Par Excellence Demo

life. I found myself advocating corporate discipline, teamwork and preparation in a world dominated, then and now, by cowboys. Of course, people moved from corporate life to entrepreneurship every day. I had just happened to find three men who had skipped the corporate step. Then, through the good auspices of a friendly board member, I took over a company that not only needed leadership but had the good sense to know that it did. This company had been founded by a father/son team, both smart men who had spent not one day in either high tech or a corporation. One was an accountant; the other a social worker. And it was true that neither of them questioned or second-guessed my judgment or my methods. For at least two months I was in heaven. I established goals and objectives, metrics and milestones. I had been hired with the understanding that we needed to raise money right away and I put together a creditable business plan with exhaustive financials. The fact that we began looking for funding in March of 2000 tells the rest of the story. CRS to screen and hire new developers. In retrospect, I believe that I had known all of that at the time, but I lacked the courage to implement it because it would have required immediate increases in cost and time that would have been hard to sell. One board member even counseled me to “stop thinking longterm”. Next, I looked at the state of the technology, which was being directed pro bono by a kindly board member whose heart – and conceivably even his experience – were in the right place. However, nothing looked right to me. The developers were working without a customer requirements specification (CRS), the design did not accommodate use by our most important target market segment, quality assurance was not only not in place but wasn’t even anticipated and no development milestones had been agreed. I told the board what I had found, but instead of recommending an immediate, albeit temporary, halt I proposed to backfill the current development methodology with an adequate CRS that corrected the course of development – by about 180 as it turned out – QA by the management team (us) using an Excel spreadsheet and milestones that emerged as we went along. The developers balked. So did the kindly board member. In retrospect, I should have called that halt four months into my tenure with the company. One imperative for entrepreneurs beyond knowledge and judgment must be a bias for action. I successfully avoided other traps into which women – and probably men, if truth be told – often fall. It didn’t take me long to figure out what was wrong. I wasn’t concerned that my conclusions weren’t popular. I understood how to map the technology to the business plan. I knew that any development process needs a support infrastructure. The one attribute that I hadn’t learned at the corporate knee was courage. In this case, the right course of action would have been to thank and dismiss the kindly board member, fire the contract developers, hire a contract CRS writer and use the new A kindly board I think courage, or a bias for action, is basically a gender issue, just as sensitivity might be for men. In that sense, it’s a personal development challenge rather than a management training issue. I’ve been somewhat skeptical of the many ‘coaches’ who have emerged from the ranks of the recently unemployed. Nevertheless, I think this is a job for a really good coach. The best business coaches begin with the individual and help her develop expertise in being proactive. Then they move on to help her link her individual talents to meet the changing needs of her organization. Wendy Wallbridge, CEO of On Your Mark Corporate Coaching and Consulting (www.onyourmarkcoach.com), taught me this and much more – but only after the fact. In my current role as executive vice president of Women in Technology International, I am cognizant of the need to bring real-world experience into our various training initiatives and of the necessity to increase the quantity, quality and urgency of the leadership training that is one-third of our three-part charter. With Dr Nancy Snyderman, I believe that being women “has everything to do with everything we do” and I work to both emphasize the advantages and overcome the disadvantages that derive from the differences in leadership style. Both genders bring tremendous assets to the management arena and the playing field moves a degree or two closer to level each year as more and more women take senior positions. As we train women managers, however, it is important that we not minimize the traditionally ‘male’ qualities like courage that are absolutely necessary to our success as leaders. www.witi.com Gender issue http://www.onyourmarkcoach.com http://www.witi.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Par Excellence Demo

Par Excellence Demo Contents Why I am Optimistic about Women in Business All the Presidents, Women Maverick Who Took on a Start-Up-and Learned a Valuable Lesson Golf Advice to Women Golfers (And it's Not How to Hit a Ball) Lifestyle You Shall go to the Ball, Cinderella (But First you Have to Get Real...) Travel Health

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