ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
T
here is only the name of the author on the cover, but there is a whole team behind her.
Deepest thanks go first with all my heart to my parents, Alfred and Tina Schaer, who brought me up peacefully and naturally. They allowed me to go out into the world where I then made my appearance as a female leader, and they would often say, “You are more in America than with us!”
The greatest respect to my mentors, Martin and Gigi Sage, who brought out my natural leadership. Together with them I was able to research, teach and pass on the principles of leadership for 12 years. As a special trio we have pushed the evolution of more peace and love in the world and united the best from the USA and Europe.
I go on my knees before my men: Uwe, Eckhard, Volker, Sebastian and Chéfe. Each of you with his love has stood at my side like a rock.
You love me and have always helped me, have accompanied me on my innovative road and have brought up and protected all the children, grandchildren, customers and the team.
It has never been easy, but it is and remains an adventure for us all!
I thank my 6 children, Sebastian, Anneli, Christian Cyrill, Benjamin Moses, Konstantin and Joy that they are as curious as their mother, who opened the family system to the world. You were ready to move at any time, and whoever brought you up is welcome.
Special deep admiration for my oldest daughter Anneli, who has always been there devotedly and has borne all the intensive phases.
Thanks to all the many clients I was allowed to wake and who trusted themselves to stand by their individual talent and thus achieved independence. The new entrepreneurship is the trend of our generation, and will have a great impact on Germany.
My very special acclamation for the united learning and building of the “most innovative company in Germany” goes to my Wailea team: Irene, Margit and Monika. You have worked so hard and have become women who are genuine role models for society.
FOREWORD
J
acqueline Kennedy Onassis was a bright child. When she was only four she went off on her own during a walk in Central Park with her newborn baby sister Lee and the nanny. When Jackie lost her way, the little girl was found by a policeman. When she saw him, she said self-assuredly, “My sister and my nanny seem to have gotten lost.”
When Jackie Kennedy moved into the White House at the side of her husband, she resolved to renovate the building and turn it into a grand house. Unfortunately, there was no money for the project.
The First Lady decided to finance it through her own resources. And she had an idea: she would introduce her own love of beauty, art and history and show children a living White House. The boys would experience history through all the things from other times that they got to see there. The girls should find it beautiful and lived-in, so there always had to be flowers there and a real fire burning in the grate. The White House should have a purpose, and that should be restored. And all the visitors and children should feel and see this purpose. Jackie resisted merely decorating, stressing the difference from restoration, and she wanted all the previous Presidents to be tangible. She herself loved the Lincoln Room, which contains all Lincoln’s effects, things that he had handled; and the atmosphere was similar to that of a cathedral, the same sense of peace and meditation. Sometimes Jackie would sit alone in the room, and could genuinely feel Lincoln’s strength, as if she was communicating with him. She had the greatest affinity with Jefferson, but it was Lincoln she loved.
Then she realized that about two million visitors walked through the White House annually. And they were ultimately the “cause” of the rapid wear and tear of the building. In any case, she didn’t charge an entry fee. Instead she produced an illustrated guide to the building, which visitors could purchase for a dollar.
It was obvious to her that every visitor would as a matter of course wish to take home this one dollar guide as a souvenir. Within a very short time the money for an extensive and lasting renovation was raised. With the assistance of the National Geographic Society, over eight million copies of the guide have been sold since 1962. Jackie Kennedy was the editor.
INTRODUCTION
Companies and businesses are like human beings. They are born, they grow and they die. And in between are several ages: innocent, curious and playful childhood; the wild storm and stress of adolescence; the erotic 20s; the decisive 30s; the level-headed 40s, rocked by midlife crisis. And so on… to old age, wisdom and death.
Just as humans, trees or businesses grow physically and organically, so too is there a mental growth that is largely undervalued. For example, as children we are curious about everything. There is nothing around us that is not new. The more we learn, the more our curiosity abates. We become curious about other things: in puberty about the opposite sex, later about self-realization, about money, about success, or about fame. And in every life of every person there is one thing that will always concern them, which will always make them curious and absorb them: their special talents. By realizing and using them a person will celebrate the greatest successes and will get the greatest enjoyment out of life. Curiosity helps us to grow mentally. As long as secrets exist, we have to discover them.
Mental Development
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ehind, however, lies experience, the awareness of an intuitive truth. Through many experiences we become undeceived in the true sense of the word, disillusioned, perhaps even embittered, melancholy or depressed. Once we have won back curiosity we grow beyond ourselves. We discover pleasure in the things we do, and experience our mental development as a career.
Curiosity is the mainspring of mental development. Our “performance scale” is based on this approach, which shows the different stages in mental growth. Whether individuals, families, enterprises or organizations –they all stand at a particular stage of development. You can frequently tell from the faces of individuals, of employees in a firm or members of a football team which stage they are at as soon as they perform: are they sad, worried, tense, or passionate, self-confident, full of enthusiasm? Once we have awakened curiosity in people, they will develop mentally. And our success grows at the same time.
The same type of growth exists in the economy. Without an awareness of the mental condition of a company or its undertakings nothing can grow further. Without knowing what doesn’t work you will not get any further towards being in the black. And that applies as much to a company team as it does to a football team.
Businesses are alive – and grow
I
n any company, you only have to see how much time people spend coming to an agreement, what the mood is and how individuals behave towards one another and communicate. This is of almost more concern to the manager today that the turnover figures. It’s not surprising: everyone knows that they can only succeed as long as there is a good team. And that is why there is a demand for female bosses, with their clear-eyed perception of everything that passes between people.
If you decide today to live your own life and go into action, at certain times things will rain down on you that you can only partially explain without the concept of mental development. We will explain these things to you and show you how to go forward. This should arouse your curiosity. In his book “Live your Dream”, Martin Sage has demonstrated how to live a life that leads to our true talent. The “female leader” is meant here – the woman who embraces her natural talent in order to make herself independent and to make a career out of her life. The time is ripe. It has never been easier for women to have the self-confidence to found their own organization and do business than today. Programs like the series “Sex and the City” have contributed considerably to a paradigm shift. Suddenly women have stopped focusing on men, and prefer to turn on their own axis. What happens next when the compass is pointed in a new direction cannot be predicted – only experienced. That is curiosity.
During the course of life curiosity is mostly repressed. Disillusionment, disappointment and above all the need for security dissuade the majority of people from putting their “calling” in the foreground or from making it the goal of their lives. If you are doing what you have always wanted to do, or if you have now decided to do it - congratulations! This book is a manual for all those who dare to take the step out into the wide prairie of independent entrepreneurship. And their numbers are increasing - especially among women.
Liberty, otherness, fraternity
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an’t live with you, can’t live without you: Relationships are indicators of human energy. Love is the highest form of energy – what doesn’t one do out of love? The powerful energy that love unleashes may indicate the strength of that. This can be introduced as the curiosity factor, which will continually drive us on the way through this book, before everything becomes familiar.
Men and women often cannot live together and under no circumstances without each other. Their differences are their capital. That has always been case throughout evolution. Only the roles were divided differently.
In business the formula for a successful future lies in different qualities. Our thesis is that the most successful teams are those with an equal number of men and women with the capability of celebrating their differences, and using them for a common strategy.
Men and women meet on the same level in business and management. After the end of “battle of the sexes” and the entry of women into business they are genuinely emancipated and bring a breath of fresh air into entrepreneurship.
There is a new energy between man and woman. For the first time they are forgetting their preconceived notions of the opposite sex. They are becoming curious about one another. Countless books have been written in the last few years about the charming differences between the perspectives of men and of women – and celebrated. Daily business included.
In fact there is little that women don’t do or look at completely differently from men. The “little differences” is one of the most exciting and entertaining themes of our time. Women are no longer “on the advance”. They have arrived. On the boardroom floor in business, as the head of a company as well as in politics, female influence is highly valued.
The integrating capabilities of women, in areas such as relationship management for example, are decisive elements in an economy in which service plays the most important part.
Never before has it been possible for women to combine their careers with standard family life to that degree. Whereas in former times the woman found herself in a dilemma between the kitchen, children and career, now she can combine all the things that are dear and precious to her owing to the phenomenal amenities of telecommunication through the cell phone or the internet. This is the first generation for which the type of “Womanagement” is possible. Men and women are no longer fixed in their gender roles. Now things are shared in a brotherly and sisterly manner.
Service - why right now?
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he information and media age lies just as far behind us as the industrial age. Since the beginning of the new millennium and its historical beginning on September 11, 2001, the service economy has superseded the old capitalist power structure, as it served capital more than people.
While the old economic tanker grindingly held its course, purging itself through redundancies, so that no employee could be sure of keeping their position, a parallel economy developed which was based on self-employment and which produced new answers, new capital and new careers with brilliant ideas and innovations in the service sector.
In Germany, the “desert of service”, especially, many a stretch of waste land has yet to be turned into an oasis. Parallel to this is the drive towards self-determination, freedom and the development of personal interests and capabilities. Even the government tends to encourage people to pursue their own interests and to develop their own business ideas and become self-employed. More and more people are discovering that the greatest potential lies in themselves: their entire personal talent lies there to be capitalized on. When women found and lead a business, they can for the first time employ their feminine talents within this service economy.
In a ten year study Danish researchers discovered that businesses which had more women in management worked more profitably. “In fact women manage differently”, commentated the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung” (5. June 1005, p. 39), “Although women lull their male competitors into a sense of security through their calmness and reticence in the beginning, when it comes down to it they negotiate tenaciously and ruthlessly with their eye on the goal. (…) The management techniques of women, who on the whole rely on intuition rather than reflection, also go far beyond seemingly friendly listening.
“In contrast to all the traditional management tools women create a closer relationship with their employees though their prevailingly highly intuitive way of leadership,” says Lammers, a female headhunter. “They create bonds which makes the employees obliged to them. (…) That is why they are so valuable.”
A further study in England compared masculine and feminine styles of leadership and came to the conclusion that, “Women managed in a much more informal way, involved employees more in decision-making and inspired them. Moreover, women in management positions forgot less quickly what it feels like to be an employee.” “The employees admired their female bosses for it,” summed up Inge Kloepfer of the FAS. “This type of bonding is a much subtler way of exercising power and influence than the pressure of hierarchies.”
The old and the new service economy
S
ervice has a new definition. “Service” does not simply mean provision of services. The German postal service, the Deutsche Post, is a classic example of a company that provides a service. But what would happen if in the near future it lost its monopoly on the delivery of letters?
They would have competition that would terrify them: perhaps postal workers who would not only deliver letters, but collect the post, sell stamps and through other services save the trip to the increasingly meager post office and replace postboxes – to mention only a few ideas that the Deutsche Post won’t look at. It is a service-impeder, a service provider that no longer provides a service, or a logistics enterprise that no longer cares about private communication - whichever way you want to look at it. In any case nothing is more tedious and cumbersome than sending a letter in the age of the email. Before the long march to the post box there are stamps to obtain, the five digit post code that nobody can remember to be looked up, and paper and envelopes to be procured.
A recent development: if the envelope does not stick properly, or if the seal of the package doesn’t hold, one is politely enforced to purchase string or adhesive tape in the local “Shop” to do what the post office worker used to do as a matter of course. Good luck to anyone who looks for redress.
The “new service” means: to put yourself completely in the situation of others and to recognize their requirements and their sources of curiosity, in order to create a product and offer it to the right people.
Women are better suited to this service economy than men, because they are better trained for historical and cultural reasons. In the history of evolution, men’s hands were full with hunting and gathering, while women concerned themselves with order in the domestic and familial structure. Apart from the Amazons and the female Pharaohs, in the history of mankind they were rarely the “rulers” who reigned over the private court, the people and the empire. Men were the hunters, the warriors, protectors and proprietors; women the ones who kept everything together. But this “deprivation” was compensated for by other capabilities. Women are better at every type of game, whether social games, power games or erotic games.
The entry of female paradigms in business
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hat is more promising for success today – showing off or team spirit? Dominance or empathy? To command or to entice? Power or networking? How do you get further in the long term: with marching orders or through knowledge of people?
During evolution particular capabilities have been gradually developed by each respective sex. Evolution has trained men to win and to display strength because they had to be responsible for protecting their existence through war, reproduction or the husbandry of the farm, the Greek “oikos”, from which the earliest “economy” sprang. Men were automatically the “rulers”, and had to live up to this role, for which they were accepted by both men and women. Likewise women wanted to be “understood”.
Today we benefit from both male and female capabilities: understanding, discretion and sexual intelligence on the female part; approval, dealing with problems, and assertion on the male.
“Children, church and kitchen” was significantly the domain for women’s self-development in earlier times. “Clothes, cosmetics and chatter” mocked a political satirist later. The truth lies in between: women can do two things at the same time. They can manage children as well as a career. Therefore they earn their own money and can spend it on what they want: clothes, cosmetics… and they are unbeatable in the art of communication.
Power and success is no longer the domain of men. The myth of the Porsche driving “top dog” who is in control of everything and everybody is over - now that women can afford and drive one themselves.
That goes for industry too. “Images” enhance the status of products artificially, and often without legitimacy. Companies “cut into” the market with new products, stage “hostile takeovers” and lose their position within the social situation or social responsibility through unrealistic and no longer comprehensible strategies of acquisition of capital.
Men have learned to assert themselves. Women look for consensus. Men know what they want. Women also know what others want. Men wield power. Women have power – often more than they show. And sometimes it is the other way round.
There are women who gain power by using men’s weapons: Angela Merkel, for example. Conversely men want to “conquer” women, and sometimes that doesn’t work at all. At least, not with the means they commonly use. They will conquer the market of the future when they are able to bring their laboriously learned arts of seduction to the business world. They will have to be able to arouse women’s curiosity. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
Men and women are a magnet for each other. Every time they meet, a game begins. They ensnare one another. They are always discovering new perspectives. They are always open to new things. They can continually surprise one another. They are curious about each other. And not only in a sexual way. In business too. Because, for the first time in the history of the human race, women have the chance of winning, the modern business game is definitely one of the phenomena of our time. The new economy no longer follows the rules of war. Increasingly the rules of a free game are dominating: the business game.
In this game, certain capabilities are required, such as being able to put oneself in the position of others and to recognize their desires and needs.
This is the idea of the new “service economy”. It works not only through tactics but also through charm. Entertainment rather than dictatorship dominates: you can no longer “conquer” the public, for example; you can only “win them over” – through entertainment, not propaganda. A product sells increasingly badly through advertising and brainwashing, through the pressures of boosted value and status symbols.
Enticement is a better means. A service is most convincing when personal recognition or satisfaction, if not complete satisfaction, can be expected of it. Entertainment, appreciation and sex are the insignia of the new service economy. And the difference lies in the fact that women are able to participate on the same level. They don’t have to adapt male strengths, in which they appear as an example of the dominant “career woman”, but can use their own.
Cooperation with men brings out a new, unexpected energy. We can see that in our daily work, especially of course in our businesswomen’s and power couples’ seminars. Often it even happens that couples who have discovered their strengths during training hit upon the idea of capitalizing on them and go on to found a successful business together.
Before, a model. Now, a role model.
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hereas before women were assigned careers which were confined to the domestic sphere, today every women can do want she wants. Where women decide, the “feminine” principles are more sought after and more successful.
Their historical roles as muse or geisha, who serves men while influencing them, are still to be seen in politics for example. Behind successful men often stand thoughtful and guiding women like Napoleon’s Josephine or Jackie Kennedy. Increasingly they are coming out from under the shadow of great men to hold high office themselves: Condoleezza Rice or Angela Merkel. Whether through more masculine means or through feminine intuition, cunning and malice. But in the end with success. And that also provides an incentive for women.
Female leaders are examples. If successful women were before almost exclusively “models”, today they are “role models”. They wield influence over methods, approaches and ways of doing business, and are turning businesses and branches of trade inside out. Women can achieve great success in business through their personality. From Anita Roddick (The Body Shop) to Carly Fiorino (HP) there are more and more women who don’t pretend to be men but are successful women as women: Christiane zu Salm, who turned the “women’s channel” TM3 into the despised game channel 9Live, in which nobody invested a cent, and out of which she made millions. She became successful and rich. Or there is Friede Springer, formerly a nanny in Axel Springer’s household, who led his financially stricken concern back to being one of the biggest publishing houses in Europe.
Or Joanne K. Rowling, who before “Harry Potter”, lived on welfare. And many other women whom we would like to introduce to you.
What applies to individuals also applies to organizations. The teams that have the greatest energy have the greatest success. Infinitely more energy is let loose through emotional intelligence, empathy, love and other “feminine” characteristics than through authority, pressure, and commands. “Male” bosses are affected by methods of dominance. They are calibrated to gain respect by authoritarian means. They make sure that they are unbearable. Which “boss” really wants to be like that?
Female bosses in the modern sense are people whom one simply doesn’t want to let down: more coach than manager. Their goals are defined more through satisfaction than through numbers.
