6 Women Who Inspire

Every young girl has a big dream — be it to teach a classroom full of children, to be the executive of a large company, to help those who are unfortunate in the world or to be a great mother and wife, all young women grow up with goals and aspirations. Being a successful woman is not always the easiest task in the world. Women face a lifetime of setbacks and challenges on their path to achieving their dreams. From people who will tell women growing up that they can’t do something, to trying to achieve greatness in a man’s world, women have their work cut out for them as they get up each and every day.

When a woman is feeling like there is no way she can go any farther, no way she can achieve her goals and aspirations, she must remember there are hundreds upon hundreds of women before her who faced similar challenges but still achieved greatness in their own lives and in the world. The following list is six women that all young girls and women alike can aspire to be like, that all women can look to for inspiration as they go forth and work harder each day to reach their dreams.

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey is well known not only throughout the United States but throughout the entire globe as one of the most popular talk show hosts in the history of television. In addition to hosting one of the most beloved shows by women for more than 25 seasons, Oprah Winfrey has spent her life as a celebrity and role model working with those less fortunate and making a big difference in the lives of women around the world. While she has achieved fame, riches and greatness in her personal life, Oprah Winfrey certainly had to overcome a variety of adversities in order to get where she wanted.

Winfrey was born in 1954, the daughter of an unwed teenager mother and an African American woman in Mississippi. Already, the odds were stacked against her as she woke up each and every morning in the segregated south, a girl who was judged before she was even born. Life got significantly more difficult for Winfrey when she was a young child and sent to Milwaukee to live with her mother. Her mother had to work long hours as a housemaid, leaving Winfrey to fend for herself in an inner city apartment. It was there that male relatives and others in her life would molest her and sexually abuse her. By her early teen years, Winfrey was living on her own and had slid into a life of sexual promiscuity. Before she was 16, she gave birth to a baby boy who later died during infancy.

At that time, she went on to live with her father in Tennessee. There, she received the structured discipline and lifestyle she needed to become successful and flourish. Her father instilled in her a love of reading and the written word — which would later lead her into a career in journalism. Despite her background and devastating childhood, Winfrey was able to set out to achieve her dreams of becoming a television journalist. Unfortunately, she had an uphill battle ahead given her skin color.

But Winfrey triumphed and not only became a successful host of a television show — but she became one of the richest women in the United States and the world. Her television show wasn’t just any show — it was the most popular daytime television show for many years. In 2011, she branched off and began her own network.

Aside from her successes, Winfrey spends a significant amount of her time and wealth on philanthropic work. She funds a girl’s school in Africa for the best and brightest, in hopes of giving African women the chance to succeed in the careers of their choosing. She promotes people adopting their pets from shelters instead of buying through breeders. She has received a variety of awards and recognition for the many philanthropic causes she works with. Oprah Winfrey is truly an idol for young women today to overcome the challenges that they have ahead — be it your background, your race, your gender or your attitude — and work for your dreams.

Anita Roddick

Young girls often grow up with the idea that businesses are started, and subsequently run, by men. It’s their dads, uncles and brothers who run the local market place, head the local accounting firm and work as doctors and lawyers. But in Anita Roddick, women who wish to open and run successful businesses have a role model.

Roddick, born in England in the 1940s, faced a childhood growing up in post World War II Europe. Self described as an outsider, Roddick claims she was most drawn to rebels and social misfits during her child and teen years. In the early 1970s, Roddick married her husband and quickly began a family. The young family survived with the small businesses they built together — a restaurant, and later, a small hotel. In time, Roddick’s husband went off to trek across North and South America, and Roddick needed to figure out how she was going to survive. It was at that time that she began The Body Shop — a business that would quickly become a staple throughout Europe and in America in no time. Thirty years after she began her experiment in entrepreneurship, The Body Shop had more than 2,000 stores in 51 different countries serving about 77 million customers.

What makes The Body Shop unique is that Roddick always felt that her business should not only benefit herself, but also the world at large. The company’s mission is to inspire social and environmental change. Among many other organizations and philanthropies, The Body Shop specifically took on the cause of the Ogoni people in Nigeria, whose land was being destroyed by the Shell Oil Company. It took many years, and even a few deaths, but eventually Shell revised their business plan and stopped wrecking havoc on the land that the Ogoni people had occupied for hundreds of years — the land that they depended on for their survival and their livelihood.

Roddick continues to inspire women today as not only a successful business owner and entrepreneur, but as a woman who has used her situation in life to promote common good and make a difference in the world. Her company not only aims to provide women with quality products that promote healthy living and beauty from within, but it also uses its wealth, power and situation to better the lives of underprivileged people across the world and to help preserve the beautiful world around us. From this, women can be inspired to not only accomplish their dreams but to realize that once their dreams have become a reality, they should work to help others around them as well.

Indira Gandhi

In the United States, women and girls have always known their country’s leader to be a man. There has never been a female president — or for that matter, a female vice president. While many women have achieved great successes in politics in the United States in the last several decades, none of them have achieved the top spot. However, women in other countries have — such as Indira Gandhi, who was the prime minister of India from 1966 to 1977.

Gandhi was born in 1917 and passed away in 1984, and her father, Jawaharlal Nehru became the prime minister of India during her young adult years. At that time, she did a job not often performed by any woman, let alone a woman in India, and she managed his office and political affairs. In 1942, Gandhi was married to a political man who never achieved the greatness of his well-liked and popular father in law. When Gandhi’s father passed away, she assumed the role of prime minister, taking on a political position the likes of which most women have never seen.

Having accompanied her father on many foreign and political trips, Gandhi had become an excellent politician who knew the tricks of trade. She was by no means shy and showed much tenacity when dealing with Parliament and Congress. She had several great successes during her tenure, such as winning the war in Pakistan in 1971 and she used a nuclear device in 1974. The public saw her as a tough woman who knew how to get the job done, and who put the needs of India first.

However, her time in office was not always marked by successes. During a series of political uprisings, Gandhi was found guilty of using illegal practices in her campaign. She was ordered to vacate her seat, but instead of doing so she declared a state of emergency in India and ran the country like one in the midst of a war zone. In 1977, she lost her election — but she was still determined. Three years later, she was elected again to the seat of Prime Minister. During this second tenure, Gandhi dealt with religious and political problems and having become unpopular with several religious groups, Gandhi was assassinated in her home by her own body guards.

While her death was unfortunate and untimely, Gandhi had earned a reputation throughout the world as a quality statesman and a woman who knew her way around politics. She is an excellent idol for many women across the world who are interested in doing political work, and ultimately would like to seek higher office. Political offices have never been an easy place for women to get to, but by acquiring knowledge and working hard, Gandhi proves that just about any job can be done by a woman in any country throughout the world.

Elizabeth I

Girls today often look to the most modern day women for inspiration. This is largely because up until the 20th century, women were often kept down by the powerful rulings of men, often asked to take on the role of caretaker and mother rather than go out and achieve a proper position in society. However, there are plenty of women in history that women today can look to for inspiration. One of those women is Queen Elizabeth I, who reigned during the Golden Age in 16th century England.

While Elizabeth was born into the monarchy and always knew she would hold a certain place in English society, she certainly didn’t have an easy road to the throne. Her mother, Anne Boleyn, was the Queen who was ordered beheaded by her husband, King Henry VIII. She had several half-siblings who also had claims to the throne, and it took a series of deaths and other monarchy maneuvers before she was crowned Queen of England in 1559. Queen Elizabeth I never married and while history has never quite told us why, it did ultimately lead to the end of the Tudor dynasty as she did not leave an heir.

During Elizabeth I’s time on the throne, England went through what is often referred to as the Golden Age or Elizabethan times. It was at this time that England faced a large threat from Mary Queen of Scots, and while Mary came to England hoping her cousin Elizabeth would spare and protect her, she was wrong and Elizabeth had Mary put to death. After the death of Mary, Elizabeth’s challenges were not over — the Spanish Armada attempted to attack England but the tiny country prevailed, which eventually led to the creation of the naval power that England became during the 1600s and 1700s.

While Elizabeth’s tenure was never easy and often seemed as if there was one challenge after another, she never faulted as the woman leader of one of the greatest nations in Europe. She is well regarded today as one of the best monarchs England has had, and is still well respected throughout history and by historians. Elizabeth I proves to women that no matter what time period you are living in, no matter what challenges you happen to be facing, there is a way to overcome them — even if you happen to be a woman. The 16th century was no place for a woman in power, but Elizabeth I not only made it possible but also led England through several victories and successes that the country is reminded of each and every day. She is truly a historical hero that women can look to for inspiration and hope for their future and the future of their daughters.

Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi

American girls have always known they have a place in the business world, and throughout the 20th century, they have learned that even they — as young women in the country — can even become the chief executives of major corporations.
Young women a generation or two ago only knew of men who were heading corporations, tackling big negotiations and traveling far and wide to meet with other great business men. But Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi is one of the women who changed all of that. Nooyi has been the head of PepsiCo, the second largest food and beverage company in the world, since 2006. As the first woman to head the company, she has become world renowned as one of the most influential and powerful business leaders in America.

Nooyi was born in 1955 in India, and received her bachelor’s degree from a university there as well. During her college years, she worked for the Johnson and Johnson Company as a product manager. It was not until 1978 that she decided to move to the United States, where she received her Masters’ degree from Yale University.

Upon graduating from one of the top institutions in the United States, Nooyi worked for a variety of operations and corporations, including taking a position as Director of Corporate Strategy and Planning and Vice President at Motorola Corporation. It was in 1994 that she began working for Pepsi, beginning as its Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning. After working her way up the corporate executive ladder, Nooyi became the first female Chief Executive Officer and President of Pepsi in 2006. She was quickly regarded as one of the most powerful women in corporate America and all of business.

In addition to working hard to achieve greatness in the corporate world, Nooyi sits on several boards and promotes several philanthropies, including those related to the performing arts — one of her passions. She is proof to young women today that not only can they achieve their dreams but they might have what it takes to do a job that was once reserved only for a man — and probably even do it better. Nooyi has successfully led Pepsi Cola into a period of growth and development, allowing it to maintain its status in the American business world and affirming her rank as one of the top business people in the country. She is an inspiration for any young girl who thinks she would make a great leader and negotiate a perfect business deal. If any young girl is dreaming of business school, she can certainly look to Nooyi for guidance and inspiration as she starts out her journey into corporate America.

Arianna Huffington

In this day and age, many people aspire to change the world, the way we live and the way we view things — but few actually accomplish this. For young women who have this goal, who hope to change everything about our lives and flip our worlds upside down, there is one woman they can look to — Arianna Huffington.

Huffington, in 2005, changed the way the Internet worked and how media companies utilized the Internet. Huffington began The Huffington Post, a news and blog site. While there were hundreds, if not thousands, of sites like this on the Web at the time, none of them clicked quite like that Huffington Post did. This website quickly became one of the most talked about, most hyperlinked and most clicked sites on the Internet. It became a way for people to get their news in the way they wanted it. It changed the way the media looked at the Internet and began a starting point for media executives to look to when trying to figure out how to make the Internet work in their favor.

Huffington still operates the Huffington Post Media Group and serves as its president as well as its editor-in-chief. Not only has she had widespread Internet success, but she also is a syndicated columnist and author of 13 books. She has shown young girls that not only can they achieve their dreams, but their opinions and ideas can prove to be very influential and important to society.

Huffington was born in Greece and educated at Cambridge University in England. She resides in the United States today and spends much of her free time working with philanthropic organizations and working to better the world around her. She is yet another example to young women for the proper way to use power and wealth — to ensure that everyone who achieves such greatness gives back to the community around them. She works closely with organizations that help at-risk children in the Los Angeles, California area an also serves on the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Young women can certainly look to Huffington as a role model for many things, including being a great business person, obtaining a quality education and using those resources to your fullest advantage, making sure to take care of the world around you and most of all — following your dreams. Huffington will likely influence young women for years and years to come, as she continues to make great strides not only in her business life but in her personal, philanthropic life as well. She is a model for women who are trying to figure out how to best balance their lives in this ever changing, global world that we live in.

There may be days where young women feel discouraged or forlorn, like the obstacles are stacked against them and there’s no way they can get where they want to be. On these days, women need to look back on history and also look to the powerful women of today and realize that for hundreds upon hundreds of years, women have been achieving greatness despite the fact that there are many challenges and obstacles in their way each and every day. These six women are just a small sample of the number of inspirational women who have graced this world, be it hundreds of years ago or just five years ago. Women in our generation — while they may have set backs and discouraging days — certainly know that women can achieve anything that anyone else can, despite their economic circumstances, despite their skin color, despite their educational opportunities and despite the fact that men still run the majority of our world. Any young woman who is destined for greatness will be glad to know she is in good company among the women listed above and the hundreds of other women around her.

When “Sassy” Marketing Goes Wrong

If you want your marketing to work, you have to know who you’re selling to and then focus on that target in presenting your offer and building your copy.

This is Marketing 101, but the marketers at JC Penney seemed to have missed that class.

This fall, as parents everywhere tried to find affordable school clothes for their kids, JC Penney decided to introduce a borderline offensive t-shirt line aimed at girls aged 7-16. The t-shirts had pithy sayings meant to be funny or ironic, but were way off the mark.

Among the sayings on the t-shirt were “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me.”

And the advertisement for that t-shirt online was, “Who has time for homework when there’s a new Justin Bieber album out? She’ll love this tee that’s just as cute and sassy as she is.”

Was that copy aimed at all the mothers and fathers who are buying clothes for their little girls? Because if it was it missed its mark by a mile!

JC Penney was deluged by complaints about the t-shirt line and made the decision to discontinue selling it, but the damage has already been done.

Thousands of people signed an online petition to tell JC Penney to “Stop selling clothing with sexist messages for girls.”

And there is little question that JC Penney lost more than a few customers who were offended.

We’ve all seen ironic t-shirts that say things we might not say in public. In fact, companies like Achtung T Shirt make their profits with these types of shirts. But the difference is that most of these T-Shirts are sold to adults or at least people over the age of 18, not children. And they generally aren’t sold at a family-friendly store like JC Penney.

Reinforcing the attitude that girls are just “cute and sassy” and more interested in Justin Beiber than doing their homework diminishes both girls and women and in the end, may diminish JC Penney’s bottom line.

Is this the message a family-friendly store wants to send to daughters, nieces, sisters and girls everywhere? Would you want your daughter to wear this shirt, no matter how old she is?

Billionaires Share a Common Trait, Failure

The gap between men and women in business is shrinking, but most of the people that reside at the top of the wealth ladder are still men. In fact, only 19 of the world’s billionaires are women and most of them had some help achieving that level of success from their husbands or brothers.

But three women stand out because they are self-made and they are all names you might recognize. Oprah Winfrey, Meg Whitman and J.K. Rowling made their money the old-fashioned way. They earned it through hard work and the ability to overcome challenges.

Oprah’s story has been told many times, so I won’t rehash it entirely in this space but she was able to overcome a tumultuous, poverty-stricken childhood to become one of the richest and most influential people in the world.

Oprah Winfrey is the only African American to rank among America’s 400 richest people every year since 1995. By 2006 she was easily the highest paid television entertainer in the United States, earning an estimated $260 million. By 2008, her yearly income had increased to $275 million. Forbes’ international rich list listed Winfrey as the world’s only black billionaire from 2004 to 2006 and as the first black woman billionaire in world history and. According to Forbes, today she is worth $2.7 billion.

Meg Whitman served as vice president of strategic planning for The Walt Disney Company throughout the 1980s. In the 1990s, she served as an executive for DreamWorks, Proctor & Gamble and Hasbro, but she really hit the big time when she served as President and CEO of eBay from 1998 to 2008.

During her time there she oversaw a company that went from 30 employees and $4 million in annual revenue to more than 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue.

Before achieving her fame, J.K. Rowling found herself in the same position many women find themselves in. As a single mother with no job and no prospects, she considered herself a failure.

In fact, she was down on her luck when the idea for Harry came to her while riding a train. It was one of the most difficult times in her life, but for Rowling, that feeling of failure was the driver that led to her success.

As she said at her Harvard Commencement speech in 2008, “Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

Rowling’s statement about how failure moved her to fulfill her potential is a telling one.

All too often people fail and they compound the matter by giving up. They forget that the only real failure is a failure to participate.

Rowling could’ve taken the easy way out. She could’ve wallowed and let her failures become who she was, but she didn’t. Oprah could’ve let the problems from her childhood take over her life, but she channeled those efforts in a positive way and became a world leader. Whitman was able to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to run for office and, despite losing, will be heard from both in the political and business worlds for years to come because failure simply isn’t an option for her.

These three women took very different paths to success, but thanks to their determination and talent, they were able to build lives as big as their dreams.

The lesson to be learned from these women is that failure only becomes real when you allow it to destroy your dreams.

There is nothing is out of reach for women today. With strength, talent and determination, any woman can achieve more than they thought possible and each of these women tells that story in their own way.

Are women leaders better at building consensus than men?

When President Obama announced Elena Kagan as his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, one of her strengths cited was her ability to build consensus.

I say this because there is a lot in management and business circles about a “female” way to lead.

The former Chilean President, Michelle Bachelet, says she indeed tried to lead through consensus, not by imposition.

Back in 2005, Caliper (a Princeton, New Jersey-based management consulting firm) and Aurora (a London-based organization) identified a number of characteristics that distinguish women leaders from men when it comes to qualities of leadership.

In general, women leaders:
• Are more assertive and persuasive
• Have a stronger need to get things done and are more willing to take risks than male leaders
• Are more empathetic and flexible, as well as stronger in interpersonal skills than their male counterparts
• Are better able to see situations accurately and take information in from all sides, meaning women leaders are better able to bring others around to their point of view

The Caliper study findings were summarized into four specific statements about the leadership qualities of women:

• They are more persuasive than their male counterparts.
• When feeling the sting of rejection, women leaders learn from adversity and carry on with an “I’ll show you” attitude.
• Women leaders demonstrate an inclusive, team-building leadership style of problem solving and decision making.
• Women leaders are more likely to ignore rules and take risks.

So … while President Obama may have been looking for a judicial ally, he was also aware that female leadership has qualities he no doubt wanted to see on the Court.

Whether or not the U.S. Congress agrees with him remains to be seen … although I suspect she will be confirmed (despite the fact that men heavily outnumber women in that branch of government!).

JS

Women in Leadership … Power in Numbers?

The International Women’s Forum was founded in the 1980’s to give women in positions of leadership a way to share knowledge, best practices and ideas.

Here’s some numbers that are interesting in terms of women in executive and leadership positions that the organization discovered in a survey several years ago …

(WARNING:  This may contradict your pre-conceived notions of commonly held statistics of women in the workplace) …

1) Women in leadership roles earn the same amount of money as their male counterparts (most studies show a substantial gap in earnings between the two).

2) Women in leadership roles have a higher overall household income than those of their male counterparts.

3) Women are more likely to use “transformational” leadership models in their leadership styles (meaning they are more likely than men to transform individual self-interests into the goals of the organization).

4) Women who describe themselves as “feminine” or “gender-neutral” report a higher rate of effectiveness than those who describe themselves as “masculine.”

5) Approximately 67% of women leaders are married (a higher percentage cited here than other studies, which report only 40% to 50% of women are married).

We hear so much about how women are slighted in leadership roles or who have hit the proverbial “glass ceiling” … I think the numbers above give a different perspective on the state of reality in the workplace for women versus conventional or accepted “knowledge.”

In the end, however, leadership challenges are the same for women as they are for men.

Is there a vision for the organization?

Are there resources to achieve that vision?

Is the proper team in place to reach an objective?

The difference, I think, is in how women and men see and approach these challenges.

What are your thoughts?

More on this in future posts …

JS