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Visit the NEW Book Club each month for best-selling business books of special interest to executive women. You’ll get great insights and great savings—and a portion of each sale will support NEW’s education and networking programs.
Climbing the Ladder in Stilettos
10 Strategies for Stepping Up to Success and Satisfaction at Work
by Lynette Lewis
Thomas Nelson, 193 pages, 2006, hardcover, $16.49
Women in business, Lynette Lewis writes, have many shoes to fill. There are the shoes they trudge to work in, the sensible heels they wear on the job, the sneakers they take to the gym and, yes, the black stilettos they wear to formal functions.
Lewis, who recently addressed the NEW’s New York Metro group and will be speaking for the Northern California group May 15, explores how women can find deeper fulfillment in the jobs they already have. The book contains practical advice on how to create a purpose statement for your life and work, follow the "Four Principles of Promotion," establish your personal board of directors, how to endure when you feel unrecognized and underpaid and finally, how to discover gifts in surprising places.
Lewis includes stories from 19 women leaders who describe their techniques for finding more meaning at work. The book has been recognized by The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Dallas Morning News and others. Whether you're stuck in a dead-end job or are living the career of your dreams, Climbing the Ladder in Stilettos is an inspiring guide for woman in the working world.
Women Don’t Ask
The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation — and Positive Strategies for Change
by Linda Babcock and Sara Lashever
Bantam, 278 pages, 2007, paperback, $14
Why do men ask for what they want twice as often as women do and initiate negotiation four times more? That question – and its solutions – is the subject of this compelling book by economist Linda Babcock and writer Sara Laschever.
Women Don't Ask blames the culture for women’s failure to negotiate, and cites research that shows the problem begins almost as soon as girls are born. The book combines this research with comments from hundreds of women to show why women seldom ask for what they want and need.
Fortune magazine praised the book as the first “to adequately explain the dramatic differences in how men and women negotiate.” It’s an important topic. In today’s less formal, more flattened work environment, women who don’t ask don’t get. Women who don’t negotiate their salaries, Babcock reports, can lose a million dollars in pay over time. Luckily, Women Don’t Ask addresses solutions as well as the problem, offering a step-by-step guide to developing your own negotiation style.
Decoding Generational Differences
Fact, fiction...or should we just get back to work?
by by Stan Smith
Deloitte LLP, 101 pages, 2008, paperback, $25
If you want to wake up a leadership meeting just ask the participants how to deal with the newest generation in the workforce – the Millennials, writes Stan Smith, Deloitte principal and national director of the firm’s Next Generation Initiatives.
The subject of generational difference can generate more heat than light. Work-oriented leaders from the Baby Boom generation accuse Millennials of being under-trained slackers with a sense of entitlement. Millennials think Baby Boomers are out of touch, out of balance and technologically inept. While there is a bit of truth in both assessments, these attitudes miss the point, Smith says. Boomers cannot manage Millennials the way they were managed. Millennials want flexibility in their working conditions, respect for their fresh ideas and challenging work assignments. They respond poorly to an authoritarian leadership style (they are, after all, children of famously permissive Baby Boom parents) and are more interested in doing work they like than making money.
Smith’s research shed light on a subject critical to American business. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, the Millennial Generation born between 1982 and 2001 includes approximately 80 million individuals in the U.S. alone. The Millennials already outnumber Baby Boomers today, and their ranks will continue to grow in importance right as the Baby Boomers head into retirement. That’s a wave you don’t want to miss.
Letters from the Cocoon
by Monica Ewing
The Nirvana Institute, 78 pages, 2003, paperback, $15
Most books for working women offer advice on how to succeed. This powerful little book addresses a larger question: What is your life’s real purpose and how can you live it?
Letters From the Cocoon is a book about faith and how to get the courage to find it. It provides healing for contemporary women who are trying to be so many things to so many people (and losing themselves in the process).
The book is built around a beautiful and effective metaphor: The caterpillar, whose metamorphosis into a butterfly is one of the most fascinating processes in nature. Ewing explains how most women undergo a similar transformation in their middle years, and offers help to make the transformation and emerge from their cocoons stronger and more beautiful than before.
The author has taken the journey yourself and understands the difficulties. But she urges readers to let go of their old fears and assumptions so they can finally fly.
Suggest a selection for the NEW Book Club. Email NetworkNews at editor@newnewsletter.org
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