>>Joanna Barsh: Here's what we're going to do.
I see the slide.
You don't see the slide.
I want this group to think about women for the next 15 minutes.
You might be the lucky ones.
This group, think about leadership archetypes, masculine and feminine.
This group, sorry to say, think about fixing capitalism, if you wouldn't mind, and we'll
come back to you and see if we've worked it out.
So can women fix capitalism?
Anybody here have the answer to that?
>>> Yes.
>>Joanna Barsh: Yes.
Exactly.
[ Laughter ] Okay.
So in the next few minutes, I'm going to put all three together, and we're going to have
a common thread between you guys, you guys -- be thoughtful -- and the capitalists over
there.
So we have to start with women.
Women are on the rise.
You know this.
First of all, 30% of the room here are women, which is a great --
[ Applause ] For Google.
Nice job.
[ Applause ] 70 million women work today.
That's up from 30 million.
17% of the Fortune 500 board seats are women.
So you're probably thinking, Joanna, why are we even talking about this?
Didn't we just solve the problem?
What's your problem?
And the answer is, we actually have a long, long way to go.
I know I needed to give you a McKinsey chart.
This would be it.
It's a funnel.
The green people are the women.
Blue are the men.
And you can see that over half of the entering class for the Fortune 500 companies is represented
by these 60 are women.
There are even some tech companies in here.
And by the time you get to the C suite, 19% are women.
And you might be thinking, well, that's because the women don't want to get to the C suite;
right?
Wrong.
Look at the bottom.
This is women's relative rate of advancement versus men.
And anybody who's rational would say my odds are so much lower.
And that's because there are a lot of obstacles in the way.
However, most of you probably don't see those obstacles.
It turns out from our recent research that most men don't see the obstacles that all
of the women are facing.
So why is that?
And I think I see the common thread from all our talks right here.
Why is it?
It's because culture norms and individual mindsets are in the way.
And that's a barrier that is very, very hard to unseat.
Mindsets are very hard to shift.
So why is that?
Think of yourself for just a minute as an iceberg.
We're kind of in a blue room here, and the cloud man said no blue, blue sky.
But how about blue icebergs for a minute?
Look at everybody around you.
Look at me.
And you judge based on what you -- what the person is saying and what they're doing.
That's it.
You have no idea what I'm thinking and feeling and not expressing, what the beliefs and values
I have that are driving me, and deep, deep down, who I am, what I'm most afraid of, what
I need, what my identity is.
And that is true of everybody, which is why it's so hard to shift.
That said, women -- we saw this this morning.
It was actually really inspiring to see so many women up here.
Women around the world are part of a global wave.
We don't know each other, but we all feel the same thing.
And that wave is building.
Here in Saudi Arabia, where I was in January, the government is intervening to make opportunities
for women to work.
That's a huge cultural shift for them.
In fact, if you want to unseat mindsets, you kind of have to intervene.
And the most obvious form of intervention are quotas.
And all the Americans in the room know that we really hate quotas more than we pretty
much hate everything.
So there's got to be another way.
There is.
In the U.K., Lord Davies, back in 2011, was tasked by the government to sort out why so
few women were making it into boards.
And so he said, let's put a commission together, and let's set a goal, double FTSE 100 by 2015.
Cool.
Okay.
What happened?
Well, we're in 2014.
And they're on track to make their goal.
That's pretty incredible that they're on track.
So you want to know why?
They don't have a quota.
First of all, they used a discrete group of companies, the 100.
Secondly, they actually set a target, which is not a quota, but, indeed, is a good way
to get everybody's attention.
And then Lord Davies got five pals together and said let's make this happen.
And peer pressure started to move the dial.
And fear.
Everybody in this room knows, right, there just aren't enough good women to go around.
So the chairmen all wanted to be the first one to get the best women.
And then ultimately, the media helped and recruiters helped by talking about it in the
public eye.
And although and behold, it works.
So more women into leadership.
And you might be asking yourself at this point, why should I care?
You can see that Mr. Incredible, most people around the world in the survey would argue
that men apply more control and are really good at making decisions by themselves.
Mrs. Incredible represents what we think about what women bring into leadership.
And as you can see, it's around people development, around long-term planning, inspiration, role
modeling, and getting people together to participate.
I love the sharing point that Dan just made.
What else do women bring to leadership?
Well, here's a picture of an organization cut into nine pieces.
And we surveyed employees of companies all around the world.
And what we discovered is, if they rate their company high on these nine pieces of the company,
that company would be healthier.
By the way, their financial performance would also be pretty high.
So when you get three or more women at the top, you actually get healthier ratings on
every one of the nine dimensions.
There's one more piece of evidence I'd like to bring you before we come to the middle
group here.
And that is, 64,000 people from around the world answering the $64,000 question, which
is, what do we want our leaders to be?
We want our leaders to have masculine archetype and be decisive and independent and aggressive
and proud.
But even more than that, people want their leaders to think like women.
And that means to really plan for the long term and to be collaborative and to be emotive
and to be empathic, to connect.
That's pretty cool.
So we need men and women to be able to do both.
So this is why I come to the middle group here.
The story, can women fix capitalism, is not as exciting as the story, can men and women
leaders, using the archetypes of both masculine and feminine, can those leaders fix capitalism?
And I call them centered leaders.
So I'm a little ahead of my story.
Let me step back.
About 2004, I woke up one day, I was a senior partner at McKinsey.
Everything was cool, I have a farm, two kids, husband I'm still married to, on and on.
I woke up and I went to David, my Israeli paratrooper mathematician husband, and said,
"I feel empty.
I actually feel invisible."
And David, being David, said, that's just menopause.
Why don't you just go buy yourself a pair of shoes."
[ Laughter ] Which I did and as the ladies know, that works
for about a week or two.
And I came back to the same feeling.
I decided to go around the world to meet women leaders who are successful across fields in
order to understand what I was missing.
And I thought if I found it, I would bottle it and drink it and share it with all of the
men and women I could meet.
And so that's what I did.
And I interviewed incredible people from around the world, mainly women, but then, ultimately,
men as well, 170 people so far on video in these very in-depth interviews.
And we discovered something.
We discovered a force that runs through all of us.
And I began to fill up with the force.
Now, are there any star wars fans here?
You know that we probably shouldn't talk about the force in rational business audiences,
because nobody actually believes you and you lose credibility quickly.
So, being a McKinsey person, I got a team together and we looked at leadership, organization
behavior, neuroscience, we look at gender studies, we look at positive psychology, evolutionary
biology, and we came up with five capabilities that if a leader possesses these -- and you
can build them -- you will go from good to great to truly remarkable.
In fact, capitalism folks, these five capabilities change the game.
So how do they change the game?
We move from short-term greedy to long-term greedy.
We move from thinking just about people who hold our shares to all of the people who matter,
the employees, the clients, the communities in which we operate, and the shareholders.
We build a community.
And let me tell you a little bit about centered leadership, which is what this picture shows
you.
I'll just give you a very quick flavor of it, kind of a tapas.
And we'll all be hungry.
But you'll come find me later.
So meanings is the anchor, and it starts with strengths.
And strengths leads to purpose.
So I thought I was a leader but that I had height deficit disorder, so all the leaders
at McKinsey just talked to each other and they couldn't find me in the room.
So I thought, if I took an assessment, I would actually send it around and everybody would
see that I'm a leader.
So I took this assessment with 24 strengths, with my children around me, because this was
such a big moment for me.
And I could not find leadership in the top five, in the top ten.
Actually was number 15 for me.
The so I thought, reframe.
I'm going to look at my top strength.
I'm going to run with it.
And it was industriousness and perseverance, which is why we all like to make fun of McKinsey.
Indeed, I was not feeling very good about that until my daughter said, mom, you love
washing the dishes.
If you'd just been a housekeeper, you'd have been happier.
So David, the mathematician, takes this assessment, because he thinks it's just for girls.
And we wanted to look at him.
And it turns out that his number two strength is loving and being loved.
Adam, he's right next to you, if you want to give him a hug.
Because that's what we do with David, we hug him all the time.
Because it's his strength.
It gives him energy.
That's what strength is, it gives you energy.
Use that, look for that in all of your people, and you will create magic.
Because we're all deficit-based.
We're not used to this.
It takes a little time.
Go through framing and reframing.
This is the ability in an upset to see yourself in your own movie and choose to shift mindsets.
Michael this morning literally showed us that.
So I don't need to explain it.
But it is an incredibly powerful skill when you can do it in the moment.
But forgiveness is one of the ways you get there.
Connecting is about trust.
You know, I didn't trust anybody, including my own family, until about last year.
Trust has a lot to do with acceptance.
And for many of us in this room, we don't accept ourselves, and when we don't start
there, we cannot accept others.
And therefore we do not have trust.
If you have it, you can build community.
Community is the power behind centered leaders.
Engaging.
This is where the rubber meets the road.
We saw a very courageous man here just a moment ago who obviously has a lot of ability to
have hope, because to take the step, to take the risk, you have to have it.
And how do you get that?
All of us have a little voice in our head.
Do you have one?
Mine is -- I thought for the longest time was my own mother telling me, don't do this,
don't do that.
You're going to screw up.
Be quiet.
Don't open your mouth; right?
Stopping you from all kinds of danger, real or imagined.
I now realize that that little voice is Edna from The Incredibles who, as you know, screams
out "no capes!"
Because she's correct each and every time.
I needed a different voice to find opportunity to take the risk.
Very hard to find that voice.
I didn't have it around me.
And so I made it up.
And I went to Emerson and read Emerson.
I had to do it anyway because I had kids in the ninth grade, and, you know, it's required
reading.
So Emerson taught me that you can carve a path.
And when you have that hope, when you think of the up side before the down side, you actually
make a different decision, and you take those steps.
And you own what happens to you, which we just witnessed.
And then finally, you need and create energy.
You create energy when you build on strengths, when you have the ability to reframe, when
you connect the group into a community.
When you take risk, adrenaline flows.
That's all energy.
But if you're going to lead, you're using up an extraordinary amount of energy not knowing
it.
So give yourself permission and deliberately practice recovery.
And, indeed, that's a mind set shift as well.
So you don't have to believe me, although I've been through this journey now for the
last five years.
You can look at some data, if you prefer.
And the data we took in 2010 shows about 2300 people who practice or don't practice each
of the five elements of centered leadership.
And what we learned was about 103 people actually do most of this naturally.
And their attitude versus the people who do none of it naturally is extraordinary.
So these masters, I call them, because I love Yoda, and I'm sure if he took the test he
would have been in that group.
The masters believe that they are more highly effective leaders than anybody else.
They believe they are more satisfied at work and at home than anybody else.
And they feel pretty good about today's challenges versus the nonmasters who, frankly, very few
of them think that they're leaders.
Most of them are unhappy, and only a fifth of them are ready for the environment in which
we are going to live for the rest of our lives.
So how about you?
What I want for you is to think about what we can do together.
We could take the Davies Commission and just replicate it.
It's not a quota.
And we could help more and more women get into leadership positions.
Not because all women are centered leaders.
In fact, they're not.
But it helps.
And it changes the conversation.
This group here has been thinking about masculine and feminine archetypes.
Putting those together, whether you are a man or a woman, will shift your effectiveness
as a leader.
So you could argue to do that, and if you did, come through any doorway.
Some of you are already experts at energizing or meaning, perhaps connecting.
Indeed, choose a different doorway that gives you a little bit of excitement, gives you
a little bit of thrill.
And maybe fear is standing in your way, or maybe you, like me, want to inspire greater
trust.
Or perhaps you guys are the ones who get angry in the discussion and end up yelling at everybody
and want to learn to reframe.
Whatever it is, try it.
I'll tell you what's happened to me, and the answer to that is absolutely nothing.
I am not a leader of a company.
I'm not a leader of a country.
I'm just an aging, Chubby lady who is prouder and more powerful and having higher impact
in the world, and feeling more love, feeling more resilience, and actually daring to go
out and talk about this stuff to brainiacs such as yourselves.
I'm an introvert so I won't find you, but I'd be really, really happy if you came to
me and shared your story.
So thanks.
Thanks for listening.
[ Applause ]