Nancy Koehn On Women in Business | Big Think

Nancy Koehn On Women in Business

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Nancy Koehn on the secrets of female success

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Nancy Koehn:

Nancy Koehn is a historian at the Harvard Business School where she holds the James E. Robison chair of Business Administration. Koehn's research focuses on how leaders, past and present, craft lives of purpose, worth, and impact.

Her new book, Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times is an enthralling historical narrative filled with critical leadership insights that will be of interest to a wide range of readers—including those in government, business, education, and the arts—Forged in Crisis spotlights five masters of crisis: polar explorer Ernest Shackleton; President Abraham Lincoln; legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass; Nazi-resisting clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and environmental crusader Rachel Carson.

Koehn is the author of numerous books, articles, and Harvard Business School cases. She writes frequently for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Harvard Business Review Online. She is also a weekly commentator on National Public Radio and has appeared on many national television programs. She has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and in many other venues.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, Koehn earned a Master of Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government before taking her MA and PhD in History from Harvard. She lives outside Boston and is a dedicated equestrian.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Topic: Women in Business

Nancy Koehn: First there's this explosion of women going into the entrepreneurial field if you will, or onto the entrepreneurial ocean and bravely sailing forth to create their own businesses and their own products. And I'm not just talking about women with rich educations and many, many sort of economic assets. I'm talking about women at all points along the social spectrum who are, you know, building beauty shops; setting up small schools for their kids; opening up new telecommunications ventures; creating a beauty company to sell to a larger beauty corporation; women doing astounding things all over the map for a variety of reasons not the least of which is being their own boss and having control of their time. But women are now starting in this country more businesses than men by some measure. And that's interesting, and exciting, and different than the past.