Mother Leads Best:
50 Women Who Are Changing the Way Organizations Define Leadership By Moe Grzelakowski
“The majority of America’s most powerful women are mothers’’ says Moe Grzelakowski, author of Mother Leads Best, a new book from Dearborn Press. According to Grzelakowski, women who have held high-level positions at Motorola, Dell and AT & T Bell Laboratories, it’s no accident that women who are also parents are moving up the corporate ladder at an amazing rate. In fact, she argues that motherhood has a positive impact on a woman’s ability to lead and it’s being proven across the country at such companies as e-bay, Hewlett-Packard, Olgivy & Mather, Verizon, Xerox and Avon, to name a few.

Mother Leads Best is based on the author’s own experiences as well as interviews with fifty corporate executives who are also mothers. “Raising a family has turned these good leaders into great leaders, “she contends. Among the women profiled in her book are Shelly Lazarus, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Olgivy and Mather Worldwide, Catherine West, President of Capital One Bank and U.S. Card, Maria Gottschalk, President and CEO of The Pampered Chef, and Doreen Toban, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Verizon Communications. Grzelakowski found that while many of these women share such leadership traits as competitiveness, ambition, and drive, motherhood helped temper their toughness. “ Motherhood strengthens the character of good women,” Grzelakowski writes, “It deepens them. It broadens their view. It makes them more human.”

Mother Leads Best also includes suggestions for men and non-mothers, showing them how to integrate such characteristics as empathy, sensitivity, warmth, and patience into their leadership styles. Grzelakowski advocates that male business leaders who are fathers become more fully engaged in the parenting process, and urges young women who are considering children to recognize that motherhood and career success are not mutually exclusive.

As someone who has been at the top, and who has experienced first hand how motherhood helped her to become a better leader, Grzelakowski offers refreshing point of view, full of straight talk and engaging anecdotes.

Moe Gzelakowski is Chicago’s most experienced high tech female executive, having held the position of Senior Vice-President at both Motorola and Dell, and she was responsible for AT &T’s multi-billion dollar international Electronic Switching Business. She was the first woman to achieve her position in all three Fortune 500 companies. She owns several companies including her own consulting business.

Details:

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Dearborn Trade, a Kaplan Professional Company (March 15, 2005)
ISBN: 0793195187
Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches

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