If you are like most people, you have or love children. You want them to live in a world that is viable and safe. You want a life for them with a real chance for happiness.

This beautiful world we live in is a mess. The best guess is that our grandchildren will live to see the end of the human race if we continue the way we are going. About one fourth of our oceans are already polluted. Forests, which provide oxygen and help prevent our world from becoming a desert, are being destroyed at an almost unimaginably rapid rate. Our savage abuse of animal life is causing an unbridled extinction of irreplaceable living treasures. The faster the destruction, the more frenzied we seem to get.

One billion people go to bed hungry every night. Most of them are women and children. Globally, women earn less, are fed less, have less access to health care and education than men, and are brutalized, subjugated, and exploited by men in ways that most people cannot even begin to come to grips with. The rest of us are fed a physical diet that is loaded with hundreds of artificial ingredients that our biology simply has no way to handle and an intellectual diet that more and more resembles fast food for the soul. Tension over the possibility—and the actuality—of war is constant. Only the participants change. The rhetoric remains the same.

None of these conditions began recently. We are simply watching the snowball effect on phenomena that have been rolling downhill—some for millennia—and now have gathered frightening momentum.

The explanations that we are given to account for the mess we are in have no power. Some explanations are simply attempts to cast blame—on our educational or religious systems, political leaders, or economic policies. Other explanations justify and reinforce the idea that human beings get what they deserve because somehow we are a flawed species. A common explanation is that we are living for a next, better life, rather than this one. Overwhelmed by a morass of explanations that have no real power to change things, many people just want to get their piece of the pie and ignore the rest.

We are nearing a time of final deadlock. Clearly, the road we are on is a dead end. Though we pray that science will save us, science is only as good as the scientists who practice it, and they are trapped in the same quandary as the rest of us.

The Breakdown of The Masculine Principle

It is easy to blame men—or more popularly, testosterone—for the problems that plague us, while the real culprit goes unseen, ignored, or unexamined. That culprit is the systematic training of boys in a particularly harsh version of The Masculine Principle, called the dominator model. Dr. Riane Eisler, in her groundbreaking work The Chalice and the Blade, describes the dominator model as the culture of ruthless domination, especially directed at women. This “cult” of masculinity is epitomized in its extreme by Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin, and political, social, and religious fundamentalists of all persuasions. Now it has also targeted the very ecosystem we live in and the genetic processes of people, animals, and plants as something to dominate and control. It is a cult that worships extreme competition and violence as the hallmarks of real masculinity and glorifies war as man’s ultimate and most glorious “sport.”

The language of the dominator model has penetrated every aspect of our lives. The “war” on terrorism, poverty, and drugs; the “fight against” cancer, heart disease, injustice, and hundreds of other things; even the “battle” of the sexes—these slogans suggest that to live is to be at war. Fight, fight, and fight. It might help if we were winning, but the fighting goes on and on and on, with victory nowhere in sight.

The reason you cannot expect men to create the world changes that will allow us to be viable and sustainable as a human species is that men have no real training in relationship or coming to consensus. These qualities are not part of The Masculine Principle we teach our boys, and so are invisible to men. When push comes to shove, as it usually does in the world of boys on the playground or men in politics, the automatic solution is “hit back.” In a press conference at the end of peace talks between Israel and Palestine held at Camp David, President Clinton said that if there had been any women present at those meetings, some agreement would have been achieved. Clearly, men alone were not able to accomplish harmony. All they could do was fight.

At the bottom of the dominator model, which Dr. Eisler estimates started several thousand years ago with the rise of Indo-European culture, is a last-man-standing mentality that values winning at any cost and identifies everyone else as the “loser.” About twenty years ago, a male television announcer covering the Olympic Games asked a silver medalist how he felt being a loser. Unexpectedly, this blatant dominator-model remark caused such a firestorm of protest around the world that the announcer lost his job.

Finally, despite the material possessions that define us, we “haves” in the developed world are starved for quality of life, driven by the highly pressurized pace that we feel forced to maintain just to keep up with what we think we must have to feel good about ourselves. Many of us are living vicariously through a small, select group who appear to participate in the excitement of life, buying into the lie that celebrities of all kinds have lives that are more important or valuable, and certainly more exciting, than our own. Reality TV is mistaken for reality itself.

If the amount of terror pumped into us by the media were poison being pumped into our water supply, we would all be dead by now. Privacy is at an end. The degradation of our humanity in favor of sensationalism, especially graphic violence of all kinds, has permeated every aspect of our lives and we are losing our ability to respond. Though there really is plenty of it around, goodness gets little press. Good people persevere with little or no credit or attention, and people who represent the lower limit of the human experience get major airtime and front-page coverage.

The look of chronic tension and unhappiness on the faces of normal people on the street is appalling. Real courtesy seems to be a lost art. In major cities, we barely even acknowledge one another’s existence, preferring to talk on our cell phones while we walk or put on headphones to listen to music. As the world has sped up externally, we have also sped up internally to the point where even short delays or small mistakes become triggers for emotional blowups that are completely out of proportion to the event.

As Albert Einstein advised, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we had when we created them.” We need to get it through our heads that something entirely new is called for!

The Wave of the Future

Though the current report is grim, take heart. There is a powerful wave of desire arising for a way to live and have the results we want in harmony with our deepest desire for happiness and in consideration of the billions of others with whom we share our world. It is a call for new leadership—not just different leaders, but a kind of leadership that has real potential to open doorways and make things new.

Women Are the Key

Is this new way to lead a breakthrough in technology? A new spiritual or esoteric insight? A revolutionary political system? Hardly. The answer to the problems we face, though repeatedly overlooked or ignored, lives right in our own backyard. Where? It lives in women who have developed and passed on to their daughters, over the millennia, strategies to raise families and to organize powerfully and effectively the villages, neighborhoods, churches, community organizations, and social groups in which they live. It lives in the elements of their strategies that include results and a style of producing them that is inclusive and nourishing of everyone involved.

Though it is hard to believe, it was not until 1993 that the World Conference on Human Rights ratified the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, declaring at long last that women’s rights are human rights. That such a proclamation would be necessary, let alone newsworthy, underscores the need for a new way of thinking and leading.

A close friend of mine attended the Beijing Women’s Conference in 1995, where then-First Lady Hillary Clinton delivered the keynote address. In it she declared emphatically that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” My friend recalled, “Before the meeting we were holding our breath, wondering if Mrs. Clinton would have the guts to make her statement about human rights. When Mrs. Clinton made her statement on women’s rights, the meeting, which was thronged with thousands and thousands of women leaders from all around the world and thousands more standing outside in the rain, erupted in joy and happiness.”

You could say that in the consciousness of the world at large, women are just on the sociological brink of becoming adults. Though shocking to consider, this fact enables us to focus on the unconsciousness with which we have treated (to use the words of the United Nations) our most valuable and underused resource. It also puts us on notice that, like a teenager entering puberty, women are beginning a “growth spurt,” and everything about them is going to change dramatically. In this universal coming of age for women, there is hope for a real change, not just a rehash of everything we’ve already been doing.

Women have always been charged with bringing in new life and sustaining it. Women are imbued with a model of reality that focuses on the viability and growth of human beings. Who better to speak for the world we desire? Women are natural multitaskers. Over thousands of years, their need to keep track of many children simultaneously has developed their ability to think globally, i.e., take into account and synthesize many elements at the same time. Who better to get the whole picture regarding any issue of importance to humanity? Representing the heart of their families, women live in an intuitive realm that, although informed by intellect, is not subjugated by it. Who better to create the nonlinear leaps that will effectuate new ways of looking at global concerns and bring about original ways to deal with them?

Let’s face it. To make a proclamation about the vital role of woman is one thing; however, to implement the changes in tradition and culture in a world dominated by a masculine view of “life as war, last man standing” is quite another.

The Stirrings of Power

In the United States and other developed countries, the modern Women’s Movement has been a powerful force to be reckoned with for the last forty years. Its earliest efforts, though useful in that they called into question the whole masculine/feminine paradigm in which we think, were essentially resistive and combative; they were done in a style that mimicked the tactics of the very men who were seen as the agents of women’s oppression. That tactical style created a deep schism in the Women’s Movement itself, where to be feminist was to be “militant.” This is a designation that most women see as the antithesis of what women have always stood for.

Perhaps the single most important outcome of the Women’s Movement was the permission and encouragement that women gave one another to stop defining themselves solely as a reflection of their relationship with men.

We might laugh now, but thirty years ago, women in business wore dark suits that made them look like junior men because they “knew” that business is a man’s game, played by men’s rules. These rules were based on military models, with business as war, competition to beat, victories to be won, and heroism to be gained. These pioneering businesswomen tried to think and act like men because there was no other model. More pointedly, there was no validation of the model that they themselves used. Being second-class people in a male-dominated world, their way of doing things was also considered second-class. If you were a woman, you were forced to try to beat men at their own game—often using the same worn-out, aggressive strategies that kill men early. Being the brilliant and flexible people they are, many women learned to play and win this man’s game, though often with the same consequent problems and debilities that have befallen men.

Claiming the Future

Times have certainly changed. With the end of the manufacturing age and the inauguration and acceleration of the information age, the emphasis on muscle power has shifted to an emphasis on brainpower. The playing field is being leveled in ways that would have been impossible to imagine even a few years ago.

Women are coming into corporate power at every level. They are the fastest-growing population of small business owners in the United States and are reinventing the style in which business is conducted. These small business owners have the freedom to decide for themselves how they will conduct their businesses.

When women realized that they have the power to choose, they went beyond the bottom line and began to include all the elements that are important to them. Intangibles like work environment, opportunity for networking and friendship, cooperation and inclusivity, the well-being of their families, spirituality, even fun became essential elements of their personal and business strategies. Moreover, most women have no interest in working in the driven style that they see detracts from the quality of life men have. As elsewhere in life for women, results and style became equally important in the workplace. At first defensive, men have sat up and taken notice and begun to rethink their own rehashed military strategies.

In a speech given by President Nelson Mandela, this heroic man said that when Black people were freed from apartheid in South Africa, the White people of South Africa were freed as well. Mr. Mandela said that as long as apartheid existed, Whites and Blacks were both imprisoned and victimized by the system. When the “prison” crumbled, both the jailers and the prisoners were free to go on with their lives. Similarly, as women have freed themselves from the delusion that they have to play the game of business or public life the way men have traditionally played it, they have also freed men to rethink their priorities, their work styles, and what they expect from their lives. This is real leadership in action.

The feminine style of getting things done, thousands of years old, presents a unique opportunity to produce extraordinary results in a brand-new way in every area of human endeavor, not just in families where it has been road tested most extensively. In the United States, where the culture of business is evolving exponentially, this style is the wave of the future. As people realize that the idea of (paternalistic) corporations taking care of them for the rest of their lives is a thing of the past, they recognize the need for a whole new way of thinking and getting things done. One thing is easily recognizable: this is a time when the ability to invent is the winning hand.

In a speech I attended recently, Dr. Wendy Flint of the Training and Development Center of the College of the Desert told us that $100 billion (yes, billion) is being spent every year for training and development by companies in North America. Of that staggering amount, the vast bulk is being spent to inculcate what have traditionally been called “soft skills”—effective communication, the ability to relate and work in teams, and customer service. Dr. Flint said that the Human Resources manager of a major international software company told her in no uncertain terms that unless engineers (a traditional masculine role) had these people skills (traditional feminine qualities), he just was not interested in hiring them.

Dr. Flint attributed this change in attitude to the change in the business environment, which has undergone a radical shift from industrial production to information production. In an age of information, she emphasized, sales and service are the most important business activities, not physical products themselves. Every person—woman and man—needs to adjust, but women have a clear edge over men in the world we have entered.

The feminine style is the basis for the wave of the future, not just for women, but for everyone who intends to be successful in the information age. To have power with this style it is urgent for women and men to realize that The Feminine Principle is a model, a view of reality—not reality itself—that can be used by anyone and can be changed when you are aware of its beliefs and mechanics. To lead in The Feminine Principle is not just to discover how it lives in you, but also to discover how to modify and customize it to meet the requirements of your own life. In the world of information, The New Feminine Principle is the jackpot.