NetworkNews | Network of Executive Women

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.

Main Selection

The Hybrid Leader

Blending the Best of the Male & Female Leadership Styles

by Trudy Bourgeois

Oakhill Press, 208 pages, 2006, trade paper, $11.21*

More than 80 percent of today's workers feel so unappreciated and disengaged they hate to come to work. According to one study, employee absences cost American business as much as $312 billion dollars a year.

Trudy Bourgeois, the facilitator of the upcoming Networking of Executive Women conference, Leveraging Your Multicultural Workforce, says business needs a change of a change in leadership if it wants to fix the problem.

This “hybrid leader” combines the strengths of male and female leadership styles, which begs the question, what are the differences in male and female leadership styles? As a general rule, Bourgeois writes, men tend to be more competitive while women tend to be more collaborative. Women are more intuitive and men are more analytical. Men are people focused “to a point,” while women leaders are people-oriented “to the core.” There are exceptions to these rules, of course. But Bourgeois, a veteran consumer products executive now working as an independent performance strategist, finds the male/female gender styles powerful tools in helping executives of both genders.

The Hybrid Leader describes how you can change your leadership approach and improve your bottom line by Achieving diversity breakthroughs; learning to nurture and serve employees; forming collaborative teams; teaching, not telling, employees; and building authentic relationships.

Perhaps most important. this book will help you understand what motivates employees (spoiler alert: it’s not money). Bourgeois doesn’t stop there: the final part of the book provides a step-by-step guide to how you can make the transformation yourself.

Alternate Selections

Stop Screaming at the Microwave!

How to Connect Your Disconnected Life

by Mary LoVerde

Fireside, 238 pages, trade paper, $11.53*

Mary LoVerde, a recent speaker at NEW regional events in Northern California, New England and Texas--has a simple and compelling message: Connect!

Stop Screaming at the Microwave! explains how to connect with yourself, your family, others, and the big picture. It starts with body, mind and spirit. Too many people, LoVerde writes, ignore the warning signs -- from irritability and forgetfulness to panic attacks and disease. Who can’t relate to the person, mentioned in the opening chapter, who works so hard to meet a business deadline that they short spending time with family members? As for connecting with those outside the family, LoVerde writes that “most of us could sit down right now and make of list of fifteen friends who we genuinely enjoy but haven’t contacted in months, maybe years.” Being so out of touch with self, family and others, people lose track of what’s really important, “and some of us lose hope.”

The book explains what works -- and what doesn’t. Time management, living in the moment, simplifying, juggling, working harder and/or working smarter -- the self-help strategies of the recent past have mostly failed, LoVerde says. It’s time for a new solution, which brings readers back to the power connection. It’s the only way to achieve true balance, tap into the power of others, and to live a life worth living.

The NEW Woman Rules

More than 50 trailblazers share their wisdom

by Fawn Germer

Network Books, 268 pages, October 2007, trade paper, $24.95

This book from the Network of Executive Women offers an eye-opening look at the struggles and triumphs of 52 trailblazing women who reached the consumer products and retail industry’s top tier.

The women executives interviewed in The NEW Woman Rules emerged from their trials unbowed, if not always unscraped, and they freely and frankly share their lessons in these pages. The never-before published interviews distill their collective success and leadership strategies. Some consistent themes emerge: work hard but have boundaries, network and mentor, take risks and embrace change.

Fawn Germer, of Mustang Sallies and Hard Won Wisdom fame, is an expert at drawing her subjects out, and she doesn’t disappoint here. The book includes five essays by Germer on performance, career development, leadership, networking, and the virtues of “imbalance,” plus forewords by NEW President Helayne Angelus and NEW Executive Director Joan Toth. Longtime Network stalwarts -- including Kimberly Betts, Trudy Bourgeois, Michele Hanson, Bobbie O’Hare and Luci Sheehan -- are also featured, along with senior executives like eBay CEO Meg Whitman and Acme CEO Judy Spires.

Germer is a veteran investigative reporter and one of the nation’s most sought-after speakers on the subjects of leadership, risk-taking and personal empowerment. This book offers unique insights on these subjects and more.

*To order contact Nathalia Granger at (312) 693-6855.

Latinization

How Latino Culture Is Transforming the U.S.

by Cristina Benitez

Paramount Market Publishing. 125 pages, hardcover, $24.95*

Cristina Benitiz is founder of the marketing group Lazos Latinos and an expert on the U.S. Latino market. In this book she calls on twenty years experience in Hispanic marketing and her personal perspective as a second-generation Latina to explore the impact of Latino immigration on North American culture.

Although politicians and the media largely discuss Latino immigration “by the numbers,” Benitez focuses her book on tastes and values that these U.S. immigrants bring with them. She covers a range of topics, from family and faith to Latinos’ strong work ethic and music, food, dance and literature.

The book provides a concise and comprehensive view of the U.S. Hispanic market. Readers “will come away with a better understanding of how to craft marketing messages; corporations will learn how to develop Latino leaders, and everyone will learn how to understand this valuable segment of our population,” the publisher says.

In his forward to Latinization, former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros writes that Cristina Benitez’s “reasoned explanations help Americans understand the new faces, the new accents and the new last names. Latinization sands down the raw edges of fear and suspicion with facts and comprehension; it opens the prospect of a nation whose best days are ahead.”

For more information read our September 2006 interview with Cristina Benitez.

Suggest a selection for the NEW Book Club. Email NetworkNews at editor@newnewsletter.org