http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/thesmartercity/index_flash.html?cm_mmc=agus_brsmartcity-20090929-usbrb111-_-s-_-genhpmerch-_-sp#/home/?menuid=healthcare&v=industries
Showing posts with label Business Ideas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Business Ideas. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
IBM: The Smarter City
Very inspirational!
http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/thesmartercity/index_flash.html?cm_mmc=agus_brsmartcity-20090929-usbrb111-_-s-_-genhpmerch-_-sp#/home/?menuid=healthcare&v=industries
http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/thesmartercity/index_flash.html?cm_mmc=agus_brsmartcity-20090929-usbrb111-_-s-_-genhpmerch-_-sp#/home/?menuid=healthcare&v=industries
Sunday, November 20, 2011
$7 Billions net worth, Rank 39 in US, Only physician in Forbes top 400: Patrick Chan Soon-Shiong
Billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong Wants To Remake The U.S. Health Care System
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Patrick Soon-Shiong is a rarity. He is the only physician on the Forbes 400 list to have made billions in biotech. He developed a new delivery method to administer Paclitaxel, a widely-used breast cancer drug. His net worth is estimated at $7 billion, which he made by selling two drug companies within the past three years. Altogether, he is one of only three biotech billionaire entrepreneurs in the U.S. Soon-Shiong has now turned his focus to something as complex and elusive as a cancer cure: The U.S. health care system. His highly ambitious plan calls for establishing a national health information network that connects scientists around the country working on breakthrough medical research with doctors and their patients, and pushing for rewarding doctors based on a patient’s outcome, instead of the number of procedures they perform.
So far, he has invested a total $400 million on projects and companies through his non-profit Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Advanced Health, and his newly-formed holding company NantWorks. He has also partnered with the University of Arizona, and Arizona State University to establish the Healthcare Transformation Institute. Soon-Shiong and his wife Michele Chan have already pledged $1 billion for health IT projects.
Other deep-pocketed entrepreneurs before him with grand scale visions of fixing a disparate health care system have thrown money at the problem and failed. Netscape co-founder Jim Clark was as passionate about it, forming Healtheon, which set out to connect doctors, insurance companies, and patients over the internet. Healtheon was eventually folded into WebMd, a company that is now seemingly in need of rescue. AOL founder Steve Case had the same disruptive vision when he formed Revolution Health in 2005. The company is now more modestly part of online consumer health site Everyday Health, a competitor to WebMd.
Timing could work in Soon-Shiong’s favor. There’s a government-mandated push to implement electronic health records, and to encourage the establishment of accountable care organizations—hospitals, doctors, and payers the government rewards not on a fee-for-service basis, but on how well they manage the wellness of a Medicare patient by reducing readmission rates, for instance. There’s also the creation of so-called health information exchanges, health care providers that have the ability to exchange patient information. None of those initiatives existed when Healtheon and Revolution Health were formed.
One of Soon-Shiong’s first moves was to take over the National Lambda Rail, the high speed link which connects academic centers throughout the country, but is also used by NASA and institutions working with the Large Hadron Collider. NLR was running out of money, and Soon-Shiong offered to write a $100 million check in July to upgrade the entire network. He is talking to genome sequencing centers about linking up, and has picked cancer as his institute’s first focus. The Institute for Advanced Health is based in Arizona, where patient sequencing data is stored in two data centers in Phoenix and Scottsdale, and crunched on a supercomputer in Phoenix that was launched last month.
It sounds futuristic, but Soon-Shiong wants to make the genomic information available in real time to doctors so they can tailor treatment, circumventing the twelve or more years it takes a drug to reach the market. One example he gives, is newly-emerging information that not all women with breast cancer who have cancerous lymph nodes in the armpit need to have them surgically removed. Scientists can look for telltale DNA markers in tumors to see which women can escape surgery. A doctor can then administer a blood test that helps him make that decision.
Soon-Shiong is still putting the pieces of the puzzle in place to implement his slew of ideas. He has invested in a dozen companies. Here are some of his partnerships, and companies:
–Vitality: Maker of GlowCaps. Reminds patients to take their meds by lighting up the bottle cap which also plays music or rings a phone.
–Dossia: Maker of personal health records.
–Ziosoft: Visualization technology that enables clinicians to build multi-dimensional images of internal organs and tumors.
–Toumaz: Remote monitoring of patients.
–Vodafone: Partnership to develop mobile health services. Identifies and invests in health IT start-ups.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
The top 1%
Citizens for Tax Justice, a research group that's been studying tax issues from its offices in Washington since 1979, provides the information we need. When all taxes (not just income taxes) are taken into account, the lowest 20% of earners (who average about $12,400 per year), paid 16.0% of their income to taxes in 2009; and the next 20% (about $25,000/year), paid 20.5% in taxes. So if we only examine these first two steps, the tax system looks like it is going to be progressive.
And it keeps looking progressive as we move further up the ladder: the middle 20% (about $33,400/year) give 25.3% of their income to various forms of taxation, and the next 20% (about $66,000/year) pay 28.5%. So taxes are progressive for the bottom 80%. But if we break the top 20% down into smaller chunks, we find that progressivity starts to slow down, then it stops, and then it slips backwards for the top 1%.
Specifically, the next 10% (about $100,000/year) pay 30.2% of their income as taxes; the next 5% ($141,000/year) dole out 31.2% of their earnings for taxes; and the next 4% ($245,000/year) pay 31.6% to taxes. You'll note that the progressivity is slowing down. As for the top 1% -- those who take in $1.3 million per year on average -- they pay 30.8% of their income to taxes, which is a little less than what the 9% just below them pay, and only a tiny bit more than what the segment between the 80th and 90th percentile pays.
What I've just explained with words can be seen more clearly in Figure 6.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Working Until Dropping: Employment Behavior of the Elderly in Rural China
- Government also can help the rural elderly through medical care.
- The health status of the elderly is closely related to their working decisions, which has further effects on the livelihood of families.
- Since most of the elderly rely on their own labor to support themselves, when individuals suffer from a disease or other health problem, the health problem becomes the main obstacles to the welfare of elderly.
- Improving the health status of the current and future elderly in rural China will help the elderly to provide better for themselves when they are older
New term learned: Human Capital
Defined by wiki:
The skills, knowledge, and experience possessed by an individual or population, viewed in terms of their value or cost to an organization or country.
Basically, the value of an individual to its society.
The skills, knowledge, and experience possessed by an individual or population, viewed in terms of their value or cost to an organization or country.
Basically, the value of an individual to its society.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Salad in Sealed Bags Isn't So Simple, It Seems
From NYT:
For millions of Americans, preparing a mixed green salad is as easy as opening a sealed plastic bag. But here in the land of lettuce, complexity is a given, and time is the enemy.
There is a reason bagged lettuce costs more than twice as much as a head of iceberg. It is not easy getting those perfectly formed leaves, washed and still fresh, from the soil to the table. The process requires speed, technology, secrecy about that technology and plain-old farmers' ingenuity.
Bagged salad sales in the United States have soared in the past decade, exceeding $2 billion last year, according to ACNielsen, the market research company. And while iceberg may still be king, accounting for 73 percent of all lettuce grown in this country, that is a decline from 84 percent in 1992. Consumption of romaine and leaf lettuces like green leaf and red oak has more than doubled since the early 1990's.
''We have a department working on lettuce breeding,'' said Peggy Miars, a spokeswoman for Earthbound Farm, a grower here whose annual sales have grown an average of 55 percent since 1995. ''You don't want a bagful of lettuces that are all flat. That is the main reason we have the frisée in there -- for texture. They are also breeding for better colors. Deeper reds are desirable.''
Whatever the color, speed is of the essence. The moment the plants are shaved from the ground, the clock starts ticking. Six days is allowed for washing and bagging the lettuce and transporting it around the country, and about a week more to sell it. After that, the leaves turn slimy.
And slimy lettuce can be disastrous. As Bill Zinke, vice president for marketing at Ready Pac Produce of Irwindale, Calif., which processes bagged salads, said, ''It's constantly a business of staying up to and ahead of what fields you will be harvesting, not just today and this week but weeks and months in advance.''
Earthbound said it was the first company to package lettuce in bags, starting in 1986. And by packaging whole baby leaves instead of mature heads cut into bite-size pieces, it can move lettuce to market without giving it the ''nitrogen flush'' that bags of cut-up romaine or iceberg lettuce need to keep the cut edges from browning.
But baby greens have to be harvested in just a few days, before they grow too big. Each bag of what the company calls its ''mixed baby greens'' has at least eight varieties of specialty lettuce, nearly all of which had to be ready for harvest the same day.
For Earthbound Farm, the country's largest producer of organic salads, it all begins in fields here. More than 90 percent of all lettuce in the United States is grown in Arizona and in California, mostly from two regions -- Yuma in the winter, and the Salinas Valley in the summer.
The places where the greens are sorted look like a Rube Goldberg drawing. Bins of freshly cut leaves are rushed from nearby farms to the packing plant in refrigerated trucks. Then the bins are lifted into a vacuum tube the diameter of a subway tunnel.
In 20 minutes, the vacuum brings the temperature of the lettuce down to 36 degrees, and it goes into cold storage. Maintaining that temperature until it reaches the grocery will keep it fresh for about 15 days.
Inside, the packing plant is cold and wet, and loud as a jackhammer, as enormous production lines ferry the tiny greens from bin to bag. First, they are upended onto conveyors, passing a row of inspectors and sweeping down a flume into the world's largest salad spinners. Then up conveyors they go, to giant scales and bagging machines. More than 14,000 pounds of lettuce can be processed every hour.
This is where the secrets are kept. The way the flume swishes the lettuce and how harshly the spinners treat it affect how much it is damaged and how nearly perfect and dry the leaves are in the bag. A photographer sent to capture the process was not permitted to take close-ups of the newest machines. Pen and paper were heavily discouraged.
''It is a very competitive environment,'' Drew Goodman, the president of Earthbound Farm, said. ''At most, you get six months'' before new ideas are picked up by rivals.
''With the different service providers and maintenance people,'' he added, ''most any new development is going to be -- available, let's say, to others.''
Mr. Zinke would not discuss Ready Pac's salad washing or drying process. ''It's a very slim-margin business,'' he said. ''So you hang closely on your points of difference that give you a competitive edge.''
Almost none of the technology now used in the industry existed 15 years ago. Mr. Goodman and his wife, Myra Goodman, the founders of Earthbound Farm, started growing lettuce in their backyard in the 1980's. Last year the business, which specializes in baby organic lettuce, had sales of more than $200 million.
The Goodmans developed much of their machinery out of necessity -- a salad spinner, for example, that dries smaller batches of lettuce at lower speeds, causing less damage to the leaves. Machines like it are now widely used in the industry.
In Earthbound's new 115,000-square-foot plant in Yuma, the water flumes have swirling jets to keep the delicate leaves from clumping. The temperature throughout the plant is controlled by a master computer. Charles Sweat, the chief operating officer, travels by company jet between here and the summer plant in San Juan Bautista, Calif., and he can adjust the temperatures by remote control on his laptop.
Once the lettuce is bagged, it is sent off in refrigerated semitrailers to stores around the country. Company officials can only hope that the cooling units on the trucks work well and that the markets store the salad in a cool place.
Fresh Express, which deals mostly in head lettuce that is cut and put into bags, has processing plants around the country, so its workers can cut the heads into bite-size pieces closer to their destination, increasing shelf life. Other companies, including Ready Pac, simply have to hurry to get lettuce on the road.
One of the most important advances in keeping baby and cut lettuce crisp from the time it is packed on the West Coast until it arrives on the East Coast was the development of a new bag to pack it in.
''We had a breakthrough in 1989 that allowed us to take it national,'' said Robin Sprague, a spokeswoman for Fresh Express, one of the companies that began using the process. The packaging, a plastic film that her company calls ''modified atmosphere packaging,'' gives the cut lettuce a longer shelf life by slowing the rate of decay.
At nearly the same time, Ready Pac came up with two more innovations: a system for washing the lettuce three times and a ''pillow pack,'' a bag that is inflated with extra nitrogen to protect the leaves from bruising during shipping.
Organic lettuce is still just about 4 percent, of a giant industry whose change and growth is rippling through other businesses. ''What we're talking about,'' said Ken Hodge, the communications director for the International Fresh-cut Produce Association, ''is a phenomenon that has cut across the whole produce industry.'' Freshly cut fruits are expected to be the next big thing.
Still, salad makers are fighting to take their industry to a new level. They are busy reducing the amount of salad that clumps in the machine. They are improving the tatsoi's texture, and the time it takes lettuce to go from the Arizona field to a dinner table in Bangor, Me.
''This business is really about performing every day,'' said Mr. Goodman of Earthbound Farm. ''So that means having the best quality every day and innovating every day. So hopefully, we're on to our next innovation while our competition is figuring out our last one.''
An Unethical Way to Profit from Agricultural Businesses with investment funding and government support
 |
| Established in 1984 on a 2-acre farm, found its niche 2 years later--being the first to retail organic gourmet salads. It gained recognition from 2003-2008, including being featured in Oprah Show, People's Magazine, Live with Regis and Kelly, and organic trade shows. In 2009, it increased to a 33,000 acre largest US organic farm. How? From private equity investment capital... read the following article. These investors also invest in Arysta, largest producer of methyl iodide, a fumigant, that could cause cancer and reproductive problems. http://www.ebfarm.com |
THE MIDAS TOUCH
Methyl iodide finds friends in unusual places.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Private equity investment – the placement of funds into a company not publicly traded on a stock exchange – is nothing new in agri-business. Examples abound all over the Salinas Valley, from HM Capital Partners of Dallas investing in Earthbound Farm in 2009, to Silicon Valley venture capitalists pumping dollar into the development of new vegetable hybrids. If the stars align for investors and companies alike, it can be a fast and efficient way to grow.
Nor is highly diversified investing unusual for the state’s pension funds. A mix of fixed income, equities and even real estate is the norm for most funds, which also place a percentage of members’ dollars into so-called “alternative investments,” namely private equity partnerships.
But parsing out who invests where can be a pain, because the pension funds frankly don’t always want to talk about it and God knows the equity guys aren’t exactly chatty. But a little bit of customized web research by a computer geek friend revealed that the California State Teachers’ Retirement System has committed nearly $1 billion to an investment vehicle called Permira IV – the fund behind the company that’s bringing the highly controversial fumigant methyl iodide to California’s agriculture market.
Trademarked under the name “Midas” by Arysta LifeScience, methyl iodide was registered by the California Department of Pesticide Control on Dec. 1. It means that barring a potential ban from governor-elect Jerry Brown when he takes office in January, Arysta will begin marketing and selling Midas in California within a matter of months.
Arysta, which has its U.S. headquarters in North Carolina, is owned by IEIL (Industrial Equity Investments Ltd.) Japan. IEIL Japan is a wholly owned subsidiary of IEIL, which is based in the Republic of Ireland. According to documents found on an official website of the European Union, IEIL Japan is a special purpose vehicle created solely for the purchase of Arysta by Permira’s “Permira IV” fund.
Connecting the dots: As of March 2010, CalSTRS has committed $968 million in capital to Permira IV. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, meanwhile, has a book value of $208.2 million with Permira IV.
According to CalSTRS’ own disclosure policy, the system has adopted a policy regarding its private equity partnerships that tries to balance the public’s right to know, subject under California’s Public Records Act, with “not disclosing when the release clearly would outweigh the public interest served by such disclosure.”
In other words, the CalSTRS 848,000 members might not know where all of their money is going. “It’s not a situation where we put out a press release on every investment we do,” says CalSTRS spokesman Ricardo Duran. He then recommended I ask CalSTRS members if they know about this specific investment.
So I’m asking them. Hey, uh, retired teachers, do you know about this one?
Assemblyman Bill Monning doubts it. Given that “the vocal nature of teachers” was responsible for creating the buffer zones that restrict fumigation and spraying around schools, he finds the whole thing troubling.
“It’s something I think warrants serious study and investigation,” says Monning, who received the investment information the same day as The Weekly. Monning said he believes the PERS and STRS members will be asking their boards a lot of questions about this particular investment, and adds, “I expect the teachers who have expressed the greatest concern on the impact of fumigation on students will be asking.”
According to Arysta’s Jeff Tweedy, the company’s head of business development and regulatory affairs, there is a lot of misinformation being circulated about methyl iodide, in particular the now infamous “54 scientists” letter, written by a group of 54 scientists, including five Nobel laureates, who vociferously opposed methyl iodide’s federal approval by the Bush administration in 2007. Arysta, says Tweedy, is the world’s second largest producer of methyl iodide.
The largest producer, at 1 trillion pounds per year, is the ocean, he says.
“If you read what’s being said, it’s, ‘There’s no acceptable level and anyone who comes into contact with it will die’ and that’s just not true,” Tweedy says. “The folks who want to create fear can say what they want and not be held accountable and not put up data to support it.”
Maybe Tweedy is right. We do have to have faith in the science, and the government institutions assigned to regulate it. But big money is driving this equation.
The strawberry industry is vital to our county’s economy. And so, too, is the health and welfare of our people, our workers. Despite the approval, questions remain.
Mary Duan is the editor at Monterey County Weekly. She can be reached at mary@mcweekly.com
Monday, September 19, 2011
I'm turning into an Alpha Female!!!
This article will help.
From
Alpha Females
01/05/09
By Dr Ho Law
How Can Coaching Psychology Help Alpha Females Become Champions Of Leadership And Corporate Social Responsibilities?
Alpha females play special roles in the gender hierarchy and have specific strengths and problems. Coaching intervention could help them develop and sustain their leadership positions, having broken through the ‘glass ceiling’.
Coaching Alpha females can be the most challenging and rewarding experience for coaches and coachees alike.
Complexity in the Expression of Alpha Female Personality Type
Alpha females share similar personality traits as their male counterparts, described by Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®) as ENTJ (Extraversion, iNtuition, Thinking, Judgment). However, their expressions tend to be more subtle. Because they are not obvious, they often go undetected.
Whilst gender differences exist due to the different social challenges that female leaders face within a typically male dominant society, Alpha females tend to maintain more balanced dynamics of personality expressions.
While they are assertive, confident, decisive, determined, dominant, efficient and intelligent (the same traits in Extraverted Thinking type as their male counter parts), they sometimes underplay these attributes and substitute them with their more gentle characters, belonging to their shadow type character (Introverted Feeling).
As Ludeman & Erlandson (2006) observe, compared with Alpha males, fewer females reach the top: the ‘glass ceiling’ for women. With equally high emotional intelligence,Alpha females are clever enough to play the corporate game. They understand that traditional gender norms imply that, being women, they are expected to play caring roles. If they appear too aggressive in their communication, their performance will be ‘judged’ less favourably than their male counterparts.
Combined with skills to strike a more appropriate balance this insight can only be mastered by a few Alpha females: in Chinese parlance, they do the ‘Yang’ job but soften the rough edge with a bit of ‘Ying’ at the right time. The former UK Prime Minister Lady Thatcher is a classic example of such championship.
The Alpha Female’s Dilemma
In our leadership research on breaking through the ‘glass ceiling’, Lesley Yeung, a trainee coaching psychologist at Empsy® Network, has found that owing to the gender stereotype in leadership, Alpha females who are effective, ambitious and critical may be perceived as violating their expected role of nurturing the team.
Thus Alpha females are faced with a unique gender dilemma: should they show off their attributes of assertiveness, independent decision making and career-mindedness; or should they demonstrate their caring side by being supportive and empathetic?
Either way, they may be criticised, as observed by Eagly & Karau (2002). Female leaders often feel torn between the two seemingly contrasting roles.
As mentioned, many Alpha females are capable of overcoming this leadership dilemma by complementing their leadership style with behaviours more consistent with their gender role. They may, for instance, place more value on interpersonal relationships and pay closer attention to people’s sentiments.
They are likely to encourage collaboration and less inclined to intimidate others, unlikeAlpha males. They may be more reluctant and uncomfortable with ‘touchy-feeling’ expressions, but do understand the importance of motivation and team work (for more information, see Ludeman & Erlandson, 2006).
These mixed behaviour patterns may make Alpha females very difficult to identify when initially encountered.
The Queen Bee Syndrome — An Alpha Female Trap
So we almost have a perfect leader or superhuman — a leader who is strategic and visionary, but can also multi-task and pay attention to relationships.
Alpha female leaders may have experienced great barriers and withstood culturally embedded discrimination, but through resilience, hard work and determination have managed to reach to the top.
Alpha females could utilise their softer skills to become better leaders than Alpha males. However, as Yeung has also discovered in her research, when some female leaders reach a position of power and authority they may actually restrain other women from gaining the leadership role in order to protect their own status, rather than helping other women break through the ‘glass ceiling’.
This phenomenon is known as the ‘Queen Bee Syndrome’. Driven by a need to control,Alpha female leaders may undermine other women to protect their own power. ‘Queen Bee’ leaders may even seek out weaker same-gender employees and bully them. As Namie & Namie (2000) observed, these tendencies may be more prominent in male-dominated organisations, where female leaders are encouraged to maintain the culture that enabled their individual success.
Consequently, they may preclude other females from helping each other and breaking the existing ‘glass ceiling’.
How can coaching help Alpha females become true champions?
Irrespective of gender, the use of 360-degree feedback is generally a good coaching tool to help Alpha leaders become aware of others’ perspectives and their impact upon others. Results from 360-degree feedback provide a start point for the coaching dialogue.
To ensure that Alpha female leaders understand their championship role and responsibility in matters of equality and diversity, important in both business sustainability and succession planning, coaches need to help them align their personal values with global ones.
Cultural Social Intelligence (CSI), the online tool developed by the author and his colleagues Sara Ireland and Zulfi Hussain, contains an element called ‘Championship’, specifically designed to measure leaders’ awareness on these aspects. It also provides a 360-degree feedback mechanism for users to review their self-awareness as well as feedback from others. (See http://www.empsy.com/coaching.htm or email the author for information).
Gender inequality and under-representation tend to be prevalent in most organisations, particularly at boardroom level. The resulting tensions in the perspectives and experiences of Alpha female leaders should be openly discussed in a safe coaching environment.
To enable Alpha female leaders to engage with the wider agenda and their corporate social responsibility, important in today’s economic climate, coaches need to inspire coachees, engaging them in re-visioning and re-appraisal exercises.
These not only raise awareness of their roles, but also re-evaluate what is truly at stake. In doing so, coaches need to help coachees to re-energise their new aspirations and address their inner fears.
For instance, when providing the coachee with feedback from her subordinates, the coach may need to explore her underlying fear about the corresponding criticisms. Bearing in mind that the coachee’s own achievements may already have been achieved against a constant backdrop of critical evaluation, negative feedback may be misinterpreted as undermining her authority and perceived as a threat.
The coach may need to focus the feedback on the positive strengths of the coachee. Key dialogues might include a leadership challenge such as:
- OK, we know that you are already very good at these areas. How could you use your own skills and experience to empower others who have not yet benefited from that journey?
- How could you, as a minority leader, help shape the culture of the organisation?
- How do you address the potential problem of bullying at work?
In the last question, for instance, a probing question like “have you been bullied yourself?” might be painfully unwelcome. Instead of asking direct questions which may prove tactless in a coaching conversation, the coach may use a narrative approach (such as ‘re-membering’) to invite the coachee to tell her own story about her experience (for more information on narrative techniques, see Law et al, 2007).
Listening carefully and reading between the lines of those stories, the coach actively identifies the hidden strengths exhibited by the Alpha female battling her way through the organisational matrix, such as struggling for power, etc.
- Do these strengths set a great role model to other women?
- Do you regard the person in your story as a role model for the others
- What would the others think about you if they were here listening to this story now?
By bringing positive values and re-authoring stories of new possibilities, the coachee may become overwhelmed with emotions. These emotions represent a self-awakening of new hopes and dreams, and are to be welcomed.
As Yeung points out, Alpha females are unique individuals with exceptional qualities who could prove to be inspirational leaders.
Coaching could enable them to achieve the highest potential and empower others (both male and female) to collectively develop their leadership skills and career paths.
Diversity in Coaching is available from www.koganpage.com orwww.associationforcoaching.com.
References:
Eagly, A. & Karau, S. (2002). Congruity Theory of Prejudice Toward Female Leaders. Psychological Review. 109, 573 -589.
Law, H.C.; Ireland, S. and Hussain, Z. (2007)The Psychology of Coaching, Mentoring & Learning’. Wiley.
Ludeman, K. & Erlandson, E. (2006). Alpha Male Syndrome. Harvard Business Press. Boston. MA.
Namie, G. & Namie, R. (2000). The bully at work. What You can do to Stop the Hurt and Reclaim Your Dignity on the Job. Sourcebooks Inc: Naperville, IL.
About the author:
Dr Ho Law is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, Chartered Scientist, Fellow of Royal Society of Medicine, a founding member of Association for Coaching, Society for Coaching Psychology, Special Group in Coaching Psychology (British Psychological Society), and the founder director of Empsy® Ltd — a network for coaching (www.empsy.com). At present a senior lecturer at UEL, Coaching Psychology Unit, he is also an international practitioner in psychology, coaching, mentoring and psychotherapy. He is the principal author of ‘The Psychology of Coaching, Mentoring & Learning’ (Wiley, 2007) and contributing author to the Association for Coaching’s book: Diversity in Coaching - Working with Gender, Culture, Race and Age, edited by Jonathan Passmore (Kogan Page, 2009) available from www.koganpage.com orwww.associationforcoaching.com.
By Dr Ho Law
How Can Coaching Psychology Help Alpha Females Become Champions Of Leadership And Corporate Social Responsibilities?
Alpha females play special roles in the gender hierarchy and have specific strengths and problems. Coaching intervention could help them develop and sustain their leadership positions, having broken through the ‘glass ceiling’.
Coaching Alpha females can be the most challenging and rewarding experience for coaches and coachees alike.
Complexity in the Expression of Alpha Female Personality Type
Alpha females share similar personality traits as their male counterparts, described by Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®) as ENTJ (Extraversion, iNtuition, Thinking, Judgment). However, their expressions tend to be more subtle. Because they are not obvious, they often go undetected.
Whilst gender differences exist due to the different social challenges that female leaders face within a typically male dominant society, Alpha females tend to maintain more balanced dynamics of personality expressions.
While they are assertive, confident, decisive, determined, dominant, efficient and intelligent (the same traits in Extraverted Thinking type as their male counter parts), they sometimes underplay these attributes and substitute them with their more gentle characters, belonging to their shadow type character (Introverted Feeling).
As Ludeman & Erlandson (2006) observe, compared with Alpha males, fewer females reach the top: the ‘glass ceiling’ for women. With equally high emotional intelligence,Alpha females are clever enough to play the corporate game. They understand that traditional gender norms imply that, being women, they are expected to play caring roles. If they appear too aggressive in their communication, their performance will be ‘judged’ less favourably than their male counterparts.
Combined with skills to strike a more appropriate balance this insight can only be mastered by a few Alpha females: in Chinese parlance, they do the ‘Yang’ job but soften the rough edge with a bit of ‘Ying’ at the right time. The former UK Prime Minister Lady Thatcher is a classic example of such championship.
The Alpha Female’s Dilemma
In our leadership research on breaking through the ‘glass ceiling’, Lesley Yeung, a trainee coaching psychologist at Empsy® Network, has found that owing to the gender stereotype in leadership, Alpha females who are effective, ambitious and critical may be perceived as violating their expected role of nurturing the team.
Thus Alpha females are faced with a unique gender dilemma: should they show off their attributes of assertiveness, independent decision making and career-mindedness; or should they demonstrate their caring side by being supportive and empathetic?
Either way, they may be criticised, as observed by Eagly & Karau (2002). Female leaders often feel torn between the two seemingly contrasting roles.
As mentioned, many Alpha females are capable of overcoming this leadership dilemma by complementing their leadership style with behaviours more consistent with their gender role. They may, for instance, place more value on interpersonal relationships and pay closer attention to people’s sentiments.
They are likely to encourage collaboration and less inclined to intimidate others, unlikeAlpha males. They may be more reluctant and uncomfortable with ‘touchy-feeling’ expressions, but do understand the importance of motivation and team work (for more information, see Ludeman & Erlandson, 2006).
These mixed behaviour patterns may make Alpha females very difficult to identify when initially encountered.
The Queen Bee Syndrome — An Alpha Female Trap
So we almost have a perfect leader or superhuman — a leader who is strategic and visionary, but can also multi-task and pay attention to relationships.
Alpha female leaders may have experienced great barriers and withstood culturally embedded discrimination, but through resilience, hard work and determination have managed to reach to the top.
Alpha females could utilise their softer skills to become better leaders than Alpha males. However, as Yeung has also discovered in her research, when some female leaders reach a position of power and authority they may actually restrain other women from gaining the leadership role in order to protect their own status, rather than helping other women break through the ‘glass ceiling’.
This phenomenon is known as the ‘Queen Bee Syndrome’. Driven by a need to control,Alpha female leaders may undermine other women to protect their own power. ‘Queen Bee’ leaders may even seek out weaker same-gender employees and bully them. As Namie & Namie (2000) observed, these tendencies may be more prominent in male-dominated organisations, where female leaders are encouraged to maintain the culture that enabled their individual success.
Consequently, they may preclude other females from helping each other and breaking the existing ‘glass ceiling’.
How can coaching help Alpha females become true champions?
Irrespective of gender, the use of 360-degree feedback is generally a good coaching tool to help Alpha leaders become aware of others’ perspectives and their impact upon others. Results from 360-degree feedback provide a start point for the coaching dialogue.
To ensure that Alpha female leaders understand their championship role and responsibility in matters of equality and diversity, important in both business sustainability and succession planning, coaches need to help them align their personal values with global ones.
Cultural Social Intelligence (CSI), the online tool developed by the author and his colleagues Sara Ireland and Zulfi Hussain, contains an element called ‘Championship’, specifically designed to measure leaders’ awareness on these aspects. It also provides a 360-degree feedback mechanism for users to review their self-awareness as well as feedback from others. (See http://www.empsy.com/coaching.htm or email the author for information).
Gender inequality and under-representation tend to be prevalent in most organisations, particularly at boardroom level. The resulting tensions in the perspectives and experiences of Alpha female leaders should be openly discussed in a safe coaching environment.
To enable Alpha female leaders to engage with the wider agenda and their corporate social responsibility, important in today’s economic climate, coaches need to inspire coachees, engaging them in re-visioning and re-appraisal exercises.
These not only raise awareness of their roles, but also re-evaluate what is truly at stake. In doing so, coaches need to help coachees to re-energise their new aspirations and address their inner fears.
For instance, when providing the coachee with feedback from her subordinates, the coach may need to explore her underlying fear about the corresponding criticisms. Bearing in mind that the coachee’s own achievements may already have been achieved against a constant backdrop of critical evaluation, negative feedback may be misinterpreted as undermining her authority and perceived as a threat.
The coach may need to focus the feedback on the positive strengths of the coachee. Key dialogues might include a leadership challenge such as:
- OK, we know that you are already very good at these areas. How could you use your own skills and experience to empower others who have not yet benefited from that journey?
- How could you, as a minority leader, help shape the culture of the organisation?
- How do you address the potential problem of bullying at work?
In the last question, for instance, a probing question like “have you been bullied yourself?” might be painfully unwelcome. Instead of asking direct questions which may prove tactless in a coaching conversation, the coach may use a narrative approach (such as ‘re-membering’) to invite the coachee to tell her own story about her experience (for more information on narrative techniques, see Law et al, 2007).
Listening carefully and reading between the lines of those stories, the coach actively identifies the hidden strengths exhibited by the Alpha female battling her way through the organisational matrix, such as struggling for power, etc.
- Do these strengths set a great role model to other women?
- Do you regard the person in your story as a role model for the others
- What would the others think about you if they were here listening to this story now?
By bringing positive values and re-authoring stories of new possibilities, the coachee may become overwhelmed with emotions. These emotions represent a self-awakening of new hopes and dreams, and are to be welcomed.
As Yeung points out, Alpha females are unique individuals with exceptional qualities who could prove to be inspirational leaders.
Coaching could enable them to achieve the highest potential and empower others (both male and female) to collectively develop their leadership skills and career paths.
Diversity in Coaching is available from www.koganpage.com orwww.associationforcoaching.com.
References:
Eagly, A. & Karau, S. (2002). Congruity Theory of Prejudice Toward Female Leaders. Psychological Review. 109, 573 -589.
Law, H.C.; Ireland, S. and Hussain, Z. (2007)The Psychology of Coaching, Mentoring & Learning’. Wiley.
Ludeman, K. & Erlandson, E. (2006). Alpha Male Syndrome. Harvard Business Press. Boston. MA.
Namie, G. & Namie, R. (2000). The bully at work. What You can do to Stop the Hurt and Reclaim Your Dignity on the Job. Sourcebooks Inc: Naperville, IL.
About the author:
Dr Ho Law is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, Chartered Scientist, Fellow of Royal Society of Medicine, a founding member of Association for Coaching, Society for Coaching Psychology, Special Group in Coaching Psychology (British Psychological Society), and the founder director of Empsy® Ltd — a network for coaching (www.empsy.com). At present a senior lecturer at UEL, Coaching Psychology Unit, he is also an international practitioner in psychology, coaching, mentoring and psychotherapy. He is the principal author of ‘The Psychology of Coaching, Mentoring & Learning’ (Wiley, 2007) and contributing author to the Association for Coaching’s book: Diversity in Coaching - Working with Gender, Culture, Race and Age, edited by Jonathan Passmore (Kogan Page, 2009) available from www.koganpage.com orwww.associationforcoaching.com.
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