“Here’s to strong women: may we know them, may we be them, may we raise them.” Mary Portas
I recently went to a talk by Mary Portas where she discussed her new manifesto and book – Work Like A Woman.
People seem to have a similar relationship to Mary Portas as they do with marmite. They either love her or hate her. Personally, I like what she says. As an informal introduction, Mary Portas is one of the UK’s most high profile businesswomen. After making her name transforming Harvey Nichols into one of London’s most iconic fashion destinations, Mary launched her own retail consultancy, started a career in TV, advised the Government on the future of High Streets, developed a fashion label and wrote two books. She says her proudest achievement to date is the creation of Mary’s Living and Giving shops for Save the Children.
I used to watch her series Mary Queen Of Shops and make notes on what she said. Do I own, run or manage a shop? No. But her philosophy can be applied to any business and she often speaks a lot of sense. Take the retail industry, Portas belies that taking the time to really understand today’s fluid consumers is at the heart of great selling and shopping. That and (in her own words) ‘a bloody great dollop of intuition, creativity, vision and risk. Otherwise, why bother?’
So what is Work Like A Woman about? It’s basically its a shout out to bring empowerment to women in the workplace – but not to the detriment of men. The book has advice and tips from the decades of Mary’s business experiences.
Mary believes that instead of suppressing women’s talents, values and expertise, putting essentially feminine qualities, like empathy, collaboration and flexibility, strength, courage and resilience, at the heart of the system will create a radical shift in how we work – and live. As Mary says, all of us would benefit from seeing more of what’s considered feminine values at work because women may be at the sharper end of this, but many men are affected too.
“Collaboration, empathy, instinct and trust: values not always associated with leadership or winning, but which made every one of us feel good.”
I’ll leave you with three of my favourite quotes from Mary during the talk:
“We all fail. It’s part of who we are. We are 20 times better when we can admit that.”
“Great leaders & innovators often work on intuition gained through connection to the world, being successful through a vision. Intuition is often suppressed when the data takes over. I’ve made my biggest mistakes by ignoring my intuition.”
“Kindness – put it at the heart of your business. Kindness is different to being nice. You can sack someone and still be kind, showing respect and decency. Kindness is just about being decent human beings.”
For more on the Work Like a Woman talk, go to the link below. For more details on the book itself, use this link.