Monthly Archive for January, 2011

From John Quelch, The Economist

As he left Rupert Murdoch’s office at the Sun newspaper clutching a fat cheque, John Quelch realised he was interested in business. He was a history student at Oxford and had not previously given the subject much thought. But in 1972 he stepped in to help Cherwell, the student rag, after cocky editors (for such people can occasionally be found at that university) had driven it, in his view, into the river after which it was named.

The young Mr Quelch displayed a certain chutzpah, too. He turned up at Mr Murdoch’s office with a rudimentary business plan “which wouldn’t have passed muster with any accountant”, and walked out with a sizeable sum. Cherwell’s editors were duly dispatched. One, Peter Stothard, went on to edit the Times. The other, Howard Davies, became chairman of Britain’s Financial Services Authority. Mr Quelch took over at Cherwell.

It was this first brush with business that encouraged Mr Quelch to take an MBA. But in the glum 1970s in Britain it was unfashionable for a student to show an interest in management. (Indeed, it would be another 24 years before Oxford opened a business school.) So he headed to America, first to Wharton and then to Harvard Business School, where he stayed for most of his career and became a star professor of marketing. He also had a brief stint as dean of the London Business School.

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From Ruth Franklin, The New Republic

I was eight months pregnant with my first child when Lisa Belkin introduced the concept of “The Opt-Out Revolution” in The New York Times Magazine. It was October 2003, and the last year or so had seen a flurry of books and articles devoted to the challenges (to put it politely) of working motherhood. There was Allison Pearson’s comic novel I Don’t Know How She Does It, in which the protagonist, a perpetually frazzled hedge-fund manager and mother of two, finds herself in the kitchen in the middle of the night “distressing” store-bought pies so that they will appear homemade. In a New York magazine cover story, working mothers and stay-at-home mothers shamelessly trashed each other’s parenting choices. More grimly, Sylvia Ann Hewlett noted in Creating a Life that nearly half of women earning $100,000 or more were childless. The implications were clear: If you have children and work, you’ll be poorly paid, your neighbors will ostracize you, and you can forget about having time to bake—let alone have sex, work out, or do anything else you might have enjoyed in your previous life.

Is it any wonder that Belkin’s article struck such a nerve? Looking around at her well-to-do friends and neighbors, Belkin had noticed a trend: As if the clocks had rolled back to the 1950s, women were once again, in increasing numbers, staying at home with their children. The difference was that they were choosing to. “Why don’t women run the world?” Belkin asked, and she answered, “Maybe it’s because they don’t want to.” But, as the article progressed, it became clear that, if women were opting out of work, their decision owed less to an emotional desire to spend more time with their children than to a punishing workplace deeply inhospitable to mothers’ needs. “I wish it had been possible to be the kind of parent I want to be and continue with my legal career, but I wore myself out trying to do both jobs well,” said one of the women interviewed. The article closed with an optimistic account of the accommodations made by some companies, such as flexible schedules and additional family time off. Such changes, Belkin concluded, represented “a door opened but a crack by women that could usher in a new environment for us all.”

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