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

Women Don’t Ask

The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation — and Positive Strategies for Change

by 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.

Alternate Selections

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.

Mass Career Customization

Aligning the Workplace with Today's Nontraditional Workforce

by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg

Harvard Business School Press, 230 pages, 2007, hardcover, $19.77

Change is the norm in business but the revolution in the American workforce is unprecedented, according to Cathleen Benko, a keynoter at this year’s NEW Leadership Summit and Deloitte’s vice chair for talent. In just two short generations the American workforce has changed completely. Women outnumber men in the managerial and professional class. The Baby Boom generation has started entering retirement. The skilled talent pool is shrinking. And changing family structures are radically altering the nation and its workforce.

These sweeping changes in the way we work, live and build careers are here and here to stay, writes Benko and fellow Deloitte executive Anne Weisberg. In this thoughtful book, the authors outline a new workplace where the corporate ladder is replaced by the “corporate lattice” and business is built around the needs of people, not vice versa. “Many knowledge workers are already building lattice-like careers by moving in and out of organizations, or up and down hierarchies, even without support from their employers,” the authors say.

Mass Career Customization proposes ways for business to attract and retain knowledge workers who are in increasing demand and decreasing supply. Part wake-up call and part action plan, the book says flexible work arrangements are a short-term solution to a long-term issue. The real solution is career customization that allows each employee to shape their career paths in ways that fit each stage of their life.

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