Gains for women in the recession

from lumaxart.com

One of the things that I’ve noticed about myself and I think that happens to a lot of us is that we read something interesting and then pretty quickly we forget about it. Later, when the information we read actually affects us, we’ve forgotten the information. Today I’m going to talk about one of those things that I read awhile back but is just now starting to be important.

Back in June I read an abstract of a study about how women advance during recessions. The study said that during downsizing, women are actually able to move up the ladder faster than normal as older men, in higher positions, take buyout packages. The movement though is relatively quick and stops after the initial promotions though as less jobs means less positions to be promoted into. So, women, if your company is going through downsizing, look for your opportunity to get promoted and take advantage of the opportunity while it exists, it wont last very long.

Another study that I read awhile back was about overconfident CEOs. It shared a lot of interesting things, including the idea that mergers and aquisitions often happen because the CEO thinks it should, not because of the business value that is actually attributed to the deal. Part of the article shared this fact:

[T]hey find that CEOs appear to overly attribute their role in successful deals, leading to more deals even though these subsequent deals are value destructive.

While we may be in a recession because of overconfident CEOs and others in the financial sector, it seems to me that everyone was overconfident over the last few years. The real question is simple. What do we do now to be successful over the next few years?