CEO advice and how to grow your business

May 18, 2012

Here are a couple of articles that got me thinking earlier today. The first is from the Wall Street Journal. It was spurred by the small storm caused by former GE CEO Jack Welch and some of the comments he made at the recent WSJ Women in the Economy conference (among other things he equated women employee groups to 'victims' units'). The Journal responded by talking to many of the 18 female CEOs in this country about what they think it takes for women to get ahead. I saw two of these women speak at a Catalyst conference last month - sister CEOs, no less. Both had many interesting things to say (both also have stay-at-home husbands, which has to make being a chief executive and having a family a lot easier then it might be otherwise).

Then I saw this on Forbes Woman - it's about Make Mine A Million, the group that helps women-owned businesses get to the point where they're bringing in more than $1 million in revenue. It has an arresting headline - 'Why Women-Owned Businesses Don't Grow' - and goes on to quote Nell Merlino of Make Mine A Million saying that too many women try to do it all, don't delegate, and therefore don't have time to make more sales. I've never run a business - until now - but I can believe this. As reported in episode 2 of The Broad Experience, women, in general, DO try to do everything ourselves, and when you're juggling absolutely everything single-handedly, there's only so much you can actually achieve.

The Broad Experience on Women 2.0

May 15, 2012

Here's a post I wrote about my strange journey to entrepreneurship - and this podcast - for the female entrepreneurs' site Women 2.0. This went up the very same day my CUNY entreprepreneurial journalism class had to present to a panel of judges who will decide whether or how much seed funding to allot our enterprises. Thankfully I was about the sixth person to speak out of 16, so my nerves didn't have too much time to go crazy. That said, my mouth was so dry by the time my turn came I had to grab a bottle of water with shaking hands before I went on. It all went by in a blur.

The Broad Experience on This Week in Google

May 11, 2012

Yikes. I knew Jeff Jarvis was a sharer - after all, this is the guy who wrote a book called Public Parts and is famous, or notorious, for his belief that public is better than private. He may even tweet in his sleep. So I was a combination of shocked, embarrassed and pleased when I saw this plug he did for The Broad Experience on TWiG - This Week in Google - the TWIT TV show he does every week with Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani. It's ironic that I had just posted the silhouette of a naked woman on my website when they went on air and the camera focused right on it. I was making a point about a logo contest I'd started, but the way the camera lingered, an outside observer might think I was promoting a strip club (maybe that's why my site got so many hits that day?)

God knows how I'd deal with actually being on TV, if hearing myself spoken about on TV results in such a jumble of mixed feelings. It starts about 8 minutes in.  

Women in tech: links and tidbits

May 5, 2012

As promised in the latest episode of the show, here are a few links related to the topic of women in tech, and women's relationship to technology.

First, check out Adda Birnir's new venture Skillcrush, which is soon to launch.

This is a great Mother Jones piece on the so-called 'brogrammer' debate that's been a major topic of conversation in tech circles in the last couple of months. Basically, while I like to think educated Gen Y men are pretty evolved, this shows that is far from universally the case.

And here's a blog post by tech entrepreneur Dan Shapiro that backs up some of what Vivek Wadhwa told me in our interview that I couldn't fit into the podcast. Kind of a depressing read if you're female, but proof that a critical mass of women is needed in the technology industry so men get used to working alongside these strange beings and begin to see them less as sex objects, more as colleagues.