One thing women at the top have in common is a set of organized goals, plans and principles that keep them at the top of their games. They stay motivated and are driven by their goals. They never stop learning and staying informed. They are very resilient and focused. I get super motivated when I read stories about these striking and influential women. It’s an honour to briefly profile few of the women who captured my interest from the last Financial Times Women at the top ranking in 2011.
Yoshiko Shinohara ranked No 9 in the 2011 Financial times 50 women in world business and her story really interests me. Shinohara is hailed not only as one of Japan’s pioneering female executives but also as a savvy entrepreneur. At age 38 she set up a temporary job agency, Tempstaff, in her one-room apartment in 1973. She brought the concept of temporary staffing to Japan. She struggled to find clients at first, and she had to lobby against Labor Ministry opposition to temp work. Business steadied by the 1980s, then boomed in the 1990s as economic doldrums forced Japanese companies to abandon lifetime job guarantees. Tempstaff now has some 5,000 staff, $2.9 billion in annual sales and 12 offices overseas. Shinohara shows no signs of wanting to retire.
How many women are resilient and focused enough to want to start very little then put in rewarding efforts to see and sustain the growth of their businesses or careers?
Ursula Burns ranked No 4 and is the first African-American woman to lead a Standard & Poor’s 100 company. She is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Xerox. “My gender and race – they are what I am. They are not special or unique to me”- She explains. She was raised in a not-very-safe and not-very-clean neighbourhood by a low-income single mother who had a very firm set of beliefs. Growing up, she had three things going against her and other women in her neighbourhood they were “poor, black and women”. Against all odds, today, Burns is the head of the world’s leading enterprise for business process and document management, Xerox (NYSE: XRX) with sales approaching $23 billion.
In her words “we all need to be more impatient with the status quo. I believe we all need to shift the emphasis in our thinking…from why we can’t create more jobs to how we can create more jobs, from why we can’t compete to why we can compete, from why hunger, poverty and injustice exist in the world to how they can be eliminated… in other words, we all need to be a little more impatient”.
There’s a dire demand for more women to rise up and declare the need for change and be ready to give all of their best to see it happen.
Indra Nooyi was ranked No 3 as the Chairman and Chief Executive of PepsiCo, the US drinks and snacks group for five years. It all started when the Indian born Indra Nooyi crossed the Atlantic with just a few hundred dollars and a place at University, precisely she travelled all the way to Yale with just $500 and a scholarship.
Nooyi pays tribute to the influence of her granddad, who always told her “Don’t ever think you have arrived, and remember that what you don’t know is so much more that you do”. This powerful woman is taking the lead with PepsiCo on sustainable growth and the curbing of its energy use.
I hope these brief stories inspire and motivate one more woman to strive for change, success and greatness no matter the challenges. It is a lot smoother for someone with a set of result-oriented goals, organised plans and guiding principles to achieve greatness because organised and focused people are rare and they are the ones at the top. I like to call myself a trail blazer and I’m hoping that I can inspire more women to blaze trails and make positive and lasting changes that would altogether make the world a better place.
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