The Naked Truth

The Naked Truth: A Working Woman’s Manifesto about Business and What Really Matters was published in 2004, just as issues surrounding women at work started to return to the fore. The book looked at the classic barriers to women’s advancement and collected experiences and advice from successful business women who had overcome them. In particular, the book examined women’s attitudes to power and how they define and use power differently from men. The book argued that whereas men see power as expressed through personal or organizational dominance, women see power as derived from orchestration. Men express ambition as defined by getting to the top, whereas women see ambition as the ability to live and work as they please. The book concludes by arguing that what women bring to the workplace is distinctive and highly suited to the non-linear complexities of modern business.

Women On Top

How She Does It (republished in paperback as Women On Top) can be seen as the sequel to The Naked Truth insofar as it looks at women who have decided to eschew the struggle to succeed within traditional, male-dominated organizations in favor of running their own companies. The book examines the statistics underlying the growth and outsize success of women-owned businesses to ask: how is it that women achieve so much more when they get so much less in the way of institutional support and funding? This leads to an examination of women’s motivation, their neurological and social advantages, choice of markets, leadership styles, use of networks and advisors and their different approaches to mergers, acquisitions and exits. In effect, the book argues that women’s different motivations, thinking and leading styles specifically position them for entrepreneurial success. But much of what makes them succeed are approaches and strategies which men could also emulate if they understood how successful they are. The book concludes by arguing that women set a particularly high standard for business success which might provide a powerful antidote to some of the failed business cultures of the past.

Willful Blindness

Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril will be published in 2011. In her latest book, Heffernan argues that the biggest threats and dangers we face are the ones we don’t see — not because they’re secret or invisible, but because we’re willfully blind. She examines the phenomenon and traces its imprint in our private and working lives, and within governments and organizations, and asks: What makes us prefer ignorance? What are we so afraid of? Why do some people see more than others? And how can we change?

Examining examples of willful blindness in the Catholic Church, the SEC, Nazi Germany, Bernard Madoff’s investors, BP’s safety record, the military in Afghanistan and the dog-eat-dog world of subprime mortgage lenders, the book demonstrates how failing to see...or admit to ourselves or our colleagues...the issues and problems in plain sight can ruin private lives and bring down corporations. The book explores how willful blindness develops and then goes on to outline some of the mechanisms, structures and strategies that institutions and individuals can use to combat it. In its wide use of psychological research and examples from history, the book has been compared to work by Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Taleb.

Power Play was a 2-part drama about Enron commissioned and broadcast by the BBC. The first play dramatized the scandal of fixing energy prices in California, while the second play postulated that the death of Ken Lay, after being found guilty but before being sentenced, was caused by his recognition that he had been willfully blind to the corruption at the heart of Enron.

In 2008, Heffernan appeared in the British Channel 4’s series Secret Millionaire, in which successful entrepreneurs go ‘under cover’ to identify and support community heroes. In her episode, Heffernan asked how any individual could choose which people, causes and organizations to support when so many are so needy. Ultimately, she gave money to the Bright Waters Laundry and a carnival troupe, both based in Nottingham.

Secret Millionaire - Lessons learned from the TV show

Heffernan was born in Texas, grew up in the Netherlands, and received an M.A. from Cambridge University.

Willful Blindness. Walker & Company, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0-8027-1998-0 Women on Top. Penguin, 2008. ISBN-10-0143112805How She Does It. Viking Adult, 2007. ISBN-10-0670038237The Naked Truth. Jossey-Bass, 2004. ISBN-13-978-0787971434

For two years, Heffernan wrote a blog for Fast Company’s website. She now writes for BNET.

How to Be Productive: Stop Working (BNet) How to Write Job Descriptions that Actually Mean Something (BNet) Is It Okay for Women to Breastfeed at Work? (BNet) Dog Eat Dog (Fast Company) In Good Company (More Magazine) Recreating Milgram: the French ‘game of death’ (Huffington Post)

Margaret Heffernan on the New Normal Margaret Heffernan on Hybrid Mom Margaret Heffernan on Secret Millionaire