Event Highlights 2006

September 2006: “Leadership Untamed”

Featured Speaker:
Nancy K. Austin Best Selling Author & President of Nancy K. Austin Incorporated

Speaker Nancy Austin began her comments with quotations and proceeded to lead the members through a power point presentation. She stressed that leadership untamed is different, dramatic, and doable. She emphasized that leadership untamed is nothing at all like by-the-book leadership rules of yestercentury—it is nothing less than the revival of excellence.

“No job is America’s God-given right anymore.” —Fiorina
“Forget China, India, and the Internet: Economic growth is driven by women.” —The Economist
“The most successful people are good at Plan B” —The New Scientist

She explored the following key ideas with the member audience:

• “There is one best way to do things,” according to Frederick W. Taylor, an idea we are still attached to and that Henry Ford made tangible with his car factory (“You can have it in any color you want as long as it’s black.”)
• “About 90% of management consists of making it difficult for people to get things done.”
• “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
• Leadership today is about: People; products; originality; execution; improvisation; passion; esthetics; relentlessness; innovation; excellence.
• Some outstanding examples: Womanship (a sailing school for women whose tagline is “nobody yells”); Richard Branson’s Virgin enterprises. What successes like these and many others have in common is love, not “customer centered marketing.”
• “The boundaries for acceptable weirdness have dramatically expanded.”
• “I always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.”
• Talent, talent, talent: You’ve got to work and think way outside the lines. Talent doesn’t usually come in nice, neat, easy to manage packages. Think: Anita Roddick (Body Shop); Meg Whitman (eBay). “Well-behaved women rarely make.”
• Hair! (Nancy outlined a whole segment about this, including Hillary Clinton’s hair, Theresa Heinz’s hair, and even her own, which involved a couple of slides with the top ten comments she has received over the years after speeches—they’re all about her hair.)
• It’s always show time.
• Graniterock, a century-plus year-old company in Watsonville, CA; family owned and run from the start; heavily influenced in its unconventional ways by its earliest leaders, both women. Now the two sons run the company, a Baldrige Award-winning business.
• “A woman in advancing age is unstoppable by any earthly force.”
• “Talent goes where it is wanted. It stays where it is well treated. It cannot be driven—only attracted.” —Walter Wriston

• People = Respect
• Products = Crave
• Execution = Drill wells
• Improvise = Charette
• Passion = Love
• Relentless = Unstoppable
• Innovate = Anti-sequel
• Excellence = Always

Read the full bio of speaker Nancy Austin ›

Featured Member
Deborah Shea, Hellbent Marketing

Featured Corporate Partner
Roseanne Fairty, Wells Fargo Bank

Photo Highlights

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