“We see women being put into turnaround situations all over the place as if the heroine is going to come in and save a company or an organization that has gotten into trouble. So what’s the problem? We are often brought in as corporate anthropologists to help organizations change. What we know is that the human brain hates the unfamiliar and hates to change,” says Andi Simon.
Q4 2020 hedge fund letters, conferences and more
Is A Female Leader The Right Solution?
"Many companies recognize what they did in the past isn’t working today, but they don’t know how to make real change. Somehow they think a fresh perspective, a woman’s perspective perhaps, could be the right solution. But they have to expect the right things. It’s not going to be easy to change it. The bottom line is they don’t really want to change. And often the woman comes in without the resources or the commitment to implement the changes, which sets her up for failure."
So now the question is, if you need to change, is the right solution a female leader? Or a different perspective that a woman might bring? According to Andi Simon, leaders need to wake up to the possibility that they need a different way of doing something. And—when they hire a new leader, (male or female) they must set the right expectations for what that new leader is going to be able to do.
About Andi Simon, Ph.D.
Andi Simon, Ph.D. , author of the book Rethink: Smashing the Myths of Women in Business, is a corporate anthropologist and founder of Simon Associates Management Consultants. A trained practitioner in Blue Ocean Strategy®, Simon has conducted several hundred workshops and speeches on the topic as well as consulted with a wide range of clients across the globe. She also is the author of the award-winning book On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights. Simon has a successful podcast, On the Brink with Andi Simon, that has more than 125,000 monthly listeners, and is ranked among the top 20 Futurist podcasts and top 200 business podcasts. In addition, Global Advisory Experts named Simons’ firm the Corporate Anthropology Consultancy Firm of the Year in New York – 2020. She has been on Good Morning, America and Bloomberg, and is widely published in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Business Week, Becker’s, and American Banker, among others. She has been a guest blogger for Forbes.com, Huffington Post, and Fierce Health.
