Lessons in Leadership: Newsweek?

There's so much more to tell about Pop Tech, but first, a note on an article on everyone lips when I got to New York after the conference.

It's been a long time since so many people I know have read Newsweek and were discussing it in extremes. It's not a bad publication, but let's face it -- it's not exactly the first magazine you'd expect the digirati to be going on about.

I Usually Don't Pick Up Magazines Before Getting on a Plane (Airport Prices . . . )

. . . however, I picked up a Newseek on the way from London to Maine for the Pop Tech conference because it promised to reveal the principles by which women leaders do their thing.

Most of the articles spoke in platitudes, so I looked hopefully to the piece in which women speak for themselves.

The Political Becomes Personal

Betty Friedan wrote an article for the New York Times a few years ago about the death of feminism. OK, the word itself seems dated and has come to represent individual stridency rather than political necessity. But for Friedan, "individual" was the key challenge for post '70s women: problems that so recently had been seen as political are now being internalized by women as personal. There's no sense that a collective

Unremarkable, then, that almost all gave their parents at least some of the credit for the confidence to pursue paths untried. Equally unsurprising, each focused primarily on individual autobiographical details that set them apart from other men AND women. Women mentoring seemed more an anomaly than something one should expect. The political has become personal in all but format.

However Betsy Myers made me feel I had got my money's worth. More in the next post.