try to provide unconditional approval rather than criticism, however constructive, wherever possible.

Final thoughts

As I read this book I was in the last month of my third pregnancy and now as I write this review I am only a few days away from giving birth. With two beautiful little boys already and not knowing the gender of our new addition, this book filled me both with trepidation at the prospect of having a daughter and experiencing such a complex relationship myself as a mother, and also a very real sorrow that I might never get to have such an opportunity.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has a mother or is a mother and hope that you too get to enjoy the insights that I have experienced from reading it.

This book was published by Random House, 2006. It is available at Amazon.

Comments and Recommendations

If you’ve read this book, what were your thoughts? Do you have recommendations for other books that you can pass on? Please let us know.

Your Feedback

The book itself is now definitely on my list of reads that I hope to find illuminating and enriching. However I doubt it can surpass the beautifully written piece of feedback already provided. The strength and fragility of a woman who is reaffirming her identity is beautifully described. The loss of a mother is no more keenly felt than when one contemplates becoming a parent and realises no matter how different our life experiences are from each other this is one thing where they are still our teachers, and we the learners. Should you embark on parenthood you will hear your mother»s words whispering to you, you will find yourself kissing a sore knee just as she did, practising family traditions that you loved as a child - she will be with you, beside you.

I noticed in the DomPost that Helen did have a daughter, so she will be able to experience the relationship, with all the highs and loving complications. Congratulations!

This article touched a chord with me for, perhaps an entirely different reason than one commonly thought. I had the misfortune of watching my mother gradually pass away to an extremely agressive cancer that took so much of me at the time. I thought that the death part was the hard part but I was proven extremely wrong on that count: it has been the last 3.5 years that have been the hardest.

The loss of my mother triggered something deeper than just grief and loss. It threw my confidence through a blender, and it it took my ability to like myself and my self-confidence. Perhaps it was as this review notes that I hadn’t realised that my mother always wanted to know what I was wearing and how I looked and presented myself. When I had TV appearances on international news programmes she was the first person to call me, to comment on my suit or note that perhaps it was time for a haircut. Infuriating as it seemed at the time, it wasn’t negative it was that she was proud and wanted the world to see me at my best.

One of the last things we did together when we were still able to leave the house was to shop for a dress for me to wear to a wedding. We spent 2 hours in that shop, she in her wheelchair issuing instructions to everyone on the look, the colour, the style that would make me look the best. I knew then that it wasn’t about the dress it was about as it always had been, making sure I shone.

A mother daughter relationship is extremely complicated, when the bond is cut the effect is profound and remains so. I haven’t had children yet and I do hope to one day but I struggle to comprehend how it will be without my own mother in the frame. Ours was not always a charmed relationship we often came to loggerheads, two fiercely independent driven women will do that, but it remains one of the most defining of my identity and losing her made me look at my view of myself, I hadn’t realised how intertwined it was to her view. I’d so like to have one more conversation but as noted in the review it would be to ensure that the way I now conduct myself meets her approval. Thank you for this review, I can’t wait to read the book.

How She Does It by Margaret Heffernan

(How Women Entrepreneurs Are Changing the Rules of Business Success)

A Book Review by Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

This was another gift to me from Galia, prompted in part by an on-off debate we’d been having on the level of analysis and proof that was appropriate and even possible in young businesses and emergent industries.

The opening sentence brought a smile to my face because it seemed to offer something for both our points of view:

This is a book of stories. But it starts with numbers.

(Truth is: we both like stories – and we both like numbers).

Rise and Rise of Women Entrepreneurs

The numbers in question showed the rise and rise of women-owned business in the US. Apparently, from 1997-2004, privately held businesses owned by women grew at twice the rate of all firms. Every day in the States, apparently, a staggering 420 new women-owned businesses are formed. And they are formed in the face of far less venture capital (5% of the total available) and government assistance than other businesses.

These women-led businesses aren’t all lifestyle cookie companies and scrapbooking enterprises, either. The key growth sectors for women’s start-ups are wholesale trade, health care, arts and recreation, and professional, technical and scientific services.

Not a How-To Manual

So much for the introduction. What of the rest of this 240 page book? Although entitled “How She Does It”, this is no step-by-step guide to entrepreneurial launch-and-build techniques. What Heffernan has done instead is to distil her many interviews into a series of themes that seemed to distinguish the female entrepreneurs’ approach and to have contributed to their success. It’s a thought provoking read that I would highly recommend, whether you have entrepreneurial tendencies or not.

The book is divided into three sections. These are

Fire in the Belly, Skin in the Game, which covers the why and how these women moved into their own businesses
It Ain’t What We Do, It’s the Way that We Do It, that teases out the key operating themes that underpinned their success
The Only Failure is Not to Try, that looks at the later stages of development, such as M&A decisions and exit strategies.

Through all of these, Heffernan tells stories of these entrepreneurs to make the points. Expect to meet the same women in perhaps two or three different chapters as she picks up on different angles of their experiences. It’s not all stories though: she weaves in research references, too. These may reflect the fact that she is the Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship at Simmons College in Boston and Executive in Residence at Babson College. Being the geek I am, I trawled happily through the ten plus pages of notes and bibliography and found some real gems.

The Author

Heffernan’s career reads like some of those profiled in the book. She began her career with BBC, working in radio and then television production, and next ran the UK trade association representing the interests of independent film and television producers. In 1994, she returned to the United States where she worked with software companies trying to break into multimedia. Here she had five CEO roles with leading internet-based firms such asInfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and iCAST Corporation. She has certainly walked the path of women entrepreneurs herself, and that experience must have helped her to draw some of these women out to tell their stories.

Priorities

If there’s one thing that’s better than reading engaging stories of business women’s struggles and successes, it’s to develop a feeling of kinship through reading them. There were so many similarities between these entrepreneurs’ priorities and our own at Professionelle. We came to ours empirically, and they were probably no different. Is it because we’re all women that we seem to emphasise similar things?

I’ll highlight several of these themes below to give you a flavour for the book.

Values

The most striking similarity was the importance accorded to Values (Chapter 4 – The Value of Values). Time and again in our first 18 months of Professionelle, we have resorted to our values to help us make decisions and tradeoffs. It seems we aren’t alone. These entrepreneur women have all put values squarely at the centre of their businesses. Their values drove their brands, assisted staff in making coherent decisions, helped staff feel respected. Values aren’t nice to haves, they are “instrumental operational assets.”

In upstate New York, Doreen Marks runs Otis Technology, a gun cleaning business. (See? these are not lifestyle businesses for the little woman!) Her key value is quality, first, second and last. As she says, no-one at her company is ever afraid to answer to answer the phone. And when KMart asked Otis to make a low quality version, it was an easy decision to decline. Values, as we have discovered, are as much about deciding who and what you are not as about what you are.

One way to discern someone’s values is to see how they act in a crisis. That’s when you know if the neat plaque of “Our Values” hanging in the office reception is all talk and no trousers. Heffernan tells the story of Brenda Rivers and her travel start up company, Andavo Travel, that was knocked sideways by 9/11. Brenda’s core value was that her people were her most precious asset, that she deeply valued them, and that they were her motivation.

Hundreds of firms have said the same. Some of those firms undoubtedly laid off staff in the last quarter of 2001 because over a million US jobs were axed that autumn. The CEOs of those hundreds of firms almost certainly did not do what Brenda did. She cashed in her retirement savings to keep Andavo going. For Brenda, the loss of her future security was less appalling than telling the many single parents she employed that their jobs were gone.

People Power

As a further development of the power of values, Heffernan takes a look at the link between values and employee engagement. The research is clear that engaged and enthusiastic employees produce far better financial and operating results. It is also clear that three things in particular get employees going:

Being treated fairly – “everybody is somebody”
Having the chance to learn and grow – “stretch”
Camaderie – “everyone belongs to something bigger”.

Here again, I felt a real kinship. The first two items on the list are in my top five signature strengths! I loved the story of Maureen Beal, who took over her father’s company, National VanLines. She has made sure National’s parking lot has bays big enough to allow the drivers to park so they can easily come in and talk. A lot of their competitors don’t have that simple thing. Women in business often experience unconscious discrimination - perhaps they therefore see more clearly the value of the trivial detail that says, “you’re someone, too.”

On the “stretch” theme, Heffernan observes that personal growth and business growth are inseparable. At Professionelle, our efforts to grow the business have repeatedly pushed us both out of our comfort zones – and we keep coming back for more! And the camaderie point makes total sense to us, too. Positive psychology talks about the power of the "meaningful" life, in which people build psychological resources through the chance to work on and contribute to something bigger than themselves. National VanLines supports a marine artist who uses their trucks for transport as he travels around, conducting coastal clean-ups. In another story, the integration of work and home life is the expression of the "bigger" thing.

Zeitgeist

I’ve been using the word Zeitgeist from the first days of Professionelle. It’s German, and literally means the “spirit of the time”. Once we’d kicked off Galia’s concept, we kept seeing signs of it everywhere. The mainstream press carried stories of professional women and their need for flexibility; business schools and research groups were increasingly reporting findings on professional women in terms of leadership issues and the link between senior women and profit performance.

The book has a chapter on just this topic. Several of the women intuited their business concept. The ideas were in the ether, so far at the leading edge of developments that there was nothing concrete to measure, no customer wishlists to tap into.

A ceramics chemist, Carol Latham, foresaw the impacts of miniaturisation and ever-faster processing speeds on computer chips. She grasped the importance for computer manufacturers of building semi-conductors from materials that would cope with heat. Her employer, ceramics company, Sohio, dismissed the notion. She went out alone. In 1995, as Intel prepared to launch the Pentium chip, they tripped over the heat problem, and came knocking at her door.

[Zeitgeist] has nothing to do with market research, which is always historical… Carol says that Sohio had tunnel vision. It’s an apt phrase because capturing the Zeitgeist is just the opposite… It’s about seeing widely, picking up lots of different signals and making sense of them.

Heffernan goes on to refer to Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence, a subject Galia has covered here before. Goleman’s research on hundreds of top executives shows that one cognitive ability that distinguishes star performers is pattern recognition. This is the ability to pick key data points out of a welter of information and to see how they impact the big picture.

And doesn’t it sound like an inexact science, a fuzzy and empathetic process, one that resists systemising and analysis, one whose softness is its very strength? It sounds distinctly feminine. No wonder they don’t teach it at business school!

The Need to Achieve

And finally, what seems to be triggering all these women to strike out on their own, despite the relative lack of assistance? For some it’s the overwhelming need for independence. For others, it’s that they can, thanks to the development of new technologies that make it cheaper and easier to set up in business for yourself. One factor, above all others, resonated with what our Professionelle members have told us. Women strike out on their own to get away from the corporate crap.

These women are moving from positions where they are undervalued… to something far more demanding. It is an existential flight to a place where who they are and what they are, how they like to work, and the things they care about are not just tolerated but are given a central, dynamic role. Disappointed by the rigid, narrow choices that so many careers appear to offer, women strike out on their own to redefine what is possible.

Amen to that!

Comments and Recommendations

If you’ve read this book, what were your thoughts? Do you have recommendations for other books that you can pass on? Please let us know.

The book was published in hardback early in 2007 by Viking, an imprint of the Penguin Group. It is available, of course, at Amazon.

Women Leading –by Sue Hayward

A Book Review by Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

Before Christmas, Galia and I borrowed a small mountain of books from the Auckland University Library. Four of the books in my stack had the theme of leadership. Two of them were under 200 pages long which made them shoo-ins for my priority summer holiday reading. They looked a little lighter in tone as well as in grammes than the other two. I’ve already reviewed the Secrets of Connecting Leadership & Learning with Humour by Peter M Jonas.

This time, I’ll cover Women Leading by Sue Hayward, a UK journalist and TV presenter.

Published in 2005 by Palgrave MacMillan, it’s in hardback and sports a mildly surreal dustcover picture of a professional woman in a desert contemplating a glass ceiling, hammer in hand. Though short, the book’s exterior suggested it would be serious stuff.

In fact, it turned out to be lighter than the froth on your average cappuccino. This is the perfect book if you want, for whatever reason, to look as if you’re holding something erudite while in fact enjoying a breeze of a read. As long as you’re prepared for its light style you can probably overlook some of its shortcomings.

Hayward claims no expertise in women’s issues but has spoken to many people who are. Her strength is evidently in getting people to talk and her approach to the book is to let women’s experiences and comments by informed parties tell the tale.

The title contains the word "leading" and Hayward sets out to explore it through a number of lenses. She looks at women’s success in the financial and corporate worlds in terms of their share of senior management seats, the barriers to advancement and different models for ‘making it work’ that women have carved out. She reviews women’s changing careers and roles in the media, inside relationships and on the international stage. She also looks at the skills and strengths women have that they can rely on to be effective leaders.

Read Women Leading for the stories and the quotations. As an ex-Unilever employee, I particularly enjoyed reading what Unilever’s CEO Niall Fitzgerald, and other senior staff had to say. Fitzgerald’s comments came from a 2003 speech in Geneva in which he talked about the “tide running in [women’s] favour” because women are highly skilled in both the emotional and spiritual field, areas where business is changing most rapidly. He also noted, with a subtlety not always seen in discussions on the topic of gender and leadership that “there is a feminine approach to leadership which is not of course confined to women.”

Linda Emery, Unilever’s UK Diversity manager, has championed the introduction of the Mum’s CV, which lists skills that mothers are likely to develop and use at home that will have value on their return to the workplace. If you’ve read Galia’s interview with John Palmer and my recent advice on “Career breaks” you will recognise this idea!

Another aspect of the book that I appreciated was Hayward’s willingness to include the concept that not all women want to be CEO or Board Director and that their choices are as valid as those of women who put their career squarely first.

She touched on a number of other interesting points that I would have liked to see her expand on and find compelling stories for. These include observations that:

Women are less ego-driven in their leadership style
The ‘power’ model of leading, based on authority and position, is yielding to the ‘strength’ model based on internal characteristics
Women with families lack the time to network

The links between some of Hayward’s points and the examples she uses to illustrate them are weak. Allow yourself to become pleasantly absorbed in her discussion on work-life balance, however, and you may not wonder what it is doing as the main topic in a chapter entitled “Leadership Skills”. The fluff on Hollywood marriages and the references to stereotypes like the ball-breaker and the flirt, will, I hope, wash over you. Lastly, the fact that Hayward is not experienced in business will perhaps not escape you, as it did her editor, but you may, nevertheless, forgive it.

Let me wrap up on Women Leading on a positive note, however! She finishes with a chapter of the most inspirational quotes and advice she gathered in the course of putting the book together. There are some real goodies in here. The one that resonated with me was by an author called Jane Wenham-Jones, who said,
“Network, network! Nothing is wasted. Everything is an opportunity.”

The Secrets of Connecting Leadership and Learning with Humor

A Book Review by Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

Before Christmas, Galia and I borrowed a small mountain of books from the Auckland University Library. We both love the smell and feel of libraries, so it was a happy way to spend a morning. Only when we could carry no more did we call it quits.

Four of the books in my stack had the theme of leadership. Two of them were under 200 pages long which made them shoo-ins for my priority summer holiday reading. They also looked a little lighter in tone as well as in grammes than the other two! The one I’ll review here was Secrets of Connecting Leadership & Learning with Humor by Peter M. Jonas. Jonas is a director of institutional research, an assistant dean and a faculty member in the areas of research and leadership at Cardinal Stritch University in the USA. The book was published byMcGraw-Hill in 2004 in paperback, with funky colours, including joke graphics of the male and female brains. You know the ones – they show large areas of cerebellum devoted to the preoccupations of sex and chocolate respectively.

I recently took the Values in Action survey, part of the Positive Psychology suite of tests freely available online, and discovered that humour is one of my signature strengths. An exercise in personal branding also revealed that one of the things people associate with me is “likes to laugh.” Thus, I was intrigued to read more about humour and its uses in the workplace.

This is a book that has several pages of academic references at the back but still managed to make me laugh. Jonas begins with a research based approach to humour, largely leaving the theoretical underpinnings to leadership and learning to other authors. He freely admits that they are all challenging concepts to research, define and codify. The concept of humour probably changes a lot less than what people find humorous at any point in history.

Jonas quickly sidesteps definitions in favour of examples and finding common variables. One of these is social context, in which the audience must be informed or knowledgeable about the social context of the joke so they can relate to it. I guess that’s why David Brent’s antics in The Office are so painfully funny to so many of us.

But humour is an art, with a lot of judgement required… The audience mustn’t relate too closely to the joke because another variable is the need for a degree of detachment. People are more willing to laugh at things that don’t touch too close to home or feel like personal affronts. Indeed, a number of Jonas’s personal experiences of failed jokes and stories come down to this point. He recommends first person stories because they help tell a human side to the story and are thus less offensive.

His section on the purposes of humour in leadership interested me. He proposes four reasons why leaders should consider using humour:

Contrasting Incongruent Ideas
(Or “If you can’t convince them, confuse them.” - Harry S. Truman)
When a team or class fails to understand a complex or incongruent situation, humour can be a way for the leader to acknowledge it and put it out into the open for discussion. If the leader shares some of the group’s confusion, humour also can be a way to signal it and become part of the group. Two of the most obvious uses of incongruent ideas for humour are the oxymoron (think ‘exact estimate’ and ‘military intelligence’) and, my old favourite, the pun. Unexpected or surprising endings to stories also fit here.
Provide a Feeling of Superiority over Others
(Or “It is frustrating when you know all the answers but nobody bothers to ask you the questions.”)
While the leader has to treat this purpose very carefully – ‘the sword that is used to point can also be used to cut’ – it can work well as self-deprecation. A leader who can laugh at himself looks human and confident and makes the members of his audience feel a little better about themselves
Releasing Strain and Tension
(Or “Most of us are willing to change, not because we see the light, but because we feel the heat.”)
Here I recognised my own common motivation for using humour at work. It’s a way to break the ice, reduce tension and open communication lines. Jonas suggests there’s no one right joke for this situation though the knock-knocks and light-bulb changing ones are pretty safe, and he also finds lists an excellent way of combining humour and content. For the leader, lightening the mood of the group can be a way to allay his own concerns and to help him feel more in control.
Coping with an Ambiguous Audience or Environment
(Or “I describe the present and because so many people have not arrived here, to them it sounds like the future.”)
Leaders are often at the centre of the awkward event such as at those times they need to give instructions or directions to others. Humour can help people relax in uncomfortable situations and provide some comfort to the group. Jonas recommends related stories as a way for leaders to join the group and help others cope. Related stories are ones that connect, for example, to the situation or industry.

He points out that leaders who can use humour successfully, which includes being able to flex the kind of humour to the situation, are better communicators, more liked, and their messages may be remembered for longer. It may help them get a job, too! In a survey by Culberson (2000), 98% of 737 CEOs said they would rather hire someone with humour over another candidate with the same qualifications but no humour.

Jonas regularly returns to his few rules of thumb:

Know your audience’s likes and dislikes. Listen to them!
Be sincere with the content of your message and its humour
Set up the joke, get in and get out. Don’t admire your work
And if the joke doesn’t work, don’t give up on humour, try and figure out what went wrong!

Like other academic books, Jonas “returns” several times to his various themes albeit they appear in various guises. Variables, purposes, tools... you get the idea. Because he was entertaining me I put up with it.

What about humour and learning? I’ll leave the chapters on this for you to discover but the news looks good. When people are laughing, the brain seems to operate more efficiently and symmetrically between the hemispheres (Scriven and Hefferin 1998). This apparently leads to heightened creativity. And with laughter claimed to be as effective as aerobic exercise, it’s easy to see that humour is good for you, mind, soul and body!

This book ends with a selection of inspiring material. Jonas has brought together fourteen pages of interesting sayings, stories and lists. And my favourite? Sorry, I can’t pick one, so it will have to be three (all short):

Don’t be irreplaceable. If you can’t be replaced, you can’t be promoted.
Experience is something you don’t get till just after you need it.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.

This book is available at Amazon.

Comments and Recommendations

If you’ve read this book, what were your thoughts? Do you have recommendations for other books of this sort that you have found helpful? Please let us know via feedback@professionelle.co.nz.

©Professionelle.co.nz

Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar

(Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment )

A Book Review by Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

In the NZ Herald one morning in early January 2008, a short article appeared, entitled “Happiness key to wellbeing.” It described how lower levels of stress-indicating proteins and hormones are found in people who report more positive emotions. The doctor who carried out the recent study of 3000 healthy Britons had a straightforward recommendation for more happiness and – by implication – better health. He recommended that people figure out what makes them feel good, and truly satisfied, and then spend more time doing those things.

Simple words. In essence, they sum up what Ben-Shahar has to say in his book “Happier”. However, it’s certainly still worth your while to read this cheerfully yellow-bound book. Its chief appeal is that it systematically explores the concept of happiness and living a happy life, demystifying it in an easy-to-read style. In parallel, the author offers a series of exercises to put the fundamental concepts into practice in work, education and relationships. What you get out of these will of course depend on the effort you invest in them…

Well grounded

Don’t be put off by the book’s subtitle, by the way, even if you’re a natural-born sceptic! It’s “Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfilment”. Before you run from what sounds like pop psychology mixed with eastern mysticism, take comfort from the fact that the book is based on the precepts of Positive Psychology and as such is grounded in robust science. Moreover, this book reflects the course that Ben-Shahar teaches at Harvard, a course apparently taken by a fifth of students there.

The book asks the important question “How can I be happier?” rather than “Am I happy?”, thus signalling an ongoing process of enquiry and progress rather than any quick fix.

Origins

Ben Shahar began contemplating happiness and what could help bring it into his life after he became the national Israel squash champion at the age of sixteen. The sense of triumph after his years of dedication and gruelling preparation was overwhelmingly sweet - and lasted just a few hours. He realised that relief formed a large part of his short-lived happiness and that the question of “what next” (perhaps more huge efforts to become an international champion) was draining his enjoyment of having met his goal.

Goals

Unsurprisingly, given his disillusionment on winning his championship, Ben-Shahar explores this issue at some length in the first section of the book. His first thought was that a goalless state would be desirable. Research led him to a clearer and more positive answer.

Goals that we choose freely rather than have imposed on us are energising both in terms of long term meaning and, in the shorter term, on the journey towards them. Any goal is likely to demand of us tasks that we have to do as well as those that we want to do; the trick is to find a goal where the former is more than compensated for by the latter.

Shahar points out that goal setting and success are clearly linked, reflecting the focus that articulating a goal can bring. Goal setting and happiness, however, are much less clearly linked, unless people choose goals that inspire them and which can be broken down into pleasurable shorter term objectives.

Three Good Things

There were three things I particularly enjoyed about the book:

The author’s simple method for assessing how much happiness an activity will bring, based on the happiness from reaching the goal (the longer term meaning of the activity) and from the journey itself (the shorter term pleasure). He presents this as a 2 x 2 matrix, suggesting he could have had an equally successful career as a consultant!
His ‘MPS’ exercise as a way of working towards the kinds of employment which are likely to make us happier. The answer is likely to lie where Meaning, Pleasure and our Strengths overlap.
His reiteration of evidence that there is almost no correlation between material wealth and level of happiness (always worth being reminded of). He reprises this theme in the last part of the book, a series of “Meditations” on happiness. The seventh meditation concerns how the compulsion to amass material wealth undermines the ability to gather happiness, the “ultimate currency”.

New Year Resolutions

This time of the year is rife with good intentions and thoughts of new beginnings. Ben-Shahar knows how hard change can be even if we want to make it stick. One of his useful ideas is to think of creating rituals rather than cultivating self discipline. Initiating a ritual is admittedly hard but maintaining it is easy. A ritual is about performing specific at defined times in line with deeply held values (think teeth-brushing in line with personal hygiene value).

The author suggests diarising the change that you think will increase your happiness and looking for it become more habit than chore within as little as a month. Habits are hard to shed – which is a good thing with good habits!

Happy Habits

As Aristotle put it,

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.

And if we can make happiness a habit, we’re likely to live longer and enjoy the journey through it a lot more!

Three [other!] Good Things

Try an exercise that the author recommends and on which Dr Marty Seligman, the ‘father’ of Positive Psychology, has run controlled experiments. In the tests on this exercise, not only did his subjects report being happier and more optimistic, but they liked participating so much that they continued writing down three good things each day after the experiment was over!

At the end of each day, or first thing in the morning if you prefer, take a few minutes to write down

three good things that happened in the last 24 hours
why each one happened
what you had to do with it

The things can be big things or small; experiential, relational, or professional.

Carrying out this exercise on a regular basis will help you focus on the good in your life as well as begin to clarify what you hold as important.

“Happier” is published by McGraw-Hill, 2007.

Comments and Recommendations

If you’ve read this book, what were your thoughts? Do you have recommendations for other books of this sort that you have found helpful? Please let us know via feedback@professionelle.co.nz.

The book is available via Amazon.

©Professionelle.co.nz

What Happy Women Know

By Dan Baker and Cathy Greenberg with Ina Yalof.

A Book Review by Galia BarHava-Monteith

optimism

With the Christmas break on the horizon, it occurred to me that Professionelle members and visitors might be beginning to think about their holiday reading and that perhaps we should review a few books for you to consider…

On Positive Psychology

If you’ve been Professionelle Website members for a little while, you will have come across Positive Psychology. The Positive Psychology movement in the US has been gaining momentum. My Professionelle partner, Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes, reviewed Learned Optimism by Marty E.P. Seligman on the site a while ago. Seligman is considered by many to be the father of Positive Psychology and we highly recommend all his writings.

Positive psychology offers an alternative to clinical psychology. Clinical psychology focuses on what’s wrong with people – disorders, maladaptive behaviours and the like. Positive psychology shifts the emphasis to the positive – finding out what is right and good about people. Positive psychology’s premise is that through identifying our strengths, virtues and character we can further build on them. This is seen to be far more helpful, productive and life enhancing than focusing on our weaknesses and always trying to ‘fix’ them.

Positive psychology is for everyone. If traditional clinical psychology’s focus was on bringing mentally troubled people from -5 to 0 on ‘disturbance and mental health’ scales,then by contrast the focus of positive psychology is to shift us from 0 to +5 on happiness and well-being inour lives.

Ever since I came across this concept in my research, I’ve been hooked. I never really read traditional ‘self help’ books because most of them were based on anecdotal observations and people’s opinions. However, now, I’d read just about anything on positive psychology because these books are based on science, empirical research, and sound theory. Yes, some anecdotal case studies are included, and they help illustrate important points.

What DO happy women know?

Of course when I saw this title, I had to have it. The fact that it is a 2007 book made it truly irresistible, my mouth salivating at the thought of all the up to date research and thinking.

The book is an easy read. It lays out the premise of positive psychology and relates it squarely to women. Dan Baker weaves research and theory with concrete case studies from his work with women. There are enough important topics covered in the book that I believe all women will find something that appeals. You might find yourself skimming some chapters but being totally riveted by others. In my book club, everyone had a different perspective on what appealed to her the most. And each of us found something worthwhile to take away.

To give you a taste for the topics coveredin the book’s ten chapters, I’ll list a selection:. perfectionism, always saying yes, the revenge rut, feeling nothing without a man, transcending loss, the career track and much more.

When I thought about writing this review, I decided that rather than focusing on the topic covered in the chapters, I’d focus on the overall impressions I was left with and some enduring concepts I took away.

Evolution has a lot of explaining to do

Personally, I just LOVED the evolutionary explanations put forward to explain some of women’s most self-defeating tendencies, such as perfectionism, needing to please others, and even obsessive shopping! You have to read it to believe it. But once I read these evolutionary explanations, things did completely make sense.

Take obsessive shopping as an example; our ancestors lived in a place and time of great danger. Food was always scarce and getting it cost men’s lives. When the men were hunting, the women where frantically gathering plants to ensure there was enough food if the men returned empty-handed. Our foremother who was never happy with what she had and who consequently gathered more and more, was the one with the most food, who was also more likely to be successful in ensuring her offspring survived the harsh winters. According to Baker, as far as the more primitive parts of our brains are concerned, we’re still gatherers needing more and more… so how do women gather today? They shop!

You get the gist, reading these evolutionary explanations felt great to me. So it’s not just me who suffers from it (take your pick, perfectionism, trying to please, working too hard), and it is not all my own personal upbringing and childhood experiences that are to blame. For some reason it felt like a great release. Perhaps it’s because these evolutionary explanations make all our shortcoming and self-defeating behaviours less personal. Also, in my work as a coach, consultant and workshop facilitator, I now use these explanations to help people understand and relate more to the dangers of all these traps women fall into.

Taking one step at the time – the Kaizen principle

Perfectionism being one of the most enduring traps I have to battle with, I found this little gem most alluring. Kaizen, according to Baker, is “the Japanese word for continual improvement through small, incremental and sometimes insignificant steps.” You want to lose weight, get fit and look younger? Rather than embarking on a ‘no holds bar’ hell regime, cut one chocolate bar a day to start off with. Make a point of parking your car two streets away from your destination every time you go somewhere so you walk a little more throughout your day. That kind of thing…

I found the Kaizen principle really appealing. Too often, I take on giant challenges and suffer disappointment when I can’t master them within my self-prescribed time frame. And then of course, feel like I’ve failed. A non-professional example is in my yoga practice. I have been doing yoga for many years now, and until recently, I used to set myself goals: by the end of the year I will be doing a handstand, that kind of thing, and when the end of the year came I’d feel like I failed in achieving this goal. Now, I just focus on one step at the time, doing the postures better, gaining more strength and just enjoying the journey. (And, yes, I can do a hand-stand now!)

I think we can alldo with a little Kaizen in our lives, realising that good enough is quite often just that - good enough - and that each step we take towards whatever it is, counts.

The diversified life

The third concept I really enjoyed and that stayed with me is the idea of treating one’s life as an investment portfolio. The premise here is that just as it wouldn’t be wise to invest all your money in one stock, the same is true of our lives. Happy women run their lives as a mosaic of their strengths and interests. Happy women have multi dimensional lives and don’t invest in just one thing.

Looking around the happy women I know, I observed that they really do that, some are mothers and wives but they all have other interests they value. They all choose things where they can really draw on their strengths, be it designing kitchens, gardens, going back to study or doing fulfilling paid work. What all of them also have in common is having great relationships in which they invest and which they nurture.

Just as having a diversified investment portfolio should cushion an economic downturn, so does a diversified life cushions women who are faced with adversity.

A little niggle

Dan Baker works mainly with women who come to the Canyon Ranch is Arizona where he founded the Life-Enhancing programme. Perhaps because of that, many of the women described in the case studies are very wealthy and that might make the more cynical of you raise an eyebrow. I missed that fact, but one of my book club members pointed it out. So beware, but rest assured that with all the other research and other case studies presented, I personally believe that he was able to strike a good balance with good lessons for us all.

Self-help and holiday reading

It might be a cliché but most people do take stock at the end of each year. We are very lucky in New Zealand that we do get a chance to take a big break over the holidays and most of us have time for some reflection. I’ll be the first to admit that I will be reading some roaring good fun fiction novels. But I will also be reading Authentic Happiness (by Seligman again). I think being reminded of these principles again and again only serves to enhance the quality of my life and helps me make the best decisions in every area.

What Happy Women Know is an easy to read and a great introduction to the concepts of positive psychology for all women. It would make a great holiday present, and a wonderfully affirming read for the break!

Dan Baker also wrote What Happy People Know and one of the book club members preferred it to this Women book. He also wrote and What Happy Companies Know. All can be purchased on Amazon

Learned Optimism by Marty E.P. Seligman

(How To Change Your Mind and Your Life)

A Book Review by Sarah

A Gift

My dear business partner gave me this self-help psychology book for my last birthday. That tells you two things straight off. First of all, she thinks I could do with being a lot less pessimistic! I, of course, argue that I’m simply a realist; later on I’ll reveal the author’s take on this issue.

Secondly, this is no pop psychology book based on “a gallon of clinical lore and a teaspoonful of research” to quote the author. It reflects 25 years of quantitative trials that began with Seligman’s development of the theory of learned helplessness and progressed by degrees to insights about optimism.

Galia discovered Seligman – known as the father of Positive Psychology – when she was researching a career move and came across the Centre for Positive Organisational Scholarship. She found the online exercises and advice very helpful and when she saw this 1990 book listed under his name she grabbed it for me, though she’d not read it herself.

optimism

High price of pessimism

Pessimism is revealed as a dangerous beast. It can lead to less success, lower health and more depression. The author notes that the skills of being happy are not the same as the skills of not being anxious or sad. In other words, curing negatives such as phobias and mental illness does not produce the positive of being happy.

There’s currently an “epidemic of depression among adults and children in the US”. There simply aren’t enough good therapists to go round and the prospect of medicating half a generation is terrifying. Luckily, Seligman’s research has demonstrated that optimism – which significantly reduces depression – can be learned.

No mindless mantras

Fear not. This book does not advocate mindless repetition of feel good statements like ‘every day in every way I’m getting better and better’. The author says if that method works for you, fabulous, but believes that most educated people, trained in sceptical analysis, will find that approach lacking in credibility.

Explanatory styles

Instead, he advocates changing thought patterns and explanatory styles – the scripts you instinctively say to yourself when something happens. These are words you may not even be aware of, but they affect how you feel and respond in the longer term.

There are three dimensions to explanatory style:

Permanence – how long you perceive the effect of the event will last
Pervasiveness – how many areas of your life you allow the event to colour
Personal – the extent to which you see your actions as directly influencing the event.

Take a bad event, such as getting laid off. A pessimist will see it as more permanent, more pervasive and more due to his own inadequate actions. An optimist will see it as temporary, confined to the arena of work, or that specific job, and not due to his actions.

Take a good event like getting a promotion. The pessimist sees it as temporary, limited to a specific time/place/situation and not due to his own efforts. An optimist – you can guess it already – will see it as permanent, spilling into other areas of life and largely due to his actions.

Example of instinctive scripts: When a company offers to rehire people it has had to lay off previously, the optimist thinks, “I knew they’d appreciate my worth in the end.” The pessimist thinks, “They must be desperate to want me again.”

Diagnostic

In Chapter Three, a 48 question diagnostic tests your responses to good and bad events on the permanent, pervasive and personal dimensions. As in any scenario-based quiz, some set-ups are hard to imagine realistic responses to, and the odd one I simply couldn’t understand. However, when I revisited the dubious questions later, the results appeared robust to different answers.

I found I had a consistent explanatory style, regardless of the type of event. I seem to see everything as temporary, specific and not due to my efforts. This works a treat with bad events and, indeed, as the author predicts, I bounce back and persevere. Because I don’t feel helpless, I don’t get depressed. Unfortunately, I get absolutely no mental leverage out of good things that happen. If I can possibly discount them, I will. Taken together, the scores say I am very pessimistic! It would seem Galia was right on that …

Learning to be more optimistic

At this point I discovered a weakness in the book. With its roots in learned helplessness, the logic presented is that people with very pessimistic scores must be poor at dealing with bad events. All the examples presented to coach more optimism and all the upside promised are based on weak responses to bad events. Exploration of weak response to good events is missing.

That said, becoming aware of my explanatory style has already been useful in adjusting my perception of events. Also, it’s easy enough to turn around the exercises for practising more optimism to work in my own situation.

The main techniques for boosting optimism are based around:

distraction – becoming aware of your scripts enough to be able to stop yourself thinking something pervasive and destructive like “I’m stupid at everything I do”
disputation – arguing with yourself as an outsider would, for example, “I got high scores in all my other tests so I can’t be stupid at everything I do.” Seligman acknowledges that there will be times when disputation is hard and seems far-fetched. But he says that many negative thoughts are equally, if not more, outrageous. I think he’s right!

Pessimists are realists

Seligman scores lots of points with me on this one. He and his research colleagues had pondered the evolutionary point of pessimism. If it produced lower health, more depression and reduced success in life, what on earth was it good for? Their conclusion was that pessimism was valuable in the climatic catastrophes of the Pleistocene for injecting rational assessment of risk. It’s sunny now, but the ice creeps higher every winter… the sabre-toothed tiger could be back any time…

Consequently, they outlined jobs that would suit natural pessimists (safety engineering, for example) and specific life situations in which it would be a better response than unbridled optimism - say at the outset of a conversation in which you want to appear sympathetic to others’ troubles.

However, it is clear that those jobs and situations are in the minority. Overall, an optimistic outlook, very occasionally tempered with an injection of realism, will serve you better.

Children

The advice on coaching to change explanatory styles, as well as the diagnostic described above, can be used with children, especially those over the age of 8. Interestingly:

pre-pubertal children are highly optimistic compared with adults
pessimism and depression pre puberty is more prevalent in boys and after puberty it switches around dramatically to girls. They are still researching the drivers of this.

Broader uses and applications

The book claims that levels of optimism among presidential candidates and in sports teams can predict their level of success. They measure optimism by analysing speeches and reported comment and have found high levels of optimism correlate with positive outcomes. Pessimistic words can put off voters, it seems, just as much as they undermine the individual’s and team’s confidence and ultimately success.

Even more tellingly, a positive correlation has emerged between optimism and health. A longitudinal study of men’s health with their youthful diary entries and more recent interviews (to measure their levels of optimism through life) has shown that the optimists live longer and in a fitter state. This research of course risks – and has attracted – accusations of quackery because it flies in the teeth of received medical wisdom.

Absorbing

I read this book from cover to cover, including the appendices, while sitting by a pool on holiday in the tropics. That’s testament both to the readability of Seligman’s style and to how clearly I could see personal upside in applying his techniques. Try it for yourself. And if you’re sure you’re one of life’s optimists, then my congratulations, and pick it up instead for your child, spouse or friend. Chances are, they’ll thank you for it.

Comments and Recommendations

If you’ve read this book, what were your thoughts? Do you have recommendations for other books of this sort that you have found helpful? Please let us know via feedback@professionelle.co.nz.

The book is available via Amazon.

Member feedback:

I have also read this book and highly recommend it. I scored as a moderate optimist but also found, like Sarah, that I do not have a strong response to good events. The key message is that it makes you aware of the script you are running in your head when something good or bad happens. The next step of changing the script is the challenge and the distraction/disputation method can seem a bit artificial - especially using this logic in the face of strong emotions. My husband has also read the book and it confirmed what he suspected - that he is highly pessimistic compared to the "norm" and as a result is easily discouraged when setbacks occur. The book has been a fantastic tool for him to get some perspective on this as he is now facing downsizing at work - he understands the rationale he uses to interpret events and what effect this has on his decision making.

Girls Just Want To Have Fund$ by Sheryl Sutherland

(Every Woman’s Guide To Financial Independence)

A Book Review by Sarah

girls cover

Girls must plan if they want to have to have funds – that could have been the title of this book. Its New Zealand author is on a mission to encourage women to take more control of their finances in order to achieve their goals. These might include a comfortable retirement, saving for a house deposit or taking debt firmly in hand. The first part of the book is designed to persuade women that they need actively to consider their attitudes to money, saving and spending. The second moves from the why into the how of personal financial management.

While a quick trawl of Amazon suggests that neither the title nor the concept for this 2005 book is original, it is Sutherland’s explicit, and localised, focus on women that made this introduction to investing enjoyable for me. Her wry tone didn’t hurt, either. (On divorce: “nothing helps wounds like that green poultice, money”). Unlike its American equivalent, it is aimed at women of all ages who want to – need to – know more about this topic, and at no time does it take a girly tone.

Women’s Life Patterns

I rate myself as moderately knowledgeable about finance. As such, I didn’t learn a lot new on the technical side from this book, but I did particularly enjoy the statistics Sutherland marshals to show how challenging women’s life patterns are to the aim of achieving financial independence. Her call to action includes such sobering observations as:

Divorce leaves women’s income down 24%. Men’s falls, too, but only by 6%.
On average, women take ten years out of the workforce to care for dependents while men take only one.
Women still earn less. (See our feature article Slip-Slidin' Away for the recent, and still depressing, statistics on pay inequity for New Zealand’s women professionals, including those in the most senior positions).

Low Involvement

These, and other life patterns, indicate that women should be planning ahead in order to make the most of the income they do generate. Yet, in Sutherland’s 25 years of experience as a financial advisor, they often don’t. The trigger for changing from this passive behaviour tends to be a traumatic event such as the death of a husband.

Why are women typically less involved in financial planning than men? After all, many women take lead responsibility for balancing the family cheque book, paying bills and so on. The author suggests innate traits as well as socially-conditioned responses to money can hold women back from learning more about how to bridge the financial gaps between today’s reality and tomorrow’s desires.

Nice Girls Don’t!

For example, nice girls don’t worry about money because one day, they are implicitly promised, their prince will come. Apparently, parents are much slower, on average, to encourage daughters to save. Sons get the message around 13, but daughters not for about another five years.

Sutherland acknowledges the emotional and societal barriers but systematically addresses them, pointing out how some are myths (yoo-hoo, Sir Galahad, over here…) while others, like the fear of making a mistake, can be managed with straightforward education on the basics of investing, debt management and more.

Test Yourself

The author provides a number of quizzes, exercises and worksheets for readers to complete as she takes them along the path of financial planning. Her years of coaxing information out of clients about their risk tolerance, time frames and money-handling styles no doubt helped her craft many of these. I confess I only filled in the multiple choice ‘quickies’ – but was happy to see that the broad direction indicated by my answers on asset allocation pretty well matched the investment profile that my husband and I have.

Financial Advice

Women who complete even some of the exercises may well find they gain new insight into their personal financial situations. This may make for more meaningful discussions with a financial advisor, if they choose this route. The book provides a checklist of questions for shopping around for such advice and also outlines typical fee structures and services offered. Sutherland is at pains to point out that an advisor isn’t mandatory. For readers with time, confidence and especially (author’s emphasis) self-motivation, she says a DIY path is feasible. Having read her chapters on asset classes and the myriad options available within them, however, my sense was that greenhorns would pale at the prospect of going it alone. So would those with limited time.

Can You Afford Not To?

Although no investment return can be guaranteed, and although the past is no accurate guide to the future, the author is unequivocal that having independent financial goals and a plan to reach them is in every woman’s interest. A clear and consistent message throughout is that women who think they haven’t enough money to save and to invest are those who most need to. Short case studies bring these points to life, using vignettes of women spanning a wide range of ages and life situations. These, together with the statistics she quotes on the reality of retirement for many women in New Zealand, would have brought me out in a cold sweat if I didn’t already have some plans running!

I’ll end with one of a number of delightful quotations about money that Sutherland has scattered through the book. This Yiddish proverb made me laugh, so it must contain a large grain of truth…

“With money in your pocket, you are wise,
And you are handsome, and you sing well, too.”

Comments and Recommendations

If you’ve read this book, what were your thoughts? Do you have recommendations for other books on personal financial advice that you can pass on? Please let us know via feedback@professionelle.co.nz.

The book is available via Longacre.

Sheryl Sutherland's website is at www.strategies.co.nz

STOP PRESS

Sutherland has just had a second book published (July 2007), again through Longacre's Shoal Bay imprint and classified as Financial, Self-Help. It is called "Money, Money, Money, Ain't it Funny...How to Wire your Brain for Wealth". According to the press release, this book will "help you find a financial structure that will suit your personality and temperament; teach you how to make decisions that are rational and less emotional; make fewer errors of judgement; recognise potential problems early; and take a long term view of your finances".

Reinventing your Life by Jeffrey E. Young and Janet S. Klosko
- a Book Review

by Galia

EEver wondered why you are never happy with anything you do? Why it is you always think you could have done something better? Ever wondered why your bosses always get angry when they don’t get what they want, or why they can’t accept ‘no’ for an answer?

Now, I’m not one for self-help books. You’re not likely to see me browsing the ‘self-help’ section at my local book store. Not that I don’t see their value. It’s more that having studied Psychology for five years I reckon I should be able to work that stuff out for myself...

Self help based on clinical research

On a more serious note, I don’t believe in quick fixes and magic seminars that sort out all your life’s problems in one weekend. But I’m a great believer in empirically-based and research-driven frameworks to anything, including self-help.

And that’s where this book is different. A good friend of mine who is a clinical psychologist put me on to it when I was designing a workshop. It’s written by two clinical psychologists and is based on years of research into the underlying causes of personality problems, while drawing on the techniques and principles of cognitive psychology.

Comprehensive

Unlike other self-help books, Reinventing Your Life is comprehensive. It doesn’t just deal with depression or obsessive compulsive disorders; it deals with a wide range of personality problems.

OK, so now you’re thinking, that sounds heavy, a book for real ‘nutters’. Well, no. Reinventing Your Life is suitable for all of us. It helps us figure out why we do the same things over and over again even though they’re really bad for us (like falling for the wrong man, attracting friends who use and abuse us etc). Reinventing Your Life also helps us figure out why the people around us keep doing what they do, even though their actions and attitudes are bad for them!

Lifetraps

The book’s main premise is that the behaviours of most people are strongly, but unconsciously, influenced by lifetraps. Lifetraps are patterns that begin in our childhood and continue reverberating within us throughout our lives. When the lifetraps are really serious they result in personality disorders which require formal therapy. But here’s the catch, even if they aren’t that serious, they can still have a significant impact on our lives without us even knowing it!

A common lifetrap for high achievers is ‘Unrelenting Standards’ (see takeaway box). My clinical psychologist friend says that often what drives many apparently highly successful people to see her is a serious crisis like a health scare or a breakup. She believes that if these people had become aware of their lifetraps sooner they might have been able to develop some better coping strategies, potentially avoiding the crisis.

Which Lifetrap is Yours?

What I like about this approach is that even though it’s based on serious academic work, it’s written in a very accessible style. Each chapter is dedicated to one of the eleven lifetraps and begins with a short ‘women’s mag’ type quiz. Don’t let that fool you. These quizzes are serious and have rigorous validity and reliability. Each chapter then goes on to describe how the lifetrap presents in its more severe forms - reading this of course made me feel better because I could see even I’m not that bad! It also provides some good strategies for you to work on if this is your lifetrap.

And, if you think you are absolutely lifetrap-free, then read it to figure out why all the people around you are so crazy!

Have you read this book? We would love to hear your thoughts about it. Are there other books you’d like us to review? Please e-mail us your thoughts on feedback@professionelle.co.nz.

Key links

The schema therapy website

The book on Amazon

What do lifetraps look like?

There are eleven lifetraps in the book. Below are quick summaries of three I thought you might be particularly interested in:

Mistrust and abuse - the expectation that people will hurt or abuse you in some way, that they will cheat, lie, manipulate, humiliate or otherwise take advantage of you. With this lifetrap you are likely to hide behind a wall of mistrust to protect yourself.

Subjugation - with subjugation you sacrifice your own needs and desires for the sake of pleasing others or meeting others’ needs. You allow others to control you. You are much more likely to be bullied in the workplace and agree to things you may not want to do.

Unrelenting Standards - key factors include:

An underlying belief that you must meet very high internal standards of behaviour and performance
An emphasis on status, money, achievement, beauty, order, recognition
Perfectionism; attention to detail
Poor delegation skills, overwork, overtraining
Rigid rules; ruled by what “should” happen, and lists of tasks to be completed
A preoccupation with time and efficiency

These traits are not inherently bad and may often be useful in achieving goals. However, problems can occur, especially when there people have difficulty slowing down and become excessively critical with themselves and others. A loss of self esteem can quickly degenerate into poor health and strained relationships.