Podcast Host, Professor, Writer

Category: Leadership

Congrats You Are A Billionaire, What Are You Doing to Change the World?

Republished with permission from twotwoone.nyc where it originally appeared.

In the deluge of pandemic news, I saw that Kanye West was in a shouting match with Forbes magazine over his net worth. He was upset that he did not have a higher net worth, even after he had instructed his staff to give Forbes proof of how much money he had. As a former Forbes billionaires’ editor and writer, I thought I would read that story for a distraction and see what my Forbes colleagues said to such hubris. I used to encounter it daily. You become immune and are instead amused by how desperate rich people are to appear richer.

But isn’t chasing a super-yacht or your 1,000th pair of Manolos or another Riviera villa so last century?

Wealth creation and celebration were hallmarks of the 20th century, enshrined by debuting on annual Forbes lists. But two decades into this new one, we are still searching for how to define ourselves. Over the past five years, I have heard my college students say two things that I think are playing out today. First, it is more important to them what people are doing to be change-makers. Their appetite for wealth lists is low, as is their tolerance for hearing about another wealthy man getting ahead. They might get a kick out of the fact that Kyle Jenner made the billionaire’s list, not because she is a young woman with a great deal of the money, because it is Kyle Jenner the influencer. She had her following before she was on a billionaires’ list and she will have her following if her net worth dips below a billion. Rich, to my students, is rich. The actual dollar figure is irrelevant. What kind of life are these rich people living is what my students follow.

I propose a new index inspired by Girl Scouts. I am a lifetime member of Girl Scouts and a current leader of Cadettes. As part of their promise, they recite,“On my honor, I will try…to help people at all times.” How do Girls Scouts do it? There is a specific set of guidelines that include, “use resources wisely and make the world a better place.”

These are thankfully, in this deeply divided country, nonpartisan. Michele Obama and Laura Bush were Girl Scouts. Every field from business to the space program has a Girl Scout alum. We are out in force now making masks for front line workers, writing letters to nursing home residents, and delivering cookies to say thank you to hospital workers. These are small steps to be sure, but everything is local. We build ourselves, and our future, from the ground up.

So how do we create a list that reflects community action and shaping a better future?

Any list creation is more art than science. It involves a series of judgments about what is important. Is it how many press mentions, how your publicly traded stock is fairing that day or how your art collection has appreciated? Or something more intangible? Every list I have every worked on has both subjective elements and hard numbers. We can start working on the methodology. But we have to start now.

My students are tired of seeing the quarantine in a mansion pictures, or how hard it is to get food to my huge yacht stories.  They talk instead about how inspired they are by people like environmentalist, Greta Thunberg. Her message is clear and sprouted a global movement via social media. Many of my students went to the Climate March in New York city last fall and heard Thunberg speak. They are still talking about how Thunberg inspired them and how it was one of the best things that have done in their life.

(For more listen to my Carnegie Council podcast on Genz, Climate Change Activism, & Foreign Policy.)

So Kanye – we don’t care about the size of your package. What exactly are you doing to make sure we give generations after us a better world? What kind of ancestor will you be?

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International Women’s Day, C-Suite News and the Juggling Act

A 1932 Soviet poster for International Women's...

A 1932 Soviet poster for International Women’s Day. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On this International Women’s Day, I am once again in angst over the very very delicate topic of women finding a balance between career and family. I struggle every day as many of my peers I know do. In a recent interview with a leading Latin American CEO for a very timely report on women in senior leadership, I was able to articulate it out loud because of her frankness. She said – and I agree – that women carry more of the guilt of not being 100% focused on career or family, the guilt of always thinking you are missing something when you are at the other. I know I can’t be 100% when I want to do two very separate things to the best of my ability, I don’t want to give up either but I also don’t have a clone. Sound familiar?

I was heartened in writing the recent Forbes Insights / Grant Thornton study that showed that women are making headway to top spots in the corporate world globally. This even though many of the CEOs and C-Suite executives I interviewed said that they still see many women leaving mid-career to start families, and it is a challenge to bring these women back into the workforce. A weak pipeline of women moving up the ranks means that it will be difficult to crack today’s tally of 24% of women in senior leadership.

I’ve written more about the study on my Forbes blog; NYSE Euronext today hosted several conferences around the globe bringing women leaders together. Starting the conversation is important because from the numbers we can see what progress is or isn’t being made and know that we need to do more to harness the energy of half the global population.

Back in the 1930s, the Soviet state tried to do just that redefining gender roles. Richard Stites, a former professor of mine at Georgetown writes in Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revoltion that “women were promoted, put into technical schools, and afforded wide opportunities to enter and rise in economic life, to establish their own identity through personal earnings, and even to gain a certain sense of self-respect and public respect as well.” The 1932 poster says it all.

But where did the promise go then? And possibly today? Stites continues, “women were saddled with a triple burden: of wage earning in the economy, of principal responsibility for domestic work and child care, and of public or voluntary work. This stripped them of their ability to use economic opportunity to advance along paths to power equal to men.”

We can get our power back by education, talent management and flexible work options says the report I wrote. Let’s keep looking for more solutions.

 

 

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