Published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on February 2, 2000. All rights reserved.
Books and articles about leadership are loaded with sports metaphors, everything from teamwork to tackling: batting a thousand, hitting the mark, getting second wind, protecting your turf, or calling the shots. If it's not from sports, it's from combat: ambush the opponent, marshal your forces, or head into battle. By reading enough of this stuff, you might conclude that leadership is being described in stereotypically masculine ways because men are the ones taking the positions as leaders.
Can it be true, in our egalitarian, politically correct world, that males continue to dominate leadership roles? The short answer: Yes. Yet although the stereotypes linger, the whole definition of male and female leadership is indeed changing, says Mary Hartman, of the Rutgers Institute for Women's Leadership (see page 6). "Women have led for as long as men have led -- in families and in communities," she says, but leaders can emerge in different areas. Now women leaders are "figuring out what part of the world they want to change, and then figuring out how they want to get it done."
Consultant and psychic John Windwalker (see page 8) asserts that women are more likely to embrace change than their male counterparts. He urges women to reclaim their feminine power: "Women are going to be the half of humanity that is more powerful than the male because things didn't work the male way."
These are just some of the predictions you will read in this annual Women in Business issue, which features the stories of six female executives (see page 12). They discuss how their technical training yielded unusual insights, whether they think their management style is gender-based, whether they give credence to the fabled "glass ceiling," and how they manage to fit their work into their personal lives.
Many of these executives are leading technological change but are actually implementing what is traditionally considered a woman's job: customer service. These women realize that, in the digital age, businesses have the chance to interact with their customers on a much more personal basis. RCN's Eileen Gabriel, for example, is focusing on how the customer needs to be treated. Kristin Hedberg, president and chief operating officer of Total Research's Blinke, is setting up E-businesses to give customers a voice. Clare Hart, CEO of Dow Jones' and Reuters' Factiva, is helping individual clients make better business decisions.
The Women in Business issue is known to raise some feminist eyebrows because we ask so many gender-based questions about personal lives. What difference does it make whether someone is married or has children? How dare we ask the Mommy Track or the Glass Ceiling questions?
Actually, our reporters generally pose these same questions to everyone they interview, male or female, throughout the year. This week, nevertheless, we probably pressed a little harder to present an array of choices in lifestyles and business styles. We asked the questions, not just on behalf of women, but also for all those men -- fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, or boyfriends -- who have a vested interest in women's careers.
Start-ups can be fun to work for, says Eileen Gabriel, formerly the vice president of information services at Toys 'R Us, now the new chief information officer at RCN. A workplace with high energy, camaraderie, and a breathless exhilarating pace -- it can arouse one's very best efforts.
RCN can hardly be considered a start-up. With $3.8 billion in cash and 3,600 employees, it provides local and long distance phone, cable television and its rcn.com Internet services to the area from Boston to Washington, D.C. in the east and San Francisco to San Diego in the West. But compared to its elders in the telecommunications industry, the Carnegie Center-based RCN is a mere child, and indeed is often described using the metaphor of David against the Goliaths.
RCN's founder, CEO David McCourt, is cast as David in the stone hurling story. And though he has not actually felled any telecommunications giants, he is growing his company at a breakneck pace and maneuvering his forces to take advantage of its size. Because RCN started from scratch, it is not stuck with outdated legacy systems, so he hired someone outside the industry to set up a seamless, single computer platform for all of RCN's bundled services.
"He wanted to be sure we don't make large decisions geared towards today, but towards tomorrow," says Gabriel. "I think he did not want someone who had a strong opinion already on the way telecommunications should be."
RCN started out as a rural telephone company in Pennsylvania's coal country. Now it claims to be the nation's first and largest single-source, facilities-based provider of bundled communications services to the residential market, and the nation's largest targeted Internet service provider (ISP), with all of its customers strategically clustered. Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen has agreed to invest $1.65 billion in RCN, which will pre-fund the construction of a network to 4.5 million homes through 2003 plus the building of 1 million-square-foot corporate headquarters in Mercer County or Bucks County.
Gabriel's job is deploy an integrated systems platform that supports RCN's bundled service offerings and manages customer relations. "Eileen's role in what we are doing now is key," says Valerie Haertel, senior vice president of investor relations and corporate communications. "We are integrating all of our systems so we have a seamless customer care support system for billing purposes and customer care. What we are offering is bundled service and cable TV and high speed internet access on a cable modem. This is unique because those are three separate businesses, and we are doing them under one umbrella in the residential marketplace, and offering them under one bill."
RCN now is very similar to what Toys R Us used to be, says Gabriel. "I was at Toys R Us during its tremendous growth period and I remember those years very fondly," Gabriel says. "As growth slowed down at Toys 'R Us, I realized I missed the excitement and invigorating atmosphere. As tiring as it was, and as hard as it is on you physically, emotionally, and mentally, that is the environment I really enjoyed. RCN was a perfect choice. Not only is this business being built on very solid fundamentals, with a clear strategy for success, it is also a place where motivated employees can really make a difference. Like all businesses, RCN faces continual challenges, but they are the kind of challenges associated with explosive growth and the strong demand for our services."
Gabriel, of Irish descent, says that part of her success can be traced to her ability to survive in a tough environment and her determination to take care of herself. "My family had no money. But I had a very very strong mother, very intelligent and successful in her own right." Gabriel says she was influenced not by her mother's words, but by what she did. "There was never anything ahead of her that she didn't tackle and didn't succeed at. She was responsible for us financially, she ran the house, she painted -- clearly she was a super person, a super mom, and a super woman, a great role model."
"Failure," says Gabriel, "was not an option. To be honest, it would have been very hard to be in front of her and not talk about success."
Gabriel shuns such gender-oriented dictums as the expectation that a woman should get anything because she is a woman. "I need to know that I earned it," says Gabriel. Another is the idea that women require mentoring. "I would have liked to have had one, but I have not had a mentor for most of my career. Maybe I react negatively to the implication that women need a mentor more than a man."
One of four children, she grew up in Bergen County, where her father was a department store buyer and her mother was an accountant. She took a premed course at the University of Rhode Island, Class of 1972. Though she was accepted at medical school, she chose not to go, and after a stint doing accounting in a retail chain store, she enrolled in training for Cobol computer programming sponsored by an insurance company.
The ability to think like a programmer, she says, is innate. "You learn skills, but I think you are born with that approach to life -- a metered, logical approach to things." She worked as the MIS director for several manufacturing plants owned by Digital Equipment Corporation, and was director of business systems for National Data, a computer service bureau in Atlanta, Georgia.
Along the way she earned an MBA in accounting and finance from Western New England. She has two children, a son who is a sophomore and on the football team at Siena, and a daughter who is a senior in high school.
For many of her children's school age years, Gabriel was a single parent. The "family friendly workplace," now so much in demand, was not ubiquitous then. "As a woman, I am more aware that people have a life outside the office than some men I have worked for. I was a single parent for many years and had to work hard to keep that fact out of my business life. People need to remember their priorities. I think it is possible to be extremely productive and still have a life."
One of the ways she survived a grueling schedule was to insist that her children eat what was put before them. If they didn't consume it in 15 minutes, it was taken away and nothing else was available. Result: "My children eat everything," says Gabriel.
When she joined Toys 'R Us in 1984 it had less than $1 billion in sales and about 100 stores and was just about to launch Kids R Us, Babies R Us, and international stores. She started as the director of financial systems, but as she emphasizes. she never worked in the Web part of the business, "except for some triage." That's important, because Toys R Us drew a hailstorm of criticism in the 1998 and 1999 holiday season for failing to serve its website customers. Gabriel limits comments to a terse statement that long term planning has always been her strong preference.
Gabriel says she used to think that she had to work for large organizations in order to progress in her career. "At some point I realized you still have to get up and go to work and really enjoy it, that it was more important to do something I really enjoyed."
In her new job with RCN, she lives during the week in Princeton and goes home on weekends to north Jersey to be with her daughter and husband. She turns this into a plus: "I am learning a new industry, and the fact that I am living here during the week has been a plus -- no one is waiting for dinner or needs to go shopping for prom shoes," says Gabriel. But during football season she manages to attend every one of her son's games, whether that requires a trip by car or plane.
At RCN it has been a baptism by fire to learn about the industry. Her retail perspective, she believes, is valuable, "because we are in the retail business. We need to focus, honestly, more than we do on how the customer needs to be treated."
She ticks off the phases of growth of RCN: The first phase was creating a business model, and the second was fundraising. "We are very capital intensive because we are laying our own network." The third is perfecting the model and scaling the processes. This is where Gabriel comes in: she must choose and implement a full suite of integrated operating support systems: "One by one we are going through all the processes, figuring out the future process we want to use and developing technology in support of that process. That is giving me the opportunity to learn the business."
She was chosen, she believes, because she is a newcomer to the industry but has developed systems for a large company. And she is having fun with the opportunity to choose "the best of breed," the best solution in each functional area. "RCN's values are to understand, seek, develop, build, and reward the best -- to be driven by enthusiasm. We want to develop an IT plan that is as smart and aggressive as the RCN's well-constructed and phased business plan."
To populate her offices on the third floor of Carnegie 214 she is hiring "people who want to be part of a high energy entrepreneurial type culture, who want to do something no one has done before, people who care about the company. When you are an owner of the company you make decisions differently."
Enthusiasm is Eileen Gabriel: "I need to get up every morning and enjoy what I am doing. I expect a lot from people around me, but people who work hard are rewarded."
All this hard work can sometimes turn into a tense atmosphere. "Just taking the time to have a light conversation with somebody can lighten the atmosphere around you," she says. "A little levity in the air can lighten the atmosphere around you. In an energetic, highly charged atmosphere, if you don't take a few minutes to disperse that, it can explode."
-- Barbara Fox