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Business Daily: Women on top

13/08/2009

Women on top

BBC World Service - Business Daily, Women on top

Talks to a fabulous female boss of a very male business.

We talk to the fabulous female boss of a very male business.  She runs a truck firm but the up-tight men didn't take her seriously until she jumped in the cab and roared away.

Business Daily talks to the fabulous female boss of a very male business.  She runs a truck company but the up-tight men didn't take her seriously until she jumped in the cab and roared away. Should a woman boss wear stiletto heels or boring suits?  How do you get the limp male underlings in line?  

How should women bosses behave in a male world?  Forgive the apparent sexism, but there are clearly questions raised when women get to the top and some men don't quite like it.

This question of female leadership was raised when the woman standing in for the British prime minister said she thought a company called Lehman Sisters might have been very different from the disastrous Lehman Brothers.

Are women managers, then, different from male ones, with a different approach to problems? It is said that women are more "outcome orientated" while men confront, perhaps to no purpose apart from just asserting their own cockiness.

And if that's true, how should a woman leader behave in a traditionally male environment. Nikki King is managing director of Isuzu Truck in Britain. |She says it was initially tough working for the Japanese company, particularly since she started late.   

We're Taking the Pulse of the Global Economy this week, of changes wrought by the financial crisis. Might it, for example, lead to more use of alternatives to traditional capitalist companies?

"Social entrepreneurship", for example, might come even more into vogue.  It means basically a company whose prime purpose is not to make profits but to do some social good directly, say by giving work to some disadvantaged group. 

The BBC's Peter Day was intrigued by it and for the BBC's Global Business programme he encountered a striking example of it in Venezuela recently.

So that's Peter Day's take on social enterprise.  So, might what you could call this kind of cuddly capitalism get more kudos?

Or might cooperatives, where the company is jointly owned, by say a group of farmers or even by the customers.
Or is it what the academics call "hog-wash"?  If an enterprise has a private owner, for example, doesn't that owner have all the power?  Don't cooperatives maximise profits just like normal companies?

James MacGregor is an economist at the International Institute for Environment and Development, an organisation that describes its aims as to work for a fair and sustainable future in which people and nature thrive. Steve Evans asked him what he thought these alternative models offered.

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