by Jean Case
From an early age, her ambition was clear: “To make my life one that was worth saving.” With a passion for mathematics, which was not taught at her all-girls school, she received authorization to take math classes at a neighboring boys’ school. Then, despite not having a college degree, she set out to have a career, starting at London’s Post Office Research Station, where she built computers from scratch and wrote code. Her interest in technology grew, and for six years she took classes at night, earning an honors degree in mathematics.
In 1959, Shirley started her own software company, Freelance Programmers, predominantly employing women—many of whom had left the industry when they got married, or when they had children. (She was also a visionary in allowing employees to work from home.) Her initial start-up capital was six British pounds, equal to about seventeen dollars at the time. She grew the company’s value into the hundreds of millions, and when she retired at age sixty, she became a philanthropist. Along the way she adopted the name Steve to help her in the male-dominated field. Now in her eighties, Shirley still has a keen sense of humor. “You can always tell ambitious women by the shape of our heads,” she says. “They’re flat on top for being patted patronizingly. And we have larger feet to stand away from the kitchen sink.”
Another one of my favorite stories involves a woman named Vernice Armour, nicknamed FlyGirl. Vernice was the first African American female naval aviator in the Marine Corps and the first African American female combat pilot in the US Armed Forces. In flight school, she finished number one in a class of two hundred. She flew the AH-1W SuperCobra attack helicopter in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and served two tours during Operation Iraqi Freedom. But Vernice was racking up firsts even before she joined the Marines. In civilian life, she was a Nashville police officer and the first African American woman on the motorcycle squad. Following her service, Vernice launched VAI Consulting and Training to encourage others to find their own breakthroughs.
In 2016, I was invited by the Harvard Business School Alumni Association to lead a discussion for Women’s History Month with Barbara Hackman Franklin, herself a graduate of Harvard Business School in 1964, the first class to include women. Franklin is a remarkable person who was instrumental in opening up presidential appointments for women. Surprisingly, she did so at the invitation of President Richard Nixon.
When we think of great champions for women throughout history, chances are Richard Nixon would not be on most people’s lists. But in August 1972, Newsweek declared that “the person in Washington who has done the most for the women’s movement may be Richard Nixon.” Due to the Watergate scandal and his subsequent resignation, President Nixon is rarely given credit for advancing the role of women in government. Nor is the appropriate acknowledgment given to women like Franklin, who played a crucial part in his efforts.
Here’s how it happened. In early 1969, Nixon had been in office only a month when, at a press conference, a hand shot up from the third row. It belonged to a reporter named Vera Glaser, whose question would reverberate far beyond the room. “Mr. President,” she said, “you have so far made about two hundred high-level cabinet and other policy position appointments, and of these, only three have gone to women. Can you tell us, sir, whether we can expect a more equitable recognition of women’s ability, or are we going to remain a lost sex?”
There was some laughter, but the president grew serious. “I had not known that only three had gone to women,” he said, “and I shall see that we correct that imbalance very promptly.”
Barbara Hackman Franklin, who was on the corporate planning staff of the First National City Bank (later Citibank), was tapped to come to Washington to lead the new White House Women Recruiting Program. Thanks in no small part to Franklin’s efforts, the number of women in top-level positions tripled after just one year, and more than a thousand women were hired or promoted at a time when personnel cuts shrank the federal government by 5 percent. Many of these women would remain in public service for decades, including Elizabeth Hanford Dole, who served a seven-year term on the Federal Trade Commission and was later elected US senator from North Carolina, and Assistant Attorney General Carla Hills, who later became secretary of housing and urban development to President Gerald Ford and US trade representative under President George H. W. Bush.
There’s a common assumption that as the number of women in high-level jobs increases, this trajectory will continue upward. But that’s not a given. There can be a two-steps-forward, one-step-back character to the fight for equality. As of this writing, women hold only 19 percent of seats in Congress, a number that has remained relatively stagnant in recent years, although more women than ever are running in upcoming elections. And while President Barack Obama’s cabinet was the most diverse in history, President Donald Trump’s is the least diverse in thirty years.
But it’s good to remember that sometimes a breakthrough can happen when a single woman raises her voice high enough to set things in motion. Change happens when people think of diversity not just as a nice thing to have but, as data have revealed, as a smart strategy to maximize performance.
NINETEEN
LEVERAGE PARTNERSHIPS FOR GROWTH
The technology sector I entered in my early twenties seemed at times like the Wild West. We had no road maps to guide us. We were just an odd collection of players counting on each other to survive.
Following the advent of the microprocessor in 1971, personal computers were mainly built by geeks who enjoyed tinkering and who would purchase kits to put together their own crude machines. By the 1980s, when I entered the tech world, things had evolved somewhat. But still, providing a compelling online experience (by the standards of those days) required a complicated and expensive shopping list of devices, including:
• a desktop or personal computer, ranging in price from $595 for the then-trendy Commodore 64, to as much as $2,495 for the first Macintosh;
• a display screen (not always standard in those days);
• software (early personal computers didn’t necessarily have a built-in hard drive or storage);
• a modem;
• a subscription to an online service.
One thing we knew for sure back then: we all needed each other. Software without a computer was useless. A computer without compelling applications had no value. An online service could not connect without a modem. You get the idea. What this meant for the growth of the industry was not only that partnerships had to be formed, but that we needed to create networks to accelerate our progress, improve our operations, and continue to innovate. For these reasons, collaboration was the hallmark of the early personal computer and online marketplace, perhaps much more so than today. We dreamed big dreams of a connected world with communication and content at one’s fingertips.
My title in those early days was manager of joint marketing. It was my job to travel across the country to visit computer companies, software companies, modem companies, and telephone companies to strike partnership agreements wherein the hardware and software companies would bundle and promote a subscription to an online service—hopefully mine.
Later, as I advanced in my career and landed at AOL, we expanded our unlikely partnerships. Omaha Steaks bundled AOL software with their famous steaks, and NASCAR featured an AOL racing car and gave away software at their events. There were unexpected alliances for content too: quilters across America had a very active quilting forum, Lucasfilm partnered to produce one of the earliest interactive games online, and Time magazine partnered with AOL for our first-ever national online conference on Billy Graham’s seventy-fifth birthday.
One of the most enduring lessons from AOL came from our ability to leverage our competition through partnerships and alliances. That’s right—our competition! In the mid-1990s, Microsoft was a tremendous threat to AOL. Because its operating system dominated the market, it could greatly influence the success of anything Microsoft bundled on the home screen—and the potential failure of those left out of a bund
le. As news spread that Microsoft was developing its own online service, to be bundled with Windows 95, we at AOL grew concerned. We knew Microsoft could use its market power to demand that computer manufacturers promote its new online service exclusively, shutting out AOL. To make a long story short, we prevailed in getting AOL bundled by agreeing to use Microsoft’s browser for AOL member access to the Internet. It became a co-bundle—two competitors promoting each other’s products.
Similarly, when it finally became legal for consumers to access the Internet in 1993 (yes, before that it was only legal for academia, government, and scientific organizations to connect to the Internet), AOL went to work building bridges to the World Wide Web. Among the first things we introduced was a search engine that enabled members to surf the Web while on the AOL service. Then we discovered a new upstart called Google that was providing its own search engine directly to consumers. We knew we had to act. So a deal was struck to make Google the official AOL search engine. In return, AOL got a 5 percent equity stake and a share of revenues generated. Here again, instead of putting our energy into fighting the power of a competitor, we “joined” them. The result was a better search experience for our customers, and a windfall when Google later went public.
Some might look at more recent history and suggest that AOL reached a little too far beyond its bubble in the merger with Time Warner in 2000, which ended in failure. My own perspective is that it was the right partnership strategy, but the wrong blend of teams. Business partnerships, like most relationships, come down to people. In the case of AOL/Time Warner, both sides dug in their heels when it came to blending cultures. There’s a well-known saying, often attributed to Peter Drucker, that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” When reaching beyond your bubble, take note of the people and the culture you’ll be working with when assessing opportunities.
Today revolutions in technology have brought about fundamental shifts in the way people think, form groups, and do their work. The Monitor Institute, which works with social impact organizations, calls this new way “working wikily,” meaning working with greater openness, transparency, decentralized decision making, and collective action fueled by social media.
• • •
When you’re planning a project or movement, it’s important to examine a spectrum of potential allies to avoid relying on the “usual suspects.” Sometimes it helps to draw a series of circles. In the bull’s-eye should be those potential partners that share the most common interests or markets. Work out from the inner circle to assess who else might have a strategic interest in the area you’re targeting.
In the civil rights movement, for example, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and his contemporaries started by mobilizing southern blacks before shifting to bringing northern whites over to their cause. When Harvey Milk began the LGBT movement in San Francisco, he started reaching out to the gay community on Castro Street, but then expanded to include straight liberals in the San Francisco Bay area. Colonel John Boyd, the military reformer who helped change the way the Pentagon functions, pursued a similar path, first preparing briefings on the proposed changes for junior officers, then congressional staffers, then elected officials, and finally the top generals.
When examining who out there might help to accelerate your efforts, consider who could be important allies, or even foot soldiers. And think about incorporating not-so-obvious partners into the process. Take a lesson from Liberia. A decade of civil war left the country’s health infrastructure devastated. There were just fifty doctors to care for a population of 4 million, and care was almost completely unavailable in rural areas, where people died from normally treatable conditions, such as a difficult childbirth. HIV was a growing crisis too. So a group of Liberian civil war survivors and American health workers joined forces in 2007, with Peter Luckow at the helm. Their project, called Tiyatien Health, began Liberia’s first rural, public HIV program with just $6,000 in seed money. They changed the name to Last Mile Health in 2013, in reference to those areas most in need, Liberia’s “last mile.”
Alone, Last Mile Health might have continued to struggle to meet even a small portion of rural communities’ needs. But then the Ebola crisis struck, and with it came an idea that enabled the nonprofit to reach beyond its bubble and scale its efforts at the same time. Last Mile Health tapped an unlikely source of health workers—people in the affected communities. With access to Liberian Health Ministry funds, Last Mile Health set out to train and equip 1,300 health workers in thirty-eight clinics across southeastern Liberia. Now, with a committed government partner and an army of community health workers, the program has an opportunity to aid rural areas that were for too long considered, according to the organization’s mission statement, “too difficult to reach and too expensive to serve.”
“It takes two flints to make a fire.”
—LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
This is the wonderful secret of successful collaboration: using “two flints” to spark opportunities with benefits for all. John Doerr, in telling the story of the founding of Google in his book Measure What Matters, describes the company’s cofounders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, in this way: “Sergey was exuberant, mercurial, strongly opinionated and able to leap intellectual chasms in a single bound. A Soviet-born immigrant, he was a canny, creative negotiator and a principled leader. Sergey was restless, always pushing for more; he might drop to the floor in the middle of a meeting for a set of pushups. Larry was an engineer’s engineer, the son of a computer science pioneer. He was a soft-spoken nonconformist, a rebel with a 10x cause to make the Internet exponentially more relevant. While Sergey crafted the commerce of technology, Larry toiled on the product and imagined the impossible. He was a blue-sky thinker with his feet on the ground.” So while you might see a picture of the Google cofounders side by side and assume they’re just two white guys, this misses their differences, which together made Google one of the most transformative companies in America today. It’s no coincidence that two so dissimilar people built this outlier of a company.
We know that when individual powerhouses join forces, the result can be dramatic, which is why it can be so painful to see our political leaders retreat into partisanship. And it can be especially inspiring, not to mention effective, when leaders cross party lines for the greater good.
In late 2004, after an earthquake and tsunami devastated eleven nations in Southeast Asia, President George W. Bush enlisted two former presidents—his father, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton—to raise funds for the recovery effort. Not only were the two from different parties, but their rivalry was personal. Clinton had defeated the elder Bush in 1992, denying him a second term in office. George W. Bush had defeated Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, in 2000. But on their trip to Asia, the former presidents became so close that George W. Bush later came to refer to Clinton as “my brother from another mother.” Their visit to Asia made a huge emotional impact, and they raised millions in aid. The joint mission was so effective that in 2010, President Obama sent Clinton and George W. Bush on a similar mission to Haiti after a devastating earthquake.
The data are overwhelming: we are better together. But should this really come as a surprise? Now the challenge for each one of us is to ask, “Who isn’t at the table?” or “What unique perspectives could help us avoid blind spots or widen our aperture?” as we look for new opportunities to seize.
TWENTY
NOW GO, GET OUTSIDE YOUR BUBBLE . . . EVERY DAY
We all have unconscious biases and blind spots that skew the way we view the world. These biases impact our daily lives in countless ways, often placing us on the outside looking in—and not always understanding what we see. The only way to overcome these blind spots is to make a deliberate effort to see and experience what we don’t know. And as Stephen R. Covey recommends in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, seek first to understand, then to be understood.
As my husband and I have discovered on our trips across America, when you travel
an unfamiliar road, you’ll see things you didn’t know were there. Sounds obvious, right? But knowing and doing are different things.
As you launch your Big Bet, you’ll need to surround yourself with people different from yourself, remembering that diverse teams that bring an array of backgrounds and perspectives outperform. So where to begin? Make a list of your team’s attributes. What’s missing? How can you complement the knowledge, experience, and skills you already have? If you are just getting started, make sure you set aside time on your calendar for coffee or lunch with those who might bring a fresh perspective to your efforts. Organizations can form advisory groups, add personnel, or hire consultants to fill in the gaps. Don’t be afraid to hear points of view that make you uncomfortable.
Be intentional in planning your alliances. Think about the interests or markets you serve, and then make a list of which other organizations share those interests. Some will be obvious, while others might be less apparent, like the rock star and the president, or National Geographic and 21st Century Fox.
Like Jill Andrews, we can step outside our comfort zones to offer a solution never imagined by those on the inside. Like the collaborators behind PEPFAR, we can give up a little in order to achieve a larger good. Like Mellody Hobson, we can pioneer diversity to build a stronger economy. Like AOL, we can partner with our competitors. Like George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, we can shrug off old antagonisms to change the world.
What first step will you take to reach beyond your bubble today?
PART FIVE
LET URGENCY CONQUER FEAR
