 |
Shaping a
Plan for Women in Business
When the maestro pulled the vice president
and head of operations for JPMorgan Chase from her chair
and asked her to take the podium and conduct his orchestra, she looked
dubious.
Nandita Chakravartti was not an orchestra
master and until this moment, on a Friday afternoon in
August, she had been a spectator, seated contentedly in the Neilson
Library Browsing Room near the orchestra's
first violin section. With her were the 52 other executives
attending the Smith College Consortium final session -- The Music
Paradigm, a business-training seminar that uses a symphony orchestra
as a metaphor for a large organization.
With borrowed baton in her fingers,
and with maestro Roger Nierenberg's
hands-on coaching, Chakravartti did manage to direct the musicians through a
passage from Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings in C Major, op. 48 and
was rewarded with her peers' resounding applause. Her debut was part of
The Music Paradigm, which was created by Nierenberg to provide business executives
with a new way to look at building teamwork, becoming better leaders, and gaining
an awareness of the importance of "working in concert." He uses the
role of conductor as a metaphor for leadership.
"The higher you are in the
organization, the more your work resembles using a (conductor's) baton," said
Nierenberg, who is also music director of the Stamford (Connecticut) Symphony
Orchestra. "Rule of the baton: when
you are holding the baton, you can no longer act only for yourself alone because
everyone is looking to the baton for direction."
The Music Paradigm reflects
Smith's holistic approach to executive learning,
which stresses the growth of authenticity, self-confidence, personal empowerment
and emotional intelligence in women leaders. Indeed, enabling women to realize
their full potential in leadership roles is one of the founding principals
of Smith's executive education business trainings for women. "At
Smith, we take the challenge of developing business leaders very seriously," says
Director Barbara Reinhold.
"And in a world where the leadership ranks of companies increasingly reflect
the diversity of their customers and marketplaces, we focus exclusively on
helping companies develop women leaders -- women with world-class leadership,
management and technical competencies."
Likewise, at the heart of Smith's
financial literacy and leadership training programs for undergraduates is the
desire to build leaders. "The grand
plan," notes Reinhold, "is that when people think of women
as leaders, they will think of Smith."
SEE offers four customized programs to high-potential women from sponsoring
organizations at four levels, from senior and upper-middle executives to
emerging managers and specialists. Each is targeted at women with different
leadership development needs and priorities, or designed with the unique
business, organizational or strategic needs of a sponsoring corporation
in mind. All four programs are "critical
to Smith's general effort of reaching out to women in business," says
Reinhold. They are:
 |
Smith-Tuck
Global Leaders Program for Women, a collaborative
venture of Smith and the Amos Tuck School of Business
at Dartmouth College, was launched in 2003 on the
Tuck campus and caters to senior corporate women,
primarily worldwide vice presidents and above, from
such sponsoring organizations as Johnson & Johnson,
Hewlett Packard and Vetter Pharma from Germany. It
is designed to be of particular value to women who
hold, or are preparing to assume, job assignments
in global business environments.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Smith
College Consortium, in its 10th year, is tailored
to upper-middle-management women.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Custom
Programs are developed by Smith to offer leadership
development training for emerging managers at the
headquarters of the client company. Programs are
typically developed together with the company human
resources team, senior executives, internal consultants
and others.
|
|
|
|
|
|
From
Specialist to Strategist: Business Excellence for
Women in Science, Technology and Engineering is an
intensive five-day leadership program to be held
for the first time June 5-10, 2005. The curriculum
is geared toward providing women in the sciences
and technology, who are five to 10 years into their
careers, with the tools to make the transition from
technical career paths to senior management. The
keynote speaker, nationally recognized management
and leadership guru Tom Peters, will discuss "Women
Leaders: Our Best Hope." |
|
|
|
|
This last program is particularly essential,
since, according to Jeffrey Willens, a consultant with
Albert International, Inc., an executive education firm
assisting with planning the 2005 program, technical and scientific
firms are traditionally "male-dominated
bastions."
"If our country is going to remain competitive
in these [technological and engineering] fields," Willens added, "our
best resource is female leadership. It's a largely untapped
resource." -- JME |
|
