Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

Why Do Relatively Few Women Make a Big Name in Business?

Quick: Name the five most famous books written by women on the subject of management. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.  Bzzzzz. You lost out. Sorry.

Let’s try an easier question. Aside from Marrisa Mayer, Ursula Burns, and Carol Bartz (to take out the easy ones) name five leading women in tech.  Tick. Tick. Tick. Oh, forget it.

Where are all the women in this age of gender diversity in the workplace, especially in tech?

Women supposedly account for more new businesses than men do. According to the Kaufman Foundation which studies such matters, between 1997 and 2002 U.S. women-owned firms grew in number by 19.8 percent, compared with a 10.3 percent growth rate firms overall.

During the same period, however, women-owned firms recorded lower survival numbers, as well as lower numbers for size, growth, earnings and profits. The data suggest that women-owned firms are smaller and less growth-oriented than men-owned firms.

What’s behind these disappointing numbers?

First, let me answer why I’m writing about gender and the workplace. I started looking at the topic in connection with a new book I’m doing. It’s hard to find women’s names that resonate in the business community like those of Peter Drucker, Gary Hamel, Tom Peters, Michael, Porter, Jim Collins, John Kotter, and Warren Bennis and so on and so on.

Then, a Fast Company article appeared in my email today on “The Most Influential Women in Technology.” The number of influential women in tech is shockingly small. Women as a founder or co-founder account for less than 10 percent of all tech startups.

I’ve read that women have greater challenges getting credit, that they still must learn to play by rules laid down by men, that they have to face social stigmas associated with women who abandon family  for career, and other reasons why fewer women make it really big in the business world.

Alicia Robb, Kauffman Foundation senior research fellow said, "The interesting thing about women entrepreneurs is that many of them may be purposely starting businesses as a lifestyle choice. The number of women-owned businesses growing faster may reflect that women are going into business as a viable way to move out of the traditional employment market and gain flexibility. It's hard to know if those kinds of businesses are where they want to be or if they would like to grow faster."

In other words it is not fair to women (or men, for that matter) to compare them on equal terms. Women often start businesses for different reasons than men do. And probably by virtue of lower testosterone levels they generally pursue business less competitively.

Do we see women who are as competitive as any man? Of course – but not as often because women are indeed different. Their brains work differently and they have characteristic values that weigh in heavier in their decisions than they do in men’s decisions. For example, research shows that women tend to be more collaboratively-minded than men are. Men are more likely to make a go of it on their own.

One thing I’m seeing is that while women’s influence in tech may be what some would call appallingly low, women’s influence on the business ethos in general is growing and men’s is ebbing. Perhaps from the standpoint of what’s good for society, maybe women’s influence on corporate behavior is more important than on corporate growth. I’ll get into more detail in my next post on this topic because it affects every aspect of business from employee relations and product design to marketing and customer servicing.

A Back to the Future Journey in Marketing

At last! A new book that is thoroughly engaging as it tells us much of what we already know – or should know. This book is novel in that in order to experience greater marketing success in the future it turns our attention to our past. It is indeed, a back-to-the-future kind of book.  

Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran’s The Hyper-Social Organization takes us back to our roots – to times before recorded history when we became homo sapiens. It is a book about marketing in the age of so-called social media that reminds us of who we really are.

Like you probably are, I’m tired of the endless stream of books that claim to have new, breakthrough insights. Their authors typically have an idea that they think is unique but is more likely old wine in new bottles or at least not near as revolutionary as jacket copy makes out.  

While the marketing world at-large is going ga-ga over Web 2.0, Gossieaux and Ed Moran won’t let us forget that we are still Human 1.0. Technology may be vastly different from 10,000 years ago but human social organization and behavior is fundamentally as it was then. The authors remind us that our basic social needs have not changed in thousands of years.

They call to our attention the fact that despite all the friends you may have in your Facebook account and followers you have @Twitter, you are unlikely to maintain stable relationships with more than about 150 people. Guess what. On average, ancient farming villages and tribes were made up of about 150 people.

The jacket copy on The Hyper-Social Organization speaks of 5 steps to being hyper-social:

1.       Forget technology – understand the four drivers of successful communities.

2.       Forget market segments and consumers – think tribes and humans.

3.       Forget company centricity – think human centricity.

4.       Forget channels – think networks.

5.       Forget processes and hierarchies – think social messiness.

You can see from those 5 steps that Gossieaux and Ed Moran are dissing  a number of sacred cows in marketing. In doing so they present us with a refreshing view of the marketplace – not a new view, but a refreshing  view!

Gossieaux and Ed Moran remind us of how easy it is to get so swept up into technology that we forget the basics of what it has mean to be human in social terms for thousands of years. They do a good job of showing us how to use technology as a way of better meeting our ancient needs in the complex world of today.

 

 

 

 

The Alex Bogusky Story

What's going on? The biggest name in advertising has quit the game because conscience overcame ambition - http://tinyurl.com/34df8no

Welcome to the Age of Transcendence

I remember the criticism that was predictably levied against Bill Gates back in the early and mid-1990s for being tight-fisted with his wealth. He owed it to the world to give back, carped legions.

I also remember writing an essay calling for patience with Gates. He was only 40 years old in 1995 when Fortune named him the world’s richest person. I predicted that as Gates moved deeper into middle age he would become the most famous and liberally generous philanthropist in history. Philanthropy is not the game of young, aggressive entrepreneurs, I noted.

Now, Gates along with buddy Warren Buffet have raised the philanthropy bar for the über rich: pledge at least half of your wealth to worthy causes while alive or upon death. See the article in the current Fortune. 

The unprecedented generosity of Gates and Buffet, along with a growing number of insanely rich people, signals a major shift in human consciousness that I first spoke about in Firms of Endearment, a book of which I was co-author. I said we were on the cusp of a new era that I called the Age of Transcendence.

Life in the 20^th century was defined by materialism. Consumption became virtually a civic duty. Business invented planned product obsolescence and disposable goods to increase consumption. The political and commercial focus was on the individual. Especially after the sacrifices of World War II, life increasingly became all about Me. Politicians and marketers played to the acquisitive ego: big is better, more is best. Don’t just keep up with the Joneses. Leave them in the dust.

Life in the 21^st century already is shaping up to be vastly different from life in the 20^th century though we are just one decade into it. But a shift in human consciousness is already apparent. The materialistic consciousness of the 20^th century is yielding to an organic consciousness. Sustainability is replacing consumption as a primary civic duty. The singularity of Me is being replaced by the unitary We. Growing numbers of people define themselves by their experiences, not their possessions. We are indeed in the early years of an Age of Transcendence.

Consumers are also predictably projecting a stronger emphasis on quality. Why predictably? Twenty years ago I wrote my first book on older markets, Serving the Ageless market McGraw-Hill, 1990). In it I predicted that as the median age rose the influence of materialistic values would decline while the market for quality would expand. See this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek.  

The change in human consciousness taking place that adds up to the emergence of the Age of Transcendence is unprecedented in both scale and speed of evolution. Yet, while researchers are beginning to correctly identify aspects of its emergence and a growing number of books are describing its properties, hardly anyone has noticed that what’s happening is not a cyclical event. It represents a new step forward in human evolution.

So, what books are examples of some observers getting pieces of this new picture? Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind and his most recently released Drive. Also, a wave of books flowing from behavioral economics is capturing elements of the new consciousness. Daniel Airley’s Predictably Irrational was one of the first. James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink fall into this category as well. So also is Joshua Lehrer’s How We Decide and Joseph Hallanan’s Why We Make Mistakes.  

Anyone who job or business depends on understanding the mind of the market and who are unaware of the books I’ve mention as only a sampling of literature evidencing a seismic shift in human consciousness is a bit behind the times, as they say.