Play Like a Man Win Like a Woman What Men Know About Success That Women Need to Learn

INTRODUCTION Not long ago, I spoke at a small conference of successful business women. Afterwards came the deluge, as one woman after another came up to me and asked for advice. It always happens at these events. I speak, I listen, I hear the same words over and over--"baffled," "angry," "lost," "trapped," "stuck," "overwhelmed"--as each woman tells me she feels that she's gotten only so far in business and can't get any further. One of the women at the conference told me she's a vice president at theFortune500 company where she's been working for two decades. In the last four years she has been given two new lofty-sounding titles, but no more power. She thinks she has hit a wall. "Have you made it clear what you want?" I asked. "Have you taken any action?" "No," she said. Like so many women, she doesn't understand that when you have an ongoing serious complaint, you don't simply, meekly, live with it. You try to change it. I told her that she needed to take action. "What kind of action?" she asked "Anything," I said. "One action will lead to another. Talk to the CEO. Job hunt. Anything. Just dosomething!" She sighed. "I don't understand. They know what a good job I am doing. Why don't they just reward me for it?" With that attitude, she is losing the game. If you don't read the directions manual when you start a game, you won't know how to proceed. You open the box, and in front of you are the board, markers, and dice, but you don't have a clue. If you're playing by yourself, you can improvise, but you may get it wrong. If you're playing with others, you can always follow their lead. But while they're focused on winning, you have to keep asking yourself if you're getting it right. Whether that game is croquet, Monopoly, field hockey, or football, you have to understand the directions first. So why play the game of business any differently? Business is as much a game as any other board, individual, or team sports game. Consider all the metaphors like teamwork, making the right moves, playing your cards close to your chest, picking the best players for your team, rolling the dice, making a preemptive bid, raising the ante, finding the right captain, getting the team into position, hitting a home run. The bottom line: When it comes to business, most women are at a disadvantage. We're forced to guess, to improvise, to bluff (which is not something we're always good at--see Chapter 5: Toot Your Own Horn). This is why so few of us play the game well, and even fewer find it fulfilling. And what about men? They don't read directions manuals, you say. True. They don't need to. The male mind invented the concept of directions. It wasn't that they deliberately ignored women, or disliked what women had to say. Rather, as business culture developed, few women were around to help. Men wrote all the rules because they wrote alone. Women have made great strides in the last century. But that progress hasn't always been smooth, nor has it been straight ahead. Sometimes it's even retrogressed. During the labor shortage in World War II, for example, women were called in to perform men's jobs, and they did well. But when the war was over, Rosie the Riveter was sent home, and women had to wait decades for another chance. The best you can say is that we've seen a kind of creeping incrementalism. Large numbers of women dot the current workplace, but like trees on a mountain, you'll see fewer and fewer of them as you climb higher in the executive landscape, until you reach a kind of timber line where you'll find about as many women as you'll find magnolias. Fortunemagazine recently ran a cover story on the 50 most powerful women in America. Nothing wrong with thatEvans, Gail is the author of 'Play Like a Man Win Like a Woman What Men Know About Success That Women Need to Learn' with ISBN 9780767904629 and ISBN 0767904621.