The Martha Stewart trial makes clear how far women have risen in the business world. America can be proud of our equal-opportunity prosecution and conviction.

Sometimes you lose - perhaps because you play against the very best, or because surprises happen - but if there is organizational confidence, you bounce back from losses and convert them to successes.

Even the new feminist research on sex-role socialization and sex differences has sometimes had the unfortunate consequence of creating a new set of stereotypes about what women feel and how women behave. Despite the large amount of overlap between the sexes in most research, the tendency to label and polarize and thus to exaggerate differences remains in much reporting of data, which may, for example, report the mean scores of male and female populations but not the degree of overlap.

Not everyone in an organization is in a position to accumulate power through competent performance because most people are just carrying out the ordinary and the expected - even if they do it very well. The extent to which a job is routinized fails to give an advantage to anyone doing it because 'success' is seen as inherent in the very establishment of the position and the organization surrounding it. Neither persons nor organizations get 'credit' for doing the mandatory or the expected.

The best way for business to move out of the Hall of Shame is to demonstrate a commitment to social causes. This also makes business sense. A focus on solving social problems has motivational benefits in lean economic times.

Leaders must wake people out of inertia. They must get people excited about something they've never seen before, something that does not yet exist.

in most important ways, leaders of the future will need the traits and capabilities of leaders throughout history: an eye for change and a steadying hand to provide both vision and reassurance that change can be mastered, a voice that articulates the will of the group and shapes it to constructive ends, and an ability to inspire by force of personality while making others feel empowered to increase and use their own abilities.