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How to make a top female boss
These women, all of whom have achieved exceptional things, mindlessly repeat the caring, sharing views that every modern CEO - male and female - is now required to have.
- By Lucy Kellaway, Financial Times
- Published: 22:52 October 3, 2009
On Saturday, the FT published a list of the top 50 women chief executives in the world and, loving such lists, I settled down over breakfast to study it. First, I admired the double string of pearls worn by the CEO of Avon; the pearly white teeth of the Sara Lee chief and the spookily perfect skin of Yoshiko Shinohara, founder of Tempstaff in Japan - who looks younger than I do but turns out to be 74.
Next I read the secrets of their success. The number one woman, PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi, says you must work hard and have fun. Irene Rosenfeld of Kraft says you must follow your passion. The others talk about the importance of having a mentor, of being yourself, of work-life balance, of teamwork and of being humble.
Reading this, I felt I was sinking into a low-slung foam chair from which I couldn't get out. It wasn't that there was anything in particular to disagree with. It was that these women, all of whom have achieved exceptional things, mindlessly repeat the caring, sharing views that every modern CEO - male and female - is now required to have.
There was only one discordant note. This was sounded by Dong Mingzhu, who runs a Chinese manufacturer of air conditioners and is rated the ninth most important businesswoman in the world. "I never miss," she says. "I never admit mistakes and I am always correct."
I read this and laughed. It was so bracing, so shocking, so out of line that I thought it a joke.
Yet Sister Dong, as she is sometimes known, has achieved results. Gree Electric Appliances has achieved total shareholder returns in the past three years of 529.5 per cent. Compare this with Avon, say, where Andrea Jung boasts that her biggest inspiration is the six million strong sales force. Alas, it seems that listening to six million ideas may have distracted her from the bottom line. Her return over the same period is a poor -10.5 per cent.
One might argue that the Sister-Dong-never-wrong school of management is something that only works in China, where the fondness for autocracy is considerable and theory of management is still about making money and hasn't evolved to include such soppy practices as mentoring or 360-degree feedback.
Yet last week I went to see The September Issue, a documentary about life at American Vogue, and can confirm that the Sister-Dong-never-wrong approach can work quite brilliantly in the most highly evolved and most competitive of industries: fashion.
Anna Wintour, the magazine's editor, is Sister Dong's Manhattan soulmate.
For 90 minutes, we see a not very personable, deeply repressed woman who never praises anyone and hardly ever smiles, getting into or out of chauffeur-driven cars and telling her underlings their work is ugly or boring. Yet for 20 years, this woman has hung on at the top of her business, while most CEOs - male and female - last four or five years before they are spat out or squashed.
For Sister Dong, and for all the other CEOs who run complicated, global businesses, it is terribly hard to tell if they are actually wrong or not. And in the meantime they have a choice. Either rule by fear - which still works in China and in fashion - or rule by banging on about passion and mentors and hoping that if you are wrong, no one will notice.
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