America's Healthy Infatuation With Entrepreneurs - David A. Shaywitz

REUTERS

America has fallen hard for entrepreneurs.

The aesthetic appeal is easy to understand. Compare the Fortune 500 CEOs interviewed on the HBR IdeaCast talking about Campbell's Soup or Coca-Cola (podcast here) with the entrepreneurs at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar Series discussing Pandora and Instagram (podcast here). The big company CEOs sound just like you'd expect. They are competent, factual,  and in control. But while most of them presumably have strong interpersonal skills and a high EQ, they come across as dry, unemotional, and focused on the "core business."

In contrast, the entrepreneurs presenting at Stanford wear their hearts on their sleeves. They are vividly passionate. They exude emotion. They are selling themselves, with a kind of animated desperation. They tell student to "do what you love." It's an appealing message, and you can see why it catches on.

These two personalities generally reside at opposite ends of the business spectrum, presumably reflecting two very different business needs. It's essential to be brash and irrationally exuberant to start a business. But to sustain a large multinational corporation, you've got to be calculating and rational.  It's also a well-described phenomenon that as start-ups evolve into progressively larger companies, their character changes, and their needs evolve, or "mature."  Mature organizations are supposed to act predictably, responsibly, unemotionally. The qualities embraced (or at least tolerated) at the start-up level can become liabilities. Many start-up CEOs hand over the reins at this stage, or at least share them (as Google did for years when Brin and Page hired Eric Schmidt), explicitly acknowledging the need for an "adult in the room." Talk to us about leveraging your capabilities.

While many large organizations might similarly benefit from having a kid in the room -- someone who is energetic, passionate, emotional, excitable - it's hard to envision a corporate phenotype that would be more doomed: the environment just doesn't support it.  Sure, companies trot out bromides about "cultivating entrepreneurship," while HR departments sponsor group training sessions on innovative thinking. But the reality is that the culture of most big companies is geared to performing established activities in increasingly efficient ways. Simply stated: doing the old things better takes precedence over doing new things well enough. Most employees (and certainly the ones who last) figure out extremely quickly how you're supposed to act at work (Sir Joseph wasn't far off). You could say most large organizations have elected to trade the passion of young love for the predictability of adult relationships.

And perhaps this is why we look so wistfully at entrepreneurs. They seem to exude the raw passion that experience has taught us to modulate, the vivid emotion that we've learned to suppress, the intense energy that we learn must be channeled, the unreasonable audacity that has been replaced by sensible objectives.  We cheer for them because they represent our youthful hopes, our idealism, our ambitions and our dreams. And when these entrepreneurs defy the extraordinary odds, and succeed, we rejoice, for at the moment we can sense, if only fleetingly, the exceptional untapped potential within each of us. We rejoice, and wonder: what if?

It would be easy to dismiss our infatuation with entrepreneurs as misty-eyed revisionism, the way we might selectively recall and invoke treasured childhood memories while forgetting the many painful challenges of youth and adolescence. The day-to-day reality of getting a new company off the ground is generally far less glorious than the inspirational experiences trotted out by the small minority of ultra-successful entrepreneurs who are routinely invited to share their stories. There's a significant selection bias here, to say nothing of the urge to write oneself into a heroic cultural narrative.

But I'd argue that if we had to find a group of people to admire and admittedly idealize -- and you know we're going to -- we could do a lot worse than taking our inspiration from impassioned, dedicated individuals seeking against all odds "to make a dent in the world." via theatlantic.com

Consulting, Speaking & Coaching. Driving Growth through Innovation  

Innothink Group is a strategic management and innovation consultancy. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting over a third of our fees at risk subject o hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships. 

For speaking, coaching or consulting inquiries contact: 

CEO Jim Woods

+1 719- 649-4118

 

Innovation & Competitive Advantage - How a Young Fashion Designer Stands Out in a Crowded Market

 

When Rebecca Minkoff co-founded a New York-based luxury handbags company in 2005, her goal was to develop a high-quality product that was both practical and sexy. What she didn't expect -- especially in the competitive fashion industry -- was that sales would rise so quickly.

Revenues at Rebecca Minkoff LLC jumped to $17.5 million in 2010 from $5.5 million in 2008, according to the Women Presidents' Organization (WPO), which ranked Rebecca Minkoff No. 6 on its recently released Top 50 Fastest-Growing Women-Led Companies annual list.

"We came out at a time when contemporary bags were hot and exciting," says Minkoff, who is 30 and also the youngest business owner on the WPO list. "We definitely rode that momentum and learned how to build a business along the way."

Minkoff's journey into the fashion business started when, at age 18, she moved from St. Petersburg, Fla., to Manhattan and landed an internship at fashion-design house Craig Taylor. She worked closely with the CEO "who took me under her wing and taught me about the whole business," Minkoff says.

By the time she left the company in 2001, Minkoff was already working on her own designs. Her first taste of national recognition came when actress Jenna Elfman -- best known for her starring role in the TV sitcom Dharma and Greg -- wore an "I Love New York" T-shirt Minkoff designed on the Jay Leno show. After the appearance, retailers began calling and Minkoff spent the next six months "sewing T-shirts on my living-room floor."

Although Minkoff continued designing, starting a full-fledged company was daunting. So, her older brother, Uri, who had founded a small handful of health-care and technology startups, joined her, and the duo officially launched Rebecca Minkoff LLC in 2005. Minkoff serves as creative director, while Uri is CEO. The company's first prototype was a leather satchel Minkoff called the "Morning After Bag."

"I envisioned a bag that you'd want to take with you on late nights out when you weren't sure where you'd wind up or when you'd come home the next morning," she says.

Rebecca Minkoff's "Morning After Bag."

The $500 bag struck a chord with consumers -- including celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan and Hayden Panettiere. Minkoff's line has expanded beyond handbags to include accessories and women's apparel, which are sold in 300 U.S. retail stores -- such as Nordstrom, Bloomingdales and Saks Fifth Avenue. This spring, the 30-person company launched a new division called Ben Minkoff, named for Minkoff's grandfather, which manufactures and sells men's bags and accessories. 

How to Break into a Crowded Industry
Minkoff's fast-track growth is particularly notable because she found success in an already crowded and fiercely competitive fashion industry. While the number of fashion-design houses has decreased 2.3 percent annually since 2005, industry revenues have been growing 0.6 percent per year, giving the remaining players an increasingly bigger piece of the market, according to IBISWorld, a market-research firm based in Los Angeles.

Here, Minkoff shares her top three tips for launching a business in a competitive industry:

1. Be unique. Piggybacking on an existing product or service usually won't get your business noticed in competitive markets, Minkoff says. Yours should fill a need and stand out from the competition. "I created a line for what I wanted to wear -- and what I saw there was a lack of in the market -- in terms of design and function at an affordable price," she says.
2. Know your price point. Regardless of the industry, customers want a quality product for a great price, Minkoff says. Setting an appropriate price for a product or service is crucial.

   Minkoff learned that lesson after she downgraded the leather for a particular handbag without lowering the retail price. "I didn't put a tag on it saying it was made with this other type of leather, but the bag didn't look the same, and my customers knew it," she says. "We recognized that immediately when sales for the item didn't perform." Talk to us about our 28 day program to strengthen your innovation capabilities to drive growth.  

3. Listen and respond. Establishing communication with customers and making them feel a part of the decision-making process has been important to Minkoff's success. She connects with her 23,000 Twitter followers and more than 16,000 Facebook fans. In 2009, Minkoff launched Minkette, an online forum for customers to share thoughts about the brand.

   "If someone writes in and tells us the strap on a particular bag isn't long enough to wear in the winter when she's wearing a coat, we'll make the bag with a longer strap the next season," Minkoff says. "My customers know I'm listening and responding." via entrepreneur.com

   Consulting, Speaking & Coaching. Driving Growth through Innovation  

   Innothink Group is a strategic management and innovation consultancy. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting over a third of our fees at risk subject o hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships. 

   For speaking, coaching or consulting inquiries contact: 

   CEO Jim Woods

   +1 719- 649-4118

    

    

 

Without A Nimble Competitive Advantage Design is Meaningless

It is really all about competitive advantage. Truthfully, designing and strategizing aren't that different. Both activities include methods to create a plan in order to achieve a specific goal. And design(-ing) goes into everything: isn't someone (designer or not) constantly creating something in an organization? Design is all around us, and there is no way around it. Of course, in this volatile age, it is encumbered upon designers to disrupt their fields and niche with insatiable products. Without a plan to innovate competitive advantage in design and strategy a product if you will, remains anemic at best where owners lament an ecnomoy laced with opportunity more than disruption.  

Since design is there to stay, the challenge really is about designing not well, but obsessivley well:

• Strengthening the significance of design strategy at the leadership level and throughout organizations
• Be competitive. Create designs that speed to market
• Create designs that are adaptive and responsive to change faster than competitors. 
• Applying its methods consciously and effectively during decision-making, problem-solving, and co-creation Talk to us about leveraging your capabilities.
• Including design in investment and optimization efforts
• Hiring design talent that can support change in culture and business models

Together with management, design should be an essential part of the overarching force of a holistic system and trickle through the entire organization. Designing right from the inception is crucial in achieving differentiation and a competitive advantage, wowing customers by engaging on an emotional level, and ultimately creating stakeholder value.

 

 

Note: Be different isn't enough today. You have to find something new to say and a better way of saying it. Jim Woods

 

Speaking 

As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth.  

If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118. Thank you!

 

 

How The World's Biggest Company Works With The World's Most Populous Nation - Walmart Is Changing China

How Walmart Is Changing China

The world’s biggest corporation and the world’s most populous nation have launched a bold experiment in consumer behavior and environmental stewardship: to set green standards for 20,000 suppliers making several hundred thousand items sold to billions of shoppers worldwide. Will that effort take hold, or will it unravel in a recriminatory tangle of misguided expectations and broken promises?

By Orville Schell

 

 

A Map of Walmart in China

From sea cucumbers in Dalian to upscale Sam's Clubs in Shanghai, Walmart stores vary from province to province.

Stepping into the building’s vast, windowless interior, I have the sense of entering an oversize Fabergé egg. But instead of refined scenes of aristocratic czarist life, I encounter thousands of middle-class Chinese engaging in the newest, and already the most inalienable, right in this erstwhile “People’s Republic”: shopping. This is the Shijingshan Shanmuhui, a Sam’s Club, one of the 352 stores that Walmart now operates in 130 Chinese cities.

Just inside the doorway, a scrum of salespeople hawk everything from roasted sweet potatoes to fitness-club memberships and massage chairs. Throngs of energetic customers push overflowing carts (fitted with data screens touting the latest bargains) making that familiar sound of wobbling rubber wheels on concrete. Indeed, its familiarity makes me feel I’ve been astrally projected back to Walmart’s natal place—Bentonville, Arkansas, which the current president and CEO, Michael Duke, recently referred to as the “Lighthouse of the Ozarks.”

But the young Chinese women workers in green aprons and sanitary masks make it undeniable that we’re a long way from the Ozarks. They call out their wares in Mandarin, proffering samples of soya-bean milk, date juice, and lychee jelly. Around them are mountainous piles of fresh pig intestines; pillow-size bags of dried fungus, seaweed, and mushrooms; packages of desiccated deer tendons (still attached to hooves!); inky-black dehydrated sea slugs; glistening octopuses on nests of chopped ice; and tanks of gulping fish, dazed frogs and turtles, and hyperactive shrimp.

Although Walmart’s $7.5 billion in Chinese sales receipts account for only 2 percent of the company’s annual revenues, its sales in China have risen substantially over the past decade. Sales in the United States, by contrast, have been shrinking. And as China’s retail market—the world’s fastest-growing—expands by 18 percent a year, Walmart’s executives smell the intoxicating scent of more growth to come. Equally important, if not more so, some 20,000 Chinese suppliers, or “partners,” reportedly provide Walmart with about 70 percent of the nearly $420 billion worth of goods that it sells globally each year. (Because of the complexity of the global supply chain, the percentage from China is hard to calculate.) China has become so crucial to Walmart’s supply chain that in 2002, the retail giant moved its global sourcing headquarters across the border from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, in southern China. 

As I tramped across the country, from Shenzhen to Manchuria and from the North China Plain to Sichuan province, visiting Walmart retail outlets, factories, farm cooperatives, and executive offices, the Walmart/China axis loomed as something unprecedented. Beyond the sheer scale of the relationship, what struck me was how interactive Walmart and China have become.

Of course, over the past century and a half, most of the foreign missionaries, merchants, military emissaries, and educators who have sallied forth in hopes of “changing China” have returned home with little to show for their efforts. Like nitinol, a unique nickel-titanium alloy that possesses “shape memory,” bending at low temperatures only to regain its original form when heated, China has long rebuked foreign efforts to change it. So one might plausibly wonder why Walmart, a company that is so indelibly American, might now have an experience that is any different.

Indeed, Walmart has deep roots in conservative, southern, small-town, fundamentalist-Christian, anti-union, middle-American values. The founder, Sam Walton, was an ardent capitalist, devoted Christian, and militant anti-Communist who rolled all these values up into a quasi-religious/political credo, a founding faith for a business praised by then–Vice President Dick Cheney as “one of our nation’s great companies,” exemplifying “some of the very best qualities in our country—hard work, the spirit of enterprise, fair dealing, and integrity.” I encourage you to read this article in entirety at via theatlantic.com

Speaking 

As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth. 

 If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118. 

Without A Nimble Competitive Advantage Design is Meaningless

It is really all about competitive advantage. Truthfully, designing and strategizing aren't that different. Both activities include methods to create a plan in order to achieve a specific goal. And design(-ing) goes into everything: isn't someone (designer or not) constantly creating something in an organization? Design is all around us, and there is no way around it. Of course, in this volatile age, it is encumbered upon designers to disrupt their fields and niche with insatiable products. Without a plan to innovate competitive advantage in design and strategy a product if you will, remains anemic at best where owners lament an ecnomoy laced with opportunity more than disruption.  

Since design is there to stay, the challenge really is about designing not well, but obsessivley well:

• Strengthening the significance of design strategy at the leadership level and throughout organizations
• Be competitive. Create designs that speed to market
• Create designs that are adaptive and responsive to change faster than competitors. 
• Applying its methods consciously and effectively during decision-making, problem-solving, and co-creation
• Including design in investment and optimization efforts
• Hiring design talent that can support change in culture and business models

Together with management, design should be an essential part of the overarching force of a holistic system and trickle through the entire organization. Designing right from the inception is crucial in achieving differentiation and a competitive advantage, wowing customers by engaging on an emotional level, and ultimately creating stakeholder value.

 

 

Note: Be different isn't enough today. You have to find something new to say and a better way of saying it. Jim Woods

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. Jim is board president of a charter school located in Colorado Springs whose sole purpose is to prepare otherwise disadvantaged students more competitively for college. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective hypercompetition strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter.   

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on Linkedin

Follow us on Facebook

 

It Could Happen Anywhere: Best Buy's Amazonian Nightmare

Where did you buy that snazzy Zenith 19″ or VCR however many years ago? Circuit City? Crazy Eddie? Nobody Beats the Whiz? Service Merchandise? Incredible Universe? The list of departed—dearly or otherwise—big boxes that once dominated the consumer electronics landscape is endless. (Not to mention the mass extinction of regional players such as Lechmere, Tweeter, Sound Advice, and Kaufman & Roberts.) So you’d think the last man standing in the field, Best Buy, the world’s top electronics retailer, would be living large right about now. Instead, with its stock at a multiyear low, the Richfield (Minn.) retailer today announced it will be shutting 50 of its 1,100 stores amid a revenue shortfall. Management promised to scale back on discounts, effectively ceding low-margin sales to rivals. Best Buy also says it plans to slash $800 million in costs over the next three years.

           (Please take a moment to visit our sponsors.)  

Best Buy’s moves show how even those traditional merchants that have managed to trump their brick-and-mortar rivals can’t automatically count on picking up their former customers. Channeling Johnny Cochran, Gimme Credit analyst Carol Levenson explains: “If you don’t perform, you must transform. … No amount of adjustments or restatements can obscure the fact that the company returned to negative comparable-store sales in the fourth quarter … and posted a second straight year of comparable-store sales declines.” All this, she says, despite the fact that ”Best Buy was handed a gift when Circuit City left the building.”

One retailing shift that’s likely at work here is a phenomenon known as “showrooming,” in which window shoppers go to one of Best Buy’s well-appointed stores to avail themselves of quality face time with gadgets and salespeople (think inventory and salary costs) before consummating the transaction elsewhere—online. Most often, they do that through Amazon.com, where shipping is frequently free and, depending on your state, sales tax does not apply. Fueling that growing practice are price-comparison apps such as Amazon’s Price Check, which lets those obnoxiously savvy smartphone users scan a particular item’s barcode at a store and immediately know who has the best deal on the Web. Consumers can then just buy it right on their phone. It’s like a scene from the vintage cartoon comedy The Jetsons, but traditional retailers with hundreds of costly stores, such as Best Buy, Sears Holdings, and even Wal-Mart, aren’t laughing.

Data: Compiled by Bloomberg

via businessweek.com

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective hypercompetition strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter.  

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on Linkedin

Follow us on Facebook

In Turbulent Times Women May Prove to Be Better Leaders Than Men

(Please take a moment to visit our sponsors.)  


During turbulent times, organizations spend a great deal of effort on rescue and recovery work. This may include fiscal fitness programs to rein in costs, employee performance is scrutinized to select candidates for terminations, suppliers are squeezed to reduce prices and employee benefits are slashed. However, organizations rarely look at the gender, style and effectiveness of management during these times. Evidence suggests that women may be better than their male counterparts in improving employee morale, motivation and performance – and these are crucial factors that can enhance chances of organizations survival in turbulent times. 


Organizations can better deal with turbulent times if leadership shows that it cares and good information is provided without falsely raising hopes. So, too, it helps if clear lines of communication are established and employees are engaged in the recovery plan. Employees know their business intimately, especially those in the front line, and they can generate great ideas to win back customers, reduce costs, improve products or streamline processes. So leaders should adopt a management style that is engaging, inclusive and collaborative, and where individuals and groups can make decisions. This participative or ‘laissez faire’ style works well in an era that makes wide use of the internet, where many people can contribute, even if they are located on the other side of the world. 


Who is best at a participative management style? Contemporary research indicates that women may be more suited to this style than men. Female managers think and operate differently. In an interview with CNN Money, Catherine Kaputa, author of The Female Brand: Using the Female Mindset to Succeed in Business, said, “In general, women are most comfortable with a management style that is more collaborative and less concerned with rigid hierarchy and top-down directives. As it happens, that more inclusive, collegial style is what gets results in global companies today.”

According to Dr Bernard Bass who developed the theory of transformational leadership, women are more suited to leadership in the current century. Bass ran a workshop with Bell Labs in the US with 24 participants – twelve men and twelve women. He picked out the participants with the four highest charismatic leadership scores and it turned out all four were women. He later repeated this in New Zealand, and also gathered data from a thousand or so cases in related research. His conclusion was that women were more inspirational. They were also more transformational. 


Evidence that points to women’s edge over men in financial dealings is cited by David Weidner, columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He writes, “A new study by Barclays Wealth and Ledbury Research found that women were more likely to make money in the market, mostly because they didn’t take as many risks. They bought and held. Women trade this way because they aren’t as confident – or perhaps as overconfident – as men, the study found.” And this is precisely what is needed in chaotic market conditions that are causing immense problems for people and organizations.

So what makes women better leaders than men? It may partly be simple biology – women have higher levels of the oxytocin hormone than men. Research carried out by Paul Zak (Claremont Graduate University, California), Angela Stanton (Chapman University, Orange, California) and Sheila Ahmadi (University of California, Los Angeles) found that oxytocin is the ‘bonding chemical’. Higher levels of oxytocin lead the individual to greater empathy with others and to a less aggressive stance. Oxytocin stimulates a nurturing characteristic that responds to the emotional needs of others. Warmth and sensitivity are also by-products of high levels of the hormone. Even when the level of oxytocin is similar in women and men, the far higher levels of estrogen found in women act as an accelerator for the effectiveness of oxytocin. This may explain why women develop stronger affections for their children and what makes them good mothers.

A more convincing view is that concepts, rather than hormones, are key controller of behavior. Hormones may create desires, tendencies or inclinations, but its concepts that really control and direct action. This can be clearly seen in reality. Consider Muslims who fast in the Middle East during peak of summer. The body craves for water and food in the extreme heat, yet devout Muslims override these bodily desires and abstain from drinking or eating from sunrise to sunset – for a whole month. Women’s distinctive behavior may be a result of ideas or concepts derived from cultural expectations, religious convictions, and physical differences between men and women.

During turbulent times, a management style that is more characteristic of women leaders really produces positive results. Collaboration becomes vital if the organization is to capture all ideas and opinions to ensure that the best possible course is taken. Women consult more with their peers and teams than men. Showing empathy when people are distraught will provide stability in the workplace. Women are better at expressing empathy than men. Similarly, responding to people’s emotional needs will ensure that they continue to perform under pressure – and women are much better at using emotions in a positive way. Women also tend to reduce or avoid hierarchical layers and to short-circuit communication channels, and this leads to improved trust and better communication. Being less aggressive will ensure that risk is reduced. Women take fewer risks than men so the organization’s chances of survival are higher. 


Not everyone agrees that women make better leaders. Gary N. Powell, professor of management in the School of Business at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, carried out research with D. Anthony Butterfield over three decades. It showed that good managers exhibit more traits associated with men, such as autonomy and independence, than traits associated with women, such as warmth and sensitivity to the needs of others.

Evidence may suggest that women tend to lead better than men, but not all women are better leaders. Andrea Jung, who became CEO of Avon Products and Carly Fiorina, who was appointed CEO of HP, both in 1999, are examples of women who did not perform well, were perceived to be arrogant, did not consult much and hence were eventually pushed out. 


There is also a strong view that women are not decisive enough. This view is backed by a nationwide survey carried out by Pew Research Center Social and Demographic Trends in 2008, where women scored lower than men in the ‘Decisive’ leadership trait category.

Women face another hurdle. Although it differs from country to country, prejudice against women leaders is still deeply rooted. According to Catalyst, a Canadian non-profit organization expanding opportunities for women and business, women currently hold only 5.6 percent of Financial Post 500 CEO/Head roles. The US fares even worse. Just twelve Fortune 500 companies were run by women in 2011, down from 15 in 2010. However, according to the 2011 Grant Thornton International Business Report, the statistics are slightly better in Asian economies. Thailand leads the way with 30 per cent of companies headed by women, followed by mainland China at 19 per cent, Taiwan at 18 per cent and Vietnam at 16 per cent.

Despite the male dominated leadership space, organizations are beginning to see the value in appointing women to lead, especially since the dot-com bust in 1999–2000. For example, there have been notable appointments in the US corporates – Anne Mulcahy took on the CEO role at Xerox Corporation in 2001 and Indra Nooyi was appointed to PepsiCo in 2007. More recently, Margaret Whitman became CEO of HP in 2011 and Virginia Rometty succeeded Sam Palmisano as CEO of IBM in January 2012. It is also interesting to note that in the midst of economic turbulence the world over, Christine Lagarde has been given the task of leading the IMF.


Organizations stand a better chance of getting through turbulent times if they give women a fair chance at the helm of leadership. Women may not have broken through the ‘glass ceiling’ yet, but there is no doubt that future corporate leadership will have much higher level of the female gender, at least in the capitalist-democratic nations. via CEO Magazine

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. We are one of the very few consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Email or call us at 719-649-4118 to speak at your event or devise an effective competitive advantage and innovation strategy for your organization.  Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter.

(Please take a moment to visit our sponsors.)  

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on Linkedin

Follow us on Facebook