The Keeper of That Tapping Pen

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/business/22corner.html?emc=eta1

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/do-women-make-better-bosses/?emc=eta1

"The Keeper of That Tapping Pen" is Anne Mulcahy who retired as Chairwoman and CEO of Xerox in May of this year. After 8 years of hard work turning around a company that the NY Times characterized as "...in disarray", she replaced herself with her own handpicked successor Ursula M. Burns, who was her second in command as president. Ms. Burns became the first African-American woman to run a company as large as Xerox ($17.6 billion in 2008 revenues).

Mulcahy took over Xerox in 2001 when security analysts described it as a lethargic company that had lost ground to Canon and Ricoh...at one point the analyst consensus was that Xerox was headed for bankruptcy. In an interview with Adam Bryant of the NY Times earlier this year (attached), Mulcahy said that, when you have a window of opportunity called a "crisis", move as quickly as you can, get as much done as you can. You learn about "failure" quickly and you perform "triage" (my word) on your investments.

Mulcahy's "tapping pen" comes from her meetings where, although she was not formal, she was impatient for people to get to the point. She rose through sales and looked to transfer out because she felt she was running out of steam. So, she chose human resources because she thought it was really interesting and could play a powerful role in organizational change. In that role, she discovered quickly how little honest feedback people got in companies and how important it was for people to have a sense of candid assessment.

Aside from the brilliance of what Mulcahy accomplished, she also broke the standard assumption that the CEO should come from Marketing, or Finance (and what a disaster that has been for GM), or Manufacturing. She came from Human Resources and knew the company. She had a feel for what was needed and made the hard decisions when they were required.

I see her as an excellent example of great management being "gender neutral". She was brilliant, results-oriented and empathetic. And, this brings me to my second attachment from the "ROOM FOR DEBATE" blog at the NY Times where the editors posed the question: "Do Women Make Better Bosses?" This subject choice resulted from a short interview done a week earlier with Carol Smith, the senior vice president and chief brand officer for the Elle Group, who said that female bosses are better advisers, mentors and rational thinkers. She also went on to say that male bosses love to hear themselves talk - this, of course, generated a lot of reaction.

It is interesting to me that the modern organization behavior texts do take a position on this issue stating, based on studies done by Alice Eagly (chairman of the department of social psychology at Northwestern University), and others, that the leadership performance of female leaders is comparable to, and in some dimensions such as transformational or change-oriented leadership, superior to, the performance of male leaders (Organizational Behavior, Bauer and Erdogan, 2009). Eagly is the first to respond in the blog mentioned above and states there that she has read hundreds of studies that compare women and men as managers, and summarizes: female managers are more collaborative and democratic than male managers. Eagly goes on, as do the opinions in the blog, and I recommend it as excellent reading.

My own thoughts go back to "The Keeper of That Tapping Pen" who was not the first choice of the Xerox Board of Directors. Their first choice was someone who failed, so they turned to her in desperation and, on the brink of failure, she saved the company and created a CEO role model for this decade.