Power: Do Women ReallyWant It?

MOST POWERFUL WOMEN IN BUSINESS
Power: Do Women ReallyWant It?

That's the surprising question more of them are asking when they ponder top jobs in business, academia, and government.

Ann Fudge is a Harvard Business School alum, General Electric board member, wife, mother, grandmother, globetrotter, public service advocate, former star executive at Kraft Foods, and—following a two-year sabbatical during which some surmised that she had killed her career—chairman and CEO of ad conglomerate Young & Rubicam. Inside her makeshift office, currently under renovation, on the 12th floor of Y&R's Madison Avenue headquarters, Fudge announces a mission: "We need to redefine power!" She's not so naive as to believe that her new clout as an imagemaker equips her to recast such a mystifying thing as power. But there's no harm in trying. Fudge wants to ditch the conventional definition of the term. "Do we have to follow the boys' scorecard?" she asks.
No, we don't, say more and more women —and that's just the point. Like Fudge, they say they view power differently from the way that men do: They see it in terms of influence, not rank. And many fast-track women are surprisingly ambivalent about what's next.

Dozens of powerful women we interviewed tell us that they don't want to be Carly Fiorina, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard (and No. 1 on our Most Powerful Women list for the sixth straight year); many don't want to run a huge company. But there's a fundamental disconnect here. Those very same women also tell us that they foresee the day in which there is parity in terms of gender representation at the top of corporate America. It is a goal that they honestly, fervently want to reach. Which makes us wonder: If these educated, accomplished, powerful women don't seek the biggest jobs, who is going to?...

Debby Hopkins: On Losing a Powerful Job Chief operations and technology officer and head of corporate strategy at Citigroup. She was forced out as CFO of Lucent in April 2001.

"The key thing I've learned is that the most powerful thing you can do is listen. You don't have to have the last word. You don't have to get credit for anything. I've always led in groups—you know, get people around the table to discuss an issue. But now I hold back what I think. I say to myself, 'Not now, not now! Wait, wait!' This new approach has changed my life. I avoid publicity like the plague. I'm trying to live in the here and now instead of worrying what the next job will be. That's a very freeing thing."


Condoleezza Rice: On Managing Powerful Men National Security Advisor "I think of myself as a facilitator. It's my responsibility to make the system work for the Cabinet secretaries. I try to be an honest broker. [Pushing my personal opinion on the issues] isn't fair to the President. I always say to him, 'This is what I think, but let me tell you what the others think.'

The key is to not take advantage of the fact that I live a few doors down from the Oval Office. That way, the Cabinet secretaries who aren't a few doors down don't have reason to be distrustful.
"I also try very hard not to micromanage. Colin Powell will tell you that I nudge. 'Oh, stop nudging!' Colin tells me. The President says that I play mother hen."

Hillary Clinton: On Work-Life Balance U.S. Senator, New York "I'm finding power in and of itself isn't very attractive these days. Men and women are trying to find balance in their lives—and to make a difference. I no longer raise an eyebrow when someone tells me, 'I'm getting out of politics.'

And women are stepping off the conventional roads to power because they may not be willing to pay the price for corporate life. I don't think it's a good thing—but I don't want a society where people are turning their backs on the fundamental requirements for personal relationships. The economy is not an end in itself. It's a means to an end—so people can have better lives."

Oliver Lum

TIME Magazine: Innovators: Oliver Lum The Moisture Merchant

Dealing in Liquid Assets

By JAKE LLOYD-SMITH

Posted Monday, April 5, 2004

Olivia Lum, head of the fast-growing water-treatment company Hyflux, never knew her biological parents. She was adopted at birth by an elderly woman she called Grandma, and home was Kampar, a poor Malaysian mining town where an exodus of jobs had left most residents with no income. After Grandma sold her house to pay some gambling debts, Lum was brought up in a wooden shack without running water—unless you counted the rainwater that would regularly seep in and flood the floors. To keep Grandma's spirits up, Lum used to say that when she made it big, she would buy her a new house. "Of course it never happened," Lum says. "She died before I became successful."

Lum found her success in the water business. She worked her way through college and earned a chemistry degree, but she always saw the business world as the way to climb out of poverty. Fifteen years ago, drawing on her meager savings, she founded Hyflux, a company that pursued a wide range of water-related ventures in Asia, from cleaning wastewater in China to investing in desalination plants in Singapore.

Today, Hyflux is one of the hottest firms in the Asian water market, and under Lum's leadership it has scored a number of R.-and-D. breakthroughs. In the 1990s, the company developed an ultrafine membrane filter (pictured above) that is used in all the company's major products. More recently, Hyflux, in association with a U.S. group, began manufacturing a condensing device called the Dragonfly, which produces potable water by extracting moisture from air—and could change the way water-scarce countries meet their daily water needs. There are some drawbacks: the surrounding air must have at least 40% humidity, and each device costs about $1,000. Lum, however, insists that the unit price will fall as her team refines the design, and says Dragonflys may soon be found in refrigerators and even cars.

Hyflux is now a $270 million company, and Lum's biggest challenge will be to sustain its rapid growth. "There are further good years ahead," says Kerryn Tay, an analyst at GK Goh Research in Singapore, pointing to growing demand for Hyflux's products in China and government support at home. For her part, the hardworking Lum wants Hyflux to be worth $3 billion within five years. Grandma would approve.

PROFILE

The Accolades – Olivia Lum The driving force behind the phenomenal success of Hyflux, Group CEO and President, Ms Olivia Lum has also received many accolades, which include: • Global Women Inventors & Innovators Network (GWIIN) Award 2004 • Voted by Business Times readers as Singapore’s “Most Creative Entrepreneur” in 2003 • The International Management Action Awards (IMAA) in 2003, administered by SPRING Singapore and the Chartered Management Institute. • Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Singapore 2003
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Ms Lum is Group CEO & President and founder of the Hyflux Group. She started corporate life as a chemist with Glaxo Pharmaceutical and left in 1989 to start up Hydrochem (S) Pte Ltd, the precursor to Hyflux Ltd.
Managing the Group for 15 years now, Olivia Lum is the driving force behind Hyflux’s growth and business expansion, responsible for policy and strategies formulation and corporate direction. She also heads the Research and Development function. Ms Lum holds several positions in the public service. She is board member of SPRING Singapore, the National University Singapore Council and the Singapore Exchange Ltd. She is also member to the UNESCAP Business Advisory Council, President of the Singapore Water Association (SWA) as well as a member to the Singapore Green Plan 2012 Co-ordinating committee. In 2004, Ms Lum was awarded the Global Female Invent and Innovate Award. She also won the International Management Action Award (IMAA) in 2003, and many other accolades recognizing her entrepreneurial achievements.

[Background] [hyflux profile] [nominated MP, CV]

MP Indranee Rajah

Director, Drew & Napier LLC, CV

MP, CV

PAP Women's Wing

INDRANEE RAJAH, 40 MP for Tanjong Pagar GRC

AFTER an internship at the London law firm Freshfields during her third year of law school, she joined its Singapore branch in 1986, upon graduating from the National University of Singapore.

Fifteen months later, she moved on to join leading Singapore law firm Drew & Napier, where she is now one of its directors.

In 2001, she became Tanjong Pagar GRC's first woman MP. It was an uncontested seat.

And how does a single woman MP like herself find a match among Singaporean men?

In an interview with The Straits Times that year, she said: 'I don't think of life in terms of PSLE, O levels, A levels, get a degree, find a husband, have children.

'If there's one thing I've learnt, it's that I can't plan my life the way it is going to turn out.'

After all, marriage is not like 'buying a handbag or a pair of shoes'.

She said: 'I'm not incomplete without a husband. He would be a bonus. Not being married doesn't make me less of a person. I am a person in my own right.

'I'm really quite happy as I am.'