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

Evans, Gail

 
9780767904629: Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman: What Men Know About Success That Women Need to Learn
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0767904621 ISBN 13: 9780767904629
Verlag: Broadway Books, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

An executive vice president of CNN shares her insights into the "good ol' boys network," arming women with the tools they need to succeed in a man's world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

An executive vice president at CNN, Gail Evans oversees the network's talk shows (<i>Burden of Proof, CNN & Co, Crossfire, Both Sides with Jesse Jackson, Evans & Novak, Capital Gang,</i> and <i>Talk Back Live</i>), the booking and research department, and recruiting and talent development. Evans's programs have received numerous awards, including a Commendation Award from American Women in Radio and Television; the Breakthrough Award for Women, Men, and Media; and several Emmy nominations. She lives in Atlanta.

Aus dem Klappentext

Women make up almost half of today's labor force, but in corporate America they don't share half of the power. Only four of the <i>Fortune</i> 500 company CEOs are women, and it's only been in the last few years that even half of the <i>Fortune</i> 500 companies have more than one female officer.<br><br>A major reason for this? Most women were never taught how to play the game of business. <br><br>Throughout her career in the supercompetitive, male-dominated media industry, Gail Evans, one of the country's most powerful executives, has met innumerable women who tell her that they feel lost in the workplace, almost as if they were playing a game without knowing the directions.<br><br>She tells them that's exactly the case: Business is indeed a game, and like any game, there are rules to playing well. For the most part, Gail has discovered, women don't know them.<br><br>Men know these rules because they wrote them, but women often feel shut out of the process because they don't know when to speak up, when to ask for responsibility, what to say at an interview, and a lot of other key moves that can make or break a career.<br><br>Now, in her book <b>Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman</b>, Gail Evans reveals the secrets to the playbook of success and teaches women at all levels of the organization--from assistant to vice president--how to play the game of business to their advantage.<br><br>Sharing with humor and candor her years of lessons from corporate life, Gail Evans gives readers practical tools for making the right decisions at work. Among the rules you will learn are:<br><br>• How to Keep Score at Work<br>• When to Take a Risk<br>• How to Deal with the Imposter Syndrome<br>• Ten Vocabulary Words That Mean Different Things to Men and Women<br>• Why Men Can be Ugly, and You Can't<br>• When to Quit Your Job<br><br>Evans is not saying that every woman has to play exactly by men's rules--not at all. Women bring many inherent traits to the workplace that can provide them with a potential advantage over men, such as a woman's ability to form relationships, or her intuition. But women do need to know the basic rules so that they can understand the full consequences of their every action and how it makes an impact on their career.<br><br>An honest and practical handbook that reveals important insights into relationships between men and women and work, <b>Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman</b>, is a must-read for every woman who wants to leverage her power in the workplace.

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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 the Fortune 500 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 do something!"

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.

Fortune magazine recently ran a cover story on the 50 most powerful women in America. Nothing wrong with that. What I found worrisome was that the positions these women occupied--group presidents, vice presidents, founders of their own businesses--were not comparable to what a similar group of men would have held. All the men would have been CEO of large companies.

Women now account for over 46 percent of the total U.S. labor force, up from 29.6 percent in 1950. But as of 1999, only 11.9 of the 11,681 corporate officers in America's top 500 companies were women. In 1998 it was 11.2. If this pace continues, the number of women on top corporate boards won't equal the number of men until the year 2064.

Last year only 3.3 percent of these companies's top earners were women, with 98 women holding positions of the highest rank in corporate America, versus 1,202 men. And 496 out of 500 Fortune companies had male CEOs. Many of America's favorite companies--General Electric, Exxon, Compaq-- have no women officers at all.

And even when women do make it to the top, we don't make as much money: Compensation for the top-paid female officers ranges from $210,000 to $4.96 million, whereas men earn from $220,660 to $31.29 million. All in all, top female executives earn on average 68 cents for every dollar a male executive earns.

The reality in today's business landscape: A woman is most likely to occupy a position of power when she started, or inherited, her own business. We're not going through the ranks and making it to the boss's office, and that's where the power lies in corporate America.


What can--and should--a woman do? The answer would be easy if men and women were born with similar instincts and were similarly socialized. But that isn't the case. In fact, the general thinking among biogeneticists is that the social skills of males and females are inherently different. After that, according to the sociologists, they're raised in ways that accentuate that difference.

Let me tell you about my three children, two boys and a girl, whom I was committed to raising in a thoroughly nonsexist environment. Starting from day one, I could spot gender-based disparities among them. For instance, the way in which my sons and daughters nursed: My two boys behaved alike. They sucked until their stomachs were full, they burped, filled their diapers, and promptly went to sleep. It was a quick, effortless transaction. End of story.

My daughter gave a different performance. She sucked a little, she closed her eyes, then she'd touch, reach out, feel, suck, rest, try to open her eyes, burble, suck, touch, and so on. It was clear from the earliest moment that she was interested in some kind of social relationship with me. She wanted to know who I was and where she was. The boys just wanted to get their fill.

Nurture also has a say in gender distinctions. While teaching a course on gender issues in business at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, I asked my students about the games they played as children. What was the object of the game, how many other children participated, what lessons did they take away from them, and so on?

As usual, the sharpest young man was the first to raise his hand. "I always hung around with at least a half dozen other boys," he said. "We played games like pick-up baseball, soccer, street hockey." He added, "The silliest question you asked was about the object of the game. We played to win. What else is there?"

"Oh, my God," interrupted a young woman. She explained how she usually played with one, or maybe two, other girls at a time, rather than a large group, and that they were always more concerned with building a friendship than with winning. Then she told us a story about playing a game of jacks with two friends at camp. When one of the girls was about to win, they all made up new rules so they wouldn't have to stop. "The object was to keep the game going as long as possible," she said....

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Verlag
Broadway Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767904621
ISBN 13 
9780767904629
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
193
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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