Rich Mintz  

Tonight, kicked off by the realization that the women he interacts with professionally are less likely to put forward and promote their own good work than the men, Clay Shirky went on a rant. He titled it “A Rant About Women,” but it’s really a rant about people who are unwilling or unable or uninclined to self-promote, and who suffer professionally as a result — who are, empirically in his experience, disproportionately women.

This post (like Clay’s work generally) is characteristically insightful, readable (and entertaining) all the way through, and hard to summarize without degrading its elegance. But to pick out the thread:

• Women, in his professional experience, are disproportionately reluctant to promote themselves, even in situations in which a little self-promotion would clearly benefit them.
• “Whatever bad things you can say about [self-promoting] behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have have changed the world.”
• This is particularly problematic for women (and other non-self-promoters) in two-sided markets, such as that for employment, in which each side needs to freely make and confirm a choice to transact with the other in order for anything to happen. In such contexts, self-promotion by the party of the first part is one of the signals to the party of the second part that the party of the first part, if selected, will take the risks necessary to be successful.
• The issue emphatically is not an imbalance of talent or creativity between men and women; it is merely an imbalance in the willingness to take certain kinds of visible reputational risks (in contexts in which the actual risk is relatively low, and the value accrues from the risk-taking gesture itself).
• Clay has no constructive ideas regarding how to solve this problem (that’s what makes it a rant). But he hopes that the women in question will take matters into their own hands. “It would be good if more women got in the habit of raising their hands and saying ‘I can do that. Sign me up. My work is awesome,’ no matter how many people that behavior upsets.”

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New Yorker visionary-at-large Malcolm Gladwell has become known for taking contrary positions about how things work (how people make decisions, how information is shared, how business is done) that turn out to be not so contrary after all. Gladwellism is at play again in “The Sure Thing,” in the January 18th issue.

In this piece, built in part off Ted Turner’s autobiography and off Gregory Zuckerman’s profile of John Paulson, Gladwell makes the counterintuitive argument that effective entrepreneurs are not risk-takers (as the popular accounts of their achievements would have it), but aggressive risk mitigators.

In particular, he advances the position of French professors Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot (in their recent study of the entrepreneur’s character From Predators to Icons) that the successful entrepreneur is, at heart, a nerd. He or she is someone who effects an analytical triumph rather than a triumph of fortitude. In the words of Villette and Vuillermot:

The [successful entrepreneur] looks for partners to a transaction who do not have the same definition as he of the value of the goods exchanged, that is, who undervalue what they sell to him or overvalue what they buy from him in comparison to his own evaluation.

This rings true to me, in both a positive and a negative sense. On the affirmative side, I’ve spent most of my professional career in the company of entrepreneurial people (mostly men, as it happens, but that’s a topic for another post) whose common defining characteristic does indeed seem to be that they’ve had the prescience to envision incipient value (and to be able to articulate where they believe that value lies, to the people on their own side of the negotiating table) in what their adversaries at that table see only as a pile of ordinary stuff.

On the negative side — well, I’ll only say that like anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit, I’ve had plenty of productive failures, each of which has made me more able to spot incipient value earlier in its lifespan (and to distinguish true value from the less useful things that masquerade as value, like hope, or tenacity beyond the point of reason, or the simple desire to be wealthy and successful).