Open Your Feminine Mind To The Power of Sustainability
What if I told you that one of the most successful converts from traditional manufacturing to sustainable manufacturing had a big clue for you? Would your brand take an interest in more seriously committing to a sustainable business approach? One more question: what if changing your ways had to do with moving your mind toward its more feminine sensibilities?
Here’s what that convert, Ray C. Anderson, Founder and Chairman of Interface (and well-known sustainability proponent) writes of male/female, left/right brain thinking in the afterword to his book, Mid-course Correction (in which he tells his story of moving himself and his business toward more sustainable practices):
“In our male-dominant society, men have risen to the top of the corporate ladder in disproportionate numbers; so business is dominated by analytical, objective, numbers-oriented, factual, results-driven thinking. And too many of our corporate leaders do not know what they are missing.”
To Anderson, this right-brain blindness is akin to color-blindness. (To repeat: you don’t know what you are missing!) And, core to starting to see your own path toward sustainability is realizing that linear thinking will no longer cut it. You’ve got to switch your brain and your business to a more right-brain oriented, cyclical process – because it is much closer to “nature’s way.”
Here’s how I see this all connecting in terms of marketing to women in this movement toward sustainable options:
1) In order to reach women, you have to learn to think like they do – so open up and engage with your feminine sensibilities (we’ve ALL got them).
2) In order to convert a business from traditional processes to more sustainable processes, you have to get in tune with “mother nature,” so again tapping your feminine sensibilities is key.
3) Finally, in order to serve the women who I believe studies will start to show are the biggest influencers in this trend toward sustainable living,* you have to dish up products made sustainably. Without tapping feminine sensibilities in yourself and looking at your ways of doing business through that lens as well – you will fail.
Just this week, several examples of sudden (it seems) awareness by traditional industries of the need for masculine-feminine sensibilities balance in leadership have arisen, and they include:
- Nonprofits have become a type of pink ghetto, where lots of women work and where the whole enterprise is considered “female,” and so, subservient to any for- profit/masculine enterprise. To paraphrase the author of the Daily Beast article on the topic: for-profits are manly and make money. Nonprofits are girly and thus expected to barely scrape by. Argh. In this case, it sounds like the field needs to convince men that tapping feminine sensibilities to serve causes does not mean losing your mojo. And, vice versa – a little masculine sensibility mixed in to the mainly female field may well help raise the fundraising bar to healthy business levels.
- Law firm leadership lacks in feminine sensibilities as well. New research mentioned in a Law Jobs article, found this: 46 percent of large law firms have no women at all among their top 10 rainmakers. Almost another third, or 32 percent, have only one woman on that list. My suggestion: make it less about gender breakdowns and more about balancing the masculine/feminine input at the managing partner level. That is how stronger organizations that (drumroll please) make more money are built.
- Venture capital is an interesting one too. Naissance has just announced that it is starting a Women’s Leadership Fund, which “will only invest in companies where women are represented on boards and in management, and will take an ‘activist stance’ against companies in which women are underrepresented.” Given that brands need encouragement to open their feminine minds to the power of sustainable business, wouldn’t it be great if a venture capital firm was pushing that,as well? Who will launch the fund that only invests in companies that both pursue sustainability and reflect a balance of feminine with masculine sensibilities in their boards?
So, we’ve got Ray Anderson – a male “captain of industry” – telling us like it is, and a few examples of traditional industries (just like his used to be) that are obviously in need of some help getting with the “feminine sensibilities” program. Stay in the dark if you want to, but be bold and go where many a man doesn’t realize he needs to go: toward feminine sensibilities that will likely bring you to more sustainable business practices. Today’s women will reward you from the corporate leadership level down to the consumer perspective.
*In November, The Social Studies Group and I are announcing collaborative work we expect will reflect the influence women have in the movement toward sustinability.
