Living Dangerously - Issue 41

Your honor, may it please the court of the new economy I stand before the court to submit three pieces of evidence as probable cause in the bloody murder of a succession of CEOs:

1. A pornographic-chat room that is hosted on a major Internet investment site, where a debate is blazing over Oracle CEO and chairman Larry Ellison's "cup" size
2. An instance where Wall Street analysts told Ford CEO and president Jacques Nasser that the problem with his stock price was less about tire recalls and more about the loose skin around his neck that distracts listeners from his message
3. A phone conversation between the CEO of a small but thriving consulting firm and an aspiring entrepreneur and acquaintance that goes like this:

"Hello Mike," says the acquaintance. "Can I call you Mike?"

"You could," says the CEO. "But my name's Harry."

"Sorry, I meant Harry. Say, would you look at my business plan? It takes up two volumes and includes my theory of the world. It'll just take the weekend. I'll buy you dinner for your trouble."

Your honor, these elements are prima facie evidence for why a passel of CEOs are dead and buried -- heart, mind, and soul.

Now, your honor, there is one kicker to this evidence: All three of these pieces of anecdotal evidence are valid -- except that none of them happened to men at the top. They didn't involve Larry Ellison's cup, Jacques Nasser's wattle, or "Harry's" real name. All three of these scenarios actually involved female CEOs and their sexual endowments, appearances, and names.

This is the crime of the century: Women get to the top, and then they are murdered in cold blood. People are talking about the murders, but nobody is doing a Joe Friday-style investigation into who the perps might be. I want to know who or what is killing the great women of the corporate world? The clues lie deeper than the misuse of strategy, tactics, or power, and trace back to the primal world of sex, success, and seduction.

Women leaders have fallen like serial victims this year: Mattel's Jill Barad, iVillage's Candice Carpenter, Enron's Rebecca Mark, and Marimba's Kim Polese. Even Pearson's brilliant Marjorie Scardino is looking vulnerable. This trend could be written off in neutral business terms: In a tough new-economy shakeout, these women didn't have the perfect strategy. But hey, this is the year of AT&T's great screwup, and nobody is calling for Mike Armstrong's head (nor is anyone mistakenly calling him Harry). As Machiavelli said, it's one thing to get power, it's another to keep it.

The old cop-out saying is that men make the rules -- and rig them to make women fail. Well, those days are over: Now female leaders get to make the rules. So why are they still failing?

I already know who the murderer is. But to be fair, let's consider a few key suspects. We'll start with attitude. Harriet Mouchly-Weiss, 58, a strategist and head of her own PR consulting firm, says that women ask for their own beheadings. "Men don't become arrogant, because they expect to be at the top. Women work so hard to reach leadership positions that when they arrive, they forget what it took to get there, and they become hard -- too tough and arrogant. They bring the vulnerability on themselves."

Of course, there is the usual suspect: politics. Candice Carpenter, 48, says that "women have great leadership skills but not great political skills. They have a harder time shifting gears. Jill held on to Barbie for too long. Rebecca held on to a strategy at Enron that didn't pull in profits fast enough. I could have cut costs at iVillage as a concession to investors, but we still would have reached profitability at the same quarter as we'd long planned. Politically, women are not as good as men at decommitting themselves. And yet AOL CEO and chairman Steve Case had 10 years to prove his strategy, and for most of those years, AOL was wandering in the desert. Women just don't get that kind of time to prove themselves. We're too visible -- and everybody's watching."

Interesting. Maybe even true -- up to a point. But I think the real killer is taboo. Taboo is a desire so dangerous that it has to be repressed.

Female leaders set off some primal alarm in both men and women that screams, "Danger!" Pink suits, long hair, and flirty feminine ways might work for Ronald McDonald, but dress a female CEO in that outfit and what do you get? Eros and authority, a lethal one-two punch that packs way too much input. So the real world says tone down the curves. Pave the earth. Level the forests. Reduce everything to smooth, hard certainty.

The problem isn't just gender. It's way past something as simple as gender. It's Mother. Female leaders are stand-ins for our own mothers. Mothers control our deep-down emotions. In World War II, allied soldiers knew how to break even the toughest German spy who refused to talk. All they needed to do was ask this one question: "Is your mother still alive?" That's all it took to reduce the toughest spy to a blubbering mass. Mothers have enormous, almost mystical power over us. And a female leader is a painful reminder of that.