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SUITE VICTORIES
SUCCESS ON OUR OWN TERMS Freelance writer and communications consultant Virginia O'Brien is a good news messenger. Fed up with stories about the impenetrable glass ceiling, O'Brien sets out to prove that negative press reports of women's progress are exaggerated. She culls her stories from a favorably skewed universe: 45 women in management at 23 major companies and their subsidiaries, companies such as Hewlett-Packard, NationsBank, and Bell Atlantic that are considered progressive. This focus proves both a strength and a weakness. The book has many inspiring stories, yet it suffers from an almost breathless optimism and is larded with corpspeak. One wonders how useful it will be to the small businesses and entrepreneurs she chose to exclude. The book's most powerful insight may well be captured in its title. These women have their own roadmaps of success--usually not a conventional path to the chief executive's suite. ''The key is understanding what works for you,'' says Ellen Gabriel, a partner with Deloitte & Touche. ''Your company will try to define it. Your husband will try to define it. Your boss will try to define it. You've got to figure out what drives you.'' To supplement the interviews, O'Brien distributed a survey through Executive Female magazine, a publication of the National Association for Female Executives. O'Brien says she was surprised at the similarities in the survey findings and interviews. Only two of 700 respondents, many of whom worked for smaller companies, listed becoming a CEO as a marker of success. Gaining power and making money were not key goals; meeting objectives, achieving balanced lives, and making a difference were. Many of these women made unconventional career moves to gain wide-ranging experience long before ''cross-functional experience'' became valued. For example, Lynn Crump gave up managing a McDonald's Corp. territory to take a less prestigious post in global training, just as the burger giant was refocusing on global strategies. Her move paid off: In a few years, she'd become a regional vice-president. Many others have carved out new niches--such as a trailblazing job-share arrangement between two women at Bell Atlantic. But frustrations about child care remain an unsettling undercurrent in their stories. O'Brien argues that the CEO pipeline is filled with women who are reshaping the workplace. Former Labor Secretary Lynn Martin agrees in her foreword to the book. But Martin also contends that women aren't advancing fast enough. With help from how-to manuals like this one, maybe these stories won't sound so isolated to the next generation.
BY ANNE NEWMAN RELATED ITEMS
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Updated Apr. 16, 1998 by bwwebmaster
Copyright 1998, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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