When Women Lead: What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn from Them
Julia Boorstein
Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster (October 2022)

Inequitable treatment of women can be discouraging but it can also empower them to invalidate it.

In this brilliant book, Julia Boorstein provides an abundance of information, insights, and counsel while explaining

o How and why women build strong companies by overcoming the odds, building with purpose, leading with empathy, and engineering smart teams

o How they solve problems by reforming broken systems, embracing change, and managing in crisis

o And how they create new patterns by defying CEO stereotypes, discovering resilience, creating new communities, and defying bias with data

Here are three key points: High-impact persons include males as well as females, as do low-impact persons. Also, all successful organizations have high-impact persons at all levels and in all areas of operation within the given enterprise. Finally, two women or two men who are great leaders can be at least as different in significant ways as a woman and a man who are also great leaders.

Why does Boorstein devote so much attention to the challenges that many (if not most) women in business encounter when attempting to accelerate personal growth and professional development? “People don’t believe me when I tell them that women startup founders have never raised more than 3% of all venture capital dollars — it’s crazy to think that 82% of all investment dollars goes to all-male founding teams (the rest goes to co-ed founding teams). The statistics about how hard it is for women to succeed in business — particularly in the world of venture capital-driven tech — are mind-boggling. (Women are 13% of decision-makers at venture funds and twice as likely as male investors to back female-led companies). I wanted to focus largely on that piece of the business world because tech is incredibly influential and there’s no other part of our economy where women are so under-represented. The more we can all understand the challenges women and people of color face in this space, the more we can all work to close those gender and diversity gaps.”

In the Epilogue, Boorstein explains that, “over the course of the two-year project of researching and writing this book, the new vision of leadership I have profiled started to colonize the old one, as women introduced images of new types of founder-visionaries.”

They included Toyin Adjayi, Sarah Blakely, Carolyn Childers, Julia Collins, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Jennifer Hyman, Lindsay Kaplan, Katrina Lake, Gregg Renfrew, Sivani Siroya, Lena Waithe, and Reese Witherspoon. However different they may have been in most other respects, all of them challenged what James O’Toole has so aptly characterized as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.”

However different these women may have been in most other respects, Boorstein found a number of commonalities.” Women tend to have an attention to context…and an instinct to search for structural solutions…and are more likely to seek out diverse perspectives and incorporate them into their decision making, and tend to pursue purpose-driven companies and showed vulnerability…”What was most surprising to me about those characteristics, though, was that they were [begin itaslics] not [end italics] innate. I found that women had, over the course of their careers, [begin itaslics] created [end italics] their powers by practicing and honing a series of strategies and approaches.” All are thoroughly examined by Boorstein and those whom she previously interviewed.

Moreover, she reveals, “As I examined the effectiveness of these women leaders, they validated and demonstrated to the world my hypothesis”: [begin italics] women leaders are creating new patterns to break free of old male-dominated systems [end italics]. Check out Pages 356-368.

Years ago, then chairman and CEO of General Motors Albert Sloan pointed out to his senior-level executives, “If what you’re doing now is what you’ve always done, it’s probably wrong.” Even now, decades later, women tend to be more inclined to speak to power and less encouraged than male executives to do so.

As you work your way through Julia Boorstein’s brilliant book, I offer two suggestions. Highlight key passages and keep a lined notebook near at hand in which to record your own comments, questions, page references, etc. These two simple tactics will facilitate, indeed accelerate frequent review of the most valuable material later.