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Cosmo Blog Awards Finalists Announced – Last Chance to Vote!
Cosmopolitan has revealed the shortlist for its 2010 Blog Awards in association with Collection 2000. The Award is aimed at celebrating the “creme de la creme” of the blogging community, and we are very honoured that you have made us part of it.
Thank you to all of our readers who have voted for The NextWomen and allowed us to be among the 6 finalists in the News and Current Affairs category! You can view the list of finalists in all other categories on the Cosmopolitan Blog Awards finalists page, where you can also cast your final vote for your favourite Blogs.
To vote for The NextWomen, visit the News and Current Affairs finalists page and cast your vote with your email address.
To vote for all your other favourite blogs, visit each of the categories finalists pages and cast your votes.
Deadlines are not mentioned on the website.
Cosmo Blog Awards – Vote For Your Favourite Blogs
Cosmopolitan Magazine launched the first Cosmo Blog Award ever this year, in search of the best and “must-click” blogs on the Blogosphere. You can vote for all your favourite blogs until August 4th, across various categories, from Sex & Relationships, to Beauty, Fashion, and Gadgets. If The NextWomen is on your favourite Blogs list, visit the Cosmo Blog Awards page and nominate The NextWomen under the News & Current Affairs category.
This might be your last chance to vote for us as your favourite Blog, as we are about to launch The NextWomen online Magazine website in September 2010, meaning we will replace the blog with a full news site.
Nominations end next week on August 4th – support your favourite blogs with your votes today!
Women Executives have a Natural Advantage in Demand Creation
Jeff Saperstein and Hunter Hastings are authors of Bust the Silos: Opening Your Organization for Growth now available in e book and soft cover versions. In this article for The NextWomen they provide an insight into their theory of collaboration as a driver of growth.
Jeff Saperstein (in Paris)
Demand Creation will be the driving force for businesses to achieve sustained, profitable growth for the next decade. Simply, demand creation is the improvement of collaboration—based on new business processes supported by technology—enabling organizations to be more customer-centric and responsive.
So why is this so important for the woman entrepreneur and innovator? Since women are intuitively more collaborative and customer responsive, Demand Creation leverages natural management skill sets the next women leaders can leverage to successfully grow their businesses.
Four profoundly significant business revolutions are coming together in a perfect storm of innovation: the digital revolution, a business process revolution, a business organization revolution and the Internet revolution. Successful companies will learn to reshape their R&D, marketing, sales and IT functions and job specifications within a new customer-centric organization paradigm to take account of these changes.
A new customer-centric organization: From Inside Out to Outside In
The fundamental change is a reversal of the flow of the corporation from inside-out to outside-in. All the activities of the corporation that were outbound—R&D, sales, marketing, advertising, promotion, service centers—must now be reversed. The customer decides when they have a need and when they are ready to listen to information or receive a service from a company that might be able to meet that need. The company must restructure so it can anticipate and respond. Read more
Forbes Woman: Empower Women Entrepreneurs to Grow Their Businesses
Investing in women business owners is not just the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do, according to an interesting article by Forbes author Maria Pinelli. She says: “Another idea that deserves attention is empowering women entrepreneurs to grow their businesses.” In the article she says that to help women-owned businesses grow and create jobs, we need to improve their access in three key areas currently not being met:
- access to capital,
- the global supply chain and
- business networks that can help them scale.
Read the full article at Forbes Woman.
Is Deauville the Next Davos? Conclusions of The Women’s Forum
Many panels and debates at WF
Last weekend, more than 1000 thought leaders came together to discuss the Economy and Society from a female perspective. Unlike the Davos Global Forum, in Deauville powerful women are in the majority at the fifth international Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society. Its motto is:
“Think again, think ahead! It is time for action, change and hope”.
There were many international speakers unveiling their ideas on politics, entrepreneurship, economics; a lot of the time about the effects of the financial crisis, but also on the chances and opportunities that it brings. Among the speakers – 17 Rising Talents of 2009 - was Founder of Smarta, Shaa Wasmund.
Some conclusions from the forum were:
Women are Hit Hard by the Financial Crisis
It may be that women-led hedge funds have performed better in the financial crisis than hedge funds run by men – as was one of the conclusions of a Report launched at the Women’s Forum - and yet women and girls in poor countries have been hit the hardest by the implosion of banks thousands of miles away.
The developed world has received far more funding to combat the crisis, in comparison to that received by the worlds poorest countries. As a result, women now need similarly large-scale solutions, including access to capital and to larger markets, to combat the crisis.
Founder of WF: Aude Zieseniss de Thuin
“The ground has shifted beneath the feet of our business models and social and economic policies”, explains Founder and CEO Aude Zieseniss de Thuin. “The Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society views moments of rupture like this as an opportunity to advance new ideas, technologies and even paradigms for society and the economy. With their male counterparts, women have a key role to play in the process of creating a more resilient future,” the Founder of the Women’s Forum said.
Empowering Women makes Financial Sense
Discussed at great length, was the idea that empowering women economically is not just a matter of fairness, but of financial sense. Read more
Women, Leadership and Economic Turbulence – Reflections from the Global Summit of Women 2009
Anna Gudmundson
Anna Gudmundson is a senior manager at advertising response company Ad.IQ where she develops and manages new products and services, the latest being their mobile internet offering, as well as heading up a product team. Here, she talks about: what she has taken from the Global Summit of Women 2009, the positives that can be taken from a recession and how these can be applied to the careers of both men and women alike.
From a balcony on the 15th floor looking out at the skyscrapers and hearing the traffic from the streets below, it would be hard to identify the city. But the mountains that tower up in the background, stealing much of the attention from the glossy buildings, remind me that I am not in London or New York. This is Santiago, the capital of Chile, with a population of 5.65 million people. The Mapocho River that runs through the city is currently almost dry which is a stark reminder of environmental and climate concerns, which seem to be on the lips of politicians meeting in nearby Valparaiso, as well as of the coffee drinkers in the many cafes across the city.
If you would allow the lack of water in the river to symbolise the difficult times we are experiencing, it surely doesn’t seem to have cracked the spirit of Chilean visionaries. Sure, the country is feeling the bite just like everywhere else, but the Chilean economy appears to be withstanding the crises better than many old economies, and the crises may well be the catalyst to push through the changes required in structures, culture and old ways of thinking, to take Chile to the next level, and maybe to break through the ‘glass ceiling’…
My purpose in travelling to Chile was to explore a business idea and to attend the Global Summit of Women 2009, the 19th of its kind. The Summit brings women leaders from around the world together, to discuss women’s economic development, leadership and political influence around the globe, to network, exchange experiences and ideas, and to take initiatives towards a more diverse and balanced global order.
With the wide range of topics that the summit covers, and the various breakout sessions to be attended, each participant can walk away with a different experience. Whether you find that the summit paints a bright and positive picture for the future of women across the globe, or if you get a sense of struggle, obstacles and hard work, is more likely dependent on your mindset rather than the program, speakers or delegates. The variety of angles, topics, countries and interests is truly broad. Read more
Do You Use the Internet a lot and Like it? Perhaps you have an Addiction
flickr: Computer of yesteryear
As part of the job I spend a lot of my free time looking around the internet for anything interesting involving women and the Internet. During one very such search I recently came across a great article on BBC News online from December 1998 entitled ‘Women’s Growing Addiction to the Internet’. The photo of an old Trinitron screen was the first thing that caused my laughter – not least of all because I am presently working on one – promptly followed by research findings that:
‘A stereotype has developed that the typical [Internet] addict is a teenager, usually male, with little or no social life or no self confidence’
Contrary to the stereotype, the research had found that of 445 Internet users although, thirty-something women were more likely to be addicted to the internet than their teenage male compatriots.
The research itself seemed somewhat flaky – they had not decided how best to define addiction and left it as ‘[someone] who used the internet a lot and was positive about it.’ Hang on a minute – doesn’t that define just about every user out there now? What’s more they had decided that anyone drawn to the Internet was already likely to possess an addictive personality, before mentioning that women were more likely to enter into their research than men any way.
It is interesting to see that ten years on, the stereotype still seems to exist, and yet potentially how underestimated the net was in those days – addicts as someone ‘who like it’! This goes to show how wrong research can be, after all the results of this particular one would label all tech entrepreneurs as depressed, introverted addicts who definitely wouldn’t attend Meetups, but do use the internet a lot and like it.
Time For a Little Monkey Business in the Boardroom?
Is it Time for a little Monkey Business in the Boardroom?
An article in the Times last week stated: ‘If women want to reach the top in a man’s world, they may have to decide between femininity and success.’ The point was that a recent study into the behaviour of chimpanzee courtship had shown female apes that made themselves desirable to the male of the species were provided for – our ape relatives were effectively exchanging ‘meat for sex’.
Three decades after women burnt their bras for equality; there is a school of thought that suggests women should abandon the celebration of their feminine wiles in favour of diminishing male/female differences. The article suggests that instead of being it all – ‘glamorous, desirable and feminine’ – women should, for progressive reasons, be more conservative in the boardroom. By having a ‘more unisex working wardrobe for women in macho workplaces’ perhaps women would achieve more in the boardroom. Read more
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