A Change Will Do You Good

Here's the subversive part: Whether your strategy for tempered radicalism is quiet or clamorous, Meyerson tells you how to pull it off. Get past the pro forma sociological study, and this is a handbook for revolutionaries -- The Prince for conflicted middle managers! Check out the lessons: "Designing Behind-the-Scenes Actions to Make a Difference," "Turning Personal Threats into Opportunities," or "Approaching Situations as Negotiations." BWGs, don't read this book!

It's actually very intelligent, engaging stuff. "Opportunities for learning and change," Meyerson writes, "often lie in the details of organizational life -- in everyday practices, mundane interactions, and 'normal' ways of understanding. Tempered radicals find opportunities for small wins in these details."

This is how change really happens in the workplace -- via modest increments rather than grand, overnight revolution. Master the small wins, Meyerson observes, and more substantial change will follow. Effective tempered radicals leverage many minor victories over time to effect broad results. Peter Grant hired one minority candidate at a time -- but over a 30-year career, he has been responsible for the hiring of more than 3,500 employees. Thus are "everyday leaders" born.

And it is tempered radicalism that provides a fulcrum of sorts for Our Separate Ways. In comparing the professional paths of white and black female executives, Bell and Nkomo observe that white women are mostly tempered; black women swing toward the radical. Black women "express their tempered radicalism via calculated strategies aimed at making a difference by uplifting the black community." White women evince relatively little anger about sexism in the workplace, wrestling with "how to play along and not rock the boat."

This is the point of Our Separate Ways: Black and white women professionals share common interests in confronting gender issues -- but they "are often trapped in a mutual perceptual illiteracy about one another," Bell and Nkomo write. "The fragile bond of gender is not enough to overcome the divisiveness of race." As a result, the two groups isolate each other in the workplace.

The explanation Bell and Nkomo propose certainly is reasonable. White women, they argue, are close enough and sympathetic enough to the dominant culture of business organizations -- the BWG thing -- to submit to it. Simply put, they fit more easily. That fit is relatively frictionless, allowing white men to retain power while white women achieve some success. Black women, by contrast, are separated from the locus of power by gender, race, and history. If assimilation is the price of organizational acceptability, "this, of course, is a condition impossible for the African-American woman to fulfill."

Bell and Nkomo walk a fine line here. The bank CEO's formative question -- Who are these people? -- is, in a way, an intellectual trap. It is the sort of question that encourages us to think of a group of like people -- in this case, black female executives -- as alike. Our Separate Ways takes great pains, by telling the life stories of 14 black and white women in almost exhaustive detail, to affirm that individuals are, in fact, individual -- their motivations, desires, and actions determined by much more than just gender, race, and class. At the same time, though, the authors steer us toward conclusions that don't feel completely comfortable.

One is the notion that white women generally are insensitive to the racism suffered by black women. "Black women feel they are left standing alone [by white women colleagues] on matters that positively impact the work conditions of minorities," Bell and Nkomo observe. Furthermore, the authors argue, "black women must know that if they are not represented their white sisters will speak for them."

I wonder: Why should white women be held any more accountable for fighting racism than anyone else? Why should we be surprised that white women would concern themselves with gender issues but not with race? In economic terms, to be blunt, race isn't their immediate problem. To demand racial sympathy by virtue of sisterhood seems, to me, a stretch.

What bothers me more, however, is the design of the study itself. Bell and Nkomo conducted in-depth interviews with 80 black women and 40 white women, following up with a survey of 825 black and white female managers. My problem: The interview subjects all were experienced managers born between 1945 and 1955 -- and the interviews themselves were done 10 years ago.

As a result, we're treated to a relatively narrow demographic slice and to an experience that may be dated. The authors indicate that "as young women, our subjects [white and black] found their career choices restrained by societal notions of female careers." Is such an observation really relevant to women entering business today? Probably not.