Madeleine Albright

I promised to share with you all some insights from the amazing leaders we met at the Leaders in London Conference a few months ago, and I decided to start this month with Madeleine Albright.  It is particularly pertinent that we start with her as January is also when we will be hosting and attending the Microsoft Women’s Conference in Redmond, and so this month, this review and insights shared with you all will be particularly pertinent to our female colleagues.

Her biography, Madam Secretary, is a pretty good read – more so the early chapters which focus greatly on her personal journey and how she arrived in America having been born Marie Jana Korbel in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1937.  In fact, one of my favourite excerpts from her book is on her personal thoughts when she had just been invited to work for Bill Clinton in the role of Secretary of State, she writes: “For all my awareness of how unexpected events can be, I had to marvel.  I had arrived in New York Harbour half a century before, an eleven year old immigrant from Prague staring up at the Statue of Liberty.  How astonishing that that girl was about to become the sixty-fourth secretary of state and the highest ranking woman ever in US history” – pretty impressive! Huh!

I was impressed with her throughout the book, as I was when I listened to her at the conference.  She is clearly an incredibly driven person and relates this back even to her youth.  As a young woman in school she tells of how her “serious streak dogged me – I went all out in class, hockey, school plays, and was popular enough to get elected to the student council but (alas) became overzealous and turned someone in for talking in the hall – I was never elected to anything again.  So to compensate, I started my own international relations club and named myself president”.   

What was also interesting to me was how as a young married woman she came up against some of the real challenges that existed for women in the workplace then, and today.  In January 1960, 12 months after she graduated and married, she moved to Chicago and was hopeful of finding a job as a journalist.  One night over dinner her husband’s managing editor enquired as to what she was going to do and when she replied that she wanted to work in the newspaper business his reply came back “Well, you can’t work on the same paper as your husband because it’s against newspaper guild policy.  And of course it wouldn’t really be helpful to your husband’s career if his wife were working for a competing paper.  So I’m afraid you’ll have to consider doing something else”. 

About 12 months later, she was asked to speak at one of the local colleges about social factors influencing women’s careers and she wrote: “Twice in two years I have had to leave good jobs with good futures to follow my husbands’ path, and that was before I had children.  Now, even to get a job, I would have to find and hire a dependable nurse and pay her perhaps more than I could make myself.  Perhaps I am being overly pessimistic; perhaps I could go out tomorrow and get a job as a typist.  The next question is, why bother?  Do I want a job merely to have a job, or do I want to work in order to be doing something worthwhile?  I must admit though, that I feel somewhat like a pioneer.  I am not satisfied to sit back for the rest of my life and contemplate in which order to clean rooms.  I want to find a solution and still feel that somehow it must be possible to be a responsible mother, a good wife and have an intellectually satisfying job”.  I am sure many women reading this will still be able to identify with these comments over 40 years later!

There are many opportunities to admire Madeleine Albright throughout the book.  One that sticks in my mind is just how committed she was to continually trying to improve herself and she embarked upon getting a Ph.D (amongst other things) starting it when she had twin baby girls and finishing it 13 years later!  To get it done, she used to get up at 4:30am every morning because it was the only quiet time in the day she could have a couple of hours to herself to think and write – 13 years!!  What a commitment and what staying power!

She also comes across as an incredibly warm and funny person.  There are lots of examples of little things she did but the one I like the best is with regards to her pins and brooches.  At one time when she was serving at the United Nations, she was criticised in her dealings with Iraq and was called a “snake”.  She happened to have a meeting shortly afterwards with a senior Iraqi official and also have a brooch in the shape of a coiled snake which she wore to the meeting – when she met with TV and press afterwards the camera’s focussed on the pin, as did the journalists questions, and thereafter she often picked out a brooch or pin appropriate to the message of the meeting or event she was attending.  My favourite is when she met with the Russian foreign minister on the subject of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and her pin was shaped like a missile.  The Russian minister asked “Is that one of your interceptor missiles?” to which she replied “Yes, and as you can see, we know how to make them very small – so you’d better be ready to negotiate!”

She ends her book with a short eulogy on how she wants to be remembered.  Amongst other things she writes “Perhaps some will say that I helped teach a generation of older women to stand tall, and younger women not to be afraid to interrupt”.  She left me with a particular quote that she gave on the day of the conference, and one which I will always remember, she said “There is a special place in Hell reserved for those women who do not help other women to reach their full potential” – and I think she’s right.  So this month many of us will be helping our female colleagues in just this way at our Women’s Conference.  You will be able to review the intranet site here (insert link) and much of the material that is going to be presented will also be video taped if you are not able to attend in person.

I would encourage all of you reading this, male and female alike, to find out a bit about what we are doing there, the sessions that are planned, and perhaps assign yourself some focussed time this month to take a look at some of this content and to invest in yourselves.  Let me know if you found this interesting, and if you read the book, share your thoughts too.