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In today′s rapidly changing and high‐pressured environment, managers need to learn to think more strategically about what they should be doing in their jobs. Shows how managers can take a strategic view of their work by first recognizing the flexibility and freedom in the job and then the choices they are making, and describes a tool which has been used to help many managers review their choices. Suggests how managers can view more strategically the different lines of action open to them by reviewing three aspects of their behaviour: (1) how they divide their time between people in their networks; (2) where they focus their attention most often; and (3) where they try to have an impact. Concludes that it is especially useful for managers to engage in strategic thinking when they are new to their jobs, later when they have accomplished their initial objectives, and after a change occurs in the job or its context.

Why do women’s ambitions wane? After an historic 50-year climb to unprecedented educational and career heights, many best-selling books, viral articles, and research studies are telling us that the aspirations and confidence of today’s women often abate. These readings offer explanations such as workplace biases and family responsibilities for the ebb of ambition; yet, all fail to identify the underlying unifying problem that explains choices women make to step off the upward fast tracks in favor of different work and life paths. The problem is that the workplace is not a reliable site of recognition for women. Without the positive feedback of appropriate recognition from an appreciative community, women’s ambitions and the intensity with which they are pursued tilt elsewhere. Women’s movement into and embrace of entrepreneurship provide a clear illustration of one way women are designing the workplace to support the maintenance of their ambitions.

Professor Ruth Simpson has been a key contributor to the field of gender and organization studies (GOS) over the past 25 years. She has influenced debates on women in management, the gender of management education, masculinity and management and the “doing” of gender in organizational life. In this paper i review our joint work – informed by a poststructuralist feminist perspective – which considers the complex struggles around normativity in relation to management and entrepreneurship.

This review is based on a consideration of four pieces of work completed between 2005 and 2012, including (Simpson and Lewis, 2005, 2007) and (Lewis and Simpson, 2010, 2012).

Drawing on the concepts of voice and visibility, the research examines how the ability to exemplify the norm in relation to management and entrepreneurship must be constantly secured and how processes of inclusion and exclusion in relation to the norm are characterised by relentless agitation and turmoil.

We (Ruth and Patricia) developed the conceptual framework of the (In)visibility vortex as a means of connecting the individual to organizational processes, discourses and cultural norms