Update: May 4, 2013: Pepsi pulled the ad, but a segment of the ad is still available to view as of today here
Having a woman CEO hasn’t sensitized those at Pepsi making advertising decisions based on an ad pulled this week showing a hysterical blond, battered, white woman intimidated by a policeman who is drinking a Mountain Dew demanding that she pick her batterer out of a line up of African-American men and a goat.
The ad, part of a series, developed by Tyler, The Creator, an African-American rapper, is a reminder that in the search for hip the lens of celebrity has its own focus.
Does Pepsi’s pulse on America really think the new edgy is taking half-a-dozen demeaning stereotypes, throwing them at the wall and not caring what sticks as long as you notice the can of soda?
The ad blunder for Mountain Dew is a reminder to companies that the definition of corporate social responsibility goes beyond the dollars they give to improve causes important to them. If they don’t link their influence in the world to how they sell products, their corporate responsibility becomes just veneer.
When every nine seconds in the U.S. a woman is beaten or assaulted (the leading cause of injury to women), when a Georgia High School just had its first-ever integrated prom, when a Chicago Police Department is criticized for racial stereotyping and ”accidental racist” is too common……when rape in India — a four-year-old girl sexually assaulted died this week — continues to underscore attitudes toward women and girls — pandering to demeaning stereotypes in attempts at hip and wannabe amusing advertising betrays corporate responsibility.
USA Today illustrates recent advertising missteps that resulted in bad press and pulled ads: parodies of suicide (Hyundai zero emission cars) and depressed women (McDonald’s regional Big Mac ad) and Ford’s depiction of sexily-dressed women bound and gagged in the back of a Figo compact car — all tributes to bad judgment.
Hip is seductive– it crowns itself its own cool, evaporates in backlash and leaves corporate responsibility without much to say for itself.
Gael O’Brien is The Ethics Coach columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine; she is also a columnist for Business Ethics Magazine — her April column is about the road to second chances.
Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor of the New York Times, whose tenure in her first 18-months has yielded four Pulitzer Prizes. is the subject of a hit-and-run POLITICO piece this week quoting anonymous journalists at the paper criticizing her brusque, dismissive, non-empathetic style, labeling her “very, very unpopular.”
It is difficult to imagine a reporter having access to or using such anecdotal anonymous information about male leaders in other industries.
Much has been said in recent weeks about a double standard in judging men and women leaders. For example, Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly was treated very differentlyin the media than Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer when both leaders ended their company’s telecommuting policies. Mayer’s decision, which came first, received national media coverage and criticism. However, inherent in the double standard is also an evolving expectation of what it expected of women leaders in turbulent times.
Over centuries, “leader” solidified as a male noun. Labels of first female engineer at Google (Mayer), first female executive editor or just female CEO mean something in the lexicon of moving toward gender parity, but can rankle those who want to be judged by their results not gender.
Male leaders have had centuries to toughen to the inevitable criticism inherent in the accountability of leadership. Women leaders, in adjusting to the glare of attention now as part of a small group face the double-edged sword of presumed expectations about the kind of leaders they are or should be.
Research feeds the expectation that women are expected to have more developed emotional intelligence (EQ) than men. EQ’s self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation and social skills– the so-called softer skills — are counted as crucial leadership skills and ones where women are considered to have an edge.
However, Abramson and Mayer emerged from the cultures that raised them — news organizations and engineering/technology — where outperforming, excelling, and high reliance on IQ and Systems Intelligence have high priority. Both assumed leadership in troubled organizations where they are required to drive change as their companies deal with economic, relevance, and technology challenges.
There is an expectation that women won’t make the same EQ blunders many men have. Mayer, who juggled her new parent status by building an office nursery, didn’t factor into Yahoo’s strategy and communication what the impact might be for employees who were also parents when she ended telecommuting; media had a field day with anonymous employee reactions.
Given the last several years of ongoing cuts in newsrooms, journalists still standing — perhaps even more especially those at the venerable New York Times — may feel demoralized. Not to operate with a heightened awareness of one’s impact on others invites criticism. One of the anonymous New York Times’ employees complained about Abramson: “There are days when she acts like she just doesn’t care.”
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg reinforces in Lean In (her book about empowering the next generation of women leaders) that “success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women.” She cites a Harvard Business School case study of an entrepreneur who got negative reactions when the name Howard was changed to Heidi. Qualities that weren’t an issue for Howard became “not the kind of person you would want to hire or work for” when the gender was Heidi.
Further proof of the challenges facing successful women is evident in the controversy over Sandberg’s book, several women reviewers indicated her wealth and status made her out-of-touch with ordinary career women. Leadership books written by men of status and wealth haven’t received similar critiques.
We don’t have yet an objective way of appraising women leaders — both accomplishments and criticisms can lend themselves too quickly to hyperbole. As things sort themselves out, one of the safety nets is to pay attention to red flags and address them. Abramson has been tagged (fairly or unfairly) with having a style attributed to many male leaders who’ve not been called on it publicly.
Expecting more from women leaders is about our giving and asking for more from everyone involved in service of creating highly productive workplaces that build trust and engagement.
Leadership is an intentional act of development evolving imperfectly. The road ahead for women leaders is helping define what is possible for leadership to create, moving into a way of being that is every bit as important in our increasingly unpredictable world as the way of doing.
Gael O’Brien is The Ethics Coach columnistfor Entrepreneur Magazine and a columnist for Business Ethics Magazine — her April column is about the road to second chances.
When it comes to issues like gender diversity on corporate boards and in C-Suites, we’ve seen glacial progress. It has led some countries to impose or threaten quotas. While laws force progress, so also can the voice of a leader using his or her position and personal authority to hold others accountable.
The current statistics on gender diversity in corporate boardrooms remain grim. According to Catalyst August 2012 research on percentage of board seats held by women globally: Japan weighs in at .9 percent, Italy 3.7, Germany 11.2, France 12.7, the United Kingdom 15, and the United States 16.1. The leader is Norway at 40.1 percent, a result of imposing quotas.
For those for whom diversity isn’t a personal or corporate value, there is mounting evidence that having a diverse board makes excellent business sense.
Most recently, a reportby the Credit Suisse Research Institute indicated that companies with women board members on average have a little less debt and are a little more risk averse; in the last six years, shares of companies with market capitalization of over $ 10 billion who had women board members outperformed comparable businesses with male-only boards by 26 percent worldwide. In addition, for companies with women board members, their net income growth averaged 14 percent compared to 10 percent for all-male boards.
Insisting on diversity is pretty straightforward. It is about how a leader uses his or her voice. It is leadership that shapes a culture of inclusion.
Former Alcoa chairman and CEO Paul O’Neill insisted on it. I spent an afternoon with him a few years ago asking questions that elicited stories about how he leads by values.
In his first week at the helm of Alcoa in 1987, O’Neill (who later became U.S. Treasury Secretary) said he discovered Alcoa didn’t have a policy against using clubs (social, golf etc) that didn’t have an open admission policy. He immediately created one. He got push back, he said, from those who asked if he was sure he wanted to make this one of the first things he did at Alcoa.
Among the consequences was that Alcoa co-owned, with nine other companies, a golf course that didn’t admit women or minorities. He made it clear that Alcoa could no longer belong unless the club changed its policy. Within two weeks the club did.
The CEO of the European Central Bank, or any bank or company can decide to use his or her voice and influence to insist that best practices for ensuring diversity is a practiced value in the organization– from corporate policies, to recruitment and promotion of employees, to selection of board members.
Insanity in leadership, as in life, is doing the same thing over and over that isn’t working and expecting a different outcome.
“The wrong way to promote women,” in a recent issue of The Economist, dismisses the serious inequity of women holding 1 out of 10 corporate board seats in Europe, and 1.5 out of 10 in U.S. companies by saying nurture, not a glass ceiling, holds women back.
Therefore, quotas — action many governments in Europe have takenin order to increase the representation of women on boards — are unnecessary and “do more harm than good,” according to the article.
In pushing its nurture thesis, the article creates a straw man: the real obstacles in a woman’s career are children, aging parents, and companies that aren’t sufficiently family friendly.
So what if you don’t have children and ignore aging relatives? What if you don’t make the mistakes done apparently by the caregiver stereotypes cited — disrupt your career by switching to part-time at some point, decline opportunities at night to network, or turn down assignments overseas to build experience — is advancement to senior management and subsequent consideration for board positions yours?
Well yes. No. Maybe? Once you overcome the pesky problem acknowledged that companies often want people who’ve had financial or operational experience for top positions and “these fields are still male-dominated.”
Prejudices, the article admits, “about women and work have deep roots,” but the author encourages companies to find ways to overcome all that. Being more family friendly to attract female talent is one way suggested. Telecommuting is offered as an example of the flexible thinking required. Who would have thought that was an express train to the boardroom?
The irony is that in trying to show what the alternatives are to governments imposing quotas to increase the representation of women on boards, the article offers no alternative except to admonish companies to figure out how to overcome the prejudice question “to win the talent war, and reap the rewards.” And that takes us back to square one.
Some companies have done a terrific job advancing gender diversity, and according to studies by Catalyst and others, experiencing financial rewards as well. But given that only 28 women are CEOs of Fortune 1000 companies and women hold only 15.7 percent of seats on corporate boards, we have an urgent problem that is shared by every other country.
Are quotas the answer?
It would be a heated but relevant debate. Out of which we are likely to get better public policy, and answers that go considerably beyond telecommuting.
Schulz, who wrote Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, said at TED that we hate to be wrong; we do all we can to avoid thinking about our being wrong. We think that getting something wrong means there is something wrong with us: “so we insist we are right; it makes us feel smart, virtuous, and safe.”
The problem, she points out, is the internal sense of rightness we experience is not reliable. “Trusting too much in feeling you are on the right side of anything can be dangerous.” She illustrates her point by saying that is how we got a torpedoed economy and 200 million gallons of oil dumped into the Gulf of Mexico.
Her TED talk has other rich ideas about being human and stepping outside our “rightness,” but her concept of “error blindness” made me think of a number of examples where being so wedded to one’s own sense of reality had backfired. Unfortunately for leaders, their backfires make headlines.
I was reminded of Renault’s espionage case; Alan Greenspan’s dogged devotion to a market theory; a county politician’s belief about what isn’t offensive; and how the Dodgers franchise has been jeopardized by divorcing owners’ sense of personal privilege.
From Startwins.com
Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn wrongly accused three employees in Renault’s electric car program of selling information to the Chinese based on what the French government called a mishandled internal investigation. The problem for Ghosn was compounded by his defending the spy claims in an interview on a national French television channel saying he had “certainties” about it.
Ghosn publicly apologized and, with those senior executives involved in the investigation, waived 2010 bonuses and 2011 stock option entitlements. They endured a public reprimand by the French government, Renault’s largest stakeholder. A security agent was later arrested for fraud and the company is revamping its security operation.
For former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan it was about the certainty of his view on how markets behave. He was forced to admit to the House Oversight Committee that his world view, considered by critics to have led to the economic meltdown, turned out to be flawed.
Then there are the everyday convictions which demean others. Orange County (CA) Republican Party official Marilyn Davenport sent an email message to her mailing list with President Obama’s face superimposed over a chimpanzee saying “Now you know why — No birth certificate.” County Republican Party Chair Scott Baugh, one of the recipients, asked for her resignation; thus far she has refused.
At the press conference this week, she apologized to anyone she offended, saying she hadn’t realized how much it would offend people: “I offended the black people” and “I humbly receive your rebuke.” She apparently ruled out that those not African America could also be offended.
The divorce war of Dodger owners Frank and Jamie McCourt is a cautionary tale of what happens when leaders make it about their right to lead rather than how they are leading.
From Blippitt
While they have played out their tug of war over team ownership, media criticism has escalated the past 18 months over their Dodger stewardship, divorce filing revelations about lavish personal spending, and the franchise’s financial integrity. TMZ.com is reporting that the IRS has begun an investigation of the McCourts.
This week, Major League Baseball (MLB) Commissioner Bud Selig announced the MLB was seizing control of the Dodgers and would appoint a trustee to oversee its operations. Frank McCourt’s brief response said the Dodgers were in compliance with MLB guidelines. In other words, as bad and public as this drama and increased debt have become, McCourt isn’t budging from the rightness of his position.
So with these illustrations and more you can think of, what can we do about hating to be wrong?
The most basic is to accept it is part of being human and figure out how to mitigate our vulnerability through our receptivity to information that may be in conflict with our world view. The more we stay open to the possibility we could be wrong, the more likely we are to get beyond our own “rightness” and experience a larger reality.
It is really akin to developing an entrepreneurial spirit to constantly question, test, and have a world view that is organic, not fixed; connecting rather than isolating.
As to the minds that create racist responses or narcissistic entitlement, being “wrong” may feel especially frightening so the control they impose makes “error blindness” more pronounced, their internal sense of rightness more fallible, the potential consequences of being wrong more dire, and ethical leadership more implausible.
