Two weekends ago, when I was working on client things and trying to unravel the mystery of addiction vis-a-vis Civilization V, there were some ladies getting righteous in my twitter feed.  Responses to Ashkan Karbasfrooshan’s post to TechCrunch, “Who Will Be the Next Talisman of the Tech World?” had lit up my feed and set my alerts to pinging – mostly because people were DMing or cc’ing me in outrage.

Perhaps because it came on the heels of two other lists that conspicuously omitted female names, this one seemed at first glance like ‘yet another list where great women in tech are ignored.’  I’ll confess that my first response was to feel exhausted, and my second was to invade Edinburgh.

But I did eventually get around to reading Mr. Karbasfrooshan’s post.  I thought it was an interesting list, this guess at who could be the ‘next Steve Jobs’.

After all, it makes for excellent link bait to write about Who Will Be the Next Steve Jobs.  It supports the folklore of Silicon Valley to speculate on his heirs, intellectual, aesthetic and otherwise. Search for “who will be the next steve jobs” on google and you get 846 million results. Everybody’s doing it. I’m thinking of going as that question for Halloween, in fact.

So, who’s on the list?  Scott Forstall, Tim Cook, Jonathan Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, Evan Williams, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Janus Friis and Nicklas Zennstrom, Mark Andreesen, and Jack Dorsey.  The list is very journo- and reader-friendly – we’ve heard of these guys.

It’s my opinion that Mr. Karbasfrooshan didn’t even consider the matter of gender when he typed up this availability-heuristic-based, link-baiting listicle of guys in tech.  But it’s the ‘guys’ part that pissed people off. Where were the women? Did Karbasfrooshan mean to suggest there were no worthy women in tech?  Or worse, that there was no place for women in tech?

How did Karbasfrooshan respond?  In the immortal words of my best friend’s ex-husband, he found himself in a hole and kept digging.  Mr. Karbasfrooshan defended his post by saying, “That’s because the media remains biased against woman (fairly or unfairly). This list is largely about whom the media will turn to, most women are IMHO both put on a pedestal when it’s convenient and then viciously and unfairly attacked otherwise.”  In the comments on the post, the twitter exchanges that followed, and in a follow-up post , he suggests that if Charlie Rose wouldn’t book the talent they weren’t worth putting on the list (in what I shall now and forever call the Charlie Rose Booking rule).

Because data is helpful as evidence in an argument, I did a quick search of charlierose.com. Only half of the list have ever been on the show.  Jeff Bezos has been on 6 times, Larry Ellison and Michael Dell 3 times each, while Evan Williams, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey and yes, Steve Jobs were on only once.

The others on the list don’t seem to have passed the Charlie Rose Booking rule; Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, practically has his own chair.  So the rule seems to hold.  In fact, in his follow-up blog post, Mr. Karbasfrooshan mentions a few women – “Catherine [sic] Fake, Sheryl Sandberg and Marisa Mayer.”  First of all, Ms. Fake’s first name is Caterina. Second, Ms. Mayer’s first name is spelled Marissa. Third, Ms. Mayer is the only one to have been on Charlie Rose – and she’s been on three times. (So why not include her in the  list if it’s really all about ‘the media’?)

It isn’t worth it to engage the kitchen sink arguments that Mr. Karbasfrooshan employs to defend his position: there aren’t enough women with enough experience, men in the media will overlook them, women in the media will overcompensate for potential perceived favoritism by excluding them, if they made it into the media we’d probably ogle their breasts, what successes they’ve had will either be criticized or minimized, oh, and tokens & Uncle Toms are bad.  Seriously, he covers all that in one post. It’d be impressive if it weren’t so bizarre.

In short, the lady (here, played by Mr. Karbasfrooshan) protests too much.  But he quotes Gloria Steinem several times, perhaps as some sort of innoculation from outraged women.

I leave it to any intrepid reader to find his self-defense plea tiresome, outrageous or both.  Because despite the author’s apparent lack of a criteria for assembling his list (other than the Charlie Rose Booking rule), there was a common thread among those who made the list – and it wasn’t just that they are all men.

What struck me as the true criteria was that the men on this list (with a few exceptions) are inventors.  Take a look at the list this way:

OS & SOFTWARE INVENTORS

• Bill Gates is a software developer who invented MS DOS and Windows.
• Larry Ellison is a database developer who invented Oracle.
• Scott Forstall is a software engineer at Apple who helped develop OSX and iOS.

INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE INVENTORS

• Marc Andreesen invented the first web browser, Mozilla.
• Sergey Brin is a computer scientist who co-invented Google.
• Larry Page is a computer scientist who co-invented Google.
• Elon Musk is an inventor with an interest in physics & engineering who co-invented PayPal.
• Max Levchin is a computer scientist who co-invented PayPal.
• Niklas Zennstrom is a business development guy with a tech background who co-invented Kazaa and Skype.
• Janus Friis is a network developer who co-invented Kazaa and Skype.

SOCIAL WEB INVENTORS

• Mark Zuckerberg is a coder who invented Facebook.
• Sean Parker is a hacker who invented Napster.
• Evan Williams is a programmer who invented Blogger.
• Jack Dorsey is a programmer and software designer who invented Twitter.

E-BUSINESS MODEL INVENTORS

• Michael Dell turned a side business upgrading computers into a vendor license into a business model – the no-overhead PC manufacturer, selling direct to their customers.
• Jeff Bezos is a network engineer who invented Amazon.com, transforming the way you buy books, music and video content.
• Marc Benioff worked at Oracle for 13 years in sales, marketing and product development before creating his own SaaS, cloud-based business, salesforce.com.

VISIONARY ENABLERS

• Peter Thiel was a hedge fund manager and venture capitalist who saw the potential of PayPal and other start-ups.
• Jonathan Ive is an industrial designer who redesigned Apple.
• Tim Cook is an operations expert who reinvented the way Apple makes and sells its products.

All but 3 are inventors of the products their businesses sell.

And this is the real problem for women in tech.  It’s not (just) that the media don’t like us or sex sells or that bias and sexism exist.  It’s that we don’t have enough women who are true inventors in our midst who take their inventions and turn them into multi-billion dollar businesses… And either stay on to be CEOs or sell the business to a bigger fish.

The sad truth is we don’t have enough inventors right now, especially in the US, where enrollment in STEM degree college programs (which would at least give you the basic skills and knowledge for inventing physical things – or say, getting a job even in this economy) is down across the board.

Even those with an interest in engineering don’t get degrees – 1/3 of the list Karbasfrooshan assembles didn’t finish college, much less get a computer science degree.  So it’s not required to have a STEM degree to invent something, but in terms of skills acquisition, women are poorly represented in the shrinking population of those who do study science, technology, engineering or math.

Perhaps more telling however is how few engineers rise through the ranks of existing companies to be CEOs.  In most of the biggest companies in the world, STEM degrees are not tickets to the boardroom.

If you look at the Fortune 500 for 2011, 18 companies are helmed by women: a media company (Gannett), food and food production companies (Campbell Soup, PepsiCo, Kraft Foods, Archer Daniels Midland), a cosmetics company (Avon), a pharmaceutical company (Mylan), retail & wholesale companies (TJX Companies, BJ’s Wholesale Club  finance and insurance companies (Guardian Life Insurance, KeyCorp, WellPoint), energy and fuel companies (Sempra Energy, Sunoco), and yes, tech companies (Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, IBM).

These CEOs are distinguished women, many graduating with honors.  Most of these women went to prestigious schools. 10 have at least one post-graduate degree.  The vast majority have been with their current company at least 5 years, some as many as 30.  They have worked hard, risen through the ranks, worked for increasingly prestigious brands, working their way up their industry food chain.  But while 6 do in fact have STEM degrees, of those, only one seems to have held a related post, the newly named CEO of IBM, Ginny Rometty. Others, despite their mechanical, civil or electrical engineering degrees, came up through operations, finance and marketing roles.  Even Ms. Rometty went from systems engineer to the consulting arm of IBM, and from there worked her way up. Meg Whitman says she abandoned a math & science degree in favor of the more lucrative and employable economics degree.

While these women have much to be proud of, not one invented the product their company sells or have revolutionized the businesses they helm.  They have made them profitable, made interesting acquisitions, improved productivity or efficiency or morale.  But they haven’t utterly transformed the way people think about packaged food or cosmetics or pumping gas.

But here’s the thing.  Most Fortune 500 CEOs are not the inventors of their products, not the visionaries, not the game-changers.  So this is not a female problem.  It’s a CEO problem.

Some of the tech brands on Mr. Karbasfrooshan’s list are on the Fortune 500: Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Amazon, Google. And you’ll find companies from tech booms past: H-P, Intel, Cisco, eBay, AMD, Yahoo, alongside those old stalwarts Xerox and IBM.  But those companies are now starting to look more like their colleagues in consumer packaged goods, finance/insurance/real estate, media & marketing, and so on.  They hire CEOs, they acquire new technology, they maximize for productivity and cut for efficiency.  They answer to shareholders and the Street.

If his logic holds true, we won’t count the women OR THE MEN of the start-up scene until they have invented and grown their businesses to the size that makes lists like these – household names even Charlie Rose would book.

The companies not on the Fortune 500 created by his tech talismen are an interesting mix: Meg Whitman acquired both PayPal and Skype (Skype is now owned by Microsoft). Google bought Blogger. Best Buy bought Napster. Comcast bought Plaxo. Netscape belongs to AOL. Facebook could IPO any day, they keep saying, while Twitter continues to seek a business model. So perhaps the other future for a product inventor is to exit well and become an investor or serial-entrepreneur.

In other words, it’s about that vision thing.  Karbasfrooshan didn’t omit women because of sexism and bias and discrimination – at least not directly.  He omitted women because there just aren’t any playing at the level these very few guys play at who are visionaries about new products and services built out of technology.  There aren’t enough women who are inventors and cultural visionaries or industry game-changers… because there aren’t enough of those kinds of people, full stop.  They are, almost by definition, rare.

As ever, I come back to the wise words oft-repeated by Cindy Gallop: you can’t be what you don’t see.
Clearly there were women in the 70s and 80s who had engineering degrees but who either could not, or would not, or didn’t know how to put those degrees to use in a way that would serve their considerable talents and ambition.  But it wasn’t just the women who struggled.  If we’re seeing enrollment in STEM programs decline it’s because the business culture makes the case that a strategist at McKinsey, or a trader at Goldman, or a lawyer at White & Case will make the big bucks; the media culture makes the case that a pro-ball player, or a rock star, or an actress, or a reality show contestant will be famous; and both still seem to believe that nerds who invent stuff lack the necessary skills to be either rich or famous, all evidence provided by the dudes on Karbasfrooshan’s list to the contrary.

There aren’t enough of them to really break the mold – so far, these 20 guys just have cracked it slightly, proffering the exception that proves the rule (think of all the nasty comments and characterizations of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg as unattractive or socially awkward, or of Steve Jobs as a cruel egomaniac). It’s upsetting, yes, that we don’t have more female role models in tech.  But what’s more upsetting is that we have so few role models in tech altogether.

Still, Mr. Karbasfrooshan should have accepted responsibility for his words instead of playing the ‘blame the media’ card.  He should have simply said, “I was talking about inventors and visionaries who are inventing what’s next, and can helm businesses and stay relevant.  I was talking about Steve Jobs, not Steve Wozniak.” That criteria makes it hard to think of anyone you’d add to the list, male or female. He could have simply played it as it lay.  But he took the bait he no doubt unwittingly set, and now looks like a fool or a jerk or both.

So, who are the women (or the men we haven’t heard of, for that matter) who are inventing new OSes, software that changes the way you interact with the world, social platforms that alter the infrastructure of the internet, technologies that enable new kinds of transactions and business models, boxes of wires and silicon that transmit and calculate data in new ways?

If you know who they are, please say so in the comments here, and I’ll follow up with that list.

In the process of thinking through what kind of business I might like to start for myself, I chose to start with a survey conducted by RSW/US, a ‘matchmaking’ company that brings clients and advertising agencies together.

As usual, satisfaction with current agency ratings are quite low, at about 41 percent, and nearly half wouldn’t ask their current agency back in a review.  Clients don’t believe traditional full service agencies have the expertise to deliver great digital ideas; but they’d rather give their business to a full-service shop.

It’s the following two charts in the report that are the most illuminating:

Right time-right place, recommendations, and just ‘fitting the bill’ – being the right kind of agency – are the most influential factors for clients selecting agencies.  Awards, search, trade associations, matchmakers – these are minor considerations for clients.  They want to have heard good things about you, and see you on their doorstep when they need you.

So why do they change agencies?

The biggest issues that lead a client to put the account in review are about their perception of the quality of the work: either the strategy isn’t there, or the creative isn’t.  In my mind, I’d combine “Lack of proactivity” and “Worsening relationships with agency team” because they both seem to be essentially about perceptions of service – together these would come in to tie at second place.  Costs are in a distant fourth place.

If clients put their business into review because the work wasn’t up to expectations, this puts the offending agency at risk for future business, since so much hinges on word of mouth.  So I spent a great deal of time this morning and afternoon thinking through the main categories of dissatisfaction, and matching those against the chief complaints I’ve heard working with or for advertising agencies about clients.  There’s a rather shocking alignment of concerns that express themselves as a kind of he says-she says account of the apparently worsening relationship between agencies and their clients.

This is step one in a process – my intention is to spend some time over the next few months examining what a Lean advertising agency would be like, perhaps even for a book (!).  I’m curious about where clients see the value coming from in what agencies are, or should be, offering.  I’m equally curious about testing the belief that while you might be able to build cars in a lean way, you can’t make a TV commercial using lean principles.  But today we’re going to just start by looking at the problems.

Product-Market Fit

Talk to any venture capitalist or start-up founder – they’ll spend a fair amount of time describing the importance of product-market fit.  This isn’t about changing the product to fit the market, or even changing the market to fit the product – though it could ultimately lead to either outcome – but rather about positioning the product in a way that demonstrates value to the potential market.  There are a lot of start-ups that fail not because they’ve made a bad product or because there is no natural market for their product – but because they haven’t clearly and compellingly articulated why that market might want or need the product.

It seems that agencies are facing a challenge in this regard as well.  Over the hundred or so years that advertising agencies have existed, the mission has become rather fuzzy.  At the outset the role of an advertising agent was to purchase advertising space on billboards or in newspapers or magazines on behalf of businesses.

After awhile, customers started asking for more: ideas about how to produce advertising that stood out and increased sales.  The agent, not wanting to lose a good customer, hired a typesetter and an illustrator, maybe wrote the ad copy himself or hired someone to write it for him.  He called up his contact in the publisher’s office of the newspaper and this time sent over an ad along with the money for the placement.

The agent became an agency.  The customer became a client – he’d be back, because the agency knew how to get this kind of work done.

And this is how advertising has evolved, as an industry of agents designing, producing and placing advertising on behalf of the client.

What the client used to want? An advertisement that drove sales.  Send us five cents and we’ll send you a Sunkist juicer so you can make juice out of Sunkist oranges.  Write to this address for a complete Sears catalog of all our tools and parts.  Visit this Ford Motor showroom to test drive a new car.

But the market changed. It became more complicated – more brands, more media, more channels. It seemed you had to spend more and more to see that sales curve lift. It became a kind of arms race between brands to see who could reach the most people.

Clients still want to see the sales curve go up.  Read the feedback at the end of the report and you’ll see a lot of concern with ROI, effectiveness, sales and volume increasing, business results, and so on.  But unlike those early days when the guy with a few dollars in his pocket to place an ad in the Gazette sold more widgets than the other guy who hadn’t thought to, the ability to track results against communications activities has become diffuse.  A campaign lives in simply too many channels; the drive for differentiation now means that there might be no direct, trackable call to action; other economic factors (pricing, distribution, competition, etc.) cause signal interference for brands that advertise widely, sell multiple product lines, distribute through multiple sales channels, and face many competitors.

It’s complicated.

But clients don’t feel sympathetic towards advertising agencies for having to muddle alongside them through all this complexity.  Increasingly, this survey suggests, clients feel a great deal of disappointment and bitterness about the failure of their agencies to clarify and simplify the complexity, while still bringing home those obvious, measurable results.

“What do you want from me? Fine writing? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?” — Rosser Reeves

Looking through the complaints I jotted on post-its as I read through this report and the complaints I heard working with and for agencies, I noticed that a lot of the problem seemed to rest under a few overarching concepts.

Strategic Expertise

Clients complain that agencies don’t think or act strategically enough, that they don’t come to clients with a case about how the proposed approach will help them gain market share, increase volume, or otherwise steal sales from their competitors.  They complain that agencies don’t know their consumers, their market, their competitors, their sales and distribution channels.

Agencies complain that sales numbers and ROI are all that clients think about – they don’t ‘get’ marketing, they don’t appreciate the concept of building a brand.  They complain that the client’s goal or definition of ROI is unrealistic.  They complain that clients are not transparent about their business objectives, that they don’t engage agencies as partners, or include them in future plans.  They believe that clients sometimes perceive themselves as competing against the wrong people, or that they want to target the wrong consumers.

Transparency & Accountability

Clients complain that agencies are bad at strategy and analytics.  They believe that agencies lack the competence to effectively measure the results of what they produce, or worse, conceal those results from the clients. They want more accountability from agencies – for agencies to follow-up on the results of a campaign, and to report these results to the client.  And they want these results to be tangible – sales, volume, measurable ROI.  I’ve had some clients who’ve wished that the agency could offer a theory about what success would look like if it isn’t going to be sales or volume or share price.

Agencies on the other hand, feel that there is more to advertising than analytics, or feel that campaign measurement is more complicated and nuanced than mere sales figures.  Agencies often feel that the work of planning and account management – where this strategy and analytics would likely be managed – are under-valued by clients, who care (they believe) only about the creative and the costs.  Often, agencies feel they are provided with instructions from a brand manager or CMO that are unrelated to the company’s business goals.  They worry that clients test ideas to destruction, that they make their goals moving targets, that they aren’t transparent about their actual business goals, and that they don’t give credit to agencies when they do have a successful campaign.

Creativity

Clients say they want – but do not get – enough new, fresh, innovative ideas from their agencies.  They say that they are often not happy with the creative output.  They say traditional agencies lack digital skills.

Agencies say clients lack taste and sophistication, are scared of new ideas, are overwhelmed by fresh or innovative technologies, don’t ‘get’ digital/social/mobile, and prefer the safe, me-too route. Those who do ‘care’ about creativity are just in it for the awards or the chance to rub shoulders with celebrities.

Trust & Service

Clients complain they don’t feel agencies listen to them, they don’t get enough attention, they get pawned off on junior team members.  They complain agencies do not bring them unsolicited ideas; they don’t bring enough ideas; they don’t bring fully realized ideas - overarching strategies with executions for each of the channels.  They complain that agencies set themselves apart and above the internal client marketing team; that they do not recognize the capabilities, talent and expertise that clients have about their own business and market.  They complain about being condescended to.

Agencies complain that clients are not loyal – that they lost business to other agencies or competitors without getting a shot at it first.  They complain that clients don’t trust them – that they don’t share information, or set up ‘gotcha’ scenarios where the agency is being tested rather than engaged in a collaborative way. They complain that when multiple agencies are used on a single campaign, the client plays favorites, undermines some players, elevates others.  They complain that clients are not responsive to requests for feedback or approval, that they unnecessarily delay signing off on scope of work agreements. And they complain that clients can be abusive to some members of the team.

Costs & Capabilities

Clients complain that agencies nickel & dime them for basic service that should just be ‘included’ in the project – for advice, revisions, or projections.  They complain that agencies are bad at projecting costs and managing them throughout the lifetime of the project.  They complain that agencies can’t tell them what the results based on spend will be.  And they complain that agencies can not do everything well, or respond nimbly to their changing needs.  They want a more innovative full service model.  Clients don’t actually want multiple agencies – they want one agency to handle all of this on their behalf, to coordinate the production and placement and management of an integrated campaign for them.

Agencies say that clients want more and more work for free – work that is outside of the agreed-to scope of work.  They say that clients don’t pay enough (in that commission on placement and production structure that most agencies still use), or negotiate them down on the agency fee for coordinating and managing the campaign, thereby making every additional request from the client an opportunity to lose money on the project.  They say that clients lack the internal structure to implement or manage the approval process for integrated campaigns.  They say that clients start with one budget, set goals and KPIs off that budget, and then cut once the project is approved – but still expect the same ROI as the higher spend.  They say that they are the last to know when the client’s needs change. And they say that the era of the big account or project seems to be waning – that it’s tough to find a true ‘full service’ piece of business these days.

What’s it all mean?

It’s pretty simple, when you look at the complaints all lined up on a wall, as I did today.  Clients have business needs, challenges, and goals.  They try to solve for these through advertising.  They believe, however, that agencies are poorly equipped to help them achieve any of these goals or surmount any of these challenges. So the two have become antagonists. – people who do not trust each other.

I think the real culprit is procedural.  Sales and marketing may not be sharing goals with one another.  Marketing may not be incentivized by sales goals.  Marketing commissions advertising based on what some in the Lean Startup movement call ‘vanity metrics’ – likability or brand perceptions or awards.

Advertising agencies aren’t paid to become experts on the client’s business, so they become experts on advertising.  They don’t have the time or the relationships to go deep on the structure of the market; they aren’t rewarded for challenging the client’s assumptions.  They don’t have access to the right people in the client teams for the information they need to make the best recommendations and the best work.  They don’t have the budgets to get that information on their own.

“Good” advertising doesn’t have a clear call to action, isn’t direct marketing – it’s lifestyle based, taps into hidden desires or unspoken needs, creates cultural icons or foments generational movements.  They fear research as a sure-fire path to killing their creative darlings. They limit their financial exposure by bringing fewer ideas to the table.  They defend them fiercely, even at the risk of seeming condescending, because it is the only asset they feel they have.

And because they fear research, and lack the client’s willingness to invest in it, they do not gather data on the efficacy of a campaign, or do not gather the best data, and therefore, do not learn from one campaign how to make the next one better. But then, often, neither does the client.

In the end, relationships falter because of hurt feelings, unmet needs, disappointment, and an erosion of trust.  These come from a misalignment of expectations with capabilities.

It’s hard to say for certain who is in the wrong here – are clients asking ad agencies to solve problems they can’t solve?  Or have agencies intertwined themselves too tightly with the services they provided as agents, and not the outcomes those services were used to create?  In other words were clients buying something agencies didn’t fully realize they were selling?  Is what clients want from ad agencies not really advertising, per se, but increased revenue, sales volume, or market share?  And in today’s complicated world, is advertising always part of the solution set?

It seems to me the fundamental problem is that advertising agencies have thought, this whole time, that they were in the business of selling access to the development and placement of advertising, while their clients were trying to buy increased sales.

Perhaps clients don’t really need advertising agencies anymore (though they will still need creative production and media placement/negotiation).  Maybe they need business-model-seeking agencies that create roadmaps to carry out consumer, product, channel and marketing strategies.  Maybe those agencies facilitate the creation of assets that are placed into those channels or campaigns on behalf of their clients.  Maybe they are paid to be trusted experts who guide clients through the ever-evolving landscape of their market.

Maybe.

When we talk about women entrepreneurs (damn that modifier is getting tired), the metric seems to be about VC dollars and the list of speakers at tech events.

What we are really talking about is recognition.

You can argue that women don’t approach VCs, and you can argue about why that is and what the results are when they do. I tend to believe that if you flood the zone, you overwhelm the defense, and then they have to change their play. How’s that for a sports metaphor, Anil Dash?

But the question that just shut my brain off at Startup Weekend presentations was something like, “Well, since everyone knows it’s really hard to find women-run start-ups…” and that was it, I tuned out.

Women start tons of businesses. They get SBA loans or they bootstrap. They hustle. They build slowly and organically. They make money and jobs, and they don’t default on their loans. They’re great bets for investment. We can talk about the causes of this approach all day (hint: none are biological – even the seemingly biological causes are sociological).

But we’re not really talking about whether they exist or whether they are good risks. We’re talking about the press they get, their visibility – in other words, we’re talking about recognition.

Recognition is about seeing something and knowing what it is when you see it. It’s about understanding and familiarity. Women entrepreneurs and business leaders are often neither seen nor heard outside their companies or industries.

But suggesting that because they are invisible, they are scarce, is a fallacy. Want to find a women-run business, just look around. Huffington Post, Flickr and Hunch, LifeHacker, Blogger, Net-a-Porter and BoingBoing are all women founded tech/media companies. The Body Shop, Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart Omnimedia, Baby Einstein are all women-founded businesses. Sara Lee, Yahoo!, Xerox, WellPoint, RiteAid, Sunoco, Reynolds, DuPont, Avon, PepsiCo and Kraft have female CEOs.

So why so little recognition (seriously internets, you want to keep offering me Mrs. Fields and Coco Chanel as your examples of women-run businesses?) for the women who are every day starting and running multi-million or multi-billion dollar businesses?

There’s really only two reasons:

Women have convinced themselves that fame is an unnecessary form of credit because it is an unlikely form of credit. It’s a modeling problem that sounds tautological: if there were more women on the dais or named in the press release, there’d be more women on the dais or on the press release. Women would think it was more likely, more necessary.

Investors and reporters aren’t actually bothering to look out for the women. Without a coach calling up the scout and saying, “you gotta see this kid play”, and then hounding the scout with video and local press clippings, the scout doesn’t come to see the kid play, doesn’t sign him, he never plays in the major leagues. Doesn’t make a very good Costner vehicle, does it?

So, two provocations:

Ladies, stop using the “reality-based paradigm.” Follow the Bush administration’s model and make reality. Show up, en masse, and make a new normal. No more 80/20. Flood the zone. Don’t think there are only so many seats at the table for women; all the seats are available. Which means, ladies, you’re going to have to compete with men. The nice story you tell yourselves about “competing our way” … Well, if you want recognition, then that strategy ain’t working. If you want to be successful and run a business your own way and bootstrap and never appear in Inc or Fast Company or Wired or the Journal, then do it your way. There’s honor in that. But you can’t then claim that you’re not getting recognition; recognition won’t be a result of your business strategy, if it isn’t the objective of your business strategy.

Organizations like Women Who Tech and Women 2.0 and Girls in Tech and Change the Ratio: raising awareness is great, educating women is great, increasing turnout is great. But you’ve got to do one better. You’ve got to make your members famous. You’ve got to shout from the rooftops and murmur over cocktails and flog until it gets old how amazing your members are. You have to promote: self-promote, mutually promote, just promote the hell out of what these women (who rely on you for access to the tech and entrepreneurialism scenes) are doing. You have to brag. Being demure, apologizing, speaking in soft, low tones? Maybe that catches you a husband, I wouldn’t know. But it sure as hell ain’t getting you investors and press clippings.

If you don’t want those things, that’s great too. But clearly many of you do, otherwise this wouldn’t be such a hot topic. So, want to obviate that insipid observation (“it’s too hard to find women-run start-ups”)? Get in their faces.

P.S. Reporters and analysts? When you get invited to Women Who Tech, Girls in Tech, Women 2.0 or Change the Ratio events, go. If nobody shows up but you, then you can say there aren’t any women entrepreneurs.

On Friday, I went to Startup Weekend at New Work City. Among 130 new friends, I pitched an idea. For the first time in 20 years, I felt terrified speaking in front of a roomful of strangers. Speaking and writing – these are my things. I’m smart, I get it, I’m good at the work I do – but the way people know that, the way I have built a reputation as something more is through my communication skills. More than that, through my general fearlessness when I get on a stage, in front of a crowd, behind a mic. But Friday, I was genuinely nervous. (Everyone kindly told me I didn’t show it).

My idea didn’t get enough votes to be developed over the weekend, but it did get enough buzz to make me commit to building it. More on that soon.

By the end of the night, I’d joined a team. I walked out of New Work City, and some of my colleagues were singing happy birthday on the street to a member of their team. I walked across the Lower East Side, needing some fresh air and to walk off the adrenaline buzz of the night.

The next morning, I looked out the window and saw what we all saw: that familiar blue sky, perfect and crisp, but missing four things (2 buildings, 2 plumes of smoke). Everyone was tweeting about #wherewereyou and the radio and TV were broadcasting the ceremony and name reading at Ground Zero. When I was in college, we recognized Shoah Night with a reading of names of those who perished in the Holocaust. Every year that we read the names of those who died 9 years ago, that word “Shoah” is all I hear in my head. It’s a moving and important thing to do, and I could have stayed all day listening to and reading what people shared about that day.

But I had to get back to New Work City, pitch in with the startup I’d joined, see how I could add any value. We worked steadily all day, challenging each other, building, developing, refining, talking, debating, listening, inspiring, working, working. I didn’t leave until after midnight. When we finally walked out, I hugged one of my new friends, and that’s when I saw it. Looking downtown from Broadway and Canal street, there were the light towers. I pointed and said, “Look at that.” She looked at it, smiled and said, “See you tomorrow.”

So that’s where I was on September 11, 2010.

On December 28, 2009, I posted this on my name site. It was not a manifesto, to be sure, but it was a promise I made to myself.

The Goal: Quit my job and be working as an independent by June 30, 2010.

Goal achieved. In fact, I was out of my job on June 15, and sitting at this desk, looking out onto a tree-lined brownstone street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

Then, in January I posted this on getting my financial and physical house in order. I had grand plans of having six months income socked away before I started my new life. That was before I remembered that I’d blown my savings on some family obligations. I don’t begrudge those expenses (much) but it has definitely made things a little more, um, pressing. Yesterday I had $50 in my checking account; today, a client’s payment arrived and I am back in good shape. By the end of September, I’ll have enough to get me through the end of the year, even if I didn’t do another job. That’s a liberating feeling, even if it was a nail-biter for a few days.

A little later that month, I ruminated on my procrastination, my disaffection for the job I had (or really, the industry I was in), and also noted that I wasn’t that into a guy I was certain I wouldn’t go out with again, but instead dated unproductively for 3 months. Oh my, how I can wallow in something unpleasant for awhile because coping and dealing and figuring out can provide enough cognitive load that I don’t worry about anything else (though that’s because I become a big ball of worry).

Anyway, it’s now the last full week of August. A lot has happened. And as I look back on those early posts – those little prayers tied to the fence posts, I have realized something very interesting: I don’t have a process for this. I can map out a strategic plan for a client, sketch a campaign, develop a methodology. But for me…

I do leaps. I do tricks. I get from here to there on what feels like and sometimes looks like wild instinct. I react. I make moves out of the pure sense of growing panic, that if I do not do this thing, I never will, that if I never do, I will go crazy, or worse.

Then I second guess, I question my own credibility, I wonder if maybe the headhunters are hinting at something, that maybe I need to build a brand at some hot agency before I can do this on my own. But I also know that I will lose a part of me if I do, that I won’t be any closer to doing what I want to do, and that I will be doing it under someone else’s aegis. Fuck that.

So anyway. This past week I dwindled down to my last $50. I put Drano on a credit card to fix my clogged tub. I tucked into my cupboards and freezer. I permitted friends to buy me a drink or two. And this morning, with my housekeeper coming, and a doctor’s appointment later in the day, I poured the change in those two Ball jars into a hot pink nylon shopping bag, tucked it into my purse, and carried it like a baby on my hip to one of those banks with the ‘penny arcade’. There were $106 in those jars. Enough to pay the housekeeper and the co-pay, and buy a sandwich later on. I would make it through today, even if the check didn’t come. I’ve been this close to the wire and on the other side of the zero balance before, but it never gets easier.

I thought of my dad, talking about days when he had half a tank of gas in the car, and the knowledge that today he had to make a sale, because the baby needed shoes, or the baby needed diapers, or they needed to pay the electric bill. He’d hope the car wouldn’t break down and the half a tank of gas would be enough. And to remind him what he was doing this for, he’d come into the baby’s room and look down, and there I was, smiling back up at him, so happy to see him. That image would motivate him to get his ass out the door and on the road and in those offices, selling, selling; that image would break his heart.

I have nothing like that at stake. But I relate to the sense of urgency, the sense of responsibility. Just as he wanted me to be happy and cared for, to love and respect him, I want to feel that way about myself, provide that to myself.

So at about 2:30, I went downstairs, sure that the check would be there, half-believing it would never come, unlocked the mailbox and took an envelope from the stack containing the payment for consultancy on a project. I took it to the bank, and deposited it, and am breathing easier. It’s all going to be fine. It’s all going to be awesome, actually. But at this particular moment, I feel like I got pulled back from falling onto the subway tracks, just as the train came barreling into the station. The adrenaline rush is quite something. Here’s to no more of that.

Girl and Woman are not adjectives. They are nouns. Those are the ground rules for this post. I do not spend a lot of time waxing feminist. And I don’t want to spend a lot of time doing that here. But there are a few things that I’ve encountered since my decision to go out on my own that have been causing me slightly absurd levels of self-doubt. So I thought I’d air those here, since that’s basically the tone and tenor of the blog this week.

Freelancer

Freelancer, in the estimation of some people I’ve spoken to, means “unemployed.” It suggests a condition that someone, well me, needs curing. This is not true. There are loads of people from the advertising industry and its adjacencies who have recently decided to eschew working for big agencies to do work they enjoy, find meaningful, or that simply earns them more revenue they get to keep. No, freelance is a business decision for some of us. I recognize that freelance is also a condition some people are thrust into unwillingly. But that is not the case for me, nor for most of the freelancers I know. They took a risk, leapt from the seeming safety of a corporation and the benefits and steady pay that those claim to offer, into the possibility of greater rewards for their own individual effort, and for the sole responsibility for their own individual failure.

So, headhunters, potential employers, clients, colleagues, when someone says they are a freelancer, do not leap to the conclusion that this is against the speaker’s will.  It’s a growing trend, and one that I feel speaks more to the failings of big shops than to the failings of the person who is now a freelancer.

A Girl Nerd

I guess my main point here is that a nerd is a nerd.  I don’t spend ages and ages playing WoW, but yes I know about the RealID controversy, 4chan, Chatroulette, Reddit v. Digg, cloud computing, hyperthreading, edge security, 3D television, augmented reality apps, QR code, the accelerometer and the gyroscope, and…

10 years ago, I was making javascript video games, figuring out how to script a website to autoscroll horizontally, testing OpenGL databases, rocking a webcam in the office, downloading The Matrix off of Hotline (yes, Virginia, there was P2P before Napster)… 15 years ago I’d already been online for 5 years, getting cheat codes off of forums on Prodigy and doing research for class papers on Compuserve.  I could do basic HTML coding and was FTPing a student magazine to the web press for printing.

I grew up reading Isaac Asimov, Robert Asprin, Douglas Adams (and that was just in the As!).  I can recite chapter and verse from Star Wars, watched classic TV based on comic book superheroes, have seen all the Star Trek movies, and saw Avatar in 3D on Christmas Day.  Also, I loved Inception because of the plot, the CG and the score – which I realized was based on the motif from “Non, je ne regrette rien” during the movie.

I blog about robots and rockets and ray-guns; I read comic books on my iPad; I spend hours a day learning new hooks for WordPress; I drool over pixel resolution and bit rates; I like things that are shiney.  My new company makes digital content, and tries really hard to be smart about it.

All this proves is that I am a nerd.  Girl Nerd seems like an unnecessary designation.  Clearly, nerdness is in its ascendency, so why does it still come as a shock that a late Gen Xer like myself would be one of the many nerds of my generation?

Now, at the same time, I notice the gender imbalance at events like DigitalDUMBO, tech meetups, and so on.  My only solution is to suggest that all the Girl Nerds start showing up to those places, and start contributing to those groups.  Which brings me to…

Woman Entrepreneur

Last night I went to DigitalDUMBO, as I have for the past five or six of these events.  The theme for the event was a job fair, and I was hoping to meet someone who could code/develop an iPhone app.  In other words, I was looking for someone to hire.  But I was met with some hostility by one of the organizers because he assumed that I was a recruiter.  Apparently recruiters are identifiable because they are well-dressed women; he told me he assumed that because I was ‘dressed up’.  I was wearing a dress, and some low heels, yes, but I wasn’t the only woman dressed that way at the event.  Something about the way I was dressed, and I suppose, that I dared to ask about name tags, suggested to this (in the end, seemingly very nice) guy that I was free riding on an event meant to – you know – connect small businesses with great digital talent.  When I clarified that I was not a recruiter but an entrepreneur, he very graciously suggested that I come back to this DigitalDUMBO thing (his next assumption was that it was my first time there) next time.  Finally, he gave me his card and said he’d be happy to connect me with a developer if I need help finding one.

It’d be easy to suggest that this is sexism, guys assuming women can only have roles women usually have.  A woman at a digital meetup? Dressed well? Must be a recruiter.  But he was not the first person I encountered who treated with me with some sexism last night.  The first person was a woman.  She made a point of introducing herself to all the men I was standing talking to before she introduced herself to me.  She then made a point of asking them all what they do but did not ask me.  Her body language was so clear that there was no mistaking it – obviously these guys were the people to meet at the networking event, that girl there must be nobody.  She avoided eye contact with me, until she overheard me talking with a friend who is developing an app for time-shifted social viewing of online TV and video.

And here’s where it all comes full circle: The next woman I spoke to translated ‘entrepreneur’ as ‘freelance’, and ‘freelance’ as ‘unemployed’ and became my personal cheering section to go meet … well, to go meet the guy who thought I was a recruiter.  Because maybe they’re hiring, and they do work sort of related to the business I told her I’d started.  And wouldn’t I really just like to be taken care of?

My slightly pissed off internal optimist makes this sincere wish:  maybe if we all stop making assumptions about gender, employment status and nerdness, we’ll get to be a lot better at networking, and therefore become far more successful.  Wouldn’t that be nice?

Walking home last night, a very clear, succinct thought passed through my head, and I wonder if it’s passed through yours, too: Action is the best expression of intention.

It seems pretty obvious, right? But how much time do we all waste in protesting that we ‘didn’t mean to’ do or say the thing we did or said? How much effort do we put in to letting ourselves off the hook for the things we don’t do by promising ourselves we’ll do it tomorrow?

And how much does fear, or the feeling of being overwhelmed, or self-doubt (which I suspect are all different flavors of the same intoxicant) keep us from doing what we mean to do?

The best line Mr. Morton ever uttered I’ve quoted here before, “Act, or be acted upon.” He had another one, though, that I think was one of my brother’s favorites: “In not choosing, you have chosen.” Choosing to do nothing is still a choice.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been choosing to do a lot of nothing. That’s not a fair statement – I’ve been working and dealing with the admin hassles of setting up a new bank account and paying my taxes and so on.

But this is not the meaningful work. This is not the work I need to do to set up my business or do what I love to do. It’s just work for its own sake, for the sake of cash flow, for the sake of having something to do.

Not doing something, it turns out, is at least as stressful as doing something. Two weeks ago I was sitting in my apartment trying to get started. I knew exactly what I should be doing – there were things I needed to read, blog posts to work on, a business plan to revise, all sorts of stuff – but I couldn’t get started. I thought I would sit and meditate for 10 minutes, try to clear my head, and begin again. I sat, concentrated on my breathing… In: 1. Out: 2. In: 1. Out: 2. Over and over again, I counted.

The next thing I knew I was bowing forward, as if in prayer, in tears. Sitting properly for a few minutes hurt like hell. My shoulder and neck were in spasms of pain, I couldn’t stop thinking about the aching, couldn’t feel anything else.

I hadn’t done anything to injure my neck. All I’d done was let stress and fear and anxiety build up in my back and neck and then, when I thought I would take some new-agey route to focus, it reached up out of my back and neck and punched me in the face.

It goes back to the stories we tell ourselves about what we are capable of, what we deserve, what is possible. We experience a failure, perhaps. It happened. But we tell ourselves that it happens. Or worse, we see someone else do something and succeed – but we tell ourselves that we are not like that person, we don’t have the money, personality, contacts, whatever to make it work.

So we have to let things be what they are, and what they were, and what they are going to be. And we have to know the difference.

Let’s go back to the top: action is the best expression of intention. I’m not talking about grand gestures, big roll-outs, major launches. I’m talking about simple, small stuff. Little things that add up to something important and enormous. Small actions that speak volumes about who you are and what you do.

Aside: Huh. Maybe this is the part where I do relate to Don Draper in the season premiere of Mad Men. Why doesn’t the work speak for itself, then? I do all this stuff, why isn’t that enough? Here’s my slight cop-out of an answer: action is the best expression of intention but you must do that for yourself and for the enactment of reality. Narratives, storytelling, framing – that’s what you have to do to help everyone else understand. (And they’re not that interested in what you do, they want to know who you are. Yet another thing to work on. Oh well.)

The first challenge then was to seek actions that would get me out of my funk.

1. Get a massage to do something about my damn neck. If you live in NYC and want a recommendation, I have the place for you.
2. Call some friends. Make dates for dinner with people who believe in me, inspire me, respect me. Who want me to succeed.
3. Come to grips with the fact that ADD is a negotiable obstacle. Start negotiating. Does that mean meds? Maybe. Might that help with focus and task completion? Maybe. Is it worth a try? Hells yeah.
4. The tricks of magical thinking. My to-do list (while I await the teuxdeux app’s approval by the iTunes store!) was becoming, frankly, the opposite of useful. It was too long, not specific enough, didn’t have due dates. I was punishing myself with a list that was unachievable, not giving myself clear enough instructions, and defaulting to triage as the only tactic for getting through the day. My new to-do list is little pieces of paper in a ziploc bag. I jumble the scraps and then pull one out. I do that one. The trick is to make them clear and achievable. “Spend one hour researching competitors’ offerings.” “Sign up for three meetup groups.” “Write blog post about The Fantastic Four: Issue #2.” Then what to do first is out of my hands. I can pretend it’s fate, or God, or the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Here is my to-do list:

Okay, those things done, I gave myself the leeway to simply say – this week has gone tits up. Who cares? Let it slide. I’ve been doing too much of that lately, though, so I had to put a deadline on it. Sunday, July 25 was a good date. The date of my dad’s birthday, three of my friends’ birthdays, the Mad Men premiere. And it was soon. Seemed auspicious enough. Plus it would mean that today would have to be different.

So on Thursday I had dinner with a friend – someone I wanted to work for early in my career, who I was blessed enough to work with in the middle of my career, and who is a dear friend and potential partner at this new phase of my career. We had a lovely meal, drank some delicious cocktails, caught up on stuff. And I had a moment of knowing what needed to be done.

1. I need to write the elevator pitch for the new company. What is it, what does it do, what doesn’t it do.
2. I need to build a rolodex – resources I can use to execute the work I want to do so I’m not playing catch-up when the first project starts.
3. I need to build the brand, which means I need to build my brand.

My friend agreed that these things were critical, gave me some useful things to think about, and said once I was ready, there were projects he wanted to do with me.

On Saturday, my other friend, someone I met when I first moved to NYC on Friendster(!) who works in the event planning industry as the editor of a trade magazine gave me some terrific ideas for number 3 on my list.

And this morning, just reading the Mashable app gave me some good ideas for number 2 on the list.

All that’s left is number 1 – which feels the most daunting, but is also the most exciting. Number 1 should be reframed as this simple question: Who do I want to be? The first step to answering that question is writing a short paragraph to post on a website. That’s it. One tiny step that will begin to unlock all the other little steps to the near future.

In the meantime I started this day by simply getting out of the house. I found a new cafe with wifi and coffee and bagels and decent music, and I’ve been here, reading and working on this post.

Which pretty much brings you up to date on where the hell I’ve been and what the hell I’ve been doing. Answers: Under a rock, being scared of the world.

Right then, that’s over (for now). On to the next thing.

So, the moral of this very long, very self-indulgent bit of bullshit is this: Get out of your own way. Do something.

Or, to quote the Levi’s campaign: Go forth.

Click here to view the embedded video.

i am going to remind you. in multiple places.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[gratuitous use of a puppy is within my rights]

i’ve been working in and around advertising for 12 or 13 years.  i’ve been a copywriter and a web designer and a planner and a strategic consultant and a qualitative researcher and an innovations lead and a ‘corporate intellectual’.  yesterday i was described on a phone call as an ‘expert on brands, strategy, research methodologies and implementation. and she’s a wild blogger.’  practically feral, i’d say.

but wait – “implementation.”

now that takes me back to the beginning, when i was making websites and ads and games.  and it reminds me of a really early conversation i had with a client who wanted to get into the e-commerce world.  this had to have been 1999, it was Ron Herman, who owns the Fred Segal store on Melrose.  he was turned on by Helmut Lang‘s website, but also by the Gap. but he didn’t have the fulfillment capabilities to ship everything anyone wanted, and he didn’t have the inventory system to know what he had and link it to his stores in both a virtual world and a brick-and-mortar one (remember how we all used to say that? i’m so glad it’s gone).

what he did have was a line called RH Vintage – which still exists, though at the time it was basically bedazzled vintage bought out of poundage.  the line was comprised of jeans or cords, t-shirts, and belts.  no two of anything was alike.  the prices were comparatively reasonable for a Fred Segal shopping trip.  we thought – let’s experiment:  let’s put up your jeans, your cords, your tees and your belts.  you have three choices to make as a customer: which of these 4 categories do you want to shop from, are you a guy or a girl, and what’s your size.  tick those boxes, and the good people at RH Vintage will pick out your clothes and send it to you.  it’ll probably fit.  it’ll probably be what you want.  it’ll definitely come in a branded bag, with a branded receipt.  it’ll make you think that you actually got in your car and went to Fred Segal.  you can pretend to your friends at Brown and Wesleyan and Amherst that you shopped there (and you sorta did), and you’ve got the threads to prove it.

Ron loved the idea – i’m not sure what happened next, but here was an answer that wasn’t an ad.  it was a micro-model for doing business.  it was a branded product line with a branded distribution system and a branded user/shopping experience.  yes, it would have a website.  probably taglines would need to be written and designs made &c.  but it wasn’t an advertising idea – it was a business idea.

the best stuff i’ve ever done in anything related to advertising has always been ‘this is what you should do‘ not ‘this is what you should say‘.

i was talking to Seth Wolk the other day at Saatchi about who in the business is making things.  (he’s so great – really smart and candid and clear and open.  frankly, a rarity.)  but he did cut to the quick: maybe i’m barking up the wrong tree.  maybe i’m expecting places who don’t, as a matter of course, do what i do, to want to do what i do – and to know how to package it, sell it, and implement it.  maybe people like me need to find a new roof. or build our own house.

it’s really important to not only think about what you do as the definition of who you are, but to make sure you’re in the right place, the place that will not only let you be you, but wants you to be more of you, is hungry for you, is receptive to you.  people like me should be in places where people say ‘this is what you should do’ – and then adds, ‘we’ll build it for you.’

and here, then, is my question:  where are those places, really? lots of places claim to be doing that, but are at heart still ad agencies or branding companies.  is it, as Seth suggested, media properties and platforms?  is it tech startups?  who are the companies that are looking at brands on a holistic level and then suggesting – and implementing - action instead of talk?

I was talking to Michael Hastings-Black of Desedo Films the other day about a great many things – it was sunny out! and we were in SoHo! with coffee!

But one of the most tactical parts of the conversation was also perhaps the hardest question.  How do you price what you do?  Furthermore, what’s the ‘right’ way to price it?

I’m aware that hourly billing is pretty standard, and that day rates are common among consultants (I even charge one, as do the bigger companies I work with).  But I’m much more comfortable with pricing the value of the thing itself.  You are paying for an answer – a design, a film, a campaign, a website, whatever.  How much time it takes to get there is agreed upon by you and me in the form of deliverable dates; the form the answer takes is also something we negotiate and discuss, preferably really early on.  But how many hours or days I commit between now and then begins to suggest that ideas happen ‘on the clock’ and that a sum of the process equals the outcome.

Which makes me (and clearly others, as the quote below illustrates) wonder, what are we really selling?  A process, or an outcome.  I’m more interested in outcomes, and I think that’s why people want to work with me.  But then we start working together and the process begins to subsume the thing itself.  I want to bust out of that.

I think it’s a better idea and more appropriate for clients to understand they are paying for a solution and not for the time associated. A designers’ job is to solve problems. One of these problems is helping clients understand the creative process, and, in turn, the value behind design.

thanks to #ideasareawesome and idApostle.

[oh, and the discussion in the comments section is pretty interesting too]