Business Doing Good: Engaging Women and Elevating Communities

Texas A&M Business professor Deer (Financial Accounting & Reporting) and Miller, owner of Quantum Circles Consulting and Training, offer an eye-opening exploration of how businesses can benefit by hiring “women our society has marginalized,” including those who have been incarcerated, worked in the sex industry, and recovered from addiction. The authors offer six business concepts that leaders can foster to elevate women while at the same time benefitting the organization’s bottom line. Those principles include an experiential learning model in which employees can learn things on their own; immediate leadership opportunities in which mistakes are part of the process; entrepreneurial culture that encourages creativity; restorative justice in workplaces to address conflict and harm; partnerships between women, businesses, and nonprofit organizations; and a process they call “translation,” wherein lessons gained through “typically marginalized experiences” are translated into work skills. An insightful chapter on solutions to specific challenges in the workplace rounds things out—companies can consider hiring women with criminal backgrounds, they write, and train managers for a no-gossip policy—and powerful stories along the way illuminate how strong and resilient women can make substantial contributions to an organization when given the opportunity. The result is a survey as inspiring as it is convincing. (Aug.)