Better Together

8 Ways Working with Women Leads to Extraordinary Products and Profits

Jonathan Sposato

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781119452188
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119452089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión de recursos humanos

It is the year 2017 and gender equality and women thriving in work place without fear of sexual harassment or discrimination is the #1 unsolved social issue of our time.

Better Together: 8 Ways Working with Women Leads to Extraordinary Products and Profits offers a rare and startling look at the business world through the lens of an expert looking in and plots out how ALL types of businesses can gain a competitive advantage and excel past competitors by simply nurturing an equal blend of men and women on leadership teams and staff.  It focuses on powerful and implementable solutions that any CEO, manager, or team leader can put to use to ensure that women thrive within the organization, leading to the business being more successful, customers happier, and employees more fulfilled.

Author Jonathan Sposato knows the challenges facing women in startup tech and venture capital today because he specifically builds his companies with-out those obstacles. He credits the unprecedented success of his businesses on his brand of gender-balanced culture, and in this fully practical guidebook to his celebrated style of team building, he puts his eight secrets to profiting through diversity in your hands. These secrets are not just for tech companies, but for teams and companies in ANY industry.

It is the culmination of extensive research on the many issues that affect gender equality (or lack thereof) in the workplace, exhaustive interviews with many powerful female CEO's and executives who have been brave in sharing stories of their own personal struggles and triumphs, as well as Jonathan's own experiences as a male entrepreneur, CEO, and angel investor in supporting the advancement of women in business. The book also shows us why that's not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do economically.

With the same entertaining and informative delivery that makes him a sought-after speaker worldwide, Jonathan walks you through adjusting your own culture to open the FULL potential of your workforce.

The data will amaze you and the real-world voices will inspire you, and with Better Together you can achieve more success with more women on your team. If you care about inclusivity and beating the forces that prevent it, you will want to read this book.

1
Men Must Change

1992. Redmond, Washington. Consumer Division. Building 17.

I remember walking the halls of Building 17 in the middle of the night, just days before the deadline for shipping a product, the unmistakable smell of stale pizza in the air, combined with the whiff of half‐a‐dozen unwashed engineers pulling their third all‐nighter.

The early 1990s were heady days for us young punks working in tech. The average age of a Microsoft employee at the time was about 29, but it felt like 19. And the population was overwhelmingly male and almost all white. In between muddy afternoon soccer matches in front of Building 8 and impromptu runs to the local Godfather's restaurant to play grease‐buttoned Asteroids, we worked our butts off creating the most innovative technology solutions to everyday problems.

Inventing new product categories was my personal specialty. After abruptly chickening out of law school, I started a games company, which grew to 42 employees at the beginning of the “software renaissance.” We made some of the very first games on the Nintendo, Sega, and NEC consoles, each project an exploration in new gaming experiences. When I came to Microsoft to get a “real job,” my projects were an interactive TV show for kids, a web‐based episodic comic book in which the pages spoke to you, and eventually the first game console that could push 124,000 polygons per second. We were changing the world one ship cycle at a time, years before Google, Amazon, or Facebook.

One colleague, who was an engineering rock star would routinely spar with CEO “billg” during meetings—and win. “No Bill, I think YOU are confused. And here's why….” We learned that loud and assertive was good. Might was right, and bravado ruled the roost. My friend, whose father was a retired engineer at Boeing, never missed an opportunity to remind his dad that our upstart software company that made the future out of thin air and brainpower boasted a higher market cap than the leading aerospace company of seven decades and billions in hard assets. Our stock option grants made us multimillionaires in our twenties, and the ideas we pitched got funded and became divisions. We sincerely believed ourselves to be a true meritocracy, and the seeds of “brogrammer” culture were sown.

Douglas Coupland's poignant capture of Microsoft's early culture.

There were very few female colleagues working on products with us, so when we dated, we looked aspirationally to the “HR babes” in Building 24. They were refined, pretty, and smart while we languished in a man‐child state. We treated them with a sort of geeky reverence. When one walked into the room, the energy would change palpably. We intuitively stopped being complete dorks and occasionally old‐fashioned Edwardian‐like romances budded. To this day, I smile when I see some of these still‐married couples. And the few amazing women who were in management, leading product, or on technical teams, most of them knew better than to waste their time on us. They dated up in the stratosphere and deservedly so.

Welcome to Man Island

Then starting in the mid‐1990s, we began to notice that the women at all levels in product groups started to leave, but we couldn't figure out why. Looking back, it's obvious: the culture was becoming unfriendly. For example, during an exhaustive candidate search for an open position, I recall one meeting with a male group manager who brashly stated his preference for the type of program manager leader we needed to hire: “I want to hear his balls clacking when he walks down the hall!”

Rather than being a conventional computer nerd, I was a scholar athlete who varsity lettered and was voted student body president. I generally traversed all social strata—friends with jocks, stoners, and computer lab geeks alike. At Microsoft, my photo was used in their recruiting brochure for several years, while I was routinely tapped to do public presentations on stage with CEO Bill Gates as a sort of amicable young company spokesperson. I enjoyed demoing new product offerings to developers, financial analysts, and movie studio execs with humor and lightheartedness not often associated with Microsoft's staid corporate persona. I remember thinking, “We're starting to become cool, coming out of geekdom.” But, at the same time, in the then fast‐growing games group, I saw some colleagues' offices down the hall be adorned with posters of big‐busted female characters from video games. A few of these guys routinely compared notes on whose booth at E3 had the hottest models. At the lowest point, one shocking team meeting in the division cafeteria featured scantily clad “nurses” passing out Jello shots as a sort of morale booster. Facepalm.

Amid this budding “bro culture,” some product divisions started to fall below a critical mass threshold of 13 to 15 percent women, entering a gender‐biased death spiral the team would never recover from. The percentage of consumer products commissioned by the company targeted to women grew less and less. Gone were the Lifestyle Products Division, the Kids & Games Product Unit, and things like Encarta were defunded. There was no slide in anyone's PowerPoint deck that said, “Let's be a bunch of guys making products for guys.” Yet that's what happened in certain divisions of the company. They were great teams with great leaders, but something was wrong. As one female colleague after another left, I wondered: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Were women leaving because there were so few women wanting to join? Or were women afraid to join the division because they could see women were leaving?

The Sad Truth of the Here and Now

It's now 2017 and things don't seem better; they seem worse. Workplace culture at some of the high‐valued new economy companies such as Uber, Snap, or Binary Capital has been highly unfriendly to women, bolstered by a new crop of male leaders who seem to have taken us back in time. And while most men in positions of leadership do not create horrible cultures, it is the overall tolerance for the bad outliers that allows institutionalized sexism to affect us all, even if we are certain we can't be sexist.

To better understand the very special way that sexism occurs in tech from a successful woman's perspective, Linda Kozlowski offers a position rooted in social dynamics between women and men during their formative young adult years. Kozlowski is a veteran tech executive who worked at Alibaba and now serves as chief operating officer of Etsy. She explains what she calls the “dork” factor in Silicon Valley, from the perspective of being a self‐admitted female dork.

Tech overall is a very new industry. If you were in the 80s and writing a book about lawyers or Wall Street, the debauchery and the ridiculousness that you would see was just as insane. Ultimately it's a male‐dominated workforce and tech is mainly made up of two main groups of people to start: (1) computer scientists or someone studying engineering or some kind of science that tends to be more male, and (2) the MBA set, which is changing but historically has definitely been more male.

It starts with this idea that you definitely hire people who look like you. When everyone in the company is younger to start, that's only exacerbated. Now let's add in another dynamic. You are incredibly awkward. You probably weren't that popular in high school or anything else. You were a dork. And, by the way, I'm dorky, so this is not an insult.

In college you are encouraged to hit on tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• With Grace Kahng
• About the Author
• Introduction
• 1 Men Must Change
• 2 Solution 1: Not Enough Women? Look Harder
• 3 Solution 2: In It to Win It: Supporting Women's Development
• 4 Solution 3: Listen Louder
• 5 Solution 4: Creating a Family‐Forward Culture
• 6 Solution 5: Just Say No: High Performance Should Not Trump Bad Behavior
• 7 Solution 6: Adopt the ERA at Your Company—Because Your Country Didn't
• 8 Solution 7: Stand Together or Fall Apart
• 9 Solution 8: The Future: Raising Better Men
• 10 Final Thoughts
• A Note from Niniane Wang
• Acknowledgments
• The Better Together Pledge
• Index
• End User License Agreement