The Suite Spot
Grabbing A Bite: Women's work
As head of the Women Presidents' Organization, a New York-based peer advisory group for female business owners, Marsha Firestone says she and her members feel a little like Rodney Dangerfield. "We don't have the respect or influence that is commensurate with the number of businesses that women own," says Firestone. "I'm not an ardent feminist," she adds. "In fact, I hate the victim role. But I don't think we are called to the table enough." Today, Firestone has one of the premier tables at Washington, D.C.'s tony Cafe Milano and, after an open-face chicken club sandwich with bacon, mustard, boiled eggs, tomatoes, and lettuce, she explains the importance of raising the visibility of women entrepreneurs. "Our membership represents $5.6 billion in revenues, 45,000 employees, and 9,000 years of experience."
Firestone created the group, made up of women who own businesses with at least $1 million in annual sales, in 1996. "There was nothing out there for women who had already achieved a certain level of success." There are 41 WPO chapters, including three in Canada. The groups meet monthly for three to four hours, usually over a casual breakfast or dinner, to share experiences and discuss solutions to thorny business problems, such as rising healthcare costs. "This is a place where you can come and really spill the beans," says Firestone. "They are creating their own new girls' network." So much so that more than 50 percent of the members do business with one another. Firestone finds that as refreshing as her dessert: peach sorbet with raspberry sauce. -Margaret Mannix
Book Nook: Ancient wisdom
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith was born in 1908. The ideas in The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time, his 35th book, seem older still. Though the eminence grise of American economics touches here on recent corporate scandals, his analysis and cure--"remedy and safeguard must have the force of law"--offer scant new insights.
But current topics occupy few pages in this 62-page tract. The rest are spent condemning capitalism itself. "Belief in a market economy in which the consumer is sovereign is one of our most pervasive forms of fraud," he writes. Galbraith engages the demons he has been railing against for decades: the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, professional economists, the Federal Reserve, and the Vietnam War. Added to the mix are George W. Bush's tax cuts.
Galbraith's lively prose becomes most buoyant when resurrecting ideas of archaic economists such as Thorstein Veblen, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. A chapter titled "The Specious World of Work" concludes with the epitaph of an aged charwoman finally released by death from a lifetime of toil. Galbraith's picture of work--"fatigue, boredom, the discipline of the machine"--and his take on the economy seem to be from a bygone era. -Matthew Benjamin
This story appears in the May 10, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.