Interview of Interest: Men Dominate, Women Orchestrate

Author Margaret Heffernan explains how women entrepreneurs are altering the course, and the culture, of business today.

By every conceivable measurement, women continue to comprise one of the fastest growing segments in entrepreneurship. According to the Center for Women's Business Research, between 1997 and 2004, privately held, woman-owned businesses grew at three times the rate of all U.S. privately held firms, and woman-owned businesses created jobs at twice the rate of all other firms.

Furthermore, women did all of this with less than 1% of the venture capital that's invested in small businesses.

Margaret Heffernan, having run five different businesses in the U.S. and Britain, including Icast, Infomation, and Marlin Gas and Trading, has some thoughts on why women are altering the course of business today. In How She Does It: How Women Entrepreneurs Are Changing the Rules of Business (Viking 2007) Heffernan has compiled not only her own wisdom on the subject, but the collective experiences of such successful businesswomen as Geraldine Laybourne of the Oxygen Network and Mona Eliassen of the Eliassen Group to describe what she calls one of the most profound developments in the business world today—the female entrepreneur.

Recently, BusinessWeek.com staff writer Stacy Perman spoke with Heffernan, who is also a visiting professor of entrepreneurship at the Simmons College School of Managemen in Boston. Edited excerpts of their conversation can be found here.

Also noteworthy is that Margaret is one of our keynote speakers at our upcoming WPO conference in Scottsdale April 19-21. Further, I am just finishing up her book and will be talking it up here next week.