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Pitch Like a GirlBy Ronna Lichtenberg Chapter 1pink and blueIn 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 BlueA 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.