Читать книгу The Female Leader - Sonja Becker - Страница 12

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hat is more promising for success today – showing off or team spirit? Dominance or empathy? To command or to entice? Power or networking? How do you get further in the long term: with marching orders or through knowledge of people?

During evolution particular capabilities have been gradually developed by each respective sex. Evolution has trained men to win and to display strength because they had to be responsible for protecting their existence through war, reproduction or the husbandry of the farm, the Greek “oikos”, from which the earliest “economy” sprang. Men were automatically the “rulers”, and had to live up to this role, for which they were accepted by both men and women. Likewise women wanted to be “understood”.

Today we benefit from both male and female capabilities: understanding, discretion and sexual intelligence on the female part; approval, dealing with problems, and assertion on the male.

“Children, church and kitchen” was significantly the domain for women’s self-development in earlier times. “Clothes, cosmetics and chatter” mocked a political satirist later. The truth lies in between: women can do two things at the same time. They can manage children as well as a career. Therefore they earn their own money and can spend it on what they want: clothes, cosmetics… and they are unbeatable in the art of communication.

Power and success is no longer the domain of men. The myth of the Porsche driving “top dog” who is in control of everything and everybody is over - now that women can afford and drive one themselves.

That goes for industry too. “Images” enhance the status of products artificially, and often without legitimacy. Companies “cut into” the market with new products, stage “hostile takeovers” and lose their position within the social situation or social responsibility through unrealistic and no longer comprehensible strategies of acquisition of capital.

Men have learned to assert themselves. Women look for consensus. Men know what they want. Women also know what others want. Men wield power. Women have power – often more than they show. And sometimes it is the other way round.

There are women who gain power by using men’s weapons: Angela Merkel, for example. Conversely men want to “conquer” women, and sometimes that doesn’t work at all. At least, not with the means they commonly use. They will conquer the market of the future when they are able to bring their laboriously learned arts of seduction to the business world. They will have to be able to arouse women’s curiosity. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

Men and women are a magnet for each other. Every time they meet, a game begins. They ensnare one another. They are always discovering new perspectives. They are always open to new things. They can continually surprise one another. They are curious about each other. And not only in a sexual way. In business too. Because, for the first time in the history of the human race, women have the chance of winning, the modern business game is definitely one of the phenomena of our time. The new economy no longer follows the rules of war. Increasingly the rules of a free game are dominating: the business game.

In this game, certain capabilities are required, such as being able to put oneself in the position of others and to recognize their desires and needs.

This is the idea of the new “service economy”. It works not only through tactics but also through charm. Entertainment rather than dictatorship dominates: you can no longer “conquer” the public, for example; you can only “win them over” – through entertainment, not propaganda. A product sells increasingly badly through advertising and brainwashing, through the pressures of boosted value and status symbols.

Enticement is a better means. A service is most convincing when personal recognition or satisfaction, if not complete satisfaction, can be expected of it. Entertainment, appreciation and sex are the insignia of the new service economy. And the difference lies in the fact that women are able to participate on the same level. They don’t have to adapt male strengths, in which they appear as an example of the dominant “career woman”, but can use their own.

Cooperation with men brings out a new, unexpected energy. We can see that in our daily work, especially of course in our businesswomen’s and power couples’ seminars. Often it even happens that couples who have discovered their strengths during training hit upon the idea of capitalizing on them and go on to found a successful business together.