Book Review: The Female Transformational Leadership a Pygmalion Effect

Title: The Female Transformational Leadership, a Pygmalion Effect

Author: Angelica Larios

Date: 2022

Quote: "I honestly believe that women and their leadership have made a complete difference."

That statement's not fully defined. Businesses have been made aware that overt discrimination against women is suicidal; they're not exactly rushing to hire women who don't completely fit a stereotype that includes "successful experience doing exactly the same job for another company where everyone was deliriously happy but she just took it into her head that she'd rather work here." Well, they're not exactly rushing to hire men either, but in any case the market for this book is probably limited to the relatively few individuals who have been promoted to "leadership positions" in corporations. The Waste Age is over and we're getting to a point where corporations can hardly afford to exist. Oprah Winfrey (profiled in the Spanish edition of this book, and probably by now in the English translation) became her own industry but, if she hadn't, she too might be fired because some innovative top management type wants to try replacing her with a computer.

I think we all need to be shaking off the science-fiction-fantasy aura evoked by the phrase "artificial intelligence," demanding that the plagiarism programs be identified as what they are--programs that compile and remix the products of human intelligence--and that the programmers pay the people whose words, pictures, etc., they're feeding into these programs. This can and should be done in a way that discourages the misbelief that business, or writing, or even military defense can be entrusted to computers. It's not my issue but it needs activists working on it now, before we blow up a friendly country's embassy because a military plagiarism-bot has stolen ideas from Bill Clinton, or some other awful consequence of imagining that computers have been taught to think rather than mix-and-mash.

Anyway...what can I say about this e-book? I think it was sent to me as a courtesy, for which I think the author, along with the Spanish version. What I received, in English, is completely unready to be marketed even as an e-book. It's incomplete--it cuts off at page 35. It's not been completely translated, and the translation reads as if it's not been fully edited by a human after being done by Google. American English and Spanish are sufficiently similar languages that automatic translation usually yields readable results. I didn't find any howling language mistakes in the English edition, but did find some cognate words--words like "biographical" and "biografica"--with the accent marks for the Spanish spelling still showing. The table of contents doesn't give page numbers for the last three-quarters of the book, which, after all, hadn't been translated yet. What I have is a very rough first draft.

By now the English edition has probably been completed, and if you are willing to read detailed discussions of business leadership but not willing to read them in Spanish, you probably should read this study of how women in top corporate positions, mostly but not all Spanish-speaking, are making employees feel that their leadership style is "softer" but not flabby. 

The English e-book I have contains only a general introduction to that study.