Future of Business, The Feminization of Culture

We are witnessing the feminization of our culture. 

Look around you: are women wearing more pinks and purples, wearing their hair longer, on the cover of more magazines... are they earning more degrees than men, starting more businesses than men, raising more bars? Are the giving, compassion, transparent, social, and innovation trends in some mysterious way being born out of a woman's inherent nature and her new access to money, power, and influence? The answer is yes. The new evolution of Eve, backed by women with money, power, and influence, will be a deep and strong shift.  

So welcome to the future of business, where you will become increasingly familiar with and accepting of words such as “feeling,” “creating,” "experiencing," "being," and “knowing.” A future where a person's values, intuitive ability, range of interests, creative faculty, and ability to integrate new ideas and connect seemingly unrelated dots, will be just as highly regarded as their ability to provide sound logic and reasoning and specialization. A future where traditionally feminine qualities such as giving, creativity, and compassion will indwell a company's DNA and be guiding principles spelled out in more company mission statements.

We will see boardrooms become dens and even the most sharply-dressed executive suite will have more warmth, comfort, laughter and creativity. Statements like, “I feel” will be heard sounding down conference halls and bouncing off walls right alongside statements like, “the numbers indicate." We will see more space and ease in even the most boiler-room professions, and the need to prove oneself at all cost will take a backseat to the passion, purpose, and spark a person conveys in his or her thoughts, words, and deeds. We will even see the high tech and deep sciences - persistently male dominated fields - come to acknowledge and accept the breath of inspiration as valuable input to and an accelerator of high innovation. 

We will see very large, global MNCs with traditional, hierarchical business models scale down in numbers, becoming engulfed by the revolutionary rise of women-led businesses, a space which will experience tremendous growth in the coming years fueled by the dissatisfaction with and inflexibility of traditional business models and the democratization of funding, which could herald the end of venture capital as we know it. 

We will see traditional business models become integrated and interwoven with decentralized, flat, and self-forming business models, turning ladders to lattices and giving more employees the room to manuever, and ebb and flow in their careers as their life needs change. There will be more career fluidity in even the largest organizations, with lateral moves made more accessible and given greater support by management. No longer will it be a simple straight line to the top, instead it will also include an evolution of upwardly mobile experiences, culminating at the top.

We will see a future where HR departments no longer simply fill roles based on a historical account of skill and experience (as if swapping out a piece part on a machine), but we will see the valuation of non-specialist learning resources: resources with their passion, values, and accelerated learning capacity out front as differentiators, allowing companies to form teams based on aligned visions and values and “swarm” projects and initiatives, raising the organization capacity to learn while performing and remaining agile enough to maneuver against economic head winds.

We will also see less people on the roads between the hours of 9-5, reversing the trend of rising congestion, and will see more people trickling in and out of work throughout the day, moving with their own biorhythmic energy, cycles, rhythms and life needs. 

Over the next decade, we will see the equalization of masculine and feminine energies in the marketplace, with a strong and deep bend towards the feminine for the next 5 years, polar balancing at the 5-10 year mark. What does not fit a woman's natural needs and desires will fail if it cannot adapt in the coming market. More macro trends on the feminization of culture to follow.