EnlightenedPower

How Women Are Transformingthe Practice of Leadership

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PRAISE FOR ENLIGHTENED POWER

“Enlightened Power offers a design for competitive advantage andsuccess. But it does more than guide. It inspires.”

—Sharon L. Allen, chairman of the board, Deloitte & Touche USA LLP

“Without question, the best set of essays on women and leadershiparound. Every leader will need to have this one on their bookshelf.”

—Warren Bennis, University Professor, University of Southern California, and author, On Becoming a Leader and Geeks and Geezers

“This remarkable new book documents how leaders who are womenare changing the old concepts of leadership and redefining futureleadership. This timely book is for leaders of the future.”

—Frances Hesselbein, chairman, Leader to Leader Institute

“Enlightened Power is a book that all women from all walks of lifecan embrace. The personal stories and lessons contained in thisbook can teach us all how to become better leaders and, moreimportant, better people.”

—Sue Myrick, United States Congresswoman, Charlotte, North Carolina

“The men and women who contributed to Enlightened Powergenerously share their personal journeys and observations.Readers will come away feeling that they’ve been privy to aunique and important dialogue; they will also be inspired toexercise their own personal power—and to nurture the best that resides in all of us.”

—Ruth G. Shaw, president and chief executive officer, Duke Power Company

“No doubt, this book will engender spirited discussions amongboth men and women. Hopefully, one of the key ideas that willget attention is how important it is for all of us to keep thinkingmore creatively about leadership in organizations.”

—Kenneth T. Stevens, CEO, Express

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Enlightened Power

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Linda Coughlin

Ellen Wingard

Keith Hollihan

Editors

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EnlightenedPower

How Women Are Transformingthe Practice of Leadership

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Copyright © 2005 by Linkage, Inc.

Published by Jossey-BassA Wiley Imprint989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 www.josseybass.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United StatesCopyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorizationthrough payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.,222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-750-4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to thePermissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030,201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, e-mail: permcoordinator@wiley.com.

Chapter 5: “At the Shore” from WEST WIND: Poems and Prose Poems by Mary Oliver.Copyright © 1997 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.All rights reserved.

Chapter 5: “Within each of us there is a silence . . .” from INVITING SILENCE, by GunillaNorris, © 2004. Reprinted by permission of BlueBridge, an imprint of United Tribes MediaInc., and by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

Chapter 5: Material from Kabir: Ecstatic Poems by Robert Bly. Copyright © 2004 by RobertBly. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.

Chapter 5: Rumi poem is used by permission of Coleman Barks.

Chapter 5: Material from THE PROPHET by Kahlil Gibran, copyright 1923 by Kahlil Gibranand renewed 1951 by Administrators C.T.A. of Kahlil Gibran Estate and Mary G. Gibran.Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Chapter 20: Material from BRAG! The art of tooting your own horn without blowing it, by P. Klaus(2003) is copyright © by Klaus and Associates, Inc. Used by permission of Warner Books, Inc.

Chapter 28: quote from Martin Luther King Jr. © The Nobel Foundation 1964. Used withpermission.

Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bassdirectly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956-7739, outside theU.S. at 317-572-3986, or fax 317-572-4002.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Coughlin, Linda, 1952–Enlightened power : how women are transforming the practice of leadership / by Linda

Coughlin, Ellen Wingard, Keith Hollihan, editors—1st ed.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-7879-7787-X (alk. paper)1. Leadership. 2. Women executives. I. Wingard, Ellen, 1952– II. Hollihan, Keith

HD57.7 .E55 2005658.4'092'082—dc 22

2005002449

Printed in the United States of AmericaFIRST EDITION

HB Printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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www.josseybass.com

For our children

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Contents

Foreword: Women Leading in the Twenty-First Century xvDavid Gergen

Introduction: The Time Is Now: A Leader’s Personal Journey 1Linda Coughlin

Part One: Reimagining Power 17

1. The Economics of the Enlightened Use of Power 21Riane Eisler

2. The Power of Shifting Context: Becoming a Contextual Leader 39

Rayona Sharpnack

3. Deeper Power 55Carol Anderson and Patricia Shafer

4. Failing Well: How to Be Vulnerable and Strong 69Barbara Corcoran

5. Work as Love Made Visible: Finding Your Passion 79Gail Straub

6. The Inextricable Link Between Mentoring and Leadership 101

Stacy Blake-Beard

7. Influencing for Impact 111Kira Hower

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8. The Natural Leadership Talents of Women 133Helen E. Fisher

9. Are We Looking After Each Other? Women LeadersWinning the Game 143

Gail Evans

10. With Children: Leading an Integrated Life 151Susan Brady and Gabriella Salvatore

11. Cultivating the Still Point: The Power of Reflective Leadership 169

Ellen Wingard

Part Two: Paths of Power 195

12. Our Many Possible Selves: What Do We Want? 199Herminia Ibarra

13. Women Building Businesses: Courage to Find Your Way 217

Sharon P. Whiteley

14. Taking Risk: Lessons from an Unconventional Career Arrangement 231

Cynthia Cunningham and Shelley Murray

15. Trafficking in Trust: The Art and Science of HumanKnowledge Networks 243

Karen Stephenson

16. Enlightened Power Through Difficult Conversations 267Bruce Patton, Michele Gravelle, and Scott Peppet

17. Crossing Over: Leadership That Makes Others Want to Follow 289

Barbara McMahon

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18. Leading Authentically: New Research into the Link Between the Essential Self and LeadershipEffectiveness 301

Tricia Naddaff

19. Completing the Circle: The Business Imperative for Diversity 317

Toni Riccardi

20. Good Girls Don’t Brag, Do They? 331Peggy Klaus

21. An Unwavering Stand for Results: A Leader’s Perspective 339

Tracey Warson

22. Leading Beyond Boundaries: The Courage to Enrich the World 351

Nancy J. Adler

Part Three: A New Power in the World 367

23. The Sustainable Advantage 371Sally Helgesen

24. Snapshots of a Corporate Radical 381Barbara Waugh

25. The Socially Responsible Leader 395Eileen Fisher and Susan M. Schor

26. Inclusive Transformation: A Different Power 411Swanee Hunt

27. Pushing Open the “Door Of Opportunity”: Women in Our Armed Forces 439

Rear Admiral Deborah A. Loewer, USN

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28. Olympian Thinking: Producing Extraordinary Results in Our World 449

Marilyn King

29. Being a Leader of Leaders 463Marian L. Heard

30. Aren’t We the Dream? 473Erin Gruwell

Afterword: Changing the Nature of Power 485Pat Mitchell

Notes 491

Acknowledgments 509

About Linkage, Inc. 513

Name Index 515

Subject Index 519

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David Gergen is a leader who has earned widespreadrespect and international acclaim for his impartiality,insight, and wisdom. Commentator, editor, teacher,public servant, best-selling author, leadership expert,and adviser to four presidents, David Gergen hasbeen an active participant in American nationallife for thirty years. He served as director of commu-nications for President Reagan and held positions

in the administrations of Presidents Nixon and Ford. In 1993, he put his country before politics when he agreed to counsel President Clintonon both foreign policy and domestic affairs and serve as a special inter-national adviser to the president and to Secretary of State WarrenChristopher. He is currently the director of the Center for Public Lead-ership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Also the author of Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, David is a bipartisan,inclusive leader of global scale and a voice for enlightened power.

In this Foreword, David extols those leaders and thinkers who havechallenged our basic assumptions around gender and leadership andmakes a passionate call for further progress in balancing the inner andouter facets of the leadership-gender equation so that we may see tangi-ble results and profound change in our lifetimes.

photo credit: David Gergen by Tom Fitzsimmons

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Foreword

WOMEN LEADING IN THETWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

David Gergen

For more than two centuries, conventional wisdom held that womenwere incapable of climbing mountains. As he prepared an expe-dition to climb Mount Everest, for example, Sir Edmund Hillaryrefused a request to include women. He allegedly gave three rea-sons: women didn’t have the qualities of leadership that were re-quired, they weren’t strong enough to carry the packs, and (thatmost ancient of all prejudices) they would become hysterical athigh altitudes.

Fortunately, some women were bold enough to challenge con-ventional wisdom. Arlene Blum began experimenting with moun-tain climbs in Oregon and Washington. Lo and behold, she foundthat she had the leadership, strength, and temperament to make it.Soon she organized a team of ten American women to prepare aquest in which no woman and no American male had ever suc-ceeded: scaling Annapurna, at 26,545 feet the world’s tenth high-est mountain. In 1978, they succeeded—magnificently—and Blumeventually wrote a book titled Annapurna: A Woman’s Place.

As a white male, I am not sure I can ever fully appreciate howchallenging it has been—and remains—for women to shatter oldbarriers. But I can say that as a participant in American public lifefor more than three decades, I am convinced that women are theequals of men in all fields of endeavor, starting with leadership. Ican say that as a father, I want to be damned sure that my daughter,just like my son, has an untrammeled opportunity to become all shewants to be. And as a citizen, I can say that it’s long past time to be

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asking women to shatter old barriers: the twenty-first century shouldbecome the century of women’s equality.

Over the past few years, I have been privileged to teach at theJohn F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University,where we have launched the Center for Public Leadership with agenerous grant from the Wexner Foundation. There we are trying toput our money where our mouth is. Barbara Kellerman, a respectedscholar in leadership studies, became our first executive director;Betsy Myers, who ran the women’s outreach effort at the ClintonWhite House, has recently succeeded her. Our first academic hirewas a woman, Hannah Riley Bowles, and several women have beenvisiting scholars. One of them, Deborah Rhode, published an editedvolume partly as a result, The Difference “Difference” Makes, and ithas been an important contribution to the field. In partnership withSwanee Hunt, who runs the Women and Public Policy Program, wehave begun an annual leadership training program for women, andin the coming academic year we will devote our annual leadershipconference to the advancement of women. The school itself, throughHolly Taylor Sargent, has created a Women’s Leadership Board thatis increasingly vibrant. Are we doing enough? Not yet, but we aretrying.

These experiences, as well as those stretching back to politicsin Washington, have led me to three inescapable conclusions.

The Summit: A Woman’s Place

First, women make great leaders. For a long while, that issue was amatter of debate, similar to the mountain climbing nonsense. Butthe argument is now over. The evidence is in, and it’s overwhelm-ing: in one community after another, women are proving to becapable, effective, and—yes—tough leaders who get the job done.

Look at the largest state in the union, California. Carly Fiorinaembarked on a high adventure when she took the reins at Hewlett-Packard and moved to a merger with Compaq. Many thought shewould never make it; her judgment and acumen were attacked, and

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it was whispered that her womanhood would be her undoing. NoCEO lasts long these days, but to be sure Fiorina was a bold andvisionary leader in her near six years at HP. She beat the odds thatsome of her critics gave her, and the merger worked out better thansome of the spectacular failures engineered by male CEOs in recentyears. Consider, too, the politics of California, a state that has oftenbeen a bellwether for others. Arnold Schwarzenegger got off to anexcellent start as governor, but he is matched in popularity by Sen-ator Dianne Feinstein. And from that soil has sprung many otherwomen leaders: Senator Barbara Boxer; Nancy Pelosi, the firstwoman to become minority leader in the House of Representatives;Jane Harman, a major voice in the House as well. When George W.Bush was looking for a national security adviser, his first choice wasCondoleezza Rice, then the provost at Stanford. Some Republicansbelieve she could one day change places and sit behind the desk inthe Oval Office herself.

Many of these women have gravitated to Washington, D.C.,and there they find themselves in the company of many other lead-ers who happen to be women—Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth BaderGinsburg, Madeleine Albright, and Pat Mitchell among them. Thespirit of Kay Graham continues to inspire there, as does that of hergood friend, Meg Greenfield.

If you turn south to my native North Carolina, you will findequally impressive leaders. Elizabeth Dole is now serving the statewell in the Senate. Until recently, the three major universities atthe corners of the Research Triangle—Duke, the University of NorthCarolina, and North Carolina State—simultaneously had womenat their helms, and all three were highly successful. When NanKeohane became president of Duke, the university was undertak-ing the biggest fundraising drive in its history, shooting for $750million. She quickly raised the goal to $1 billion, then higher, thenhigher again. At the end, Nan and her team pulled in $2.3 billion,and she retired in a blaze of glory.

Women are racking up successes all over the country. Furthersouth, Donna Shalala is not only maintaining football prowess at

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the University of Miami but also guiding the school toward anintellectual renaissance. A little further north, Christie Todd Whit-man commands widespread respect for years as governor of NewJersey and as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.Shirley Tilghman is quickly making her mark as the new presidentof Princeton, recruiting other women to serve in top administrativepositions and bringing in more women to the faculty. Together, theywill make Princeton a magnet for promising young women going tocollege. At the University of Pennsylvania, Judith Rodin succeededso well that when she stepped down as president, they recruitedanother woman to replace her.

In New York, of course, Hillary Clinton has become a powerfulmember of the Senate in her first term and could be heading towardthe White House in her own right. When she went to the Senate,some worried that she would be a show horse; instead, she has be-come a workhorse, winning respect from unexpected quarters. Irecently had dinner with the officers of a major corporation head-quartered in upstate New York. Most of them were Republicans,and their company is in a place where there aren’t many Demo-cratic votes. But they said Senator Clinton had represented themmore effectively than any other senator of either party.

In my adopted state of Massachusetts, a woman heads theSupreme Judicial Court and wrote the opinion recognizing gay mar-riages. While controversial, the decision is also pathbreaking and,in my modest judgment, will likely be embraced by more and moreAmericans in the decades ahead. When people are pioneers, theyoften take heat at first—but many of them also wind up on ped-estals. We have a long record of women pathbreakers in Massachu-setts, stretching back to Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren.Today these pioneers are officially recognized.

Overseas, we see the same pioneering leadership. I’ve had theexperience in recent years of coming to know Mary Robinson.After her success as president of Ireland, she went on to head up theHuman Rights Commission at the United Nations. Some criticizedher for her handling of a human rights summit in South Africa

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where Israel was unfairly targeted, but she struck me as brave forgoing forward with the enterprise at all. Coming from Japan, whichhas had trouble fielding strong diplomats, Sadaka Ogata served withdistinction at the United Nations. So did Gro Brundtland, whoheaded the World Health Organization and who earlier, as primeminister of Norway, pulled the world forward toward sustainabledevelopment. All over the world, then, women have proven them-selves to be good leaders. The argument is over!

Circles of Influence: The New Leadership Style

Second, we have learned that women seem ideally suited to the new lead-ership style that has been widely embraced. The old style was top-down, command and control, and directional. If you see the moviePatton with George C. Scott, you will spot it instantaneously. Thereare many other examples: Lyndon Johnson as president, “ChainsawAl” Dunlap as CEO, Bobby Knight on the basketball court, Herbertvon Karajan conducting an orchestra.

Today that kind of command-and-control leadership has givenway to a new approach, often called an influence model of leader-ship. Instead of picturing a leader at the top of a pyramid, we envi-sion her in the middle of a circle with spokes extending outward.Instead of hurling thunderbolts from atop Mount Olympus, thenew leader persuades, empowers, collaborates, and partners. Thebest leader, we are finding, is one who identifies top talent andnurtures them to become leaders in their own right—a leader ofleaders. Serving on the board at Yale University, I was extremelyimpressed by how effective Rick Levin, its president, became byrecruiting and then empowering such strong talent around him. Hebuilt such a great team that no less than three of his appointees—two of them women—have now been tapped to run major univer-sities on their own. That is the mark of a good leader.

Adapting to this new world, the way we teach leadership haschanged considerably. If you ask an expert like Rosabeth Moss Kanterat the Harvard Business School, sign up for an executive session

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with the Center for Creative Leadership, or attend one of the train-ing programs for our Women in Power series at the Kennedy School,you will find that leadership is viewed as a series of concentric cir-cles. In the innermost circle is the individual leader—you. To be aleader—regardless of gender—you must first know thyself and thenachieve self-mastery. Leadership is a journey that starts from within,as I have found in working with and studying U.S. presidents: thosewho have been most effective over the years have first made theirown journey. Franklin Roosevelt was transformed as a leader by his struggle with polio, for example. The second, larger concentriccircle—containing the first—is the organization of which you are apart. After learning self-leadership, one must learn to lead thislarger group. In the framework of emotional intelligence popular-ized by Daniel Goleman, the essence of leading others is to developempathy with them and to develop the social skills that will per-suade them to work toward shared goals. Much of the literatureabout leadership is devoted to this second circle. Increasingly, lead-ers within organizations discover there is yet a third circle justbeyond, which also must be mastered: the multitude of other orga-nizations with which yours must cooperate, coordinate, and partner.Whether you are running eBay, the Red Cross, or the Centers forDisease Control—all now headed by women—you must learn towork across silos, collaborating with others in order to move yourown work forward.

Recognizing these concentric rings, it is easier to understand thevalue of what I call 360-degree leadership—that is, leadership thatrequires you to listen and learn from others all around your outer cir-cles. In days gone by, a CEO might pay attention only to thosedirectly beneath him in the pyramid. A president might pay atten-tion only to those who form his political base or share his ideology.But that approach is no longer sufficient: it means that a leader ismaking decisions with only a fraction of the information and insightthat she needs. We live in such interconnected environments thatto be effective, a leader today must seek out information from a widearray of people, especially those who don’t share his or her biases.

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Whatever his personal flaws, I found that Bill Clinton often madeexcellent decisions in the Oval Office because he was insatiablycurious about the views of everyone around him. As president, henot only wanted to talk to his fellow Democratic chieftains but alsowanted to hear from those have usually been in the shadows of na-tional power—African Americans, Hispanics, and women seekinga place at the table. Overseas, he wanted to hear from Europeans,of course, but he also wanted to know the perspectives of people inAfrica and India. To this day, Nelson Mandela remains a staunchfriend, and Clinton is hailed in India. John F. Kennedy showed asimilar approach during the Cuban missile crisis when he assembleda team around him that represented not just his cabinet secretariesbut men who had diverse views and personal knowledge of NikitaKhrushchev. Both Clinton and Kennedy were practicing 360-degreeleadership.

Women leaders, as it turns out, seem perfectly tailored for thisnew style. Think about the words we use to describe the old-styleleadership: aggressive, assertive, autocratic, muscular, closed. When wedescribe the new leadership, we employ terms like consensual, rela-tional, web-based, caring, inclusive, open, transparent—all qualities thatwe associate with the “feminine” style of leadership. One can arguewhether this feminine style is in women’s genes or is created by social-ization. It doesn’t matter much. The key point, as Sally Helgesenpoints out in her book The Female Advantage, is that women areknocking on the door of leadership at the very moment when theirtalents are especially well matched with the requirements of the day.1

Before setting down this argument, however, we should recog-nize that there are times when a leader must be decisive, aggressive,and autocratic. In a crisis, for example, a president or a CEO doesnot have time to roundtable a question for several days, hammeringout a consensus. If someone in your organization chronically under-performs, you must first ask him to do better, but sooner rather thanlater you must put him off the bus. Effective leaders, in other words,must mix together masculine as well as feminine qualities. The psy-chologist Carl Jung argued that each of us is born with a feminine

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as well as masculine side—an anima and animus. Typically, one sidedominates and the other is more hidden. In Jung’s view, an indi-vidual achieves a healthy personality when he or she fully recog-nizes both sides and integrates them into a balanced whole. Thebest leaders are those who achieve that balance in their approachto others. One of the reasons Rudy Giuliani was so inspiring onSeptember 11 was that we saw his caring side as well as his decisivequalities. Of all our presidents, Lincoln demonstrated the greatestbalance of masculine and feminine traits, and he remains today abeloved leader.

In the same way, women who have the qualities that we associ-ate with the new style of leadership need to have a masculine sidethat they integrate as an authentic part of their personalities. CarlyFiorina certainly has a steely edge—one that helped her during herlong run at HP. In her early days as First Lady, Hillary Clinton struckmany as so overly aggressive that she was off-putting, especially forolder men, but in more recent years she has matured into a morebalanced and more appealing leader. Madeleine Albright turnedher many hats into a trademark, and everyone knew she had asofter side, but she could also be tough as a boot. If anything, theDefense Department thought she wanted to send troops into toomany countries. Donna Shalala, one of my favorite leaders, oncetold me a story that illustrates the importance of this masculineintegration for women who aspire to the top. When she was presi-dent of Hunter College in New York, the trustees at the Universityof Wisconsin were seeking a new head. Donna soon found herselfon the short list and was the only female candidate. She had a rep-utation then as a liberal and a keen feminist. That didn’t drive offthe trustees at Wisconsin, but they did have one concern. Duringtheir interview with her, very gingerly one said in effect, “As youknow, our football team hasn’t been doing so well lately, and wewant to know how you would feel about building a good team.”Donna seemed to confirm their fears when she said, “No, thatwould not make me happy.” Then she continued, “If your ambitionis only to build a good team, I’m not your person. I want a great

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team, and if you’re willing to do that, I’m willing to do the job!” Asit turned out, Donna may have been the only candidate whoshowed a keen interest in football. The trustees hired her, of course,and she built one of the best football programs in the country. Even-tually, the University of Wisconsin went to the Rose Bowl, andShalala rode on a float down the streets of Pasadena. There’s evenbetter news to the story. So happy were the regents and the statelegislature with her successes in football that they supported herfinancially on nearly all the academic programs she wanted! Shewas a memorable president—one of the best. The masculine andthe feminine sides, coming together, form a powerful whole.

The Gap: Our National Shame

Third, we know that our commitment to equal opportunity for risingwomen leaders is riddled with hypocrisy. In my view, we should beashamed as a nation that we have so few women in positions ofpower, authority, and influence in our national organizations despiteknowing that women can lead and, in fact, are well suited to thenew leadership style. In February 2004, the magazine Fast Companylooked at this matter of leadership, and its headline asked, “WhereAre the Women?”2 Where are they, indeed. Women constitute 47percent of our workforce and 63 percent of all workers earning theminimum wage or less.3 Yet they represent only 13.6 percent of theFortune 500 boards,4 and as of this writing only eight Fortune 500companies have women as their CEOs.5 The Bush White Househas made a public commitment to equality, but tellingly, the presti-gious White House Fellows program in recent years has hoveredaround 20 percent or less in female selections. In every major uni-versity of which I am aware, more than 50 percent of the studentbody is now female, but not a single one of the big universitiescomes close to having women represent half of their top faculty;rare is the university whose recruits to junior faculty positions arehalf female. In other words, when female students sit down in col-lege classrooms across the country, they almost always have a man

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standing in front of them. The United States today is the world’snumber one economic, military, political, and cultural power—yetit is 60th in the world when it comes to women in positions ofpolitical leadership.6 All of this needs to change. We must deal withthe gap by confronting it head-on.

Some point insistently to the progress we have made—and tobe sure, it’s there—but we are moving at a perilously slow rate.Marie Wilson, who was at the Ms. Foundation and then started theWhite House Project to elect a woman president by the year 2008,has just written a book titled Closing the Leadership Gap. She arguesthat at the rate we are going, the percentage of women on Fortune500 boards won’t reach 25 percent for another twenty-five years.7 Inpolitics, the progress is even slower: we won’t see parity for severalhundred years.

To repeat: we now know that women make good leaders. Weknow they are well suited to the new leadership style. More andmore women are knocking on the door, seeking positions of leader-ship. Yet we are still saddled with this tremendous hypocrisy. To me,that points to an inescapable conclusion about where we should beheaded.

Setting Goals, Measuring Progress

The United Nations has set admirable goals for the world in thisnew millennium. One is to cut the rate of world poverty in half by2015. Many people are working hard to achieve that objective. Wemay not be making as much progress as we should, but we have aspecific goal that helps keep us on track. Within the United States,we often set social goals for America, too, as President George H. W.Bush and the nation’s governors did a decade-and-a-half ago onadvancing children in school.

It’s long past time that we set goals for advancing women in ourmidst. If the United Nations can cut the rate of world poverty inhalf by 2015, surely the United States can cut its leadership gap forwomen within the same time frame! If we have performance and

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accountability measures in our schools, surely we can measure therate at which women move forward as leaders. We ought to cut theleadership gap in half by 2015 as a first step and then move beyondto close it altogether. Before we leave this earth, we should be able tolook back and say, “We did it.”

The reasons for closing the gap are both simple and compelling.The first is economic. We all want to build a more prosperous soci-ety. If you have read the 2004 Catalyst study, The Bottom Line: Con-necting Corporate Performance and Gender Diversity, you know thatcorporations with large percentages of women on their executiveleadership teams gain returns that are 35 percent higher than thosewith few women in positions of leadership.8 In other words, havingwomen at the top is smart business.

The rise of more women to leadership will also make us a morecaring society. Recent experience shows that once women occupyabout 20 percent or so of top positions in an organization, the orga-nization’s agenda begins to change. If only one or two women are ata table, men may seek to smother their voices, but if they are therein sizable numbers, they will speak up and be heard. Although we arestill far behind Scandinavia in percentages of women serving in ournational legislature, we have already seen a shift in the congressionalagenda as more women are elected. In the Senate, women of bothparties have tried to get together for a dinner once a month. It’s abipartisan group. Not coincidentally, the women in that caucus havehelped usher many critical bills to enactment, such as the Familyand Medical Leave Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, theChild Support Enforcement Act, the Women’s Health Equity Act,and the initiative for the Office of Women’s Health Research at theNational Institutes for Health.

Even more fundamentally, the advancement of women intopositions of leadership will help make this a more just society. It tookmany long years of suffering and struggle before the country finallywoke up to the fact that extending freedom to black Americanswould enhance the freedom of white Americans, too. We are still farfrom achieving equal opportunity, but at least we understand. Not

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so with regard to women. It is still too easy for men to pay lip serviceto equal opportunity for women but not really believe it. Until menknow that full freedom for women enriches their own freedom, theywill drag their heels and find excuses. And it is increasingly easy forwomen to become discouraged, too. Indeed, we see some signs ofbacklash occurring among both men and women as the excruciat-ing challenges of finding a balance between work and family areencouraging growing numbers of professional women to curtailtheir careers—and level off their incomes—after children are born.

Women scholars like Deborah Rhode, Kathleen Hall Jamieson,and Alice Eagly have written persuasively that we must first dis-mantle the emotional and physical barriers that exist for womenseeking leadership roles. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson has pointedout, women still find themselves in a double bind in which aggres-sive, male-like leadership will prompt others to call them a witch,while nonaggressive, female-like behavior will brand them as weak-lings.9 Young, caring fathers are experiencing a similar bind. If theytake time off to look after a baby, their superiors may regard them assoft; if they stay on the job, their peers may regard them as insensi-tive. Getting rid of gender stereotypes should be at the top of theagenda for today’s CEOs.

Clearly, we also need to work hard at creating equal access tomentors and networks. Every white male I know, including me,would not have achieved his success were it not for the mentors hemet early in his career. In my case, older white males went out oftheir way to open doors for me, give me recommendations, andintroduce me to others who helped me move up. If not for the fiveor six men who had been there for me along the way, I would nothave enjoyed the privileges I have had as a citizen, and I am im-mensely grateful to each of them. But as I look back and also lookaround today, it is blindingly obvious that rising young women lackthe same degree of help from mentors and networks, especially incorporate and political America. What you know these days isimportant, but, for better or worse, who you know can be crucial.

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Friends make a big difference, too. I once asked David HerbertDonald, author of the best single-volume biography of Lincoln,“What’s the most important asset of a president?” He replied thatthe most important asset for any leader is a friend. In order to reachthe summits of life, you need people with whom you can talk can-didly and to whom you can pour out your troubles. I was blessed toknow both Katherine Graham and Meg Greenfield of the Washing-ton Post and could see that their close friendship inspired each ofthem to become the best in their field. At our Women and Powerseminar at the Kennedy School, the attendees prize their breakfaststogether. All the participants are women, and they are divided intogroups of five. Each morning at breakfast, one woman plays CEOand the others serve as her board. The CEO describes the chal-lenges she faces as leader of her organization (usually drawn fromreal-life issues back home), and the others provide their frank, can-did counsel. Together, they work through the challenges, and thenext morning someone else sits in the CEO’s chair. Over the courseof the week, those women bond and develop a safe place to talk.

As we know, women don’t have many safe places to talk in amale-dominated society. There is little opportunity to speak openly,to say, “I’m not sure I can handle this. Do you have any advice?”Men do have those places, group settings in which friends can helpeach other. Sometimes the issues lurking beneath the surface arefamily related, sometimes work related: “How can I be more presentat home?” “How do I fire this person?” “What if I fail at my newassignment?” As I have grown older, more men are concerned abouttheir health, and they don’t like to talk about their issues in mixedcompany. I believe in the creation of “all-women” groups, just as Ihave come to believe that “all-men” groups are worthwhile, so longas the men are committed to equality of opportunity for both gen-ders. I happen to belong to such a group, and the bonding processwith other men has been enormously helpful, allowing me to formnew friendships and to become more open and honest with othersbecause I have a safe place to talk. Women deserve those places, too.

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It is increasingly urgent that we make work more family-friendlyas well. Americans have not come close to what Europeans haveaccomplished in balancing work and family life. If you are a profes-sional woman and you enter a competitive track in a law firm, uni-versity, or other institution, your organization should stop the clockwhen you take time out for a new child. And after you return towork, special provisions should be made so that both you and yourspouse can achieve both professional and family success. A decadeago, we patted ourselves on the back as a nation when the Congressand the Clinton White House enacted the Family and MedicalLeave Act, providing twelve weeks of unpaid leave. But in truth, asthe Europeans show us, the leave should be fully paid and at leastsix months.

I’ve recently joined the board of Bright Horizons, a for-profit cor-poration that provides high-quality child care, especially in corpo-rate and university settings. What makes Bright Horizons successfulis that it pays child-care workers much more than the industry aver-age, and because of that, many of their child-care workers are col-lege graduates who are dedicated to helping their charges grow. Theservice costs more, but the difference is worth it. Serving on theboard—and thinking, too, of grandchildren on the way—has openedmy eyes to issues of child care. We know high-class attention worksbetter for children than custodial care; we simply haven’t musteredthe will yet to make it affordable to families nationwide.

Finally, may I suggest that it is important for women in Amer-ica to reach out to women around the world. On a global scale,women are taking a real beating. Two-thirds of the world’s poor arewomen and children. Massive numbers are dying because of mal-nutrition, HIV-AIDS, deprivation, and violence. The sex traffic inwomen is increasing, not decreasing. Yet women are clearly thesolution to many of the world’s problems. We know, for example,that one of the most productive investments of foreign assistance isin the education of young women. We know that microfinancing inplaces like India and Bangladesh empowers women and lifts the

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