Getting Away From the Corporate ‘Glass Ceiling’ : Women: Instead of tearing down corporate barriers, female entrepreneurs are advised to break into business for themselves.
Joline Godfrey of Ojai has a solution for the “glass ceiling” that’s keeping women from being fully represented in the top echelons of corporate America: Forget trying to break it down, get out from under it instead.
Godfrey, 42, is the author of “Our Wildest Dreams: Women Entrepreneurs Making Money, Having Fun, Doing Good” (HarperCollins, 1992), which is cementing her role as one of the most visible spokeswomen for a growing movement--women who have gone into business for themselves.
There are about 5.5 million women-owned businesses nationwide, yet they still form a kind of invisible economy, said Godfrey. The issue was driven home to her three years ago when Inc. magazine published its annual selections for a management “dream team.” All the players--managers considered tops in their fields--were men.
Although the magazine had been targeting women readers for several years, when it came time to find some dynamic, successful women business leaders who could make the team, there weren’t any. “It wasn’t that they weren’t there,” Godfrey said. “They just didn’t see them.”
Godfrey herself left a management job at Polaroid Corp. seven years ago to start a company, Odysseum, which provides learning games and training for corporate clients. It eventually was sold, and she now runs a nonprofit enterprise called The Knowledge Network, which is developing a program called “An Income of Her Own” to introduce teen-age girls to the prospect of starting their own enterprises.
“She has a very unique perspective shared by very few other women,” said George Gendron, Inc.’s editor. “She has worked in the Fortune 500, run her own company, met a payroll, worked with venture capitalists,” he said.
According to research by Cambridge, Mass.-based Cognetics Inc. and the National Assn. of Women Business Owners, the businesses owned by women now employ more than 11 million people, more than the Fortune 500 combined.
Yet when it comes to official tallying, women’s businesses are frequently under-represented, Godfrey said. Women’s businesses tend to get overlooked because they don’t always conform to existing models of “successful businesses,” she said.
It was this observation that brought Godfrey to the attention of Gendron. After the Inc. story came out, Godfrey fired off a letter to the editor that later proved to be the catalyst for her book.
“Joline was the first woman to come along and say bluntly, ‘You’re looking for the wrong qualities,’ ” Gendron said. The magazine, by focusing on traditional measures as revenue growth and market share, was not weighing other qualities important to women. Godfrey said women are more concerned with the quality of their relationships to employees, clients and customers and with doing “good work” consistent with their personal ethics.
As a result of the letter, Inc. sent Godfrey on a cross-country journey to find the kind of women’s businesses she was referring to.
What she discovered, through a series of round-table dinners held in cities around the country, was that women’s businesses comprise a diverse mix of industries, styles and personalities.
Some get started out of desperation, some to pursue a dream. Some owners scheme and plan. Others start by happenstance. Some women have MBAs. Many more don’t. Among the women she found:
* Marti McMahon designs, builds and charters boats. Her San Francisco Bay-based fleet, called Pacific Marine Yacht Charters, grew out of a hobby refinishing boats and a love of entertaining. Today, she hosts everyone from brides to royalty on yachts that seat up to 700 guests. It took 13 banks before she found one that would back her.
* Kathy Bresler of Jackson Hole, Wyo., started Cattle Kate, a mail-order business for Old West-style clothes, with a $300 family loan. She now sells all over the world.
* Frances Lear used a divorce settlement to found Lear’s magazine, which caters to an audience of older women. At the time, there were snickers that she hadn’t “earned” the money she used to get started, despite a long tradition of male entrepreneurs (including Donald Trump) who have also parlayed windfalls into fortunes.
* Ruth Owades, founder of Calyx and Corolla, a specialty fresh flower mail-order business based in San Francisco, blossomed in the national limelight after she sent catalogues to Desert Storm troops, giving them discounts and domestic rates on sending flowers to loved ones.
Godfrey found some common themes. Most women started their businesses without the benefit of formal bank financing. Families, friends, credit cards and savings were the more common sources of seed money.
What has surprised her the most about the book, she said, is the number of men who have responded to it. “Men have been so slow to challenge the status quo,” she said. “All the men who grew up with ulcers and high blood pressure and hypertension . . . are saying, ‘Hey wait a minute, this is nuts.’ ”
Godfrey was reared in a tiny rural town in Maine where her grandparents owned a dairy and she grew up in the family business. But she was never encouraged to go into it. In her family, the two options for women going into careers were teaching and social work. She chose social work.
However, business had always been close to her heart. While obtaining her master’s degree in social work from Boston University, she discovered the field of industrial social work and was hooked.
She spent 10 years with Polaroid, working in various capacities from the affirmative action department (where her job was to encourage the CEO himself to change ingrained recruiting and hiring patterns), to new product development, to manager of various special projects. She also made the transition from traditional “women’s work” within the company to work in the mainstream of operations--including stints in manufacturing and quality control.
And what she observed was that few women were being allowed to fully realize their management potential. Instead of resigning herself to a life under the glass ceiling of the executive suite, she devised a way to promote herself out of the corporation.
Her opportunity turned out to be a project she initiated as a marketing tool for Polaroid. With seed money from the company, she and partner Jane Lytle spun off Odysseum, the corporate training concern.
The venture, which earned her the “Intrapreneur of the Year” award from McGraw-Hill in 1987 and a fellowship in leadership development from the Kellogg Foundation in 1989, employed 20 people and had reached $500,000 in annual revenue by its fourth year. Then its financial backers pushed for a sale.
“One is your capacity for creativity and your endurance to make something happen is far greater than you ever appreciate,” she said. The second is that “you can really trust your own instincts, no matter what the conventional institutions say.”
