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"Historically, every time women have poured into the workforce, there has been a huge ripple effect, the shifting of the tectonic plates of society. That's what's happening now." Nancy F. Koehn ness environment. What are the implications of multination- al companies trying to work from Colorado? What are human resources practices like in the U.S., and how do they differ from human resources practices in Europe, Asia, or Latin America? What are the trends in telecom, tech, and biotech?" Both businesses and business schools benefit when the two come together to discuss such issues, Ambron says. She is not just focused on increasing numbers of women in business school, but on improving business education in general. "The business school at CU-Denver is the largest graduate school of business in the state of Colorado," she says. "We have 2,490 students, and slightly more than 50 percent are women. Make it a great educational experience for students, and you'll get more men and women." While Nancy Koehn sees her career as a "healthy mix of serendipity and conscious planning," she says two factors were very impor- hours a week for ten years. How do you do that and hold onto a rich and satisfying marriage? We talk a lot about the work/life balance. I don't know that those are the right file folders. Living well in this context is a very complicated enterprise, but it's critical to the next generation of female leaders. We are human beings first, and our ability to lead or communicate leadership to the next generation has to come from that animated corpus of our humanity." The fact that the corporate world has too few female Those demands have been intense. "I've worked 80 Nancy F. Koehn Professor of Business Administration Harvard Business School Cambridge, Massachusetts tant in her development: excellent mentors and a strong sense of her own goals. She always found it critical to "understand what I really loved and where I had been as a scholar—being able to keep a split screen in my mind's eye between my bank of experience and what I learned would really make me tick. I would tell every woman who aspires to a position of leadership never to lose sight of either of those data files." She also owes a debt to mentors and teachers who "helped me learn to think broadly about how to navigate organizations; how to think rigorously and with integrity about the material of my trade; and finally, how to hold on to my humanity in moments when there were many political, substantive, psychological, and material demands on me." leaders is something Koehn analyzes from a historian's per- spective. She believes a key barrier to the rise of women is the fact that "organizations founded before 1975 were real- ly built around a professional workforce of men, with com- mitments that are different from women's traditional com- mitments," she says. "The very structure that has grown up in companies in a post-war era was not designed to accom- modate women who have elder parents or huge family responsibilities." Some companies may be investigating ways to change this, she points out, noting that Deloitte & Touche has pioneered a range of job categories that give men and women more flexibility in their working lives. In addition to the structural issues, she says that the com- petitive nature of global business has also made corporations resistant to change. "How do you figure out how to deal with huge social and economic injustices when most busi- nesses feel that the intensity of competition is growing by leaps and bounds? With more competition, there's often less economic, financial, strategic, and cultural slack to experi- ment with change. The margin for error is so small." Time may be the best ally for women who are able to look to the future. "I think we might be in the third chap- ter of a ten- or 12-chapter book about the huge shift in the balance of power in society," she says. While women have always worked hard, she says, not until the last 25 years have they entered the workforce in such great numbers and in so many positions of leadership. "So if you think about what that power shift means organizationally for both large busi- nesses and individuals, and how those things sync up, some changes just aren't going to happen in Chapter One. It involves too many organizations—work, family, community, and state, local, and national governments. Historically, every time women have poured into the workforce, there has been a huge ripple effect, the shifting of the tectonic plates of society. That's what's happening now. We're not going to get any fast answers." s z BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2002 35