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May 5, 2008

Branding, Conferences, Inc. 500 conference, Innovation, Sales and Marketing, Women in Business

Women Presidents' Organization Conference on Innovation

Posted by Athena Schindelheim at 7:03 PM

At the end of last month, from April 24 through April 26, I had the distinct pleasure of joining the Women Presidents' Organization (WPO) at the 11th annual conference on innovation in Boston. WPO has 75 chapters across the U.S. consisting of 20 female leaders of privately held companies topping $2 million in annual revenue. (Women from service-based companies with greater than $1 million in gross annual sales are also eligible for membership). After checking in Wednesday night and asking the front desk to point me in the direction of ice cream, I dropped my bags in my room and took a moment to admire the view. Then, I began my journey to procure a vanilla ice cream bar dipped in milk chocolate from a drug store across the street.

Boston, as I'm sure you know, is full of dazzling Revolutionary architecture in its churches, libraries, and homes. Hosting a conference on innovation in this historic setting highlights the group's relatively short access to entrepreneurship. (I know, it's a bit of a logical stretch. My writing has gotten a little rusty since I moved from the editorial team.) During the Q&A for Malcolm Gladwell, who gave an opening keynote speech on differing innovation styles, addressed this point while fielding a question about why so few women-owned companies break the million dollar mark. (Shameless plug: I blogged about the New York Times report last fall and introduced you to one of these women in our March issue.) Gladwell asked whether it was the right question to ask. Based on how deep the roots of female entrepreneurship reach--not very deep, compared to the other gender--he inferred that it was an unfair standard.

He spent most of his two hours giving an insightful oratory about two kinds of innovation--bold flashes of experimental brilliance and labored conceptual genius--framed around the life and work of Picasso compared to Cezanne's. His speech was inspired by David Galenson's book that posits that Picasso's most valuable works came from his twenties while Cezanne bloomed in his sixties. Gladwell illustrated the analogy with other examples like Melville (Picasso) vs. Twain (Cezanne), Orson Wells (Picasso) vs. Alfred Hitchcock (Cezanne), and a brief history of the band Fleetwood Mac. The main takeaway point from his entertaining anecdotes is essentially that business owners should invest in a portfolio of innovation risk rather than rely on one type over the other--not that one kind of innovation is superior to the other. Gladwell's effectiveness as a speaker derives from the clarity of his thesis point, but also from his casual relationship with the audience. He endeared himself to us and, actually, even compared one glowing inquisitor to his own praising mother.

There were a lot of mentions of motherhood and nurturing qualities of women this weekend, which isn't that surprising when it's the one definitive difference between men and women. You can argue a lot of other statements, like that women are more caring or that women are better communicators, but no one can say that a man was born to be a mother. Except for maybe that transgender pregnant man recently in the news.

One of the attendees who expressed this opinion of difference to me, Carol Campbell, president and CEO of Chicopee Industrial Contracters, talked to me about other characteristics she thought are specific to women. The company she started 16 years ago moves and installs machinery, and all of her 25 employees are men. Regular staff training emphasizes the "soft skills" of communication and emotional sensitivity, traits not traditionally associated with blue collar work. But, Campbell claims that her approach results in an employee retention rate far exceeds her industry's norm. In one training scenario, she asks employees to decide in groups what four items that would take with them to survive on a boat. It's a fun exercise to get them thinking, to evaluate each other's problem-solving, and to encourage collaboration.

Not to trap us into a spiral of stereotypes, but speaking of collaboration, women sure do like to talk! (Please don't tell the editor of Inc. that I wrote that last sentence on this staff blog.) In the following breakout sessions I attended over the weekend, the amount of audience participation and fellowship was energizing and motivational. The legal representatives presenting a session on intellectual property struggled through their slides because everyone in the room had questions about how to apply the information to their own businesses. My mind wandered while I remembered how the CEO of Mini Melts (a 2007 Inc. 5,000 company) had gotten embroiled in an $8 million litigation against Dippin' Dots when the latter sued for patent infringement. MiniMelts won when Dippin' Dots was found to be guilty of patent fraud. The founder and CEO of Jazzercise, who happened to be in the room, shared her own story about policing Jazzercise copycats and winning.

I attended another great session, this time about ideation, delivered by a woman from Edelman, Marilynn Mobley. She talked about how the Dove campaign about real beauty came out of a formula the firm uses to develop brand strategies. By redefining what women needed emotionally--an embrace of all kinds of beauty--Dove was able to emerge as the brand of choice. Edelman used Starbucks as another example of a brand that listens to its customers to devise solutions. Their site mystarbucksidea.com invites coffee drinkers to submit whatever would make the customer experience more enjoyable. (Full disclosure: you can also comment on this blog to let us know how you feel about this entry, and you can always send a note to mail@inc.com if you'd like your comments to be considered for publication in the letters section of our magazine.

In fact, as we collect applications for this year's Inc. 5,000 list (deadline extended to May 9!), our events staff also welcomes your suggestions as we plan the annual Inc. 500/Inc. 5,000 conference in D.C. You can register here.

The WPO program ended on Saturday morning with an interactive and emotional session led by Roger Nierenberg. Nierenberg's unique presentation uses members of an orchestra dispersed throughout the audience to demonstrate the effect of positioning in an organization on perspective. He invited a few different attendees onto his podium to experience the sound from his leadership station compared to whichever instruments they were sitting closest to before coming to the front. They each described a sudden epiphany of how their perception of the whole changed and a new understanding of how a leader must recognize the realities from each viewpoint in their organization.

Thanks for bearing with me through the duration of this long post. I hope some of what we've shared with you helps to enlighten the way you run your business. Beyond reading lessons in Inc., attending big meetings with other brilliant entrepreneurs like yourself serves as a big educational tool. We hope you'll join us in D.C. come mid-September to meet with fellow great minds and enrich the perspective from which you run your own company. Everyone is welcome.