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About Me, CV Harquail

I want to live in a world where: 

  • strong, thriving organizations make ingenious products and deliver life changing services

  • business relationships are trustworthy, mutually-affirming, productive and inspiring,

  • people are engaged in joyful and meaningful work

  • employees, customers, managers, and investors all share fairly in the value the business generates

  • everyone flourishes not only through what the company does but also through the way the company does it.

    In this world, businesses contribute to the greater good of human flourishing — not as an afterthought, or because the business is sanctimonious or naive — but because contributing by the way that you create is a great way to run a business and contribute to social justice. 

I want to leave behind the people and companies that mindlessly follow the status quo, assuming that to be an effective organization you have to be competitive, and that to be competitive you have to grab as much value as you can while dominating other businesses.  I’m tired of companies competing to be "the best" or "the only" one, rather than collaborating to create the best for everyone. I’m tired of people dismissing social impact — much less human and planetary flourishing — by treating a business’s impact on the world around it as an afterthought, or maybe like a box to check off for a tax credit. I’m tired of all of us missing the broad range of opportunities that exist for us to create and add and share value, because we don't ask and answer harder questions about the values and visions we’re really pursuing when businesses go with the status quo.

We are missing the chance to create more value for our companies, our economies, our communities and each other, because we aren't asking enough of our businesses. We are only asking them to improve at the margins and not to transform at their core. And yet — we can ask businesses to re-evaluate their values, to reconsider their reasons for being. We can businesses to help lead us towards of future of work and life where people and businesses flourish because of they are working to create a more just world.

With my book, with the tools I’m creating, with my speaking, teaching, and consulting, I’m working to support a new conversation about business as inspired by and reimagined through feminism.

A note about My Feminism

  • I believe that all systems of oppression—especially White supremacy, settler colonialism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, nativism, and capitalism—reflect the same fundamental lie: that some humans are better than others, deserve more than others, and should profit by controlling and taking from others. We can use our understanding of gendered, racialized, and classed dynamics to transform work for a world where all people can flourish.

  • The feminism that I aim to practice is radically inclusive, collective, expansive, and multi-dimensional. This feminism guides us to confront all forms of oppression, recognizing that gendered oppression offers us insights that can help us challenge and change illegitimate systems of power everywhere.

    Explicitly, radically inclusive feminism calls us to join with intersectional #BlackFeminist initiatives directed against White supremacy and with indigenous feminisms addressing settler colonialism and promoting sovereignty.

  • My feminist practice and my work are focused on co-creating a world where the politics of domination are no longer normal or possible. (H/t to Kelly Diels for this clear language.)

  • Businesses can be sites of social change and social justice, if we choose to make them so. Because my focus is on feminist business practice, I challenge systems of oppression as they are made manifest in our work, our organizations, and in the economy.

And the best part about how Feminism is Revolutionizing Business?

Bringing feminist values and practices into your workplace and into the ways you do business will help you create great products, connect with customers, organize yourselves, steward your resources, and focus your efforts in ways that build your business’s financial strength AND move us towards social justice at the same time. It’s possible, using feminism in business, to feel creative, purposeful, authentically you, "all in", and as though everything/anything you do at work is making more of a difference than you could ever have imagined.

Here’s a more formal bio statement:

CV Harquail, FeministsAtWork

CV Harquail, PhD, is an author, management scholar, consultant, tool maker, and rabble-rouser. She is a co-founder of FeministsAtWork.com - a feminist business practice consultancy, The Entrepreneurial FeministForums.com - a conference series for feminist entrepreneurs, and an instigator in the Feminist Enterprise Commons.

She serves as a mentor and design team member in the Fifth Wave Feminist Business Accelerator, an initiative of the Canadian Film Centre’s Media Lab.

 CV designed the Feminist Business Model Canvas (2015) and Feminist Business Toolkit to help entrepreneurs build feminist principles and values into their enterprises, products, and leadership. She offers workshops on all facets of feminist entrepreneurship, feminist business, and feminist business praxis as well as topics in inclusive, collective feminisms and lean startup approaches to entrepreneurship.  She has shared her provocative business ideas as a keynote speaker at conferences like the SheEO World Forum (Toronto 2020), The Center for Women’s Enterprise (New England, 2021), and the New Jersey Conference for Women (Princeton, 2021).

 CV is the author of Feminism: A Key Idea in Business and Society (Routlege, 2020) the first book to explore business practice through a feminist lens.

 As a management professor, she’s taught entrepreneurship, leadership, and organizational change at Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, NJ) and The Darden Graduate School of Business at University of Virginia. She pursued her master’s certificate and taught in the Women’s Studies at University of Michigan, and received her PhD in Leadership and Organizations from the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.

 CV and her family live in the traditional homelands and waterways of the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations, also known as Chicago. 


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Do you want bio information that’s more formal? Here you go:

An award-winner researcher and teacher, CV graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a degree in Political Theory, pursued her master’s certificate and taught in the Women’s Studies at University of Michigan, and received her PhD in Leadership and Organizations from the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. For several years she was a professor at the Darden Graduate School of Business, University of Virginia, teaching leadership and organizational change to MBA and Executive students. More recently, she taught entrepreneurship & lean startup methods at Stevens Institute of Technology. She now works as a feminist business coach, mentor, and agitator.

CV’s recent book, Feminism: A Key Idea in Business and Society, is the first book to combine feminism and business. Written for both practitioners and students, Feminism: A Key Idea argues that feminist analysis, values, and practices are uniquely able to transform business and the future of work, allowing us to leap over improvements at the margins to shift to a completely different and better way of thinking about and doing ‘business’.

CV consults with startups and small businesses who want to build feminist practices and goals into their businesses, often using the Feminist Business Toolbox she’s created to fuse together ‘lean startup’ methods and feminist values.  

CV has published research for both academics and practitioners in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Organization Studies. Her writing addresses not only feminism and business but also social media and social change in organizations, organizational identity and reputation, employee branding, and positive organizational studies.  She’s active on Twitter, with 6000+ followers, and is listed as one of the Top Management Professors To Follow On Twitter.