Thinking about my thesis on Product Science (TL;DR: every aspect of business should be reduced to simple well working systems, first), I have come to the conclusion that women make better leaders because their psychological differences enable a level of intuition that is rarely exercised in men. The significant variance being that men typically work in predictions-of-perceptions to predict risk vs reward.
Since the majority of success has traditionally been measured in “value of reward multiplied by risk taken”, regardless of capitalism, socialism, or communism, we focus more on how men think when telling women how to be successful.
A few things come to mind:
The way men approach leadership is like climbing trees. See the top branch; evaluate the risk of trying, then execute on that evaluation. Nature approach?
The way women approach leadership is like swimming in the ocean. Be where you are; evaluate the value to the whole school of being somewhere else; enact change by purposeful participation. Nurture approach?
The majority of attempts at leadership to date have been men, and most attempts fail.
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” - Einstein
Showing women different ways to climb like men as education on leadership is stupid.
Intuition always serves us better from beginning to end, and through both Problem Science and Solution Science, the intuition caused by empathy and nurturing is what makes great sustainable success with less risk possible. We need to take risk out of the equation and replace it with intuitive value. Is something really worth doing? What value does it bring, to whom, and do they even need it right now from us?
We can always justify risk with the backwards thinking of starting with a solution and finding a problem that looks like a target. But that doesn’t justify value and the sustained effort and perseverance to love, achieve, deliver, and nurture that value. Continuing to generalize, I’d say the former is Minimum Viable Product and the latter is Minimum Lovable Product thinking. I’d like to study that hypothesis by measuring how many successes were built on MLPs vs MVPs.
Leadership is best defined as the intuition to bring intrinsic value, where needed, regardless of, but accounting for, the risk. I believe the way women think, biologically, gives them a significant advantage over men, in leadership. Where does the typical male fit in, in this? Men execute phenomenally well, and with a woman’s mindset defining the boundaries of that execution the risk that men justify is far more quantifiable and qualified, making it significantly easier to measure incremental wins and losses as reinforcement to the collective understanding.
Finally, to close out the tree analogy vs a school of fish:
Man: I want to be on top of that tree, and there’s lots of good reasons like seeing farther, access to something up there, and if I don’t die along the way I can pull the rest of us up.
Also man: watch me climb this beast!
Also man 90% of the time: falls.
Also man: let me try, I can stand on the last guy that’s still laying on the ground.
Woman: I hear what you’re saying: seeing farther and being higher in that tree will be good for all of us. Is there any other way? How is everyone else not in trees doing that? How worth it is to follow your risk? Do we really get the same valuable rewards?
Also woman: does that hill allow us to see the necessary farther?
Also woman: can we knock down that smaller tree to lean against this one like a ladder that the rest of us can use safely, too?
