>> Deborah Carnegie: Hi everyone, and welcome to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker
Series. I'm Deborah Carnegie, and I'd like to introduce today’s speaker John Gerzema. John
Gerzema is a pioneer in the use of data to identify social change and help companies anticipate
and adapt to new interests and demands. A best-selling author, columnist, speaker and social
theorist, his books have appeared on the best of lists at Fast Company and The Week magazine.
As chief insights officer at Young & Rubicam, he oversees the world's largest database of brands
and consumer behavior and studies social change and its impact on business, society and the
economy. He's here today to talk about his newest book, The Athena Doctrine: How Women
(And the Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule the Future, which he co-authored with Michael
D’Antonio. Gerzema and his team traveled four times around the globe surveying 64,000
citizens in 25 nations to learn how the most innovative people are deploying feminine strengths
and values to recover from economic and social crisis and create a more hopeful future. Please
join me in giving a warm welcome to John Gerzema. [applause]
>> John Gerzema: Thank you. Hey, how is everybody? Thank you so much for coming. Thank
you Deborah; I really appreciate it. As Deborah mentioned, we spent the last two years sort of
uncovering and examining what's happening in society, looking at new traits and things that
define leadership in this age, and I thought I'd start off talking a little bit about two countries
that we visited that were focused on crisis. Obviously the events of last week, we saw some of
the worst things happen in Boston. They were followed by some of the best things, right? The
compassion and sort of the passion and caring that sort of came out of that, and we sort of saw
the same things when we went around the world. One of the things that we saw was sort of
this ideal, I guess I could describe it as sort of this universal national feminine response to crisis,
and what I mean by that is there was a terrible event that happened two years ago in Tokyo
and ironically the whole focus of this got wrapped up in a concept as ordinary as canned tuna,
and I'll try to explain. So this is the Nagato Kimura and he has a canned tuna factory in
Ishinomaki, Japan. The factory was completely destroyed after the earthquake and the tsunami
and as he told me, as people were sort of going through and looking through the rubble and
trying to uncover survivors and recover debris, they started to see all these little cans of tuna.
Little cans that were basically not dented; most of them were completely intact, but they didn't
have their labels. They'd all been washed away and they all were all dotting the beach. And so
this is a fabulous brand in Japan. Just imagine the most incredible, you know, super premium
fish. They love this brand from The Kinoya and so a bunch of citizens decided to travel from
Tokyo and help out, and so they gathered up all the cans. They washed them; they cleaned
them. They brought them back to Tokyo to sell because they were going to try to help rebuild
the factory; it was their gesture. There's kind of a marketing problem in here though which is,
how do you sell something that doesn't have a label? And they didn't know what to do and so
they decided basically to put all of the cans on the store shelves bare. And what happened over
the next several days was somewhat remarkable. All throughout Tokyo and the Metropolitan
area, people went in and they just started designing messages on the cans. They took Sharpies;
they took Magic Markers. Basically they created this huge movement of people that came in
and suddenly these little cans of tuna and mackerel he came sort of this symbolic hope of the
nation and the story as Kimura’s son told me about, maybe about six months later I was having
canned mackerel with him in Tokyo and he told me help ordinary citizens basically got together
and through their efforts, 800,000 cans were recovered to help them rebuild their factory, so
those little gestures, in Japan. We go 5000 miles on the other side of the world. We spent time
in Reykjavik, in Iceland and their there were about 7 or 8 guys that basically broke a country.
They speculated with all of the money and as a result there was this provisional government
that was brought back into sort of repair the public trust. Emotions were seething when we
where there. If you had bank, bankers that were not unlike what we had here sort of four years
ago, but, you know, this was systemic inside culture. There was basically in this small society
not nearly a person that wasn't affected by what happened. And what the government decided
to do is they need to really establish credibility in an entirely new way if they were going to get
people back on their side. And so ordinary citizens formed and framed this new Constitution
and they broke from their centuries old Constitution that had been based on Denmark and they
decided to go their own way. And what they did is they created this group. They got together
and used all the modern tools of social today and they crowd sourced the first constitution of a
sovereign nation. So kind of here you have these two societies, these two island nations, both
of them basically people took to the streets in rage and protest, but the ultimate resolution to
crisis kind of came from the opposite of anger. That's what I want to talk you about. We are
seeing a fundamental shift in the role of masculine and feminine values in the 21st century.
We're seeing that we live in a world that's far more social, interdependent and transparent and
in this world we see feminine values becoming more ascendant. Now before I get into, oh my
gosh, he's going to talk about the end of men and that's not what this is all about. [laughter].
It's not really. It's the fact that we all have these things inside us. We have masculine traits; we
have feminine traits. What we saw was amazing men and women all over the world leading
and innovating by taking advantage of the social economy, the sharing economy, the
interdependent and transparent economy. And they are following what we call the Athena
Doctrine, which sort of looks at the idea that flexibility, collaboration and nurturing, these are
all really essential trends or traits rather that you can use to thrive in the years ahead. So in this
context as Deborah mentioned, we fielded a massive data set using brand asset valuator. We
gathered data all over the world. This is about 65% of global GDP, these countries that’s
represented, and so we gathered data from Canada, Chile and Mexico to Indonesia. We were
specifically looking for very diverse types of countries both economically, culturally, politically in
order to sort of get a sense of the public sentiment. We also then did nationally representative
samples of all these folks, so we wanted to get a sense of what ordinary people were thinking
today. The other thing we did though is to supplement the data, we basically traveled all
around the world. I think I had hair when we started this project, but what we did is we
basically went and spent time in the favelas of Peru, but we talked to world political leaders.
We got to interview Shimon Perez. We talked to his diplomats. We talked to a lot of startups, a
lot of NGOs. We talk to CEOs of Fortune 100 companies. We talked to education leaders, some
of these people I'm going to talk to you about today, and basically we even went to Boton
where we interviewed the secretary of the Gross National Happiness Commission and when we
went around the world we started asking people questions about, you know, what makes them
happy, what gives their lives meaning, and we started to see at a macro level, there was this big
sort of sense of animosity and sort of concern. Now the fact that life will be better for my
children than it is for me. This is 13 countries of data, 51 percent of people disagreeing with
that, so questioning that. They were also really looking at questioning and really criticizing the
large power in the hands of large institutions and corporations. We've seen that in our country
obviously. But this was around the world in all of these 13 nations. But this question about
empathy. We'd seen this a lot in our data, that my country cares about its citizens more than it
used to, you know, 76% of people disagreeing and then people even question society’s basic
fairness. And as we got into this and we started to unpack it, we started to understand that
there was this, I guess, this sort of quote unquote global referendum on men. We asked this
question. We said I'm dissatisfied with the conduct of men in my country. And literally the
majority of people are dissatisfied with the conduct of men including 79% of people in Japan
and South Korea and about 2/3 of people in the U.S., Indonesia and Mexico. U.S., Indonesia
and Mexico, they couldn't be three more different countries and yet you saw this sort of data
happening. But there's something really interesting, right, Canadian men are doing something
right. [laughter]. We need to go up there and really understand what's going on with those
Canadian men. But, you know, what's really important in this is that I left all of the data just
pure as we recorded it, but if you took out China for which there may be some research bias in
existence in a lot of the questions that citizens answered, and Canada, that just seems to be
doing great. You take those out and you're at levels that approach 78 to 80% of the people in
most of these countries. But the really fascinating thing for us was millennials; young men and
women have a fundamentally stronger appreciation of feminine values and the role of women
in their society. We saw very interestingly double-digit generational gaps in very misogynist
quote unquote, misogynist societies like Japan. I'm sorry. Like South Korea, like Germany and
then also when you go into places like even Indonesia and India, right? So interestingly and a
lot of the questions that we asked about these types of questions as a myriad of them, young
men and women actually outperformed women over 50 and men over 50 in a lot of these
measures, so young people are thinking in a very different way. They are seeing the world not
nearly as stark and contrast. And then we asked this question then, well would the world be a
better place if men thought more like women. And again, you saw 2/3 of people around the
world believing that to be the case including, you know, nearly 79% of Japanese men, so what
we're talking about here is really this structural issue, right? How do we think through the ideas
of making society more transparent, making pay equal, making the world far more balanced for
both men and women? So these are the types of things that we started to see and again, we
saw very strong relationships to millennials in the data. And I think perhaps what's behind this,
and I'm going to talk about these masculine structures, these ideas around sort of the codes of
control, aggression, black-and-white thinking that have led to many of the problems that we
face today from wars and income inequality to all the reckless risk-taking and scandal. So we
got to this point about, well, wow! What does thinking like a woman mean? And I'm like well,
that's kind of a problem for me because I'm not a woman, so I don't know how do women
think. I am a dad and I'm a husband. My co-author, Michael, we're dads in all-female
households, but it's not really empirical research. We needed to find a way to go out and try to
understand this a little bit. Very, very difficult thing to talk about with gender. I'm not a gender
expert. Until I started this project, I still don't profess myself to be a gender expert; I'm a
researcher, but I wanted to go out and conduct a piece of research to understand if this was
really happening. So what we did is we created two samples. We asked 64,000 people around
the world to basically take a 125 human traits and classify them as masculine, feminine or
neither. Then we took the other half of the sample and we asked the other half to basically
take those very same traits, but only this time there was no gendering to the words
whatsoever. We basically asked them to say okay, you believe that there's a lot of problems in
the world today. Which of the traits that we need in our leaders, what are the things we need
to make ourselves happy? How does it define morality and really how do we think about
success in the modern world. So what we did is we then basically measured those two. We
modeled the data to basically understand what people felt was masculine or feminine or
neither and what they felt was going to drive success. Overall, we were really surprised. I
mean there's some differences clearly by countries and am going to show you some broad now
country average data of those 13 countries. But what we saw was a lot of consistency around
the world about what people thought was masculine and feminine and we started to see this
emergence of this feminine traits and values. So let's look at a couple of examples. This is one
of the things that we saw with the focus on the idea that the modern leader, the essence of the
modern leader is becoming more feminine. So one of the things most highly correlated to
leadership were leaders that were expressive. So just think about tone deaf politicians and
people don't really get out there and connect with you. People talk about why do you want to
run in the first place. Show your feelings, help us really understand what you really, really care
about. Now it was interesting too, this big focus on patience and reason, you know, working
through to get to compromise, to build consensus and to sort of get things done like the people
did in Iceland. And this whole idea then of decisive and resilience, even those things are seen
as masculine and they are still really important. Look at how they are balanced by being flexible
or by being patient. We also saw this big dimension around planning for the future. There was
a lot of questions and criticism in our data about people basically being frustrated by the
expediency of not really getting big problems solved. So we thought it was really interesting,
and then we got into this idea of being more intuitive, being more empathetic. Empathy in our
data has risen by 400% since the crisis because people want companies, institutions and leaders
to really get them. So in this context, the selflessness we thought was also very interesting.
There's been a lot written about leadership and like why do people want to be leaders to begin
with and there's this movement away from the I want to be leader because it sounds good, me,
to I want to be leader because I believe in something that's bigger than myself. And that was
sort of the essence that we started to get. So we also saw that there was these trends that
were sort of patterning, that were favoring the feminine in places like morality, in concepts like
morality which I thought there would be lots of difference based on culture and custom, but
the highest place where feminine traits were most correlated were in the idea of happiness.
We just need these things in our lives to make ourselves better as people and to make
ourselves sort of more satisfied. And so what we started to understand was there was a lot of
connections between, you know, bringing more inclusivity into feminine values into helping to
solve problems, so questions like in a world with less money, happiness is a more important
measure of success. That's clearly a post crisis attitude. Today's times require we be more kind
and empathetic. I'd work for less money in a company whose culture and values I believe in,
very interesting in developing, when we pull out these country averages, these numbers
approach nearly 80% for millennials in the U.S. So again, this idea, too, that you realize that you
need to collaborate; you've got to have a far more open set of nuances, so really what we
started to see and our data was about change management, how all of us are going to think
about our careers, how we are going to collaborate, how we're going to be more flexible and
how we are going to work together in order to thrive. So I'll give you some examples of some
of the people that we met around the world. And this is an idea around demonstrating and
leading with your vulnerability. And the idea is if you're actually open and honest about what
you don't know, you can actually sort of really get some great support. So this guy here Doctor
Madisch, he is, the guy is brilliant. He's got a PhD in virology and he told me he kept getting
stuck in his experiments and when he got stuck he went to his colleagues for help at Harvard
and he'd say, you know, I'm having these problems. And they would say, hey buddy, why are
you admitting you don't know this stuff. You look kind of ridiculous [laughter] and he started
realize that all of medical research is siloed. It's people in cubicles and it's very much a me, me
culture. You go and you present your paper at a conference and you solve one tiny bit of the
problem. He was really focused on expediency and he thought there has to be another way to
do this, and so rather than being chastised, he actually went out and created ResearchGate.
Has anybody heard of ResearchGate? It's the social network for scientists, basically. In the
span of the last three years, he now has two million scientists from 200 different countries
collaborating on 800,000 different papers. Now, you know, he doesn't know yet how he's going
to scale this and how it's going to truly work, but his goal is to basically have a group of
scientists come together and win a Nobel Prize. So what I think is very interesting in this idea
when you think about leadership, is you can't open a book today or a magazine article without
learning from failure, learning from failure, learning from failure. His whole idea was that
there'd be less failing to begin with if we admitted what we didn't know in the first place. So
how do we get help from our friends, as Ringo Starr said. We spent time in Israel with Major
General Orna Barbivai. She's the highest ranking woman in the Israeli Defense Force. And
when I asked her how she approached military strategy, she said from the perspective of a
mother. And she talked about the idea that you actually have to have a wider view than what
you see looking through a gunsight. And one of the things that she's been credited with in
Israel is actually focusing on bringing more women and more feminine values into the
checkpoints in order to engage and to de-escalate conflict and to measure with what she
believes in, she has two of her daughters stationed at the Gaza and Syria Strip, or Gaza Strip
and Syria rather. We spent time with Leo Riski. He is at the Felleshus. The Felleshus is Danish
for house for everyone. Has anyone heard of this? This is the first shared embassy in the
world. It's home to the five Nordic nations of Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Sweden and Finland.
And what's really interesting I think about this 21st century model is it's about putting aside
your individual country differences and working together both for economic development, but
also to sort of guide and shape diplomacy. It's a fascinating idea. You have this open embassy.
He's standing in the courtyard. Each country kind of has their own little wing, but it's all open.
It's like a big campus like it is here at Microsoft and you can kind of go for from room, from
building to building and country to country and it's become this sort of diplomatic hotbed in
Berlin, and I was quite surprised when I stepped outside after meeting Leo that directly across
the street you see the Syrian embassy that's shuddered and covered in graffiti, sort of two stark
contrasts of openness and closure. One of the more fascinating countries we went to was
Columbia, and one of the things we saw in the research for this book and in our interviews were
feminine traits and values being applied to solve some of the biggest most difficult problems
that exist in the world. If anyone has followed Columbia in the recent progress that they had in
the country over the last decade and I half, you start to see how feminine values have driven
the solution. And Catalina Cock Duque runs the Mi Sangre Foundation, very interesting
program, a bit controversial, but this is about forced empathy. And what she has is she has
these Casa dez paz, or peace houses where 30,000 ex-rebels of the Farc have basically been
reintegrated into society. What's controversial about it is that these former soldiers live with
victims that they once terrorized or controlled. In these environments that are very, very
emotional and very, very controversial in some respects she's trying to create programs for
people to understand that these young soldiers, many of whom were children who were drug
into the wilderness, you know, into the mountains knew no other life and knew no other
context. So what's fascinating about Columbia is what is happening there and how people are
investing in the future. We also met the head of the municipality in Medellin, and they have
devoted 62% of Medellin’s civic budget to people under 40, right? So they are focusing on
digital schools, education, different ways to sort of break the systemic cycle of violence and civil
war that's really plagued their country, some big thinking there. Jonas Vig and Mans Adler,
Mans is the guy with the wild hair, kind of interesting about Bambuser. Bambuser was shut
down during the Arab spring faster than Twitter. This is live video platforming. You video
stream live from your phone and it goes to your social graph. What they started, what they
thought they'd built was something fun for millennials to say hey, I'm at a party and I'm going
to shoot my video to my other friends. Suddenly they realized that when the state department
showed up at their offices and human rights groups showed up, basically people were using the
Bambuser servers to hide from the government and to document sort of all the issues that
were happening in Tunisia and in Egypt. When we were there and they had two servers that
were humming. Once said Syria and the other one said Egypt. So they've really toggled their
business model and they’ve adjusted to this new world of trying to help arm individual people
with the power of transparency over institutions. Maria Ziv, I loved Maria. We spent time in
freezing Stockholm and Maria is head of Swedish tourism board and if you're the head of the
Swedish tourism board you have a business problem. She told us her business problem. She
said when we do our survey research people think of two things about Sweden. They think of
blondes and Abba. [laughter]. And she said there's a far more diverse and interesting portrait
in Sweden. You know, we've got an incredible progressive culture and an incredibly
multicultural society; we need to get out show that. So you can't really do it in a glossy sort of
travel magazine ad because you're going up against existing perceptions. So they decided to do
something kind of radical and they took the @Sweden. It's a great Twitter following to follow,
just @Sweden, but they give over the national Twitter account to one individual citizen to
tweet every week. So they proudly have shown the face of Sweden in a very diverse and
interesting way. This is also radical transparency. The government doesn't censor anything the
citizens do. The very interesting thing that happened is that there's been some controversial
people that have broadcast some pretty, you know, profane, anti-Sweden types of messages on
the @Sweden account, but rather than the government getting involved, ordinary citizens have
basically jumped on in the community to force them back into civic well-being. So a very
interesting program there. A lot of the themes that we saw when we did the research for the
Athena Doctrine were the ideas of winning is plural, multiple wins. And the idea behind there is
sort of in a masculine structure winning and losing is a zero-sum game, right? You win. I lose. I
win. You lose. You know, and people usually don't feel so good about that, right? Here in the
winning is plural idea many of the clever Athena leaders we met were trying to find multiple
positive outcomes for all involved in a way to sort of get progress happening faster. And so one
of the great examples was Emily Bolton from social finance. They lead social impact bonds in
the UK. The idea here is to find a way to reward private investors if governments lower future
costs. So in one program she described for us they were trying to lower the rate of reoffending
prisoners from nearby Peterborough prison, and they estimated if they can get the rate below
7.5%, these social impact bonds would be profitable and investors would profit. What was
interesting about it, though, was that the investors became social activists. They got involved
through enlightened self-interest, but they were working to help these prisoners reintegrate
back into society with drug counseling, job training and other aspects. And in this model they'd
actually seen positive outcomes where the government has saved money, prisoners are being
reintegrated back into the society and investors are making money. It's a very interesting sort
of multiple win outcomes that happen in a lot of the places that we saw. The other theme that
we saw with Athena is this idea of jumping infrastructures and how feminine values can take
hold. Kenya for us was probably, in addition to Columbia, Kenya was probably the most
interesting country we visited. You've got 72% of the entire Kenyan economy flowing through
M-PESA, the text based platform that's part of Safaricom. And what they've been able to do
though is really improve quality of life for this burgeoning middle class and help refugees at the
same time. One of the big problems in Kenya has been corruption and extortion when
currencies move around well meaning MGOs trying to get aid to people that need it. What
they've been able to do is use the text based platforms and that's a whole big part of Robert
Collymore. He's the CEO of Safaricom. His goal and ambition is to create protective
environments using the text in ways that get information and help and aid and support to
refugees in a far faster way. Rose Goslinga, another interesting example of communities
coming together to create common good. The business problem here was many of Nairobi
Kenya's farmers are so poor, the cost of being able to afford crop insurance basically would
wipe them out. You're talking about a matter of $15 of insurance doesn't work in the business
model. So what Rose did is she found a high-tech solution using M-PESA and Safaricom and a
low-tech solution which was these weather monitors to basically measure the rainfall, measure
the percentage of drought that was occurring around the farmland, and then sending text
messages with insurance payments directly to farmers. So the cost of having an insurance
adjuster come and visit your land would basically wipe out the process and the ability to afford
the insurance, so what she's been able to do in the last three years is 12,000 farmers are now
together in this community. We saw a lot of this, this idea of these trust circles in a lot of these
emerging fast-growing economies. Another group of people we talk about in Kenya was a
group of a savings club that had a box with a savings in it and there were four different locks
where people came together. It's called 4-Lock Box. Again, these ideas of sort of collaboration,
trust and empathy were dominant in these emerging markets. We're also seeing very
interesting innovative business models arise. This is Tim Kunde and he's over in East Berlin and
he's the founder of Friendsurance. Has anybody heard of Friendsurance? So Friendsurance is
an exercise in behavioral economics. And the problem was that most people dealing with an
ordinary institution, there often is high levels of fraud in insurance that gets passed along into
higher claims for ordinary people trying to get policies. He did an exercise using his research
and discovered that if you went into groups of insurance with your friends, you would actually
be more accountable. So what happens here is you go in and you by auto insurance, home
insurance, life insurance and health insurance with your friends. So immediately start to think
about your seven friends that you go into auto insurance with, think of the ones that you would
do it with and think of the ones that you wouldn't. Well that's what happens. They started to
create these little communities around accountability and these trust circles again. Like what's
been interesting is that he's been able to document in the four years that Friendsurance has
been in existence lower fraud, more accountability to people rather than an institution and
people started to actually modify their behavior, driving more safely and in their test runs right
now on health insurance, they're seeing people actually change their eating habits, stopping to
smoke because they feel more accountable to people they know. We loved Grannie Holly. We
spent time in the English countryside with Grannie Holly and she’s one of the platoons of
grandmothers that sew hand knitted scarves and hats for this British startup called Grannie’s
Ink. Grannie’s Ink is fun. It's a super hot millennial brand in the UK and the most awesome
thing about it is you can go on their website and pick out your own granny. [laughter]. What
Holly talked about was sort of empathy meets CRM, right, because what she’s found is that she
started and a lot of the other grannies to sew these hand knitted little messages of inspiration
and hope to her young charges and so these twenty-somethings who have got to get their extra
foster grandmother and she's talked about in these discussions about how she developed penpal relationships with a lot of her customers and she even had a couple of them ask if they
would send her cookies. [laughter]. So again, emotion and interest arising. We met
extraordinary people that were using the courage to challenge up against authority and this is
Silvia Loli in Lima Peru, and she runs the Women's House. And in Peru sadly domestic violence
and domestic abuse and issues against women has basically gone unreported for many
decades. She got really mad by that and she also got frustrated that the entire police force was
all male. By coincidence, there were high levels of corruption in the all-male police force. So
she thought, you know what? Women can do this job just as good as men, so she created her
own police force. She trained them up to the level of which they exceeded the capabilities of
the existing police force and she forced integration of women into the police force which then
in turn, not surprisingly, lowered the rate of corruption dramatically. I think in the estimates of
30 to 32% over five years. So by inclusion of that, she's also pushed reforms in their national
Congress in order to finally have these serious abuses being taking care of, being taken
seriously. One of my other favorite guys that we interviewed for the book, his name is Shai
Reshef and he is the founder of the University of the People. I'm not sure if you've heard of
University of the People. This is the world's first tuition free online University, and it's an
incredible example of sort of putting together the goodness in humanity in people and the
opportunity for young people who really want to learn. And what he discovered, he believed
similar to a lot of what Bill and Melinda Gates talk about at the Gates foundation is that, you
know, intellectual capital is widely dispersed around the world. It's just economic capital that
isn't, so he wanted to find a way to get young people a proper high-quality education. So he
did something pretty cool. He created this online platform for computer science and business
administration. What he then did is he turned around and he asked 2500 volunteer professors
from the world's greatest universities if they would teach these kids. The thing I haven't told
you yet about these kids, 80% of his students are in the bottom 20% of GDP producing
countries, okay? These kids are basically working on first-generation phones in internet cafés,
downloading their coursework, doing anything it takes to get an education. So these educators
turned around from Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Stamford all these incredible places and
what Shai did is he moved all of his servers over into the West Bank. He's Israeli but he's based
the company here in California, or down in California, but he basically tried to create the first
true global University. He tells this story of this incredible young man named Zho Zhing
[phonetic]. And Zho Zhing was in Haiti and he lost his family in the earth quake. He then
persevered and started studying in a tent for the last three years and he got pre-accepted into
NYU business school, right? So that's the power of education and the power of hope when you
put together, these insights and one of the great insights with Shai was that does anyone have a
teacher in their family? My mom was an English teacher. Teachers always want to teach, right,
so it's the power and the passion of these teachers connecting with the power of these kids
that really want to learn, and that's where technology comes in. Also, we saw very innovative
patterns in our Athena leaders just being quite frankly clever, not thinking in the conventional
way. And part of that came from having passion and compassion. So Maria Damanaki is
originally from Crete and she loves the water, loves everything about oceans, loves everything
about the environment and she took on this job to become the European Commissioner for
Maritime affairs in Brussels. It's a technocrat, European technocrat job and you don't associate
creativity with European technocrats, but that's what she did. She found out that she had a
whole bunch of fishermen that were unemployed because fishing stocks had been basically
overfished in the waters around Europe. At the same time she had a big problem with all this
plastic, these plastic barges that were basically floating around the ocean. So she set a price for
plastic, and she sent the fishermen out to fish for plastic in a way to help supplement their
income and to help address the issues of pollution. And then we also spent time in, a lot of
time in India, in Ahmedabad with Rajendra Joshi. They’re thinking through, we talked earlier
about long-term thinking; they're trying to lift people out of low income housing into middleclass housing by building an entire ecosystem around the housing. So they don't just go and
put low income housing up. They actually look for jobs, employers, entire communities to
basically build and create a sustainable ecosystem that's going to help people build out and rise
up. And then we also spent time in Stockholm and we were with Lotta Rajilin and Anders
Bengssten. These guys are the founders of the first gender-neutral preschool in Stockholm.
And what's interesting about the gender-neutral preschool is it goes even beyond the idea that,
you know, girls can play with trucks and boys can play with dolls. The whole idea is there's no
labeling at all about femininity and masculinity; it's about people and humanity. And her whole
point on this is basically tied to that famous Sir Ken Robinson speech on TED about does
education really enhance our creativity. That's her point. Her point is you've got young kids at
the most expansive times in their lives, right, when their eyes are wide open and putting gender
lenses on boys or girls, puts them in a box. It basically threatens their creativity. That's the
whole argument behind what she's about and that's really what argument is behind in all the
data, because even though we talk about the inclusion of feminine values, we're talking about
how do we understand that these are human values inside all of us that all this did these things
to thrive in the days, weeks and months ahead. And to kind of prove that out, this is correlation
data, not causation but correlation of looking at economic development of countries and
whether or not they are inclusive of feminine values in our data. And you start to see that the
more developed a country, the more balanced they are. Whereas, sort of more of the
emerging markets from Brazil, India, China and Indonesia still skew slightly a little bit masculine
in their attitudes reported in our data by their citizens. But even beyond the idea of sort of
GDP, you get into overall quality of life. So we worked with Gallup and we started to look at
our data against their Gallup quality-of-life index and you see that when you include feminine
values you have a higher reported quality of life. And that's really the argument inside this
entire sort of book, is that we've got the most innovative men and women that already
understand this. I'm not saying it's a mainstream concept. I'm saying it's an emerging idea that
they understand that they can access their femininity whether they are a man, access their
masculinity whether they are woman and find ways to be more balanced in ways to sort of
drive progress. And I guess it kind of gets us to think about the idea that our gender is who we
are and not what we can be. That we can think through these ideas around gender, dispel
them and think about humanity. It drives itself into the marketplace. We just did an analysis.
This is fresh data from this week, but we looked at brands that were inclusive of feminine
values, which are the red brands, meaning that they are high feminine or high masculine
against our data, and we looked at brands that were high feminine and low masculine which
meant they skewed feminine. And you start to see the red and the orange sort of breakout.
They have higher levels of usage and preference, meaning that having some femininity in your
brand is likely good for business. The other thing we did is we did a ranking and I'll send you
guys the background behind this if you're interested, but we did a ranking of our BAV data of
the top 50 most feminine brands. We called it the Athena score, the Athena list, but you start
to see brands that are focused on, you know, nurturing and health, whether it was St. Jude's or
the Mayo Clinic, into brands that were about teaching and education. Google surprisingly
shows up pretty high, but so does Bill Gates and so does Microsoft, [laughter] at 30 and 35. You
see Coca-Cola. You see family brands like McDonald's and Applebee's sort of make this list.
You see brands that are about learning and development from like Lego and Crayola and
Target. Interestingly, the U.S. Army, you know, we're unpacking that. They're a massive
employer of women. I think they're one of the largest employers of women in the country, so
interestingly to see how people’s perceptions take hold. And I guess before we get into a
discussion I'll leave you with this thought of how you can use feminine values to really change
something big. We met a woman in Tokyo named Eriko Yamaguchi and she runs this company
called Motherhouse and her story’s pretty fascinating because when she was a young child she
was bullied so badly that her parents had to take her out of school for about four years. She's
this spindly young woman. She looks like she doesn't weigh more than 120 pounds if that and
she has this incredible energy about her and this aura, and one of the things she did after she
got a little bit bigger, she took up kickboxing. But she also had this compassion about other
people that was formed by just being beat on by all these mean kids for all those years and she
told us a story. She said she started to get really good at fashion when she was at home from
school and she decided to get a fashion degree and she didn't know where to go. But she also
wanted to help people and she told us that she went on and searched one day and asked what
was the poorest country in Asia, and discovered that it was Bangladesh. And so she decided to
go get a fashion degree BRAC, which she did, the only fashion school in Bangladesh. She was
down there for a couple of years and she decided to lease a factory in Dhaka to try to make
high quality handcrafted goods. Now nothing had ever occurred to this factory before. They
were basically making sacks for grains and potatoes. That was their level of quality. But the
other thing I haven't told you yet is that she was the only woman. She was 22 at the time with
a hundred men in this factory. Most of them were a literate. Most of them had no faith in any
way that they could sell something as high-quality as Japanese luxury handbags in Shibuya
which she now does. What she did, she did two really powerful things. The first thing she did is
she started to do trial and error with these men over the course of about a year and a half until
they got one sample product that she thought was good enough. And what happened was she
felt right off the bat she needed to bring esteem to these men, so she issued them name cards
and these men were so poor they had never had a photo of themselves. And so she built
esteem in these men. But the other thing she did is she immediately raised their prices, their
wages by 50% before they'd even made anything. She was basically saying, I know you guys can
do this. You can do it. And I've got to pay you commensurate with what high level, high-quality
handbag makers make. And it, you know, hopefully someone will make a documentary on her
or do something incredible, but she basically got these men to believe in themselves, one little
twenty-something girl. So today she now has seven stores in Tokyo, and she now has outgrown
her headquarters three different times and she now pays double the average wage in
manufacturing in Bangladesh as a result of her efforts. And I think that's really what this is all
about is that there is power in femininity. There is not only grace and urgency, but there's this
idea of compassion, collaboration nurturing, all of these things that people around the world
said were feminine are emerging constructs in what are going to drive the success into the
future of tomorrow. And I think that's why we talk about this idea of, you know, femininity
being the operating system of the 21st century and that this idea that men and women who can
think like this are going to be the ones that are going to really guide and really rule the future
and create a world that we all want to inhabit. So that's kind of a brief summary of the Athena
Doctrine. It's worth mentioning too that what we've done is partnered up with United Nations
girlup foundation. I would love it if you would go onto the girlup and like their Facebook page.
It's a pretty powerful group. This is all about sort of championing the next generation of
women leaders and all the proceeds of our book support girlup and that's our story. Thank you
very much for your time. [applause]. I'd be happy to answer any questions or comments or…
Yes?
>>: What inspired you to write the book in the first place and to start all the research?
>> John Gerzema: So I wrote, my previous book was called Spend Shift and it looked at postcrisis consumerism and I was giving a talk at a women's empowerment sort of networking event
that was hosted by Denise Morrison. She's the CEO of Campbell's, and after I spoke she started
to talk about how they were going to work together to nurture and develop the careers of all
these young women in the room, and there were probably 60 women and me, some middleaged dude. And it occurred to me you couldn't put 60 men together in a room and probably
get the same sort of positive energy and I just started to think about that and the ideas of the
world changing and being more socially dependent and transparent and we started to develop
hypothesis, so that was sort of the start and then we went off and started to look more closely
at the data to see if there was any merit to it. Yes?
>>: So do you think that this is something new in that these values are more, no pun intended,
more valued now than they were before, or do you think it's something that has always been
the case but maybe it wasn't uncovered or maybe because of lack of social networks or, you
know, lack of that communication it wasn't that easily discovered?
>> John Gerzema: I, that's a very interesting point. I'd love to know what other people think. I
would think it's perhaps a combination. It may be more of the latter that, you know, we are
aligning with all of these different forces, millennial values and technology that are helping to
make these things more urgent. But at the same time to be really frank, one of our partners,
and my mom who's very much invested in this topic, you know, we didn't go into this without
understanding that we were men and one of the things that, you know, a lot of people, a lot of
women have told us is that, you know, they’ve felt that the way that they think and value is
somehow undervalued because it doesn't align with the constructs of business. I am curious
about what anyone else thinks.
>>: So you just described my dissertation research. [laughter]
>> John Gerzema: Excellent. Tell us about it.
>>: Mid ‘90s and I'm beginning to think that I need to go back and revisit the data. We
correlated the descriptions of masculine and feminine leadership traits with performance
ratings on performance reviews on the job, and what we found out is if the masculine trait was
associated with, the masculine leadership trait was associated with higher performance; men
got higher ratings. Women profiled the same, got lower ratings. And there's a lot of research
out there around schemata and when things are contrary to this idea that we have in mind that
we rate them as less appealing or less effective. If that schemata is changing, which is what
we're talking about, that some of these feminine traits are seen as more effective that could be
a shift in how we view these traits in the workplace.
>> John Gerzema: I'd love to get a copy of your paper [laughter]. That's if you can find it. No,
but…
>>: I will warn you it's got like 20 years [indiscernible] [laughter]
>> John Gerzema: I know, but may be able to go back and tie it to our data to see if there's
been this change, very interesting question. I mean, I guess also as sort of a dad of a 10-yearold girl I believe that the best way to advocate for women and girls is to have men model the
approach, so if men start to see these things as competitive advantage, talking the language of
men, data, you know, ways to win, this can only help in some small way, it can only start to
help, you know, bridge a little bit of the divide and sort of create more partnership. Geraldine
Laybourne, does anyone remember Geraldine? She founded Nickelodeon and Oxygen; she's
been a huge proponent of the book and she said to me the other day, she said you know what,
men and women are great partners, you know, it's just only in the business world that this gets
sort of all skewed up, and in politics, I guess too. Yes?
>>: Did you do any research into the real cause of why this shift in masculine and feminine
tendencies?
>> John Gerzema: Unfortunately, we don't have data over time to see this, which is why I'm a
little curious to see his paper. What we saw was out of the custom study questions and I'll send
you guys a link to all the questions. There's 80 or 100 questions; you can start to at least
intuitively line up some of the things people were concerned about, things like the ROI on a
college education is worse today. You know, 70% of the people think that. This idea that
they've been failed perhaps by the incumbency of these masculine structures, that's a
hypothesis, not an insight.
>>: Well I'm wondering if it might be like the availability of resources. Like if you're living hand
to mouth, maybe the masculine way is contingent on survival.
>> John Gerzema: Yeah, interesting.
>>: But if you're not worried about that then maybe cooperating with others might be the
strategy to survive.
>> John Gerzema: That's very interesting. I think we saw that in the data about the brick
markets are still a little more masculine skewing, but it doesn't account for what's going on in
places like Columbia and in Kenya. We thought it was just fascinating like you know how
technologies jump generations? It seems like they're doing some really innovative things and
they're tackling just ridiculously complex problems. I mean, this stuff in Columbia for us was
incredible, you know, the systemic civil war and societal issues that they're trying to go after.
By no means are they fixed, but they're going at them with these traits. An interesting point.
Yes ma'am?
>>: I, one thing that strikes me is that basically the message here is collaboration, compassion
it's [indiscernible] traits that are winning traits as we're moving forward. And I was wondering
why not just deliver that message instead of calling them feminine values at all? No objection
no [indiscernible] it's all good for me. But sometimes I feel like it's actually harder for men to
embrace values that are labeled feminine values. It's just traditionally, it's just not traditionally
completely against what has been fostered [indiscernible].
>> John Gerzema: Yes.
>>: So it almost kind of disadvantages the idea that you're trying to capture.
>> John Gerzema: Fair point. Fair point, indeed. My intention, you know, is to understand
from a research standpoint how people approach these things and if they do have these gender
biases and how they attribute them, but that's absolutely a fair point. Geraldine said the same
thing to me. She said I don't know about the copy; why do you call it the Athena Doctrine? And
well, Athena Doctrine, she was the goddess of wisdom, but she was also the goddess of fairness
and she was a pretty tough cookie and I think, you know, we need to find ways to bring those
messages in.
>>: I'm just saying I love it, but I can see the problem with [indiscernible]
>> John Gerzema: I totally get you. Thank you for your comment.
>>: I actually agree completely with that concern. I was somewhat troubled by the continuous
labeling of feminine traits and masculine traits as though these are intrinsic and I want to see if
you believe that or if you are willing to at least qualify this as traditionally masculine and
traditionally feminine or in some way of saying it doesn't have to be [indiscernible]
>> John Gerzema: They're totally traditionally and I hope you get my message. My message is
about human traits and it's still, though, about including these things into our lives because you
know all the statistics. You've got 15% of women on corporate boards. You've got 16% of
women as CEOs. You know, there's no way that the world is fair and advantaged and inclusive
yet. And so I think definitely that's your point. But I also stand firm to say that these are values
that are ascendant that men have got to understand.
>>: You kind of focus on corporate and business and NGOs and social organizations. What
about micro-politics? You could argue that over the last 20, 30 years that sort of the iron Lady
approach. What do your findings imply for the next 10, 20 years?
>> John Gerzema: Yeah. I mean one of the more interesting things that we saw in our data and
our research was very thorny problems in politics were being addressed, you know, by these
Athena type thinkers. So you know, the [indiscernible] in Germany, we spent time with Shimon
Perez. We interviewed him and it was fascinating. He's an 89-year-old president and he told us
we're in a new world with many old minds, and he talked about adapting yourself. So I think,
you know, this is definitely an era and a place that's got to have more focus. I mean, how do
we get to a grand bargain? How do we align ourselves on issues where the public feels oneway and government still goes and does another thing? You know, the gun control lobby of last
week. I don't want to get political on you, but these are detachment of concepts that I think
need to be addressed, so, you know, we hope that there's some public policy implications
through the work that we do.
>>: I would suggest this has been a long time coming. Twenty years ago we saw the flattening
hierarchies and more emphasis on soft skills and collaboration and so I think what you are
saying is that the trends are accelerating because of generational and the technology factors,
which is great, but playing hardball isn't dead yet. And I think we still have a long way to go, but
it's heartening to know that people are beginning to absorb these lessons.
>> John Gerzema: Yeah, definitely, and you know and the data people would say, you still got
to be aggressive. You got to be resilient. It's important or we get nothing done, but again,
these people, I don't characterize them as soft, Kumbaya kind of people. I mean, they were
going after some crazy problems, you know, how do you deal with reintegrating prisoners into
society? How do you deal with Civil War conflicts? How do you deal with really systemic big
problems? I think that was interesting thing was that they were attacking very difficult
challenges by being more inclusive of collaborating and being more flexible. Thank you. Great.
Well I really appreciate your guys’ time. Thanks for your input and thanks for coming.
[applause]