How Women Leaders Have Transformed Management

In a recent New York Times column, “How to Get a Job at Google,” Thomas Friedman interviews Laszlo Bock, the company’s senior vice president for people operations (which seems to be Google-speak for talent management). Bock notes that because constant innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, people who succeed in the company “tend to be those with a lot of soft skills: leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability, and loving to learn and re-learn.”

... In 1990, I published The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership , the first book to look at what women might have to contribute as leaders rather than how they needed to change and adapt. Based on diary studies of outstanding women leaders, who were sparse on the ground in those days, I benchmarked what I found against The Nature of Managerial Work , Henry Mintzberg’s classic study of the diaries of leaders who just happened to all be men.

Read full article: Strategy + Business, March 7, 2014