'Pitch Like a Girl'

Pitch Like a Girl
By Ronna Lichtenberg

Chapter 1

pink and blue

In a way, the world would be easier if all women were the same and all men were the same. There would be those handy visual cues we could rely on to tell us everything; we could simply note a heavy beard and assume that everything coming up in chapter 3 is true and that would be that. Except that all men are not alike, and neither are all women. Most of us have found that out the hard way, by making assumptions that turn out to be completely wrong.

That's why even though I am going to go through the vast generalizations about brain sex and stereotypes, I'm also going to spend time on ways to get a better fix on individual differences. The first kind of difference I'm going to look at is the difference between the styles people prefer to use to do business: whether they put a higher emphasis on connection, or relationship, or whether they put a greater emphasis on task, the activity of business.

I call this preference pink and blue style because, more often than not, a woman will have a pink style and a man a blue style--but not always. Sure, these colors are less politically correct than, say, orange and green, but that makes them easier to remember, too. Over the past few years, I've found that pink and blue is a simple concept for people to "get"; it's easy to use, and it's really powerful. You can get a lot of "A-ha!" moments out of the concept of pink and blue styles, and I'm going to rely on it through the entire pitching process.

The Basics of Pink and Blue
A person with a pink style is someone who wants to connect with you before doing business with you. A "pink" will first mention the weather, your bull dog, your handbag, your shoes, your vacation--something, anything, before getting down to the business at hand.

It's easy to find pink-styled women on TV and in the movies: The enormously successful Legally Blonde films are a great example. Elle Woods, the lead character played by Reese Witherspoon, is an over-the-top pink who not only wears it as her signature color, but dresses her Chihuahua, Bruiser, in it. Elle does well at Harvard Law and as a lobbyist, not despite her style but because of it. Her desire to connect to other people, and to be personal even in situations where personal is traditionally not valued, help her win.
If you're really in the mood to rent a DVD, there's a classic scene involving pink styles in the movie White Man Can't Jump, the only basketball movie that ever made sense to me. In the scene, the character played by Rosie Perez is in bed with her honey, played (adorably, in my opinion) by Woody Harrelson. She tells him her mouth is dry. Woody jumps up and gets her a glass of water, clearly expecting some kind of acknowledgment. Instead, she gets pissed off. She tells him that she didn't want the glass of water. She didn't want him to fix the problem; she wanted him to empathize with her experience of dry-mouthedness. Empathy over task, that's the height of pink.
But there are men with pink styles, too, even though most of them don't like it the first time they have to say so in one of my workshops (by the end, they realize it's cool to be pink). Former president Bill Clinton's style tended toward pink, and whatever else you might say about him, he is abundantly a guy. But equally abundantly, he wants connection, not to mention affirmation. Newspaper coverage of Clinton's first day out of office, for example, reported that he greeted a woman in the crowd by saying, "Love your shoes!" My rule is if they start a conversation by talking about your shoes, honey, they are pink.

In a training program I did with Steven Safier, Ph.D., from HayGroup (the big consulting firm), we used a lot of movie references to start teaching people how to spot pink and blue. One of our favorite pink men is Dr. Wilbur Larch in the movie The Cider House Rules. Dr. Larch, played by Michael Caine, is a physician in charge of a 1940s New England orphanage. One of Dr. Larch's former charges is Homer Wells, played by Tobey Maguire. In one moving scene, we see Homer reading a letter from Dr. Larch, including a very straightforward "I love you." The "I love you" is a dead giveaway of pink style because normally in movies a man is only allowed to say "I love you" to another man under the following conditions: it's his partner, who is dying of something awful; the team just won, or the team just lost; he and his buddy are either about to be or just have been fired upon by serious weapons and one of them isn't going to make it.

But what about women, real business women, with a pink style? There are more of them than you might think, but my nominee for the most compelling triumph of pink style is Oprah Winfrey. Oprah puts connection first, so much so that despite the fact that she is one of the most successful businesswoman in the world, she's been quoted as saying that she doesn't think of herself as a business person. Oprah's ability--and her desire--to connect is the hallmark of everything she does, and it's key to the degree and nature of her success. As a Fortune magazine writer put it in a cover story about her, "Everything is personal at Harpo," Oprah's production company. Including business.

Now blues, on the other hand, are the opposite of pinks. They place a high priority on what I call task--just getting the job done. Someone with a blue style either just isn't naturally a "people person" or wants to keep his or her emotional connections outside the office.

Blues like to know where people stand, literally. Rank and order matter to blues. A blue wants to know right away how you fit into the grand scheme of things. Blues introduce themselves with titles and accomplishments.
Blues value business relationships and form close ones, but they're able to see their success as independent of relationships. A blue who is well paid will feel she has achieved success, regardless of how she feels about her workplace relationships. The CEO of Boeing, a classic blue, distinguished himself from his predecessor by saying that he was more likely to shoot first and ask questions later. If you hear a blue say someone has "killer instinct," it is probably meant as praise.
It's getting easier to find positive examples of blue women on television and in the movies, too, but traditionally, blue women got a bad rap; hard-boiled, cold-blooded, overtly ambitious women are a standard movie cliché and a way that our culture expresses ambivalence about women and power. (In chapter 3 I'll talk about the female stereotypes that present particular challenges for blue women.)

One positive image of a blue woman, though, is in the James Bond film Die Another Day. Those of you who are longtime Bond fans (and who isn't?) may remember that Bond's boss, known as M, was always played by a man--until a few years ago when M began to be played by the incomparable Judi Dench. In a scene near the beginning, James, played by (in my opinion, a slightly too skinny) Pierce Brosnan, has just been released from a nasty Korean prison, which specialized in low-tech but effective tortures that involved a lot of scorpions and ice water.

Anyway, in the scene in question, Bond and M are having a little debriefing about the circumstances leading up to his negotiated release and M makes it clear that if it had been up to her, she would have let the enemy shoot him. She also makes it clear that he will get back to work only when she decides. Her part of the conversation involves a lot of steely-eyed glances and ends with her spinning on a heel and striding out of the room, dismissing the possibility that she has the slightest interest in what he has to say about his future. We know that she cares about him but that her duty, and her actions, will be based more on how she feels about the job than how she feels about him. Very blue.

Positive images of blue men, on the other hand, are everywhere in popular culture. One of my favorite blue men in movies is U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard, played by Tommy Lee Jones, in The Fugitive. The U.S. marshal is on the hunt for a doctor, played by Harrison Ford, who is accused of murdering his wife. From the start, the marshal's team refers to him as "Big Dog," which is a definite clue that he is probably not going to have a pink style. But any doubts you might have had about his style are erased when he takes over the case from some lame local authority and starts barking out directions about the kind of search he wants done.

Blue-styled women in real life are pretty easy to find, too, because women with a blue style were the first wave of big achievers in business. Margaret Thatcher, to reach back a bit, had a very blue style. Buttoned up. No nonsense. Martha Stewart has a blue style as well. She is interested in the thing, in the task, not the person. Fortune 500 company women CEOs also tend to be blue--or at least act as if they are, which is what I call having a "striped" style.

In every workshop I do, there are strong pinks and strong blues. But most people have had to adapt their styles to some degree. The truth is that since the world of business tilts toward blue rules, if you are a pink woman in business you probably have a few blue stripes.

What does a striped woman look like? The big-time women broadcasters all seem striped, although the width and depth of those stripes vary. Katie Couric, for example, often leads with a pink style: friendly, approachable, clearly wants to connect. But she gets to task quickly, and it is clear she is about the business of getting the story. And Barbara Walters seems to me to have given herself permission to be pretty pink in recent years, especially when she's just one of the girls on her TV show, The View. Anyone who specializes in making people cry has got to put a big emphasis on connection.

Most people with stripes have one that is dominant--a style that they lead with and that they default to when stressed. Others are pretty evenly balanced. For example, my friend Diane Perlmutter, who heads up Gilda's Club, an international nonprofit organization that helps families live with cancer, says she is striped. She does care about connection. But when running a meeting, she wants to "get to the point." And when writing e-mails, she often has to remind herself to "say something nice"; some kind of opening note about the weekend, or a holiday, or whatever. For a total pink, that note would come naturally. A total blue wouldn't bother.

think pink

Here's what's great about being pink.
You live your business life in a way that gives you the opportunity to connect and to leverage those relationships to create value. Sorry to say leverage--I know it sounds pretty blue and maybe even a little calculating, but the truth is that relationships hold value and help you get things done.
Chances are, if you're pink, you have more people to turn to who will help you get what you want. You probably know the names of your dry cleaner, your kid's substitute teacher, the gynecologist's billing clerk, and everyone in security and in the mailroom.

You probably also have times when whatever work you are doing feels really good because it helps someone else. What you do can feel meaningful. Sometimes it just feels good to have coworkers, or colleagues, or employees, or whatever work relationships you have--and if you don't have these connections, you can at least imagine a situation where work would feel good because of the chance to have good working relationships.
Here's what's not so great about being pink.

When you're pink, you care so much about relationships that they are always with you. Ask a pink why she has trouble asking for a raise (more on this in chapter 9) and she'll talk to you of her concerns about how her boss feels about her. Listen to two pinks trying to negotiate a business deal and you will hear immense awkwardness, apologies, and a lot of talk about how they both feel--and that's a good discussion. The bad ones are when both pinks feel that they sacrificed too much in exchange for making the other person feel better and then brood about it, silently and independently.

It's also hard to be a pink in business. The way most people think about business is blue; only the really smart ones get the value of stripes. So if you're pink and you work, you are already pretending to be blue some of the time. The more blue the company culture, the more you are pretending.
That's an enormous strain, and, I think, one reason women end up bailing out of jobs in big companies. When you are a pink woman, you are living in what is essentially an alien culture, which has a high cost. The "price" of trying to be someone you aren't is part of why the price of success, at least corporate success as men define it, seems to be too high for a lot of women. If you are a pink woman trying to be blue all the time, you don't need me to tell you how hard it is. Chances are the effort to be someone you're not is making you unhappy and probably also a little angry.

Another challenge for pink women is that pinks spend a fair amount of energy monitoring and reacting to other people's emotions. The saying "it's not personal, it's business" was invented for pinks: A pink can get so caught up in relationship drama that she loses focus.

Finally, what's most hard is that a lot of blues have bad attitudes about pinks, especially pink women. They think pinks are a little flaky. They think that pinks are scattered. And they think a pink's focus on relationships is excessive and a liability when it comes to tough business decisions.
blues rule

What's great about being a blue woman?
A blue woman's style is more naturally consistent with how most big organizations are run. A blue woman's desire to get down to business, or be strictly business, is easier for blue men (and most of the guys at the top of the food chain are blue!) to understand. Because a blue woman, as opposed to a pink woman, tends to put a higher premium on being respected than on being cared about, it is in many ways easier for her to succeed in the classic definition of success: climbing the next rung of the ladder.

What's not so great about being blue? Blue women are more likely to make a classic woman's mistake: thinking that working hard and efficiently is all it takes to get ahead.

Some months ago, I met with a blue woman named Marci, who worked for a giant telecom company and who, after sixteen years of devoted service, had the feeling that one of the heads cut off during the next round of head-cutting would be hers. (She was right: She got the news not long after.) Marci, to put it mildly, was terrified. She was also amazed that this could happen to her.

She told me she'd worked really, really hard. Marci was in the office late most nights. She was in the office at least one day every weekend. She did what she was told, and she did it well.

But when I asked her who she could turn to for support internally, when it looked like it might be possible to get a lateral move in the organization that would keep her from getting cut, she couldn't come up with any names. And when I asked her about her outside networks, she drew a complete blank. Marci had been working; she hadn't been "wasting" her time socializing--classic blue, classic blue risk.

Another risk, particular to blue women, is the opposite of the blue woman's advantage. Because blue women more naturally fit into the "normal" rules of business, it is easier for them to get taken seriously, to be given visibility, and to be asked to join the right projects and teams. But the double bind is that "normal" rules of being feminine are the direct opposite of a blue style: Women are expected to be empathic, care more about connection, take a moment to smile, remember the personal.

Women who don't follow all of those rules in business are more likely to be admired, and also more likely to be feared and criticized, both by pink men and pink women. A blue woman, paying attention to task in a blue way--by concentrating on the job to be done rather than on those who are doing it--is more likely to be called a bitch.

In the high-tech years, there was even a camp for blue women, which was supposed to cure them of being "bully broads." The idea was that the same behaviors that are okay in guys are not okay for women. Here's just one example, as reported in a New York Times article: "Her clients loved her. Her coworkers didn't. She didn't say please and thank you or greet everyone as she walked down the hall. Many men at her company didn't, but she was sent [to a coach] for her 'intimidating style.'"
Blue women I know who've worked on adding a few pink stripes point out a hazard shared by both styles: feeling like a fake. Nancy, a blue friend, told me that she'd just written an e-mail and gone back over it to add a paragraph at the beginning that was more personal. She said that it made her feel bad to do it because it isn't who she really is. I hadn't realized until she pointed it out that her e-mails to me are all purely transactional--what needs to be done, how we are going to do it, etc. She feels comfortable enough with me to be blue and not to add something that isn't natural for her.

I've also run across a lot of women who pretend, even to themselves, that they are blue when they are really not because the superficial advantages of it are so strong and because it is so strongly reinforced. Employers have over the last few years spent a lot of money to teach pink women how to act like blues, starting with dressing for success in the '70s and continuing with power talk in the '90s. Management has hoped for a while that the way to create an inclusive workplace is to get women in general, and pink women in particular, to just suck it up and turn into guys, or at least blue women.
That is not going to happen, for all kinds of biological, cultural, and psychological reasons I'll get to in a bit.

Taking Pink and Blue to Work
The reason you need to know your style is so you can adapt it to your prospects--I'll get to specifics in chapter 7.
Now that you know how to spot a pink or a blue, and before you take a test so you can be sure of your own style, let me share a couple of stories about the potential power that lies in knowing these styles.
The stories involve the same pitching partner, whom I'll call Tom. The first time we pitched Vicky, I decided to experiment by sharing my pink/blue system with Tom in advance. My natural style is pink, if you haven't already guessed, and so is Vicky's. She's a big deal at a big investment bank: We were pitching her on a substantial training project. As a blue, Tom's first idea was to go to the meeting prepared with a big binder full of facts and figures.

Knowing Vicky is pink, here is how we decided to approach it instead. It was summer, and I knew she wasn't on a diet. How did I know? Another pink woman will always tell you which diet she is on within the first ten minutes of a discussion. I also knew that she loved chocolate. I know that because I am really off the deep end about chocolate and talk about it too much, so other pinks, wanting to relate to me, bond with me by talking about it, too.
When we arrived at the meeting, Tom brought with him fancy iced mocha drinks, and I brought my personal favorite brand of dark chocolate. She was happy to see the chocolate and tucked it away for later--I will confess, much to my intense disappointment. I had figured since she's pink, she would share.

Then Vicky and I talked about shoes for a while. Then we talked about her daughter. Then we talked sort of generally about issues related to the program we were there to discuss. And then, finally--and only because I thought Tom might explode if we didn't get on with it--we told her about what we wanted to do. But we didn't go through a binder. We didn't ever hear specifics about Vicky's current position or how that fit into the broader scheme of things. We agreed on one next step, which was that she would talk to someone she trusted to move things forward. She did. And we did eventually end up getting to Tom's binder; the formal presentation and all the detail would have been wrong to cover in a first meeting with a pink.
Shortly thereafter, Tom and I met with Jeff, a senior guy at an accounting firm. What we had heard about him in advance made us think he was blue, so we prepared for a blue meeting. We had a binder. We had a chart. We were clear about next steps...

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