For the first time in history, three women could sit on the Supreme Court. If it happens, two of them will be childless. Whatever the reason for this personal decision by Justice Sonya Sotomayor and recently nominated Elena Kagan, there's a subtle, yet powerful, message being sent to working women across the nation: If you want a perch at the pinnacle of your profession, it's easier without kids.

And not just kids, without husbands. Ever since Kagan was 13 and dressing up in a judge's robe, she has been preparing for this job. From law clerk to Dean of Harvard Law School to Solicitor General, she has been doggedly, diligently riding the legal hamster wheel, checking off boxes and moving ahead toward the ultimate career brass ring. Same holds true for Justice Sonya Sotomayor. But why have they chosen to do it without a family?

Some speculate that there is a fear among ambitious women that they can't rise to a preeminent position if they start a family because of the intense job pressures -- late nights, long trips, the need to be available 24/7. Let's face it, could Justice Sotomayor really schedule car pool from One First Street, N.E.?

This town is littered with examples of women who have given up having a family to advance their law careers. Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice comes to mind. So does a litigator at a high-powered law firm who spends 70 hours a week either on the road or at her desk. Not a lot of time left in that schedule for changing diapers or pushing a stroller in the neighborhood.

Ask any woman who has had the privilege to serve at the Office of the President how long she was able to keep her career together before her family life careened off the rails. Even C.J. Craig, who played Press Secretary and later Chief of Staff in the popular tv series West Wing, was single.

It's easy to turn the lens on my own profession. Uber-star ABC World News Tonight anchor Diane Sawyer, while married to movie producer Mike Nichols, does not have children. And remember Joyce Purnick, who in 1998 caused a stir among reporters at the New York Times for admitting to a commencement audience at her alma mater, Barnard College, that she wouldn't be metropolitan editor if she'd had kids? She said she never decided not to have them, it just happened.

While the pressures for women may be too great at the upper echelons to withstand adding the mommy title to their resume, the incentives also play a role. These high-powered jobs come with perks: proximity to power, financial security, and let's not forget the occasional invitations to the President's box at the Kennedy Center.

But being childless doesn't have to be the only way.

71% of women in the workforce have children ages 6-17. And for the first time in history there are more of us working than men. So why -- with the numbers on our side -- are so many working women climbing the ladder frustrated with the lack of corporate flexibility? Why aren't more companies offering job shares and telecommuting? Why isn't this cacophony of unhappy voices being heard?

The problem lies at the top. Senior corporate executives, predominantly men, with a handful of women who have paid their dues by working 10-12 hour days at the office away from their kids, set the tone and policies for working mothers. If they sat in the cafeteria and listened and watched, they would realize that these mothers, who still bear the brunt of childcare responsibilities, don't need to be at work all week to be productive and plugged in -- thanks in great part to technology.

While some bad apples have tainted "working" from home by underperforming when not in the workplace, the answer is not eschewing flexibility, rather it is incumbent upon corporations to set meaningful performance goals for employees and to hold employees accountable no matter where their desks are.

Flexible work arrangements may not have been possible in 1957 when Sandra Day O'Connor made a choice to stay home for eight years and raise her three children before returning to the workforce in 1965, first as Arizona's assistant attorneys general, and ultimately as the first female Supreme Court Justice. Nor would it have been as easy when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was raising her two children; Jane, born in 1955 and James in 1965.

As a working mother of three (10, 6, and 2), I can vouch for the fact that holding down a full-time corporate job would have been easier without the endless middle-of-the-day doctor appointments, teacher conferences, and "Mom have you seen my soccer cleats?" phone calls. But it was doable thanks to my BlackBerry.

Of my four best female friends in Washington, three are lawyers, one is a business woman. All are or have been at the upper echelons of their professions. All of us have two or more children. We do it. We juggle conference calls and crying babies, we tuck in kids before going out on a weeknight to business dinners; we schedule time to look at email while on vacation. And while my friends and I are making it work, we'd all tell you it takes a toll on your health, and your sanity.

Recently, I traded in 60-minute daily commutes and 10- 12-hour days in an office building for the flexibility of owning my own company and setting my own hours. I've never been happier. But not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur.

I know many women who struggle each day to find the elusive balance between work and family. If being childless is not an option for you, it's time to raise your voices, demand flexibility in your workplace and show the world that yes, you can work full-time and be productive members of a corporation without being chained to a desk just because that's the way it's always been done.

Lauren Ashburn is President of Ashburn Media Company in Washington, DCand worked as a Managing Editor for the Gannett Company for ten years.

At a time in my life where I am facing this question - am in awe of women that manage to do it and am torn over whether I can too without detriment to my children. How have you done it my beautiful sisters?

Big revenues and the CEO’s upcoming book release are winning Zappos loads of public press. Zappos doesn’t approach customer service like most organizations. In fact, the company makes it publically clear they have a culture that qualifies as more than just little bit quirky.

One of Zappos’s core principles is to promote employee and customer happiness. Of note on the employee side: Zappos values happy employees so much that at the end of new-hire training, trainees are offered $2,000 to quit.

Now, while offering $2K for new-hires to leave seems ridiculous and is likely unfeasible for most companies, the goal is noble. The program is designed to save the company money by getting rid of folks who won’t thrive and will likely leave soon anyways. In other words, it zeroes in on the importance of staff retention. And the costs you incur when unhappy employees leave aren’t just what you spent on training them.

CCC finds the frontline staff performance benefits of rep retention far outweigh the benefits of hiring for rep attributes indicating a high initial performance. In fact, the performance lift from just an additional six months of tenure is 2.6%, compared to a 0.2% lift from previous service organization experience.

On the flip side, poor engagement can cripple a service organization. It leads to early attrition and higher recruiting and training costs. Even worse, CCC data has found disengaged employees exert 63% less discretionary effort. In other words, disengaged employees do the bare minimum to get by – leading to less productivity and a lower service experience.

So how do we dodge poor engagement? Below are some tips to better engage your staff, based on the top three most important things to drive rep engagement:

1. A visible career path – Creating transparent advancement opportunities for staff boosts engagement. We’ve seen companies get creative to make more opportunities available, even just on a rotational basis. Leading companies also lay out a clear career path for reps so they know what tangible next steps they need to take to advance.
2. Staff motivation – An environment where reps believe in what they do leads to rep engagement. Companies have focused on communication and inclusion so reps can see how their work fits into larger organizational goals.
3. Coaching effectiveness – High-quality coaching is crucial to retaining reps. Simply having a coaching program isn’t enough – poor coaching actually degrades performance and engagement. For CCC members, we’ve taken an in-depth look at what a high-quality coaching system entails.

These are just a few examples of engagement techniques, and are by no means a complete list.  Help me add to it – what’s your favorite way to engage your frontline?

CCC Members, check out our Employee Engagement Portal where you can see how other organizations tackle the top drivers of retention and get involved in our Employee Engagement Pulse Survey. You’ll see how Dow Chemical communicates advancements opportunities and Cadence Design Systems boosts staff motivation through job rotations.

Zappos have in many ways challenged traditional ways of doing business for a long while. The approach is novel and yet addresses the issues head on. Would you consider implementing a similar program in your business? How are you measuring staff retention.

Having worked in organisations that have not invested in this area I am more likely NOT to recommend them to colleagues or business contacts as prospective employers or even as organisations to do business with period. How do you measure the cumulative impact of that sentiment?

#cnow fantastic presentation delivered today at the Connect Now conference in Sydney. Digest and enjoy.

Thanks to @missinglinknz for getting this up so soon after the presentation. Enjoy the post and check out some of the resources she has been so great about sourcing and attaching so quick to share in a really valuable presentation by @missrogue #cnow

Advertising agencies have to grow up. And quick.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18 by
David Rae in Marketing Services Procurement, Services Procurement, Strategic Sourcing, Supplier Relationship Management |
A guest post earlier this week, written by Ralph Daniel of Third i Marketing, points to a recent study conducted by Advertising Age magazine and how it discovered that fewer than one in ten marketing procurers have experience in marketing.

It wasn’t particularly scientific work, comprising of looking through the LinkedIn profiles of marketing procurement folk. Neither did it satisfactorily address the more important question of whether marketing experience is actually something that those who buy marketing services should have. I would argue not, Advertising Age would no doubt disagree.
Take this comment by Miriam Frawley, a principal of e-Diner Design & Marketing, New York, who claims she was there at the beginning of aggressive sourcing. “What’s happening now is that it’s all data based,” she told Advertising Age.
Good. Spending huge amounts of money on one of the largest categories of indirect spend (for many, the largest) without recourse to solid data is irresponsible at best and, at worst, directly conflicts the ultimate goal of maximising shareholder value.
Neither can these agency folk argue that the process is solely a penny-pinching exercise, where procurement is making huge corporate-wide marketing decisions on their own. The uncomfortable truth for agencies is that the chief marketing officer is in on this development. The squeeze in fees that the advertising industry is experiencing is as a result of better communication between marketing and procurement, not worse. The end result, as far as the CMO is concerned, is that their marketing dollar goes further – without a drop in quality.
It’s an uncomfortable truth.
But there is something of a gathering of momentum. At the Advertising Age Awards, procurement was in the limelight again as various agency folk complained of its influence. And the magazine’s editor Jonah Bloom delivered a critique of procurement at a recent conference where he complained of the dwindling margins of the agency industry.
In his speech, Bloom mentions an “obsession with ROI” as if it’s a bad thing and noted that the margins of the world’s top-100 advertisers had dropped by just 0.1% to 11.5% while that of agencies had dropped by 1.7% to 10.5%.
Now, time to take a breath. Have we not just navigated one of the most challenging economic crashes in the best part of a century? Are companies the world over not continuing to go bankrupt? Or did I dream all of that?
I find the whole debate a bit disturbing – as if creative talent (of which I believe in and stand behind – writers are, after all, creatives, as are the photographers and illustrators we use) believes it lives in a different world where something as crazy as return on investment doesn’t exist.
Matthias Gutzmann, the vice president of international operations of the Procurement Leaders Network, recently joined a group of procurement executives in meeting with senior representatives of the advertising agency industry. He reported back on a productive and informative session.
It’s through this type of communication that agencies will understand better how procurement works, and vice versa – not by throwing rattles out of the pram and complaining that buyers are making multi-million pound investment decisions based on good data and return on investment calculations.

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Reader Comments (5)

If you'd listened to my speech in its entirety, or read Ad Age with any regularity over the last 10 years, you'd know that we are not critics of the notion of measurement, ROI or even procurement. Indeed for decades (and particularly in the last decade) we've championed anything and everything that will enable marketers to better understand the data available to them and make more informed decisions. We've also repeatedly, probably to the point of being extremely boring at times, stressed the need for accountability and an ROI based on business metrics -- not fluffy brand metrics. Few in the marketing world would disagree that a clear determination of expected ROI and real-time monitoring of ROI, must be built into to any work done to connect product or service with consumer.
However, it is our feeling based on a great deal of reporting and research, that there's been a shift this year that goes well beyond good practice/extracting value and into the realm of bullying. There were at least half a dozen times this year when multiple sources reported that a procurement-led review had resulted in an agency essentially doing business on an account at cost, even at a loss. You could argue that this is about supply and demand -- there is clearly an oversupply of agency services, giving all the leverage to the buyer of those services and enabling them to drive down the price.
But my central point - as I was addressing the buyers, not the sellers - was that at some point you drive the price down to such a degree that you get considerably worse service (regardless of what you're lead to expect during the buying and negotiating process), and you prevent your agency partner re-investing in the talent and technology that they will need. In other words, procurement stops being about what it should be about - ensuring value, clear grounds for measuring performance and some incentive for good performance - and starts being about diminishing returns for both sides.
It's tough to evaluate, and if you've done the reporting too and find our reporting inaccurate, I think people should hear about it--indeed, I'd be happy to publish it. But the above is an over-simplification of the case that Ad Age and some marketing industry leaders are making. No one that I know is saying procurement practices shouldn't exist; everyone of any caliber in the marketing business strongly espouses the notion of ROI; what we're critical of is bad procurement practice. I would expect procurement leaders to be similarly critical of what's happened in many cases this year.

November 18, 2009 |
Jonah Bloom

As one of the apparently rare Marketing Procurement guys with a blue chip Marketing pedigree, I have to say that the issue of agencies whingeing about nasty Procurement guys threatening their margins is not a new one. That said, bad practice is bad practice, whether Marketing Procurement or otherwise. If Procurement guys are simply focussing on reducing input costs across the board, then shame on them. All they'll do is wind up the agencies and upset their Marketing stakeholders because their needs will not be being met.
The keys to effective Marketing Procurement are frankly no different to any other category.
1. Really understand the stakeholders' business needs
2. Really understand your marketplace
3. Use commercial insight to develop the right strategy to deliver business benefits that reflect the business needs and value sought. This needs to focus on driving value in for those sub categories where the upside of success is proportionately so much higher than the cost benefit of shaving a couple of quid off an agency planner's day rate! On the other hand, there are sub categories where (assuming certain levels of quality, service, consistency etc) one should be ruthlessly aggressive around cost - think about Marketing Production, and Promotional Materials and Merchandise.
4. Work hand in hand with business stakeholders to deliver the strategy
Until Marketing Procurement guys apply simple segmentation of the category and recognise that different areas of marketing spend will require different commercial strategies, then the accusations levelled about bad practice will, unfortunately, continue to hold true.

November 24, 2009 |
Simon Soothill

What may accelerate this process, is the possibility to buy marketing services as if they were commodities, and that as a purchase2pay process: The German buyers alliance "BME e. V." just awarded such a system (by the way: last year the award also went to a project concerning service procurement).
The "problem" for advertising agencies is, that this way their services will be made comparable. Something, no advertiser really thought to happen ever.

November 25, 2009 |
Andreas Knepper

The issue is not the experience of the procurement professional it is their methodology and approach to the category.
Read "Beware the hit and run Procurement Professional" on my blog http://www.trinityp3.com/blog/2009/10/beware-of-the-hitandrun-procur.php
In a category traditionally poor in providing value metrics, it is easy for procurement to become cost driven at the expense of value.
This is why increasingly marketing and their suppliers can think of procurement as knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
But are the marketers and their suppliers providing the relevant metrics and information which allows procurement to account for value in the category?

December 4, 2009 |
Darren Woolley

Let's not even begin to talk about bad practice on the side of marketing...! Of course there's good and bad practice on both sides.
What's at the heart of this debate is who's qualified to judge cost and value. And I think the answer is neither party on their own. I've found that when marketing and procurement work closely together generally you have a well run, thorough and balanced selection process that achieves the goals for the business and that most suppliers are satisfied with.
Some suppliers (usually the unsuccessful ones) will always find a reason to grumble. When it's a procurement-led process you hear the 'cost of everything, value of nothing' stuff, yet when it's a marketing-led process you hear 'there were no rational measures in place'.
Greater collaboration between marketing and procurement can mitigate some of this but regardless of how robust the process is it's simply easier to blame someone else for failure.

December 10, 2009 |
Steve Antoniewicz