Do Female Tigers Have the Muscle to Shake Up Business Culture?
By Joan Oleck March 7 (Bloomberg) — Carol Vallone killed her own creation. The CEO of Universal Learning Technologies called a halt to the software her company had designed for putting university course material on line when she realized that her competitor, WebCT, had a product that already boasted the momentum and customer base hers lacked. So Vallone initiated a risky merger with WebCT. In “Women on Top: How Women Entrepreneurs Are Changing the Rules of Business Success,” Margaret Heffernan shows how Vallone — woman that she was — confronted the intense emotions that surround an M&A deal. “It was a bereavement, and I felt that we had to acknowledge it just as in any death,” Vallone told Heffernan. “So we had a memorial service. We literally stood around and had readings about the product, remembered it, had a eulogy!” She went further. To ward off the usual M&A turf war, she sent technical teams back and forth between WebCT’s offices in Vancouver and her own company’s base in B
