Everything About Business Except The Bottom Line: FunnyBusiness

Are you being PC if you say you don't care if your boss is male or female?

The headline from the MSNBC.com read, "Men Rule-at least in workplace attitude." It was the first of a series of articles on MSNBC's and Elle Magazine's Survey on Work and Power  Survey. where they interviewed about 60,000 people.

Despite the potentially inflammatory headline, it did not create a blogging firestorm. In fact, it created somewhat of a blogging backlash.

Talkwench, wasn't buying their argument.

So MSNBC have teamed up with their intellectual equivalent in all things pretty and girly - Elle Magazine to conduct a survey on attitudes in the workplace, "would you rather prefer a female than a male boss" and the results of which were published in the article below titled "In workplace - men rule". Reading that headline one would naturally assume that the results must have been 90/ 10, or even 60/40 but no it was 39/ 50/ and the rest didnt care either way.

 

And from Women's Voices for Change:

                    "The smart Echidne analyzes the survey -- and the many negative comments about women that                                follow the story -- and pulls out what's truly important here:

[The] major message of it is that the gender of the boss does not matter for the majority of the respondents. But because more people prefer a male boss to a female boss the article then veers into the question of what might be wrong with female bosses.

Note that we don't really get a discussion anywhere on what might be wrong with male bosses (or what might be good with female bosses), and so the comments begin with the assumption (unstated) that male bosses are good, and that all one needs to do is to point out the worst possible characteristics of female bosses to compare them to the good male boss. Although some comments later diverge from this, the topic is not set up as a neutral one, and it is not surprising that we don't get a balanced discussion.

Journalist Eve Tahmincioglu  writes about careers on MSNBC.com and is author of From the Sandbox to the Corner Office: Lessons Learned on the Journey to the Top. www.sandboxbook.com. She recently chatted with me about the survey and why she believes  the  51% who said they didn't care if they had a male or female boss were simply being "PC."
 

This is cross-posted at Blogher

On Assignment with Boss Lady

The year was 1964. I was thirteen years old and riding solo on a Greyhound bus from Clearwater,Florida to Marion,Virginia. Somewhere in South Carolina a young woman sat next to me.

She was very excited. She had just gotten a full set of dentures. Our conversation made a lasting impression on me. Not because she got dentures --at the time I didn't think that was too weird--my grandparents had them. No, what I remember is that she called her boss the boss man.

I have no idea why that phrase cranked my motor but it still does. So when I recently saw that  Boss Lady had joined the Blogher Blog Roll I had an immediate urge to check them out.

As their tag line indicates, Boss Lady exists "because women run businesses." Although this blog is relatively young-- it is a reincarnation of sorts. Boss Lady's Bosses...Lauren Bacon and Emira Mears have been  producing Soapboxgirls, first as an ezine and then as a blog, since 2000.

While Soapboxgirls discussed a wide variety of issues of interest to women, Boss Lady is very targeted--focusing on the issues that are of interest and importance to women business owners. In addition to starting the blog, Bacon and Meirs are also co-authoring a book, called Boss Lady.

You might expect, as we did once, that the world would be full of books on this subject, because there are just so darned many women doing business with creativity, intelligence, and style… but the fact is, no one in the publishing world seems to have cottoned on to the fact that more and more women are heading out on their own to pursue their passions as entrepreneurs. At least, that's what we’re hoping. We’d love nothing more than to be the first to champion what we think is the most fun you can have while making a living. We started this website as a living guide to business, Boss Lady style. You can expect to find our thoughts and ruminations on business, updates on our book-writing and -publishing adventures, profiles of women-run businesses, resources for women entrepreneurs, and more than likely ideas on a few other assorted topics.

Just this week, Lauren Bacon and I had a chat about the blog, the challenges of getting a book published and why she thinks there are so very women business bloggers.

Fatique Management

When it comes to napping on the job, William and Camille Anthony have written the definitive book on the subject - The Art of Napping at Work.    Bill Anthony who runs a research lab at Boston University is a passionate napper. This is his second book on the subject -- the first was just a generic book on napping but the media seized on one paragraph in that book -- a paragraph about wife Camille's habit of using her bosses couch during lunch to take a snooze.  As Anthony explains in this podcast, it was when the Today show asked if they could tape Camille napping at work that they realized they had to write a follow-up book specifically targeted to the workplace.                                           

While Anthony says the concept of napping at work has yet to hit its tipping point, there are companies that are trying to provide napping services to the walking sleep deprived. To read more about napping in the work place, check out my post at Blogher.

Companyclick -where Myspace meets the watercooler

One of the newer social networking spots on the web is Companyclick-- It's a place for employees of The Fortune 500 to meet other people in their own corporation. Dimitry Rappoport says he got the idea when he worked in the financial sector. He says he always wanted to meet other people at work but just didn't know how. At best he says his networking circle always hovered around 10-15 people

In its first month, Companyclick signed up around 500 members. Rappaport says when they reach 50,000 they hope to attract advertising.

  You can listen to the entire podcast.

Podcast#1 _On Assignment_Joni Cole

Five years ago, Joni Cole was having a very bad day. She imagined her
friends were living "big lives"--that instead of sitting in a home
office and eating lunch out of a microwave box, they were "On
Assignment."

Joni turned that bad day into a great book idea. She invited women
from all over the country to share their day diaries.
This week--the first week of 2006--the second volume of This Day In
The Life is hitting the bookstores.
It is an addictive read and readers will walk away wishing they could"
go to lunch" with the women who share their feelings, thoughts,
passions and fears.
The book has earned a starred review from Publisher's Weekly.
This is my very first attempt at podcasting. Let's just say I have a
lot to learn.
First, I did the interview over Skype which I thought was very cool.
Only problem-- somehow I didn't have my computer settings to allow my
mic to record so while Joni's answers are loud and clear my questions
were lost.
Then I did some direct recording into Audacity and while they sounded
fine in playback, when I edit them in with Joni's soundbites, the
volume on my soundbites will make professional audio folks shake their
heads in disbelief.
And figuring out how to convert my WAV file to a MP3 that didn't sound
like a cat scratching a blackboard was an all day endeavor.
So yes, this is not the finest hour of podcasting history but it's my
first podcast.
Thanks for listening!


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