PREFACE
We believe that what women see—what they notice and value and how they perceive the world in operation—is a great underexploited resource in organizations. In this book, we explore what the female vision is, what it has to offer, and why it matters—to women, to organizations, and to the world.
Each of us has worked with women around the world for over twenty years. Sally is an author, speaker, and consultant; Julie has coached hundreds of senior executives in global companies and held leadership positions within major organizations. Our experiences have convinced us that, although women's capacity for vision is profound, companies routinely fail to recognize the power of what women see. As a result, women lose confidence in their own ability to articulate and communicate what they notice, and organizations lose the insights and balance that a female perspective might bring.
Organizations today are far more committed to developing women's talents and leadership potential than in the past, and good companies recognize the value of workforce diversity. Yet women still have limited impact at the strategic level because they are not perceived as visionary.[1] We believe this perception not only gets things wrong, but gets things exactly backward. Women's greatest asset lies in their visionary power.
We came to this belief after four years of research and thinking about the true value that women bring to work. What we present evolved over the course of a long-running conversation that began in 2005 on a beach in La Jolla, California, where we were attending a professional retreat. At the time, each of us was preoccupied with the questions then engaging most people in our field: Why were so many talented women either leaving senior positions or watching their careers stall out? Why weren't more women represented at the senior executive level? Why did major corporate boards do such a poor job of recruiting senior women? We had followed the research and were familiar with phenomena such as the widely discussed "female brain drain." But our own experiences suggested that fundamental issues were not being addressed.
Our conversation kept returning to a phrase that each of us had heard from women who had either left high positions or considered doing so: I decided it just wasn't worth it. We realized we could not meaningfully explore the relationship between women and power unless we addressed the question of what women most deeply value and how this might conflict with what mainstream organizations expect their leaders to value.
We began interviewing dozens of senior women and immersing ourselves in academic research on the subject. Our aim was to put together a book that would set what was happening with women in the larger context of values. We soon recognized that we needed to develop original data if we were to accurately describe the values women bring with them to work. We launched a full-scale research study, supported by an association with the National Council for Research on Women and with financial backing from sponsors who saw value in our project. In the final phase of our research, we decided to broaden our perspective and look at the connection between the values women bring to organizations and the vision most women hold about what life and work—at its best—could be.
This book is organized into three sections. In the first, we define the female vision, show why it is important, and describe the consequences of it being undervalued. In the second, we explore the three components that shape the female vision: the capacity for broad-spectrum notice, the ability to find satisfaction in the daily experience of work, and the penchant for viewing work in a larger social context. In the last section, we show how women can act upon their vision and what organizations can do to support them.
We intend this book for a broad audience. We want to engage individual women seeking to identify and articulate their own strengths in order to create more rewarding ways of working and living. We want to help organizations and institutions seeking to develop women leaders and benefit from their strategic strengths. And we want to provide a resource for teachers and students—in colleges and universities and in high schools as well—who hope to build a better world by preparing young women to exercise their vision and develop the leadership skills that will be required in the years ahead.
注释：
[1]Herminia Ibarra and Otilia Obodaru, "Women and the Vision Thing," Harvard Business Review 87, no. 1 (January 2009), 62–70.
