http://www.roycecarlton.com/speaker/profile/Sylvia-Ann-Hewlett.html
http://www.roycecarlton.com/speaker/video/Sylvia-Ann-Hewlett.html (video on brain drain of
women and minorities)
PROFILE
President of the Center for Work-Life Policy, economist and Columbia
University professor Sylvia Ann Hewlett is a leading expert in the fields of talent
management, workplace transformation, diversity and inclusion.
Dr. Hewlett has been charting new ground for companies and employees with her
bestselling books and cutting edge research. Her book, Off-Ramps and On-Ramps
(Harvard Business School Press), was named one of the top 10 business books of 2007
by Amazon.
Her most recent book, Top Talent: Keeping Your Best People When You Need Them
Most, published by Harvard Business School Press in October 2009 is part of the Memo
to the CEO series. Hewlett explains how companies can hold onto, re-engage and reenergize their star performers.
In Fall 2011, Hewlett will release her book Winning the War for Talent in Emerging
Markets: Why Women Are the Solution, which explains how companies can strengthen
their workforce in expanding markets by attracting and retaining talented women.
Hewlett is also the author of eight Harvard Business Review articles, and co-author of
nine research publications on issues including leveraging talent, sustaining high
performance, and reversing the brain drain.
Shumeet Banerji, CEO, Booz & Company comments “Sylvia Hewlett makes a compelling
case for the intangibles that genuinely help you engage your top talent and, ultimately,
build the bottom line—during bear or bull markets.”
Dr. Hewlett is the founding director of the Hidden Brain Drain a Task Force, comprised
of 64 global companies committed to the full realization of female and multicultural
talent. Working with Goldman Sachs, BP, GE, Microsoft and others, Dr. Hewlett has
authored and developed innovative models of best practice.
In addition to her Columbia University appointment where she directs the Gender and
Policy Program in the School of International and Public Affairs, Dr. Hewlett is the
founding President of the Center for Work-Life Policy, a Manhattan-based think tank.
She recently received the Isabel Benham Award from the Women's Bond Club and
Woman of the Year Award from the Financial Women's Association. She writes regularly
for the Harvard Business Review and the Financial Times and has appeared on Oprah
and Charlie Rose.
“The event was very good. All the feedback I received about her discussion was excellent. She was also very generous with her time, as people stood
in line to speak with her personally after the event.”
-Association for Corporate Growth
BIOGRAPHY
Sylvia Ann Hewlett is an economist and the founding president of the Center for WorkLife Policy (CWLP), a Manhattan-based think tank where she chairs the “Hidden Brain
Drain,” a task force of 60 global companies committed to global talent innovation. She
also directs the Gender and Policy Program at the School of International and Public
Affairs, Columbia University. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the
Century Association and the World Economic Forum Council on Women’s
Empowerment.
Hewlett is the author of eight Harvard Business Review articles and ten critically
acclaimed nonfiction books including When the Bough Breaks (Basic Books, winner of a
Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Prize), Off-Ramps and On-Ramps (Harvard Business
School Press, named as one of the best business books of 2007 by Amazon.com), Top
Talent: Keeping Performance Up When Business Is Down (Harvard Business Press) and
Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets: Why Women Are the Solution
(Harvard Business Press, forthcoming 2011). Her writings have appeared in The New
York Times, The Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and the International Herald Tribune
and she is a featured blogger on Harvard Business Online.
Hewlett is the founder of Sylvia Ann Hewlett Associates LLC, a boutique consultancy. In
2009 Sylvia Ann Hewlett Associates formed an alliance with Booz & Company focused
on helping organizations leverage top talent across the divides of culture, gender and
generation.
Dr. Hewlett has taught at Cambridge, Columbia and Princeton universities and held
fellowships at the Institute for Public Policy Research in London and the Center for the
Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard. In the 1980s she became the first woman to
head up the Economic Policy Council—a think tank composed of 125 business and labor
leaders. She recently received the Isabel Benham Award from the Women's Bond Club
and Woman of the Year Award from the Financial Women's Association.
Hewlett is a well-known speaker on the international stage. She has keynoted
International Women’s Day at the IMF, given the featured address at Pfizer’s Emerging
Markets Leadership Summit in Dubai, and spoken at the White House with co-author
Cornel West. She is a frequent guest on TV and radio, appearing on Oprah, NewsHour
with Jim Lehrer, Charlie Rose, ABC World News Tonight, The Today Show, The View,
BBC World News and Talk of the Nation—and she has been lampooned on Saturday
Night Live.
A Kennedy Scholar and graduate of Cambridge University, Hewlett earned her PhD in
economics at London University.
Hewlett, S. A. (2002). "Executive women and the myth of having it all." Harv Bus Rev 80(4): 6673, 125.
When it comes to having a high-powered career and a family, the painful truth is that
women in the United States don't "have it all." At midlife, in fact, at least a third of the
country's high-achieving women--a category that includes high wage earners across a
variety of professions--do not have children. For many, this wasn't a conscious choice:
Indeed, most yearn for motherhood. So finds economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who
recently fielded a nationwide survey to explore the professional and private lives of
highly educated and high-earning women. Other findings are similarly disturbing. Many
of these women who are raising children have suffered insurmountable career setbacks.
In addition, today's young women will likely experience even starker trade-offs. In
general, Hewlett's data show that, for too many women, the demands of ambitious
careers, the asymmetries of male-female relationships, and the difficulties of conceiving
later in life undermine the possibility of combining high-level work with family. By
contrast, Hewlett's research reveals that high-achieving men continue to "have it all." Of
the men she surveyed, 79% report wanting children, and 75% have them. Indeed, the
more successful the man, the more likely he is to have a spouse and children. The
opposite holds true for women, particularly the highest-achieving women in Hewlett's
survey: At age 40, 49% of these ultra-achievers are childless, while 19% of their male
peers are. The facts and figures are bleak but, the author contends, could be liberating if
they spur action. Hewlett urges lawmakers and corporations to establish policies that
support working parents. But recognizing that changes won't happen overnight, she
exhorts young women to be more deliberate about their career and family choices.
Hewlett, S. A. (2004). "Fast-track women and the quest for children." Fertil Steril 81 Suppl 2:
15-18.
Childlessness is a tremendously important issue for American women. Women's
reproductive lives remain extremely different from men's so that women cannot simply
clone the male competitive model in the labor market. A new model is called for to
enhance women's chances of crafting lives they want to lead.
Hewlett, S. A. and C. B. Luce (2005). "Off-ramps and on-ramps: keeping talented women on the
road to success." Harv Bus Rev 83(3): 43-46, 48, 50-44 passim.
Most professional women step off the career fast track at some point. With children to
raise, elderly parents to care for, and other pulls on their time, these women are
confronted with one off-ramp after another. When they feel pushed at the same time by
long hours and unsatisfying work, the decision to leave becomes even easier. But woe
to the woman who intends for that exit to be temporary. The on-ramps for professional
women to get back on track are few and far between, the authors confirm. Their new
survey research reveals for the first time the extent of the problem--what percentage of
highly qualified women leave work and for how long, what obstacles they face coming
back, and what price they pay for their time-outs. And what are the implications for
corporate America? One thing at least seems clear: As market and economic factors
align in ways guaranteed to make talent constraints and skill shortages huge issues
again, employers must learn to reverse this brain drain. Like it or not, large numbers of
highly qualified, committed women need to take time out of the workplace. The trick is to
help them maintain connections that will allow them to reenter the workforce without
being marginalized for the rest of their lives. Strategies for building such connections
include creating reduced-hour jobs, providing flexibility in the workday and in the arc of a
career, removing the stigma of taking time off, refusing to burn bridges, offering outlets
for altruism, and nurturing women's ambition.
Hewlett, S. A. and C. B. Luce (2006). "Extreme jobs: the dangerous allure of the 70-hour
workweek." Harv Bus Rev 84(12): 49-59, 162.
Today's overachieving professionals labor longer, take on more responsibility, and earn
more than the workaholics of yore. They hold what Hewlett and Luce call "extreme jobs",
which entail workweeks of 60 or more hours and have at least five often characteristicssuch as tight deadlines and lots of travel--culled from the authors' research on this work
model. A project of the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force, a private-sector initiative, this
research consists of two large surveys (one of high earners across various professions
in the United States and the other of high-earning managers in large multinational
corporations) that map the shape and scope of such jobs, as well as focus groups and
in-depth interviews that get at extreme workers' attitudes and motivations. In this article,
Hewlett and Luce consider their data in relation to increasing competitive pressures,
vastly improved communication technology, cultural shifts, and other sweeping changes
that have made high-stakes employment more prominent. What emerges is a complex
picture of the all-consuming career-rewarding in many ways, but not without danger to
individuals and to society. By and large, extreme professionals don't feel exploited; they
feel exalted. A strong majority of them in the United States-66%-say they love their jobs,
and in the global companies survey, this figure rises to 76%. The authors' research
suggests, however, that women are at a disadvantage. Although they don't shirk the
pressure or responsibility of extreme work, they are not matching the hours logged by
their male colleagues. This constitutes a barrier for ambitious women, but it also means
that employers face a real opportunity: They can find better ways to tap the talents of
women who will commit to hard work and responsibility but cannot put in over-long days.
Hewlett, S. A., C. B. Luce, et al. (2008). "Stopping the exodus of women in science." Harv Bus
Rev 86(6): 22-24, 139.
A new study reveals that U.S. companies face a troubling brain drain: Fifty-two percent
of female scientists, engineers, and technologists abandon their chosen professions. If
companies understand why women drop out, however, they can create targeted
interventions and head off a talent shortage.
Hewlett, S. A., C. B. Luce, et al. (2005). "Leadership in your midst: tapping the hidden strengths
of minority executives." Harv Bus Rev 83(11): 74-82, 166.
All companies value leadership-some of them enough to invest dearly in cultivating it.
But few management teams seem to value one engine of leadership development that is
right under their noses, churning out the kind of talent they need most. It's the
complicated, overburdened but very rich lives of their minority managers. Minority
professionals-particularly women of color-are called upon inordinately to lend their skills
and guidance to activities outside their jobs. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who heads the Center
for Work-Life Policy, and her coauthors, Carolyn Buck Luce of Ernst & Young and Cornel
West of Princeton, present new research on the extent to which minority professionals
take on community service and other responsibilities outside the workplace and more
than their share of recruiting, mentoring, and committee work within the workplace.
These invisible lives, argue the authors, can be a source of competitive strength if
companies can learn to recognize and further cultivate the cultural capital they
represent. But it's hard to convince minority professionals that their employer respects
and values their off-hours responsibilities. A lack of trust keeps many people from
revealing much about their personal lives. The authors outline four ways companies can
leverage hidden skills: Develop a new level of awareness of minority professionals'
invisible lives; appreciate the outsize burdens these professionals carry and try to lighten
them; build trust by putting teeth into diversity goals; and, to finish the job of leadership
development, help minorities reflect on their off-hours experiences, extract and
generalize the lessons, and apply what's been learned in other settings.
Hewlett, S. A., L. Sherbin, et al. (2009). "How Gen Y and Boomers will reshape your agenda."
Harv Bus Rev 87(7-8): 71-76, 153.
When it comes to workplace preferences, Generation Y workers closely resemble Baby
Boomers. Because these two huge cohorts now coexist in the workforce, their shared
values will hold sway in the companies that hire them. The authors, from the Center for
Work-Life Policy, conducted two large-scale surveys that reveal those values. Gen Ys
and Boomers are eager to contribute to positive social change, and they seek out
workplaces where they can do that. They expect flexibility and the option to work
remotely, but they also want to connect deeply with colleagues. They believe in
employer loyalty but desire to embark on learning odysseys. Innovative firms are
responding by crafting reward packages that benefit both generations of workers--and
their employers.
Ohmae, K., S. A. Hewlett, et al. (1991). "The boundaries of business: commentaries from the
experts." Harv Bus Rev 69(4): 127-140.
The World Leadership Survey, which began a worldwide dialogue on a set of important
issues facing managers in the 1990s, continues with commentaries from four recognized
experts, each of whom addresses the survey results from a different perspective.
Kenichi Ohmae, chairman of McKinsey and Company in Tokyo, addresses "The Perils of
Protectionism." Ohmae argues that the old definitions of national boundaries and
corporate interests reflect obsolete economic theories. The real test of national wellbeing, Ohmae suggests, should be the economic welfare of a nation's citizens. Sylvia
Ann Hewlett, economist and former director of the Economic Policy Council in New York,
analyzes the survey in terms of "The Human Resource Deficit." According to Hewlett,
four principles should guide corporate strategies in the 1990s: human resource
development should move up the scale of corporate priorities; a family-friendly
workplace will attract and keep talented workers; companies will take limited direct
responsibility for training and education; the private sector will promote public investment
in social issues. James E. Austin, the Richard P. Chapman Professor of Business at the
Harvard Business School, writes about "The Developing-Country Difference." In
developing countries, Austin observes, managers display attitudes and follow practices
that diverge from those in developed nations. In particular, the role of government,
investments in education and technology, and environmental concerns set these nations
apart. Michel Crozier, president of the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations in Paris,
writes about "The Changing Organization." In the 1990s, Crozier argues, managers
need to break from old management theories and practice, questioning hierarchy,
control, distance, access to information-the whole managerial system.
SUGGESTED TOPICS
• Winning the War for Talent in the Emerging Markets
• The Power of Difference:
The Impact on the Bottom Line
• Top Talent:
How to Reengage and Reenergize your Workforce
• Making Smart Choices in Life and Work:
What Every Person Needs to Know
• Leveraging New Streams of Global Talent
• Flaming Out and Fighting Back:
Reinvention for Success
• Extreme Jobs:
The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Work Week
• Innovation, Diversity and the Marketplace
• The Transformation of Leadership in a Global World
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