The Female CEO ca. 2002

When I talk with women, I'm always struck by their honesty, their directness, and their lack of posturing. Honesty has a way of releasing energy, the kind of energy that business desperately needs to embrace. Time after time, I've witnessed the paralysis that sets in when people are afraid to tell each other the truth. I've come to believe that it's part of the way that men relate to each other in the workplace. For all of their macho posing, most men are simply conflict averse. They don't really want to have an honest disagreement. And so they dodge one another, play turf games, engage in endless rounds of infighting and shadowboxing. They do anything they can to avoid sitting down with one another and telling the truth.

I've encountered CEOs who are unwilling to ask questions, because they're afraid of the answers. I've come into contact with CEOs who are unwilling to tell their direct reports that they are being replaced, because those CEOs are immobilized by the fear of bare emotions, terrified of unscripted conflict. I've seen deals hang in midair, because no one had the honesty to say out loud what everyone was thinking privately: This is really stupid and It will never work. And so millions of dollars and countless hours of work hover somewhere between intent and execution, with people in the know hoping that the whole mess will simply go away -- but remaining unwilling to address the problem head-on.

Everyone I've spoken with on this matter -- male and female alike -- knows exactly what I'm talking about when I describe the awkward silence that sets in at corporate meetings when it becomes clear that the emperor has no clothes. Isn't that the most plausible explanation for what went on at Enron? The problem isn't that we don't know the truth. The problem is that we're afraid to speak the truth. Well, the truth is, women are much more likely than men to be truth tellers.

5. Women work differently from men.

This is the great unspoken truth, the new orthodoxy that every woman I have encountered acknowledges -- although usually only in private or with a group of other women. Their caution betrays a fear that is commensurate with the truth: the fear that an acknowledgment of difference will come to mean an acceptance of inequality. A fear that "different from" will morph into "less than."

I don't believe that this is true. I don't believe that we can make meaningful progress as long as we willingly live a lie. More important, the new generation of women won't accept business on its old, dishonest terms.

The Legally Blond generation is not interested in compromise or assimilation. It wears its femininity with pride and seeks success on its own terms. If that success can't be found within traditional businesses or business schools, then these young women simply won't go there. "If I don't fit into GE or Ford or IBM," one bright young woman told me, "that's not my problem. That's their problem." Rather than fight the system, this next generation of women simply dismisses the system. Instead, these women seek places to work that value individuals -- whether as customers or as employees. They seek places that are transparent and collaborative, that respect relationships as the bedrock of all good businesses. What women want are companies that look a lot more like a network than a pyramid, companies where fairness is a given, companies that value what's ethical above what's expedient.

At the same time, this next generation of women is too practical, pragmatic, and tough-minded to be dismissed as ideologues. If they can't find these kinds of companies, then they'll simply build them. What I love about the voices of these women is how they sound: They're not angry, strident, or arrogant -- they're profoundly hopeful. These young women may not have seen many female CEOs, but that's just fine. In fact, it's wonderfully liberating. Unintimidated by precedent and unconstrained by convention, these women feel free to create their own style.

Not long ago, I attended yet another conference on business, competition, and where we are in the ongoing evolution of organizations. Needless to say, the speakers were almost all men. But one of them, a senior executive at a major multimedia company, caught my attention. He stood up in public in front of his peers and said, "Our way of doing business is broken."

Oddly enough, I found that admission enormously heartening. That executive said what most of us women already know: that the old command-and-control structures, inspired by or inherited from the military, simply aren't effective. And they are definitely not fun or inspiring. As I watch my female colleagues leave traditional business structures, as I see them flourish, as I notice how well networks protect women through a recession and how brutally men suffer from the harsh cutbacks and relentless downsizings that rumble through corporate hierarchies, it strikes me that women are building a parallel business universe. It's one in which companies work differently, one in which lives are lived honestly -- a world of work where lives are integrated, not delegated.

If our way of doing business is indeed broken -- and if the collapse of Enron, Andersen, Global Crossing, Kmart, and others are just the symptoms -- then we had all better hope that this parallel universe is almost complete. We may need it sooner than we thought we would. And it sure looks like a lot more fun.

Margaret Heffernan (margaret_heffernan@hotmail.com) is writing a book on the naked truths about women in business.