Dave Desforges began piloting "Work From Home" solutions over 3 years ago. His role required identifying additional candidate requirements and necessary remote work practices for both employees and managers at Sun Microsystems. His current work encompasses blending appropriate technology, organizational practices, and workplace environments to support mobile and distributed teams.
Jim McGee is currently a Director at Huron Consulting Group. He has spent much of the last 30 years working to understand, design, and apply information and technology innovations in organizations. Before Huron, Jim taught at the Kellogg School and was one of the founding partners of DiamondCluster International. With Larry Prusak, he was the co-author of Managing Information Strategically (Wiley, 1993). Jim has both an MBA and a doctorate in Information Technology, Organization, and Strategy from the Harvard Business School.
Regina Miller has more than 18 years of experience in Organization Development, Human Resources, Leadership Development and International Operations. Regina recently launched a global consultancy called The Seventh Suite which assists growing companies bolster their competitive edge via aligned strategy and progressive people practices. Her last corporate job was as the VP HR/OD for Oskar (Vodafone) which has been dubbed “one of the fastest growing mobile operators in Eastern Europe.” More info here.
Giovanni Rodriguez - Through a combination of luck and persistence, Giovanni has worked in the company of some of the most interesting and colorful leaders in several worlds: the law, theater, and technology. Today, he is a principal at Eastwick Communications, a Silicon Valley PR agency, where he advises both emerging companies and market leaders on executive leadership, public speaking, marketing strategy and media relations. He has worked for, consulted and advised numerous businesses and organizations including HP, Stanford University, Fujitsu Computer Systems, Cadence Design Systems, VMware, the American Arbitration Association, and the Unified Court System of New York. He is a graduate of Princeton University (Religion and Anthropology), and he has done graduate course work at the Columbia School of Journalism and N.Y.U.
Jim Ware is a cofounder of the Work Design Collaborative and the Future of Work program. He has over 30 years experience in research, executive education, consulting, and management, including five years on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. He was the lead author of The Search for Digital Excellence, (McGraw-Hill, 1998), and holds Ph.D., M.A., and B.Sc. degrees from Cornell University and an MBA (With Distinction) from the Harvard Business School.
Just Released the 2008 Tribalization of Business study - an in-depth look at how 140+ organizations are managing and measuring online communities
In this last installment I'd like to approach another inherent aspect of women’s leadership that I found to be quite effective while planning BlogHer, or for that matter, any major business or community endeavor—humility.
I can personally attest that not all women are humble. I’m pretty clear that I’m quite alpha when I want to be. But you don’t gather the trust of a community, nor of a gaggle of top bloggers and top sponsors who have heard every pitch in the book, without some humility--or shall we say, authenticity. And in my humble opinion, women do a much better job of falling on their sword. Men, think about it: how many times have you given in to your wives or women friends after they’ve said, “You’re right, Sweetie; I’ll defer to you.”
In her essay in More Space: Nine Antidotes to Complacency in Business my co-author Evelyn Rodriguez writes about a shift in value memes, or set of beliefs that comprise a decision-making framework. We are moving, she says, from a green, or consensus-based dynamic, “that often views hierarchies as oppressive” and “establishes linked communities” to a yellow value-meme:
“The yellow value meme integrates systems and explores open systems and networked meshes. It reintroduces vertical hierarchies and ranking, grasps big picture, and tends to be expressive … Rather than create a duality of any sort, it tends to accept people and values—while not necessarily agreeing with their varying world views. It is the basis for ‘Integral commons.’”
When I read about the yellow value meme I thought of the underlying ethic behind BlogHer—a laboratory of sorts where I personally have been allowed to experiment with a feminine brand of leadership.
My subtitle sounds a bit strange, but it was my realization a year ago, when I attended a personal development retreat, and was brought back in touch with my feminine nature. Before that I figured that men and women were the same, but that men actively decided to be obnoxious listeners.
At the end of the seminar, when I was asked what I'd learned, I didn't know that what I had said in earnestness would inspire laughter from the group.
I said: "I learned that women really are different than men!" There really are inherent natures in each gender that facilitate entirely different management skills.
As I mentioned in my last installment, I haven’t always had the best time working for a woman or being a boss. Though I don’t think that failure to lead is a female inadequacy. Not at all. I think that my experiences were the result of bad leadership—both mine and my colleagues’.
I once wrote about an outstanding female boss I had. She was outstanding, not because she was a woman, but because she was less concerned with her SVP title than she was with determining her team’s strengths and building an organization that capitalized on them.
HOWEVER—isn’t there always a however?—I believe that, being a woman, she was much more attuned to the underlying dynamics of our team, which had morale issues from having seen a number of bosses and business models come and go. She interviewed each of us informally to get a sense of our personalities, the things we were most proud of accomplishing, and she fought for us when other demands unrelated to our core goals threatened to divide our attention. She didn’t assume that she knew the answers before investigating. Her goal was not to kick ass and take names, but to help the company thrive by helping us be our best selves.
My phone rang early on Saturday morning. Calls like these, from people who assumed I had no personal life, used to come from my mother, but that was before I started working on the BlogHer Conference.
“You up?” it was Elisa Camahort, one of the BlogHer co-founders. She and Lisa Stone took me up on my offer to “help out where I could” back in March. Who woulda thunk we’d practically end up appendages of each other?
“Yep, I’m up,” I said, lying.
“I need you to look at something before I send it out,” she said. It was a note to a key figure we needed to engage for a session we were developing. After three months a Pavlovian response was starting to kick in. I had unlearned my usual Saturday-brush-off response, “yup, looks fine”—and sat at my computer to read the note she’d written.
Since March, we’d moved full-force into developing a conference for women bloggers. The finish line (at least for now) is July 31—the day after the event. What started as a pet project scheduled in the periphery of my time has stirred in me a renewed interest not only in blogging and the power of online communities, but in the power of feminine leadership. Why, despite my varied past working with women leaders, was this experience so transforming, and others so disappointing?
Giovanni Rodriguez
Elizabeth Albrycht
Dave Desforges
Jim McGee
Jim Ware
