Work Like a Woman: A Manifesto For Change

Product Information

The couple lives in Primrose Hill, north London, and have recently bought a second home in the Slad Valley in Gloucestershire. In her book, she refers several times to her Catholic working-class roots – her mother was so devout she once genuflected in the aisle of a cinema by mistake – but she isn’t one of those people who likes to insist that, no, she has not really changed at all. In fact, she can hardly recognise the girl she once was. I used to love watching Mary do her Changing Rooms ( except less shit)thing to ailing retail outlets. I love that she has faith in actual retail outlets. I'm Team Mary all the way for people and the planet before profits. Yet for every hard-working, no-nonsense retail saviour are multiple fast fashion online outlets churning out cheap clothes at a Rumplestiltskin rate. This book written by Mary Portas about her life is a memoir to feminism and all women who are fighting against alpha culture in the workplace✨ I was really interested and intrigued to read Mary’s theories about leadership using more traditionally ‘feminine’ values, but I was hugely disappointed. There seemed to be a lot of padding and repetition of the same points about gender inequality in the workplace, and very few actual ideas or examples of what she proposed. Of the few ideas she did propose, such as enhanced maternity pay, flexible working, no blame culture and not putting profit at the heart of everything, I found them unoriginal and also (can I be the only one?) already in place in my current working environment (higher education). I therefore found it a bit bizarre that she proposed these things as new and groundbreaking. I would have liked to know more about what she meant by leading by intuition and more interesting and original examples of what ‘feminine’ leadership looks like in theory and in practice. There was also very little definition of what she meant by ‘feminine’.

Work Like a Woman - Penguin Books UK

Can the high street be saved? “It completely can, but we need politicians to understand its role, and we need to create destinations people love. Don’t start with the shop. Start with the crèche that’s perhaps attached to a shop. The council could give it a tax break. Then a coffee shop will grow up beside it. When we opened Harvey Nichols in Leeds we were paying no rent at all, we were so wanted. I looked out of the window and thought: ‘What have I done?’ But of course the others soon came in their droves.” I have never resented anything. I was trying to survive. I was petrified She also writes about the values in embracing typically 'feminine' qualities within work, steering away from the usual hierarchical alpha-style working practices of offices, businesses and boardrooms. She suggests (using examples from her own business practices) that being more flexible, more open minded and more supportive of each other could really transform the quality of employees' working experiences and could help to bridge gender gaps.She is infuriated by the fact that even now only 10% of boards in the retail sector comprise women, and believes the high street would not be in such trouble were this figure higher. “You read the papers time and time again, and it’s always: here comes another man to save Marks & Sparks. Look at the stats, they say. He’s been at Asda! Give him a clap! What no one is doing is looking at women and what’s important in our lives. That’s what connected shopping is about.” Loved this book and Mary’s conversational style of writing - you can imagine her saying every line. Referencing her own experiences of work in an alpha-male world, Mary challenges the typical workplace and how ‘working like a woman’ and bringing equality into both the workplace and the home can have benefits for both women and men. Mary has got it spot on with what millennials in particular are looking for in their working life, and there’s very few companies taking into consideration sharing childcare, collaboration, letting people be their real self and standing up for what they believe in, I’d love to work’s at the Portas agency. I can only hope that every company moves to this way of thinking in the future and we create a more equal working culture.

Work Like a Woman by Mary Portas | Waterstones

Work Like a Woman is a memoir-cum-self-help manual in which Portas aims to show how businesses might become less “alpha” and more woman-friendly, a process she began to put into practice at her own company five years ago, when she stepped down as its CEO, having decided she would be better deployed as its chief creative officer. Henceforth, she and her colleagues would work more meaningfully, with profit no longer the bottom line. Her book is full of advice for working women, some of it practical (she has much to say about improved flexible working and how it might best be achieved) and some of it – as even she admits – just a touch Oprah Winfrey (there’s quite a lot of goofy stuff about taking your “whole self” to work). At its heart, however, lies a personal crisis, one born of fame and success – and it’s this story that will perhaps most pique the interest of the reader, however much you might be looking for advice as to how to secure a hefty pay rise and a seat on the board. This is half-memoir and half-advice, which actually worked really well for me. Each chapter starts with Mary Portas telling part of her story and it seamlessly changes into advice that links to what she as talking about at the start of the chapter. It makes for both easy reading and it shows how Mary knows what she is talking about and has experienced the advice she is giving. She has had a fascinating life and career where she had to work incredibly hard to get where she is now.She sounds so confident as she tells me all this, even a little bullish. You would never know how bruised she still is by the press she received after the government asked her to look into the issues affecting Britain’s high streets in 2011 (the Portas Pilot Towns, where her ideas were tested, were widely criticised; shops in many of these places closed rather than opened, and some thought the budgets had been misused). “I was really hurt by it,” she says. “Of course I’m glad I did it. The issues did join the public agenda. I mean look at Margate now. It has totally changed. But… I went in with a touch of hubris when they said they’d call them Portas towns.” In January 2011, Channel 4 aired Mary Portas: Secret Shopper. This new format saw Mary championing the often “underserviced” customer on the British high street, giving a voice to disgruntled consumers. With two more series being commissioned in 2015. I listened to the audio book and enjoyed it. I'm glad Mary Portas narrated it herself as she did so with vigour. I was entertained by the book, and enjoyed learning about her career journey. A lot of whats in this book is just common sense. But there is something missing - thats the single woman with no children.

Work Like a Woman: A Manifesto for Change Book - Oliver Bonas

If you had told Mary Newton at 15 what life she would end up leading, she would not have believed you. I am a completely different person now. I genuinely do think that a person can have more than one life.” Again, she shakes her head; again, every last hair snaps to attention. And, as I watch this happen, I realise she is that rare and marvellous thing: at once both a brilliant invention and yet, somehow, so completely and utterly herself. ‘I don’t want to lean in’She did do some television after this, but much, much less than before (today, she still gets four TV offers a month; her agents are always begging her not to turn everything down). Meanwhile, after some deep thought and a lot of scribbling in an orange notebook, she set about rearranging her life and her business. For the agency this meant, among other things, creating a profit share, bringing in a “menu” of options for working parents (the company provides emergency childcare and even night nannies), and encouraging the practice of “radical candour”; the boardroom table would now be round, rather than rectangular. But we’re half the workforce and only a third of its managers, directors and senior officials. That’s rubbish by anyone’s standards. The workplace is still working against us and, as much as I respect Sheryl Sandberg, who argued that women need to adapt their behaviour to better suit the status quo, I’m more of a Gloria Steinem fan. ‘It’s not about integrating into a not-so-good system,’ she said. ‘It’s about transforming it and making it better. If women have to acquire all the characteristics of a corporate world, it’s probably not worth it.’ Too right, Gloria. I don’t want to lean into a system that is entrenched in a working world that’s quite frankly dated, limited and controlling. It’s bloody well time it changed.

Mary Portas: ‘It was a question of how do I want to work as a

I like that Mary tries not to exclude men from this, and couches terms in such a way that you know she isn't saying they apply only to, and to all, women exclusively. It shows that thought has gone into the presentation of this manifesto, as well as into the beliefs it represents.Inspired by her weekly ‘Shop!’ column in the Telegraph Magazine, Mary began her television career in 2007 when her efforts to rescue failing independent boutiques were documented by the BBC2 series Mary Queen of Shops. The show was nominated for two Royal Television Society Awards and a BAFTA.