Nurturing success through the feminine experience

Heru Prasetyo, Country Managing Director, Accenture

How many of us employers see that the challenge of today's business is less complex than what we faced before? How many of us employees feel that the demands on our ability have declined? I dare to assume not many, and those who feel that way should be very grateful for their enormous luck, or may deserve a wake-up call.

Life and work are getting exceedingly complex. The speed of events, the nakedness of our inability in the eye of easily distributable e-mails, the need for multi-tasking -- they all contribute to the complexity of our daily challenges.

The ability to survive and prosper depends on the new technology sprinkled work. In the outer layer, blanketing our work, the economic and political environment is equally tasking, forcing long term plans to be reconstructed into a long string of short term (and reactive) ones.

Against that backdrop the challenge of performance does not blink -- not even once. It even gets more acute due to the fact that the company has to succumb even more to the wishes of the customers. Ah, the customers! These days they have the widest array of choices in history. More TV stations, more airlines, more telephone service providers, more supermarkets, more brands, more ... you name it. And this reflects on how the company must behave to survive. Not surprisingly the pressure extends to the workforce. And the battle cry is "care!" -- customer care, including employees.

Is it a surprise, then, that on those half page newspaper ads on the insurance sales superstars that most of the faces are women? When will we accept that nurturing is the domain of women or a feminine experience that the unlucky other half of the population have been largely deprived of?

Is it surprising that the person who initiated the worldwide movement to clean up land-mines, left over from various wars, was a lady and her Internet keyboard? What of names like Carly Fiorina of HP, Wiwiek Santoso of Astra and Ditta of Sampoerna and Ratna Sarumpaet?

Outstanding performance means standing out among the crowd. And when the crowd grows very sophisticated, in order to stand out you need to be extraordinary. And the tool is here, for all to use -- information and communication technology. And for a defined window of time the game has shifted to an area where the feminine experience is extremely powerful.

The delivery, the management and the maintenance of innovation! Innovation itself is gender neutral but what about the nurturing of it into fruition, and imbibe it in the minds of the next generation of leaders? Just ask yourself whether it was your mom or your dad who had an abundance of care, patience and decisiveness that influenced "the you" of today.

So the message is clear -- in today's complex world, care is a competitive advantage. So if you are not blessed with the opportunity of the feminine experience you need to learn it quick, and if you happen to be fortunate enough to have it, this is your time to shine. Outstanding performance, here we come!