Women Managers (continued from page 9)

of war. Not too long ago, Mother Jones Magazine reported on an exclusive seminar for top marketing executives in Europe. Addressing them was General William Westmoreland, whom most of us remember from the days of the Vietnam War. His speech, entitled "Marketing Warfare," focused on delineating `

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world markets as battlefields, competitors as enemies, and marketing techniques as "weapons" for capturing territory. If this were one isolated event, it would not be worthy of mention, but that it typifies the language and training of managers everywhere in the world makes it significant for women in management to ponder.

Does getting a piece of the action for women mean playing the war game with men? Is adopting the intelligence of businessmen our way of re-ordering the world? I hardly think so. My experience in the world of management tells me that women who think differently, who consider multiple options and seize opportunities for unifying conflict, are up against much more than the sheer numbers of men in control. These women are up against an intelligence of conquest.

The future is not, in my mind, an object for strategic control. The future is no more than a reference point in consciousness that gives dimension to the present and the past. It is an open field wherein rests opportunity for a new order of things, and a new way of conceptualizing and realizing world making. Women who set their sights on managing a future for the sake of social justice and equity cannot let go unchallenged the fundamental assumptions and mind-set of the present order of things. The matter here is the emergence of the mind that is woman. It is the emergence of difference which all of us recognize in our daily interactions with men and

come to understand as a matter of how we think.

An example will help to drive the point home. In conversations with men in management, the dominant mode for considering options is dichotomous thinking. Everything is boiled down to two choices. Things can go either one way or another. People are either this way or that way. There is either winning or losing. You can understand it if you listen closely to your conversations with men and listen to men on television. What you hear is most always a function of dichotomy. The few women in the history of intellectual thought and management writing whose works have been allowed to emerge give credence to the fact that women think holistically, with multiplicity of ideas and the mergir g of diversity. Women think as life is, integrating lifferences and seeing opportunities for the nourishment of creation.

If the women's movement is to succeed in creating a world where women not only share control but seize opportunities for social, political, and economic justice, we must become wise to the most penetrating of realities we have to face-the “intelligence” which dominates the world, the mind set which governs our realities. We must have the courage to set forth and develop an intelligence and mind-set which speak to the essence of our experience and our knowledgethe essence which says that the future is a matter of vision, not control, a matter of belief, not conquest, and a matter of life-creation, not life-domination.

Our movement and our visions are not so young anymore. We are in the thick of things now. And as we enter into those realms once left only for males, we must show the other half of our species not that we too can do what they do as well as they do it, but that we can create what they are no longer capable of creating a world where creative, innovative, and just distribution of the wealth and power hinges on new ways of thinking about and understanding what wealth and power are all about. It may be a lonely and strenuous effort, but it is necessary for the survival of our vision. ·

Gay Update (continued from page 6)