Margaret Heffernan is an international businesswoman and writer. She is the author of three books: The Naked Truth: A Working Woman’s Manifesto about Business and What Really Matters, How She Does It(published in paperback as Women on Top) and Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril. Heffernan’s articles on business leadership, entrepreneurship and innovation have appeared in Fast Company, Huffington Post, BNet, Real Business, Reader’s Digest and London Business School’s Strategy Review. Heffernan speaks to corporations, associations, universities, and education conferences about such topics as managing high-achieving talent, continuous innovation and the role of leaders in serving the talent they hire. While Heffernan’s first two books focused on these issues as they impact women in the workplace, her overarching theme has been the need to recognize and release the talent that often lies buried inside organizations, under-valued and under-rewarded because it is unconventional. Heffernan’s voice is primarily one of critical challenge, taking little at face value and regularly questioning received wisdom.

Heffernan writes from direct experience. In the United States, she worked, bought, sold and ran businesses for CMGI, serving as Chief Executive of iCast Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and Information Corporation. In the UK, she ran IPPA and Marlin Gas Trading Ltd. Before running her own businesses, she worked for thirteen years for the British Broadcasting Corporation where she produced a wide range of radio and television programming. Her perspective as a writer is deeply informed by her experience of running businesses that operated in markets that were highly competitive for creative talent. While her work has garnered respect and praise from academics, she has also secured serious attention from leading executives who value academic insight only insofar as it is tested by real world leadership.

Books more less

The Naked Truth

The Naked Truth: A Working Woman’s Manifesto about Business and What Really Matters was published in 2004, just as issues surrounding women at work started to return to the fore. The book looked at the classic barriers to women’s advancement and collected experiences and advice from successful business women who had overcome them. In particular, the book examined women’s attitudes to power and how they define and use power differently from men. The book argued that whereas men see power as expressed through personal or organizational dominance, women see power as derived from orchestration. Men express ambition as defined by getting to the top, whereas women see ambition as the ability to live and work as they please. The book concludes by arguing that what women bring to the workplace is distinctive and highly suited to the non-linear complexities of modern business.

Women On Top

How She Does It (republished in paperback as Women On Top) can be seen as the sequel to The Naked Truth insofar as it looks at women who have decided to eschew the struggle to succeed within traditional, male-dominated organizations in favor of running their own companies. The book examines the statistics underlying the growth and outsize success of women-owned businesses to ask: how is it that women achieve so much more when they get so much less in the way of institutional support and funding? This leads to an examination of women’s motivation, their neurological and social advantages, choice of markets, leadership styles, use of networks and advisors and their different approaches to mergers, acquisitions and exits. In effect, the book argues that women’s different motivations, thinking and leading styles specifically position them for entrepreneurial success. But much of what makes them succeed are approaches and strategies which men could also emulate if they understood how successful they are. The book concludes by arguing that women set a particularly high standard for business success which might provide a powerful antidote to some of the failed business cultures of the past.

Willful Blindness

Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril will be published in 2011. In her latest book, Heffernan argues that the biggest threats and dangers we face are the ones we don’t see — not because they’re secret or invisible, but because we’re willfully blind. She examines the phenomenon and traces its imprint in our private and working lives, and within governments and organizations, and asks: What makes us prefer ignorance? What are we so afraid of? Why do some people see more than others? And how can we change?

Examining examples of willful blindness in the Catholic Church, the SEC, Nazi Germany, Bernard Madoff’s investors, BP’s safety record, the military in Afghanistan and the dog-eat-dog world of subprime mortgage lenders, the book demonstrates how failing to see...or admit to ourselves or our colleagues...the issues and problems in plain sight can ruin private lives and bring down corporations. The book explores how willful blindness develops and then goes on to outline some of the mechanisms, structures and strategies that institutions and individuals can use to combat it. In its wide use of psychological research and examples from history, the book has been compared to work by Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Taleb.