未來的科技界會不會由這些女性主宰？
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如果只是說萊克西·瑞斯是一個“辦事靠譜”的人，這還不足以展現她的才干。在快速增長的初創公司Gusto（小型企業薪酬與人力資源軟件云端提供商），為了理清她作為領導的職責需求，她通過名為“?Dónde está Lexi?”的詳細列表來記錄其日程，這份列表事無巨細地對其時間安排進行了劃分。這份文件細分為四大首要價值和五項季度要務，從“推動營收”一直到“個人事務”。每一項要務都包含一組行動以及執行計劃細節，包括牽涉的人、方式和“節奏”，從每周與銷售團隊的會面到與丈夫一個月兩次的市內約會。她在一份單獨的表格上列出了她的實際日程，以15分鐘為單位，用醒目的顏色進行了標注。 數年前，當她準備離開工作了8年的谷歌之時，瑞斯在搜尋工作方面也保持了同樣的謹慎態度，并列出了四大標準（包括1000億美元的目標市場額，以及具有彈性的工作）以及與Gusto會談的每一個小時的詳細記錄。 瑞斯的習慣展示了人們眼中首席執行官所應有的機構敏銳度、動力和對完美的追求。但她并不是Gusto的首席執行官（她在筆記中記道，在獲得工作之前，她花了21個小時與公司首席執行官會面，包括三個小時的登山。）她于2015年10月加入公司，擔任首席客戶體驗官。去年，她升任首席運營官，在科技界最熱門的一些公司，這一職責的重要性幾乎可以與首席執行官比肩。 |
To say Lexi Reese is a get-things-done kind of person is an understatement. To navigate the demands of her leadership role at fast-growing startup Gusto, a cloud-based provider of payroll and human resources software for small businesses, she maintains her schedule with an elaborate spreadsheet called “?Dónde está Lexi?” that meticulously categorizes exactly how she spends her time. The document is broken down into four overarching values and five quarterly priorities, ranging from “drive revenue” to “personal.” Each priority contains a set of actions and details of her plan for execution, including who’s involved, format, and “cadence,” from weekly meetings with her sales team leads to twice-a-month dates in the city with her husband. A separate tab lays out her actual schedule, down to 15-minute increments in color-coded glory. A few years ago, when she was ready to leave Google after an eight-year stint, Reese applied the same meticulousness to her job search, identifying four criteria (including a $100 billion addressable market and a “stretch” role), and logging, in fine detail, every hour she spent talking with Gusto. Reese’s habits show the organizational acumen, drive, and perfectionism that you’d expect from a CEO. But she isn’t Gusto’s chief executive (though, according to her notes, before getting the job she did spend 21 hours, including a three-hour hike, meeting with the guy who is). She joined the company in October 2015 as chief customer experience officer. And last year she was promoted to chief operating officer—a role that’s becoming almost as important as CEO at some of the tech world’s hottest companies. |
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有這么一句名言：“如果想辦好一件事，把它交給那些忙碌的人。”也可以簡化為，“把它交給首席運營官。”在硅谷，越來越多自身條件優越、業績突出的首席運營官希望獲得更多的尊敬和重視，瑞斯便是其中的一員。她還具有這些優秀副手所擁有的另一個共性：女性的占比異常的高。 不妨看看過去12個月中熱鬧的科技公司所做出的首席運營官任命：愛彼迎的比琳達·約翰遜、WeWork的詹妮弗·博倫特、房地產和科技公司Compass的梅埃勒·蓋威特以及視頻流平臺（亞馬遜子公司）Twitch的莎拉·克里門斯等等。僅在2月底，薩瓦娜·薩克斯便被任命為美容訂閱服務Birchbox的首席運營官。同時，Pinterest宣布移動支付公司Square前高管弗朗索瓦絲·布洛芙將成為公司首位首席運營官，這也讓她成為了眾人矚目的焦點。 這些女性只是眾多科技行業現任首席運營官的冰山一角罷了。Instagram的馬恩·列維、在線地產巨頭Zillow的艾米·博胡廷斯基、Etsy的琳達·芬得利·科佐羅斯基、Stripe的克萊爾·休斯·約翰遜、企業軟件公司Infor的帕姆·墨菲，可謂是不勝枚舉。當然，其中有一個人可能是最近這場運動的中堅力量——謝麗爾·桑德伯格，她剛好是在10年前離開了谷歌，開始擔任Facebook的首席運營官。 企業界，尤其是科技行業，在塑造女性首席執行官方面遇到了不少困難。但就這一領域的首席運營官一職而言，女性可謂是趕上了好時候。鑒于科技行業女性領袖的匱乏以及最近“兄弟”文化的泛濫，女性運營領袖的崛起正值行業的發展關鍵時期，而且其不斷增長的比例在高增長型科技初創企業尤為明顯。在這一領域，快速的增長、較高的財務風險及其備受矚目的特性為這一職務增添了額外的分量。 然而，科技領域的男性首席運營官比女性首席運營官要多得多，所有的高管級別職務都是如此。例如，在50家估值最高、設有首席運營執行官一職的私營“獨角獸”公司中，70%的首席運營官都為男性，30%為女性。然而，與30%形成鮮明對比的是，同一組別中女性首席執行官的比例僅為4%。（盡管獨角獸公司前50強之外也存在女性創始人，但這一數字依然是相形見絀。）2017年，《財富》500強公司的女性首席執行官占比為6.4%，女性首席運營官占比約為10.7%，與這一數字相比，上述30%的比例看起來更加驚艷。事實上，在經濟最活躍的一些領域，高管職務向女性傾斜的變動正在發生，寥寥無幾的女性首席執行官依然在提醒著性別平權人士現實中依然存在的種種棘手障礙，但這一現象也讓他們有充足的理由去憧憬美好的未來。 為了深入了解女性首席運營官占比頗高的現象，《財富》采訪了19位現任或前任女首席運營官、多名男性首席執行官、招聘人員、風投資本家和其他管理專家。盡管眾多的女性首席運營官并未將其看作是一個趨勢，但那些緊密關注這一動態的人士卻注意到了這個現象。2015年開始擔任Zillow首席運營官的博胡廷斯基說：“我曾經思考過‘女性首席運營官’現象。我自己也注意到了這一點。”帕拉奧托高管獵頭公司Egon Zehnder合伙人瑪莎·約瑟芬森嘆息道，“純粹只是個表面現象，但它顯然不容忽視。” 首席運營官的職責是出了名的難以界定，主要因為它的形態一直在不斷地變化：它的職責取決于公司、行業和首席執行官。然而，不管最終的形態如何，其影響力是毋庸置疑的。它幾乎是最接近首席執行官的角色，而且有著最寬泛的全企業監管職責。縱觀美國企業史，這一職務一直都是通往最高職務的跳板。 |
There’s a famous saying: “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.” You might just as easily say, “Give it to a COO.” ?Reese is part of a growing cohort of high--profile, high-performing chief operating officers who command increasing respect and attention in Silicon Valley. She’s also emblematic of another commonality among these stellar seconds-in-command: An unusually large percentage of them are women. Consider the female COO appointments at buzzy tech companies in the past 12 months: Belinda Johnson at Airbnb, Jennifer Berrent at WeWork, Ma?lle Gavet at real estate and technology firm Compass, and Sara Clemens at video-streaming platform (and Amazon subsidiary) Twitch, to name just a few. In late February alone, Savannah Sachs took on the role at beauty subscription service Birchbox, and Francoise Brougher, a former top exec at mobile-payment company Square, made headlines when Pinterest announced she would become its first-ever COO. These women join a very long list of tech-?industry COO incumbents: Marne Levine at Instagram, Amy Bohutinsky of online real estate giant Zillow, Etsy’s Linda Findley -Kozlowski, Claire Hughes Johnson of Stripe, Pam Murphy at enterprise software firm -Infor—there are too many to list them all here. And, of course, there is the person who is arguably the spark for this recent movement: Sheryl Sandberg, who left Google to become Facebook’s COO exactly 10 years ago. The corporate world—and the tech industry in particular—has a lot of trouble minting female CEOs. But when it comes to the COO role in this sector, women are enjoying a golden age. The rise of these operations masterminds comes at a pivotal time, given the sector’s abysmal dearth of female leaders and the recent revelations of the pervasiveness of “bro” culture. And their growing representation is especially noticeable in the universe of high-growth tech startups, where rapid growth, high financial stakes, and the glare of publicity give the role extra heft. As is true with all C-suite positions, there are still far more male COOs than female COOs in the tech world. Among the 50 highest-valued privately held “unicorn” companies, for example, of those with COOs, 70% have men in the post, 30% women. But that 30% is a striking contrast to the mere two out of 50 CEOs in the same group who are female. (While there are female founders outside the unicorn top 50, the numbers remain scant.) Compared with the 6.4% of Fortune 500 companies that had female CEOs in 2017, or to the 10.7% of Fortune 500 COOs who are women, that 30% looks even more significant. And the fact that this C-suite shift is happening in the most dynamic sector of our economy gives advocates of gender parity in the workplace plenty of cause for hope—even as the minuscule number of female CEOs reminds them of the stubborn obstacles that remain. To explore the female-COO phenomenon, Fortune talked to 19 female current or former COOs, a handful of male COOs, recruiters, venture capitalists, and other management experts. While many female COOs were reluctant to call this a trend, those who closely follow such things have noticed the phenomenon. “I’ve thought about the ‘woman thing,’?” says Bohutinsky, who was named COO of Zillow in 2015. “I’ve noticed it myself too.” “It’s so superficial,” laments Martha Josephson, Palo Alto–based partner at executive search firm Egon Zehnder. “But it is definitely a thing.” The COO role is famously hard to define, largely because it is a shape-shifter: It varies company by company, sector by sector, and CEO by CEO. Yet whatever its shape, its scope of influence is undeniable. It is almost always the role closest to the CEO, and the one with the broadest cross-enterprise oversight. And throughout the annals of corporate America, it has been a stepping-stone to the top spot. |
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高管獵頭公司Crist Kolder對673家《財富》500強和標普500公司的調查顯示，首席運營官一職是通往最高職務最常見的路徑；超過40%的現任首席執行官都是從總裁/首席運營官一職提拔而來。可口可樂現任首席執行官詹姆士·昆西在擢拔之前曾在穆泰康手下擔任首席運營官；凱文·約翰遜在擔任星巴克首席執行官之前曾擔任首席運營官。蘋果的蒂姆·庫克可謂是當前最引人注目的首席運營官升任首席執行官的案例。在大型公司中，這一路徑對于女性高管來說亦是十分普遍：在過去12個月曾擔任《財富》500強企業首席執行官一職的36名女性當中，有15名曾擔任首席運營官，包括洛克希德馬丁公司的瑪麗蓮·休森、金寶湯公司首席執行官丹尼斯·莫里森以及Guardian Life Insurance首席執行官迪安娜·馬利根。 這一模式也帶來了一些顯著的問題。科技行業當前聘請女性首席運營官的趨勢是否會催生更強大的女性首席執行官候選陣容，繼而擔任屬于她們自己的頂級職務。或者，首席運營官職務自身是否有可能會成為一面玻璃天花板，在這個職務上，功勛卓著的女性領袖會永久性地扮演支撐者的角色，推動行業的發展，這樣就不會破壞首席執行官的兄弟營。 顯然，有關首席運營官的任何調查都難以回答這一問題。一個重要的指標顯示，首席運營官職位的數量實際上正在減少。克里斯特·科爾德稱，設有首席運營官一職的《財富》500強和標普500強公司已從2000年的48%下降至去年的29%。這一下滑始于2001年經濟衰退之后，在2008年再次加速，因為財政壓力迫使一些公司取消了這一職位，并將其職責分派給了其他高管。董事總經理喬什·克里斯特指出，這些職責一直在向其他日漸關注運營的高管轉移，尤其是首席財務官。 然而最近，首席運營官的位置似乎成功回歸人們的視野。輝瑞、餐廳連鎖巨頭Darden以及英美煙草集團在過去幾年中先后設立了首席運營官一職，而零售商科爾士百貨和塔吉特于2015年增設了這一職位。同時，在那些保留了首席運營官職務的公司中，這一職務通常仍被看作是成為下一任首席執行官的跳板。確實，大多數大型公司的首席執行官，不管是男性和女性，都由公司內部培養產生，其中的大多數來自于所謂的線性責任職務，也就是監管負責賺錢的業務部門，通常是總裁、部門總裁或首席運營官。 首席運營官的地位比其他首席級別的職務更高，在現實中幾乎總是如此。Korn Ferry副董事長兼首席執行官簡·愛迪生·史蒂芬森指出，“首席運營官一職能夠讓某人在不擔任首席執行官的情況下，凸顯其相對于其他人的非凡資歷。” 事實證明，首席運營官一職如今在科技領域變得更加受歡迎，原因何在？答案在于，它有助于公司理性地去看待眾所周知的“高增長型科技”領域，其中涵蓋那些近些年相對較新，但營業額、規模和影響力飆升的科技企業，既有原型獨角獸，也有上市巨頭。 一方面，隨著公司的發展，這些公司的創始人如今更不大可能退居二線，或甘心被人取而代之。曾幾何時，投資者和董事會都會迫使創始人讓出首席執行官的職位，并聘請有著豐富閱歷的企業領導擔任這一職務，案例包括eBay的梅格·惠特曼或谷歌的埃里克·施密特。在人們看來，引入外來高管意味著公司的規模已經足夠大，而且做好了接受“成人監管”的準備。 但是這一浪潮在進入21世紀后開始轉變，而且這一變化在2009年7月馬克·安德森和本·霍洛維茨創建其以自己名字命名的風投資本公司之后呈加速蔓延之勢。當時，這家公司的核心理念就是要把初創企業的創始人培養成為首席執行官。他們的邏輯在于：科技行業大多數偉大的公司，包括微軟、英特爾和蘋果在內的長期領導者，均由創始人經營了很長一段時間。隨著風投資本公司投資初創寵兒的競爭愈演愈烈， “善待創始人”已經成為了談判的籌碼。 然而，善待創始人這種做法也存在缺點：年輕的創業者突然會發現自己正在經營一家公司，但通常精研某一產品或具有工程背景的他們缺乏或毫無管理經驗，而首席運營官恰好可以彌補這一短板。 Compass首席運營官蓋威特說：“在硅谷，創始人就是地球的上帝。”她此前曾先后擔任Priceline（如今的Booking Holdings）首席運營官和Ozon.ru（人稱“俄羅斯亞馬遜”）首席執行官。她說：“突然間，首席運營官這一職務有了重要的存在價值。他/她會盡其所能分擔統一團隊共識、大規模的流程建設以及其他所有通常讓創始人感到厭煩不已的事情，同時還能讓創始人得以保留，可謂是皆大歡喜。” 與此同時，首席執行官在所有領域的職責已經發展成為了一種更加外向型的職能。首席執行官如今被視為公眾人物，大量出現于社交媒體，各類會議，全球客戶路演等諸如此類的活動。在他們奔波于各種交際場合之時，總得有人出面打理公司。 這些變化讓公司二把手的職責變得更加重要。然而，一個不容忽視的額外因素在于：聘請謝麗爾·桑德伯格擔任Facebook首席運營官。當23歲的馬克·扎克伯格2008年把桑德伯格（時任谷歌全球在線銷售和運營副總裁）從谷歌挖過來時，Facebook還沒有盈利，而且尚未確定公司未來的商業模式。在3年的時間中，公司實現了盈利，而且其員工數量從130名增至2500名，同時用戶數量翻了十番。桑德伯格將其打造谷歌大獲成功的廣告平臺的經驗帶到了Facebook，幫助這家初出茅廬的公司賺錢，推動其發展，并實現平臺的專業化。她承擔了從營銷到文化和政策的所有事務，并幫助帶領Facebook開展了首次公開募股。從紙面上來看，扎克伯格和桑德伯格是一對格格不入的組合，一位是毫無社交經驗的工程師，但另一位卻是異常成功，并在麥肯錫和華盛頓特區有著廣泛關系網絡的資深人士。然而，這兩者之間的合作是Facebook成功的基石。（桑德伯格拒絕就此事發表評論） 幾乎是在同時，其他公司開始嘗試復制這一模式。Egon Zehnder合伙人約瑟夫森說：“很多人都要求我幫他們尋找‘另一位謝麗爾’，不下十次，我找得目光都呆滯了。所有的投資者都想要為自己找一個‘謝麗爾’，就好像這跟在亞馬遜上下單那么簡單。”放心，我會為你物色另一位高管，他曾幫助打造了一個市值高達5000萬美元的上市公司，創建了一個全球性的女性賦權品牌，而且常常有傳言說他還是總統候選人。 然而，有了桑德伯格-扎克伯格模式這一成功的案例，各大公司也就更愿意將女性作為候選人。另外幾個因素也助長了這一新出現的女性首席運營官熱。如今，業界存在一大批經驗豐富的女性高管，她們一直在科技行業摸爬滾打，靠自己的努力進入了公司的頂層，同時也頗為擔心科技公司高管層的多元化問題。尤為重要的是，事實在于，那些世人認為女性更為擅長的技能——執行多重任務、建立共識、更看重工作的意義和使命而不是頭銜，無論正確與否，讓她們尤為適合扮演這一關鍵的二號角色。 |
According to a study by executive search firm Crist Kolder of 673 companies in the Fortune 500 and S&P 500, it is the most common path to the top job: Upwards of 40% of sitting CEOs were promoted from the president/COO role. James Quincey, the current CEO of Coca-Cola, was COO under Muhtar Kent before taking over the top job; Kevin Johnson was COO before becoming CEO of Starbucks. Today’s highest-profile COO-turned-CEO? Apple’s Tim Cook. This path is just as common for women at large corporations: Of the 36 women who have held Fortune 500 CEO jobs in the past 12 months, 15 were previously COO, including Lockheed Martin’s Marillyn Hewson, Campbell Soup CEO Denise Morrison, and Guardian Life Insurance CEO Deanna Mulligan. Given this pattern, some obvious questions emerge. Will the current wave of women COOs in tech give rise to a new, more robust pipeline of female chief-executive candidates, teed up to take top spots of their own? Or does the COO role risk becoming a glass ceiling in itself—a position from which accomplished women leaders stoke the industry’s growth, in a perpetual supporting role, without breaking into the CEO boys’ club? Any study of the COO is, by definition, hard to tackle. By one important measure the role itself is actually in decline. According to Crist Kolder, the percentage of Fortune500 and S&P 500 companies with a COO has fallen from 48% in 2000 to 29% last year. The decline began after the recession of 2001 and accelerated again after 2008, as financial pressures led some companies to eliminate the role and spread its duties among other senior management. There has also been a shift toward other executives becoming more operationally focused, especially the CFO, says managing director Josh Crist. More recently, however, the COO position appears to have made a comeback. Pfizer, restaurant giant Darden, and British American Tobacco have all created a COO role in the past few years, and retailers Kohl’s and Target added the position in 2015. And at the companies that do maintain the title, the role is still very often seen as a stepping-stone for the next CEO. Indeed, most big-company CEOs, men and women, are groomed internally, with most coming from roles with so-called line responsibility, or oversight of a business unit responsible for making money—typically, president, division president, or COO. It’s also almost always true that the COO spot occupies a space higher than other C-suite positions. “It’s a way to designate someone’s extreme seniority relative to others without making them the CEO,” says Jane Edison Stevenson, vice chair, board and CEO services, at Korn Ferry. So what to make of the evidence that the COO position—and its significance—is becoming so much more prevalent in the tech sector? For an answer, it helps to zero in on the field commonly known as “high-growth tech”—the universe of relatively new tech companies, ranging from proto-unicorns to publicly traded giants, that have seen their number, size, and influence soar in recent years. For one thing, the founders of these companies are now much less likely to step aside—or be replaced—as they grow. It wasn’t so long ago that it was standard practice for investors and boards to move the founders out of the CEO’s chair and replace them with heavily credentialed corporate leaders: Think Meg Whitman at eBay or Eric Schmidt at Google. The high-powered import was seen as a sign that the company had gotten big enough that it was ready for “adult supervision.” But that tide started to shift in the 2000s. The change accelerated after Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz launched their eponymous venture capital firm in July 2009 and made central to their mission a vow to keep founders as CEOs. Their rationale: Most of the great companies in the tech industry, including long-term leaders like Microsoft, Intel, and Apple, were run by a founder for a long period of time. As competition among venture capital investors for stakes in promising companies became more intense, being “founder-friendly” became table stakes. There’s a drawback to founder-friendliness, however: It has meant that young entrepreneurs, typically with a product or engineering background but often with little to no management experience, have found themselves running companies. Enter the COO. “Silicon Valley has been living in this world of the founders being God on earth,” says COO Gavet of Compass, who was previously COO of Priceline (now Booking Holdings) and before that served as CEO of Ozon.ru, known as the “Amazon of Russia.” “Suddenly the COO makes a ton of sense,” she says. “He or she has done his or her fair share of team alignment, process building at scale, and all the things that usually bore to death the founder, but then you get to keep the founder. So everybody’s happy.” At the same time, the role of CEO in all sectors has evolved to become much more external. CEOs today are expected to be public figures, with a robust social media presence, conference gigs, worldwide customer tours, and the like. While they’re pressing the flesh, someone needs to run the shop. These shifts have made the role of the second-in-command more pivotal. But there’s one additional factor that can’t be overlooked: the hiring of Sheryl Sandberg as chief operating officer of Facebook. When a 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg hired Sandberg in 2008 from Google, where she had been VP of global online sales and operations, Facebook was not making money and not sure what its business model should be. Within three years the company was profitable and had grown from 130 employees to 2,500, while users had grown 10-fold. Sandberg brought her experience in building Google’s enormously successful ad platforms to Facebook, helping to monetize the nascent company, grow it, and professionalize it. She took on everything from marketing to culture to policy and helped steer Facebook through its IPO. On paper, Zuckerberg and Sandberg were an odd couple—he the socially awkward engineer, she the über-?successful, well-?connected veteran of McKinsey and Washington, D.C. But their partnership stands at the core of the company’s success. (Sandberg declined to comment for this story.) Almost immediately, other companies tried to replicate the model. “I’ve been asked a dozen times for ‘a Sheryl,’ to the point where my eyes glaze over,” says Josephson, the partner at Egon Zehnder. “All the investors need ‘a Sheryl’ as if it’s something you can order from Amazon.” Sure, I’ll just find you some OTHER executive who helped build a half-trillion-dollar public company, created a global brand around women’s empowerment, and is an oft-rumored presidential candidate. Still, the success of the Sandberg-?Zuckerberg model has stuck, making companies all the more amenable to bringing in women as candidates. A few other factors are contributing to this new eagerness. There’s now a strong pool of seasoned female executives who have spent their careers in tech working almost all the way to the top, along with a heightened concern about diversity in tech’s C-suites. And not least, there’s the fact that the skills that, rightly or wrongly, women are perceived as excelling in—multitasking, consensus building, caring less about the title than the meaning and mission in their work—lend themselves particularly well to the critical No. 2 role. |
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很多人認為這是好消息，因為很明顯該現象說明女性在努力爭取更高的管理職位。“說明很多才能出眾的女性在商界出人頭地。”哈佛商學院兼哈佛大學高級領導力行動主席羅莎貝絲·莫斯·坎特表示。 “如果女性能擔任的最高領導職務是首席運營官，該職位確實有很多女性，那么對女性來說已經是巨大勝利。”總部位于舊金山的獵頭公司Rich Talent Group創始人嘉娜·里奇表示。 如果說這些就是為了接下來筆調突轉，你猜得沒錯。雖然首席運營官看似職位很高，但往往只是首席執行官的副手，而且多為幕后工作。兩個職位之間的矛盾在硅谷體現得格外明顯，因為硅谷（通常為男性）充滿創新精神的天才創始人影響力巨大。首席執行官負責提出愿景，首席運營官則負責實現愿景。首席執行官主外，首席運營官則主內。首席執行官主要負責產品和工程方面的決策責任，其他雞零瑣碎的枯燥事務都落在首席運營官頭上。 紅杉資本合伙人阿爾弗萊德·林曾擔任Zappos首席運營官兼總裁，他表示二者關系就像“冰與火”，具體來說由創始人/首席執行官為創新想法注入企業家精神和無限激情，但“也需要冰冷的管理技巧，”他表示。“處理激情與管理之間的矛盾正是開創偉大公司的關鍵。”但首席運營官的視野要更高，處理起來會遇到挑戰：接近金字塔頂端并不意味著真正在頂端。史蒂芬森表示，如果最終目標是當首席執行官，那么擔任首席運營官可能最終淪為“沉默的助手”。 當然了，身居如此高位仍然會很有滿足感，而且確實有影響力。米歇爾·扎特林是網絡性能和安全公司Cloudflare首席運營官兼聯合創始人，她與公司另一位聯合創始人兼首席執行官馬修·普林斯合作就很符合陰陽調和的關系。“如果非要描述我的工作，就像幕后的首席黏合官吧。”她表示。工作內容包括設立公司組織架構，搭建集中規劃流程，讓所有人了解公司的目標，也要掌控進程，隨著公司發展到員工超過600人，相關工作也要隨之適應。她還負責解決麻煩事。“如果黑白分明，團隊很快就能解決。”她說。“一般交給我的都是處于模糊地帶的事。”她經常想起高中籃球老師跟她說過的話。“有次她告訴我，‘你得分從來不會最高，但是只要你在場上，整個隊伍表現會更好。’” 但并不是每個首席運營官地位能像扎特林一樣，畢竟她還兼任共同創始人。從外部聘請的首席運營官，不管是男性還是女性，有時都得身兼危機管理和導師的角色，尤其是創始人年輕又缺乏經驗的創業公司里。（許多女科技首席運營官比首席執行官合伙人年長幾歲，并非全是巧合）。Facebook早期有不少故事，不少提到桑德伯格和投資人指導扎克伯格公開演講以及什么時候不能穿帽衫等等。即使最著名的首席運營官也要習慣隨時待命，有時要決定總部外面擺放圣誕樹的大小，有時要幫首席執行官找手機充電器（本文采訪的首席運營官確實做過這兩件事）。 如果出現極端情況，女性首席運營官的角色可能更接近扮演類似于辦公室主任，更差情況下像保姆。這也是女性領導支持者最想避免的情況。“我看女性承擔的職責時，出發點一定是女性能施加多大戰略影響力，而這也是女性地位提升的關鍵所在。”薩莉·赫爾格森表示，她是領導力專家，也是即將出版的《女性如何崛起》一書合著者。 凱倫·皮考克離開Intuit接手創業公司工作時，也有類似顧慮。她在Intuit擔任高級副總裁，手下超過500名員工，負責25億美元的小企業部門業務，包括QuickBooks品牌。找工作時她咨詢的好幾位顧問給出了同樣的建議：“不管以后做什么，千萬別當首席運營官。”顧問團認為皮考克已經可以勝任首席執行官，事實上她也確實有幾份類似工作邀請。但她也在考慮首席運營官的機會，考慮過程中她仔細研究了這一職位可能遇到哪些問題。她發現如果首席運營官和首席執行官的合作關系基于共同價值觀，兩人技能互補，而且首席執行官愿意“分而治之”，且兩人對出現爭端后如何處理有明確預期時，情況會好許多。正因如此，皮考克決定加入用戶通信平臺Intercom擔任首席運營官前，花了5個月時間認真了解聯合創始人兼首席執行官奧恩·麥卡布。 硅谷很多女性首席執行官在公司愿景和戰略方面確實發揮了重要作用。知情人士透露，WeWork首席執行官珍·貝倫特近日談妥了日本巨頭軟銀注資44億美元。Etsy的科茲洛夫斯基負責利潤生產和接觸用戶的各項業務。Compass的加威特表示“重要決策之前，（她和首席執行官羅伯特·里夫金）都會先談一談。” 擔任公司二把手的首席運營官需要哪些素質？要專注、高效，還要善于學習。他們要特別擅長多任務處理，還有近似的“模式轉換”，雖然本質上是單任務模式但要在大量任務之間切換。（“我在模式轉換方面堪稱一絕。” Stripe公司的約翰遜說。）時尚租賃公司Rent the Runway首席運營官莫林·薩利文表示，最重要的素質是“既能飛上5萬英尺高空，又能迅速潛下5英尺甚至5英寸的地面，還得應對自如。” 一年多前，中小企業高管二把手首席運營官的組織——首席運營官聯盟創始人兼首席執行官卡梅隆·赫羅爾德組織了一次試驗，他給60位創業者和60位首席運營官出題，問他們喜歡怎樣啟動新項目。結果呢，赫羅爾德表示，95%的創業者非常魯莽，而95%的首席運營官特別“重視事實”。“他們簡直完美補充了創業者的弱項。”他表示。他還介紹說，去年會員中的女性已從20%增加到35%。 我跟19位女性首席運營官談過后，可以坦率地說，她們真的很厲害。每個人都很準時甚至早到。談話中她們準備充分觀點明確。如果忘帶充電器，她們很可能立刻拿出一個備用的給你。她們語速很快，我感覺要是把采訪筆記交給她們，過一夜她們就能把擬好的草稿交回給我。 像皮考克和里斯一樣，很多人找現在這份工作時都非常謹慎。她們認真研究了哪些說法有效，哪些沒用。按照科茲洛夫斯基的說法，弄清楚首席執行官的需要是成功的關鍵因素。至于什么沒用：“如果職位描述寫著‘我只是需要個幫手’，或者‘能不能把我不想做的事都甩給你？’，以后麻煩就大了。” 首席運營官角色的改變是否對女性首席執行官候選人有利？多數知情人士表示樂觀。畢竟已有很多先例：《財富》500強榜單上“傳統經濟”中堅力量的大企業里，不少女性首席執行官就是由首席運營官一職提拔。美國好時公司的米歇爾·巴克就是最新一例。其他著名的由首席運營官升任首席執行官案例包括Booking.com的吉莉安·譚斯、TaskRabbit’的黛西·布朗-菲爾波特、納斯達克公司的阿迪娜·弗萊德曼，還有SoulCycle的梅蘭妮·威蘭。 很多在任首席運營官希望桑德伯格之后的一代人可以發揮更大作用，也進一步提升女性形象。“不管在公開場合還是公司內部，首席運營官不會再是‘次要’角色，也不會安安靜靜躲在幕后。”Zillow的博霍廷斯基表說。“通過前例，我們相信會有更多女性擔任首席運營官，還可能走上首席執行官職位，而且更多女性開始敢想象朝著這些目標努力。” 但并非所有人都同意。“我覺得說女性以后機會多還太早。”紐約風投公司FirstMark Capital董事總經理貝斯·費雷拉表示，她之前在電商公司Fab擔任首席運營官，還在Etsy創立初期負責運營。“我認識很多首席運營官，男女都有，他們都曾聽說過好消息，‘首席執行官’肯定是你來當，結果最后并不是。”她表示，高層職位選擇男性的幾率還是比女性高很多。 但費雷拉等人也指出，多虧#MeToo活動，還有其他揭露男性主導公司和行業導致弊端的行動，現在女性機會真的更多。費雷拉表示過去兩個月里有四家公司邀請她擔任首席執行官；而之前四年里很少有機會，即便有也都不是好機會。（“都是些麻煩纏身可能倒閉的公司。”） Korn Ferry公司的史蒂芬森表示，她發現董事會也開始考慮將首席運營官當成首席執行官候選人。但她也指出，由于女性領導風格不一樣，董事會考察女性候選人時也應采取不同的方式。舉例來說，女性“不會瘋狂追求首席執行官的位子，”她表示，這一特點“對首席執行官候選人來說算不上加分，也不算減分，只是風格不一樣而已。”2017年史蒂芬森曾合著一份獵頭公司光輝國際的報告，題目為《女性首席執行官有話說》，報告調研了57位現任和曾任首席執行官的女性，發現其中只有12%明確知道自己想當首席執行官，超過半數完全沒想到，直到有人明確表示她們很有潛力。 對某些女性高管來說，首席運營官職位也類似。紐約證券交易所首席運營官史黛西·康寧漢姆表示，公司總裁湯姆·法雷找她出任首席運營官時談了三次她才答應。“這是很典型的反應，”康寧漢姆表示，“我只想著自己缺乏的能力。” 但如果觀察《財富》500強女性首席執行官的發展軌跡可以發現，首席運營官確實是個很不錯的跳板。幾乎每位接受采訪的首席運營官都表示，曾有人找她們出任首席執行官。馬萊·加威特相信用不了幾年，科技行業就能涌現很多位高權重又經驗豐富的女性首席運營官，董事會可以從中挑選首席執行官。她表示，最主要的問題還是董事會是否信任她們。“很快就能知道。接下來兩年到五年就能看出來。” 有些董事會已經回答了這個問題。寵物狗按需服務公司Wag最近獲得日本軟銀一筆3億美元的投資。幾乎與之同步，Wag董事會決定撤下現在的男性聯合創始人兼首席執行官，換上一位更有經驗的高管。 新任首席執行官到底是誰？她叫希拉里·施耐德。（財富中文網） 譯者：馮豐 審稿：夏林 |
Many see all of this as good news, for the obvious reason that it means women are reaching new levels in executive ranks. “It indicates how many talented women there are that can really make a business work,” says Rosabeth Moss Kanter, professor at Harvard Business School and chair of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative. “If the most senior role available is the COO role, and a lot of them are going to women, to me that’s a huge win for women,” agrees Jana Rich, founder of San Francisco–based executive search firm the Rich Talent Group. If these optimistic words sound like a setup for a big “but,” you’re onto something. As senior as it is, the chief operating officer role is often a counterpoint to the CEO in ways that keep the COO far behind the scenes. And that tension can be particularly strong in Silicon Valley, where the mystique of the (usually male) creative-genius founder holds tremendous sway. The CEO has the vision; the COO executes on that vision. The CEO is external-facing; the COO is internal-facing. The CEO holds on to the make-or-break responsibilities of product and engineering, while the unglamorous work of running everything else falls to the COO. Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia Capital who was previously COO and chairman of Zappos, refers to it as the balance of “fire and ice”—the founder/CEO brings the entrepreneurial spirit and passion for bold ideas, but “you also need the icy-cold skills of management,” he says. “That tension is the tension that makes for great companies.” But for a COO with sights set higher, that dynamic can present challenges: The closest thing to the top isn’t the top. For those whose goal is to become CEO, being COO may risk being seen as a “silent sidekick,” Stevenson says. To be sure, these kinds of roles can still be extremely fulfilling—and influential. Michelle Zatlyn is the COO and a cofounder of web-performance and security company Cloudflare, and her partnership with cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince fits this yin-and-yang model. “If I had to say what my job was, it’s like the chief glue officer behind the scenes,” she says. That includes setting up the company’s organizational structure, establishing a centralized planning process so that everyone knows the company’s goals and can monitor progress, and scaling all of that as the company has grown to more than 600 employees. She also tackles anything thorny or problematic. “Anything that’s black-and-white, our team just solves,” she says. “What comes up to me is all the grays.” She often finds herself thinking back to a conversation she had with her high school basketball coach. “She told me once, ‘You’re never the highest scorer, but the team always does better when you’re on the court.’?” But not every COO enjoys the kind of status within a company that a cofounder like Zatlyn has earned. For COOs—male or female—who are brought in from the outside, especially at startups where the founder is young and inexperienced, the role can sometimes comprise a combination of crisis manager and teacher. (Not coincidentally, many female tech COOs are several years older than their CEO partners.) There are many stories from Facebook’s early days about Sandberg and the company’s investors instructing Zuckerberg on topics like how to handle public speaking and when to shed his hoodie. And even the most high-profile COOs are accustomed to jumping in wherever needed, whether that means choosing the size of the Christmas tree that will sit outside headquarters or tracking down the CEO’s phone charger (both tasks that COOs mentioned in this story have tackled). Taken to extremes, this dynamic can put the female COO in a role akin to chief of staff or, at worst, babysitter. That’s the role that advocates for women in leadership are most eager to steer clear of. “I’m always going to come at this from the point of view of how much strategic influence are women exerting, and that being the sort of be-all and end-all of what we’re trying to achieve here,” says Sally Helgesen, leadership expert and coauthor of the forthcoming book How Women Rise. Karen Peacock had some of these concerns in mind when she left Intuit to seek a more entrepreneurial role. As a senior vice president, she had responsibility for Intuit’s 500-person, $2.5 billion small-business unit, including its QuickBooks brand. As she started the job hunt, several of the advisers she consulted gave her the same advice: “Whatever you do, don’t become a COO.” Those advisers thought Peacock was ready for a CEO role—and indeed, she says she was offered several such positions. But she also considered COO opportunities, and as she did so, she studied the reasons the role can be problematic. She found that the COO-CEO partnership tended to work better when it was based on shared values, where the two have different skill sets and the CEO is willing to “divide and conquer,” and where there are clear expectations on how to handle disagreements. Before deciding to join Intercom, a customer messaging platform, as COO, Peacock spent five months getting to know the cofounder and CEO, Eoghan McCabe. To be sure, plenty of Silicon Valley’s female COOs wield influence over vision and strategy. Sources say Jen Berrent, the COO of WeWork, negotiated the company’s recent $4.4 billion investment from Japanese giant SoftBank. At Etsy, Kozlowski has responsibility for everything revenue-generating and customer-facing. Gavet of Compass says that “every big decision comes from a conversation that [she and CEO Robert Reffkin] have had together.” So what are these second-to-none COOs like? They tend to be focused, efficient, and quick learners. They are experts at multitasking—and even more so at its second cousin, “context-switching,” which is essentially single-tasking but switching from task to task a lot. (“I can context-switch like no one you’ve ever seen,” says Johnson of Stripe.) Maureen Sullivan, COO of fashion-rental startup Rent the Runway, says a key trait is the ability to “fly at 50,000 feet and dive down to five feet or five inches and not feel turbulence.” A little over a year ago, Cameron Herold, founder and CEO of the COO Alliance, an organization for No. 2 executives at small and midsize companies, ran an experiment in which he gave 60 entrepreneurs and 60 seconds-in-command a personality test designed to reveal how they like to start new projects. The findings: 95% of the entrepreneurs shoot from the hip, Herold says, and 95% of the COOs came up as “fact finders.” “They’re almost the perfect cleanup act to the entrepreneur,” he says. He says the group has seen women rise from 20% of its membership to 35% in the past year. (For an in-depth look at COO support groups, see Fortune.com.) After speaking with 19 of them, I can say that these women COOs are also, to put it bluntly, ballers. They’re on time or early. They come to a conversation with prepared and thoughtful points. If you forget your charger, they may have one already plugged in and waiting for you. They talk fast. I got the sense that if I handed them my reams of notes, they would turn my story around overnight and hand it back to me fully drafted. Like Peacock and Reese, many of them took a meticulous approach to the search for their current jobs. They have studied what works and doesn’t work. According to Kozlowski, clarity in what the CEO needs is the most important element for success. What doesn’t work: “When your job description is ‘I just need help,’ or ‘Can you do all the things I don’t want to do?,’ then you know you’re in trouble.” Are these changes to the COO role creating a pipeline of female CEO candidates? Most sources I spoke to are optimistic. There is plenty of precedent, after all: Consider the Fortune 500 women who have been promoted from COO to CEO at “old economy” stalwarts, including, recently, Michelle Buck of the Hershey Company. Other recent notable female COO-to-CEO promotions include Gillian Tans of Booking.com, TaskRabbit’s Stacy Brown-Philpot, Nasdaq’s Adena Friedman, and SoulCycle’s Melanie Whelan. Many sitting COOs hope that the post-Sandberg generation has raised the profile of the role and the women who hold it. “You see it in both the public and internal sphere not as a ‘secondary’ role or as the quiet or background role,” says Bohutinsky of Zillow. “That has set an example for seeing more women in this role and imagining more women in the CEO role—and, for more women starting to imagine these roles for themselves.” Not everyone agrees. “I don’t think it’s a layup,” says Beth Ferreira, managing director at FirstMark Capital, a New York City venture capital firm, who was previously COO of e-commerce company Fab and ran operations in the early days of Etsy. “I know many COOs—men and women—who have been told as things evolve, ‘the CEO job is yours,’ and it doesn’t happen.” She says she sees men still chosen for stretch roles far more often than women. But Ferreira and others point out that, thanks to the #MeToo movement and the exposure of the downsides of male-?dominated companies and industries, we are at a turning point when it comes to opportunities for women. Ferreira says she has been approached about four CEO roles in the past two months; in the four years prior to that, she says, she got very few, or else they weren’t appealing opportunities. (“They were, like, companies that were going to hit the wall at any moment.”) Korn Ferry’s Stevenson says she has noticed a shift on the part of boards to start considering positions like COO more frequently as developmental roles toward a CEO seat. But she also notes that differences in the way women lead may mean that boards have to look at female candidates differently. Women, for example, “don’t pound the door down to CEO,” she says, a trait that “doesn’t make her a better or worse CEO candidate, it’s just different.” A 2017 Korn Ferry report Stevenson coauthored, “Women CEOs Speak,” which surveyed 57 current and former female CEOs, found that only 12% knew they wanted to be a CEO—and that more than half gave no thought to being one until someone explicitly told them they had the potential. For some women executives, a similar dynamic has been in play around the COO position. Stacey Cunningham, COO of the New York Stock Exchange, says that NYSE president Tom Farley had to ask her three times to take on the role of COO before she said yes. “It’s that classic thing,” Cunningham says. “I focused on the skills I didn’t already have.” But if the Fortune 500 women CEOs who have moved up from the role are any indication, the COO job can indeed be an effective primer. Almost every COO I talked to says she has gotten inquiries for CEO positions. Ma?lle Gavet believes that within a few years, tech industry boards will have a substantial cadre of high-powered and well-rounded female COOs to choose from to fill CEO seats. The main question, she says, will be whether the boards trust them. “We’re about to find out. We’re literally going to find out in the next two to five years.” Some boards are already answering the question. Wag, an on-demand dog-care service, recently lined up a $300 million investment from SoftBank. In tandem with that move, Wag’s board decided to replace its male cofounder and CEO with a more experienced executive. The new CEO? Her name is Hilary ?Schneider. |
