Posts filed under 'BizExecToBe'
Martha Barletta’s interview with Tom Peters, discussing What do Women Want?:
Key insight: women want what men want, just more of it. Martha makes the point that research has shown that women are more detail-oriented than men. Details bother us or delight us. To give a concrete example lots of folks can identify with, who’s bothered first by the dirty dishes in the sink at your house, or the layer of dust on the shelves? Women make the details work, and that benefits everyone (men like houses that aren’t dusty too, right?)
So, women want the details right. That’s true for the products marketed to us, the services given us (I won’t work with a company that does a horrible job at service, no matter how good the product is), and our work environments. OK, but so what? The ‘so what’ is that we, directly or indirectly, control the vast majority of the money in our economy. We either directly make the decision, or offer the input to the decision, for most purchasing decisions. We make more than our husbands 30% of the time, and as much as our husbands 20-30% of the time. We control the checkbook 83% of the time. [Think of your own finances - most of the money goes out the door for the basic category items that never hit the big decision making processes that the guys have been typically attributed with.] We talk (you knew that, right?) and give references lots more than guys do. If you’re looking to sell to us or to someone we know, that reference can make or break you. If you’re looking to hire us, or someone we know, similarly, that reference can be the difference between an enthusiastic hire of a super-qualified person, or the continuation of a long and expensive hiring process.
So, listen to us when we offer opinions about the details. Actively solicit our advice, encourage us to offer it, rather than burying us in low-level areas. Seek to find and develop women into positions of influence – who better to lead your business than someone who’s wired to make the details better for both your women customers (note that whether or not you see them, their influence is mighty!) AND for your male customers.
July 13th, 2004
In my hunts for formats for lessons learned documents, I ran across the following conference listing on the Project Management Institute’s website:
Five Lessons Learned From the Memoirs of Wile E. Coyote, by Kelly R. Slone.
Looks like a looney kind of session, if you ask me… One I’d have happily attended.
(A little bit of follow-up search found an article of the same title, written by Kelly R. Slone, in the newsletter for the Western Michigan Chapter of the PMI.)
July 7th, 2004
Something for my next employment contract: if it remains necessary for me to work at some large threshold above normal for more than 3 weeks in a row, I get an automatic bonus in the paycheck. This idea came to mind as part of the wrapup for our phase 1 deployment. This phase has been a beast – since December and up until just a few weeks ago, our whole project team was consistently wracking up work weeks in the 55 to 60 and up range. Software professionals expect that once in a while; it’s an accepted necessary evil to hit “crunch time” and work a bit harder. To do it for as long as our team did it, though, speaks of a team’s commitment to making the impossible happen, and is an expression of just how near impossible what we pulled off was. High personal cost, to us individually and to our families. Low corporate cost: there’s no financial indicator that any of this happened, since we’re all salaried. Salaried does imply a bit of leeway for the corporation, hence setting the performance bonus out after a lengthy period of overtime, rather than at the first bit. The idea is to remind somebody who runs the purse strings that this isn’t the way things should work. I’m a bit cynical: corporations learn best, I believe, when someone looks at cost versus benefit. It’s hard to quantify personal cost…. it’s a lot easier to quantify dollar cost. So it makes some amount of economic sense to make the picture clearer by assigning a dollar value to the personal impact.
June 25th, 2004
I was intrigued to see a new book by the guy who wrote The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas Stanley. His new book is ‘Millionaire Women Next Door’. Apparently in his research for his first set of books, he discovered that some 92% of the folks he ended up speaking with were men, and he decided that it was time to look for the millionaire women and find out what their secrets were. I haven’t read the book yet – want to check it out of the library – but according to the book review on Amazon, “While many characteristics such as frugality and simplicity of lifestyle are similar to those of their male counterparts, Stanley demonstrates that most millionaire women work harder and do better at school, in business, and in investment practices”.
So it highly amused me to see the book that Amazon is offering to pair it with in one of its ‘Buy Together’ promotions – ‘Lottery Master Guide’. So the secret of millionaire women has nothing to do with financial or business acumen or personal achievement; it’s that they know how to pick those numbers??
June 24th, 2004
I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person. Did a little bit better than OK in school, worked hard (_really_ hard) at a couple of classes in college, but other than that, the main work there was time management to get things done. So, have been looking forward to returning to school in the fall to finally (!) get started on that MBA I’ve been thinking about since my junior or senior year in college. The timing was never right. First I wanted job experience to make the MBA that much more worthwhile (and hey, maybe easier if I already knew the stuff). Then we got married. Then we had a kid. And then we had another one. School takes time, time that’s always spread a bit thinner than one would like. But still, the MBA beckoned. I’d peruse the course catalog and wish I could take the class, just for the material covered. I’d plot out how many years it’d take to complete the degree part-time (too many!). I even went so far, last fall, as to write out my application essay for a local school. Never actually sent it in… Jason and I were looking at baby #2 coming and then some minor upheaval in the Coleman household as I returned to work and he took over primary care for the kids. Didn’t seem fair to load a night out to class on top of that.
In the meantime, my interest in the courses haven’t waned. And each time they come around at work to check where we individually fit on the GSA schedule, I’m reminded yet again that I never got that advanced degree. So, today went and took the GMAT exam. It’s required for the local biz school where I hope to earn my degree, one class at a time over the next several years. I’m quite certain evenings spent watching Law & Order will now be spent poring over economic and accounting tomes. Jon Stewart’s monologue may be the refrain behind research for papers. Signup’s coming up for the fall semester – need to get my application in order, including that application essay and a copy of my resume. Good excuse to get it up-to-date, anyway. Lots of things to add, of late, including (tada!) a paper I’m listed as a co-author on that’s going to be presented at a conference at NIH in a couple of weeks. (If it’s posted anywhere, I’ll post a link here… paper describes some cool work we’ve done at the National Library of Medicine).
It’ll take me long enough to get through the MBA program that Cora may be doing her homework while Mommy works on hers. One class at a time, baby, one class at a time.
May 24th, 2004
Fast Company magazine’s cover asks “Where are the Women?” The starting point of the article is to ask why there aren’t more women in corner offices / executive positions, given the number of women in the workforce and the number of years we’ve now had to make it into the cushy chair. The article basically examines a study done by a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business that determined that men are almost exclusively the ones in executive positions because men compete harder and sacrifice more of their personal lives than women. Women are just as competent, just as skilled, etc, as men, generally, but men are m ore willing to work longer, relocate, and just generally give more of their lives to work than women are. This is actually the second article I’ve seen that’s based on this study. The first was in Fortune magazine, entitled “Power: Do Women Really Want It?”.
Particularly in article in Fortune, the spin seemed to be that women just aren’t willing to go that extra mile for the executive spot, and that, hey, that extra mile is required for those who want to reach the pinnacle. Two thoughts come to mind: one, is that extra mile really required for the job itself, or is it just more of a barrier to entry, a way to winnow the competition? Couldn’t companies figure out better ways to use their top job resources, so that above and beyond all call of duty _isn’t_ the required duty? Seems like then the company would be less about the man (nearly always) at the top, and more about its mission of producing something that produces value (to shareholders or some other ownership).
Second thought, and more interesting to me to explore… If the reason that more women aren’t at the top is because they value other things in life over the rewards gained via sacrifices for work, why is it that men don’t value those same things? The articles pointed out that women aren’t stepping aside merely for the “mommy track”, that they’re often stepping aside for other jobs that provide a better balance of work and life. Lots of folks seem to look at that as “settling”, as somehow demeaning what you could have been. But that supposes that the best you could be was the person wholly focused on beating the competition out to win the top spot in this one arena of business, and thus necessarily losing focus on other areas in life. Those other areas – family, personal time, other interests – why are they of so relatively less value to the men examined in this study?
January 27th, 2004
I’ve been hunting the perfect PDA for a while now. I generally carry a phone and a PDA, and worry about dropping one or the other. Women don’t tend to wear the Bat-belt setup that guys do, with a pager, PDA, and phone all strapped to them like either techno bombs or Batman’s equipment belt. We just don’t tend to draw attention to our waist, particularly not with things that stick out from it. And it doesn’t matter if we’re geeks who’re just as excited about the newest toy as the guy in the next office: we’re not going to strap that thing to us and have someone pay close attention to whether we’re quite as tight in the abs as we want to be. The woman thing of wanting to look thin beats out the geek excitement any day. For guys, that whole thin waist thing doesn’t seem to apply for any but the very few. Given the “street cred” a cool geek toy gives to a techie, women need to find an appropriate way to wear their PDA. PDA armcuffs? A mini purse? (A real purse is generally too bulky to pick up and lug into meetings.) More thought required… both on the case and that perfect PDA.
January 16th, 2004
Seen referenced in some Florida government contracting guidelines and documentation:
“Cone of Silence” requirements.
Seems specific to Florida, given my brief check via Google. So, if you’re at a purchasing conference and you see someone wandering around with a shoe to their ear, you can pretty well assume they’re from Florida.
January 13th, 2004
Was amused to discover, as I deleted the latest comment hawking the opportunity to buy generic Viagra, that this particular comment was posted to my rant on comments that hawk products. Brashly obnoxious, rather than merely obnoxious.
January 12th, 2004
I spent a lot of time working with Microsoft Project 2000 this week. I’d count myself as an intermediate user, which means I can deal with resources, tasks, Gantt charts, durations, constraints, and the like, but I don’t yet do much with PERT analysis, cost tracking, earned value analysis, or tracking against a project baseline. After spending literally days working on a project plan for a project that has a defined start date and end date, with an extreme (impossible?) amount of stuff to get done in the middle, here’s my take on how Project could have been more useful.
* more than one undo operation – what other Microsoft app only allows one level of undo????
* better help in figuring out circular dependency relationships
* spell-check that highlights the spelling error, rather than pushing me to a task number – showing me a dialog box that lists a task number does me no good. Take me to the offending task and show me the “error”.
* warnings when data gets truncated in text fields: we overloaded the text1 field to include a description of the task so that we could export a WBS dictionary. Project happily and quietly chopped our text.
* show me what’s going to change down the line, in terms of time lines: given that our end date is fixed, I spent a lot of time trying to get things to line up precisely to end on May 28. I didn’t appreciate it when making a change in March for a task that wasn’t critical path pushed out my schedule in May. Wish I could tell Project – hold the beginning _and_ the end constant.
* a how-do-we-fit-all-these-tasks-in template: My wish – I give the beginning and end date, and you make up a story as to how it will all fit in nicely. Options could include lengthening the work day, adding more people, shortening tasks, hiring nuns to offer prayers on our behalf…
December 27th, 2003
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