Aiming straight in Sydney

I ran a strategy workshop in Sydney for the Domestos brand. What might be its future role in Australian bathrooms?

Included was a mix of Unilever managers from various functions and an equal number of Aussie 'consumers', all women.

I can’t quite remember how it started, but the women got into a group rant about the inadequacies, the incompetence, the total hopelessness of men. This went on for what seemed an age until they paused, quiet, perhaps to draw breath.

Then a tall blonde announced with an air of game, set and match : “They can’t even bloody AIM STRAIGHT.”

Women wanted for innovation?

Interesting piece on the Voxy news/blog site in New Zealand lamenting the lack of women innovators: http://www.voxy.co.nz/business/women-wanted-innovation/5/116926

According to Voxy, women take out less than 1% of all patents in New Zealand. Of course, this is a real problem – and not only in Kiwiland, but all over the Western world.

In my view the source of the matter lies in the negative attitudes of women towards science and mathematics, and in particular towards engineering. In the “West” there are simply too few women engineers. For it’s engineers that dominate the patent game.

I wonder what the figures look like in Russia or China, where there are shedloads of female engineers?

But perhaps Voxy is taking too pessimistic a view of the situation. After all, in the real world, most innovation happens without any consideration of patents – in strategy, in brand development, in organisational change, in people management, in design, in cultural development, in the arts and so on.

And women may well be in the majority in all those fields, innovating day by day.