Born to lead - Building Gender Balanced Business

• It’s time to stop trying to make the business case for women now
• Advocates for more women leaders in business should look at the changing business scene
• Organisations need to be fast, flexible, innovative, highly skilled at leveraging talent and well networked
• The skills top leaders need now were once considered female skills
• Making the future business case for women in business means spotting the confluence between what women have to offer and what organisations need

In 1992, Felice Schwartz, founder of Catalyst, the leading US research organization on women in business, published an influential article in the Harvard Business Review entitled
Women as a Business Imperative
The article highlighted the need for those who championed women leaders to “make the business case for women,” and introduced the phrase into the global conversation.

That was 16 years ago, and we’re still talking about the need to make the business case for women — in corporations, partnership firms and non-profit organisations. I work with companies all over the world seeking to build first-class women’s leadership programs, and find that there always comes a moment when someone in the organisation stands up and says, “if women are going to get somewhere, we need to make the business case.”

I think it’s time to stop using this phrase. If we still believe we have to make the business case 16 years after (and Felice Schwartz herself did a powerful job of it), I doubt it’s going to happen anytime soon.

It’s the 21st Century Now

In any case, the world has changed dramatically since 1992. The World Wide Web was less than three years old then, using email required mastering the complexities of DOS, and company websites were an oddity. In other words, we operated with an entirely different technological infrastructure than the one that informs our work today, which means that the economics, opportunities and challenges were also different.

Today’s 24/7 hyperlinked and highly uncertain global business environment requires that organisations are flexible, fast and highly innovative, skilled at leveraging the best thinking of all their people in order to move nimbly to market with new products and services. It also requires that companies keep firmly focused on the future because the trends that are transforming the environment in this third industrial revolution are big, powerful, and never stop coming. If an organisation is unprepared for the latest demographic, economic or technological wrinkle, it can lose its markets overnight. Just ask Digital Equipment Company, Swiss Air or General Motors.

Given this volatile environment, those of us who passionately believe in the importance of developing women leaders would do better to focus our energies on making the future business case for women. Benchmarking and other practices that measure what has been successful in the past are simply inadequate in our fast-moving era.