As part of my ongoing education in how leadership works, I recently had a choice: I could go uptown to hear a handful of Fortune’s “50 Most Powerful Women in American Business” give the same old speech about the opportunities for women at the top. Or I could go downtown to a little theater accurately named the Flea, where a women’s circus called “Volcano Love” was holding court.
I went downtown. I wasn’t the only one to make that choice. Also in the audience at “Volcano Love” were Sigourney Weaver and Madonna.
The decision to go downtown was a no-brainer. “Volcano Love” makes it clear what the uptown girls are missing. The women in that show are doing what heroes do: challenging the rational. “Volcano Love” is the creation of Sarah East Johnson, a fire-eater, juggler, stilt dancer and trapeze artist who founded the New York City-based dance company Lava. “I want to expand the models of what women can be, to see what all the possibilities are,” she says. Johnson named her company after the fiery heat of Earth’s inner forces, thereby celebrating the Earth’s struggle to rearrange its known categories.
Johnson has a role model that I’m sure wasn’t mentioned uptown: “There is so much to learn from things that are beautiful and powerful. I drove across the country several years ago. And when I reached the Rocky Mountains, I felt that I wanted to be a Rocky Mountain. There are very few things in the world that you see and say, `That’s what I want to be’–particularly if you’re a woman. How many role models are there that are really inspiring?”
What’s interesting here is that Johnson doesn’t just want to get to the top. She wants to be a powerhouse. The Fortune women say again and again in their magazine interviews that it wasn’t very hard to get to the top. Maybe that’s because the game that they’re playing is way too easy. Maybe that’s why, when you look at a comparable list of the most powerful male CEOs in America, you get builders, shapers, dazzlers like Bill Gates. Not people who get along by going along. Not people who get swept up in the current and pulled along by it, as the Fortune “most powerful women in business” have done.
Why isn’t there a woman leader to rival Steve Jobs or Bill Gates? Forget the old argument that women haven’t invested generations in business. Neither have the new male rich. In the new economy, everybody was born yesterday.
The most “powerful” women are good girls writ large and rational. And so their influence is small. Why aren’t women going out and building the kinds of businesses that build society? After all, women start twice as many businesses as men do. Every 60 seconds in the United States, a woman starts a company. But such companies don’t grow very large. Why is it that most businesses that are started by women, or run by women, never reach the stage of becoming big-time players? Why do they never achieve the status of legend? Legends reach into the realm of the heroic–testing themselves, daring to look ridiculous.
Heroes, according to the mythologist Joseph Campbell, test themselves, put themselves into unfamiliar territory, risk their identity, and come back from an ordeal or adventure with a gift for the community. The risk, the challenge–that’s what makes a hero’s abilities increase.
As I sat in the audience at “Volcano Love,” I imagined the uptown scene. I thought about the uptown girls engaging in what they do best: genteel talk between morning fruit and afternoon salad. The downtowners were willing not just to talk but also to do–to face the enemy. But the enemy isn’t men. Nor is it the intransigent corporation. The enemy is fear. The Lava women have learned to move past their fear.
The rest of us groan about jumping through hoops. Lava women plunge through hoops–backward and in high heels. Lava women put themselves at risk.
They face embarrassment at every moment. They are riveting to watch because you worry about them; you expect a spill. The Fortune women keep reassuring the rest of us through interviews how easy their rise was. The downtown girls offer a lesson in what’s missing, not only from the world of women’s leadership but also from the world of leadership in general. Look at the latest dot-com startups: puny businesses, thin ideas, no risks. Something big is called for–something irrational.
Time for a little volcano in the world of leadership.
