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 or so 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!
How She Does It: How Women Entrepreneurs Are
Changing the Rules of Business Success
is available at
Amazon
© Professionelle Ltd 2008