What's Wrong With This Picture? - Building Gender Balanced Business

“We have to stop speaking in our respective silos. It should be unacceptable in 2009 to have a major conference with almost no women’s voices. And much as I enjoy a good women’s conference, I’m increasingly coming to realize that this can not be the only venue for women to speak out and be heard. It simply is not enough.”

When I asked Dae-whan Chang, the Chairman of the World Knowledge Forum, why there were so few women at his conference in Seoul, he asked me for a list…. So did Martin Lees, the Secretary General of the Club of Rome. Both lamented that they wanted more women… but just couldn’t find them.

So this is it. It’s time to create a list. We’ll make sure these gentlemen receive it every year, as will every other major management conference organizer. We’ll track how many women speakers there actually are at the top conferences, and publicise the presence of gender balance (or lack thereof). As we did when Davos had only 17% female participants (let alone speakers) in 2009.

The world needs women – the new 20-first List

We’ll call it The 20-first List. Its mission will be to raise the volume and visibility of today and tomorrow’s global businesswomen and their visions. The world is begging for the green shoots of new ideas and new perspectives in business and management. The 20-first List will aim to do for business what Emily’s List has worked for politics – to put the other half of the world’s minds to work. We think women are equipped with many of the capabilities and behaviours, not to mention education, that business needs today. A 21st century world more defined by the collaborative potential of the web than the competitive legacies of war.

The talk in Seoul was of the management innovation and leadership needed for economic recovery. Gary Hamel, in particular, argued forcefully for adapting our corporate hierarchies to more internet-like forms of follower-appointed leadership. He said he was dubious about the speed of change, that “those with a stake in the current system would be least likely to want to change it.”

Well, we know a rather large segment of educated knowledge workers with little stake in the current system: women. Hamel cited as an example W.L. Gore, a 50-year old company that has revolutionized its management approach. It did away with managers and hierarchy and replaced them with a ‘lattice’ network with a handful of leaders who are appointed by their … teams. The CEO who was appointed in 2007 in this peer-based system happens to be a woman, Terri Kelly. Her vision of leadership? “I’m a leader only if there are people who are willing to follow me… A project doesn’t move forward unless people buy into it. You cultivate followership by selling yourself, articulating your ideas, and developing a reputation for seeing things through.” (Fast Company Magazine).

Other speakers drilled home the fact that innovation needed to be more customer-focused and less technology-driven. We couldn’t agree more, and this website has done all it can to explain to business who the majority of their consumers are: women.

The pyramids of yesterday’s corporate hierarchies are yielding to the pomegranates of a networked, multi-polar globe. Let’s recognize leaders able to multi-task, to balance, to nurture competing dreams and personalities as loving sibling rivalries in families aligned around core values, not just core competencies. Leaders who nourish and grow babies as well as businesses – that will be around for the next generation and the next – sustainable, organic organizations built to maximize human potential, not just shareholder value.

Women have never been so ready to lead. Are you? If you’d like to nominate someone to appear on the 20-first List, or get a copy of the list for your next conference, please email: TheList@20-first.com.