Wingtips for Women: Success Without Compromise

Maybe this is a good time to back up and tell you a little about why we wrote this book. I say ‘we’ because if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a city to write a book! The idea was birthed out of an innocent lunch in which my friends and colleagues, Laura and Daryl, jokingly (I thought!) suggested that one day I should write down all the things I had learned about succeeding as a woman in business and put it in the form of letters to my then teen-aged niece. The idea was to pass on the lessons learned to the next generation.

A couple of years passed and another business acquaintance suggested the same thing. I was beginning to get the message. When the third person gave me a numerical (data) reason to write the book, I knew it was time. The stats he quoted to me were astounding and compelling. His particular area of interest was women in sales. And his question was: If 25% of the people in sales are women, but only 1% of those women make it to top leadership positions in sales, where did all the women go? And why?

As I thought about this, I checked some other stats. It isn’t just sales leadership that is short on women; the shortage is in the board room and the C-suite across the board. And my mother thought her generation had waged and won the battles for career women of her daughters’ generation! Sadly, and fortunately for you, the frontiers are still plentiful.

The wonderful part of our pursuit of this book was learning that many women who have done well in their careers truly care about sharing their experiences with the next generation—and not just with women, but with men, too, who are climbing the career ladder.

So, while the women we interviewed for the book are each the top sales executive in their companies, the wisdom they share is mostly sales-neutral. That is, the lessons can be applied to any function and any organization, for-profit or not-for-profit, business or education.

The book is our way of helping you to learn from some extraordinary, yet ordinary, women who love what they do, who have made successful careers in the midst of a mostly male world and who have not compromised who they are as women, mothers, wives, mentors and executives. The book provides you access to women who know what it takes to reach the top rungs of the executive ladder without losing yourself.

Did we find out why so many women don’t make it? Not quantitatively, but there are some qualitative findings that we will share along the way.

Listen and learn from their experiences, the good and the not-so-good!

The book will be on Amazon in the next few weeks, so watch for Wingtips for Women coming your way. In the meantime, visit the blog as often as you wish and let us know what is on your mind. We want this to be a resource for you, not just a writing exercise for us!

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