Female Drug Dealer

Money can be like a drug.  While it is a dirty job, drug dealers represent some of the savviest business people known to mankind.  With the exception of the deadly Griselda Blanco, the top earning drug lords have been male.  But nowadays it’s clear to see that females are hustling the street and making the chips just as much as men.  We have seen emerge a different kind of hustler: the female baller (a woman player, gamer, diva, hustler, operator, sugar mama) as females are rising to the top of their professional fields.   This article talks about the three major female drug dealers on the street and analyzes their hustle style: Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard, Sheryl Sandberg of FaceBook, and Marissa Mayer of Yahoo.

This singular accomplishment is why I love Meg Whitman. She recently closed a deal to sell the webOS operating system (legacy Palm 2010) to LG Electronics. What a hustler. Here’s why she may be the only shard of hope that HP will emerge from the garbage pail: their leader is the slickest of all used car salespeople out there. Nobody else on Wall Street, male or female, would have been able to hawk that piece of intergalactic electronic junk by convincing any credible company, much less LG, that it could earn billions by hooking televisions up to the Internet. Way to go, Meg, you are the quintessential female baller.  Play on, player.

Now let’s move to my least favorite diva, Sheryl Sandberg.  Don’t get me wrong, SS has talent but she’s not the bang up entrepreneur that her self-promoting book portrays her to be.  Sandberg gets street cred for being the market engine driving Facebook, but here’s the thing: she doesn’t really own it.  She’s not really at the top of the power structure; she is a master at selling someone else’s product.  I find her story to be uninspiring; it is the typical tale of a woman who didn’t have the guts to really lead anything so she directed her talent towards making the men who work at her company more successful than her by marketing their product, not her own.  She’s not an entrepreneur by nature; she worked at institutional companies like McKinsey and for the government.  If you really peel the onion, she is the opposite of what young women should aspire to.  She reinforces a negative stereotype.  Writing a book is her fifteen minutes of fame so she has to try to rip us all off now by telling her life story. While it’s good to see her doing something on her own, the whole premise of the book is bogus.  I don’t buy it, Sheryl!  She’s no player, she’s a glorified marketing associate.

Marissa Mayer, an accomplished computer scientist and businesswoman, has the potential to become one of the most influential women in business that has ever walked the face of the earth.  She is a “geek who can speak. ”  What has driven her success is her ability to operate as a highly skilled technician with superior communication skills. If you watch her speak, she is professorial, brilliant, and inspiring.  She is a woman building an empire, a risk taker, a problem solver, and a powerful decision maker.  Her drive and her penchant for risk are assets for her company, but there are signs that perhaps she isn’t quite ready for the role she has assumed just yet. An example is her decision to prohibit Yahoo employees from working remotely.  Not only does this inflate costs for the company, it goes against the trend of “mobile workforce” telecommuting that has become the status quo.  This won’t last for long once the sub-population that need the flexibility (e.g. working mothers) gets fed up that they can’t pick up their kids from soccer practice and quit to go work for competitors. This move was a bit too “out there.”  She has to learn to be relatable in order to take the company to the next level because she needs her employees to trust her in order to lead them.

Although the three companies mentioned in this article are publicly traded instruments, nothing in this article represents an official buy or sell recommendation of any sort.  For financial advice, please consult a financial advisor.

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